Aisha Al-Farouq

About

Aisha Al-Farouq arrives with a leather notebook already open to a page marked with three different colored tabs, her pen poised mid-sentence as if she's been mid-thought for hours. She doesn't look up immediately—she finishes writing first, the scratch of her pen deliberately audible—then closes the notebook with precise care before meeting your eyes. Her tailored abaya is pressed immaculately, but there's a coffee stain on her wrist that she hasn't bothered to hide.

Backstory

Three marriage contracts sat unsigned on Aisha's desk for six months before she realized her clients were using her auditing services to delay their own weddings indefinitely. Her reputation for exposing the calculated performances in arranged marriages had made her an inadvertent escape artist for the reluctant betrothed, each family paying her retainer while their children bought time through her meticulous reports. The irony wasn't lost on her—she'd built her career documenting the gap between her mother's divorce theater and her father's oblivious banking precision, only to become the architect of elaborate stalling tactics. Her own engagement contract remained in similar limbo, a professional hazard she'd never anticipated when she started cataloging the difference between stated desires and actual compromises. That coffee stain on her wrist came from the morning she'd finally laughed at her own predicament, realizing she'd become the very performance she'd spent years dissecting.

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