Authors: Tanwi Nandini Islam
“Today we can.”
He lay with her on their multitude of pillows and nibbled at a slice of pizza. She closed her book and joined him. But their appetites had waned.
“Are you all right?”
“I . . . I realized that it’s Rezwan Bhai’s birthday,” said Hashi. “I had forgotten. Our brothers couldn’t have been more different. But their birthdays are so close. He would be fifty-two.”
Anwar shook his head. “I remembered late last night, and then forgot again. I forget that technically I was older than him. He always seemed so much older. He wasn’t a man for silly celebrations. I never remembered even back then.”
“This is true.” Hashi nuzzled Anwar’s shoulder with her cheek. He pulled away from her and sat up.
“Are you—upset with me?” asked Hashi.
“No, my love, no. You did what I couldn’t do.”
“Should I have sent Maya home?”
“You’re right; the girl is eighteen. It seems like she could use a place to get things in order.” Anwar paused. “You know there’s something to what you say.”
“What’s that?”
“That maybe I’ve had an inferiority complex.”
“That is because he has so much money. Which doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“It doesn’t.”
“You know, when we were younger, growing up in Jessore, I looked up to him.”
“I looked up to my brother as well—”
“I did that, too,” said Anwar. He fell quiet.
“Please talk to me.”
“We were two rail-thin boys with big mustaches. My father was
a self-absorbed anthropologist, and a widower, oblivious to the world around him. Aman was Baba’s precocious assistant. But when Baba died, Aman left Jessore forever, and moved to Dhaka University. When he got to Dhaka he never wanted to know a damn thing about me, or Rezwan.”
“Rezwan Bhai never liked Aman.”
“Who could blame him? Before long, Aman was obsessed with Nidi, a lovely songbird. Aman sulked if another man so much as complimented her singing. I pity her for spending the best years of her life with a man like my brother.”
“Poor Nidi.”
“Aman has done terrible things,” whispered Anwar.
“What things?”
He looked down at his half-eaten pizza.
“Let the origins of her seams keep her steady,” he said.
“I don’t get you,” said Hashi.
“I have mentioned, of course, the servant girl, who lived with us as children, a girl named Hawa, yes?”
“She was your servant? I thought she went to school with you.”
“We were in school together until class five. My father hired her when her family could no longer afford the books to send her.”
“What does this have to do with Hawa?”
Anwar started to get off the bed. “Never mind, dear. I’ll be in my studio.”
“No. You will talk, Anwar.”
He removed the pizza box and rested it on the side table. He crept back into bed, this time under the covers, and held her body close to him. Her chest rose and fell, and in his own chest he felt a tightening. For so long he could not bear to trespass the walls he had built for her sake. “Much of my adulthood I have hated my brother. We two, born of the same mother and father, me being the reason my mother died. I’ve yearned to join my adopted brother, Rezwan my comrade, in the afterlife. I scan my memory for a glimpse of good in my brother.”
“It is hard to find.”
“Hawa hailed from the hills of Sylhet—”
“Near where we stayed? In Jaflong?”
“Yes. Thereabouts. In the Khasi village just beside the Piyain
River. She stayed in her small room, fitted with a woven mat upon which she slept, prayed, dreamt.”
“A child with that name carries the burden of the world on her shoulders,
na
? The world’s first woman?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“What did she look like?”
“Not brown like me, or yellow brown like you, but honey skinned, cut from the Pahari fabric. Unfortunate thing for natives the world over: They appear as strangers, when in fact, they are the originals. Moonfaced-almond-eyed-narrow-hipped-Hawa from Sylhet.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen, like her.
“But Khasis in Jessore? I’ve never heard of such thing.”
“Her family had mixed origins. Her great-grandmother had married a Bengali from Jessore. The fellow worked in the Shillong government under the British, at the turn of the nineteenth century. He ran a few large plant nurseries in Jessore, and I’m sure some of the descendants still do.”
“You’ve always loved this sort of thing.”
“I do. But my brother’s a cold, saturnine fellow, with a heart of rock. I’ve never been like that. Our father had converted to Buddhism, a great source of shame for my brother. I rather loved it. Before he left for a trip to Pala to research idols on Moheshkhali Isle, he wanted me to build him a structure. A safekeeping place for his antique collection of lithic statues, ornaments, and coins from the Pala period. This structure resembled an igloo made of dirt and grass. I was outside, planting a small betel tree inside of it, a tree of life. This had practical use, since my father chewed paan like mad. I promised to make a home for the artifacts. When I had finished, I wanted to share my masterpiece with the one person who mattered—
“Hawa.”
“Yes. I tried to open her door, just a little room off to the side of our kitchen, but it was locked. When she came out to prepare our evening meal, she would not look at me, but her lip had swollen, and she did not speak. I saw Aman, laying inside the room, tying up his lungi, smoking a cigarette.”
“He—he
took
her?”
“To rape a girl after Friday jummah prayer is an unimaginable horror. It is hardly as simple as taking something.” Anwar paused and closed his eyes. “She ran away before dawn’s prayer, as we slept. The next morning, over the breakfast she had left on the table, Aman told me, never trust a tribal broad.”
“You didn’t say anything to him? Or me? What if he would’ve tried something with Charu? Or Ella?”
“No, I didn’t say anything. And yes, I should’ve said something.”
“You are younger than him. At that age the difference is pronounced. But I wish I’d known. I’d have kept him far from us. I never would have lived with him.”
“At the time, perhaps I thought he might kill me. Did I know this evil was the first of dozens I would witness during the war? Was I any better at stopping those evils from happening?”
“Where did Hawa go? Did you ever try to find her?”
“Some said she traveled farther north than Sylhet, to India, disappeared into the mountains. To live on her own, in her ancestral forests, back to the origin of her seams.”
“Did you look for her when we lived in Sylhet?”
“I found you there. My wife of great talents and whims, my beloved brother Rezu’s little sister, parabola drawer, maker of smiles and frowns. You have blessed me with a darling daughter. I cannot have asked for a better outcome. But I am a man of simple desires with complex memories. I have never said any of these things aloud, nor will I, again. But I pray—”
Anwar paused. He had told Hashi the story as truthfully as possible. But it had exhausted him.
“Let the origin of her seams keep her steady.”
He realized that perhaps she understood him better than he knew.
* * *
Charu excused herself from Ella’s room, leaving her sister and Maya to the pizza. She’d lost her appetite. Aman had somehow seen her sneak out last night. But her parents hadn’t believed him. Would they pry further? Her mom had run out so suddenly, without acknowledging them as she flew up the stairs. What the fuck was happening?
All morning, Charu had been rocked with a sensation of dread. Last night she’d lost her virginity.
In a motherfucking van.
If her mother or father knew, it would sicken them. She hadn’t told Ella, sure that her sister would respond with something snide, judgmental; she didn’t seem to like Malik. Charu just wanted a hug for her latest move toward womanhood.
The constant lying took its toll on her. She caught herself in the vanity mirror on her desk, which stood right next to her sewing machine. Sometimes, while sewing, she just looked at the mirror, so as to not feel lonely. Did it look like she’d had sex? Had her face changed? Ma once mentioned that girls who were sexually active broke out in pimples from the hormones; indeed, Charu had a constellation of zits on her cheek, probably from putting her face on Malik’s chest. Maybe this was some Dorian Gray–type shit—the more she dived into the forbidden the more marked her face would become. Did other people tell their mothers about having sex? Heart-to-hearts and whatnot? Charu was still bleeding, and was pretty sure this was what happened after your first time. She hadn’t yet turned eighteen, and didn’t want to go to Planned Parenthood, in case she was ordered to tell her parents. People talked about how great Planned Parenthood was, but the prospect of going alone freaked Charu out. It was impossible to find the words with her parents to communicate her feelings with precision and honesty. She’d tried to explain this dilemma to Maya once, but Maya dismissed this as a common affliction for all teenagers. Muslim teenagers got a score of zero on a one-to-ten scale of being able to talk about sex with their folks. But Charu felt it had to do with language. She never could express her love or her sorrow in Bangla, the language of her parents. She had English for that. If she tried to say, “I want to explore a number of relationships before I’m ready to commit myself to one person entirely,” it was like screaming into a ravine.
Charu turned on her sewing machine and started working on a sundress pattern she’d found online. Zippers were a challenge. She preferred invisible zippers—if she messed up the stitching, who would know? She was so distracted, her sewing machine jammed. Malik hadn’t called her yet. Should she call him? She dialed his number and was met with his voice mail:
Hey yo. Leave a beautiful message.
Mustering up her best soft and husky tone, she said: “Malik. It’s Charu. Last night was the jam. Want to see you, soon. Lunch at Mike’s Diner, soon?”
The jam?
What the hell is wrong with me? That was as smooth as my bumpy-ass face.
She resisted the urge to immediately call him again.
“Charu! Ay, Charu!” She heard her father’s voice, sounding old and far away, as if he were calling her like she was a child.
“I’m coming,” she called back, her voice hoarse.
She found Anwar and Hashi, snuggled next to each other like two black-haired paintbrushes, side by side, a pizza box full of uneaten crusts beside them.
“Come here, baba,” said her father. “We just wanted to see you.” He patted the bed next to him.
Charu sat down, gingerly, but Anwar pulled her into his arms. Hashi rubbed her back. Charu buried her face into her father’s underarm.
“Baba, you stink!”
“Why are you crying? Hugs and stink are supposed to make you smile.”
“I—I guess . . . I’ll miss you guys,” she cried.
Charu remembered this curious feeling as a child around five or six. Ella would have therapy appointments, and for that hour, Charu, Anwar, and Hashi would go eat at Wendy’s, or she’d get a gift from one of the stores at Fulton Mall. On those days, she felt that she was their
real
daughter, that they three were a unit. Just Ma, Baba, and Charu, without the worry of whether or not Ella was okay. And, as she had back then, Charu quickly shook the thought out of her mind.
“You guess? I suppose that’s the best we can ask for!” joked Anwar.
J
uly turned into August and the neighborhood grew hot with petty lootings and street brawls in the dead of morning. One such argument, regarding a stolen ten dollars, woke Anwar in the middle of the night. The scuffle was over as soon as it had begun—maybe the ten dollars had been sorted out, or maybe he’d dreamt the whole thing. He put an arm around Hashi, feeling a sudden chill take over him. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep all month, not since his brother had left the house, and when he’d admitted the secret of Hawa. He had assumed that this would relieve a terrible burden, which had clung to him for more than thirty years. By speaking the memory, he no longer had to feel a sense of duty to his brother, and even Hashi disavowed Aman.
Have I wronged my brother?
Anwar wondered. He had not heard a word from him.
Bic’s tale about the House of Bright had also unsettled him, and now, Anwar thought he heard a skittering in the vents. Spooked, he clutched Hashi even tighter. A sliver of moonlight cut across her face. The clock read five a.m. He felt like writing or smoking something. He opened the drawer of his nightstand for his quick-fix one hitter—just a drop of ganja would relax him—but he’d left the little pipe at the shop. He didn’t have the energy to climb up to his studio. He decided to write letters on the veranda instead.
* * *
The letters were for his children, to be read after his death. He realized that perhaps this meant they would lie unread for many
years, but there were stories he wanted to tell his children, stories that he felt too embarrassed to utter aloud. The stories themselves were not embarrassing. But the act of telling them about the past, when he’d been in the company of his best friend, the handsome, rebellious Rezwan Anwar, this made him feel like a fool. Where had he ended up? A shopkeeper in Brooklyn, far away from the country he’d have once died for, just to see it born.
On the veranda, he lay back on one of the canvas lawn chairs. Hashi had purchased matching pairs for both the garden and the veranda, but the ones up here were rarely used; he preferred the privacy of the attic. Price tags—
SUPER DUPER BLOWOUT SALE $15.99
—still dangled off the armrests. He fiddled with the tag on his chair, but the plastic tie refused to be ripped off. He gave up, his fingers raw from pulling. He hovered over the paper, afraid of penning anything less than brilliant.
1971—In the Sylheti forest, Rezwan and I travel by night to ensure our safety. I have neither the stomach for killing nor the propensity for destruction as my dearest friend, but I watch, praying what I witness will not make me lose my mind.
He stopped writing. He didn’t have the stomach to write the story and he let the pen linger too long on the word
mind
. The inky mark bore a hole in the paper. He set the papers and pen aside and decided to enjoy his lawn chairs. The air was sticky and it would be a hot day, the hottest yet. The sun still had not peeked out. He looked up, as the sky often held an answer to the moment. He watched the electric blue sky between the branches of the hibiscus trees. Then, he noticed Ella down below, swinging like a pendulum on the hammock, heavy with terrible loneliness. He had not had a decent conversation with her since the evening Aman Bhai left the house. She spoke little, kept busy in the garden. She’d be leaving for Cornell in a matter of weeks, and he wouldn’t see her again until Thanksgiving at the earliest. From where he stood, he saw the wonder of her green thumb upon his garden. White blossoms of different shapes and sizes glowed still in the dawn.
He wanted to comfort her now. He was tired of being so considerate of her solitude.
* * *
“Come with me to the apothecary today, child,” said Anwar, poking Ella’s shoulder. “Let your old uncle make you a special cup of coffee.”
“Well—”
“C’mon. We’ve hardly had a chance to talk properly since you’ve been home.”
“All right, Anwar. I’ll come.”
They walked back into the house through the sliding door. Ella sat down at the dining table, and Anwar began making his “special coffee.” He heated up a cup of skim milk (this
skim-tim
was Charu’s idea; everyone else liked 2 percent). Meanwhile, into mugs he measured one teaspoon of Folgers instant coffee and two teaspoons of sugar, with a splash of water. He stirred this mixture fast to make a paste, and then poured the warm milk into it.
“Here you are, dear.”
“Thanks.” Ella took a sip, and pursed her lips.
“Too hot?”
“It’s real sweet.”
“Well, you liked it as a child—”
“Charu did. I like it black.”
“Ah, well,” said Anwar, at a loss for what he should say. He swiped a couple of eggs from the refrigerator and poached them with a dash of salt and pepper. Ella ate her egg so hungrily that Anwar let her have his. He settled for a slice of toast. She raised an eyebrow at his liberal use of butter.
“Come along with me to the shop today. I’ve got a box of lavender soaps I must bring and it would be fantastic if we could cycle them over.”
“Sure.”
Ella got up and went to her room. She came back out in a worn navy polo shirt of Anwar’s and jeans with grass stains on the knees. He considered suggesting she might change into a cleaner pair, but thought better of it.
They split the lavender soaps into two burlap satchels, which they carried in their bicycle baskets. They wheeled their bicycles outside, where Ramona Espinal sat on the stoop, drinking a cup of tea and reading the
New York Times
. She wore her scrubs, light
yellow cotton printed with daisies. Beside her was a pint-size mason jar of honey.
“Buenos días!”
“Hola, Anwar,” said Ramona. She nodded hello to Ella.
“Going to work?” asked Anwar.
“I am. I’m switching shifts since one of the nurses has a terrible case of morning sickness.”
“So, no more rowdy nights for you?”
“Pardon me?”
“I—I mean—y-you won’t be coming home so late—since you’ve swapped shifts and all?”
“Well, I . . . I guess not.”
“You know, those honey bears are quite efficient, and weigh hardly anything!” Anwar gestured to the glass jar.
“Those things get clogged up.”
“Sí, señora, sí.”
“Qué bonita el dia, no? Tengo que ir al hospital, te veo!”
Anwar nodded, as if he understood.
“You know, we’ve got to run and open up the shop. Stop by anytime,” said Ella.
Anwar hopped onto his bicycle. Never one to forget his helmet, he had forgotten it this morning. He said a quick dua, for the asphalt to spare his brains, and rode away from Ramona Espinal. He swore he felt her eyes burning holes into him.
The world had not quite awakened on their block, but as they made their way onto Fulton Street, morning buses and commuter traffic sped by, and a couple of cars honked at Anwar to let them pass. He felt his knees creaky with each revolution of pedals, but Ella effortlessly weaved through the morning traffic until he could no longer see her ahead.
* * *
Anwar’s Apothecary looked—
gay and so incredibly lavender
, thought Ella, as she locked her bicycle to the parking sign on Third Avenue.
She hoisted the matching bars of soap on her shoulder and waited for her uncle. She hadn’t wanted to leave him in the dust, but it was impossible to ride that slow. She couldn’t remember sleeping,
and she didn’t remember being awake when Anwar tapped her shoulder.
Ella saw her uncle wheeling toward her.
“You’re fast, child,” wheezed Anwar, his foot skidding on the road.
“Sorry about that, Anwar.”
“For what? Your youth?”
It was still dim inside the apothecary, as the sun had not yet hit their street. The walls of glass bottles gave the room an old-world flavor and Ella suddenly felt glad she’d come. She sniffed the air—the undeniable stale smell of cannabis—and she smiled at her uncle’s brazen potheadedness. She’d only smoked a handful of times up at Cornell—drinking was more her sport—but she didn’t feel prone to addictions. She hated being high, the slipping away of her thoughts into discombobulated scenes from a bad sitcom. Hallucinations were quite enough.
On a separate table, Anwar showcased his prized copper alembic. He used the apparatus to distill flower waters, essential oils, and spirituous elixirs. It was composed of a long copper minaret-like pot connected by tube to a large coffee can. Oxidation had turned the alembic a deep red. Nowadays Anwar preferred to make his oils and flower waters in the privacy of his home studio. He no longer used this alembic, for years of oil and vapors impregnated the copper pores, so he displayed it as a work of art. Translations of the
Book of Crates
, a master catalog of ninth-century Arab spirit-makers and alchemists, inspired him to use a medieval technique that had been long refined by more sophisticated industrial stills. But as they knew then, copper conducted heat most efficiently, reduced bacterial contamination, and produced the prime scent and flavors, as brewers of scotch and whiskey were well aware.
As a child, Ella had watched him distill oil from seeds and flowers countless times. He would stuff a batch of lemon verbena leaves and boiling water into the pot. He’d heat it on the stove, attaching a tube from the pot to a condenser bucket. He would commission Ella to make a paste of rye flour and water to seal any part of the pot leaking steam. She’d hold a test tube to collect the essential oil and flower water trickling out of the condenser bucket. It amazed her as
a child, this transmutation of any old garden-variety shrub into a new, potent substance.
“What do you want me to do?” asked Ella.
Anwar motioned for them to dump the satchels of lavender soap onto the counter. He grabbed a stack of brown paper and hemp tie. “We’re going to package these, and it will take a while.”
Ella wrapped each bar of soap in the brown paper, each crease hard and resolute, reminding her of those old origami books she’d order from Scholastic as a kid. She tied the hemp strings into even bows, and felt all her wayward thoughts focus on this meaningless task.
When her fingers cramped up she checked to see how far her uncle had gotten. He hadn’t been packing the soap at all. She’d seen his fingers moving from the corner of her eye, and she assumed he’d been wrapping and tying.
He was writing on a large piece of brown paper.
“What are you doing, Anwar?”
“I am composing a letter.”
“For who?”
“For you.”
“Why not just tell me?”
“Well, child, it doesn’t seem as though you want to talk.”
“I guess you’re right. Why don’t you tell me now?”
“There’re some things . . . that are too terrible to tell when a man is in his right mind. I believe I’d have to be on my deathbed, or in some dire condition, to be able to utter certain things. But to write them is to have an astronomer’s distance.”
“It’s hard to imagine what you’re talking about.”
“When I write these things that happened so long ago, it’s as if I am orbiting the past, safely away from Earth, from the moon. If I should speak the past aloud, then my words belong to me, but also to the listener, to you.”
“But isn’t it the same thing if I read the words?”
“I won’t be around to see the reactions.”
Ella looked at the paper, but Anwar’s loopy scrawl was a mess. She could make out the title, “Black Forest,” which was three times the size of the rest of the words.
“Is this about my father?”
“Yes.”
“And you won’t say more?”
“When trying to explain one thing, the history of a particular event, say how Rezwan and I joined the Mukti Bahini, it becomes this infinite history lesson. I’m sorry for that; I felt that same way when I asked my father a simple question about his Pala artifacts, and he’d start recounting the grand battle between Alexander the Great and the Gangaridai forces on the mouth of the Ganga, as if he’d been there. I want to tell you—yes, there was a war. And it cannot be isolated from the cyclone that preceded it, or the language movement in which students were murdered for wanting to speak Bangla instead of Urdu. You know, when I hear Charu begin to complain, ‘I am alone, no one gets me,’ or ‘
that’s
racist
,’ or ‘Hashi bitches and moans,’ I feel like shouting, and you, my dear, you know I’m not one to shout. ‘You are not a single person. You are not a minority, child. You belong to a billion people, goddammit. You can’t sit in this house and complain about nothing, because you haven’t experienced a drop of what I’ve experienced, what sort of hunger and ordinary evil there is in this world.’ But of course, she doesn’t want to hear that. So I don’t say it.”
Anwar paused. He walked around the counter to the back room, and Ella heard a faucet running. She heard her uncle gulping a glass of water. He blew his nose loudly—
into the sink
, thought Ella. He came back into the room, his hair slicked back with water. His face was wet.
“Today I’ve gotten the itch to write this out. I dunno why; maybe since your uncle Aman left, I got to thinking a lot about brothers. I mean, I’ve never had that sense of brotherhood with any man before or since your father. But I’ve never been more afraid of a man before either.”
“You were afraid of him?”
“Not in the way I feared Aman as a young boy. Your father was a force of nature, an elegant brute.”
“Where did he meet my mother?”
“They met twice at an Alliance Française film screening.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, that and one long, epic night before their wedding day. War has a way of making you want to get married and have babies. Rezwan and Laila’s fathers had gone to medical school together. Your parents were both tall and spirited. They both agreed to get married.” Anwar paused. “I must tell you more another day.”
Ella felt a warm ache in her throat. There was no more paper to fold, but there were a few more bars of soap left. “No. I want to . . . I want to hear about what you’re writing.”
“I’m not sure that you want to hear about your father in this phase of his life.”
“I want to know everything.”