The Newlyweds (36 page)

“Uneducated people,” her grandmother said. “Allowing their children to run around all night.”

“They were trying to speak English to me.”

Her grandmother hadn’t carried a lantern into her bedroom, but there was light from the front room and the courtyard, where the singing continued. It illuminated the four-poster bed, where her grandmother and Parveen slept, and her grandmother’s curio cabinet, which Amina had loved to look through as a child. She remembered in particular a box of Russian candies wrapped in paper printed with bears (how she’d once longed to taste them!); stern, individual photographs of her uncles and her grandfather in tiny silver frames; and trial-sized plastic bottles of Pantene shampoo. Now a Casio clock, displaying
the correct time from inside its original cardboard and plastic packaging, hung above the cabinet. It was eleven thirty; one thirty in the afternoon in Rochester.

“Your mother is asleep,” Nanu said. “She gets tired easily, especially in a crowd of people.”

“We’ll take her to the doctor when we get back to New York.”

Nanu brushed that abstraction aside. “She says you won’t stay with Moni.”

“They don’t make my father welcome.”

Her grandmother tilted her head slightly in acknowledgment, her hooded black eyes glossy and sharp.

“My mother and I were talking about that time in Dhaka—when those men locked us in. I was thinking of how you invited him to stay that night.”

Her grandmother took a hand broom from the dresser and began sweeping dead leaves off the sill into the yard. The skin on her hands was as creased and dry as the leaves dropping around Amina’s feet.

“What did you think of my father, Nanu—back then?”

“A bad family. I never would have agreed to that match.”

“But the first time you saw him?”

“I’d seen him before that.”

“I mean, when you met him properly?” She expected Nanu not to answer, the way she often did when a question wasn’t to her taste, and so she was surprised by the old woman’s vehemence.

“Skinny. Dark. And a
watcher
—with his eyes on everyone all the time.” Her grandmother’s hair was white now, but her eyebrows were still pure black. It was hard to look away when she was talking. “But your father could talk to anyone—laughing and joking. Said he would share your Itee Nanu’s bed, since Ashraf was in Jessore and she was all alone. We laughed all night.”

“You liked him, once you met him.”

Her grandmother frowned. “I opposed the match, and you see what bad luck has followed. Even that night—look what happened.”

“My mother said they might have set the house on fire, but God protected us.”

“Your grandfather might have kept the marriage from happening, but he was ill by then. And Khokon was gone. Still, I had Emdad.
When he died, I went to that wife of his. I said, ‘Tell me you’re expecting.’ Stupid woman—she just sat there and cried.”

Amina tried to picture her uncle’s pretty widow, Botul, but the face wouldn’t resolve in her mind.

“Have children right away, Munni,” her grandmother said. “Or you might wind up alone like me.”

“You have four living children. Eight grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Four, once Rashid has his child.”

“None for my house.”

“I lived in your house.”

Her grandmother looked at her curiously. It was hard to know whether Nanu thought it was a foolish argument—Amina had lived there, but then she had gone—or whether she simply didn’t remember. It was possible that one granddaughter blurred into another.

“And Micki didn’t leave,” Amina added.

“Micki made a good match, under the circumstances. Parveen is fortunate.”

“And my match,” Amina couldn’t help asking. “What do you think of it?”

She wondered if the two little boys had run back home, or if they’d cut through the fields and doubled back around to the house, hoping to sneak a sip of whiskey from one of the old men’s flasks.

“Oh, who can say?” Her grandmother pulled her orna across her chest, squinting into the shadows around the makeshift graveyard. “God knows what will happen to you, all the way over there.”

8
She woke up in Nasir’s apartment on the morning of the visa interview to the sound of her parents’ arguing. The window was open, and the noise from the lane was such that she couldn’t believe she’d slept as long as she had; the air had an unmistakable metallic thickness that would’ve let her know she was in Dhaka, even if she hadn’t opened her eyes. Nasir had given them his bedroom, in spite of their protestations, and her parents had gone into the tiny attached bath in order to talk without waking her. The door was shut, but the knob was missing, and she could see a piece of her father’s hand through the empty hole.

“It’s just a hen,” she heard her father say. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“And you’re already selling its eggs!”

“You’re overexcited because of the interview.”

“I won’t pass, I might as well not go.” Amina could hear her mother opening the mirrored chest above the sink, selecting one of the neatly labeled tinctures. “I need something to calm my nerves.”

“What if they test us?”

“Test us?”

“Urine test for drugs.”

“Drugs!” her mother exclaimed. “Everything Mufti Huzoor prescribes is natural.”

“I never thought you would follow that kind of nonsense. Your sisters or your mother, maybe—”

“My mother! Where would we have stayed, if not for my mother? Where would we have lived without my sister’s husband? What would we have done all of these years?” Her mother burst out of the bathroom and glanced at Amina as if she were startled to find her there.

“Your father wastes our last taka on a hen for dinner. Before we’ve even got the visas.”

“I’m only thanking Nasir for all he’s done for us. Not celebrating yet.”

“We have enough money,” Amina said, as quietly as possible. “It’s fine.”

Her mother turned to face the wall. She started doing a frantic set of exercises, rotating her arms from the shoulders in circles and lifting her legs in a stationary goose-step. Her father stayed in the bathroom another moment, gargling loudly with water from a plastic bottle next to the sink, and then came out holding his wallet. He began shuffling through a stack of old business cards, as if there were someone he needed to contact immediately. Had these arguments between her parents started right away, when they were newlyweds in Dhaka, before she was born? Her father would have had no model for married life, barely remembering his parents together before his mother died, and her mother would’ve been living in a city for the first time, attempting to execute her wifely responsibilities as she’d seen them performed in the village. She thought they would have played these unfamiliar roles with painful awkwardness, relishing their time apart
more than the time together—if only because it allowed them to relax into their familiar, singular selves. But wasn’t that what it was like for all newlyweds? Certainly she and George had been no different. It felt strange until one day it didn’t, until that abstract partnership finally seemed more solid than the lives they’d left behind.

She heard Nasir discreetly moving around in the main room, not wanting to disturb them before they were ready. There was another toilet, but it didn’t have a shower; no doubt he was waiting to get ready for work until they’d evacuated the bedroom. She herded her parents into the main room, where her father announced that he was going out to buy the
Daily Ittefaq
. Nasir had just finished shaving and was standing at the sink holding a small green towel.

“Hello,” he said. “How did you sleep?”

The bus had gotten in at ten the previous night, and Nasir had been waiting up for them when they arrived at his apartment a half hour later. She’d been remembering him the way he’d been when he came to bring
The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam
, with beard and prayer cap, and it was strange to see him clean shaven again, looking almost the way he had when she was a teenager.

“Munni,” he had said, with mock gravity, but had paid most of his attention to her mother, asking about the bus ride and making her a Horlicks drink himself. Amina had been free to examine him, moving expertly in his tiny kitchen—his broad forearms beneath rolled-up white sleeves, the square, sharp line of his chin—and wished she knew whether he found a change in her.

“We’ll make breakfast,” her mother said now.

“I’ll do it.”

“Nasir loves Bombay toast—you won’t do it right.” Her mother laughed unnaturally, but at least she went into the kitchen, where Amina hoped a familiar task would calm her down.

“They’re worried about the interview,” she told Nasir, who nodded politely, although she was sure he’d overheard every word of her parents’ argument. He was wearing jeans and a dark red T-shirt, and she wondered how he dressed around the house when he was alone. Most urban young men would wear shorts in this weather, but something about Nasir made her think he might put on a lungi like her father.

She waited for him to shower and change, and then sat with him
while he ate breakfast. Her mother had made her a plate of toast as well, but the thought of the heavy fried bread made her stomach turn over.

“You remember we’re going to your aunt and uncle’s this afternoon, after the embassy,” her mother said. “I promised we would. We’ve already insulted her by not staying there.”

“Did you tell them we didn’t know how long it would take?”

Her mother nodded. “We’ll just call when we’re on our way. Moni wants to show off her new furniture.”

Nasir had eaten quickly. “She’d be horrified if she saw this place.”

“This is a wonderful building,” her mother said diplomatically, taking the plates to the sink. “Munni, have you seen what Sakina did to the roof?”

“It’s a real garden up there,” Nasir said shyly.

“Squash and peppers and everything!” her mother said from the kitchen. “You should see it.”

“If you want to come up,” Nasir offered.

“Won’t you be late for work?”

“Our boss doesn’t arrive until eleven. As long as I’m there at ten thirty.” It was nine thirty, and the interview wasn’t until two, so Amina allowed herself to be led up to the roof, where there was a surprisingly fresh breeze. Nasir’s younger sister Shilpa lived on the ground floor with her husband and children, while Sakina had taken a smaller, one-bedroom flat on the fifth floor.

“She likes to be close to the plants,” Nasir said. “I thought we’d find her up here, actually.” Amina wondered if he were apologizing for the fact that they were alone on the roof together—a courtesy that seemed quaint to her now. Sakina’s pots were arranged in rows; someone, perhaps Nasir, had built a long trellis at the southern end to accommodate runner beans, melons, and gourds.

“We shouldn’t have taken your bedroom,” Amina said. “I was so tired last night—I wasn’t thinking.”

“Actually I prefer the small room,” Nasir said. “I would sleep there all the time, only it feels silly when I’m alone. Sakina Apu insisted I have this flat when she started looking for a bride for me. Little did she know it would take so long.”

Nasir smiled down at his feet—in black plastic sandals, the kind of
shoes George refused to wear because he found them feminine—and Amina saw that he was making fun of himself; he was so different than he’d sounded in his e-mails. Then again, she’d often winced when she reread her own saved e-mails, especially the first ones she’d sent to George. They seemed so labored and were riddled with the kind of tonal mistakes that you could only correct once you lived your daily life in the language in which you wrote. She wondered if the difference between Nasir on paper and Nasir now in person was the result of those same constrictions.

“You have time,” Amina said. “A man always does. Better to wait and find the right person.”

Nasir laughed. “Now you’re the elder sister.”

“I’m being strict with you.” Amina smiled. “You were so strict with me before I left. I thought you’d become a mullah.”

Nasir looked suddenly serious. “I was strict over there. I kept it up for a while after I got back, and then …”

“You were busy with your job,” she supplied.

Nasir dismissed that with one hand. “That job pays almost nothing.”

“At least you have one.”

Nasir shook his head. “But it’s not like abroad. Sometimes I still think about London—how if I’d just stayed long enough to meet some people outside the restaurant, what might’ve happened.”

“The U.S. economy is in a recession right now—maybe even a depression. Europe’s supposed to be next.”

But Nasir brushed that aside with one hand. “It’ll improve. It’s always going to be better than here. The problem was—I couldn’t stop thinking of home. It’s like a girl. She’s perfect while you’re away, and then you come back and she’s changed so much.” He flushed and hurried on. “I mean, I used to dream about my mother’s pulao when I was over there. In the dreams I would be a little boy in a tupi, going to the mosque with my father. Then we’d come home and eat.”

“I dreamed about my parents in America,” Amina said.

Nasir nodded. “And then you come back.”

“And you’ve forgotten what they’re like.”

“I think I had forgotten they were dead.” His voice wasn’t bitter so much as lost, and she had to keep herself from touching his arm. “Sakina Apu makes pulao the same way, but it doesn’t taste the same.
And I go to the mosque alone and see the beggars. I see how the tap doesn’t work, the smell of all those bodies, everyone talking business, even during the prayers. It was easier to be strict over there. My sisters thought I should come home to find a girl, but even the women seem different to me now.”

They were right at the edge of the wall, looking down into the narrow street, and it was exciting to be standing so close to him. On the roof opposite, two small boys were playing football; to the left an old woman in an abaya hung laundry, and several buildings down, construction workers were taking a break, eating in the spidery shade of a bamboo scaffold. A generator nearby roared to life, and she could hear voices from the street market down the lane, where her father had gone this morning to buy the hen. From this height she could make out the white and brown eggs separated into straw-lined baskets, but the chicks themselves were just a moving mass of gray and brown.