Authors: Nell Freudenberger
“Were you scared?” Amina asked. They were in the empty studio after class, cleaning up the towels, water bottles, and stray pieces of clothing the students had left behind. Kim took a soft cloth from a drawer and began polishing two brass incense burners that hung on chains from the ceiling, framing a portrait of the elephant god, Ganesh.
“No,” she said. “Not really, to be honest. It sounds awful to say, but it was actually kind of exciting. I don’t know how to explain—it didn’t feel like something that had happened to me. You know that thing people said,
We are all New Yorkers?
I didn’t feel like a New Yorker. Not that I felt Indian or anything, but all the missing persons signs—they didn’t seem real to me. I think Ashok was more upset about it than I was. He sealed all our windows with that blue tape—you know, like electricians use—because of the smell. His parents called us every day, and he kept telling me to call my mom. But I figured she thought I was in India, and she wouldn’t worry. I mean—I hadn’t even called her when we got married.”
Two months after the attacks, when she finally did get up the nerve to call, Cathy had collapsed in tears on the phone. She’d said that when she didn’t get a call after the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, she’d assumed her daughter was dead.
“I know we haven’t been on the best terms,” her mother had told her. “But I said to Eileen, ‘If she’s alive she would call. There’s nowhere on earth she could be where she wouldn’t hear about this.’ ”
“But I was the one in Manhattan,” Kim told Amina. “Why would I have been worried about her in Rochester? I said that, and then it was just the same old conversation—about how she’d done her best, but it wasn’t enough for me.” Kim stopped her polishing and stood with the cloth in her hand. Her clothes—a pair of lime-green shorts
and a magenta T-shirt with the Devanagari om—were at odds with her somber expression. “Years had passed, but we were still arguing about the same stuff. These patterns repeat themselves, with parents and children—that’s another reason I went to India. If I was going to have a family, I wanted it to be totally different from the one I’d had.” She lifted her left foot and rested it against the inside of the opposite thigh, standing comfortably on one leg. Behind her Amina could see a heavy, cold rain falling outside two narrow windows to the street.
“It’s funny to think I didn’t know you then,” Amina said. “Or George.”
It had been dinnertime in the old Mohammadpur apartment, and the television had been on; they’d learned about it first from the BBC, even before their friends and relatives began to call. Her mother had watched for five minutes and then declared that it was the end of student visas.
“My mother said we might as well stop thinking about the U.S.,” she told Kim. “As soon as we heard it on the news. She said my only hope was Europe.”
“What about your father?” Kim asked.
“He said that America was going to need Bangladesh for an ally against the terrorists. He was really excited. He said that now the U.S. would finally give up on Pakistan.”
“They were both wrong,” Kim said.
“Actually my mother was right about the visas—there were fewer of those. The fiancée visas changed right after I got here. It got much harder to come, especially from a Muslim country.”
“Has George ever been to the mosque with you?”
“We looked around. There is one place—my cousin at home recommended it. But we’ve been so busy—we haven’t gone.” Amina had looked online again this year and seen that the Eid potluck was the night before her calculus final. She knew there would always be an excuse and that it was important just to take the first step, but it was the kind of thing that got harder the longer she waited to do it. She imagined the people she would meet at the ICR—perhaps even other Bengalis—who had joined as soon as they arrived in Rochester and
were now part of a genuine Muslim community. What would they say when they heard it had taken her almost two years to visit for the first time?
“You haven’t gone at all?”
Amina had the peculiar urge to defend herself, almost as if she were talking to another Muslim—Nasir, for example. “At home women usually aren’t permitted in the mosque,” she told Kim. “So this isn’t different for me.”
“But you
can
go here,” Kim said. “Don’t you want to? I’d love to go with you—I mean, if that’s allowed.”
“Anyone is welcome,” Amina said, because of course it would be wrong to discourage anyone who showed an interest in her faith. “It would be nice if you could be a witness at our wedding—I mean, our Muslim wedding ceremony. We’ve always meant to do that.”
“Oh, Amina!” Kim lifted up on her toes several times, as if her excitement required some corresponding action. “I’d love to! But shouldn’t we wait until your parents get here? So they can be part of it?”
Amina stared at Kim. For the first time someone other than herself and her parents had expressed faith in their plan—had, in fact, spoken of it in English as if it were a certainty. She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the casual frequency of American hugging. She took a paper towel and began wiping the top of the radiator, trying to avoid looking up into Ganesh’s oddly human eyes. She couldn’t help noticing that the Hindu god was seated on a large gray rat.
9
In March of 2007, Amina passed her driver’s test. George took her out to Giorgio’s to celebrate the license, as well as the second anniversary of her arrival in America. They were one month shy of another anniversary as well: they didn’t talk about it, but this month marked the eleventh since they’d begun trying to have a baby. She would sometimes catch him looking at her with an injured expression, as if he suspected she were preventing a pregnancy on purpose.
She’d gone so far as taking her temperature in the mornings and
allowed herself to buy a package of ovulation predictor kits each month. They had become an expensive habit, but George never said anything about them; now, instead of having sex at regular intervals, they obeyed the smiley faces on the plastic sticks. For the first three months, she’d been relieved to get her period, but once it had been half a year her innate urge to succeed took over. George brought up the question of a doctor first, asking if she wanted him to go and be tested. She had the feeling that this was his way of asking her to go, but the thought of an American doctor putting something inside her and looking around was too strange. She couldn’t help seeing in their failure to conceive a kind of sign about the other impasse in the marriage: it was now only a little more than a year before she would be allowed to apply for citizenship and sponsor her parents’ applications, but she and George were no closer to an agreement on that subject.
“Maybe we should try a little longer,” she had told him, and she’d been relieved when he didn’t force it.
“It could be stress,” he said. “Did you know it takes the average person ten years to adjust to a new country?”
“I don’t think adjustment is the problem.”
“The first two years are the hardest—according to this website I found. After that it gets much easier.”
Whether or not it was a sign she was adjusting, the spring and summer did seem to move faster than previous ones. She learned online that the first stirrings of conception could feel like menstrual pain and that there could even be spotting, and so she refused to believe that she had failed each month until she had soaked through a pair of underpants. She had never particularly noticed pregnant women, in part because they were not so visible in Desh: women tended to stay closer to home, and when they ventured out, their condition was more easily concealed underneath their looser clothing. Here in Rochester they seemed to be everywhere—circling the tract in their jogging clothes, obstructing the aisles of the supermarkets, and arriving in droves for the new prenatal class that an instructor named Stacey was offering on Monday and Wednesday mornings.
It was difficult not to mention this preoccupation to her mother, with whom she talked nearly every day. Her mother was in the habit
of calling early in the mornings, before Amina left for Yoga Shanti, to give her a report on whatever had happened in the village the previous day. She had begun visiting a
pir
, a celebrated healer who lived two hours from her nanu’s by bus; it was this man, revered as a saint by some of the local people, who had prescribed the tulsi drops her mother believed had finally cured her ulcers. It didn’t matter to Amina whether it was the drops themselves that had been effective or her mother’s faith in them. The important thing was that her mother was eating and gaining weight.
“You need to continue them regularly, to be sure,” Amina had said the last time her mother called. “You’ll go for your medical exam before you apply. The doctors are very strict.”
“I am cured,” her mother said, “one hundred percent. The only problem is my sleeping.”
“You still aren’t sleeping well?” Her parents had been living in the village more than a year now, and her mother’s insomnia had begun soon after they’d arrived. She was afraid, she told Amina, especially at night. She couldn’t sleep because she felt that “something was coming.” Her mother had always seen things that other people couldn’t; she was especially susceptible to ghosts and jinnis, who had appeared to her ever since she was a child. Once, when her mother was only fourteen or fifteen, she had been sitting in her parents’ courtyard chopping vegetables when she looked up to see two soldiers standing at the gate in ragged clothes. This was during the war, less than a month after her brother Khokon had been killed, and Nanu hadn’t left her bed since she’d heard. Amina’s mother didn’t scream right away, because she recognized the boys as her distant cousins, childhood playmates of her dead brother. She ran into the house to tell her parents—who were napping under the mosquito net—describing how the elder had been supporting the younger, who wore a bloodstained bandage on the left side of his chest. Her father ran out into the yard, but Nanu knew her daughter had been seeing ghosts: she gave her a hard slap across the face to bring her back to her senses.
When Nanu told the story, she always pointed out that it was a blessing the boys’ mother, who had been visiting just two days earlier, hadn’t been there: how terrible for her to hear that her sons were standing in the road and then to run out and find only a pair of small
black pigs, snuffling in the pile of coconut shells by the gate. Only a week after Amina’s mother’s vision, the mother of those two boys heard the news that her younger son had died near the Indian border, from a bullet wound just below his heart.
10
George got the news about Cyclone Sidr early, through his Google filter. Reading VOA online sent Amina into a panic—they were comparing it to Bhola, when half a million people had been killed. But when she reached her parents, they assuaged her anxiety. Everyone in Nanu’s house was safe, although no one had been able to contact her dadu, her father’s father, who was more than eighty years old now and lived alone in Kajalnagar. As soon as it was possible to leave the village, her parents went to find him, traveling sometimes by rickshaw and sometimes on foot. The eleven-kilometer journey took them an entire day: a day in which they saw pots and pans, bedsteads, clothing, and children’s toys floating free across the fields. They saw dead bodies, human and animal, beginning to decay in the sun, as well as those animals that had survived by taking shelter on the roofs of partially submerged houses, crying pitifully for food and water. Her mother even reported that they’d spotted delicious shrimp and lobster swimming freely right next to the road, escapees from local fish farms flooded by the storm. She had pointed out that someone’s bad luck was another person’s dinner.
Her mother’s account of the storm left Amina guiltily relieved. She believed that Cyclone Sidr was the “something” that her mother had been predicting, and now that it had passed—sparing her parents, her nanu, and even her dadu—she thought that her mother would start to sleep. Instead she had become even more apprehensive, calling Amina almost every day and insisting on whispering in case there was someone listening, a habit that compounded the unreliability of her parents’ cell phone and made her mother almost impossible to hear.
But it wasn’t the intermittent reception or even the whispering that exasperated Amina so much as a familiar trick of her mother’s: to bring up a subject in such a roundabout way that Amina had to pry it out of her, as if she were the one who’d wanted to discuss it in the
first place. It was one thing when she’d lived at home in Desh and had hours to chat with her mother; it was another early in the morning in Rochester, when there were breakfast dishes in the sink, a bus to catch, and eight hours of work and classes ahead of her.
“Never mind,” her mother had said yesterday morning. “You’re too busy to talk.”
“I’m not too busy,” Amina said, moving to the counter and keeping the faucet on a trickle, the way the water always came at home, so that her mother wouldn’t know she was doing dishes.
“This village is more dangerous than it was when you were here,” her mother said. “Plus, everyone knows we’re going to America next summer.”
The certainty her mother gave the words—“next summer”—was startling. As the months before the citizenship application dwindled, the problem of her parents’ emigration took on a sickening urgency. Tell her, Amina thought suddenly: tell her now.
“They know you and George are coming to get us,” her mother said.
George doesn’t want you to come and live with us
.
“They think we’re rich.”
I can’t get pregnant
.
“I’m afraid to sleep near the windows. Even your father’s worried.”
She couldn’t say anything, and her cowardice made her sharper with her mother than she would otherwise have been. “Are you talking about thieves?” she demanded.
“Not common thieves—they wouldn’t dare come to your nanu’s house.”
Her mother’s evasions made Amina conclude that her father had gotten into trouble again. It seemed implausible that he would risk another business scheme in the year before they planned to apply for their visas, but she knew him well enough not to rule it out. “Something about Abba?”