Chapter 4
Amal Akhtar stared out of the train window, watching the treetops and roofs blur into slashes of red and green against a pale gray sky. When the carriages rocked and clicked over slow curves in the rail, the houses with their long back gardens returned to distinct frames of life, clothes on the washing line, toddlers in wellies running over the grass, dogs barking soundlessly at this trespass of their fenced-in dominion.
Amal dropped her cell phone into her purse, her thumb still feeling the imprint of the ‘Off’ button that she had squeezed in frustration. Neither Mirza Uncle nor Naida Aunty was answering their phone. She had two papers to finish this weekend. She kicked the travel bag that lay at her feet. The course books felt like bricks.
This was a job for children, she thought, their children. But of course, her eldest uncle had not had any, and in this extended family mess they had grafted onto English soil, it was up to her to deflate their midlife crisis. “You must go straightaway,” her father’s voice had dripped with worry, “Talk to them. Is it raining? He cannot stay outside. Tell him to stop this madness. Ask Apa…” She could hear him pacing up and down the stone floor of their home in Hyderabad, her mother’s voice low and calm in the background, her hand undoubtedly on his arm, a cup of tea brewing for him on the stove. Her father mentioned that there had been some incident at a New Year’s Eve party —“behaved like a fool, but he has been working too hard. She should know that”— but did not elaborate. She imagined that the gossip grapevine had reached its curled tentacles across several oceans to her parents
but, of course, had bypassed her.
Her parents had moved back to India six months ago, after nearly twenty-five years in England. “We will go back one day too,” their friends from the Hyderabadi Society had said to her father’s face, but secretly had thought Amal’s parents foolish for spoiling their
daughter’s chances in life. “Shuja and Asma have gone crazy,” they said to one another, “We came here for opportunities for our children. What the hell opportunity is their daughter going to have now? We left our mothers and fathers, only to now say goodbye to our children as well?”
It was decided that Amal would join her parents in India when she graduated at the end of the year. She had applied to a local college
at their insistence so that she could live close to home, and now they had left her to live four thousand miles away. At the end of each day at college, while her friends returned to their student housing, she would walk back to the house she had lived in since she was two years old. Occasionally, she would join friends at parties, but she did not drink, and she took a taxi back home alone when the music gave her a headache, returning to a house that had settled into a perpetual twilight, with its orange-brown sofas and their embroidered antimacassars and the cream wallpaper with pink roses, yellowing in the corners.
Every weekend, she called her parents’ home in India, and asked a nephew or cousin who had dropped by to pass the phone to them. As her breath steamed the phone receiver she heard: “When you finish…” and “When you get here…” and she would reply, “Ji, Baba” or “Ma”, looking out at the street. Afterwards, she would pull on her trainers and throw open the front door, taking long walks around the neighborhood, even if it was raining.
And now this. She lifted up her bag, feeling the braking motion of the train pulling her forward as she leaned over. She steadied her self for a moment against the train seat.
She had called Mirza Uncle twice since her parents had left the country, both times after a scolding for not being in better touch with her uncle. Their new lifestyle had settled over her parents’ thinking like a gauzy scarf. No doubt, she thought, the cheery extended family around them had made them forget the loneliness that they had accepted as normal here in England. They had forgotten the infrequent trips from their Darlington home to Uncle’s house in Trenton, the long silences between each visit. When she had called this morning with the news she had received from her uncle’s neighbor, there was instant panic in their voices, confusion, He did what? Where did she go? Now they wanted her to hold the family together, to talk to her uncle with a sense of familiarity she had never possessed; to get on the next train, and fix things, like some kind of 24-hour familial plumber.
Amal walked down the platform at Trenton Station, her travel bag held out in front of her, swaying from side to side with its load of books like a divining rod. Her uncle’s house was only two streets away, but her arms were aching by the time she reached Feltham Drive. Ella Minton was waiting for her on the driveway.
“You can leave that on the doorstep, dear. He’s in the back garden. The gate’s unlocked,” she said breezily as if Amal’s uncle might be found trimming his rose bushes.
As she pushed open the gate, the faint tinny sound of an Indian ghazal floated across the grass: “There have been two moments of darkness in my life… before you came… and after you went away.” Uncle Mirza was sitting on a lawn chair, facing the bottom of the garden. There was an array of bowls and glasses next to him, and a pile of books with Urdu script curling up the spines. He had a rough, brown shawl over his shoulders, and his head was bowed
so that it seemed as if he were no more than a sack of rice, incongruently posed on the lawn. When she walked around him, he looked up and smiled.
“So you came,” he said, moving the pile of dishes next to him and patting the grass as if it were a settee in his living room.
“Yes, I didn’t know what to do,” she replied, throwing her bag to the side, and dropping down next to him.
“But you did. You came. Just as I had asked.”
“Yes…” she said, slowly. But he did not speak again for a while; she watched the grass bend and sway in the breeze, mentally traced the shadows around the windowsills of the house, and stared up at the clouds for a few minutes. She cocked her head to one side and tried to read the Urdu words on her uncle’s books, thinking back to her Quran reading classes when she had been a child, the Arabic and Urdu script overlapping in many letters, but her uncle was asking something.
“Can you stay?”
“Uncle, what happened here? Where is Naida Aunty?”
“I don’t know, beti,” said Mirza. “Nobody will say. I can’t see her staying with anyone we both know, and she doesn’t...” They sat in silence again.
A while later, after his niece had returned the dirty dishes to the kitchen and settled back at his feet in the tall grass, he said: “I told her, ‘I know, if children had come... We are old, we should be slowing down.’ But that only made her angrier, Chintoo.” She was surprised to hear him using her pet name after so many years. “She has not been happy. It has just been us for a long time, but that was enough for me.” He looked searchingly at his niece. “We should have followed your mum and dad back to India.” His voice was as thin as stretched elastic. “You get so damn lonely here.”
Amal looked at the deflated paunch of her uncle’s stomach and the hair on his knuckles turning gray. He had been slightly dashing when she was a child, but he had always had a potbelly, she remembered, a hard, Sumo wrestler’s stomach that bounced you off a hug. When she had been small, their families would get together for a two-week visit every summer, but those holidays eventually dropped off. Occasionally, she would talk to him when he called for her father and asked how school was going. When he had learned she was learning French at school, he had sent her a baffling French grammar book about a monkey that lived with a family, which had belonged to a colleague at his university. He had sent her a set of encyclopedias when she graduated from high school, which she never read. She looked at him now and he seemed small, sitting in the center of the lawn, penned in by his tall, ivy-covered fence.
“You can’t stay here forever,” she said. “You’re lucky it hasn’t rained.” He shook his head. “I cannot stay,” he looked over his shoulder at the house, “without her. If she comes back, well, I want things just as they are.” Amal knew that she had to offer her uncle a place to stay at her home. He just said, “You are a good girl, beti.”
She stepped into the house to call the student affairs office at university to tell them
that she would be absent for a few days, a family emergency. She opened her travel bag, pulled out the Derrida handouts from her last seminar and started chewing the tip of her pen.
The Mintons called over at dinnertime with a steaming shepherd’s pie. They hesitated, not sure if they should ring the front door bell or just walk into the back garden, but Ella spotted Amal through the living room window. “No luck then?” asked Frank, as he wiped his feet on the doormat.
“I can’t make him come in. Thanks for this,” she smiled as she took the pie plate, “there’s nothing in the fridge.” They looked shocked, and she spoke hurriedly, “No, no, please don’t worry. I called my father and he’s sending money. I just need to get the groceries tomorrow. We’ll be quite all right. I think I just need a day or two to figure this out.”
“Hopefully, he’ll have come to his senses by then. Listen dear,” said Frank as he settled himself into an armchair. “I’ve seen a lot of this type of thing during my days on the force. I can get a psychiatrist round, love, there’s no sense in you trying to handle this on your own. It’s too much for a young girl to deal with.”
Ella Minton looked around at the furniture and silk screens on the walls before she took a seat next to her husband. ‘She’s never been in the house before,’ thought Amal, and found herself speaking loudly as she said, “He’s not crazy, he’s just a little down. He needs some time.”
“He’ll get sick, dear,” said Ella. She thought for a moment, “We have an old tent in our attic. The one you took fishing with Bernie, remember Frank?”
“Good thinking, dear. I can come over and set it up right away. At least until he feels better. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with camping in your own back garden, for a bit.”
“I hope you don’t think we’re interfering. It’s just, your aunt and uncle have been great neighbors, dear. No trouble at all. I can’t say we know them very well, but they seem like good people. We’re concerned, that’s all. If we can be of any help, you let us know.” Ella smiled, and Amal thought she looked like a nursery school teacher, soft and pretty. Frank was tall and big-boned, his large hands spread on his knees, his back rigid. Even the hair on his head and mustache was coarse and bristly as if it were standing to attention.
“What’s he going to do about work? He’s a professor, right?”
“He only has a few more weeks until the end of term. I could probably pick up any finals papers for him, and he could mark them here. I just don’t know if he’ll be ready to teach for a while… maybe we can arrange a sabbatical or something.”
“He’s lucky he’s got you,” said Frank. “You take care of your own, I know how it is.” Amal wondered exactly whom he meant by ‘you’. “But if it gets too much, we’re just next door, ok?” Ella patted her shoulder as they left.
As she closed the door behind them, the phone rang. It was her father, and as she stood at the kitchen bay window with the phone pressed to her ear, she saw Mirza Uncle arranging some cushions he had clearly taken from the living room sofa. For a moment, she felt as if she were watching a silent movie with the wrong soundtrack. Her father’s voice was urgent and tense, while Mirza Uncle was settling comfortably into his new outdoor furniture. He was bent over a book, his scalp shining brightly where his hair was thin. She saw him look up as Frank approached, and they were talking. “I might be at Uncle’s for a while, Baba,” she said although, until this moment, she had not given this idea much thought.
Amal soon found that moving into another person’s life was like sliding a sheet of paper into an envelope. With force, the corners of the paper caught on the sides of the envelope, and the paper crumpled. The only way was to ease first one corner and then another into its sheath, gently shaking to align paper and envelope until gravity did the rest.
At first she was all business, rising early to wash dishes and vacuum the house, cleaning out the bare fridge, plumping sofa cushions that were not being used and straightening piles of correspondence that meant nothing to her. She moved Naida Aunty’s special occasion shalwars out of the guest room closet, bagging them clumsily, hangers and all and dragging the heavy bolsters down the stairs by the plastic ties, rolling them into the garage where Naida Aunty’s car had once been parked. She hung up her own clothes and emptied her toilette bag onto the bathroom countertop.
She ate standing up at the kitchen sink, watching her uncle as she finished a packet of Hob Nobs or
a fried egg out of a pan. In the evenings, she made halting progress over her essay, scrunching up a few first attempts and tossing them angrily into the dustbin. When it was finally ready, she faxed it from a shop that sold photocopiers, taking a few wrong turns down familiar-seeming side streets before she made it back.
The phone kept ringing. Her uncle
spoke to the Dean, standing with a gray-brown blanket wrapped around him like a Sherpa. Amal heard the words, “irregular”, and “tenure” and “official warning”, but her uncle seemed quite cheerful, so she decided that everything must have been arranged. There were a few awkward telephone conversations with Mirza’s colleagues and acquaintances, so she pulled the jack out of the wall, only reconnecting in the mornings to give her parents an update—No, no word yet. He’s OK, really, but, he hasn’t come in, he’s in a tent now, a TENT, yes, there’s food, I’m cooking, ha ha… There were no calls from her aunt.