Brick Lane

by Monica Ali

  Sides of grave falling down with rain and I cry for our mother.

  My husband working long long hour. He saying I have change my face but I do not know what he mean. I put more cosmetics less cosmetics but he cannot see what he saw before. I thinking he need more rest but he cannot be still and he go out. Is what is call bad patch for the marriage.

  June 1995

  He say things not in good order any more even I do always try to keep it good ordered like anything. He say I put curse on him and that is why we marry. He say how his family going to take daughter-in-law like me?

  I saying to him this is bad patch for the marriage. Every marriage has bad patch. Even my sister sometime having bad patch and she respectable like hell living in London and everything.

  July 1996

  My own loving sister I always dreaming of you sending your letter and waiting. I do not have address for you to reach me. When I am settling somewhere you hear from me.

  Do not worry. When I have work I send news.

  January 2001

  I hope this reach you. I hope you are in same address. Some time past I living here and there. Some time past only food for one day and the next. Everything I putting out of mind now. They have taken me in and I am maid in good house. All are kind. Children are beautiful. My room is solid wall room. Clean place. Nothing here for making scared of. Mistress is kind. Mister is kind. They give plenty of food. If you are in same address now you write to me again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TOWER HAMLETS, FEBRUARY 2001

  The girls stood before their father and twisted their toes into the carpet. Chanu sat cross-legged on the floor. Leaning forward, his belly filled the thigh-and-calf cradle. Chairs were out of favour. He was a floor man now.

  'Come,' he said. 'Begin.' He clapped his hands together.

  Shahana pushed Bibi with her elbow. Bibi drew circles with her big toe. Her plaits hung around her face; rope ladders to the roof of her head. Nazneen pulled laundry from the wooden clothes rack and began a campaign of vigorous folding and sorting. Activity, ordinary and domestic and cheerful, was needed. The clothes were still damp.

  'She knows it,' said Nazneen. 'Only yesterday I listened to her practise.'

  Chanu held up an open hand. It was a gesture for peace, or a threat to Bibi.

  At last she began:

  'O Amar Shonar Bangla, ami tomay bhailobashi Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune . . .'

  Chanu sighed and rubbed his stomach. He plumped it like a cushion, fists working in a circular motion. For five days he had been teaching his daughters to recite 'Golden Bengal'. This evening they were to perform the entire poem. Chanu was taking his family back home and Tagore was the first step of the journey. Bibi continued.

  '. . . As if it were a flute.

  In spring, oh mother mine, the fragrance from Your mango groves makes me wild with joy – Ah what thrill.'

  Her voice gave no hint of joy or of thrill. It plodded nervously along, afraid that a sudden burst of intonation would derail the train of recall.

  Chanu ceased his kneading. 'Ah,' he said loudly, and looked around the room. 'What thrill!'

  Bibi twisted her head to look behind, and then looked at her father. His invisible audience was, for her, a perplexing yet palpable reality. She felt the presence though she could not see it as he did.

  'Try it again,' he urged. He moved his attention to his left foot, probing a new bunion with tender fingers.

  'Ah. What. Thrill.' Bibi joined her plaits beneath her chin as if to stop her mouth from opening again. She waited for clearance.

  Chanu inclined his head to the side and remained philosophical. 'Can't expect the amra tree to bear mangoes.'

  Now she raced:

  'In autumn, oh mother mine

  In the full-blossomed paddy fields, I have seen spread all over – sweet smiles!

  Ah, what a beauty, what shades, what an affection And what a tenderness.'

  There she halted, before a sudden precipice of uncertainty. Chanu looked at Shahana. She had her arms folded across her chest and her top lip tucked into the bottom lip. Nazneen moved about the room inventing chores and making brisk, everyday noises. From the dangerous set of her daughter's mouth, Nazneen divined a flogging ahead.

  Terrible in the incantation and stunningly inept in the delivery, these beatings were becoming a frequent ritual. They took their toll on each member of the family but most of all on Chanu. It was inevitably Shahana who incited his anger and it was Shahana who appeared to suffer least.

  'Tell the little memsahib that I am going to break every bone in her body.' Chanu never addressed his threats directly to his elder daughter. Nazneen was the preferred intermediary or, if a new and particularly lurid threat had been invented, Bibi would be chosen. 'I'll dip her head in boiling fat and throw her out of that window. Go and tell the memsahib. Go and tell your sister.' Bibi could be relied upon to convey the message word for ringing word, even though Shahana was rarely more than a couple of feet away. In this way she proved to be a more reliable stooge than her mother, who only murmured low soothings and tried to move the girls out of range.

  Shahana did not want to listen to Bengali classical music. Her written Bengali was shocking. She wanted to wear jeans. She hated her kameez and spoiled her entire wardrobe by pouring paint on them. If she could choose between baked beans and dal it was no contest. When Bangladesh was mentioned she pulled a face. She did not know and would not learn that Tagore was more than poet and Nobel laureate, and no less than the true father of her nation. Shahana did not care. Shahana did not want to go back home.

  Chanu called her the little memsahib and wore himself out with threats before launching a flogging with anything to hand. Newspaper, a ruler, a notebook, a threadbare slipper and once, disastrously, a banana skin. He never learned to select his instrument and he never thought to use his hand. An instrumentless flogging was a lapse of fatherly duty. He flogged enthusiastically but without talent. His energy went into the niyyah – the making of his intention – and here he was advanced and skilful, but the delivery let him down. Busy still with his epithets of torture, he flailed about as Shahana ran and dodged and dived beneath furniture or behind her mother's legs. And Bibi hugged herself and was covered in pain, and a hand reached inside Nazneen's stomach and began to pull entrails up her throat, and Chanu stopped shouting and stopped flailing and began a twitching that ran from his eyebrows to his fingers, and Shahana took on his temper and yelled the ending, which everyone already knew.

  'I didn't ask to be born here.'

  'Your sister will continue,' said Chanu, addressing himself to Bibi. Bibi opened her mouth, as if to show that she was on standby.

  Shahana disentangled her lips, rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and recited in an even tone:

  'What a quilt you have spread at the feet of Banyan trees and along the banks of rivers! Oh mother mine, words from your lips are like Nectar to my ears! If sadness, oh mother mine, cast a gloom on your face, My eyes well up with tears . . .'

  Chanu closed his eyes as they spilled over. His stomach rolled a little further forward into its nest of thigh. He began to hum and took up the verse in song. The children looked at Nazneen and she agreed by a slow blink that it was finished. She spread wide her arms and herded them away to their room.

  In the late evening, to the sound of the walls that buzzed their eternal prayer of pipes and water and electricity, Nazneen clipped hair from her husband's nose. The quiet made Nazneen alert. All day and into the evening she was aware of the life around, like a dim light left on in the corner of the room. They used to disturb her, these activities, sealed and boxed and unnerving. When she had come she had learned first about loneliness, then about privacy, and finally she learned a new kind of community. The wife upstairs who used the lavatory in the night. She and Nazneen had exchanged only pleasantries but Nazneen knew her by her bladder. The milkman's alarm clock that told Nazneen the gruelling hours her neighbour mus
t keep. The woman on the other side whose bed thumped the wall when her boyfriends called. These were her unknown intimates.

  Somewhere above, a man's muffled laugh slid into coughing and the coughing became muted by footsteps. From behind the wardrobe, a television hooted and applauded. Nazneen relaxed. She snipped a fat hair from the left nostril and watched it land on the sprigs of Chanu's chest.

  'Finished,' she said. She knelt on the floor at the end of the bed and began on his corns.

  'You see,' said Chanu, 'she is only a child.' His voice was grave. It was the voice a doctor might use to deliver bad news.

  Nazneen sliced the waxy skin. Shahana was only half-child now. Or rather she was sometimes all child, and sometimes something else. The most startling thing possible: another person.

  'She is only a child, and already the rot is beginning. That is why we must go.'

  Nazneen worked around the corn. There was a time when it disgusted her, this flaking and scraping, but now it was nothing. Time was all it took. She looked up and saw the photograph of Raqib on the bedside table. The glass needed dusting.

  'Planning and preparation,' said Chanu. 'The girls must be made ready. Fortunate for them that I am at home.' His mouth, pulling in different directions, looked sceptical. He picked up his book and lay back on the bed.

  Nazneen gathered her parings. If they went to Dhaka she could be with Hasina. Every nerve-ending strained towards it as if the sheer physical desire could transport her. But the children would be unhappy. Bibi, perhaps, would recover quickly. Shahana would never forgive her.

  In the picture Raqib looked a bit like Chanu. Or maybe all babies, fat-cheeked, looked a bit like Chanu.

  They would go. Or they would stay. Only God would keep them or send them. Nazneen knew her part, had learned it long ago, and rolled the dead skin around in her palm and sat quietly, waiting for the feelings to pass.

  When Hasina had been lost and found and lost again and returned to her once more, Nazneen went to her husband.

  'My sister. I would like to bring her here.'

  Chanu waved his thin arms. 'Bring her. Bring them all. Make a little village here.' He shook his delicate shoulders in a show of laughter. 'Get a box and sow rice. Make a paddy on the windowsill. Everyone will feel at home.'

  Nazneen felt the letter inside her choli. 'There has been some difficulty for her. I only have one sister.'

  He slapped the side of his head and he appealed to the walls. 'Some difficulty! There has been some difficulty! How can it be allowed? Has anyone here experienced any difficulty? Of course not! Anything we can do to stop the difficulty must be done. At once.' His voice, though it had become a squeak, lost no measure of volume.

  She could not explain. Hasina was still working at the factory. This was all Chanu knew. She hovered for the postman, hid letters, invented bland statements of well-being and minor mishaps. All she could do for her sister was deliver her from further shame and this was all she had done. Nazneen turned away and walked to the door.

  'My wife,' he called after her. 'Are you not forgetting something?'

  She stopped.

  'We are going there. I have decided. And when I decide something, it is done.'

  But they did not have money. And money was needed. For tickets, for suitcases, to ship the furniture, to buy a place in Dhaka.

  'Some of the women are doing sewing at home,' said Nazneen. 'Razia can get work for me.'

  'Raz-i-a,' said Chanu. 'Always this Razia. How many times do I tell you to mix with respectable-type people?' He lay on the sofa in lungi and vest. He no longer wore pyjamas, a sign of imminent return to home, and he often spent the day prostrate on the sofa without dressing, or pinned to the floor beneath his books.

  For a while he ruminated and explored the folds of his stomach. 'Some of these uneducated ones, they say that if the wife is working it is only because the husband cannot feed them. Lucky for you I am an educated man.' She waited for more, but he fell into a deep reverie and said nothing further.

  These days, with the children at school and Chanu littering the sitting room, Nazneen often retreated to the kitchen, or sat in the bedroom until the wardrobe drove her out to wander around the flat with a damp cloth, wiping and straightening. He showed no sign of getting a job. The small edifice of their savings was reduced to dust. In a final bout of activity he had put on a suit and gone out to lobby the council for a transfer. The new flat was in Rosemead block, one floor from the top, two floors above Razia, and it had a second bedroom. 'Playing the old contacts game,' said Chanu. 'Yes, they jumped up pretty sharpish when they saw me. Old Dalloway shook my hand. Sorry he lost a good man. That's what he said.' The toilet blocked persistently and the plaster had come off in the hallway. 'Got to get on to my contacts,' said Chanu, but he made no move.

  Nazneen sat down and looked at her hands. Chanu read his book. He no longer took courses. The number of certificates had stabilized, and they were waiting in the bottom of the wardrobe until someone had the energy to hang them. Now he was more teaching than taught and the chief beneficiaries were the girls. Nazneen also benefited.

  'You see,' said Chanu, still supine, holding his book above his face, 'all these people here who look down at us as peasants know nothing of history.' He sat up a little and cleared his throat. 'In the sixteenth century, Bengal was called the Paradise of Nations. These are our roots. Do they teach these things in the school here? Does Shahana know about the Paradise of Nations? All she knows about is flood and famine. Whole bloody country is just a bloody basket case to her.' He examined his text further and made little approving, purring noises.

  'If you have a history, you see, you have a pride. The whole world was going to Bengal to do trade. Sixteenth century and seventeenth century. Dhaka was the home of textiles. Who invented all this muslin and damask and every damn thing? It was us. All the Dutch and Portuguese and French and British queuing up to buy.'

  He got up now and retied his lungi. Nazneen watched him stride around the sofa and knew he was rehearsing for this evening's lesson with the girls. Bibi would sit on his lap and attempt through her stillness to reassure him that the lesson was being learned. Shahana would alternately hop about and lounge sullenly across an armchair. As soon as he stopped speaking she would rush to the television and switch it on, and he would either smile an indulgence or pump out a stream of invective that sent both girls to the safe shoreline of their beds.

  'A sense of history,' he said. 'That is what they are missing. And do not forget – the Bangladeshis they are mixing with are Sylhetis, no more, no less. They do not see the best face of our nation.'

  'Colonel Osmany,' said Nazneen quietly. 'Shah Jalal.'

  'What?' said Chanu. 'What?'

  'Our great national hero and—'

  'I know who they are!'

  Nazneen apologized with a smile, and then added, 'And that they both come from Sylhet.'

  'But that is the point I am making. These people here simply do not show our nation in its true light.' He pounced on the book and began riffling pages. 'Do you know what Warren Hastings said about our people?' He purred and exercised his face as he prepared the quotation. '"They are gentle, benevolent . . ." So many good qualities he finds. In short, he finds us "as exempt from the worst properties of human passion as any people on the face of the earth".' He waved the book in triumph. 'Do you think they teach this in the English schools?'

  'I don't know,' said Nazneen. 'Is that an English book?' She wondered who this Warren Hastings might be.

  Chanu ignored her and played to the gallery. 'No. This is not what they teach. All flood here and famine there and taking up collection tins.' He used the book to scratch inside his ear.

  Nazneen thought about Shahana, how her long thin face would group all its small features as if trying to make them vanish, closing down its operations. She had a way of glazing over that seemed accomplished, mature beyond her years. I'm going inside now, it said, and I may not come out again. But when it was o
ver it was only a sulk, and the sulk was made clear in the tantrum that followed. Then her mouth became a round angry hole and she began to kick. She kicked the furniture, she kicked her sister and most of all she kicked her mother.

  'Four European countries fought over the place. And when the British took control, this is what gave them strength to take all India.' There was sweat on his brow although the room was not too warm. He wiped it with a forearm. 'During the eighteenth century' – he looked down from behind the sofa into the soft well that his backside had left on the cushion – 'this part of the country was wealthy. It was stable. It was educated. It provided – we provided – one third of the revenues of Britain's Indian Empire.' The book slid from his hand and he bent for it. He rubbed the edge of the cushions and he looked at the far wall, at the place where his certificates had hung in the old flat. He smiled and his cheeks pushed up into his eyes.

  'A loss of pride,' he said, talking to the wall, 'is a terrible thing.'

  Nazneen got up in the night and went to the kitchen. She took a Tupperware container from the fridge and ate the curry cold, standing up against the sink. If she had a job, she would be able to save. And if she saved then they would have enough money to go to Dhaka. Or if they didn't go to Dhaka, she would save enough to send money to Hasina. Chanu would not know how many linings she had sewn or how many jackets she had button-holed. He would not know how much money there should be, and she would be able to put some aside.

  The moon was uncertain tonight. Pock-marked, it lurked behind a purple ink cloud and tried to drown itself in a too-shallow sky. Hasina wrote once that she watched the moon and thought of her, watching the same moon. But the sky here was so low, so thin, that it was hard to believe it was the same high heaven that soared over Hasina; and the moon would not be out in Dhaka and maybe it was a different moon after all.

  She put her face beneath the tap and turned on the cold water.

  'Amma.'

  Bibi stood in the doorway. She watched as Nazneen dried her face with a tea towel. Her brow was made broad to carry all her worries.