Authors: Nell Freudenberger
There was an electronic pinging from the room next door, and she knew Nasir was using his phone. Whom could he be calling so late? His voice a moment later was low and urgent, but she couldn’t make out the words; he seemed to speak for a long time without waiting for the other person to respond. She forced herself to listen to the noise outside, to avoid straining for clues. The rain had started, and she could hear the persistent complaint of car horns in the bazaar. It muffled the construction sounds, almost as if she were listening over a long-distance line. Her mother rolled suddenly against her, her body warm and almost impossibly slight inside a bulky cotton nightgown. She could no longer hear Nasir’s voice, but somewhere below them on the street—it came very clear—a man was whistling.
13
She reached George the next afternoon. She hadn’t anticipated it while she was dialing, but when he answered she was almost afraid to say hello. She thought he might hear something in her voice, as if that kiss on the roof could have changed the register or the accent.
“I’m sorry,” George said right away when he answered. She was so surprised that she didn’t say anything. “I overreacted when we were talking about the job. And the stuff with Kim—”
“It’s okay,” Amina said.
“She’s gone,” he said. “I checked with my mom—she left the week after that dinner party. No one’s heard from her—she hasn’t even e-mailed.”
She’d considered the possibility, when she woke this morning, that what had happened on the roof last night might finally neutralize her jealousy, alleviate one betrayal with another. But the two poisons seemed instead to compound each other’s effects.
“No,” she said now. “I went too far. There was no reason for me to think she would be there.”
“Of course not,” George said. “Anyway, she’s gone. I just wanted to tell you that.”
“Thank you,” Amina said. You couldn’t be angry at someone for an expression you’d glimpsed on his face or a feeling you believed he’d had. That was the hardest thing about marriage, she thought—how could you continue to be kind, once you knew all of another person’s secrets?
“And I talked to the hotline,” he hurried on. “It’s an additional security clearance, so it’s just going to take some time.”
“But what can we do?”
“You’ve just got to sit tight until someone reviews the application. You’re depending on a human being, unfortunately—so it’s completely unpredictable. But don’t worry—that’s why we bought the open returns.”
“What about Starbucks?” Amina asked. “Keith only gave me the days to be nice—since it was a onetime thing. If I’m not back a week from Monday, he’ll find someone else to take my job.”
“If you lose it, you’d get another,” George said. “You should enjoy yourself. Who knows when you’ll be back there?”
“I won’t come back to Bangladesh.” She was sitting on the bed in the room Nasir had given them, her knees pulled up to her chin. In the distance she could hear a loudspeaker mounted on a truck, advertising some political candidate over jangling music. “Not unless my father’s request is denied.”
“It won’t be denied,” George said, attempting to reassure her. “How are your aunt and uncle—still torturing you?”
“No,” Amina said. “We’re not staying there. We’re at Nasir’s now.”
“Nasir?”
“He’s the son of my father’s oldest friend.”
“Right.” George hesitated, and in that silence she could hear her pulse in her ears. It was so loud she imagined he could hear it, too.
“I sent in that résumé,” he said.
She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. “That’s great.”
Her enthusiasm seemed to encourage him. “I got a follow-up e-mail, and they want to set up an interview—it could be just informational, but you never know.”
“Great,” Amina said again. She was suddenly so lonely that she felt a tightness under her cheekbones. The loudspeaker had moved on, giving way to the familiar sounds from the street: the echo of hammering, metal on metal, horns, the whine of a siren somewhere in the distance. In the kitchen her mother was frying bitter melon, spiced with turmeric and cumin. How could she feel homesick again
now
—in the city where she’d spent most of her life, with her parents in the next room and her husband on the phone?
There was another pause.
“Well, call me when you hear something,” George said.
“Okay,” she said again. She was about to say good-bye and hang up, when he spoke again:
“Amina?”
She wondered if this of all times was the one he would choose to tell her he loved her. Nasir’s yellow-and-orange curtain fluttered at the window, and through the open door to the main room, she could see the green towel he used for shaving, folded neatly over the side of the sink.
“Are you using the camera?”
“What?”
“Are you taking a lot of pictures?”
“Not so many.” George’s camera had remained in the bottom of the suitcase, where she thought it was safest. They would’ve taken hundreds of pictures in the village if he had been there, but with only herself and her parents, no one had suggested it.
“Take some for me,” he said. “I want to see what you’re seeing—once you finally get home.”
She had eleven days. They still intended to leave on the thirtieth, and arrive in Rochester with a day and a half to spare before she had to start work again on the first. If the visas came through, they would try to leave even sooner. And then there was the alternative—that the visa would be denied, and they would be marooned at Nasir’s indefinitely, a scenario that was as tempting as it was frightening. She didn’t sleep well, and during the day she felt claustrophobic and on edge: not since childhood had she been in a position where she had so little control.
Nasir treated her as politely as he always had, eliminating only the teasing and joking that had become a part of their relationship since she’d returned. He paid her no special attention and showed no less solicitude about either the threat to their safety or the progress of her father’s visa. Amina pretended a modesty she only half felt and made sure not to be in the room alone with him, and after a few days, with a sinking feeling, she realized that he was taking similar precautions.
Both Nasir and her parents insisted on the necessity of staying indoors, and at first she didn’t take the trouble to disobey. But she spent hours thinking of what she would do if she had those eleven days to herself. She had no interest in the major sights, Lalbagh Fort or the National Assembly, but she would have liked to visit the places she and her parents had lived—to stand outside those apartments and let the particular sense of each time wash over her. She would have liked to walk to the war memorial by the river, as they sometimes had on cool nights in her girlhood, her father buying them newspaper cones of chanachur while her mother speculated about its probable
contamination. She thought of trying to explain to her parents the way a walk like that would start to take on the drama and beauty of a favorite old film as soon as they got to America. But they seemed to exist in a kind of limbo between here and there, preferring each other’s company and the silence of the apartment to the proof that life was continuing in the city without them. For once, they were united in their stubborn optimism about the future that awaited them, and she could hardly blame them: she had felt the same way herself.
She skipped three dinners with Nasir, on the grounds that she couldn’t wait until ten o’clock after having become accustomed to eating before the sun had set in Rochester.
“But you ate at the normal time in Haibatpur,” her mother said.
“I couldn’t be rude to Nanu.”
“But this looks rude to Nasir!”
“He doesn’t care,” Amina said. “He doesn’t even notice—he’s just so glad for your home cooking.” Then she sat in the bedroom and listened to him talk with her parents, just as she’d done so many years ago. She remembered his passion, when the conversation turned to political subjects, and the way he gently teased her parents; what she couldn’t have noticed then was how young he sometimes sounded, when he talked about his own prospects or awkwardly dodged her mother’s prodding about his future marriage and family. That tone in his voice was the one that made her shut her eyes and try to conjure again the moment just before he’d kissed her on the roof.
On the third night after they’d been on the roof together, she rejoined them for dinner: her father and Nasir were having a conversation about a scandal in the Department of Agriculture, and she allowed herself to examine his face openly as he talked, a knot that appeared at the corner of his mouth when he was excited, as if he were manipulating a glass marble with his tongue. His eyes flicked up to her face and away, and the corresponding sensation in her chest made her afraid she should have stayed in her room. He and her father had been arguing about whether it was possible to be honest when you were surrounded by corrupt colleagues. Her father believed that Bangladesh could only be saved by another natural leader like Fazlul Huq; Nasir
pointed out that Sheikh Mujib had been considered such a leader, until his Awami Leaguers had dragged the country even deeper into corruption and chaos.
“You can’t rely on one man,” Nasir said. At this point her father, who was prone to stomach troubles, had to rush to the toilet. Her mother commented that he had suffered from diarrhea on and off since returning from the village, and then went into the kitchen to replenish the fried okra. Amina’s first thought was not that she and Nasir were alone together again but rather embarrassment about her parents and their manners—the unselfconscious discussion of bodily functions that would mark them as villagers no matter where they ended their lives. She was startled, then, when Nasir reached across the table and put a hand on her arm. Her pulse reverberated in her ears, and she could feel the heat in her face.
“Don’t watch me like that—they can’t know anything now.”
She was still staring dumbly at him when her mother returned with the okra, speculating aloud about whether it would be possible to find the ingredients for the dish in America. Nasir looked purposely away. What had he meant? He had spoken English as a precaution, and that left his meaning open to interpretation. Could he have said
now
, and meant
yet
? For four days she’d been telling herself it was crazy even to imagine staying; they had to go, as soon as they could. But the following morning she woke up with a bright feeling of possibility, as palpable as a change in the weather and equally difficult to deny.
That was Saturday, exactly a week before their intended departure, and they still hadn’t heard from the embassy. It took Amina two hours to convince her parents she might go to the university district unaccompanied to check her e-mail, and once she got into the street alone, the exhilaration was intense. She’d allowed her father to put her into a rickshaw; he’d carefully selected the driver, paying extra and barking instructions about the route, but as soon as they’d turned the corner she collapsed the flimsy hood and let her scarf slide down around her shoulders. The sun wasn’t yet too hot on her face or her hair, and no one gave her a second glance. The shouting and the bicycle bells, the smell of fried snacks from the roadside vendors, and the air that got inside her clothing as the driver pedaled expertly through
the stalled traffic were thrilling, as was the feeling—after five days hiding in Nasir’s apartment—that she was taking a risk. Her parents had allotted her only an hour and a half, but more than once she thought of redirecting the driver and making a circuit through the city. She wasn’t sure if it was the threat or simply her time away, but as they traveled past Dhanmondi and the Science Laboratory, south through the city to Fuller Road, everything they passed seemed to have acquired brighter colors and a more definite shape. She almost wished she’d brought the camera, as George had instructed.
When she logged on at the British Council, the first e-mail was from George, who said that his interview was on Tuesday. They’d told him there was actually a job open, and so he was hopeful; he wrote that he would call her after it was over, and that he loved her.
She was scanning the rest of her in-box, expecting only junk, when her eyes fell on the message as if it had been highlighted:
Dear Amina
,
Well, I don’t know if you’re even reading this. I can see that you might not open it, if you saw it was from me. If you don’t write back, I’ll just tell myself that you were too busy seeing friends and relatives and things, and not that you hate me. I could understand if you hated me permanently, but I’m back in Bombay (going a little crazy) and I couldn’t help writing now that you’re so nearby
.
I’m on the computer a lot these days, but I don’t have too many people to e-mail back home. Ashok is working for his dad now and he’s never here—they’re making a movie about gangsters. When I ask what kind of gangsters (since isn’t every Indian movie about them?) he says I wouldn’t be able to understand since I’m not from here. I told his mother I was interested in getting a job, but she said no job I could get would pay enough to make it worth my while
.
Amina, I’ve got to get out of here. I thought that maybe if I told them my girlfriend from home was in Bangladesh—maybe they would let me come and visit you? I thought I could say your parents were sick or something, and you needed comforting? I remember you said it would be difficult getting your parents’ visas—could an American friend be helpful? If so, I would be so grateful to escape even for a couple of days. I could fly to Dhaka—or to Kolkata even, and take the Maitree Express
.
I read on Wikipedia how the name of that train means “Friendship Express.” I guess you know there hasn’t been train service between India and Bangladesh since before the war, and it just started again in April. I would LOVE to take that train, just for the experience. And to see you on the other end would be fantastic
.
Oh, Amina—I hope you’re reading this! I think of you often and I would love to hear from you. I hope everything is fine with your parents’ visas, and that it’s nice to be back home for a while. Write soon if you can!