“My father bought you a fancy kurta,” she said instead. “To wear for our wedding pictures.”
“Oh, God,” George said. “Can he return it? Can’t you tell him I’ll just wear a coat and tie or something?”
Amina’s mother was sitting on one of her aunt’s new upholstered chairs, watching Amina and holding the Yankees cap protectively in her lap. She wished she could go back to the moment, almost five years ago now, when they’d first agreed she would write to George, to remember who had said what. Had it been her mother encouraging her, or the other way around? Even if her parents had wanted this, had they known enough to decide? And now that she knew, wasn’t she the one responsible for their happiness—for making the right choice for them as well as for her?
“Amina?” George said.
“Yes.”
“That essay—it made me think of those e-mails we used to write. It sounds like you—like the way you talk.” He hesitated. “I miss you.”
“My parents are right here.”
“You can’t even say you miss your husband in front of them?”
“No.”
“That’s good for me to know. Cultural differences—” He laughed. “Hey, do you realize it’s only four more days?”
Amina found that she couldn’t speak.
“I’m having trouble hearing you,” George said. “If you can hear me, I’ll see you at the gate on Tuesday.”
He waited a moment and then gave up. “Bye, honey.”
“What?” her mother said, when Amina hung up. “George got a job?”
Amina nodded. “A good one—even better than he expected.” She had the strange feeling she was lying, even as she told her parents the truth.
“Thanks be to God,” her mother said. But Amina was thinking of how her parents wouldn’t be able to drive themselves to the grocery store. How unhappy her mother would be to depend on her or George every time she ran out of something in the kitchen.
“You see,” her father said happily, “things are working out.”
“Here, look—you forgot these.” Her mother had found the box of tin birds, empty except for the wood thrush, the sparrow, and the cardinal, and was squatting on the floor in the village style, examining them. “We can drop one off for Nasir before we leave—maybe this red one. His wife will like it, when he marries.”
Amina had left the other two in the box because of their dull, brown coloring, but she’d been pleased not to have to give up the cardinal. At one time she’d been annoyed at the real bird; now she felt nostalgic for his crazy determination—his stubborn belief that there was something through that window for him.
“Not that one,” she said, replacing it. “I think the clock and cap are enough.” Her parents exchanged glances but didn’t argue, and her mother purposely changed the subject:
“But what did you win? You didn’t tell us.”
A part of her wanted to conceal it, but she’d never been good at lying to her mother. “A scholarship,” she said. “Ten thousand dollars toward my tuition at MCC.”
Her parents gasped, and for a moment she thought they were struck, as she had been, by the irony of that particular sum.
“Ten thousand dollars for university,” her father said. “My daughter!”
“It’s just a community college,” Amina said.
“American scholarship,” her mother said in English. “For real this time.” Her mother’s eyes, listless and dull before the phone call, had taken on a familiar sparkle, and both her parents were looking at Amina in a way that made it impossible to contradict anything they had said.
18The day before the flight, Fariq drove Amina back to Nasir’s to deliver the gifts. She was afraid she might run into Sakina, whom her mother informed her was back from Comilla, but that Monday afternoon Amina was lucky. It was Nasir’s younger sister, Shilpa, who called her name on the stairs as she blinked in the sudden darkness of the stairwell. It was the hottest part of the day, and most people who weren’t at work would be either eating or napping indoors. Shilpa met them on the stairs and insisted on serving Amina a cold drink in her apartment while Fariq loitered uneasily inside the door. She seemed eager for the company; she said she’d been sitting on her balcony hoping for a breeze when she’d seen Amina get out of the car. Shilpa’s two boys were in school, and the apartment was calm and relatively cool, with the fans going and all the curtains closed.
“How is your father?”
“Alhamdulillah, he is recovering,” Amina said. “We’ve been staying indoors, of course.”
“Of course. My brother told us as soon as we got back—we’re praying for you.” Shilpa put a hand on her enormous belly, stretched taut. Now, so near the end of her third pregnancy, Amina thought that bearing children must seem like the most normal thing in the world to Nasir’s sister, hardly to be remarked upon, requiring no special luck or skill.
“We didn’t know you were back,” Amina said.
“Thank God we are,” Shilpa said. “You think it’s hot here? It’s like an oven down there, and those people are so used to it, they don’t even notice. I could hardly remember everyone’s name—my brain was cooking the whole time.”
“Is it a large family?” Amina asked casually.
“Enormous,” Shilpa said. “The girl is the youngest of nine, everyone’s pet. I thought she might be spoiled, but my sister was right. She’s very quiet and sweet—the kind who’s embarrassed about being so pretty. She made all the food herself. You could see her fingers were still stained with turmeric. We were all impressed.”
“Wonderful,” Amina said.
“Their children will be frighteningly beautiful,” Shilpa went on slyly. “My poor Shabu and Lallu won’t be able to compete.” Then a recent scrapbook was pressed upon Amina, who was forced to disagree. She admired pictures of Shabu and Lallu in their school uniforms; at a mathematics competition (Shabu had failed to distinguish himself, but Lallu had placed third in his age group); and in front of the tiger cage at the Mirpur Zoo.
“Do you have pictures from the trip?” Amina asked, but Shilpa shook her head. “They sent a portrait of the girl, but I think my sister’s given it to Nasir already.”
“So it’s all settled?” Amina asked, as casually as she could manage.
Shilpa gave her a candid smile. “Well, now they’ll have to meet. But I think the families agree. You won’t get any argument from the girl—she’s very obedient. She’ll be lonely here without her family, though.”
“Your brother will be kind to her.”
Shilpa shrugged. “If he agrees to meet her. Who knows with him? He called Sakina the other night—it was so late, but I sometimes sit up with her, watching TV. She said he sounded crazy, talking about how he couldn’t marry—how we shouldn’t make the trip. But when my sister asked for his reasons, he wouldn’t tell her.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Shilpa said. “A few days before we left. My sister ignored him, of course—the trip was all planned. And my brother gets worked up so easily.”
Amina felt her face flushing in a way she thought Shilpa couldn’t help but notice. If she’d made a mistake about that phone call, and he’d really been talking to Sakina, what did it mean? Had he seriously considered breaking off the negotiations with the family in Comilla? If he had preferred her, even briefly—and then she’d gone across the street and tried to interfere in his life? After all that, he couldn’t help but be disgusted with her.
The apartment felt hot and close, and Amina was dizzy. She sat down on a chair, expecting to have to make excuses to Shilpa—it was embarrassing, given the other woman’s condition. But Shilpa’s attention had wandered to the plastic Home Depot shopping bag Amina was holding, which she’d used for packing. She’d forgotten the exotic cachet such things had here.
“I just brought something from my parents for your brother. I’ll leave it in the apartment, with the key.”
“I can take it up,” Shilpa said.<
br />
“I wouldn’t make you climb all those flights,” Amina said, and then, before Shilpa could protest: “I’m afraid my mother left something behind in his apartment—a tonic for her eyes. She’s obsessed with these herbs from the village.”
“Our mother was the same way,” Shilpa said. “That’s the way we Deshis are—we complain and complain in the villages, and then take us out and it’s all we can talk about.”
“Aren’t people that way everywhere?” Amina said. “I mean, when they lose something?”
“Are they?” Shilpa laughed in a self-deprecating way. “I wouldn’t know.”
Nasir’s apartment was hot, although he’d left the windows in the bedrooms open. Fariq followed her inside and watched as she set the gifts on the table; clearly he didn’t think much of them. He looked at his phone in a way that implied he would be glad when her troublesome family was no longer his responsibility. Amina had to remind herself she owed her uncle’s servant no explanation. Still, she went into the bathroom as if she were looking for her mother’s medicine. Water dripped from the tap onto an overturned plastic bucket, and through the vent in the wall she could hear children calling to one another outside.
Nasir, she thought, only the thought was like speech: she seemed to hear her own voice as if it were coming from the other side of the wall. She went into Nasir’s bedroom—he still hadn’t moved back to the larger room—with the vague idea that she was searching for the photograph of the girl in Comilla, but of course it wasn’t lying out on any obvious surface. There was a thick cotton spread on the bed, a green-and-gray pattern, and a dresser with a photograph of his parents in a gold frame. The only other piece of furniture was a nightstand with an empty eyeglass case sitting on it, a five-taka coin, and a book—a Tagore novel, The Home and the World, which she’d neglected to read in Bengali Literature at Maple Leaf. The room was very still, and she had the strange thought that she could be visiting the bedroom of someone who had died, preserved by the bereaved relatives as a memorial.
She stepped out onto the balcony, where several of Nasir’s shirts were drying. One of his sisters must’ve washed them for him after he went to work this morning, and they were hanging against the iron grille, making a wet curtain between herself and the street. She touched the sleeve of a white shirt and then pushed it carefully to the side, as if she wanted to look out. In fact her mind was so full that she found herself simply staring at the wall of the building opposite, adjacent to the one where the Rahmans lived. She thought she must have stood there for a long time, and gradually she became aware of the people passing in the lane below, on foot and in rickshaws. The apartment was so similar to the one she’d left three years ago that she could almost imagine she was back there, waiting eagerly for the first glimpse of her husband-to-be. But instead of George it was a girl she saw, wearing her uniform shalwar kameez and carrying a heavy bag of schoolbooks on her back. She paused in front of the gate, searching through her bag for her key, and then let herself into the courtyard of the blue building. Her hair was loose around her face, but Amina knew very well who it was.
She peered through the grille, stifling a peculiar urge to call out. Once she had thought there was a girl who’d stayed back to hold her place for her, but that was just another one of the illusions that came with distance. The balcony was small, the view obscured, and Amina was alone.
19They arrived too early to go through security, and so they were forced to wait near the baggage claim, on orange plastic chairs that her mother insisted on wiping with a napkin before they sat down. No flights were coming in, and several of the ceiling lights had burned out; they sat in the gloom while other, larger families coalesced and dispersed around them, flush with the busy self-importance of air travel. It was afternoon when they entered the airport, but it seemed like dusk inside. Her parents continued peering through the tinted glass to the parking lot, and Amina wondered if they weren’t already regretting how little time they’d spent saying good-bye.
Halfway around the world, George was just getting out of bed. It was a new one, a box spring and mattress they’d ordered online just before she left, much cheaper than the fancy bed frame they’d looked at in the store. What had George said that day, about her and her inflexible plans? She’d thought he wasn’t being fair, that he couldn’t understand her, but was it possible he’d been right after all?
She looked at her parents—her mother with a green woolen sweater already draped over her shoulders against the terminal’s mild air-conditioning, and her father in an oversize shirt that tented out around his bandaged chest. When she’d gone alone, she’d been able to adapt, and because she had no one to talk to about the things that were shocking or offensive or odd, they’d slowly grown to seem less so. But with three of them there, it would be different. Her parents would unwittingly begin taking over the house—little touches like the slippers by the doorway, the smell of spices in the furniture, the language itself—until not only George but even Amina herself would feel like a stranger there. This was the moment she’d imagined: when she was supposed to have fulfilled her obligations as a daughter. She was handing her parents a gift, the magnitude of which dwarfed the modest television she’d once presented. They had watched the safety and security of life abroad on that tiny black-and-white screen for years and believed they had seen the future. Now, just when she should have felt the weight of responsibility lifting, she seemed to have grown even heavier, burdened with three people’s fates, each of which was being irrevocably changed because of her.
It should have been obvious that her parents were waiting for someone, but she realized it only when she saw him coming through the double doors. Nasir was dressed for work in a white shirt and gray slacks, carrying his briefcase under his arm. He’d clipped the bottoms of his trousers in order to ride the motorbike and forgotten to undo them when he dismounted; there was something that touched her about the plastic clips and the strip of black sock revealed under the cuff. He had already spotted them, and gave a brief, familiar wave, as if he were the final member of their party arriving to travel.
“Jams everywhere,” he said. “I couldn’t have gotten here without the bike.” He had been avoiding her eyes, but now he turned to look at her directly. “Do many people ride scooters in America?”
“Not in Rochester,” she said. “It’s too cold.”
Nasir nodded, as if this were vital information he’d been seeking for some time. He took in the crowd at security, less a line than a heaving throng. “What time can you go through?”
Her father glanced at her mother and then maneuvered his arm painfully to reach into his pocket for the watch, which he handed to Nasir. He looked exhausted already, and she couldn’t imagine the toll the long flight would take on him.
“Please keep this,” her father said. “It’s nothing—it was my father’s. He gave it to me before I went off to university, just before I met your father. Your father used to admire it. Back then it was quite fashionable.”
Nasir was shaking his head. “I can’t.”
“Someone will give you a new watch when you marry,” her mother said. “The bride’s family. Take this old thing until then.”
Amina could see that they’d agreed her gifts weren’t sufficient and had settled on this course of action last night before her father slept. She had been next door in Ghaniyah’s room, waiting for her mother to join her, but they’d still been bickering when she’d fallen asleep. Their concerns were always shared; they only differed on how best to address them. She almost envied them their perpetual quarrel—the way it tied them together, more securely than any marriage contract. This morning she’d woken to find that her mother had spent the night in the chair beside her father’s bed.
The two of them went back and forth with Nasir about the watch until he finally accepted it. He was just able to fasten it around his much broader wrist; he would have to make another notch in the leather strap. Both of her parents were beaming, relieved and please
d, and of course Nasir now got out his own gifts, secreted in the briefcase.
“The one I should’ve given you years ago,” he said, handing her father a book of poems. There was attar for her mother, from his sisters. “Less than three ounces—so they won’t think you’re trying to blow up the plane,” Nasir joked. Then he handed Amina a small white box, fastened at the sides with tape.
Her parents were watching her closely, and she was forced to look at Nasir simply to avoid their identical, inquiring expressions. They wanted her to open the box, but she was suddenly afraid of its contents.
“I should apologize,” Amina said. “It was wrong of me to meddle in your affairs.”
Nasir nodded, acknowledging that fact. “I confused you, talking about that other girl.” He was looking at her as if they were alone, and she realized that he was just as comfortable with her parents standing there as he might have been without them. She remembered George’s distaste for “dirty laundry,” and she knew there was no business Nasir could have with her that was secret from her parents. The thought made her fear the white box even more.
The intensity of the conversation was beginning to disturb her parents, who were shifting uncomfortably on their feet, glancing at the security line. Surely they would be allowed to pass through now. Her father was still worried about the suspicious bulk of the bandages under his shirt and had told them several times that they would have to allow extra time for him to be checked by hand.
“Open your gift, Munni,” her father said. “Then we have to go.”
Amina fiddled with the tape on the side of the box. Such a small box could only contain jewelry, but she couldn’t imagine what Nasir would think appropriate to give her. Because she didn’t know what else to do, she slid her nail under the tape on the side of the box and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled on a white cotton square, was a pair of enameled yellow hair barrettes, with a pattern of intertwining white leaves and branches—the kind of trinket you might buy at a stall in the bazaar for twenty taka.
The Newlyweds Page 38
