Bright Lines

by Tanwi Nandini Islam

  “Just suggesting a bit of protein,” said Anwar.

  “If you want steak, you cook it.” Hashi took another hard bite of tomato, squirting the table with juice.

  Anwar wiped the slimy seeds with his finger and licked them off.

  “Disgusting, Anwar,” said Hashi, grimacing. “Aman Bhai called earlier. He asked if he could stay with us for a week or so. I guess the divorce is final?”

  “I can’t understand why he doesn’t stay at a hotel or something, not like he doesn’t have the money.”

  “Or he should try to work things out with Nidi.” Hashi started clearing the table. It took Anwar a minute to realize she was fixing a plate for Charu.

  “Point is, he should find another place to stay,” said Anwar.

  “He’s your brother. He let us stay with him for all those years—”

  “We lived in his basement, and I paid him rent, yet never had heat.”

  “Well, he may have money but you have me, Charu, Ella. He needs your support. Your love.”

  “My love,” repeated Anwar. Bah! His brother did not need his love. Aman owned a triad of pharmacies around Brooklyn, and was indecently self-sufficient for a family member. His wife, Nidi, had fled after years of neglect. And as much as Anwar believed in support and love and other filial bonds, he and his brother did not share them.

  “We don’t need another lunatic in this house.”

  “Are you calling me a lunatic?” asked Hashi.

  Anwar put his hand up to end the conversation before it started. “I need to do some work in my studio.”

  “It’s always you in the studio-tudio,” said Hashi.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “She gets her wild ideas from you, you know.”

  “We all flounder before we flourish.”

  “You enable the worst in people.”

  “I still live with you, don’t I?”

  Anwar left Hashi in the kitchen. Above him the patterns of flowers and vines cast in the white molding calmed him, and he felt the evening’s argument subside. He recalled the days before Charu and Ella became women—their first bleeding had changed everything—on walks to P.S. 20; they were tiny girls trundling the street in their snowsuits, looking like miniature cosmonauts. Anwar was the wittiest character they knew, and he captivated them with obscurities: The seeds in one apple produced eight different trees; potato fruit was poisonous; New Delhi had the oldest alluvial soils in the world; cicada larvae took seventeen years to mature. He was their magician, their scientist, their Baba, and they adored him without much effort on his part. Nowadays, it was ever more evident that his girls had grown into adults. He grew flustered by everyday accidentals: Charu walking naked from the bathroom to her bedroom, or Ella sobbing while planting rosemary in the herb garden.

  He touched his painted forehead. A raw scrubbing and hot water would get it off. He worried for a second—maybe the stuff was so impenetrable he’d need a toxic paint thinner to remove it.

  No, I will leave it be, he thought, smiling sleepily.

  Anwar made his way upstairs to their bedroom, climbing with heavy feet. The floorboards creaked, harmonizing with his knees. He had built his home in the spring of 1988, along with a band of men now known as the legendary construction company Brownstoner Brothers. They were the first renovators in Bedford-Stuyvesant, years before it was sliced into neighborhoods with fancy names ending in Hills or Heights. He’d met the head contractor, a bespectacled Saudi named Omar, his first weeks in the city. Anwar had grown tired of suburban somnolence on Long Island, where he worked in a pharmacy and lived with Hashi and the girls in Aman and Nidi’s basement. Each day assaulted his pride, and when he’d saved enough money, he left at once for Brooklyn and drove a black gypsy taxi, vowing never again to shell pills in a pharmacy. Omar was one of his first passengers. He asked Anwar to drop him off at an abandoned property on a tree-lined block. The brownstone stood empty and gutted, windows boarded up with rotting planks of wood, the unforgettable phrase CALL ME DIG BADDY spray-painted over the rusty wrought iron door. Sneakers dangled off the phone lines in front of the house, commemorating the dead. City’ll give ya this crack house for a dollah, Omar told him. There’d been a DEA raid on the brownstone, making it available in one of the first housing sweepstakes in the city. It was the first time he’d signed up for anything since the war, besides those Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.

  Anwar won the decrepit 111 Cambridge Place for one dollar, as there were no other bidders interested in such arduous renovations in a notorious neighborhood. The inside of the home lay rotten with water damage, broken stairs, vermin droppings, and a general ill aura. As beautiful and settled as the houses and generations of families surrounding them appeared, their new neighborhood was renowned as a war zone, impoverished and violent and isolated, something Anwar had never imagined existing in America.

  It suited him perfectly.

  He orchestrated the renovation of the squatter house using his inheritance of his father’s lithic Buddhist statues and gold coins from Bangladesh’s Pala period. Seeing no use for his father’s artifacts, Anwar sold them to Sotheby’s for a tidy sum. (His father, an archaeologist trained in the UK, died a second time around for his son’s insolence.) He hired Omar and his men at Brownstoner Brothers. Many of them were undocumented young men living underground, surviving on part-time construction and painting work. Hashi begrudgingly cooked the rice, lentils, meat, and vegetables for the workers. Years later, her succulent meals were lauded by the men who had transformed the drug den into a sunlit warren.

  They started with a shared staircase between all of the floors in the house. Anwar’s chronic indecision between modernity and tradition led him to build two of everything. Two master bedrooms: one for lovemaking, which he and Hashi shared, and one for solitude, which was now his studio. He built two smaller bedrooms for his daughters, with Ella on the first floor, looking outward onto the gardens she so loved, and Charu’s room on the second floor, directly above Ella’s. As a child, Charu was prone to illness and Hashi wanted her close. Two kitchens: one with a tandoori oven and copperware, the other composed of state-of-the-art appliances. (When they built out the third-floor apartment for a tenant, he relented and permitted the installation of modern appliances; the tandoori sat unused in his studio.) He built two expansive bathrooms. The one in their master bathroom had a slate-tiled archaic stone bath with crevices in the walls for candles.

  Anwar debated whether or not to have a Turkish toilet, but Hashi put her foot down, saying, What is the point of America if you still squat like a dog? He built a veranda just outside their master bedroom, which overlooked the backyard. The veranda was a quintessential feature of any respectable flat, a place to smoke and think. Sure, this wasn’t a flat. But having lived in Aman’s basement for so many years meant Anwar would not live in a house without immediate access to escape.

  Hashi had two requests. One, he would pay for her to get a BA in psychology at Brooklyn College, because she’d cut off her studies to marry him and had never gotten over the embarrassment of not finishing school. Two, as a way to even the score of having to cook for the horde of builders, she wanted Anwar to build her a beauty parlor in the garden apartment, the most dilapidated part of the house. He praised her independence, and was happy that it absolved him of the responsibility of adjusting her to city life. She was lonely in the neighborhood and wanted the company of other women. At first, few neighbors would venture into their half-built home, once notorious for its illegal transactions.

  When the final touches were complete and Omar’s crew had departed, Anwar planted three hibiscus trees. The scent and beauty of his garden spread an air of nostalgia and clarity on Cambridge Place, and the neighbors praised Anwar for his contribution. Last month, fifteen years after he’d planted the trees, the block association awarded him the coveted Neighbor of the Year award.

 
* * *

  Anwar paused for a moment in front of Charu’s bedroom door. He heard muffled whispering, a girlish laugh. Three clangs of a bell and a flat drone saturated the hallway. The sound filled Anwar with an unnamed dread—stop, you are being paranoid. He shook his head at the feeling of dread. There lingered the invisible dust of some old horror, for who knew what had happened in this house before their time here. He imagined the desolation of addiction, women stuffed with bags of rock, beaten in murderous rages. He did not believe in ghosts. But if there were any, he wished them on their way.

  Another giggle from Charu’s room. And then, there was peace, he thought, making his way to his bedroom.

  * * *

  All of the ceilings at 111 Cambridge Place had the same beautiful white floral molding. However, in the master bedroom, a door handle was embedded in one of the leaves in the pattern. Once opened, the door revealed a fold-up ladder, which led upstairs to the third floor, to Anwar’s studio. To reach the door handle, Anwar stood on a chair and pulled down the ladder. He hoisted himself into the room and sat for moment to steady his trembling knees.

  Heaven. He inhaled the wisps of baked blueberry in the air. A refrigerator preserved fresh fruit extracts, yogurts, and soy and oatmeal scrubs for Anwar’s Apothecary goods that he concocted in this kitchen. Wicker furniture scored from weekend stoop sales. Leather-bound journals and old magazines created a skyline of paper towers on the floor. Hashi never came upstairs, preferring the make-Anwar-do-it system. She would holler, “I need cleanser!” Then Anwar would send the products down in a bucket attached to a rope.

  He unbuttoned his daytime shirt and pants and changed into his night gear, a plaid lungi and a plaid shirt.

  Time for a toke, Anwar thought. On the floor was a border of nineteen empty pint-size mason jars, courtesy of none other than Rashaud Persaud, who grew a potent crop out in an abandoned house in the Rockaways. Anwar had never been there. He squatted down and unscrewed the lid. The pungent leafy aroma floated into his nostrils. He plucked a dark green bud laced with purple hues, packed a nugget in a wooden pipe, lit it with a match. One luxurious drag let the evening’s quarrel subside.

  “Unnh,” he heard, as he inhaled. Did I make this sound? Anwar thought. He inhaled and then exhaled again out the tiny arched window. What was this sound? He kept the space vermin-free. He heard drumming, then another long, melodious sigh.

  “Unhhhh.”

  “Hashi?” he asked.

  No answer.

  Hashi had not come upstairs. The drumming sound beckoned him to investigate the wall he shared with their tenant, Ramona Espinal. A thin wall and a locked door separated them. Only Anwar had the key. He rolled toward the wall, his elbow hitting it with a thud. Drumming ceased. He took another toke. Laughter. He chuckled along. Was Ramona Espinal with a lover? He pictured a sweaty, stubbly mariachi, riding the spur of his boots down her tight, voluptuous hips. I must have seen this on TV, he thought. Ramona was a Mexican nurse-midwife at Brooklyn Hospital, and nearly half his age. He checked his watch. It was a quarter to midnight. She shouldn’t be home at this hour.

  Drumming commenced. A man laughed. It is the headboard, Anwar realized.

  “Anwar!” he heard Hashi shout from below.

  “Yes, darling!” As soon as he said it, he clasped his hand over his mouth. Abruptly, the drumming stopped.

  “Bedtime, na?” called Hashi. “And the shampoo!”

  “Yes, darling.”

  He rolled away from the wall and opened his eyes. Ah, my old friend. Rezwan’s severed head floated around Anwar. He blinked several times and Rezwan’s head did the same. Ghastly bits of spinal cord and purple-black windpipe trailed from Rezwan’s neck. A machete scar sliced open cheek into mouth, yellow half-moon smile. How many times can I answer for your death? I am sorry for abandoning you.

  As if hearing Anwar’s thoughts, Rezwan’s head nodded yes. Anwar nodded back. He had loved Rezwan, his brother-in-law and comrade, more than any man before or since. Years after the war, in 1985, Rezwan and his wife, Laila, were both shot to death by an unknown gunman. They had planned to settle near Laila’s hillside family home in Rangamati, away from the decaying city Dhaka had become.

  They were killed mere days before the move.

  Rezwan’s anti-government views about President Ershad were well known in Dhaka. But Anwar did not believe the gunman was an unknown assassin or a government operative.

  He suspected it was an act of revenge.

  Yet Anwar was too far away to investigate. There were weightier matters involved. Ella had been spared, having slept over at her grandparents’ flat that evening. Upon hearing the news, Anwar and Hashi begged to bring Ella to New York, to live as their daughter. It took two years for Hashi’s parents to agree to let them take her.

  Today would have been Rezwan’s thirtieth wedding anniversary, Anwar remembered. Married on a pristine beach in Cox’s Bazar, barefoot upon the striated black-and-white sands. Save for Anwar, Hashi, and their immediate family, all the other guests were villagers whom Rezwan and Laila had met while installing tube wells in the surrounding villages. That day, one of Anwar’s happiest—rice wine, song and dance aplenty—was etched in his mind forever. He realized that besides the bride and groom, many of those in attendance had suffered for years afterward, poisoned by arsenic-laced well water.

  “We die. Memory is fragmentary. I believe in nothing,” said Anwar to his friend. “But there are times when scripture relieves a sense of flailing.”

  They moved their lips in recitation, Arabic into Bangla into Arabic again, scraps of Surah al-Noor (The Light).

  See how Al—h created the Seven Heavens and Earth

  Made the Earth, a niche

  Made the moon, a lamp

  Made the sun, a glass, a brilliant star

  Lit from a blessed tree neither of the east nor west

  Its oil luminous though no fire touched it

  Light upon light

  Speak to us in parables, knower of All—

  I must be with your sister now, thought Anwar. Rezwan stuck out his tongue and disappeared into an air vent. Anwar wanted to hold the closest thing to his dead friend, his daughter, Ella. But she had not yet come home.

  2

  A quiet backpack-clad figure walked to 111 Cambridge Place. Ragged from a bus ride, Ella considered turning back to the steep hills and collegiate abandon of Ithaca, where night skies held the ancient grand stars like Alphard the Solitary, in the constellation Hydra. Down here in Brooklyn, stars lay stitched under a veil of gray-black clouds and light pollution, lost to city dwellers.

  The wrought-iron front gate was unlatched. Ella paused for a minute. It didn’t seem like anyone was awake. She made her way around the side of the house to the backyard. She did a quick walk-through—the garden looked healthy; it was something she worried about at college. She circled back to the hibiscus tree that led into her cousin’s room. She stepped onto the tree’s lowest branch and climbed up to Charu’s second-floor window. Through the sheer curtains, Ella could see the selection of mood enhancers: a Virgin de Guadalupe pillar candle, burning sticks of Nag Champa, white Christmas lights framing the bed. And there was Charu, strutting around in a pair of lacy black panties and bra. Ella flushed, shamed by her spying. She blinked her eyes a few times to make sure what she was seeing. Her eyes weren’t so—reliable.

  * * *

  It was hard coming home. Ella was drawn to her uncle’s rambling anecdotes and flower gardens, but she loathed her aunt’s curling iron and frills. She never quite felt she was in her aunt’s favor. She switched between calling Anwar “Uncle” or “Anwar,” and he didn’t seem to mind either way, understanding that if her mood permitted intimacy, she’d allow it. She never called Hashi “Ma.” But for Charu, words failed her. The word sister—in any language—missed the mark, though she knew Charu felt that they were sisters. Char
u was the one person for whom Ella would do anything. She had been a bright-eyed bouncy toddler with an infectious laugh, and Ella, scrawny and nearsighted, had claimed the role of protector.

  As they grew up, Ella loved everything about Charu, even her contradictions: The same girl who despised capitalist materialism owned enough fine threads to open a used-clothing store; the same girl who scoffed at other girls for idiotic flirting was a clever coquette. She demanded an end to anorexic beauty ideals, but lamented her “third world body”: protruding belly, scrawny arms and legs. Charu, the unapologetic fashion chameleon—on certain days she dressed in plaid shirts and baggy khakis; other days, monochromatically. And once, when she was a sophomore and Ella was a senior, Charu channeled pop culture celebrity with short shorts and stilettos made to stab a man in the chest. She changed right back into jeans and a T-shirt when chided by the dour-faced Principal Jenkins.

  At Brooklyn Tech, Ella fell in line with the smart and lonely characters whose sights were set on the Ivy League. Her senior year she was known as the “hot Indian chick’s sister.” Charu’s entry into the school gave Ella an ounce of attention (and, she suspected, pity) for inheriting the short end of the genetic stick. She remembered once when walking home from school, a boy on the street said, Dang, you ugly, and Charu shouted, Shut the fuck up, mushroom dick! The boy let it slide the second his eyes made contact with Charu’s. Ella mumbled they should keep moving—he didn’t go to their school and they’d never see him again. Charu seethed the entire walk home. Ella knew that if she herself had said such a thing, the kid would harass her more. But he hadn’t done anything but laugh, for he, like Ella, was not immune to Charu’s charm. Charu aligned herself with outsiders, with fringe dwellers. She accepted the weird, the freakish, the perverse, the gothic, and the queer. She loved people different from her; Ella was a perfect complement. As Charu grew curvy, Ella’s muscles became long and limber. Ella refused the pains of contacts and was damned to thick glasses with plastic frames.