The Newlyweds (34 page)

“I’ve been thinking of that apartment in Moti Mahal,” her mother said, as if she hadn’t heard the question. “Those weren’t such bad times. Long Nose was kind, and your father sometimes had work from Omar. And you were funny at that age—very serious. Everything had to be just so, even your clothes. Do you remember that red-and-yellow dress I made, from the pattern you found? ‘Tea dress.’ And then you hung around in the hallway, waiting for the across-the-hall neighbors to see you in it—do you remember those people? I ran into them at Kaderabad Bazar just before we moved down here. The little boy was called Shajar.”

They climbed out of the pond and stepped into a narrow shelter constructed from woven palm, open to the sky. Her mother was out of her wet clothes and into the dry ones almost instantly, without revealing anything—a trick Amina had never mastered.

“Shajar’s mother was buying three hens at once, for a feast. She said she couldn’t afford them, made all kinds of excuses, but I could see she was trying not to shame me. I had only vegetables in my bag.”

“But you told me I sent enough. You told me more than enough!” It came out more fiercely than she’d intended, and her mother’s face exhibited a familiar injured expression.

“Why would I buy three hens for your father and me? I’m only telling you—Shajar’s family is doing well.”

“And I’m only saying if you need money—tell me.” The shelter gave the illusion of privacy, but anything they said would be overheard easily by someone standing outside. Amina struggled to keep her voice low. “Don’t talk to others.”

Her mother looked at her sharply. “Which others?”

She hadn’t meant to repeat what her aunt had said. There was no way it could be true, and she was waiting to hear the truth from her mother unclouded by gossip.

“
Ai
, Munni!” Her aunt’s voice came from the direction of the house, loud and teasing. “Have you gone back to America?”

“She wants to feed you,” her mother said. She pulled Amina gently out into the open, but Amina hung back.

“What jewelry was it?”

Her mother spoke in an undertone. “Nothing valuable. Some wedding gold that belonged to your dadi—he said he wanted us to sell it in America.”

“Dadu gave you the jewelry?”

“Of course. What did you think?”

Amina’s relief came out as anger. “But you know you can’t do that—I’ve told you a thousand times! You can’t bring things in for business purposes, especially on the kind of visa you’ll have. Why did you agree to take it?” She’d forgotten to lower her voice, and her aunt was watching them with interest from the porch.

“Your father knows all that,” her mother said calmly. “He was only
being kind. He said we could take it to a shop in Dhaka and sell it for your dadu there. He wouldn’t know the difference.”

“And then what happened? The jewelry was lost?”

“Stolen,” her mother said. “Before we even left your dadu’s house. We packed it in your father’s suitcase the night before, and then Bhulu and Laltu came by late that night with whiskey. I told your father not to join them—but his own father and his cousins, how could he not? All the men sat and drank, and the suitcase was in the room. In the morning we left, and we didn’t discover the jewelry was missing until we got back here.”

“You never told me.”

Her mother looked down, but a proud smile nudged the corners of her mouth. Amina wondered how many other things she’d been protected from.

“Does Dadu know?”

“It was a trick.” Her mother’s voice was electric with indignation. “Of course your dadu must’ve bragged about how we would sell his gold in America. Bhulu and Laltu knew we had it, and so they decided to take it themselves—so that we couldn’t sell it at all.”

She hadn’t seen her grandfather since she was fourteen or fifteen years old. Their visits to her father’s village happened only every few years, and she could remember the arguments Dadu and her father had once had—mostly over the land being sold and occasionally about the senselessness of spending all one’s money on educating a girl. If they couldn’t have sons, her dadu said, they might at least have held on to the land.

“Now those cousins are filling your dadu’s head with lies. He’ll never remember what that gold was worth. They’re saying it’s much more valuable than it really is—and that we stole it. They claim they’re defending Dadu—defending! From us!”

“You mean they’re saying we kept the jewelry for ourselves?”

Her mother nodded. “Your father told Dadu what he thinks happened that night, after they were all drunk. Bhulu and Laltu might have pretended to leave and then snuck back in and taken the jewelry from the suitcase. But they’re the ones in the village with Dadu—of course he’s going to believe them instead of us.”

“So we send Dadu the money directly,” she told her mother. “Let Bhulu and Laltu know we see through their tricks. How much are they saying it’s worth? I have cash with me now, or George can wire me whatever it is.”

“Ten thousand,” her mother said quietly.

Ten thousand taka were about a hundred and fifty dollars. She wouldn’t like to part with that much money, but if it would protect them, she could manage without it. She could tell George they had ended up staying in the hotel one night after all, omitting the jewelry, the drinking party, and Salim’s violent history. There was no need to amplify an upsetting experience by turning it into a story.

“I have that much with me,” Amina said. “Will that satisfy them? Will they tell Salim to leave us alone?”

But Parveen was approaching them from the house. “Come inside and sit,” she said. “What are you chatting so much about? Around you your mother is a schoolgirl.” She guided them into the house, handing Amina a spongy white round of pakan pitha.

“This is delicious, Aunty,” Amina said. “Wait just a minute, while I get some things.”

“Oh no,” Parveen protested. “Why did you carry extra? Your bags must’ve been so heavy!”

Her nanu smiled. “You shouldn’t waste your money.”

“Come and help me,” she whispered, and her mother followed her obediently into the room they would share, painted bright green, with an ornate Chinese-made Singer sewing machine in one corner. A large window opened onto the garden; at night you might latch the wooden shutters, but of course there was no glass. Already the garden was in shadow, her uncles’ tombs white in the dusk.

“How fast can we get it to them?”

Her mother shook her head and put her finger to her lips. Parveen and Nanu were in the main room, and of course they couldn’t close the door. Her mother’s purse was on the table, and she reached inside and pulled out a pencil, along with a crumpled timetable, the type blurred where the ink had run; no doubt she’d been worrying it in her fingers all morning while she waited at the bus stand. She cupped her hand to make a writing surface and scratched something into the
margin. Then she handed the paper silently to Amina. In the small white space above the timings, her mother had sketched a tiny symbol: $.

Ten thousand
dollars
. Amina stared at her. “You said that jewelry was worth nothing.”

“That was before it was stolen,” her mother said, her eyes on the floor. Then she took her daughter’s arm and guided her back into the main room, where Parveen and Nanu sat her down on the bed and began to feed her the buttery, sugared sweets by hand.

6
She woke in the night and thought she heard a noise. The shutters were closed, and the wooden latch clicked gently in the draft from the fan. Otherwise the air was still. Amina reached for the miniature flashlight George had given her in preparation for the power cuts and checked her watch. It was before three in the morning, and her mother was sleeping soundly beside her.

She had always been frightened as a child in the village at night. She would fall asleep easily, watching her grandmother—at that hour usually engaged in the lifelong project of organizing her possessions—and listening to the sounds of Parveen finishing in the kitchen. When she woke next, it would be midnight, and Nanu and Parveen would’ve moved her so that she was close to the wall, just under the window. She hadn’t been afraid of people then, but of spirits: a long, white arm attached to a pair of wings, something that would snatch her in its jaws and fly. She would turn from the window and burrow into her aunt’s bulk, but it was not the same as being next to her mother; Parveen didn’t have the same power. And so it was always better to turn and face the window, even if her stomach rose into her throat. At least she would be able to see the thing coming.

She would tell Micki nearly every day about how her parents were coming for her.

“They’re only waiting until they earn enough. I’ll go to a school called Maple Leaf, and my mother will come every day to fetch me herself.”

“But my mother says your mother only gets piecework to do at
home, and your father doesn’t have a steady job either. They’re living in a bad place, and she thinks they might as well come back here. Maybe you’ll have to stay in the village forever.”

The idea of staying in her grandmother’s house, the only house she’d ever known, and having her parents there with her was not as unpleasant as Amina pretended. As much as she proclaimed her eagerness to leave, the idea of an English medium school in the city was frightening. There were things she’d heard her grandmother say to her aunt that made it difficult to discount Micki’s version of her parents’ life in Dhaka. And even though Micki had the tendency to repeat bad news, she knew that it was only because her cousin loved her. Micki didn’t want her to leave any more than Amina wanted to part from her.

“If my father doesn’t get a better job, then they’ll come back.”

“Nanu’s house is big enough.”

Amina shook her head. “We’ll have our own house.”

“Right next to ours.”

“A concrete house, like Nanu’s.”

Having established what would happen in the real world, they would escape to an imaginary one. Their playhouse was in the most remote corner of the village, beyond Shoma Aunty’s mustard field. The house had once belonged to a Hindu laborer and his family; they had fled to India during the war, but people in the village still called it by his name. Gopal’s house had been so poor that no one but Amina and Micki had claimed it; the roof was gone, but there were some bricks from a long-ago courtyard and a stand of bamboo growing where one of the walls had been. They had built a little table with the broken bricks, and her grandmother had given them a jute mat too worn for any other purpose. The house became the one they would share once Micki had become a famous singer; Amina’s profession changed daily—film star, air hostess, newscaster—but the two of them were always successful beyond their parents’ wildest dreams. The game was rarely acted out but rather told:

This is our house in Dhaka. It has fourteen rooms and three indoor toilets, and the windows are made of glass
.

Here is where your parents sleep—next to mine—and here’s the room for
Nanu. Here’s the refrigerator where we keep the ice cream, and here’s where we put on our makeup to go out
.

They had been playing this way for at least a year when Amina arrived at the house one day to find Micki there with a little boy. Ghoton was only four, a year younger than Amina, but Micki was on her knees in front of him, pretending to bathe his feet. Ghoton was telling her about the new Honda motorbike he was going to buy when he harvested the rice this year.

“You’re the baby,” Micki said to Amina, barely glancing at her. “Abba just came home, so you go and lie down. I’ll feed you in a minute.”

After Micki began including Ghoton in their games, Amina found herself less eager to seek out her cousin as a playmate. She had stuck closer to her grandmother and her aunt and had tried to focus her mind on the things that would please them. She made bargains with God, sitting still in school, and proving herself dutiful, even showy, about saying her prayers. She found she could do almost anything, if she imagined her fate was resting on it. In that way another year passed, and when her parents had finally come for her, just as they’d said they would, Amina had been more than ready to go.

In the morning they called her father. He was sitting at his old desk in her uncle’s office, waiting for a package that might or might not arrive from abroad.

“No one is here,” her father said. “So I can stretch my legs—I walk around and around. First I’ll talk to you, then I’ll walk for fifteen minutes. Then it will be time to pray.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t call me,” Amina said. “I was worried when there wasn’t any answer.”

“I knew you’d be angry if you found out I’d come to Dhaka. But you didn’t know why—now your mother has told you.”

“Moni Aunty made me promise we’d come there when we arrived. She said she was buying a bed.”

“Nasir has also offered to host the three of us,” her father said carefully. “I think it’s safer. Salim knows exactly where Omar lives.”

Amina thought the real peril was much more likely to lie at the
consulate, where any erratic behavior on her mother’s part could cost them the visas. Bhulu and Laltu had heard that Amina had a rich American husband, and so they’d sent their errant brother Salim to Dhaka to make threats and gather information. Perhaps they thought Amina and her parents would pay a bribe simply to be rid of them—something Amina would have been willing to do, had their demands been more reasonable. But ten thousand dollars? Because they’d been so arrogant, she was determined to give them nothing.

“Are you sure Nasir has room for us?”

“Yes, yes,” her father said excitedly. Of course he would prefer staying with Nasir, who treated him like a father, to imposing once again on Moni and Omar, to whom they owed so much already. “He has three big rooms. He would be hurt if we went elsewhere. It won’t be long anyway—less than two weeks. And then we’ll be eight thousand miles away. No one will ever find us!”

There was a part of her, of course, that was eager to see Nasir and to have him see her. She was curious to know what his life was like—how did it feel to leave Bangladesh and then return here to live? She remembered their last meeting, almost four years ago now, and the way he’d lectured her about her marriage. Would he be different now that she’d returned, to all appearances a success?