Authors: Nell Freudenberger
“It’s also called ‘climax,’ ” he said, resuming a lecturing tone that was comforting in its familiarity. “I’m doing something wrong. But if we keep practicing I’m sure we’ll get it.”
It was 11:30, and she knew she would be exhausted at work in the morning, but strangely she didn’t mind.
“Just not on Mondays,” she said. “I’m so tired.”
“Mondays will be abstinence day,” George said. “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder—that’s something they used to tell us in sex ed. That’s sex education—we used to have to go every week.”
Amina lifted her head to look at him. “In
school
?”
“But they didn’t teach us the stuff you really need to know.” George stroked her arm slowly, from shoulder to wrist, and suddenly she thought of how different it would be if her parents were in the bedroom next door. They would have to whisper and keep the lights off the whole time.
“I love you,” George said, and Amina didn’t hesitate:
“I love you, too.”
18
Her parents might have met each other earlier, if not for the war. In March of 1971, when it began, her father was a twenty-year-old engineering student at Rajshahi University. Abdul Mazid and Nasir’s father, Noresh, had been two of the first to put down their names when the university had issued the call for volunteers. As college students with engineering training, they’d been sent to Dehradun, the famous Indian military academy in Uttar Pradesh, for guerrilla training. They learned to operate the Indian self-loading rifles, as well as light and submachine guns, and drilled with explosives and grenades. Noresh was bored by the strategy sessions with the Indian officers, but Abdul Mazid had a knack for thinking several steps ahead; he always seemed to have the answer their instructor was
looking for. He befriended the Deshi commander of his own district as well, and when the commander returned to Khulna, both Abdul Mazid and Noresh went with him. Amina’s father, her mother often told her, had been the bravest man in his company, once begging the commander to be allowed to mount a dawn raid on a fortified Pakistani forest camp. Her father had fought so fiercely, and inspired his men so successfully, that they’d routed the Pakistani unit with only twelve men, taking four POWs, a cache of G3 “tak-doom” rifles, and a carton of King Stork cigarettes. No less than Lieutenant General Sagat Singh, the Indian IV Corps Commander, had sent congratulations to her father from the front.
Abdul Mazid and Noresh fought for six months together, during which time Amina’s father assumed command of the unit. When he was wounded during a guerrilla operation, blowing up electrical pylons behind Pakistani lines, it was Noresh who brought him first to a makeshift field hospital in Satkhira and then home to Kajalnagar. By the time Noresh reported back to the commander at Shyamnagar, Lieutenant General Niazi had surrendered to the joint command of Indian and Bangladeshi forces at the Race Course Maidan, and Bangladesh was free.
Her parents saw each other for the first time at her aunt Moni and uncle Omar’s wedding, in the spring of 1978. Her father had immediately made inquiries, but her mother’s father had politely let her father’s family know they weren’t interested. In spite of Abdul Mazid’s impressive military service, and the college degree that he’d gone back to finish after the war, his family had a reputation in Kajalnagar as people whom bad luck followed.
Abdul Mazid’s grandfather had been an estate manager for the local
zamindar
and had been clever enough to lease a great deal of that man’s land before Partition; in 1950, when the
zamindari
system was formally abolished, Amina’s great-grandfather had become the owner of more than two hundred acres of land. That land had been divided between two sons, Amina’s grandfather and his brother, neither of whom had managed it well. When his brother died in his early forties, his three sons were left with thirty of the least desirable acres, small parcels that they had sold as soon as they were old enough to do
so. Amina’s grandfather had done only slightly better, holding on to forty acres. But as land prices began their dramatic ascent all over the country, his brother’s widow had become obsessed with the idea that her three sons had been cheated, inheriting the poorest of the family land. Her sons grew up believing that Abdul Mazid would inherit land that should rightly have belonged to them.
Amina had never known her paternal grandmother, who had died along with a stillborn baby before her father was two years old. He’d been raised by the wife of a poor tenant farmer on his father’s land, a woman with five children, who looked after her father in exchange for payments of rice and grain. Amina couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to remember your own mother; there had been no one to tell him, through looks and touch and angry scoldings, that he was the most precious person in the world to her. Her father had once joked that his own father hadn’t noticed he existed until he came back from the war. She’d never spoken about it with her mother, but she sometimes thought this tragedy had defined her father’s personality—the reckless disregard for his own safety that had made him such a success as a soldier but a failure as a provider ever since.
To her mother, her father at twenty-seven was a hero of the war; more than that, he was soft-spoken, educated, and, she had once told Amina, the first person she’d ever met who singled her out from her three sisters as worthy of attention and interest. The two of them exchanged six letters and met twice in secret; a month after her elder sister’s wedding, Fatima Areebah defied her parents for the first and only time and took a bus to Khulna with Abdul Mazid. They were married and spent the night in a hotel. The next day they returned to Kajalnagar, where they lived with Dadu for more than a year. During this time, Omar and Moni resettled in Dhaka, where Omar’s family owned an apartment building. Omar was a natural businessman, acquiring more real estate and eventually forming his own development company, and Abdul Mazid and his new bride soon followed them to the capital, where Omar put Amina’s father to work as a construction supervisor. Her father was grateful for the job, which would sustain him while he looked out for a way to make his fortune.
Her mother returned to her own village for Amina’s birth, in 1980, and her father took a leave from his job with Omar. He went to see
his new daughter and then visited his father in Kajalnagar, where he ran into a childhood friend with a business idea too tempting to resist: Baag Import-Export was going to bring in powdered milk from Australia and send back jute fiber to be used for the backing of carpets. Abdul Mazid quit his job with Omar and sold the first quarter of his land to invest in the scheme. When it failed, a year later, her parents decided that they should return to Dhaka while Amina stayed in Haibatpur with her grandmother until their luck improved.
Amina had joined her parents permanently in Dhaka when she was six years old, but their troubles had continued. There was no shortage of promising opportunities: normally her father had been the one optimistically waiting for news of success, while her mother had always remained cautiously fearful. As a child she had shared her father’s enthusiasms, but by the time she was twelve years old, she had begun to shift to her mother’s point of view. They had stopped hoping for miracles and only prayed that whatever new endeavor her father had become involved in wouldn’t leave them worse off than they already were.
The year she was twelve had been the worst, because they’d fallen seven months behind on the rent. Her mother had sold what little jewelry she had to pay Amina’s school fees; there was enough for another year, if they were careful, and then her father had heard about his cousins’ fishing project. These were the same cousins who had disputed her father’s ownership of his land; the fish farm they had recently started was enjoying unprecedented success, and they were planning to expand into shrimp.
Amina could never remember the proper names of her father’s eldest cousins, who were called Bhulu and Laltu within the family, but her parents always referred to the youngest by his more formal name: Salim. She clearly remembered seeing Salim in Kajalnagar as a child, because of his physical defect and the story that was attached to it. Salim was tall, well built and fair skinned; if it weren’t for his left eye, permanently stuck in an unnatural, upward-looking position, he would’ve been more handsome than his older brothers. His deformity was common enough, less damaging in a man than in a woman, and he should have married easily in spite of it. When he turned nineteen, his parents made an offer to a poor family with an especially
pretty daughter in a nearby village. The family declined, and Salim’s parents took the answer as a serious insult. They mocked the other family’s pretensions all over the village, but of course the reason for the girl’s parents’ demurral was clear to everyone. Amina’s father said that Salim had always been sensitive about his eye and that, after two weeks in which his rejection was the subject of discussion all over the village, he couldn’t stand it. One night he had gone to the girl’s house in the village with a plastic cup of battery acid and thrown it through the open window where the girl was sleeping next to her five-year-old brother. Neither had been killed, but both children were badly burned, and the girl’s beautiful face was permanently disfigured. The message was clear: if she wasn’t going to marry Salim, she wasn’t going to marry anyone at all.
That had happened just after the war, and Salim’s family had bribed an officer at the
thana
headquarters, who delayed filing the charges from the girl’s family until Salim had left the country. He spent ten years in India and then returned unexpectedly—not destitute, but without fortune or family—for his father’s funeral. He had moved in with his eldest brother Bhulu’s family, and his reputation for strangeness intensified. Although it was widely believed in the village that Bhulu and Laltu brought him into the fish farm out of charity, it was Salim who had contacted her father to ask if he wanted to go in on it. Salim told her father that if he could raise the capital, the three cousins would agree to give him an equal share of the profits, as a kind of reconciliatory gesture for the years of enmity between the two branches of the family.
At the time they were living in Mohammadpur with the kindest of all their Dhaka landlords—a man that she and her mother called Long Nose, but only behind his back. Long Nose was a widower who lived in the ground-floor flat with his eldest son’s large and noisy family. He clearly admired Amina’s mother, but he was always proper about it, coming up to the fifth floor to sit and chat with them only when her father was at home. At that time their complementary needs—his loneliness, their poverty—had provided the equilibrium on which a true friendship had rested. It hadn’t occurred to Amina at the time, but she thought now that her mother, frustrated by her inability to change their situation, would have been flattered by Long Nose’s attention,
and the idea that his leniency with regard to the rent was in some way her doing.
Her father had never liked the idea of a quarrel and was inclined to believe the best of people. He had accepted his cousins’ proposition and, instead of paying the back rent to Long Nose, used the last of her mother’s jewelry money for the fishing project. He had made the trip back to Kajalnagar alone, staying in the village for several weeks and calling with enthusiastic reports about their prospects. Soon, however, Moni had heard rumors from one of her sisters-in-law in Kajalnagar, who said that Amina’s father was being deceived. His cousins had doctored their books and even stocked their ponds with borrowed perch in honor of his visit. They were only waiting for him to return to Dhaka, after which they would dismantle the beds they’d constructed and begin spending the money he’d given them. In fact, her father’s cousins were already bragging that they’d outsmarted Abdul Mazid, whose land ought to have belonged to them anyway.
Amina’s mother had been skeptical of the fish farm from the beginning, and now she was mortified—not only by her husband’s failure, but by the way the story was circulating in both Kajalnagar and Haibatpur. Nanu had never warmed to her third daughter’s husband; after the elopement, she had tolerated Abdul Mazid’s presence in the village when they visited but never spoke to him directly, and insulted him by handing her daughter money right in front of him. That made it all the more surprising when Nanu decided to intervene after the fish farm scam, contacting the district commissioner of police, who had been a close friend of her late husband. The commissioner succeeded in getting some of Amina’s father’s money back on grounds of fraud, but his cousins were furious; because of Salim’s reputation for violence, Nanu had invited her son-in-law to come from his home village and spend the night with her in Haibatpur.
This reconciliation between mother and son-in-law had gone some way toward consoling Amina’s parents for their humiliation. Her father had called them in Dhaka to say he’d be home the following day, and Amina remembered that her mother had gone to sleep that night cheered by the knowledge that her husband was being treated with respect in her childhood home for the first time. Very early the next morning, she and her mother had woken to a scratching at the
front door. They had both leaped out of bed, but her mother had been the one to grab the biggest knife from the kitchen and stand in front of Amina just inside the door. They’d heard a metallic clanking, followed by the sound of footsteps running down the stairs.
“Salim,” her mother hissed—an intuition later confirmed by several sources in the village. She thought he’d been trying to rob them and had lost his nerve; it was only once they tried the knob that they discovered they’d been locked in. They could hear the padlock rattling in the old slide-bolt latch on the other side of the door. There was no way to get out.
Her mother had screamed for Long Nose, even though it wasn’t yet five in the morning, and their landlord had come upstairs and reassured them through the door. He called the blacksmith and waited there three hours for the man to arrive. By that time most of the other tenants had squeezed with Long Nose onto the small fifth-floor landing—a collection of curious faces—to inquire about the drama that was playing out in their building. When the door opened, Amina and her mother were bombarded with questions:
Who was the culprit? Where was her father? Would the person who had done this menace the building again?
The amazing thing had been how Long Nose herded everyone away, only making sure himself that she and her mother were safe before acting as if everything were normal, so they wouldn’t be any more embarrassed than they already were.