by Tahmima Anam
Ammoo spotted me, leaned back and frowned. ‘This was a strange place to meet. Is something wrong? Where’s Dolly?’
I had thought about it on the way over, rehearsing the scenario in my mind. ‘I wanted to buy you a gift,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve saved some money, and I thought I should get you something. How about this one?’ I said, pointing to the blue cotton.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked again. She held my elbow so she could face me fully.
I went on the offensive. ‘What, I can’t buy my mother a present?’ I glanced at the price tag. I wanted to buy her something expensive, something flashy that would glint every time she opened her cupboard, but I knew she would never go for that. ‘This one’s too cheap. Won’t you buy a silk or something?’
‘Jaan, really – this one will be fine. Something wrong with Rashid?’
The short drive to the sari shop had given me a chance to rehearse what I was going to say, but I wanted to begin the conversation on my own terms, and Ammoo had a habit of unsettling me. Already the energy of the morning was starting to dissipate. ‘While we’re at it, let’s get something for Nanu too.’
We chose a grey pastel for Nanu. I paid. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘there’s a café next door, and I’d like to go there, and I’d like to talk to you about something serious.’
I led us out of the store and down the narrow street beside it. A metal staircase bolted to the side of the building led to a café on the second floor. Inside, the room had a curved wall on one side, and a set of tall windows on the other that looked down at the traffic on Gulshan Avenue. We sat down on a pair of soft armchairs with our backs to the view. The menu listed a variety of cupcakes and fruit juices.
We ordered coffees. ‘I’ll have the chocolate soufflé,’ I said to the waiter, ‘I hear it’s very good.’
Ammoo leaned back in her chair, slipped off her sandals, and tucked her feet under her. I had rarely seen my mother sit any other way – sometimes even at her office, she led meetings in bare feet, crossing her legs over a conference chair or leaning a bent knee against a boardroom table.
‘How are the trials going?’
‘There are twenty-seven Birangona women at the centre in Sirajganj. One of them told me the people in her village still won’t let her draw water from the tube-well. It was supposed to be a name that helped them, but it’s become a label for life.’
‘Will there be more convictions?’
‘Sometimes I think it’s a pointless exercise. But then I meet these women and at least I can look them in the eye and tell them we’re doing something. That we haven’t forgotten.’
‘We haven’t,’ I said. I was beginning to understand why she had pressured me to change my major in college. My mother went to sleep every night knowing that she had played her tiny part in making the world turn. I had always told myself that Ambulocetus was no different, but I knew now that it was. Mo had taught me that, the way he had attached himself to you and me and made us feel that we belonged together, and to him.
‘So, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’
The coffees arrived, and I busied myself with a packet of sugar. Of course now that I was here, in this moment with my mother, I didn’t want to do it. ‘There’s a boy who works at Prosperity. Can’t be more than eight or nine. His parents are both dead, or missing, I can’t be sure. I’ve been teaching him to read.’
We’d had three lessons before everything fell apart. Mo quickly memorised the alphabet, and his hand was steady as I had him trace over the letters. I had even gone into town and bought him books, with simple words accompanied by images: ‘ma’, ‘kak’, ‘bok’. Late into the night, the light remained on in the kitchen as he placed the book on the floor and squatted over it, not touching the pages, just leaning forward and mouthing the words. ‘Those men at Prosperity, they need people like you,’ I said. ‘People who care what happens to them. I’m trying to understand you. And I wish you’d try to understand me too.’
‘Is that what’s bothering you? I’m sorry, you’re right. I never really got my head around your studies. I won’t complain about the whales any more. But what’s going on? Are you finished with Rubana’s project? You come and go without explaining anything.’
I had rarely seen my parents argue. Sometimes I would notice a brittle silence between them, or my mother, hypertensive, would put a large pyramid of salt on the edge of her dinner plate. I don’t think either of them was used to apologising, at least not overtly, though perhaps something passed between them when I wasn’t looking, a pattern of recriminations and sorrys that occurred behind closed doors.
‘You know your father and I are proud of you. We thought you’d be a professor one day.’
‘I don’t know if I should have married Rashid,’ I said. It was as good a place to start as any.
Ammoo reached out and touched the edge of the table. ‘You can’t say that. Don’t say that.’
‘He’s suffocating me.’ There, it was out.
‘You don’t know that for sure. You haven’t given him a chance. It’s hardly been two years.’
‘Why are you defending him?’
‘He’s always been like a son to me.’
It was just as I’d suspected. That Rashid was the child my mother had never had. ‘He’s your son more than I am your daughter?’
It took a moment for her to realise what I meant. Her face fell as if I had hit her, her gaze dropping to her lap, her mouth twisting and drawing inwards. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’
‘It’s true. You love him more than you love me, I’ve always known it.’ I had started in this brutal vein, and found I couldn’t stop.
The soufflé arrived. I broke the surface of the chocolate and plunged my spoon inside. It was burnt and dry. Ammoo started to cry.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, pulling a tissue out of her handbag.
I dipped my spoon into the dessert again. ‘This is disgusting.’
Ammoo carried the soufflé away. I watched her arguing with the man behind the counter. A few minutes later she came back, removed her sandals again, and sat cross-legged on the chair. ‘They’re bringing another one,’ she said, her voice clogged with tears.
‘I need to know more. About my adoption. We never talked about it and you never told me anything. It’s my fault too. I never dared to ask.’
We looked at each other. For an instant, I thought she might reach across the table and hold my hand. We would stay like that for a long time, talking about everything. Then we would walk out of the café with our arms intertwined, the burned soufflé forgotten, perhaps even having neglected to pay, no words, only the heavy truth hanging like a hammock between us.
Ammoo started laughing, a hollow, sharp laugh. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You’re saying it’s not true.’
‘I’m saying I don’t know what you mean. We told you and then there was nothing else to talk about. I can’t believe it. My own daughter.’
That’s just the thing. Not your own daughter. ‘I’m just asking to have a conversation.’
‘You sound so American,’ Ammoo said. That meant I was cold and heartless, that I didn’t care about hurting my mother. That I wanted to talk about things. ‘I want to stoke the American in you,’ you had once said. Well, maybe that’s exactly what you’d done.
‘I want to know, Ma.’
‘Why don’t you ask Dolly?’
What was this obsession with Dolly? ‘Because I’m asking you. Don’t pass me off to my mother-in-law.’
Ammoo was shaking her head. ‘Dolly arranged everything. She brought you to us and had us sign the papers. She told us your mother had abandoned you and wouldn’t come looking, that’s it.’
The replacement soufflé arrived and when I took a spoonful I discovered it was identical to the first, grainy and overcooked.
‘Why you insist on bringing me
to these pretentious Gulshan-type places, when you know they can’t even make a decent cup of tea?’ Ammoo said. ‘Let’s go.’ She pulled a note out of her handbag, flung it at the table, and marched out of the exit, not looking back to see if I was following. I took another spoonful of the soufflé, then another, scraping the sides until it was reduced to a rubble of chocolate crumbs at the bottom of the dish and my mouth was filled with the taste of burned chocolate.
The driver opened the car door and I got in beside Ammoo. As we were about to pull away, we saw the waiter rushing towards us. He tapped on the window. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’m very sorry, but bill was eight hundred and sixty taka. You only gave five hundred.’ He held his hands behind his back while Ammoo counted out the money and passed it to him through the car window.
We were silent until we reached the Gulshan roundabout. ‘So you’re telling me that Dolly and Bulbul brought you a baby and you didn’t bother to find out where I’d come from?’
‘It was a mercy,’ Ammoo said, wiping her face with the end of her sari. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
Outside, it began to rain. Abul Hussain turned on the wipers.
‘You don’t know what it’s like to want something so badly, to try, and keep failing. Your father and I – we couldn’t bear it. Thank God for Dolly and Bulbul.’
‘I’m in love with someone else.’
Ammoo threw herself back against the seat of the car and put her hand over her eyes. ‘I’m not listening to this.’ And then: ‘It’s that American boy, isn’t it?’
‘Elijah. His name’s Elijah.’ Where had she heard of you? I thought for one paranoid moment that Rashid had told Dolly and that it was all over the family now, but then I realised I had spoken about you soon after I’d returned from Cambridge, using any excuse to say your name aloud. Ammoo had probably suspected something and decided to ignore it.
For a moment I thought Ammoo was going to slap me, but she was defeated, staring up at the roof of the car. ‘Rashid knows.’
‘Oh, God.’ I could almost hear my mother thinking, my poor boy.
‘I’m sorry. It was my fault. I take responsibility for everything.’ After the roundabout, the traffic came to a halt. A boy with an armful of white roses knocked on the car window, pleading with me to buy a few flowers.
‘You take responsibility, but at the same time you want to blame us for not talking to you about this – this adoption thing?’
‘I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying, a little transparency would have gone a long way.’
‘What’s wrong with Rashid?’
‘I can’t stand being in that house. I can’t breathe. They’re just like any other rich family. The kind of people you taught me to laugh at.’
‘I don’t recognise my own daughter. Why are you talking like this?’ She pulled out her phone. The little boy knocked again, and Ammoo waved him away. ‘I’m calling Dolly.’
‘I don’t want to talk to her.’
She put her phone away. ‘Do what you like, but please, don’t tell her about this other boy, it will break her heart. And she’ll never forgive me.’
The traffic eased and we pulled away from the little boy and his flowers, passing the market and turning left at the park. The collective disappointment of everyone I knew pressed down on my chest and made it difficult to breathe. And yet at this news of my adoption – could it be true? Was it really all Dolly and Bulbul? – I felt a small lifting. Now that my mother and Rashid knew, even though things were messy and they were all about to gang up against me, at least it was out in the open, and things that should have come out many years ago were finally being said. I would ask Dolly for the whole story. I hadn’t given up my right to know.
When it came to it, I didn’t have the courage to confront Dolly. I woke up every morning and promised myself I would ask her at breakfast, but then Bulbul would be at the table, or Rashid’s brother would walk in just as I was about to bring it up. I saw her ordering the servants to tidy up the garden or organising menus for dinner and decided she looked tired, or busy, and I would put it off. The questions gnawed at me, but my mother’s look of disappointment reverberated in my mind, making everything seem impossible.
Sally came over one day with her baby, her second (as she had predicted herself, she’d had two in quick succession). They had named the girl Nadia. She passed him to me as soon as she walked in the door, blowing on her freshly painted nails. ‘I just got a manicure,’ she said. ‘I think of that as winning. Today is a winning day.’ She had tried to cheer up her skin with a heavy coat of make-up, but underneath her eyes were dark and sunken.
‘I’m so fucking tired,’ she said. I offered her a coffee. ‘I can’t drink caffeine,’ she sighed. ‘It goes into my milk.’
The baby stirred in my arms, batted a hand against my chest, and fell back asleep. I lifted his head to my face and kissed the mellow indent at the top of his head. He smelled fragrant, yet unperfumed, a kind of sweet loaminess that came from deep within his skin. I inhaled and inhaled.
‘There’s a rumour you and Rashid are on the outs,’ Sally said, leaning back and putting her head against the rounded armrest of the sofa.
‘People are always trying to break us up,’ I said. ‘Remember a few years ago, when there was a rumour he was sleeping with you?’
Sally blew on her fingertips again. ‘Assholes.’
‘And then there was another story about him and some Indian girl who worked in garments.’ I was getting a little agitated, remembering all the rumours about Rashid and other women.
‘So there’s nothing to it?’ Sally said.
The baby stirred again, his mouth opening and closing, so I stood up and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I considered telling her everything, wondering whether she would laugh it off and declare me finally – finally – human, capable of making mistakes like everyone else, or whether she would hold it against me for ever, even if she pretended to take my side. ‘No, there’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just the usual. Marriage isn’t easy.’
‘You’re telling me. I married a man who still calls his mother every night before he falls asleep and tells her what he ate and how many shits he did.’
I laughed. ‘Seriously?’
‘No fucking joke.’ She sat up, pulled a cigarette out of her bag and clamped it between her teeth.
‘You’re smoking?’
‘No I’m not fucking smoking. I’m just holding onto my brain by chewing on a Benson’s.’
The baby screamed. I swayed more aggressively but I was ineffective, so I passed him back to Sally. She swivelled around to check that no one was looking, pulled at her kameez, and guided a dark, enormous nipple into the baby’s mouth.
‘Yes, I know. My tits are fucking incredible, but Nadeem won’t even touch them. He says they’re for the baby and that creeps him out. I’m so horny I could screw the driver.’
‘It was never true, was it? About you and Rashid.’ My eyes were lemony with tears.
Sally drew the baby closer and looked up at me, the unlit cigarette still dangling from her lips. ‘I’m going to tell you something honestly. Don’t be mad.’
‘Okay.’
‘I would have. Seriously, I would have. We’re all a little bit in love with Rashid. You know that.’
I did know that. Everyone, my mother and my friends and random people I had never met, telling me how wonderful he was, what a perfect man. The baby suckled fiercely, his cheeks pulsing as he swallowed.
‘Did you do it?’
‘No. But not because of you. Because he wouldn’t. He would never touch anyone but you.’
I let out a breath, letting the tears fall freely against my cheeks. We didn’t speak after that. Sally held her baby upright until he burped wetly and softly on her shoulder, and then she left, leaving behind the fragrance of curdled milk and tobacco.
That night, I examined Dolly as she ate, careful to open her mouth just wide enough to prevent her lipstick from smudgin
g. Bulbul was narrating a story about a telecommunications secretary who had asked him for a bribe that morning. ‘Nowadays they don’t dance around the subject,’ he said. ‘They just put out their hands and tell you how much.’ Rashid complimented the lamb chops, and Dolly said it was all down to the meat, which she had procured at great expense from the German butcher. Who by the way, Rashid interjected, now sells bacon. Bacon? The eyes of the assembled group widened, even mine, more out of surprise than horror. ‘What’s the country coming to?’ Dolly lamented.
‘I actually like bacon,’ I said. Rashid swung his knee towards me under the table.
‘Tawba, tawba,’ Dolly said, slapping her own cheeks.
Bulbul pushed his chair back and said, ‘Every time I go to Bangkok, we eat the noodle soup. Then someone told us it’s made of pork.’
‘We had to stop eating it,’ Dolly said.
‘But we haven’t,’ Bulbul said. ‘We had it the last time. And you know the sausages at the breakfast buffet aren’t chicken.’
‘Of course they’re chicken. Five-star hotel is full of Arabs.’
‘Everyone pretends they don’t know what’s in it.’ Then he pointed at me and said, ‘Just don’t go telling everyone your secret.’
After dinner, instead of following Rashid up to our bedroom, I lingered at the table and asked Dolly if I could borrow a necklace. Rashid and I were invited to a wedding the following night and I wanted something to go with my sari. Her annoyance at my pig-eating dissipated and she led me up to her bedroom, where, inside a panelled bank of closets, she turned the combination lock on a safe. ‘Do you want just gold, or some kind of colour? Ruby, emerald?’ Her voice was high and melodic and I realised she was practically giggling with joy. So this was what she had envisioned when she thought of my future in this house, that we would coo over her collection of trinkets, coordinate our outfits, share handbags and earrings. I must have done something to give her the impression that this future was possible, and I remembered now that when she had proposed shopping trips to London or Singapore, I had smiled and agreed, because some part of me wanted a mother like that, a mother who wasn’t tempering every conversation with some new angle on how terrible the world was. Dolly lifted a three-stringed ruby necklace out of its velvet box. A diamond clasp bound the necklace together. I took it from her and held it with both of my hands. Then I said, ‘Ammoo told me that you arranged my adoption.’
