by Monica Ali
'Y'don't say.' The man returned the camera. He had an easy way about him. He was relaxed as a child in its mother's arms.
'I do say,' said Chanu.
Shahana rolled her eyes. 'I'm from London.'
'Is that in India?' He wore a blue checked shirt and his face glowed with health.
'No, no. India is one country. Bangladesh is another country.'
'Y'don't say.' He seemed simultaneously surprised but resigned to this fact. 'Do you mind if I get a shot of all of you together for myself?' He toted his own camera. And by way of explanation he added, 'I'm hoping to go there one day, India.'
As she posed again, Nazneen realized that today was the first time they had stood together as a family for the camera. It filled her with a mixture of panic and hope, the possibility of holding things together with the unexceptional ritual of family life.
When the film was developed, a few shots were only blurs of colour, like a glimpse through a doorway when the monsoon washed away the shape of things, and of the family together nothing could be made out except for the feet.
They sat on the grass in St James's Park and Nazneen laid the picnic out on four tea towels. Chicken wings spread in a paste of yoghurt and spices and baked in the oven, onions sliced to the thickness of a fingernail, mixed with chillies, dipped in gram flour and egg and fried in bubbling oil, a dry concoction of chickpeas and tomatoes stewed with cumin and ginger, misshapen chapattis wrapped while still hot in tinfoil and sprinkled now with condensation, golden hard-boiled eggs glazed in a curry seal, Dairylea triangles in their cardboard box, bright orange packets containing shamelessly orange crisps, a cake with a list of ingredients too long to be printed in legible type. She arranged them all on paper plates and stacked up the plastic tubs inside the carrier bags.
'It's ready,' she cried, as though calling them to the table.
Shahana extricated a Dairy Lea and picked the foil apart. She rolled the cheese inside a chapatti. Bibi sat on her feet and chewed at a chicken wing. Chanu took his time loading a plate with each item, including three crisps and a slice of the cake. He balanced it on his knee. 'It's quite a spread,' he said in English. 'You know, when I married your mother, it was a stroke of luck.' He gestured at the tea towels as if his luck were plainly on display. Then he ate with a fervour that ruled out conversation.
After lunch, Chanu removed his money belt and his sandals and lay down. Though his eyes were buried beneath his dark glasses, Nazneen became aware from the rise and fall of his stomach that he had fallen asleep. The girls decided to go for a walk around the lake, and Nazneen told them to follow the path and not to get lost. She would have liked to go with them to explore the seductive contours of the park, linger among the flowers and stand close to the fountain that shot fabulous jewelled arrows against the plate-blue sky. But to leave Chanu here stranded on his back would be, she felt, to dishonour him and she stayed.
She rubbed the grass with her toes and watched the people passing by with red cans and white ice creams. A heron landed by the lake and stretched its wings and folded them flat again. Gaily coloured ducks strung themselves across the water, bobbing aimlessly, like a garland of flowers. On the far bank a tree trailed its leaves, green and braided hair, onto the lake's ever moving, ever still surface. The sun worked its warm fingers on her arms. She watched the people, all colours, all sorts, and they shared an aspect. Here they were, seeking the moment, ambling or strolling or trotting and anxious to have their share of enjoyment. A brown-skinned family passed by. They looked like Pathans, tall and dignified, with sharp cheekbones and high brows. Nazneen wondered if they too were on holiday from a different corner of this city, but something in their way of looking told her that they had made a longer trip. A girl on roller skates, her shorts shorter than her buttocks, split the family apart, and they watched her speed along the path and if she had raised her arms and flown they would have been no more and no less surprised.
Nazneen plucked a blade of grass. She cut it along the ridge with her thumb nail and curled the ends one way and the other to form two spirals. She tossed it away. We are no more than this, she thought. Each life is no more than a blade of grass on this lawn.
The last few weeks, since the first time with Karim, since her life had become bloated with meaning and each small movement electrified, she had taken to reminding herself. You are nothing. You are nothing.
They had developed a routine of sorts. In the early afternoon she watched from the window. When he appeared, she raised her hand as if she were about to scratch her face. Then he would come up. If Chanu was still at home, she leaned her head against the glass, and he did not wave or smile or do anything other than continue his walk across the yard. Then she imagined that she would do the same every day, until he stopped appearing. She would simply watch and eventually he would understand and not come back again for her. But the next day she trembled just the same as she raised her hand.
He was the first man to see her naked. It made her sick with shame. It made her sick with desire. They committed a crime. It was a crime and the sentence was death. In between the sheets, in between his arms, she took her pleasure desperately, as if the executioner waited behind the door. Beyond death was the eternal fire of hell and from every touch of flesh on flesh she wrought the strength to endure it. Though they began with a gentle embrace, tenderness could not satisfy her, nor could she stand it, and into her recklessness she drew him like a moth to a flame.
In the bedroom everything changed. Things became more real and they became less real. Like a Sufi in a trance, a whirling dervish, she lost the thread of one existence and found another. 'S-slow down,' he moaned. But she could not.
Out of the bedroom, she was – in starts – afraid and defiant. If ever her life was out of her hands, it was now. She had submitted to her father and married her husband; she had submitted to her husband. And now she gave herself up to a power greater than these two, and she felt herself helpless before it. When the thought crept into her mind that the power was inside her, that she was its creator, she dismissed it as conceited. How could such a weak woman unleash a force so strong? She gave in to fate and not to herself.
After she had changed the sheets (this is where the pain, without the balm of passion, became severe) they went into the sitting room. Karim sprawled on the sofa. He checked his mobile for messages. 'Nerves and worrying,' he said. 'The man is a worrier.' As if the son could not give cause for the father to worry.
'I fancy a bit of chanachur,' he said. And Nazneen went to get his snack.
'A glass of water.'
'I left my magazine over there.'
'Could you pass my phone?'
'Leave that sewing now, for God's sake.'
Nazneen danced attendance. It was a thrill, this playing house. But she knew she was playing, and she sensed for Karim it was a serious business.
He told her about his mother. 'She was always the one with her feet up. It used to make me boil up to see my father bring her tea, bring her food, wipe her hands. She was always lying down if he was around. And if he wasn't there she did everything so slowly, like she didn't want to be bothered, couldn't be bothered with her children. She started staying in bed, calling for everything. It made me furious. I was furious with him as well for being so weak, for not being a man. I never thought – funny how children are – that she might be ill.'
'So your father was strong,' she said.
He put his fingers over his hair. It was cut so short that it could not be ruffled. 'I don't know. I never thought of it that way.'
Sometimes she fell into a state of bottomless anxiety. She spent the night eating leftovers in the kitchen as if layer on layer of food inside her would push out the anxiety, displace it like water from a bath. And at the end of these sessions she felt nauseous and tired, too tired to care what would happen and certain that in any case nothing could be helped.
But much of the time she felt good. She spent more time talking to her daughters, and th
ey surprised her with their intelligence, their wit and their artless sensitivity. She served her husband and she found that he was a caring husband, a man of integrity, educated, and equipped with a pleasing thirst for knowledge. She did her work and she discovered that work in itself, performed with a desire for perfection, was capable of giving satisfaction. She cleaned the flat and even wiping the floor after the toilet had flooded was not so tiresome if it was done with a song on the lips and in the heart. It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim had cast a special light on everything, a dawn light after a life lived in twilight. It was as if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted the missing sense.
She did not go to any more meetings. The Bengal Tigers got along without her, but they were not getting along very well. The trouble was a lack of trouble. The Lion Hearts' press had stopped rolling. The Bengal Tigers put out a couple more leaflets (one entitled Ten Ways to Taqwa, and the other designed as a fold-out poster for Islamic Jihad with the words emblazoned across an AK-47 rifle) but without the spark of the Lion Hearts the fire had gone out.
Karim fretted about it. 'They're planning something,' he said. 'When they go quiet, that's when you've got to worry.'
In the north, there were more disturbances. 'They've gone up there to agitate. But they'll be back. It will be ninety-three all over again.' That was when the BNP councillor was elected and it was not safe to go out. 'No,' he said, 'it will be much worse than that.'
But the Bengal Tigers dwindled; they became an endangered species. At one meeting only five people turned up and Karim seethed. 'The Lion Hearts have gone underground. They are gathering their forces. And what are we doing about it?' He stood in the hallway, and all Nazneen could think of was the bedroom. 'When the time comes, will we be ready?' He worked his leg. He pushed his sleeves up, above the elbow. Nazneen undid a button on his shirt, and she ran a finger along the gold chain around his neck. She put a hand to his chin, where the mole was now covered – only just – by his beard.
He had begun to grow a beard soon after they became lovers. Now the hair on his face was the same length as the hair on his head. And he began to take religious instruction from the Spiritual Leader, the imported imam with the women's shoes.
'Do you know, in the Bukhari collection there are seven thousand five hundred and sixty-three hadith. The second most important is Hajjaj, containing seven thousand four hundred and twenty-two.' He sat on the dressing table while she pulled the sheets from the bed and rolled them up. 'To be an Islamic scholar . . . man, you've got to have a good memory.' He moved out of the way while she took bedlinen from the drawer. 'Do you know, the Ka'aba was built by the first human, Adam, and is therefore the first shrine for worshipping God?' She spread the sheet and worked her way around the corners. 'Do you know, when you do tawaf, how many circuits round the Ka'aba you're actually supposed to run? Three. I thought it was all of them. Basic things – I never knew.' She listened and she was glad to have the words – any words but her own – in her ears while she covered the traces of their un-Islamic deed. In the evening, when he had long since gone and she moved around the kitchen preparing food, Shahana followed her with a textbook in her hand. 'Do you know,' she said, 'that humans have forty-six chromosomes, dogs and chickens have seventy-eight, scorpions have four and peas have fourteen?'
'No,' admitted Nazneen. 'I did not know. And what is "chromosome"?'
Shahana was offended. 'Well, it's something to do with biology. But aren't you interested that we have less than the chickens?'
Nazneen picked another blade of grass. She forced herself back into the moment. The girls returned from their walk and asked for ice creams. Nazneen considered whether to wake Chanu but before she could decide he sat up. He belched lightly, with his hand over his mouth, and then yawned with abandon. 'I'll go for the ice cream,' he said. 'Stretch my legs.'
'I'm having a good time, Abba,' said Bibi.
'Then it is worth it.' He looked at Shahana. 'And you?'
'Oh,' she said, 'nothing could be better.'
He hesitated. Something dark passed across his brow. But then it was gone. He lifted his jowls in a smile. 'As long as the memsahib is pleased.' And he walked across the grass, down to the lakeside.
'Are you in love with him?' Shahana looked fierce. Her eyes narrowed.
Nazneen went into freefall. She bowed her head.
'I mean, have you ever been in love with him? Perhaps before he got so fat?'
Nazneen reached out to her daughter. She stroked her arm and she would have liked to embrace her, hug her tight against her body. 'Your father is a good man. I was lucky in my marriage.'
'You mean he doesn't beat you,' said Shahana.
'When you are older, you will understand all these things. About a husband and wife.' Nazneen did not know which one of them was wiser, the mother or the daughter. She did not know if Shahana's questions were acute or naive, but all the same she felt proud of the girl.
Shahana was not satisfied. 'But do you love him?'
Bibi sat with her feet drawn up to her bottom and her arms around her knees, bracing herself for a crash. 'Do you, Amma?'
Nazneen laughed. 'Well, you silly girls. Don't you think I love my family? Look, here is your father now, and he has chocolate ice creams.'
On Monday morning Mrs Islam came for her money. She leaned against the wall in the hallway and another chunk of plaster was dislodged. For a few moments she massaged her hip and she let out a groan that at once suggested great pain and the capacity to bear it. She sprayed a cloud of Ralgex Heat Spray. Most of it landed on her chiffon sari but it appeared to revive her. 'I've brought you something, child. Here. Carry my bag for me.'
When she was recumbent on the sofa, Mrs Islam closed her eyes.
Nazneen stood by. From the next-door flat there came a faint and rhythmic knocking. It was the bed moving. The neighbour had another new boyfriend. Nazneen blushed. She wondered if others listened to her bed and how much it had already told.
'Whenever He is ready, I am also ready.'
Nazneen was used to this. She no longer bothered to protest. She waited. Listening to Mrs Islam was like being in Gouripur, listening to the radio in a storm. She kept on cutting out.
In the flats immediately next door, there were white people. And they minded their own business – something Mrs Islam had told her years ago – and now she knew why. For this English peculiarity, she was grateful.
'The mosque school is full. Do not send your daughters. We cannot take them.'
Nazneen saw that the wart on the side of Mrs Islam's nose had grown a secondary knobble. From this nodule grew a fourth hair. The hairs were long. Perhaps Mrs Islam's hand had grown too unsteady to pluck them, or her eyesight too weak. Perhaps she was, at last, attaining invalidity. And the hair on her head was not tied tightly, as it usually was, in a neat spool of white held together by the invisible powers of Godliness and elastics. Now it more nearly resembled the nest of a slovenly and spectacularly incontinent bird, and it glittered with the demented treasure of a dozen black metal pins.
Nazneen went to the showcase and opened the door. From beneath the wooden elephant she pulled out a yellow envelope, and counted for the third time that day the five ten–pound notes. Chanu was determined she should have no more. For a couple of weeks he had said, 'That crook, I'll give her nothing. All money goes to the Home Fund.' But after a persuasive visit from her sons, he had settled on fifty pounds per week.
'How much money do you have, child?' Mrs Islam began to press along the length of one hand with the other, still with her eyes closed.
'Fifty pounds. As agreed.'
Mrs Islam opened her eyes. Those eyes could not miss anything. They were small and dangerous. 'Arthritis. The hands of a cripple. But do not worry. I am too old, anyway.' She fished in the pocket of her cardigan and held something up. 'Take them, take them.' Her voice faded away, and her head fell back as if she had fainted.
She recovered. 'When I was a
girl, my mother massaged my hands every day. I had the smallest and most supple hands in all of Tangail. But now' – she sighed – 'I can't get these bracelets on. Take them, child. Take them.'
The bangles were of dark green glass, motes of gold suspended inside.
Mrs Islam took a handkerchief and wiped her brow. She smelled of mints and cough syrup; a layered smell, such as of perfume over sweat, the sweet smell of decay.
'Very pretty,' said Nazneen.
'Yes, yes. Take what you want.' She allowed her eyelids to droop. Her voice was barely louder than the rustle of her lilac chiffon sari.
Nazneen held the envelope. She held her tongue.
Mrs Islam began to massage her temples with her crippled hands.
Before her elder, Nazneen waited without comment or patience. The old woman, the better to relax her face, let her mouth hang open. Nazneen imagined cramming the money inside that black hole.
'So you are going back.' The geriatric voice had vanished.
Overhead, a vacuum cleaner was switched on. The bed next door had stopped moving against the wall. 'I don't know.' Nazneen counted the money a fourth time.
'You don't know. Of course you don't. Why should you know? If you are planning to rob an old woman of her money, then you should know nothing. Better keep your mouth closed.'
'I have your money here.'
'You have it all?' snapped Mrs Islam. Her black eyes glittered. 'Give it to me. How much is here? A thousand pounds still owing, and you are going to run away? Give me the rest.'
'That's all I have.' A taste of bile came in her mouth.
'No, child. Are you going to swim back home with your pots on your head? You have money for the plane ticket.'
She could have spat, right there and then, on the lilac chiffon. She swallowed. 'Not here. I don't have any money here.'
A change came over her guest. Mrs Islam began to breathe heavily. She held her chest and she shrank inside her sari, as if she were being eaten alive from the inside. She gasped and waved her hand. Nazneen rushed to the bag to find Benylin or some other, more extreme form of unction. But Mrs Islam waved the bag away. 'Come close to me,' she croaked. Nazneen kneeled down by the sofa and Mrs Islam grabbed her hand. Her skin was hot and dry as sun-baked leaves, and her knuckles were sharp. From this close range it was possible to see all the thousand tiny veins on her cheeks and nose. They showed through, so it seemed, where the skin had worn away. 'I have been a widow many years.' Nazneen breathed in the complex smell of the sickroom, of smells hiding smells. 'God knows how I have suffered. Without a husband all these years. Listen to me. Get close. God has tested me, a widow's life is no joke. I think I will take a little Benylin.
