The Newlyweds (37 page)

Amina could remember being a little girl on roofs like this one, the delicious fantasy of jumping. She felt that childish bravado now.

“You’ll find a girl who hasn’t changed.”

Nasir looked as if he were going to speak, but she hurried on.

“Look down. There are so many of them. How about pink sari—there?”

“I hate pink,” Nasir said flatly.

“All right,” Amina said, cloaking her feelings in the pose of a bossy older sister. “Those two—getting out of the rickshaw. The one in green is too short, but the other is very graceful.”

“Graceful is nice,” Nasir said, getting into the spirit of the game, “but do you think she cooks?”

“Oh, I think she fries the best jilapi in the neighborhood.”

“I’m not one for sweets.”

“You’re too picky—I pity your poor sisters, matchmaking for you. What’s wrong with that one, bargaining for eggs? Don’t tell me she’s too plump for you.”

“I do like them on the slender side.” He smiled directly at her, knowing and wry, and suddenly she was back in the old Moti Mahal apartment, admiring his voice as he read aloud from her father’s books after dinner. She had the same feelings, sweeter because they’d been
dormant for so long, but her wish from that time had been granted: she was a grown woman, with everything she would need to attract a man like Nasir.

“Actually there is someone.”

Amina felt the blood rush to her face. They had been flirting, but it had been harmless; now he was speaking seriously, and she had no idea what he was going to say. She knelt down to hide her face, on the pretense of examining some young coriander plantings.

“I haven’t said anything to her yet.”

The soil in the pots was wet, so someone must’ve been here already this morning. His sisters could come up at any moment and find them in the midst of this conversation.

“I think she lives right across the road—in that blue house, there.”

Amina looked in the direction he was pointing. The combination of relief and regret was so strong that she didn’t yet trust herself to speak. She wondered how she could have been so vain as to imagine he was talking about her. If he’d ever loved her, those feelings had long since passed; even if he had still been harboring a crush, he wouldn’t have been so bold as to say it to a married woman.

“That one?” Amina said. “With the fancy grille?”

“I wasn’t spying,” Nasir said hurriedly. “I never tried to see inside. I noticed her going off in the mornings, to school or to work. They’re simple people—she walks, or takes a rickshaw if it’s raining.”

Amina thought of her own days of going out to study and then to teach. She wondered if the girl had noticed Nasir, too. He was certainly tall and broad shouldered, but did his face have the same effect on other women that it did on her? She had never swooned over the newer Bollywood stars the way her girlfriends did; she didn’t like men who looked like women. Something about the shape of Nasir’s nose (it had been broken as a child), the square set of his chin and jaw, and those large, dark eyes—it was what she thought a man was supposed to look like.

“I don’t know her name,” Nasir admitted. “In my head I call her Yellow Barrette, because she was wearing one the first time I saw her. Now you know my secret,” he said, smiling. “I hope you’re not going to tease me.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

Nasir considered her, and for a moment she was afraid he could see what she’d been thinking a few moments ago.

“I was surprised you agreed to come and stay here.”

“I didn’t think I could stand staying with my aunt again.”

Nasir laughed. “How flattering.”

“I mean, we all wanted to stay with you—only I was afraid my parents had been imposing too much. You’ve been better to them than their own relatives.”

Nasir shrugged. “My parents are gone. You only realize what you had once you’ve lost it.”

“Or when you’re far away.” Amina looked from Nasir to the street again, both hoping and dreading that they might see the girl he admired. “Even when they made me angry, I used to worry about something happening to them.”

“And are you worried now?”

She’d guessed her father had confided in him about Salim, and now she was sure of it. Nasir had the kind of old-fashioned manners that kept him from bringing up anything unpleasant directly.

“Not now that we’re here.”

He nodded. “Still, it’s good to be cautious. Perhaps stay inside unless it’s really necessary.”

There was a hint of the patronizing tone she’d resisted four years ago, and it made her own voice sharper. “The visa interview is necessary.”

“Of course, but take a taxi.” Anticipating her objections, he took a five-hundred-taka bill from his wallet. “Tell them your husband insisted.”

“George would insist if he knew.” She wondered why she felt she had to defend George to Nasir. Would she have done the same if he’d never brought up Yellow Barrette?

“Of course,” he said again.

“Actually I can’t tell him about Salim, because he’d worry so much.”

Nasir nodded. He was still holding the money when they heard a noise behind them. She started, and then saw that it was his sisters, Sakina and Shilpa, coming toward them on the roof.

“Assalamu alaikum,”
Sakina said, looking her sharply up and down, and Amina returned the formal greeting. Nasir’s younger sister,
Shilpa, smiled and embraced her; she was heavily pregnant and breathing hard from the stairs.

“Munni,” she said, “you look so fashionable!” Amina was wearing a pale blue sundress she’d bought in Rochester with a pair of white shalwar trousers, and she’d neglected to put on a scarf. Shilpa may have admired such a modern outfit, but Amina could see that Sakina didn’t share her sister’s sentiment. Shilpa and Nasir had still been children when their parents died (Shilpa was eight; Nasir eleven), but Sakina was older than her brother by six years. An uncle had helped her manage the building until she could do it herself, and she’d taken care of her two younger siblings alone from the time she was seventeen years old.

Sakina noted the bill in Nasir’s hand before he put it carefully back in his wallet. The white streak in her hair had gotten more pronounced. “We didn’t know you’d arrived.”

“We reached Dhaka only last night.”

“Of course I want to pay a visit to your mother, but my little brother’s been giving me orders about it.”

“I only said not to sit chattering for hours. She hasn’t been well.”

“He’s trying to keep you all to himself. And then we’re off to Comilla next week.”

“I remember you have family there.”

“Oh—yes. But this time we have some business there as well.” She gave Nasir a significant look.

“My sister’s going along to help with the children,” Nasir told Amina. Then he turned back to Sakina. “I have to get to work, and Munni’s dealing with the visas for her parents.”

“For America!” Shilpa put in: “It’s so exciting.”

Sakina ignored her little sister, fixing her gaze on Amina. Her eyes were an unusual hazel color, heavy lidded and intelligent. “How will they handle the change, I wonder. At this time in their life.”

“The important thing is for us to be together,” Amina said firmly. “That’s how they feel.”

“Of course,” Sakina said. “Now that you’ve left.”

“You’ll be late, Munni,” Nasir said, herding them from the roof, and Amina didn’t hesitate. She thought of her aunt Moni, whose criticism always came from her own insecurities and could be dismissed as
such; by contrast Nasir’s elder sister never said anything dishonest or petty, even when she was deliberately trying to provoke.

“I’ll visit your mother anyway,” Sakina said, but she followed the three of them from the roof. Amina had been squinting, she realized, because her head hurt. All but the closest buildings were cloaked in a dense brown haze. And it would be much worse than this in the winter months; she couldn’t imagine how she’d once ignored it.

They descended the narrow concrete stairs—Nasir ducking his head and holding Shilpa’s arm to support her—until they were standing in the corridor outside Sakina’s door. Amina thought he would be late to work, but he seemed unwilling to leave the three of them talking there together. He waited until his sisters had disappeared into Sakina’s flat and then turned back to her. The collar of his shirt was dark with sweat.

“I won’t see you until tonight. I hope everything goes well at the embassy.”

“It’ll be fine,” Amina said, willing it to be so. “Americans are fair.” It wasn’t the Americans she was worried about.

They went down to the fourth floor, and he left her outside the door of his apartment. “Please take the taxi.”

“Of course.”

“Allah hafez.”

She returned the good-bye and then watched his oiled, dark head disappear down the staircase. When she got back inside his apartment, she went to the window. She could see the blue building, but not into the screened balconies. They weren’t so much decorative, as she’d once thought, but functional—designed to hide the women inside while they hung their laundry, swept, or sat in the rare breeze to nurse a baby. She thought of Nasir’s instructions and was annoyed all over again. Would he have told her to stay inside if she were a man? Salim had threatened her father, but she was the one Nasir had cautioned. All Deshi men were like that, she told herself again, no matter how open-minded and modern they appeared on the surface.

She took a corner of the homemade curtain between two fingers and tried to call up George’s face. Instead she found herself remembering photographs: the first one he’d sent her, in coat and tie; the bleached-out childhood portrait; and the wedding picture that hung
above the fireplace, in which he clutched her tightly to him but seemed to be looking at something slightly above the photographer’s head. Across the street a square of sunlight hit the silver grille directly, picking up the dust from the road and giving the dark balcony behind it a hazy sparkle, as if there were some kind of hushed, interior paradise on the other side.

9
The embassy waiting room had changed in the nearly four years since she’d applied for her own visa. The paint had aged; there were stains on the carpet, and the plastic chairs struck her as unnecessarily uncomfortable. Even the seal with the golden eagle seemed to have grown smaller. The biggest change, however, was in the embassy workers she saw walking briskly in and out of the waiting room, talking to colleagues or on cell phones. There was something wrong with the way they were dressed, particularly the women, perhaps because of the challenge of conforming to standards of local modesty while wearing ordinary American clothing. Four years ago these embassy workers had seemed to her like angels, occasionally visible in a doorway or at the end of the hall, but clearly existing in another realm. Now, sitting in the first row of chairs with her American passport in her purse, she wondered if it had simply been the seductive legal fiction that this building existed on U.S. soil.

Her parents had been called into another room almost immediately, and there was nothing for Amina to do but sit and wait. She had squeezed her mother’s shoulder before she went in; she’d seen the glazed expression on her face, the tremor in her hands, and hoped for a miracle. Her father, as usual, had been confident and self-possessed; he’d never had a passport before, but he carried the newly issued Deshi one as if it had already been stamped with the visa. If only they would let him do all the talking, she thought, but she knew that both of her parents would be required to answer questions. If her mother started rambling, about Mufti Huzoor’s miracle cures or Kwaz, spirit of all waters, they would be politely escorted out. They could apply again in the future, but this denial and the reason for it would remain in the embassy’s computers, and it was possible her parents would never get to America at all. For the first time since she’d left the country, she
allowed herself to wonder about the value of the long journey that had led them all here.

She still remembered her snobbish seatmate on the flight to New York, and so as soon as she’d passed through the security check, she’d put her passport away in her purse. Both she and George had assumed she would have to give up her Deshi citizenship, but in fact she’d been allowed to retain dual status. The U.S. passport meant better treatment and shorter lines in both airports, however, so she’d gone to the trouble of sending it in to the consulate in Manhattan for a Deshi visa. Now the Deshi passports in evidence all around her made her think of her own arrival in the United States, of how many times she’d flipped through that old passport on the flight, checking that the visa was still there.

She’d been so jittery that the anxiety had finally spent itself, so the moment of arrival had been strangely still and calm. She had searched for George’s face in the crowd and hadn’t found it. This terrible possibility had occurred to her so many times that when it actually happened, it had almost failed to be frightening. She experienced a kind of peace in the face of her complete helplessness, a second infancy, and for several minutes she stood and watched the other passengers streaming around her. And then something had happened. An ear had appeared, between two other bodies, and she had known with absolute certainty that the ear belonged to George. She didn’t call out, but waited for him to find and claim her, thinking how strange it was that she should recognize his ear.

She was remembering this moment when her parents appeared in the doorway of the waiting room. They looked smaller and thinner than they had been this morning, and their clothes—how had she failed to alert them?—only advertised the fact that they’d recently come from the village. The embassy had intimidated them into relative decorum at first, but her parents were now frightened enough to be completely uninhibited; her father massaged his forehead with his hand, while her mother waved frantically at Amina. Whatever documents they’d been given were in her right hand.

Amina hurried across the room to them. “What happened? You didn’t get them?”

Her mother looked at her father.

“Oh, Munni,” he said. “Oh Munni, I’m so sorry.”