By the time the sun began to slide behind the grey-brown buildings of Mile End Road, the shop signs started to blink themselves awake. Neon halal signs hummed softly. Steam wrapped itself around the glass of the kebab shop like a shy ghost. Buses exhaled people at the stop opposite the big Tesco, and those people scattered into the evening, each carrying invisible worlds in their shopping bags and on their shoulders.
On the first floor above Al-Amin Halal & Groceries, in a flat that always smelled faintly of fried onions and Dettol, lived a woman the community called Matchmaker Khala.
Her real name was Rokeya Begum, but hardly anyone used it. She had become her function a long time ago. Mothers whispered it over phone calls. Aunties mentioned it between mouthfuls of biryani at weddings. “Call Matchmaker Khala,” they said, as if invoking a small, stubborn miracle.
In the drawer of her old wooden dresser, Rokeya kept three things she did not show anyone—
a photograph,
a letter,
and a sim card.
The photograph was of a much younger woman with her hair loose and laughing, holding the hand of a man whose face had been folded so often the features were almost gone.
The letter was written in a hand she knew as well as her own.
The sim card no longer worked.
On this particular evening, when the sky above East London looked like poorly washed denim, Rokeya wiped her kitchen table, smoothed the plastic tablecloth, and placed her most important tool in the middle: a thick, battered notebook. Its pages swelled with names and numbers, dates of birth, heights, job titles, secret notes.
Next to it she set a chipped mug of tea, and then she waited for the doorbell.
Because on Mile End Road, dusk was when people came looking for futures.
The Woman with the Notebook
The bell rang just after Maghrib.
Rokeya wiped her hands on her apron, adjusted the end of her dupatta over her shoulder, and opened the door. A mother stood there, already apologising with her eyes for the intrusion. Beside her, a young woman stared at the floor as if memorising the pattern of the doormat.
“Assalamu alaikum, apa,” the mother said. “Sorry to come unannounced. You know how it is.”
Rokeya did know how it was.
She ushered them into the small living room where the sofa sagged in the middle from years of visitors’ anxieties. The TV in the corner showed a muted Bangla drama—two people crying under a palm tree while dramatic music throbbed silently.
The mother’s name was Nasima. Rokeya remembered her from weddings and funerals, from WhatsApp groups and Eid parties—always talking, always arranging something for someone.
The daughter’s name was Samira. Twenty-six years old. Born in Whitechapel, raised in Bethnal Green, carrying two postcodes and two continents in the space between her ribs.
Rokeya poured tea. She had learned that important conversations went down more easily with something warm in the hands.
“So,” she said gently, when everyone was settled, “how can I help?”
Nasima began at once, words tumbling like rice from a sack. “Apa, you know how it is, the girl’s getting older now, twenty-six already, we are not saying rush but nowadays boys’ families ask ‘how old is she, how tall is she, what does she do, does she pray five times, can she make biryani’—”
Samira’s jaw tightened. She said nothing.
Rokeya nodded, letting the river of Nasima’s words wash over her. She had heard versions of this speech hundreds of times in hundreds of living rooms, all over Tower Hamlets and Newham and beyond. Each mother believed their problem unique. Each story had the same bones and different skin.
“And she works in office,” Nasima added proudly. “Finance job. Good company. She earns more than her father, alhamdulillah. But you know, apa, money isn’t everything. People talk. They say, ‘your daughter is still at home, still not married, what’s wrong with her?’”
She laughed, but it sat awkwardly on her tongue.
Rokeya turned to Samira.
“And you?” she asked. “What do you say?”
Samira looked up for the first time. Her eyes were the colour of strong tea. There was a tiredness there that didn’t belong on a face so young.
“I work long hours,” she said quietly. “Sometimes weekends. I take the Central line every day and pretend I’m not tired. I pay bills, help with the rent, order my mum’s prescriptions. I… haven’t really had time to think about it.”
Nasima gave a little snort. “The time has come,” she said. “Time doesn’t wait, Samira. You’re not a bus people can catch later.”
Rokeya smiled faintly. That line had to be new; she hadn’t heard it before.
She reached for her notebook and flipped it open. The pages were crowded with neat handwriting, some names crossed out, some circled, some annotated with little symbols only she understood.
R = reliable
? = not sure, investigate
X = no, never again, don’t even ask
She scanned the list with the calm of someone standing in front of a wardrobe full of clothes, trying to find the right outfit for a very particular body.
“There are some good boys,” she said slowly. “Accountants, engineers, one dentist, few with their own shops. Family from Sylhet, from Moulvibazar, from Dhaka. Practising. Not too strict. British-born. Good English. Some even can cook.”
Nasima’s eyes brightened. “See? What did I say? Matchmaker Khala will find someone.”
Rokeya raised a hand. “First,” she said, “I want to speak to Samira alone.”
The room shifted.
Nasima frowned. “Why? We are here, apa. We can discuss everything together. She is shy, poor girl, she doesn’t know what’s good for her.”
“That’s why,” Rokeya said gently. “I always talk to the girl alone first. House rules. Ten minutes only. You can wait in the kitchen.”
Nasima hesitated. There was a brief, silent tug of war in the air. Finally she sighed, stood, and shuffled off towards the kitchen, muttering something about “modern ideas” under her breath.
The kitchen door closed.
Silence settled, soft and fragile.
Ten Minutes of Truth
Rokeya studied Samira’s face for a moment. Noticed the tension around her mouth. The slight dent where she had worried her lower lip with her teeth. The way her hands clasped one another too tightly in her lap.
“You don’t want to be here,” Rokeya said calmly.
Samira’s eyes widened. “Ammi told you?”
“I don’t need your ammi to tell me that,” Rokeya replied. “I’ve been doing this a long time. I know when a girl is being pushed.”
Samira exhaled, some of the tightness leaving her shoulders.
“I just… it’s not that I never want to get married,” she said. “I’m not against it. I just don’t want to be handed to a stranger like a parcel because the aunties think my expiry date is near.”
Rokeya chuckled softly. The image of a shelf full of daughters with “Best Before 30” stamped on their foreheads flashed in her mind.
“Do you like someone?” she asked.
Samira’s silence was answer enough.
“I won’t tell your mother,” Rokeya added. “Not unless you want me to. This is between us.”
Samira hesitated, then nodded.
“There is someone,” she admitted. “We met at my old job. He’s Bangladeshi. From Birmingham. Not Sylhet.” She gave a small smile. “Ammi thinks non-Sylheti Bangladeshis are basically foreigners.”
“Birmingham is another country for some people,” Rokeya agreed dryly.
“We’ve been talking for three years,” Samira continued. “He asked about marriage last year. I said I’d tell my parents when I was ready. I kept waiting for the ‘right time’. There was never one.”
“Does he pray?” Rokeya asked. “Does he work? Does he respect you? These things matter more than postcodes and dialects.”
“He’s good,” Samira said simply. “He listens. He makes space for me. He doesn’t… shrink me. When I talk about promotions or maybe doing a Master’s, he’s proud. Not threatened.”
Rokeya felt something sharp twist unexpectedly in her chest. Old, old echoes.
“You have told no one?” she asked.
Samira shook her head. “If I tell my mother, she’ll cry until the Thames dries up. Then she’ll say he’s trying to ‘steal me away’ from the family. She’ll talk about shame. Reputation. The fact that his parents are ‘nobodies’ because they work in a takeaway.”
She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve.
“I love her,” she added. “She’s done so much for us. I don’t want to break her heart. But I don’t want to break mine either.”
For a moment, the room was quiet apart from the muffled sound of the TV in the kitchen and the faint hiss of buses on wet asphalt outside.
Rokeya closed the notebook.
“I am a matchmaker,” she said. “But I’m also a mother. Let me tell you something mothers sometimes forget.”
She leaned forward.
“Our children are not savings accounts. We don’t get to deposit them into the futures we wanted for ourselves. We only get to guide them. And hope we did enough.”
Samira swallowed.
“If I help you,” Rokeya asked softly, “will you be brave enough to face what comes with that?”
A slow, uncertain nod.
“Yes,” Samira said. “I… think so. I want to be.”
“Good,” Rokeya replied. “Then we’ll work together.”
From the kitchen, the clink of cups announced that Nasima had finished her tea and was ready to come back and steer the conversation towards “a nice engineer boy from Romford”.
Rokeya placed her palm over the notebook protectively.
She had once arranged a marriage that shattered a girl.
She had promised herself, afterwards, that she would never again match people’s names like puzzle pieces without first touching the edges of their stories.
The Mistake She Still Carried
Long before they called her Matchmaker Khala, long before she had a notebook swollen with other people’s futures, Rokeya had been just another young woman on Brick Lane, standing behind a sweet-shop counter with sugar on her fingers and hope in her heart.
She was twenty then. Newly married. Fresh from Sylhet, dazzled and homesick, wearing her best saree every time her husband took her out on the 25 bus. They had met in what the aunties later called a “dangerous way”—not through families, but through letters.
He had been living in London already, working in a factory in Hackney, sending money home. She had been finishing college in Sylhet. They became pen pals through a cousin’s matchmaking mischief. Letters turned into cassette tapes. Cassette tapes turned into vows whispered under mehendi-stained breath.
He had died three years later of something the doctor called “a heart that worked too hard in the wrong body”. Sometimes she thought he died of the commute from Mile End to Hackney. Sometimes she thought he died because London did not know how to look after men who never complained.
His death had cracked her life in half. In one half: grief, loneliness, and a small daughter named Lamia. In the other: a headscarf, a job in a textile factory, and aunties saying, “You are young, you will marry again,” as if husbands were replaceable like lost earrings.
Instead of marrying again, she started arranging marriages for other people. At first informally. Someone’s son needed a wife. Someone’s daughter needed a husband. Rokeya knew people. She listened in buses, in mosque corridors, at weddings where plates of meat were piled high and gossip piled higher.
Matchmaking felt like giving other people the happy ending she’d been denied.
Until she met Farhana.
Farhana had been nineteen. Big-eyed, shy, just out of college, working part-time at a chemist in Whitechapel. Her parents worried about the “London poison” infecting their daughter—the independence, the make-up, the friendships with girls who had boyfriends.
“Find someone religious,” they had begged Rokeya. “Someone serious. Someone who will keep her on the straight path.”
Rokeya did.
He was serious. He was religious. He never missed a prayer. He never smiled much either, but people said that was better—a laughing man could not be trusted. He was from a “good family.” No divorce. No public scandals. No rumours of drinking.
The wedding had been loud and colourful. The bride’s eyes smudged with kohl, the groom’s kurta stiff with embroidery. People said Rokeya had done well. That she had brought two good families together. That Allah would reward her.
Six months later, Farhana turned up at Rokeya’s flat with a bruise hidden badly beneath her dupatta and a look that said everything.
“He does it after Fajr,” she had whispered. “After he prays. Like he is punishing me on Allah’s behalf.”
The shame of it had burned Rokeya’s throat.
She had introduced them.
She had put Farhana in that home.
No matter how much she told herself that no one can see the inside of a man’s temper from a wedding stage, the guilt sat in her like something toxic.
She helped Farhana leave. Helped her find a refuge. Sat with her at court. Testified. Listened.
Since then, she had changed her rule.
No matching without knowing.
No decisions made in rooms full of aunties but empty of truth.
Rokeya’s matches became slower, more careful. People grumbled. “She is picky,” they said. “Too modern. As if she is choosing husband for herself.”
She did not care.
Every time she opened the notebook, she felt Farhana’s bruised silence watching her hand.
The Boy from Birmingham
After Nasima had gone home that night (with a promise that “Khala will search carefully and find someone good”), Rokeya sat alone with her notebook and a fresh cup of tea. The TV in the corner played an old Bangla film where everyone’s problem eventually dissolved in song.
She let the pages fall open where they wanted.
Names. Dates. Heights. Occupations. Little comments. Good boy but mother interferes too much. Intelligent girl but father thinks education is decoration. Suitable family but they still talk about caste like it is 1850.
She ignored all of them.
Instead, she opened the contacts app on her phone and added a new entry.
Name: Zain – Samira’s friend (Birmingham)
Notes: Works. Practising. Respectful. Loves her already.
She stared at the blinking cursor where the number should go.
“Samira,” she murmured to herself, “you better be ready for this.”
The next time Samira came alone—ostensibly to “drop off some paperwork” her mother forgot—Rokeya insisted she stay for tea.
“How serious is he?” she asked once the first cup was poured and the conversation had loosened.
“Serious-serious,” Samira said. “Or he’d have left by now. It’s been three years. He jokes that he’s basically in an arranged marriage with my fear.”
Rokeya laughed. Then sobered.
“I need his number,” she said.
Samira blinked. “Why?”
“I will ask him questions,” Rokeya replied. “The same as I would any boy. Maybe harder ones. If I’m going to stand in front of your mother and say, ‘this boy is worthy of your daughter’, I need to know I’m not lying.”
Samira looked at her for a long moment, then nodded and slid her phone across the table.
“Don’t scare him too much,” she said.
“No promises,” Rokeya replied.
Later that night, when the traffic quieted and the only sounds came from distant sirens and closer fridges, she called.
He answered on the second ring.
His voice was cautious at first, then softened when she explained who she was.
They spoke for an hour.
She asked about his job, his parents, his faith, his debts, his worst habits, his best regrets. She asked if he had ever hit anyone smaller than him. If he knew how to say sorry without choking on the word. If he saw Samira as a partner or a project.
He answered slowly, honestly where he could, admitting faults, not performing sainthood.
By the end of the call, she found herself smiling.
“Young man,” she said, “you are more scared of her mother than of Allah right now.”
He laughed. “Aunty, Allah will forgive me more easily than she will.”
“That’s dangerous theology,” she replied. “But true.”
When she hung up, she wrote in her notebook under his name:
Heart in the right place. Spine mostly intact. Needs courage.
Courage, she knew, could be grown.
Sometimes with gentle words.
Sometimes with fire.
Mothers and Other Storms
Convincing a mother that the boy from her daughter’s dreams was better than the boy from her own WhatsApp group was an art Rokeya had not yet mastered. But she kept trying.
She invited Nasima to her flat one afternoon without Samira.
“Let’s have tea,” she said. “Just us.”
Nasima arrived armed with biscuits, opinions, and a list of potential “good boys” she had assembled from friends and relatives in Luton and Ilford.
“Engineers,” she said proudly. “One is even a doctor. Parents own house, no mortgage.”
Rokeya listened patiently, then said, “I spoke with Samira.”
Nasima’s mouth tensed. “She told you what she always tells me: ‘later, later’. We are running out of later.”
“She told me about someone,” Rokeya said gently.
Nasima’s face changed in an instant. Shock, hurt, anger—all flickered through like fast-moving clouds.
“Astaghfirullah,” she breathed. “Already there is someone? Behind my back? At work? At uni? These places are poison. This is what I was afraid of.”
Rokeya let her speak, let the storm come.
“Three years,” Nasima said, voice cracking. “My daughter speaks to a boy for three years and says nothing. What do I look like to people now? A fool? A mother who can’t control her own house?”
“Your house is not a prison,” Rokeya said softly.
Nasima glared at her. “Whose side are you on, apa? Mine or the girl’s?”
“I am on the side of the future,” Rokeya replied. “Yours and hers. Listen to me.”
She told Nasima about the boy. About his work. His family. The conversation they’d had. She did not romanticise him. She did not demonise him. She simply placed him in the room as honestly as she could.
Nasima’s anger began to soften, but her fear remained.
“What if he takes her away?” she whispered. “To Birmingham. Or further. What if she forgets us? What if his family laughs at our village ways? At my accent? At my old sari?”
Rokeya reached across the table and took her hand.
“You did not cross oceans and clean other people’s offices for twelve hours a day just to be discarded,” she said. “Any boy who loves your daughter must understand that she is woven from you. If he cannot honour you, he is not worthy of her.”
Tears spilled over in Nasima’s eyes.
“I wanted better for her,” she said. “Not… less struggle. Just… different struggle.”
“She is not choosing less,” Rokeya said. “She is just not choosing your version of more.”
The sentence hung in the air between them like laundry on a line—simple, slightly twisted, catching light in places.
Redefining “Matchmaker”
In the end, it did not happen all at once.
There was no cinematic confrontation with music swelling in the background. Instead, there were many small conversations spread over weeks—between mother and daughter, between Samira and Zain, between fear and trust.
Rokeya found herself less a matchmaker and more a translator—taking the language of parents and reshaping it so children could hear love instead of control, taking the language of children and softening the edges so parents could hear longing instead of rebellion.
On the day Nasima finally met Zain properly, she wore her best sari and her most suspicious expression. Zain wore his most respectful shirt and his most honest nervousness.
They sat in the living room, cups of tea trembling slightly in their hands.
“What is your plan?” Nasima asked bluntly after twenty minutes of polite small talk.
“For Samira?” Zain replied.
“For life,” she snapped. “For both of you.”
He could have said something grand. He didn’t.
“I want us to build something together that doesn’t break either of us,” he said simply. “Where she doesn’t have to be small to keep me big. Where you can visit and feel at home. Where I don’t forget who I am, and neither does she.”
The room was quiet.
Something in Nasima’s shoulders loosened.
“You will take my daughter away,” she whispered.
“I will take her forward,” he replied gently. “But never away.”
After they left, Nasima sat alone at her kitchen table with a cup of tea she had forgotten to drink. Rokeya stood at the sink washing dishes, giving her friend the illusion of privacy.
“Is this what we crossed oceans for?” Nasima murmured eventually.
“For our children to choose things we don’t understand?”
“Yes,” Rokeya said. “Exactly this.”
The Other Sim Card
That night, after everyone had gone and the lights of Mile End Road were beginning to blur with tiredness, Rokeya opened the dresser drawer.
She took out the photograph, the letter, and the dead sim card.
The photograph showed a woman laughing, her hair wild in the wind, her hand stretched out towards someone just beyond the frame. Every time Rokeya looked at it, she remembered how it had felt to laugh like that. Before widows started speaking softly and walking carefully.
The letter was from her husband, written in a neat script on lined paper during his first years in London.
In it, he had written, “If we ever have a daughter, I pray we raise her to choose with her own heart—but with our duas in her pockets.”
The sim card was from an old phone, long broken, that had held dozens of messages between them. Words that once flashed on a cracked screen. Words full of ordinary affection.
She had kept all three for years, as evidence that she had once been more than Matchmaker Khala. That she had once been a girl whose own life had been matched by something bigger than family arrangements—a stubborn, quiet love.
She put the sim card back.
She placed the letter on top of the notebook for a moment.
Then she did something she had not done in a long time.
She picked up her own phone and called her daughter.
Lamia lived in Manchester now, working for some tech company whose name Rokeya could never quite remember. They spoke often enough, but always with polite distance, like women on opposite sides of a small river.
“Ma?” Lamia said, surprised at the late call.
“Are you okay?”
“I am fine,” Rokeya said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”
There was a pause.
“Are you crying?” Lamia asked, startled.
“No, no,” Rokeya lied, wiping her cheeks. “I am just… proud of you.”
Another pause.
“Where did that come from?” Lamia asked, half-laughing.
“From a letter your father wrote before you were born,” Rokeya said. “And from a girl I met today who reminded me that you are also my choice. Not just something that happened to me.”
She told her, for the first time, about the things she never spoke of—about the letters, the love, the early years in Brick Lane, the fear of losing Lamia to the country that had already taken her husband.
On the other end of the line, Lamia listened. Really listened.
“Ma,” she said quietly, when her mother finally stopped. “You don’t always have to arrange everyone else’s futures. You’re allowed to have one too.”
The words settled somewhere deep inside Rokeya, in a place she had forgotten was there.
Two Roads, One City
Months later, when the wedding finally took place in a modest hall in Whitechapel—Samira in a simple but radiant outfit, Zain grinning nervously, Nasima crying into her handbag tissues—people said Matchmaker Khala had done it again.
“See?” they whispered. “She finds the good ones.”
No one knew the full extent of the work hidden behind that sentence. The late-night phone calls. The tears. The compromises on both sides. The quiet pushing of boundaries without snapping them completely.
After the ceremony, as fairy lights blinked and children slid under tables, Samira hugged Rokeya tightly.
“You weren’t just a matchmaker,” she whispered into her ear. “You were a bridge.”
Rokeya smiled, her chest full.
“Bridges only stand,” she said, “if both sides are willing not to burn.”
When she stepped out onto Mile End Road later that night, the city greeted her with its usual mix of grit and light. Buses roared past. Teenagers laughed too loudly. The smell of grilling meat floated out from the kebab shop downstairs.
She walked slowly home, her notebook heavy in her bag, her feet remembering old routes.
Somewhere between the chicken shop and the mosque, her phone buzzed.
A message from Lamia.
Got the promotion. Wanted to tell you first.
Love you, Ma.
Rokeya stood under a streetlamp and read it twice, the glow of the screen painting her face in pale blue.
She typed back, fingers shaking slightly.
Proud of you. Always.
Come home soon.
There is something you must see.
She smiled at her own choice of words.
On Mile End Road, the matchmaker walked slowly back to her flat, where the notebook waited. Inside it, names and numbers shifted quietly, like seeds in soil, waiting for the right rain.
She knew now that matchmaking wasn’t just about pairing husbands and wives. It was about arranging small miracles between people—mothers and daughters, past and present, grief and hope.
And as she climbed the stairs, the city breathing around her, she felt—just for a moment—that she, too, was being matched to a future she hadn’t yet dared to imagine.
Not by an aunty with a notebook.
Not by a river in Sylhet.
But by a life that refused to let her be only the architect of other people’s happiness.
That, she decided, was the best kind of match of all.
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
💛 Support My Writing
If this story inspired you, moved you, or entertained you, you can support my writing journey here:
👉 Support Me on Buy Me a Coffee
Your contribution helps me reach my goal of raising £100,000 to take two years off and write a full-length novel.
Shop on Amazon UK using my affiliate link – This may earn me a small commission at no cost to you.