Authors: Nell Freudenberger
Sincerely
,
Amina
The desk where Amina sat, underneath a framed poster of the Buddha, was in a room with burnt-orange walls, dimly lit and scattered with votive candles that burned throughout the day. The smell of the yoga studio was familiar in its elements, but combined to make something overpowering and foreign—a heady mixture of sandalwood soap, patchouli oil, and cardamom from the pot labeled CHAI, simmering on the hot plate in the kitchen. It was Amina’s job to make the tea when she arrived early in the morning, after which she turned on the computer and selected one of a stack of CDs, contemplative flute and sitar music, which she set on shuffle for the rest of the day. She watered four large ficus trees, as well as a thriving collection of spider plants and aspidistra hanging from the ceiling in cradles of woven hemp, and then sat down at the desk, waiting for the phone to ring and consciously keeping her eyes from straying to the three recessed niches in the walls, where smoke-stained Hindu idols sat among candles, garlands, and offerings of oil.
She had come for her interview on the first of August, and Kim had called her the night before to help her prepare. She had reassured her that the guru was a kind and open-minded person, but had suggested that Amina might want to wear her own clothes to the interview. For a mortified second she thought Kim was referring to the gardening trousers Amina had been wearing when they last met: Did her new friend think she made a habit of going around in her husband’s old clothes? But it soon became apparent that Kim thought the guru would like Amina better if she dressed the way she had in Desh.
“I don’t want you to pretend to be someone you’re not,” Kim said. “It’s just that you don’t have a ton of experience, and I was thinking that the way you look might help. That’s how I got my first waitressing job.”
“You wore Indian clothes?”
Kim laughed. “No—much worse. The interview basically consisted of standing up and turning around, so that the manager could look me up and down.”
“Would I have to wear shalwar kameez every day?” Amina had asked. “I mean, if I get the job?” She thought her mother might be
able to find a way to send more, but that it would be hard to explain why she needed them.
“Oh no,” Kim had said. “The last girl always wore jeans. It would just be for the interview.”
Kim’s guru was older than she’d expected, but handsome, with a face that looked as if someone had cut it from stone. There were lines across his forehead and around his eyes in the way of white people who were not vigilant about sun protection, but his sleeveless black Yoga Shanti T-shirt revealed his tanned and muscular arms and shoulders. Lucas’s salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a short ponytail, and he wore a single gold earring in the shape of ankh. He spoke with an accent Amina couldn’t identify, pausing for an unnerving amount of time between thoughts and looking at Amina in a way that reminded her more of a doctor than a boss. They had sat with Kim on cushions like the ones in her apartment, drinking tea, and the guru had observed that Amina’s hips weren’t open, and that that was why she was uncomfortable sitting cross-legged. They would have to get her into a class or two, he had told Kim, who nodded solemnly and then smiled at Amina as if to reassure her that the yoga classes were optional.
Amina had told Lucas an abbreviated version of how she’d come to Rochester, and about her job at MediaWorks and her classes at MCC, but Lucas had been most interested in hearing about her early life in the village.
“I was there in ’71,” Lucas said, startling Amina, until she realized he was talking about the Concert for Bangladesh rather than the country itself. “Forty thousand people in Madison Square Garden.”
“I—” Amina began, but stopped herself; telling Lucas she’d been born nine years after the war had ended might rudely emphasize her relative youth. “I love Paul McCartney,” she said instead.
She wasn’t sure whether it was her clothing or Kim’s influence, but Lucas offered her the job as soon as they finished talking. She could work a morning shift, which would allow George to drop her off on his way to work. Her classes at MCC were in the evenings at the Brighton campus, and so she would have the afternoons free for her schoolwork.
“It doesn’t make sense for you to go all the way back to Pittsford on
the days you have class,” Kim said. “Why don’t you just use my apartment? I’m mostly in and out. And it’s easier to get to Brighton by bus from here anyway.”
“Thank you,” Amina said. “But I would be in the way.”
“I could take you to Namaste,” Kim said, as if she hadn’t heard. “That’s the Indian market in Henrietta. You could teach me some Bengali cooking.”
“You’ll sure be spending a lot of time with Kim,” George had observed, but at first that wasn’t the case. When Amina arrived in the morning, Kim was already teaching the Mysore students, who did their yoga—Amina learned to say “practiced”—in a warm, silent room at the back of the studio. The Mysore room was open from 6:00 a.m. until noon every day except “moon days,” when no one practiced because the full moon affected their balance. The students, who were mostly thin and solemn young women, came in and out according to their schedules, and so Amina didn’t see Kim until it finished. At that time she would often go out with the other teachers for chai tea lattes from Starbucks—her weakness, she told Amina—and once she got back it was almost time for her to teach the Basics class, attended by a different population of plump and talkative Rochester ladies.
Kim had shown her where she kept the spare key, in a shoe outside the door, and eventually Amina became convinced that her friend genuinely liked having her there. They went to the Indian market, where Amina was thrilled to find red, yellow, and green lentils sold in bulk, ground coriander, dried mango, and even frozen kajoli fish. Namaste had all the Maggi hot sauces as well as jarred lemon, garlic, and mango pickle; in the fresh produce section she found karela, mukhi, and her beloved kolmi, so much more delicate than the American spinach she’d tried from Wegmans. Some of the vegetables were organic, which meant that they hadn’t been sprayed with pesticide—so it was almost as if you’d grown them in a garden at home. Kim was knowledgeable about different types of chemicals and their harmful effects; she was especially concerned about parabens in cosmetics and BPA in plastic bottles.
“People are starting to be aware of it here,” she said. “But what about in a place like India?”
They were standing in front of an alphabetized wall of Hindi movies. Amina recognized some that had been popular the year before she left—
Main Hoon Na, Masti, Murder
—but George’s interest in her part of the world didn’t extend to its cinema, and so she resisted the temptation.
Kim was still talking about plastic bottles. “They think they might be causing birth defects—or even infertility in high-enough concentrations.”
“I’ve been trying to get pregnant.” She’d spoken without thinking, but when she saw Kim’s face she wished she’d kept this piece of information to herself. Had she been insensitive? She’d been offering up a personal failure, the way you did when you wanted to advance a friendship between women, but now she considered that her casual introduction of the subject might seem callous.
Kim smiled faintly at Amina, then looked back toward the vegetables. “I’m sure it’ll happen soon.”
“I don’t know,” Amina said. “Maybe there’s some problem. For my mother it happened so quickly.”
“You really want a baby now?” Kim asked. “Or is it George?”
“I want one,” Amina said. “As long as my parents can come to help us take care of it. Only I didn’t know Americans don’t like to live with parents.”
“George doesn’t want them to come?”
Amina hesitated, feeling disloyal. To say anything would be to air the kind of “dirty laundry” George believed in keeping to themselves.
“Do you want me to talk to him for you?”
“Oh—no,” Amina said. “Please.”
“Maybe he’ll change his mind when the baby comes,” Kim said. “There are these herbs you can take—they’re supposed to taste awful, but I know someone who did it and had twins.”
“I don’t want twins,” Amina said quickly.
“Well, let me know if you want me to say something to him,” Kim said, putting her string bags down on the counter. “He listens to me. And there are some things about your culture George just isn’t going to understand.”
6
Although ESL was listed only by its number in the catalog, Jill renamed it;
Migrations and Transformations
, she wrote on the white board on the first day of the fall quarter, saying that the class was not only a way to improve their English, but to “consider putting into narrative the journeys that led us all here.” In the margin of her first paper, about her online courtship with George, her teacher wrote
Great ideas, more organization!
and the following week, when she described her early childhood in the village:
Amina—this is fascinating stuff. But where’s your thesis statement?
Amina often wrote the papers in Kim’s apartment after work while she waited for George to pick her up. Sometimes the apartment was so untidy that she would start by doing a little bit of housework—washing the dishes in the sink or watering the plants. When Kim noticed, she would be effusive in her thanks, insisting that it wasn’t necessary, but it seemed to Amina the least she could do in exchange for Kim’s generosity. If she was working on a problem set for calculus, she appreciated the quiet of the apartment, but on the days when it was English, she always hoped Kim would come home early. She would read it through and help Amina put things in the right places; if there was no thesis statement, her friend could always come up with one. Then she would make tea, and they would talk until Amina had to leave for the bus, or they heard George honking the horn outside.
Kim loved Amina’s stories about Desh and was often able to determine which of them would please her teacher best. For example, Amina had suggested writing about the triumphant day she’d bought the TV to surprise her parents—from a neighbor who worked for LG in the electronics department of the export fair at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar. Kim, however, argued in favor of the story about the time Amina’s grandmother had seen the white legs of a ghost dangling from the tree outside her house. This had happened on an evening when Amina and Micki had been in their playhouse, involved in some complicated domestic fantasy; by the time they’d come home, the whole village was talking about what Nanu had seen. A Hindu herbalist with a stall in Satkhira had come to investigate the site and recommended that
Nanu put an offering of fruit out each evening for a week on the steps of the pond. The ghost was never seen again, but every morning the fruit was gone—messy scraps of flesh, pit, and rind littering the steps and the ground underneath the mango tree. Kim had suggested that she also describe the house where she and Micki had played: the clay cups that had furnished their kitchen and the banana leaves that had served as plates. She told Amina to be sure to include the fact that the house had belonged to a Hindu, who had fled to India during the purges that accompanied the war—it was that history that gave the story depth and meaning.
Amina understood that she was supposed to write about her own experiences, but if she’d had a choice she thought she might have preferred describing Kim’s. Often when they were finished with Amina’s homework, she would ask Kim about India. After their conversation at Namaste, she was careful to stay away from the subject of pregnancy. Instead they talked about Kim’s life in Bombay before her marriage—a topic her friend never tired of discussing—and, when that was exhausted, the months Kim and Ashok had spent living together in Manhattan.
Once they started dating officially, Ashok had taken Kim to the horse races, to the tennis club, and to the fabulous wedding celebration of an Australian businessman and a Bollywood actress on an island in the Arabian Sea. They dined habitually at expensive restaurants, where the maître d’s greeted Ashok by name and referred to Kim as “madam.” In his parents’ second home outside the city, an open farmhouse on a hill surrounded by villages, Ashok rowed Kim out into the middle of a still, sparkling lake. All around them were low hills and fat clouds; insects skimmed the surface of the water, and Kim couldn’t believe the uncanny softness of the air. Of course the peaceful landscape wasn’t as empty as it looked, and the tiny, rounded huts that Kim admired from a distance each contained a family. They kissed in the middle of the lake, his hand in her sun-bleached hair, and Kim, at least, was startled when they returned to shore to find a crowd of gawking villagers.
To Amina these experiences were wonderful, but Kim described them as painful and full of errors. She remembered once having a bad cold; after a day of watching her hack and snort into tissues, Ashok
had observed casually that “Indian women don’t really do that.” And as soon as he said it, she had begun to look around and notice that while a lady might hold a tissue over her nose at a particularly noxious intersection, wipe the seat of a taxi or the rim of a glass, she certainly didn’t expel her own body fluids in public.
For as long as she could remember, Kim said, she had looked at her mother and been privately grateful to her unknown biological parents for her height and slender build. She had felt glamorous going into a small boutique on Malabar Hill to buy an outfit for the wedding they were attending; Ashok had told her to put her purchases on their account at the store, which was owned by a friend of his mother’s. As a teenager she’d never had enough money for what she wanted—and, she admitted to Amina, there were a few times when she’d shoplifted clothing just for the pleasure of getting away with it—but she’d always been conscious that she knew how to choose things that would look good on her. In India Kim was thrilled by the variety of garments and fabrics, and she’d fallen in love with a pale green-and-gold lengha, which she knew Ashok would admire. But when she’d gone behind the curtain with a shopgirl to help her get dressed, Kim had discovered that the blouse was made for a woman with a narrower frame. The girl went to retrieve what they had in larger sizes (none of them as pretty as the first), but these were designed for older, heavier women with larger breasts. The saris themselves could be wrapped to suit the figure, but the girl wasn’t used to doing it for someone so tall, and a good portion of Kim’s ankles showed beneath the heavily decorated hem. She had been embarrassed, returning home empty-handed, to find both Ashok and his mother waiting to see what she’d selected.