by Tahmima Anam
When Rashid and I were in high school his older sister Ruby sometimes helped me sneak into their house, leaving the downstairs door open and ushering me through the unlit corridors to his bedroom. By the time we got engaged, she had changed her mind. I suppose she had calculated the precise number of handsome, rich, decent bachelors in Dhaka and decided her brother, who had never crashed his daddy’s car or spent a fortune on drugs or gambling, was too good for an old love.
Ruby had a tattoo of a camel on her left breast and dressed like she owned the whole world. She once wore pink cowboy boots under her sari. It was Eid and she propped her feet on the coffee table at her house and showed them off, knee-high, heavily embroidered, and with pointy toes that looked like they could commit murder. After college she had married a weak-chinned American and settled down in New York City, coming home on two-week holidays to distribute lavish presents to the entire family. As soon as the wedding date was set, she booked her flight and started emailing me photographs of the sequined saris and lehngas she wanted to order from a Pakistani designer who lived in her co-op. I was never going to wear a lehnga, and this sparked a polite, cool correspondence between us, with Rashid acting as mediator. He always took my side, at least in private, and found a way to get me what I wanted without letting Ruby know she was being turned down. He was expert at this sort of diplomacy, and when I expressed annoyance at his unwillingness to get into a fight with his sister, he would say, ‘Isn’t it better this way? You got your sari, didn’t you?’
Ruby arrived the week before the wedding and we decided to surprise her at the airport. When she came through the gates the first thing she said was, ‘There isn’t going to be enough room for my luggage.’ She smiled and shrugged at the same time, tilting her head to the side, and Rashid put his arms around her and lifted her off the ground. Her hair appeared to be recently blow-dried, and I was reminded of the time she told me she never washed her hair in winter except at the salon. Rashid had had the driver bring a second car, so there was, in fact, enough space for Ruby’s luggage, which followed her out of the airport in three carts. ‘I had to get all the things for your trousseau,’ she said, shrug-smiling, ‘you lucky thing.’
Ruby sat in the front with Rashid. ‘How’s Matt?’ I asked, leaning into the air conditioning from the back.
‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s bringing the kids in a few weeks. I can’t stand being on a plane with them.’ She turned around and winked at me. Then she put her hand on Rashid’s knee and said, ‘Little brother! Never thought you’d actually do it. How are the parents? Is Mummy having a fit?’
‘She’s driving everyone crazy.’
‘Bet she forgot to make my favourites for lunch.’ She twisted around again. ‘See? You’re already ruining my life.’
I was hoping Rashid would offer to drop me off at home, but he drove straight to his house and I stood by awkwardly while Dolly and Bulbul and Rashid and Ruby and Junaid, who was home from boarding school, all hugged and said how good everyone looked, despite the tension of the upcoming wedding. They ordered tea in the garden. ‘Now I can relax,’ Dolly announced, leaning back on a rattan chair. ‘Your father is completely useless and the servants are outdoing themselves with stupidity.’ They exchanged complaints about the staff while Bulbul nodded off, dropping his newspaper onto the grass. Junaid’s phone beeped and he stood up to answer it, nodding briefly at me and loping off.
I was wondering if anyone would notice if I slipped away when Ruby rolled out one of her suitcases. ‘Don’t look!’ she barked. ‘I’m just going to give you a preview. Just one.’ She handed me a shoebox. I peeled off the lid and separated the tissue. ‘Don’t you just love them?’ Ruby said.
Dolly picked up the lid. ‘Ferragamo? Sweetie, you shouldn’t have.’
The stilettos were gold and bronze, with a thin strap across the toes and another around the ankle. ‘Thank you,’ I said, pulling one out. ‘They’re beautiful.’
‘You hate them,’ Ruby said.
‘Oh, no, not at all, they look – very weddingy.’
‘That’s exactly what I was thinking, it’s so hard to find designer shoes that work for our clothes. Ammoo and I are always complaining when we shop in New York.’
‘Very right,’ Dolly said.
‘But if you don’t like them, you should just say. We’re sisters now, after all.’
‘Oh, no, they’re great. I just – you know I’m not used to wearing high heels, so I might have a little trouble walking.’
Ruby nodded enthusiastically. ‘I knew you would say that.’
‘You’re so simple,’ Dolly said.
‘But anyway at the wedding you won’t be running around, you’ll just be sitting there, so it won’t matter.’
‘That’s true,’ I said.
Ruby used both hands to place the shoe in its box. I stood up. ‘I should let you rest, Ruby,’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t have time to rest,’ Ruby said. ‘We’re going to talk to the biryani guy today, aren’t we, Mummy?’
Dolly rubbed her eyes. Rashid was looking down at his phone and frowning. ‘Daddy, did you hear about the strike?’ Bulbul shook himself awake and they leaned over the phone together.
I took my leave, kissing everyone on the cheek. ‘We have to go to the parlour,’ Ruby said to me, ‘those eyebrows need gardening.’
On my wedding day, I thought of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, who had written a novel, Sultana’s Dream, about a world in which men and women changed places. It was 1905, and Rokeya was waiting for her husband to return from a business trip, and to impress him with her command of English (which he had taught her), she wrote a short novel. Because in Rokeya’s real world, women wore veils and lived sequestered lives, in her imaginary world, it was the men who were trapped, the men who were locked away. The women, led by a benevolent Queen, ruled using science, technology and the wisdom that comes from having something that is hard won.
Rokeya’s story made me think this: how many novels were written to impress a beloved? And: how did she, trapped in her zenana, push her eye to that better place and see all that would someday come to be, and imagine the things we would never have? Rokeya was my mother’s hero. She dropped her name like other people invoked Jesus or Allah. If Rokeya could do it, she said, so could we. Begum Rokeya had done so much with so little. She championed the education of women, started a school, went from village to village to recruit students, gave speeches in parliament, fought her dead husband’s family over her inheritance, and cracked jokes at dinner parties. And she was a widow, having lost that husband early in life. Perhaps Rokeya reminded my mother of her own mother, also a widow, also from that generation when things like going to school weren’t taken for granted. Now, on the wedding dais, I thought of Rokeya, of my mother, and her mother, and all the women who had done what their mothers had told them to do, and those who had flipped the world around, making prisons into meadows.
After the reception we drove to Rashid’s house, which was draped with strands of light that stretched out onto the sidewalk beyond the gate. Inside, Ruby was taking over the whole room, happy because she’d convinced me to wear a gold chain across my forehead and fasten it to my hair with a safety pin, annoyed because I’d refused to wear three necklaces staggered on top of one another so that the ornaments would have started at my navel and ended high on my neck, triumphant because now that I was part of the family she could boss me around and tell me what to wear. In the midst of all this happy/unhappy, Rashid picked me up and stepped over the threshold with the embroidered nagra shoes he wore to match his wedding sherwani, lowering me down so that I could dip my feet into a wide bowl of milk. Then rice was thrown over our heads, prayers whispered and blown over us, already the post-mortem of the reception in full swing – was the biryani a little oily do you think, yes, Reeta S had decorated the hall beautifully, excellent choice of orchids and white roses, doesn’t our Rashid look like a prince – and my parents were nowhere to be seen, because I was theirs now
, Rashid and Dolly and Bulbul and Ruby’s, wearing, as tradition dictated, not a stitch of my old clothes, dressed head to toe in things Rashid’s family had given me, right down to the gold thong Ruby had chosen from a New York lingerie boutique, the most uncomfortable, scratchy thing to have ever touched me.
A big show was made of ushering us into the bedroom. I was buried under so much make-up, my sari pinned together with so many safety pins, that it took a full hour for me to undress. I looked at myself in the mirror in my blouse and petticoat, dark streaks across my eyelids where the liner had been difficult to remove. I stepped into the shower to wash out the hairspray, struggling to untangle the complicated bun at the back of my head. When I came out of the bathroom in my old sweatpants and T-shirt instead of the silk negligée I’d been given, Rashid was on the armchair with an opened bottle of champagne. He had removed his shoes and socks, and the top button of his sherwani was undone.
‘What, no sexy nightie?’
‘Sorry. I’m tired.’ I had decided to say it now, because if I waited any longer it would seem as though I was hiding from him, and for all the years that stretched ahead, I wanted it known, as a matter of record, that I had been honest from the very first day. I looked into his face, as familiar to me as my own reflection, his curved nose and flared nostrils, dark, heavy eyebrows, the impressive eddy of ink-black hair. ‘Listen, there’s something I have to tell you.’
He reached under my T-shirt and pulled me towards him. ‘Later,’ he said, his mouth arching towards mine.
I brushed his lips lightly. ‘No, really. It will just take a minute.’
He sighed, folded his hands on his lap. ‘Okay, Mrs Khondkar, I’m all ears.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘I’m just saying it out of love.’
‘I’m sorry. Look, we have to talk about this, because we’re married now, and someday there might be children, and these things need to be out in the open.’
‘So serious.’
‘I’m not Ammoo and Abboo’s biological child.’ I took the champagne glass from his hand and drained it. Immediately it made me light-headed. ‘I’m adopted. My parents never told anyone. They only told me once, when I was nine – it was my birthday – and we never talked about it again.’
He reached down to the floor and picked up the bottle. When he turned to me again he was smiling. ‘Sweetheart, I know.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve always known, Zee. My parents told me years ago.’ Rashid was still chuckling as he refilled the glass.
I took another sip and let the words sink in for a minute. ‘All this time?’ I gestured with my hand and a dribble of champagne spilled onto my lap.
‘Listen,’ he said, taking the glass from my hand, ‘it’s nothing. My parents know, and nobody minds. I love you. Everyone loves you.’ He kissed me on the forehead. ‘Now I want my wedding-night fuck.’
Nobody minds. There was generosity there, and something else – forgiveness, maybe. I didn’t know what I had to be sorry for, but I was sorry, and he was telling me it was all right. I tried to imagine the conversation he would have had with his parents – when? – about how to handle the story if it were to get out, if other relatives got involved and questioned the wisdom of forming an alliance with a girl of uncertain provenance. Maybe they had even discussed it with Ammoo and Abboo. What had my parents said? Were they grateful because the Khondkars were willing to stand behind them, to legitimise their daughter by sanctioning the marriage?
Elijah, I thought back at that moment to what you said to me about the longing of the soul. The loneliness of being only in one body, when the spirit wanted nothing but communion. You didn’t try to make me feel better, you made my fears seem unremarkable, just another small instance of the universal need for kinship. But Rashid was trying too, in his own way, pressing his lips against my neck, grazing my breast with the back of his hand. I allowed myself to enjoy his caresses, his hand firm against my back. We kissed. I tasted champagne and the familiar tang of his breath. He passed me the champagne again and I took another swig from the glass, the fizz going all the way to the back of my throat. Our bed was decorated with roses, and garlands were suspended from the ceiling and taped to the wall. Everything smelled pungent and slightly rotting. Rashid peeled back the bedcover and lay me gently on the bed. We made love quietly, both tired from the day, and, although we had done it before in this room, the smell of the flowers and the fresh paint and the lingering heaviness on my face and the thought that everyone else in the house knew what we were about to do weighted and dulled the ordinary gestures of sex, and afterwards Rashid got up to fold his clothes and brush his teeth, and by the time he came back to bed I was almost asleep, so that I was only vaguely aware of his hand on my hip, his breath behind my ear.
In the morning my parents arrived as guests in my new home. The cook piled chicken korma onto my plate, and Dolly gave me the key to the drawer in my closet, telling me to lock my things away in it whenever I left the upper floor of the house, in fact to lock the bedroom door itself because you never did know with the servants. It suddenly occurred to me that though Rashid and I had grown up within a few minutes of each other, so that moving into his house should have felt like little more than moving from one end of my parents’ apartment to the other, it was another world, here in the three-storey building with the swimming pool on the roof, locking doors behind me, korma for breakfast, a fleet of cars in the basement, a suspicion of servants, because you never did know, except that I did know, and what I knew made me bitterly sad, the conversation from the night before grating on me as I remembered the pity and absolution in his voice. It was only the first day and already I felt the depths of the mistake, touching me like the ink from a stray pen in my pocket.
Every night there was an invitation to a relative’s house for dinner, and, the following Friday, a visit to a factory that Bulbul owned. Occasionally there was the thrill of closing the door behind us and sneaking in a quick kiss, and once or twice Rashid played some of our favourite songs on the music system he had set up around our bed, and we held each other under the canopy of drying flowers, and in those moments there was the feeling of being out of context, away from the brocade saris and the thousands of pleasantries that had to float out of my mouth, a sense of it being just the two of us, old friends and childhood sweethearts finally reaching the natural conclusion of something we had started many years before. But then the rest of my life would come into focus, and I would catch a glimpse of the person I used to be, was, in fact, just months ago, the sort of person who would travel across the world to dig whale bones out of the ground, and in those moments I felt as if I was battling a phantom, a woman who haunted my otherwise perfect life.
Then, one day, Rashid went back to work at the factory. He got up in the morning, showered, dressed in slacks and a shirt with cufflinks, pulled on the watch my parents had given him as a wedding gift, and got into the back seat of his car. I watched all of this while still in my pyjamas, leaning out of the second-floor balcony and listening to the car door close behind him with a heavy snap. Then, contemplating the day ahead, I crawled back under the sheets and buried my face in the bed.
I flipped through the books on my shelf and found Moby-Dick, remembering how you had teased me that day at the airport. Moby-Dick got me thinking about Diana, still trapped underground, maybe even desecrated by now if what they said about unrest in that area was true. I imagined indifferent hands lifting her bones out of the ground, disturbing what had lain undisturbed for millennia, and this made me think about time and its inevitable forward march, that I too would be bones in a grave someday, that I would be dead, and then I started counting all the things I would regret if I were dying, and lying in bed on a Monday with nothing to do but read Moby-Dick was not on that list. I would not look back at my life and declare it well spent if this was what I had spent it on.
Again and again I thought of the conversation Rashid and I had had on our wedding
night. I wanted to ask him about it again, to find out the details of how he had come to discover my secret, and why they had all – Dolly and Bulbul and Rashid and Abboo and Ammoo – decided never to offer me the comfort of their collective knowledge. But I didn’t want to see him laughing it off again, didn’t want him to reassure me and tell me it was all right, implying in his own way that, somewhere deep within, I owed him a debt for not minding, for treating me as though I were anyone else, a person with a bloodline that people could trace and rely upon. So I kept quiet, repeating the pattern of unsaying that had begun with my birth, and after a few weeks Melville became a friend, and the parties subsided, and I came to an accommodation with the fate to which I had submitted.
I don’t often think about my wedding, Elijah, but I have a photograph I carry around. I even brought it with me on this trip. I look beautiful, in the way of a person who has made an effort to look good for a camera. The sari Ruby and Dolly had chosen was tasteful and suited the copper tones of my skin. I had allowed a make-up artist, a friend of Sally, to paint my eyelids and blow a light dusting of glitter across my forehead. I am not as pretty any more, Elijah – in fact, by the time you arrived on the beach, that particular sheen was long gone – but in your presence, as you know, I was beyond pretty: I was majestic, a sovereign, like the Queen in Rokeya’s story.
