Authors: Nell Freudenberger
Amina began the ritual denial, but her aunt cut her off: “Your mother looked so skinny. I gasped the last time I saw her.”
“She’s always been thin,” Amina said. “She’ll be very fashionable in America.”
“That’s what I tell everyone, when they ask.” Her aunt tapped her forehead: “It’s only up here that I worry.”
“Sit, sit,” her uncle said. “At least we have chairs.”
“The furniture is coming,” her aunt said crossly. “They made a mistake with our order. We’re getting everything new—I don’t know if your mother told you. All of the old things were shipped to Chittagong for Rashid. Your mother told you about his job at the new international university? And Marin is pregnant—they’ll do the ultrasound in two weeks to determine the sex.” Amina had always been a little frightened of Ghaniyah’s older brother, who’d been a math prodigy as a child and gone to college to study computer science when he was only sixteen years old. She knew her aunt and uncle had counted on Rashid going into business and making a terrific fortune and were disappointed by this university job. But naturally her aunt didn’t complain about the things that really bothered her.
“One son all the way in Chittigong, and my son-in-law is such a big, important man—he never has time for dinner with his in-laws. Why
do we need this huge apartment? I asked your uncle. Who will ever come to see us? Except you,” she added, looking Amina over. “And you look so tired. How many jobs do you have over there?”
“Only one,” Amina said. “With Starbucks, the international coffee chain store. It’s close to my college campus.” She was about to say something about Starbucks’s ranking in
Fortune
’s top 100, but she caught herself. It no longer mattered what her aunt or anyone thought. In nine days she and her parents would be at the airport, inshallah, out of the family’s reach forever.
Her aunt was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning. There was moisture on her upper lip, darkening the mustache that she’d been struggling to eradicate for as long as Amina could remember. Moni and Amina’s mother shared their nanu’s elegant features, but her aunt was so much more substantially built that on her that kind of beauty looked almost masculine. Amina thought of her mother, who would be cold at this temperature, and experienced another wave of longing. Now that she was back, all of the bickering they’d done over the phone could be forgotten. That had been the stress of being separated; secretly she believed that her mother’s anxiety was only because she missed her. In Rochester they called it empty-nest syndrome. Now that she had come for them, her mother would return to normal, and they would never be separated again. A night and day seemed too long to wait.
Her uncle yawned and folded his paper. “I’m ready for bed. I hope you ladies won’t keep each other up too late gossiping.”
“She comes here for one night only,” her aunt complained. “Less than two weeks to spend at home. And I had to beg her mother to stay with us when they return to Dhaka.”
When her uncle had gone to bed and she had finished eating, Amina suddenly felt better. It was midmorning in Rochester, and she had a surge of energy: her body must’ve gotten the idea that she’d just fed it breakfast. She could see that her aunt was exhausted but didn’t want to go to bed yet. There was something in particular that she wanted to say to Amina.
“I hope the excitement of seeing you won’t be too much for your mother. Parveen’s been worried, too.”
“She’s been under a lot of pressure, waiting all this time,” Amina said. She was aware that she was defending her mother for exactly the kind of behavior that had driven her crazy over the phone in Rochester; now that her aunt was needling her, however, it was impossible not to take her mother’s side. “She’ll be better once we get to Rochester.”
“I only hope there are no problems,” her aunt said darkly. “Of course they have to leave Shyamnagar as soon as possible. I was hoping you might come earlier.”
“It had to do with the paperwork. It wasn’t up to me when I came.”
“I only wonder if you’ll be safe there.”
“Safe in the village?” She felt she was taking her aunt’s bait, but there was no other way to find out what she meant.
“You know I respect your father.” Her aunt pleated the hem of her orna, which she now wore even in the house. Her mother said that Moni was becoming more religious, that she’d started putting an abaya over her clothes when she went out shopping. But her father laughed and said his sister-in-law was only trying to hide the fat.
“But I can’t help worrying when your mother calls me in such a state. This was right after they returned from your dadu’s, after the storm. It’s gotten much worse since then.”
“
What’s
gotten worse?” Amina demanded.
“If your father had taken something that wasn’t his, no one could protect him. Especially if he’d taken it from his own people.”
It took several moments for her brain to absorb the strangeness of what her aunt was saying. She was looking at Amina in a probing way that made it almost impossible to think, since she was concentrating on concealing her thoughts as much as she was on having them.
“My father is the most honest person I’ve ever met,” she said finally. “Too honest—he’s not crafty or clever, the way you have to be to succeed in business.”
She wouldn’t have said it if her uncle had been in the room; she liked her uncle Omar, who had always been kind to them. She thought he’d succeeded not out of any deviousness, but because he was the type of person whom God willed to be successful. Others were not meant to be so. It didn’t mean that God loved them any less, but the world
couldn’t be full of only one type. The sooner you knew which type you were—and which were the people in your family—the sooner you could accept your lot and be happy.
“Of course you don’t want to think about that,” her aunt said. “You’re his daughter, so it’s natural.”
“I don’t like gossip,” Amina said. “That’s what I like about America. People say things straight out.” She felt herself flushing as she said this; once, she had believed it.
Her aunt was looking at her carefully. “No one will believe that gold was stolen from them. Even if it is true.”
Suddenly Amina remembered her last phone conversation with Nasir, coded because her parents were standing right there.
“Are you talking about jewelry?”
But now that her aunt had ascertained that she knew more than Amina, she was satisfied.
“I don’t know your father’s family. How should I know what they have?”
“But what gold do you mean? You know my mother sold the things Nanu gave her years ago. And she never had any wedding gold.”
“Of course this wasn’t your mother’s. Why would your father have to steal that? But you’d better ask your parents—I don’t want to repeat hearsay. Especially since you seem to dislike it so much.” She gave Amina a tight-lipped smile. Her aunt’s complexion was sallow in the overhead light, and Amina could see their two miniature figures reflected in the black window across the room. “You must be so tired, and you’ll have to be up early to catch the bus.”
Amina didn’t say anything.
“You barely ate, Munni. Maybe our food isn’t up to your standards anymore.”
“The food was delicious, Aunt.”
“Oh, I hardly cook anymore. It’s Borsha—my new girl from the village. These girls are lazy, but at least they’re good in the kitchen. They’re too ignorant to take shortcuts.”
Her aunt and uncle did have a second bed, a narrow twin with one of the plush blankets Amina remembered, printed with moons and stars. She had thought it would be difficult to sleep in Dhaka
now that she was accustomed to Rochester’s deep nighttime hush, but Savar was quieter than Mohammadpur, and her aunt and uncle’s generator drowned out what noise there was. She couldn’t blame her wakefulness on the city, and she hadn’t brought a book to read, and so she lay in bed thinking of what she’d heard from Nasir and her aunt. Both stories had several pieces missing. It was impossible to think that her father could’ve stolen anything, much less gold jewelry, but she had an uncomfortable feeling that there might have been a misunderstanding. Her father had a tendency to leap several steps ahead in his own financial dealings, so that he often believed an agreement had been reached or a partnership struck before there was good reason to do so. The gold jewelry was the detail that bothered her, since it had appeared in both her aunt’s and Nasir’s accounts. Coming from two such disparate sources, it was hard to believe it was a fabrication. And if her father had come into possession of gold in some legitimate way, why hadn’t she heard of it?
She was awake for nearly three hours and fell into a deep sleep only just before morning. She dreamed she was back in Rochester; it was raining hard, and the red geraniums she had planted in pots were getting crushed. As she began to bring in the geraniums, she noticed two small figures coming up the hill where Skytop curved and disappeared toward Wood Hill, fighting with an umbrella that was turning inside out in the wind.
Amina retrieved the big golf umbrella from the hall closet and started out into the storm to help her parents. Her mother was in only a thin shalwar kameez, without even a sweater over her shoulders. They were calling her—oddly they weren’t using her nickname—and she yelled that she was coming. She had almost reached them when the wind lifted her parents several feet off the ground, where they hovered eerily. And it was only then that Amina realized, to her horror, that she was looking at a pair of jinnis, who had craftily adopted human forms in order to lure her out of her house.
The calling got louder and more insistent—
Amina, Amina
—until she finally managed to open her eyes and see a young girl, her aunt’s new servant, Borsha, looking shyly at her own bare feet on the marble floor.
3
It was raining when she arrived at the bus depot with Fariq, who told her to wait in the car. He’d reserved her seat yesterday, and now he was negotiating with the driver, giving him a tip from her uncle to look after the showy foreign suitcases and make sure that her father received them safely on the other end. She used the few moments alone in the car to dial her father’s number from the phone her uncle had lent her—a spare—and was startled when it went on ringing. Even when she called too late or too early from Rochester, he only very rarely missed it; sometimes there was a problem with the phone itself, but her parents were always available. She wondered if that was the trouble today, although her uncle had said he’d been able to reach them easily last night. Of all the mornings in the world, this was the one she expected they would keep the phone turned on. How could she be sure her father knew which bus she was on and that her parents would be waiting for her at half past three in Satkhira?
Fariq and the driver had agreed upon a price, although Amina didn’t see the money change hands, and her uncle’s driver returned to the car looking relaxed: he had fulfilled his duty for the morning. There was already a crowd around the Satkhira bus, and Amina found that the depot looked much worse to her than it had in the past. A mob of people clamored at the ticket counter, and there was a wide lake of black sewage between the station and the street, over which a mother and father were in the midst of passing three small girls in hair ribbons and stiff, garishly ornamented dresses. She wondered if her reaction to the scene was the effect of her time in America or simply of arriving in her uncle’s air-conditioned car, which made the transition to the street much more dramatic than it was if you traveled by rickshaw.
“Please ask my aunt to try my father again later,” she told him, when he got back in the car. “I might lose service on the way, and I want to make sure he knows I’m on this bus.” Fariq took the phone without asking and redialed the number, as if her difficulty might be the result of general female incompetence. She reminded herself that this characteristic in Bengali men was one of the things she’d left the
country to escape and was perversely pleased when Fariq had no better luck with the phone.
“No problem with the connection,” he said anyway, as if he had settled things.
She had called George this morning, and her aunt had been unusually sensitive, going to take her bath while Amina was on the phone. George had been sitting at the computer, doing his e-mail and waiting for her call. He asked her if it was nice to be home.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “My aunt cooked all my favorite things last night, and now I’m going to the village to see Nanu and my parents.”
“Great,” George said, and she could hear in his voice that he didn’t feel threatened by her past or the pull it might exert on her now that she was back. What did he have to be jealous about, after all?
There was a long silence, in which she’d heard George typing.
“I’m calling from my uncle’s old phone,” Amina said. “You don’t remember, but I called you from this phone the first time we ever talked, because we weren’t getting a good signal from our house. That was before my aunt and uncle moved to Savar, but this phone is the same one. My mother was trying to distract my aunt, but she couldn’t do it because she was so interested in hearing us herself.”
“Do you know the population of Savar?” George asked.
“What?”
“It’s three hundred seventy-eight thousand thirty-four, according to the 1991 census. That’s the only number I could find, and it’s almost twenty years old. Imagine what that number is now.”
“I don’t know,” Amina said.
“But you remember the population of Rochester,” George coaxed. “Two hundred nineteen thousand, give or take. And that’s the third-biggest city in New York. Savar’s only a suburb, and it probably has twice as many people!”
“I should go,” Amina said. “My aunt’s getting out of her bath.”
“Okay,” George said cheerfully. “Call me when you get to the village, if you can.”
“Yes, okay,” Amina said. “George?” But she didn’t know what she wanted to say. She wanted him to say something about what had happened
to them in between the time they’d made that first call and this one, but she knew he wasn’t going to do that. “I was thinking about your trip here—about when we decided to get married.”