Authors: Monica Ali
I speak to Ahmed again. Again he is pressing. I tell him this. I am a low woman. I am nothing. I have nothing. I am all that I have. I can give you nothing.
Still he insist. I do not know what to do.
April 1995
I give thanks to God. As it is written in the suras 'Do not despair of the mercy of God for Allah forgives all sins. He is the Compassionate the Merciful.'
I am here with my husband. Not so far from Ghulshan which is best district in all of Dhaka. Three weeks now without I leave the flat. My husband go out in evening and return from shoe factory in morning. Then we have big meal and go to sleep. In afternoon we are together. Always he watching me with love. If I move he move. If I go to wash he follow. And he keeps hand on me. Like he thinking I going to vanish if he stop touching. This is kind of devotion.
When he go out in evening I begin housework. Everything have to be in good order. That only thing my husband asking. Good order. All jars and tins must keep the place. Tallest one first then next tallest next one bit shorter and so on to the smallest which is for saffron. All to be wiped each day so none is sticky. It do make everything easy to find. My husband roll his cigarettes each evening and leave on shelf and you never see such straight line. Good order of house meaning good order of mind. And he have three pairs of proper shoe and twenty-one pairs of lace. Each laces set match with only one of pair of shoes. They need keeping careful like anything.
I begin housework at night but even taking all care it done before morning and sometime I do fall asleep. Then it difficult to sleep when husband comes and it is my turn to do the watching.
Sister I know how you enjoy to leave your flat. But I have come inside now. How I love the walls keep me here.
April 1995
My husband have gone to bazaar. I go up on roof with other wives. I growing mustard in a pot chilli plants in another. I speak with wives and they grumble about husbands. I must grumble also or they looking strangely at me.
I stare down in street yesterday watching the road it getting dug up. The women have big spade and long handle axe. Some carrying basket of stones on shoulder. All thin like sticks. When men work in field at least they have mathlas. These women go bare head. And sun is red like a hell and big like anything.
Then they finish the work and lining up for pay. They getting pay in wheat. The wheat coming all way from America. This is what wives telling me. This is how they getting paid. How to live on wheat?
All day I thinking about these women who are not housewives like me and like you sister. I thinking what I do if I one of them. Which way I turn? How I think to get out from under the stones?
My husband soon he return and getting ready for job. Storm is coming. But it too early for rain. Now we long for rain. Storm stays in the sky. Red and white lights. How hot it is today. Grisma going on for longer in city it seem. Before the rains come my husband taking me to his village. Mother no longer alive but he have father and two brother not yet marry. I going to meet my new family. Sometime I worry they find out about me. I cant tell to husband. If I speak that way I remind of what is behind me.
He rub my head for me. He is quiet man. Sometime I think he fallen asleep but is just peaceful. He is a serious man. If someone say only few words every word takes more weight. How Shahana liking school? Is natural for mother to cry when the child begin to grow away but if your friend give advice to see doctor then go. See the doctor and he will tell you how well your sister reads your heart.
May 1995
All his life people been stare at my husband. I think that how he getting so serious. Also how he understand things for woman like me. Not many men getting stare at in their life. He have few blister on cheeks and nose is fry like pakora. Also in spite of these thing he handsome in an actual fact. Now I am use to blue eyes and blue eyes very nice as well.
It night now and I try to stay awake. This evening I go up on the roof. Talking with wives. They smoking secret cigarette cleaning children feeding babies. All are great Authority on this thing or that. One know all about wind. If someone burp in certain way it meaning they eat too quick. Another kind of burping mean too much spices. Deep belch is sign of twisted stomach tube. And wind from other end can be read in many way. Some lucky ones is sign of money coming. I call her the Windy Wife. Then there is Great Disaster. If someone stub a toe she say 'You lucky. Only the other day I mash two toes in the door.' Someone else has sick daughter. 'You can count blessings. Only the other week my daughter rushed to hospital.' Another wife have take beating. 'Thank God for one rib only broken. When my husband beat he make sure to break all bones.' And biggest Authority of all is Woman Who Know Men. Aaahh she says if you want your husband faithful you must hide his toothbrush in the morning. She do always say Aaahh before everything. A man not going to another woman with smelly breath. I know men! Aaahh another thing. To stop him snoring you must burn incense in the room and always turn him on right side. I know men! Aaahh I can tell you something. Give your mother-in-law the best pieces of meat and next day he bringing jewellery for you. She know men!
One of young wife cannot have child. She have cut hair short and she praying. Not even short hair can bring child for me now. I have tell my husband and he accept it.
Before the rain come we going to his village. It must be soon.
Sometime I look out from roof and think I see my first husband. I see him with shirt unbutton to the chest. I see riding a motor bike. I see talking on mobile phone. I see man walk with hand on hip just like he use to do. And this when my fear is escaping. Other time I see man who come to me very often in Narayanganj. These time I feel the fear on my back.
May 1995
I pass these nights write to you sister. Flat is clean everything in good order. What I can say?
My husband is please with me. I am good housekeeper. I never mix up laces and laces are important to shoe man.
You know my husband tell me this. First moment he see me it the perfect moment in his whole and entire life. This is how he say. In his whole and entire life. He like to live it again and he planning to make it come again as an actual fact. He have me sit in bed and put my hair in certain way over one shoulder. Sheet is smooth at one end and crumple at other. I must tilt my face so or so. But light is never right. I hold head too tight or too loose. It hard for him not to get angry he trying to make something perfect. Sometime he say my face have change and he tell me to change it back but I soothe and he is quiet again.
The rains come now and we will not go to the village for a while.
If doctor gives pills you must take even in spite I do not know what kind of pill can cure disease of sadness. When you get use to Shahana being out from house you feeling like your old self again.
June 1995
Hussains funeral it pass today. Someone bring word for me and I go to say goodbye. I stand apart away from rest. Few of jute mens nobody else. I cover myself but they know who stand behind. They do not speak with me and I take for respect.
Sides of grave falling down with rain and I cry for our mother.
My husband working long long hour. He saying I have change my face but I do not know what he mean. I put more cosmetics less cosmetics but he cannot see what he saw before. I thinking he need more rest but he cannot be still and he go out. Is what is call bad patch for the marriage.
June 1995
He say things not in good order any more even I do always try to keep it good ordered like anything. He say I put curse on him and that is why we marry. He say how his family going to take daughter-in-law like me?
I saying to him this is bad patch for the marriage. Every marriage has bad patch. Even my sister sometime having bad patch and she respectable like hell living in London and everything.
July 1996
My own loving sister I always dreaming of you sending your letter and waiting. I do not have address for you to reach me. When I am settling somewhere you hear from me.
Do not worry. When I have work I send news.
January 2001
I hope this reach you. I hope you are in same address. Some time past I living here and there. Some time past only food for one day and the next. Everything I putting out of mind now. They have taken me in and I am maid in good house. All are kind. Children are beautiful. My room is solid wall room. Clean place. Nothing here for making scared of. Mistress is kind. Mister is kind. They give plenty of food. If you are in same address now you write to me again.
T
OWER
H
AMLETS
, F
EBRUARY
2001
The girls stood before their father and twisted their toes into the carpet. Chanu sat cross-legged on the floor. Leaning forward, his belly filled the thigh-and-calf cradle. Chairs were out of favour. He was a floor man now.
'Come,' he said. 'Begin.' He clapped his hands together.
Shahana pushed Bibi with her elbow. Bibi drew circles with her big toe. Her plaits hung around her face; rope ladders to the roof of her head. Nazneen pulled laundry from the wooden clothes rack and began a campaign of vigorous folding and sorting. Activity, ordinary and domestic and cheerful, was needed. The clothes were still damp.
'She knows it,' said Nazneen. 'Only yesterday I listened to her practise.'
Chanu held up an open hand. It was a gesture for peace, or a threat to Bibi.
At last she began:
'O Amar Shonar Bangla, ami tomay bhailobashi
Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune . . .'
Chanu sighed and rubbed his stomach. He plumped it like a cushion, fists working in a circular motion. For five days he had been teaching his daughters to recite 'Golden Bengal'. This evening they were to perform the entire poem. Chanu was taking his family back home and Tagore was the first step of the journey. Bibi continued.
'. . . As if it were a flute.
In spring, oh mother mine, the fragrance from Your mango groves makes me wild with joy – Ah what thrill.'
Her voice gave no hint of joy or of thrill. It plodded nervously along, afraid that a sudden burst of intonation would derail the train of recall.
Chanu ceased his kneading. 'Ah,' he said loudly, and looked around the room. 'What thrill!'
Bibi twisted her head to look behind, and then looked at her father. His invisible audience was, for her, a perplexing yet palpable reality. She felt the presence though she could not see it as he did.
'Try it again,' he urged. He moved his attention to his left foot, probing a new bunion with tender fingers.
'Ah. What. Thrill.' Bibi joined her plaits beneath her chin as if to stop her mouth from opening again. She waited for clearance.
Chanu inclined his head to the side and remained philosophical. 'Can't expect the amra tree to bear mangoes.'
Now she raced:
'In autumn, oh mother mine
In the full-blossomed paddy fields, I have seen spread all over – sweet smiles!
Ah, what a beauty, what shades, what an affection And what a tenderness.'
There she halted, before a sudden precipice of uncertainty. Chanu looked at Shahana. She had her arms folded across her chest and her top lip tucked into the bottom lip. Nazneen moved about the room inventing chores and making brisk, everyday noises. From the dangerous set of her daughter's mouth, Nazneen divined a flogging ahead.
Terrible in the incantation and stunningly inept in the delivery, these beatings were becoming a frequent ritual. They took their toll on each member of the family but most of all on Chanu. It was inevitably Shahana who incited his anger and it was Shahana who appeared to suffer least.
'Tell the little memsahib that I am going to break every bone in her body.' Chanu never addressed his threats directly to his elder daughter. Nazneen was the preferred intermediary or, if a new and particularly lurid threat had been invented, Bibi would be chosen. 'I'll dip her head in boiling fat and throw her out of that window. Go and tell the memsahib. Go and tell your sister.' Bibi could be relied upon to convey the message word for ringing word, even though Shahana was rarely more than a couple of feet away. In this way she proved to be a more reliable stooge than her mother, who only murmured low soothings and tried to move the girls out of range.
Shahana did not want to listen to Bengali classical music. Her written Bengali was shocking. She wanted to wear jeans. She hated her kameez and spoiled her entire wardrobe by pouring paint on them. If she could choose between baked beans and dal it was no contest. When Bangladesh was mentioned she pulled a face. She did not know and would not learn that Tagore was more than poet and Nobel laureate, and no less than the true father of her nation. Shahana did not care. Shahana did not want to go back home.
Chanu called her the little memsahib and wore himself out with threats before launching a flogging with anything to hand. Newspaper, a ruler, a notebook, a threadbare slipper and once, disastrously, a banana skin. He never learned to select his instrument and he never thought to use his hand. An instrumentless flogging was a lapse of fatherly duty. He flogged enthusiastically but without talent. His energy went into the niyyah – the making of his intention – and here he was advanced and skilful, but the delivery let him down. Busy still with his epithets of torture, he flailed about as Shahana ran and dodged and dived beneath furniture or behind her mother's legs. And Bibi hugged herself and was covered in pain, and a hand reached inside Nazneen's stomach and began to pull entrails up her throat, and Chanu stopped shouting and stopped flailing and began a twitching that ran from his eyebrows to his fingers, and Shahana took on his temper and yelled the ending, which everyone already knew.
'I didn't ask to be born here.'
'Your sister will continue,' said Chanu, addressing himself to Bibi. Bibi opened her mouth, as if to show that she was on standby.
Shahana disentangled her lips, rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and recited in an even tone:
'What a quilt you have spread at the feet of Banyan trees and along the banks of rivers! Oh mother mine, words from your lips are like Nectar to my ears! If sadness, oh mother mine, cast a gloom on your face, My eyes well up with tears . . .'
Chanu closed his eyes as they spilled over. His stomach rolled a little further forward into its nest of thigh. He began to hum and took up the verse in song. The children looked at Nazneen and she agreed by a slow blink that it was finished. She spread wide her arms and herded them away to their room.
In the late evening, to the sound of the walls that buzzed their eternal prayer of pipes and water and electricity, Nazneen clipped hair from her husband's nose. The quiet made Nazneen alert. All day and into the evening she was aware of the life around, like a dim light left on in the corner of the room. They used to disturb her, these activities, sealed and boxed and unnerving. When she had come she had learned first about loneliness, then about privacy, and finally she learned a new kind of community. The wife upstairs who used the lavatory in the night. She and Nazneen had exchanged only pleasantries but Nazneen knew her by her bladder. The milkman's alarm clock that told Nazneen the gruelling hours her neighbour must keep. The woman on the other side whose bed thumped the wall when her boyfriends called. These were her unknown intimates.
Somewhere above, a man's muffled laugh slid into coughing and the coughing became muted by footsteps. From behind the wardrobe, a television hooted and applauded. Nazneen relaxed. She snipped a fat hair from the left nostril and watched it land on the sprigs of Chanu's chest.
'Finished,' she said. She knelt on the floor at the end of the bed and began on his corns.
'You see,' said Chanu, 'she is only a child.' His voice was grave. It was the voice a doctor might use to deliver bad news.
Nazneen sliced the waxy skin. Shahana was only half-child now. Or rather she was sometimes all child, and sometimes something else. The most startling thing possible: another person.
'She is only a child, and already the rot is beginning. That is why we must go.'
Nazneen worked around the corn. There was a time when it disgusted her, this flaking and scraping, but now it was nothing. Time was all it took. She looked up and saw the photograph of Raqib on the bedside table. The glass needed dusting.
'Planning and preparation,' said Chanu. 'The girls must be made ready. Fortunate for them that I am at home.' His mouth, pulling in different directions, looked sceptical. He picked up his book and lay back on the bed.
Nazneen gathered her parings. If they went to Dhaka she could be with Hasina. Every nerve-ending strained towards it as if the sheer physical desire could transport her. But the children would be unhappy. Bibi, perhaps, would recover quickly. Shahana would never forgive her.
In the picture Raqib looked a bit like Chanu. Or maybe all babies, fat-cheeked, looked a bit like Chanu.
They would go. Or they would stay. Only God would keep them or send them. Nazneen knew her part, had learned it long ago, and rolled the dead skin around in her palm and sat quietly, waiting for the feelings to pass.
When Hasina had been lost and found and lost again and returned to her once more, Nazneen went to her husband.
'My sister. I would like to bring her here.'
Chanu waved his thin arms. 'Bring her. Bring them all. Make a little village here.' He shook his delicate shoulders in a show of laughter. 'Get a box and sow rice. Make a paddy on the windowsill. Everyone will feel at home.'
Nazneen felt the letter inside her choli. 'There has been some difficulty for her. I only have one sister.'
He slapped the side of his head and he appealed to the walls. 'Some difficulty! There has been some difficulty! How can it be allowed? Has anyone here experienced any
difficulty?
Of course not! Anything we can do to stop the
difficulty
must be done. At once.' His voice, though it had become a squeak, lost no measure of volume.
She could not explain. Hasina was still working at the factory. This was all Chanu knew. She hovered for the postman, hid letters, invented bland statements of well-being and minor mishaps. All she could do for her sister was deliver her from further shame and this was all she had done. Nazneen turned away and walked to the door.
'My wife,' he called after her. 'Are you not forgetting something?'
She stopped.
'We
are going
there.
I have decided. And when I decide something, it is done.'
But they did not have money. And money was needed. For tickets, for suitcases, to ship the furniture, to buy a place in Dhaka.
'Some of the women are doing sewing at home,' said Nazneen. 'Razia can get work for me.'
'Raz-i-a,' said Chanu. 'Always this Razia. How many times do I tell you to mix with respectable-type people?' He lay on the sofa in lungi and vest. He no longer wore pyjamas, a sign of imminent return to home, and he often spent the day prostrate on the sofa without dressing, or pinned to the floor beneath his books.
For a while he ruminated and explored the folds of his stomach. 'Some of these uneducated ones, they say that if the wife is working it is only because the husband cannot feed them. Lucky for you I am an educated man.' She waited for more, but he fell into a deep reverie and said nothing further.
These days, with the children at school and Chanu littering the sitting room, Nazneen often retreated to the kitchen, or sat in the bedroom until the wardrobe drove her out to wander around the flat with a damp cloth, wiping and straightening. He showed no sign of getting a job. The small edifice of their savings was reduced to dust. In a final bout of activity he had put on a suit and gone out to lobby the council for a transfer. The new flat was in Rosemead block, one floor from the top, two floors above Razia, and it had a second bedroom. 'Playing the old contacts game,' said Chanu. 'Yes, they jumped up pretty sharpish when they saw me. Old Dalloway shook my hand. Sorry he lost a good man. That's what he said.' The toilet blocked persistently and the plaster had come off in the hallway. 'Got to get on to my contacts,' said Chanu, but he made no move.
Nazneen sat down and looked at her hands. Chanu read his book. He no longer took courses. The number of certificates had stabilized, and they were waiting in the bottom of the wardrobe until someone had the energy to hang them. Now he was more teaching than taught and the chief beneficiaries were the girls. Nazneen also benefited.
'You see,' said Chanu, still supine, holding his book above his face, 'all these people here who look down at us as peasants know nothing of history.' He sat up a little and cleared his throat. 'In the sixteenth century, Bengal was called the Paradise of Nations. These are our roots. Do they teach these things in the school here? Does Shahana know about the Paradise of Nations? All she knows about is flood and famine. Whole bloody country is just a bloody basket case to her.' He examined his text further and made little approving, purring noises.
'If you have a history, you see, you have a pride. The whole world was going to Bengal to do trade. Sixteenth century and seventeenth century. Dhaka was the home of textiles. Who invented all this muslin and damask and every damn thing? It was us. All the Dutch and Portuguese and French and British queuing up to buy.'
He got up now and retied his lungi. Nazneen watched him stride around the sofa and knew he was rehearsing for this evening's lesson with the girls. Bibi would sit on his lap and attempt through her stillness to reassure him that the lesson was being learned. Shahana would alternately hop about and lounge sullenly across an armchair. As soon as he stopped speaking she would rush to the television and switch it on, and he would either smile an indulgence or pump out a stream of invective that sent both girls to the safe shoreline of their beds.
'A sense of history,' he said. 'That is what they are missing. And do not forget – the Bangladeshis they are mixing with are Sylhetis, no more, no less. They do not see the best face of our nation.'
'Colonel Osmany,' said Nazneen quietly. 'Shah Jalal.'
'What?' said Chanu. 'What?'
'Our great national hero and—'
'I know who they are!'
Nazneen apologized with a smile, and then added, 'And that they both come from Sylhet.'
'But that is the point I am making. These people here simply do not show our nation in its true light.' He pounced on the book and began riffling pages. 'Do you know what Warren Hastings said about our people?' He purred and exercised his face as he prepared the quotation. '"They are gentle, benevolent . . ." So many good qualities he finds. In short, he finds us "as exempt from the worst properties of human passion as any people on the face of the earth".' He waved the book in triumph. 'Do you think they teach this in the English schools?'