The Newlyweds (6 page)

“I am embarrassed not to have telephoned you before,” Amina said. “Of course I—George and I—we would like to invite you to eat at our house. We owe you so much.”

Min laughed, the high, clattery sound of tin plates under a tap. She was smaller than Amina, and she wore her long hair in a bun: Amina could see that there was a great deal of it, straight and lustrous black—hair like her mother’s once was, let loose only at night.

“What could you owe us?”

“Because of the website,” Amina said. “AsianEuro.com.”

“Pardon?” Min said, sounding for the first time like a nonnative speaker.

“George wouldn’t have known about it without Ed.”

Min didn’t stop walking, but her expression became suddenly wary and defensive. She looked as if she’d received some insult.

“I don’t know what that is,” Min said. “But if Ed knew about it, it was before my time.”

“AsianEuro,” Amina repeated, suspecting a misunderstanding. “The website where you met—and then we met. George first heard about it from Ed.”

Min stopped in front of a pyramid of blue-and-white humidifiers that stretched almost to the double-height ceiling. “Ed and I didn’t use a website. I barely knew how to use e-mail when I met him.”

“But then how did you meet?”

“In church.” Min spoke so naturally that Amina was forced almost immediately to give up the hope that she might be lying. “Ed came to Cebu with his church group on a Friendship Mission, and I was part of the welcome delegation. We fell in love at first sight.”

“In the Philippines?”

Min nodded. “We wrote letters—I mean, paper letters—back and forth for a year, and then I came to Rochester to get married. We were already sister congregations, so even though my family wasn’t here, it felt like getting married in my own church.”

“That’s wonderful,” Amina said. Min was looking at her strangely, and so she told the other woman that she’d been confused and that it must’ve been another of George’s friends who’d met his wife through AsianEuro. Then she assured Min that she could find the mat on her own and took a roundabout route to the travel cosmetics section, near the exit, which she and George had fixed as a place to meet.

She had debated, but she’d never mentioned meeting Min to George. If he had lied, it must’ve been out of embarrassment; maybe he thought it sounded better to have heard about the website from a friend rather than admit he was browsing dating sites on the computer. Amina had been conscious when she signed up that she was one of the only South Asian women on the site and that perhaps the men who were looking there were more interested in women who looked like Min—women from the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand,
Malaysia, or even China. What made you choose Bangladesh, she had asked, since the only picture on her original profile was of her country’s red-and-green flag, and George had said that he’d been curious about her because she was different.

10
Although she kept it to herself, the meeting had renewed Amina’s anxiety about the Muslim ceremony, without which they wouldn’t really be married. She wished now that she hadn’t promised her mother they would have that wedding first. Her mother had been afraid that once they were legally married, George might change his mind about becoming a Muslim. George had promised to become a Muslim in the same way that he was a Christian: he believed in God, he told Amina, but he didn’t think God cared very much whether people prayed or went to church. Amina repeated the first part of that formulation to her mother and then promised her that George wouldn’t change his mind. In the eighteen months she’d known him, George had never changed his mind about anything.

The problem was that all of the mosques in Rochester seemed to be closed. They had tried the Rochester Masjid of Al-Islam, which had hours posted on its website but was nevertheless tightly shuttered when they arrived. When she looked up the Sabiqun Islamic Center, she got several articles about vandalism; according to the articles, someone had written “racial slurs” across the face of the mosque for the third time. (This was something she didn’t mention to George, since it was sure to get him started on the subject of thugs.) In desperation one Saturday they’d driven out past the airport to visit the Turkish Society of Rochester.

George had wanted to spend Saturday morning at Home Depot, and the afternoon reinstalling the knobs on the kitchen cabinets, which had a habit of coming off in your hand. Amina had promised that they were going to have time to do that errand when they got home, but by the time they reached the Turkish Society, after several wrong turns, it was already two o’clock. They left the car on the street, in front of a pizzeria with the metal grate pulled over its face. Far down the block there were some teenage boys sitting on a porch smoking, but apart from them the street was deserted.

“I don’t like the look of those kids,” George said.

“I can go. You stay with the car.” Amina was glad to go on her own. She was afraid that an imam might object to performing the marriage so hastily or impose some sort of time-consuming preparations, and if she had to argue, she would prefer to do it without George there. She believed that she could persuade a Turkish imam to do the ceremony, if she could only meet him face-to-face.

But George wouldn’t let her go alone. When they reached the mosque, once again the gate was locked.

“Goddamn it,” George said, and kicked the gate; the chain and padlock rattled loudly, and across the street two black women in fancy dresses and hats turned to look at her husband.

“It says open from noon to three,” Amina said, pointing to the sign. She called out in English, “Anybody there?” and then more softly,
“Assalamu alaikum,”
but the courtyard remained empty. There were two small plastic bins affixed to the gate, with the printed instruction
TAKE ONE
; the first bin was empty, but the second still held several xeroxed yellow fliers. George took one automatically, and Amina was startled to see a printed banner advertising the same Islamic Center of Rochester that Nasir had found for her, almost two years ago now.

“I know that place.”

George was reading the flyer. “It’s right on Westfall Road—why didn’t we go there first?”

Amina didn’t want to explain about Nasir or her reluctance to take his suggestion. He had come back for his book one afternoon, only a few minutes after her father left on a long errand to a photo shop in Kaptan Bazar, on the other side of town, where a friend had promised he could get his old camera repaired cheaply. Amina had told him it was a waste of money, but her father said that he wanted to be able to take pictures at the airport.

Nasir came at such a perfect time that it was hard to believe he hadn’t been watching the house. Until that moment, Amina had forgotten about the book under the table leg; she kept her eyes on her cousin’s face, praying that he wouldn’t look down.

“Please have something to eat,” her mother said. “I’m just making Munni some Bombay toast.” Nasir protested weakly, once, but her mother was already in the kitchen.

“My mother says you’ve left England for good.”

“I was successful there in earnings, but not in life. I’ve come home to be successful in both.”

Why, Amina often wondered, did Bengali men feel the need to brag about everything, especially when they were talking to a woman? From the moment she’d met George, he’d told her that his job was nothing special and that it was too boring to talk about with her, even though he was an engineer with a master’s degree.

“What sort of business will you have here?” Amina asked, and she was pleased when Nasir colored and said that he’d only just returned and was still settling in.

“Munni, get your cousin’s book,” her mother called from the kitchen, and for a moment Amina panicked. Had her mother forgotten? She could hardly look down, for fear that Nasir’s gaze would follow her own and find
The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam
pinned under the foot of the table.

“On the shelf in the bedroom,” her mother added casually, and then Amina did look down: somehow, in between the time her father had left and Nasir had arrived, the book had migrated from the floor to her parents’ room.

“Have you read it?” Nasir asked.

“Only parts of it,” Amina said. “My father read it. I don’t think he liked it as much as he liked the books you used to bring him.” She smiled, but Nasir remained serious. He didn’t seem to care what her father thought.

“Which parts?”

She thought about fibbing, but she had a feeling that he would only direct her to the correct chapters, and perhaps even sit in the chair in front of her, eating her mother’s Bombay toast while he waited to get her reaction.

“ ‘Marriage to the Women of the People of the Book.’ And ‘The Prohibition of a Muslim Woman’s Marrying a Non-Muslim Man.’ ”

“What did you think?”

“Very interesting,” Amina said. The book had been interesting. According to the author, there were two reasons a Muslim woman couldn’t marry a non-Muslim. The first was the obvious one: the fact that a child would likely be brought up in the religion of its father.
The second reason was one she hadn’t anticipated, but couldn’t help appreciating for the elegance of its logic. Since a Muslim respected all of the prophets—not only Mohammed, but Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as well—a Muslim man could respect the beliefs of his Christian wife. But since Christians believed in only one prophet, Jesus Christ, a Christian husband would have to disdain his wife’s prophet as a false one. And since each man was the head of his own household, it would be intolerable for a Muslim woman to live in the household of a Christian man.

“But it didn’t change your mind.”

“Why should it change my mind? My fiancé, George, plans to convert.”

Nasir looked surprised, but only for a moment. “He says that today.”

“He has said it all along.”

“I know Englishmen.”

“George is an American.”

Nasir shrugged off the difference. “And what about your children?”

“They will be Muslim, of course.”

“But will they pray? Will they fast?”

Amina regretted the joking tone she’d used earlier. She was insulted by the familiarity that Nasir assumed, whether because he had known her as a child or because they’d once been thought of as a match. She was a woman now, engaged to be married to someone else. Her mother should not even leave them alone together in the same room.

“My father will be here soon. You should go.”

She still remembered the nights he would visit her father. Afterward she would have to ask forgiveness, but when he was in the room all of her resolve disappeared, and the only prayers she’d been able to offer were that he would stay for dinner and, after dinner, that he would sit up with her father talking, so that she could lie on the bed in the dark listening to his voice. When Nasir had called her a clever girl, the English words she knew had fled to some inaccessible place; when he’d touched her hair, it was as if all of the water in her body (the body, they had learned in Mr. Haq’s science class, was 61.8 percent water) had turned to soda.

“Good-bye, Amina,” Nasir said, though he had always called her Munni. “God protect you.”

“Allah hafez,”
Amina said. “Good luck with your new business.” Just out of curiosity, she looked straight into her cousin’s heavily lashed eyes, but that Nasir was gone and it was an angry stranger who looked back at her.

Ordinarily she took her mother’s side, but on the subject of Nasir she agreed with her father. How dare he tell her where to worship in America, as if he were her father or her brother? He had never even
been
to America. Standing on the pavement in front of the Turkish Society of Rochester, Amina saw the possibility for a compromise.

“I misunderstood,” she told George. “I thought the ICR was farther away.”

George sighed. “The wedding is next weekend. When are we going to go to Brighton?”

This, Amina thought, was the difference between an American and a Bengali husband. George might shake his head and look put-upon, but if she told him she had to be married by an imam, he wouldn’t try to change her mind. She knew that if she asked him, he would take a day off of work next week just to go to the Islamic Center.

“Who knows if they could even do it next week.”

George looked at her hopefully.

“Also, what are its qualifications? How do we know it is reputable?”

George nodded. He did not point out that Amina hadn’t had any such reservations about the Masjid of Al-Islam, the Sabiqun Islamic Center, or the even Turkish Society of Rochester.

“It doesn’t matter when we do it,” Amina said, testing the idea by saying it out loud. “As long as we do it at some time.”

“I want to do it,” George said eagerly. “We’ll do it in a couple of weeks, as soon as the wedding’s over.”

“The other wedding.”

“That’s what I meant,” George said.

11
At the bridal shower, Jessica had wanted to know her favorite flower and had listened politely as Amina explained about the
krishnachura
and the romantic origins of its name. She’d felt silly when
Jessica had shown up at town hall on the morning of the wedding, carrying a bouquet of lilacs and apologizing because there were no
krishnachura
to be had in Rochester. Amina had assured her that lilacs were her favorite American flower. Then George’s mother had arrived with her own wedding veil, which she shyly offered to Amina for the ceremony.

“She didn’t want a veil,” George said, annoyed with his mother, but Amina took her mother-in-law’s side, just as a bride would have done at home. Jessica gathered up a few of the ringlets the stylist had created and pinned the veil so that Amina could wear it hanging down her back. Then the small party—Jessica; her husband, Harold; George’s mother, Eileen; Aunt Cathy; Ed (without Min, who had excused herself on grounds of an unseasonable flu); and George’s college friends from Buffalo, Bill and Katie—followed them into the office where they completed the paperwork for the marriage certificate. Amina misunderstood and thought that this was the wedding itself, so she was confused when the clerk ushered them into a small, carpeted antechamber with a bench and a framed poster of sunflowers and asked them to wait.