by Tahmima Anam
Anna said to Vronsky: Don’t you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me? It did for me, too, Elijah. But not enough. Everything did not change enough, not enough for me to have the courage to tell the truth in the moment that the truth demanded, not enough for me to stand by you and leave behind all the unanswered questions of my life. Too much remained the same. Don’t read this and forgive me – I know you won’t – don’t forgive me yet. There is so much more to the story, you will see; for now, I will only tell you this: I wanted desperately to be the person who would upend everything and thrust myself into the unknown, but the future was not the only thing that was unknown to me, and because I was already unmoored, I could not cut the threads that held me in place. Not yet.
In the days that followed, I was a puppet. He instructed me to eat chicken soup, so I did. Told me I should stop taking walks around the estate with Joshim because the daytime mosquitoes might give me dengue fever, so I spent the mornings inside. He drove us to Patenga, where we dipped our feet in the sea and listened to the sound of gulls and peanut shells cracking beneath our feet. He was patient, solicitous, as if he had found me in the throes of a terrible illness. But at night he kept to his side of the bed and never touched me, not even the barest graze of his knuckle against my skin.
I couldn’t sleep. My body was cold and I caught a whiff of you in the crook of my elbow, as if my arm had brushed a dark and very private part of you. I didn’t shower, afraid the smell would disappear. I lay awake at night, trying to cover over the wound, and every morning, as the day hit my eyes, it would open up like a flower as I remembered everything, the way the light poured through the windows and pooled around our feet that afternoon, and the grate in my voice as I dismissed Mo, and the streaks of dark in the cement of the stairs as I climbed down, because my head had been bowed and I had concentrated on nothing except putting one foot in front of the other.
At the end of the week, we returned to Dhaka. I couldn’t face the beach, or Gabriela. I called Bilal and told him I was sick, that I needed a few weeks off. ‘Is it typhoid?’ he asked. ‘There’s been something in the water in Sithakunda.’ ‘No, it isn’t typhoid,’ I said, wishing it was something measurable like that, something that could be treated with drugs. Maybe I’ll go to Nadeem and ask for some pills. Of course I knew I wouldn’t. There was no point in seeking oblivion now.
In Dhaka, it was my mother’s birthday. My parents came to dinner and we sat around the table while Rashid and his father told us about China, marvelling at the height of the Shanghai skyline and the fact that the electricity never went out. My father was animated by this conversation; as an old leftist, he had a lingering fondness for the Chinese. Everyone was jolly, even Ammoo, though I knew she had recently returned from another trip to visit the rape victims in Sirajganj. When the cook brought out a cake to celebrate Ammoo’s birthday, I realised I’d forgotten to buy her a present and was about to apologise; but Rashid came out with a grey velvet box, inside of which was a necklace of milky pearls. ‘This is wonderful,’ Ammoo said, her eyes shining and wet, ‘this is unimaginable happiness.’
In the morning I resolved to tell him everything, starting with the music and Sanders and the way I’d felt the night before we were married and how I hated being called ‘Bou-ma’, daughter-in-law, by Dolly, as if she had brought home an injured animal from the zoo. But I didn’t. I ate white bread toast and scrambled eggs. I went to lunch with Rashid at the golf club and watched him practise his swing, a solid figure against the gently undulating blanket of green.
You had said something to me about having courage. About my will. But I was nothing but a coward. Just looking at Rashid, the way he twisted his hip as he raised the club, made me afraid.
One day my clothes and books and laptop – the things I’d left behind at the apartment – appeared at Rashid’s house. He must have asked Joshim to pack everything up. I didn’t ask him about it and he didn’t volunteer anything. Among my things I found a T-shirt that belonged to you. ‘Had you left it for me to say, I am still here, I understand, I will be patient, I will wait’? Of course not. Joshim would have found it bunched up at the foot of the bed and he would have folded it into my bag. All the next day I walked around with VERMONT written across my chest.
It was a Friday morning, dull with rain. I was about to get dressed, had just peeled the covers off the bed, when Rashid appeared in front of me, wielding my laptop. He held it high in his hand and then threw it against the wall, making a bright, clapping sound.
When he started yelling, I raised myself off the bed and sat very still at the edge, my feet balanced on a chair (‘What is that fucking T-shirt you wear all the time, and that look on your face like someone just slapped you?’). He was pacing the room, and occasionally stopping and turning to look at me. I concentrated on a small square of marbled floor under my feet. He pulled out a cigarette from the drawer of his bedside table, lighting it with shaking fingers and inhaling deeply. ‘Don’t smoke,’ I whispered, and at this, the first words I had spoken, he shouted, ‘What the fuck?’ And I said, ‘Don’t smoke on my account. I mean, don’t punish yourself because of something I did.’
There was a knock on the door. ‘Breakfast!’ Dolly chimed. On Friday, everyone ate together in the dining room, Bulbul at the head of the table, French toast arriving hot from the kitchen. We looked at each other and called out, in unison, ‘Coming!’ Then Rashid, changing his mind, holding the cigarette behind his back, opened the door a crack, said, ‘Ma, Zubaida’s not feeling well, can you just send something up?’ and there was a brief exchange about my symptoms, whether a visit to the doctor was called for, a list of things I must do (the word ‘gargle’ was repeated), and then finally Rashid closed the door and came back inside. He opened a window, ushering in the sound of the rain hitting the thick leaves of the jackfruit tree that leaned against the eastern side of the house. For a moment I considered leaping out of that window and falling softly onto the grass below. Then, in answer to his question, I said, ‘He’s someone I met at Harvard.’ To which Rashid said, with a sadness that could only be whispered, ‘You already said that.’
It had come up before, when our engagement had been announced to the extended family. That I, having attended the elite college in New England, and then Harvard, would be more educated than Rashid. ‘More qualified’ is how people put it. But nothing had come of it – Dolly and Bulbul had mentioned it casually, and my parents had dismissed it, saying, how could this small thing matter when the children had known each other for years? Surely they would have discussed it and worked things out. But we hadn’t. What was there to say? How would such a conversation begin? Hey, I’m cleverer than you, what should we do about that? Should you read more books so you can know what I mean when I refer to Stephen Jay Gould’s Cerion snails? In retrospect, I wondered if we should have said something to each other. Perhaps Rashid should have read a few more books. Anna Karenina, at the very least. I remembered now how casually he had unpacked my boxes and put my books on the shelf in the study of our little suite, treating them as if they were all the same. My rare edition of Jane Eyre, for instance, with the lithographs, he had placed beside a paperback of his own, a Scandinavian thriller with the image of a white wolf on the cover. If I told him to read Anna Karenina now, he would get fifty pages in and say I was turning to Tolstoy for an excuse to cheat.
Rashid was saying something to me, but he was facing the open window and I couldn’t hear him. I was suddenly very tired. He tossed the cigarette from the window and turned to confront me again. He wanted, of course, to know the details. When and how. And why. There was a knock on the door, and a trolley was wheeled in with a jug of tangerine juice, a steel cloche, and a pot of tea. On a plate next to the teapot was a tiny pile of chopped-up ginger and a small dish of honey. The honey made me think of the mangrove, of that plastic bottle – what had you done with it? Rashid pulled up the cloche and asked me if I wanted something to eat. I shook my head.
The smell of eggs made the bile rise in my throat. I knew I should keep talking, tell Rashid how sorry I was, tell him it was over, that I would never do something like that again. But I couldn’t bear to utter the words. I was emptied of will. Nothing happened. It was nothing.
‘Should I move out?’ I said finally.
This made him angry. ‘So like you,’ he said. ‘Running away when things get messy.’
I saw him battling with himself: on the one hand, giving himself licence to rage, on the other, measuring, calculating, bookending his anger. He came over and sat very close to me, and I saw his hands holding each other. I was suddenly filled with an old affection for him, the man who had been my childhood friend, and I leaned into him, and then the words, the things he wanted to hear all came pouring out, the sorrys, the desperate pleas for him to forgive me. All the time I felt you listening and your heart breaking, and now I was trying to tell a story, a maudlin, nonsensical story that was an explanation of what I had done and why.
We lay down together on the bed. Rashid pulled the sheet over our heads. A small amount of light came through and I could see the outline of the room, the heavy curtains framing the windows, the pair of Shakoor paintings, a present from my parents, on either side of the bathroom door. Oh, God, my parents. I would have to tell them. I turned around and buried my head in the pillow. I had ended up on Rashid’s side of the bed and I smelled his sleep smell. I could hear him breathing on the other side, and wondered if he was crying. But he wasn’t. I heard him get up and cross the room. At the door he turned around and said, ‘I’m joining my mother for breakfast.’ And as I heard the door closing behind him I realised he had been waiting for me to say I loved him, and that I hadn’t, not once.
About half an hour later he came back. He was holding the newspaper in his hand, and a bottle of cough syrup. I was on the bed where he’d left me. I had allowed my thoughts to drift back to that early moment on the beach when we climbed aboard Grace and you played the Steinway for the first time. I remembered the smell of the auditorium, already turning briny, and how you pierced the silence with your playing, as if it was the first sound in the history of the world. I might have slept, because when Rashid started talking it was difficult to open my eyes. He looked at me and sighed, long and deep, and sat down on one of the matching armchairs that faced the bed. ‘Did you tell your mother?’ I asked him.
‘No. But she knows something’s wrong. You’ll have to come out for lunch, at least, or she’ll call a doctor. She loves you. Everyone loves you.’
There it was again.
‘I love you too,’ I forced myself to say. And then, a truer statement: ‘I don’t want to lose you.’
The day dragged on. I took a shower and dressed in something Dolly would approve of. At lunch I was given broth and broken rice. In the afternoon everyone went to their respective parts of the house and it was very quiet, so I went outside and destroyed a few ixora flowers by pulling them from the bush and squeezing them between my fingers. A few of Rashid’s relatives came after dusk, and snacks were wheeled out on a trolley, and Dolly made excuses for my silence by claiming I had been ill for the last few days, and an uncle put his hand on my forehead and declared me feverish, after which I was excused and given dinner in my room, everyone taking a certain amount of pleasure at my frailty.
Later, in bed, Rashid turned away from me and I swam my palms across his back, overcome by a deep longing to be held. When I tapped him on the shoulder, knowing he was awake, he turned around and I said it all again, the sorrys and the forgive mes, genuine this time, because how could I want for anything, here in this house that had welcomed me, Rashid even now willing to lie beside me on the bed, and I said how undeserving I was, how I would try and make it up to him, that I did love him, I did. He kissed me on the forehead, his breath grave with smoke, and that is when I realised he hated me – you both did, except one of you would do it from afar, and the other from up close.
I couldn’t sleep and neither could he. I felt him twisting and turning on his side of the bed. At one point he got up and paced the room, finally settling into the armchair with another cigarette. He turned on the lamp by the dressing table, casting a lean shadow against the wall. When he finished smoking, he changed into shorts and running shoes, and I thought he would leave then, for the gym, but he switched off the light and sat back down. Every so often I would open my eyes and he and his shadow were still there, gazing back at me.
As the hours passed, I felt a small seed of rage taking root inside me. It occurred to me that I was owed something in return for what was happening. What was happening was that I would never be touched in the way that you had touched me, that all the things I had said to you as we made love would come back to you and you would be disgusted by the thought of me, and if I was going to have myself live in your memory as a woman who had no will, who, given all the freedoms and choices in the world, would choose this, if I was going to fall that far in your regard, then I would demand something in return.
The logic was faulty, of course – I have told you before, there had never been any explicit demands, no ultimatums or threats. And yet I felt as if they were all holding my life to ransom. What would I ask for in exchange? What could be as big as this? Even as the question was posed in my mind, the answer came catapulting back: I would seek out the woman who had eluded me my whole life. This was the only reasonable exchange, the only bargain I was willing to strike. And with this resolution firmly lodged in my mind, I fell into a thick sleep.
A few hours later I woke to find Rashid packing for an overnight trip to the factory. He was rolling his socks into cylinders and while he was placing them in a corner of his bag, I told him I had decided to find my birth mother. He paused, a pair of trousers folded over his arm. ‘How does that make anything better?’
‘I’ve decided,’ I said.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re confused. I can see why you think looking for your – for this woman – is going to help, but it won’t.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because there are probably things you would rather not know.’
I recalled our trip to Savar, his proposal by the rectangular pool. ‘What are you trying to say, that I’ll find out I have adulterous genes or something?’
‘Zee, don’t bullshit me, I know you know what I mean.’
‘What, that I couldn’t help myself so I cheated on you?’
‘What the fuck do I know why you lied, cheated, whatever the fuck you did with whatever fucked-up stranger you met in America?’ He turned away from me and I saw he had an old scar just below his cheekbone on the left side. I had never noticed that scar before. What kind of a wife did that make me? I was a poor companion to him even before you came along. Then he said, after a long time, ‘Are you in love with him?’
It was the first time he had asked me, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I was tired and my head was heavy. I leaned against the soft upholstery of our bed. I considered telling him the truth, that not only was I in love with you, but that there was something out there called love, something I had never believed in because I thought it was beyond me until I met you, and now that I had, this did not make the love more desirable – perhaps even less, because of the wreckage it would leave in its wake – but unassailable, something enormous and fixed, a piece of architecture that would remain in my consciousness no matter how hard I tried to deny it.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Thank God for that.’
‘No,’ I repeated. He asked for assurances, and I gave them to him. I swore up and down the walls and past the corridors, and my sorrys spilled out into the garden outside, where the thick-leaved trees stood still. But I was resolved, and his resistance had only made me more determined. I was full of rage, against him, and Abboo and Ammoo, Dolly and Bulbul and all the other people who knew and had refused to talk to me all this time. The rage made it so that giving you up was the best thing I ever did, Elijah. Do not allow this to wo
und you, because in my anger – at my own cowardice, at the chain of events beginning with my birth that had conspired against me, against love, against all that I longed for in my body and breath and soul – I was finally released. I would do something, I would jump out of my own scissored self and traverse the difficult and treacherous chasm of history, and though I didn’t realise it at the time, because all I could feel was the missing-limb ache of your loss, the start of this journey prompted a small, electric joy.
To find my mother I would start with my mother.
I called Ammoo and found she was on her way to a sari shop in Gulshan Two. I asked if I could meet her there, and, always suspicious when there was a spontaneous change in plans, she asked me repeatedly why, and when I refused to say, she relented and gave me the name of the shop. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘Unless the traffic is bad.’ When I arrived she was already there, sifting through a pile of printed saris. I observed her for a minute before entering the shop, noticing how, lately, she had become more beautiful, something in the way her face had settled into middle age made her appear gentler, almost placid. She had chosen a sari now, a blue cotton, and the shop attendant was opening it up to show her how the pattern changed across the six yards of material.
I pushed open the glass doors, slipping into the cool of the shop and remembering a joke I sometimes shared with my father about Ammoo’s moods, referring to her as a thermometer. ‘What’s the reading today? Fever?’ ‘No,’ he would reply, ‘chills only.’
