Authors: Nell Freudenberger
“Did you know that seventy percent of men and sixty percent of women admit to having been unfaithful to their spouse, but that eighty percent of men say they would marry the same woman if they had the chance to live their lives over again?”
“What do the women say?” Amina had asked, but George’s website hadn’t cited that statistic.
George had said that they could use the money he’d been saving for a rainy day for her to begin studying at Monroe Community College next year, and as soon as her green card arrived, Amina planned to start looking for a job. She wanted to contribute to the cost of her education, even if it was just a small amount. George supported the idea of her continuing her studies, but only once she had a specific goal in mind. It wasn’t the degree that counted but what you did with it; he believed that too many Americans wasted time and money on college simply for the sake of a fancy piece of paper. And so Amina told him that she’d always dreamed of becoming a real teacher. This was not untrue, in the sense that she had hoped her tutoring jobs at home might one day lead to a more sustained and distinguished kind of work. What she didn’t mention to George was how important the
U.S. college diploma would be to everyone she knew at home—a tangible symbol of what she had accomplished halfway across the world.
She was standing at the sink, chopping eggplant for dinner, when she saw their neighbor Annie Snyder coming up Skytop Lane, pushing an infant in a stroller and talking to her little boy, Lawson, who was pedaling a low plastic bike. The garish colors and balloon-like shapes of that toy reminded Amina of a commercial she had seen on TV soon after she’d arrived in Rochester, in which real people were eating breakfast in a cartoon house. Annie had introduced herself when Amina had moved in and invited her out for coffee. Then she’d asked if Amina had any babysitting experience, because she was always looking for someone to watch the kids for an hour or two while she did the shopping or went to the gym.
She asks that because you’re from someplace else, George had said. She sees brown skin and all she can think of is housecleaning or babysitting. He told her she was welcome to go to Starbucks with Annie, but under no circumstances was she to take care of Annie’s children, even for an hour. Amina was desperate to find a job, but secretly she was glad of George’s prohibition. American babies made her nervous, the way they traveled in their padded strollers, wrapped up in blankets like precious goods from UPS.
She had never worried about motherhood before, since she’d always known she would have her own mother to help her. When she and George had become serious, Amina and her parents had decided that she would do everything she could to bring them to America with her. Only once they’d arrived did she want to have her first child. They’d talked their plan through again and again at home, researching the green card and citizenship requirements—determining that if all went well, it would be three years from the time she arrived before her parents could hope to join her. Just before she left, her cousin Ghaniyah had shown her an article in
Femina
called “After the Honeymoon,” which said that a couple remained newlyweds for a year and a day after marriage. In her case, Amina thought, the newlywed period would last three times that long, because she wouldn’t feel truly settled until her parents had arrived.
In spite of all the preparation, there was something surprising about actually finding herself in Rochester, waiting for a green card
in the mail. The sight of Annie squatting down and retrieving something from the netting underneath the stroller reminded her that she had been here six months already and had not yet found an opportunity to discuss her thoughts about children or her parents’ emigration with George.
2
Theirs was the second-to-last house on the road. The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul-de-sac, and beyond the cul-de-sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived—had made her wonder, just for a moment, if she had not been tricked (as everyone had predicted) and found herself in a sort of American village. She’d had to remind herself of the clean and modern Rochester airport and of the Pittsford Wegmans—a grocery store that was the first thing she described to her mother during their first conversation on the phone. When she asked about the field, George had explained that there were power lines that couldn’t be moved, and so no one could build a house there.
After she understood its purpose, Amina liked the cornfield, which reminded her of Haibatpur, her grandmother’s village. She had been born there. That was when the house was still a hut, with a thatched roof and a fired-dung floor. After she was born, when her parents were struggling to feed even themselves in Dhaka, they had done as many people did and sent their child back to live with her grandparents in the village. Because of a land dispute between Amina’s father and his cousins, it was her mother’s village to which they habitually returned. And so Amina had stayed with Nanu and her Parveen Aunty and Parveen’s daughter—her favorite cousin, Micki—until she was six years old. Her first memory was of climbing up the stone steps from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s, watching a funny pattern of light and dark splotches turn into a frog, holding still in the ragged shade of a coconut palm.
Her nanu had had four daughters and two sons, but both of Amina’s uncles had died too young for Amina to remember them. The elder, Khokon, had been Mukti Bahini like her father, a Freedom Fighter against the Pakistanis, while the younger one, Emdad, had stayed in the village so that her grandmother wouldn’t worry too much. Even
though he was younger, it was Emdad her grandmother loved the best: that was why she’d kept him with her. When you tried to trick God that way, bad things could happen. Khokon had been killed by General Yahya’s soldiers only two weeks after he’d enlisted, but Emdad had lived long enough to marry. Her mother said that Nanu had often congratulated herself on her foresight in convincing Emdad to stay at home, and so it had been almost impossible for her to believe the news, ten years after the war had ended, that her younger son had been killed in a motorbike accident on his way to Shyamnagar, delivering prescription medicines to the family pharmacy. For months afterward, whenever people offered condolences, her grandmother would correct them:
“You’re thinking of Khokon, my elder son. He was killed in the war.”
By the time Amina was grown up, her grandmother had recovered her wits. But by then she had only daughters, and that was the reason she’d become the way she was now, very quiet and heavy, like a stone.
Little by little, over the eleven months they had written to each other, Amina had told George about her life. She’d said that she came from a good family and that her parents had sacrificed to send her to an English medium school, but she had not exaggerated her father’s financial situation or the extent of her formal education. She’d said that she had learned to speak English at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka but that she’d been forced to drop out when she was thirteen, when her father could no longer pay the fees. She’d tried to explain that it wasn’t arriving in a rickshaw every day, when everyone else came by car or taxi, or borrowing the books other girls owned, or even working twice as hard because everyone else had a private tutor after school. What she couldn’t stand, she wrote to George, was having to leave school a few months after her thirteenth birthday, waking up in the morning and knowing that today she was falling six hours behind, tomorrow twelve, and the next day eighteen. What she couldn’t stand was all the waste.
She’d also confessed that she was twenty-four rather than twenty-three that year: her parents had waited to file her birth certificate, as many families did, so that she might one day have extra time to qualify for university or the civil-service exam. Her mother had
warned her to be careful about what she revealed in her e-mails, but Amina found that once she got started writing, it was difficult to stop.
She told George how her father’s business plans had a tendency to fail, and how each time one of those schemes had foundered, they had lost their apartment. She told him about the year they had spent living in Tejgaon, after losing the apartment in the building called Moti Mahal, and how during that time her father had bought a single egg every day, which her mother would cook for her because Amina was still growing and needed the protein. One night, when she had tried to share the egg with her parents, dividing it up into three parts, her father had gotten so angry that he had tried to beat her (with a jump rope) and would have succeeded if her mother hadn’t come after him with the broken handle of a chicken-feather broom.
Sometimes she got so involved in remembering what had happened that she forgot about the reader on the other end, and so she was surprised when George wrote back to tell her that her story had made him cry. He could not remember crying since his hamster had died in the second grade, and he thought that it meant their connection was getting stronger. Amina wrote back immediately to apologize for making George cry and to explain that it was not a sad story but a funny one, about her parents and the silly fights they sometimes had. Even if she and George didn’t always understand each other, she never felt shy about asking him questions. What level did the American second grade correspond to in the British system? What had he eaten for dinner as a child? And what, she was very curious to know, was a hamster?
It had felt wonderful to have someone to confide in, someone she could trust not to gossip. (With whom could George gossip about Amina, after all?) It was a pleasure to write about difficult times in the past, as long as things were better now. By the time she and George started writing to each other, Amina was supporting her parents with the money she made from her tutoring jobs through Top Talents; they were living in the apartment in Mohammadpur, and of course they had plenty to eat. She still thought the proudest moment of her life had come when she was seventeen and had returned home one day to surprise her parents with a television bought entirely out of her own earnings.
The other benefit of tutoring, one she hadn’t considered when she started out, was the use of the computers that many of the wealthy families who hired her kept for their children’s exclusive use. All of her students were female, and most of them were between eight and fourteen years old; as they got closer to the O- or A-level exams, their parents hired university students to prepare them. Many of these parents told Amina that they’d chosen her because they’d been impressed by her dedication in passing the O levels on her own, but of course Amina knew that Top Talents charged less for her than they did for an actual university student.
Amina had seen one of her students, a fourteen-year-old named Sharmila, three times a week; since her parents both had office jobs, they liked Amina to stay as long as she wanted so that their daughter wasn’t just sitting around with the servants all afternoon. Her mother confided that she thought Amina would be a good influence on her daughter’s
character;
Sharmila was very intelligent, but easily distracted, and was not serious enough about saying her prayers.
She has been raised with everything
, her mother said, her arm taking in the marble floors of the living room and the heavy brocade curtains on the six picture windows overlooking the black surface of Gulshan Lake, which was revealed, even at this height, to be clogged with garbage, water lilies, and the shanties of migrant families.
She doesn’t even know how lucky she is
. Amina nodded politely, but the way that Sharmila’s mother complained was a performance. She would put on the same show when her daughter’s marriage was being negotiated, exaggerating Sharmila’s incompetence with a simple dal or kitchuri, so that the groom’s family would understand what a little princess they were about to receive.
Amina had sworn Sharmila to secrecy on the subject of AsianEuro.com, and then they’d had a lot of fun, looking through the photos in the “male gallery” after the lessons were finished. Sharmila always chose the youngest and best-looking men; she would squeal and gasp when they came across one who was very old or very fat. More often than not, Amina had the same impulses, but she reminded herself that she was not a little girl playing a game. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman whose family’s future depended on this decision.
According to her mother, the man could not have been divorced
and he certainly couldn’t have any children. He had to have a bachelor’s degree and a dependable job, and he could not drink alcohol. He could not be younger than thirty or older than forty-five, and he must be willing to convert to Islam. Her mother had also insisted that Amina take off her glasses and wear a red sari she had inherited from her cousin Ghaniyah in the photograph, but once it had been taken and scanned into the computer (a great inconvenience) at the Internet café near Aunty #2’s apartment in Savar, her mother would not allow her to post it online. “Why would you want a man who was only interested in your photograph?” she demanded, and nothing Amina could say about the way the site worked would change her mind.
“The men will think you’re ugly!” Sharmila exclaimed when she heard about Amina’s mother’s stipulations. They were sitting on the rug in Sharmila’s bedroom at the time, with Sharmila’s
Basic English Grammar
open between them. Her student was wearing the kameez of her school uniform with a pair of pajama trousers decorated with kittens. She looked Amina up and down critically.
“Your hair is coarse, and you have an apple nose, but you aren’t
ugly
,” she concluded. “Now no one is going to write to you.” And although Amina had the very same fears, she had decided to pretend to agree with her mother, for the sake of Sharmila’s character.
As it happened, George did not post his picture online either. They sent each other the photographs only after they had exchanged several messages. George told her that her picture was “very beautiful,” in a formal way that pleased her: it was almost as if he were a Bengali bridegroom surrounded by his relatives, approving of their choice without wanting to display too much enthusiasm, for fear of being teased. Months later, once they had decided to become exclusive and take their profiles down from the site, George told her it was the day he saw her photograph that he’d become convinced she was the right person for him—not because of how pretty she was but because she hadn’t used her “superficial charms” to advertise herself, the way certain American women did.