But even so, what Rohimun had done to this family: the pain and sorrow she had caused, the damage to the reputation of all of them, her recklessness, her refusal to think about the consequences of her actions . . .
“This cannot be simply set aside.” He wiped a finger across his upper lip. “She would taint all of us, were she to return. After what she has done, what has been said about her. You cannot move me. And be clear on this, Mrs. Begum: Bourne Abbey is not Windsor Cottage. Into one house in this neighborhood, she shall never be welcome. That cannot change.”
He moved to the kitchen door, eager to escape the sense of entrapment and failure that were as tangible in this kitchen as roasting spices.
Mrs. Begum scrambled to her feet, pulling at the pallu of her sari to wipe her face, and held out her hands, like a child showing an uncle or a father that they were clean. “How, tell me, how can she ever marry and clear her name if she is not allowed back in this house? You are cursing her. She cannot hide at the Abbey forever. You are giving her no choice but to go upon the town, to become someone’s girlfriend, someone’s mistress, again. Your own daughter.”
He averted his eyes from her empty arms with an effort that made his tone harsh. “What is done cannot be undone. Who would marry a girl like that? No one we would want in our family. She must be gone from here today.”
His wife gasped with the pain of his words, and he escaped into the hall, shutting the kitchen door on her cry. Truly the sins of the parents were being visited upon their children. Surreptitiously he bit down upon the fingertips of his right hand to ward off the further bad luck that must surely be coming.
Walking almost on tiptoe, Dr. Choudhury hurried to his study, locked the door behind him, went to the sari cupboard and opened it. He reached in and ran his hands across the folded stacks of silks, microfibers and brocades, breathing in their familiar scent, and saying under his breath the first line of the first ayah of the Surah Al-Fatiha, the old formula of prayer and protection. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem. In the name of Allah, the infinitely compassionate and merciful. In the name of Allah.
But this morning neither saris nor surahs could soothe him, and he closed the doors of the cupboard and sat down in his study chair and swivelled it from side to side, trying to rock himself into calmness. Where could she go? Where would she go when she could no longer stay at the Abbey? How could he be a good father in this?
He pulled open his desk drawers searching for something to eat, but they were so clean and empty that it looked as if Mrs. Begum had dusted their insides. He slumped in his chair, let his hands drop between his legs and stared at his so-so-clean desk. All come to this.
—
ROHIMUN WOKE TO the sound of familiar household noises drifting up from downstairs: the clash of pans on the stove or in the sink, running water, the bong-bong-bong of Mum hitting a wooden spoon on the side of a pot after stirring, the kettle’s whistle cut short, cupboards shutting, and the murmur of a male voice that could have been Tariq’s or Dad’s. There was bright sunshine in the little room and her first thought was that she’d overslept and was late for school.
She sat up, remembering, then lay back intent on misery. But soon, somehow distracted by the fresh smell of the sheets, the narrowness of the bed and the sound of birdsong, she drifted back to sleep.
Sometime later she woke again, but now the sun was slanting through the dormer window at a higher angle, and her mother’s warm hand was patting her face and telling her to be up now, it was time to go. Old fears rose in Rohimun’s throat then, as she remembered her arrival in the grey dawn light and her mother silently helping her to take off her sari and putting her to bed in her blouse and petticoat. Her breath caught as she tried to speak, to ask for one more sleep in this child’s room.
Her mother’s arms went round her, and she whispered in her daughter’s ear, “Nah, nah, nah, my Munni, my precious one. Don’t worry, don’t cry.”
She was dressed and walked downstairs and into the kitchen and quickly fed, taken out, past the shut study door, to Tariq’s car where she was once again put into the front passenger seat. There, great tearing sobs rose up, hurting her ribs and pulling her forward jerkily against the pressure of the car’s acceleration, drowning out Tariq’s words.
At least a minute passed before she could hear him and understand that she was going somewhere else, just for a while, somewhere close, until everything had been sorted out. She looked around and realized that she was not on the A road heading for the motorway, but on a narrow lane that travelled downhill toward the bend in a sparkling river, then climbed up again, past stands of mature trees.
“It’s the Abbey that Dad’s been working on, Munni. You’ll be safe there and I’ll visit you every day: it’s just till I’ve sorted out Dad, you know? Just for a few days and then you’ll be back home, I promise you, yeah. I promise.”
The Abbey loomed then, and Tariq’s little rental car zipped up and around the back, away from the scaffolding.
“No one’s here on the weekend. I made sure. Come on.”
—
AFTER TARIQ HAD walked her up the crooked dark stairs at the rear and shown her into the room that Dad had chosen for her, he left to run back down to the car for some more of her things. Rohimun walked forward slowly, a little shocked by the room’s size. She’d expected something like the bedroom that she shared with Shunduri at the cottage, but this was gigantic: big enough to be a basketball court or a dance studio; and flooded with light, from a large bank of mullioned windows at the far end, and above those, just below the ceiling, a row of high square windows that made the room bright despite the dark oak paneling and the green curtains that surrounded the lower windows as well as the bed.
Long rectangles of sunshine lay across the floorboards like carefully spaced beach towels. The bed, a massive four-poster that must have been built in here, dominated the room. A leather-bound trunk rested under the windows on the far wall and a 1930s-style veneered cheval mirror sat in one corner between the massive bed and the stone fireplace, looking flimsy and disposable in comparison. Her easel from school rested on the ground, along with the old carpenter’s tray full of paints and brushes and rags, and a battered sketchbook, as if she’d just dropped them there, home from college for the holidays. She walked to the windows: trees, hills, and to the right she could just see the river they had passed. This building must face it.
Tariq came back in with an army kitbag and a toiletry bag, placed them on the bed and nudged the easel with his shoe. “It might take me a while to get your stuff from London, yeah. I found these in Mum and Dad’s shed, just for now.”
“Oh.”
“Thought it would keep you busy: you know, for the next few days.”
She hadn’t told anyone that she couldn’t paint anymore, had hardly picked up a brush for almost twelve months. Tariq’s obvious pride in his find kept her quiet. She mumbled something, and after he had fussed around some more, giving her a three-tiered tiffin container from Mum and showing her how to stow the kitbag and his old Scout camp stretcher under the big bed, he left. She listened to his steps recede down the hall with a mixture of desolation and relief.
—
TARIQ SLID INTO his car, shut the door and found a tissue to wipe his eyes and nose. He’d promised Munni he’d never abandon her again, and what was he doing to her now, less than a day later? No one could live without family. He’d learned that the hard way.
Growing up in the Oxford Bangladeshi community, a respected captain of his school and his school’s soccer team, with the occasional dip into Christian life with one of his father’s university dinners, he had seen himself as confident and worldly for his age compared to his school friends. But once he was at Oxford University, living at college had been a shock. He had not realized how different his life would be without the rounds of visits to friends and relatives, the name days, the celebration of
new babies, circumcisions and Eid, the glory of visitors from Bangladesh, community-center melas for betrothals and weddings, and the great duties of laying out and burial.
There was so much empty time. All his habits of hospitality that he had taken for granted, of feeding his guests before himself, always paying for their coffees, were inappropriate or laughable. He was a sucker for always buying and never drinking; a try-hard for cooking people meals, giving lifts, helping out with assignments.
Few reciprocated; no one understood his big-brother kindnesses. And no one visited your room, called or dropped in to see how you were going, unless it was with an agenda: they needed a meal, a lift, to borrow an essay or a smoke, or to see if they could tick off sleeping with a Paki on their must-do list. He was completely unprepared for the loneliness of student life, disconcerted at how much he missed friends and family.
All his Bangladeshi and Pakistani friends, without his “in” into Oxford, had disappeared off to red-brick universities to do all the usual Asian courses: optometry, pharmacy, engineering and medicine. They were sharing apartments and houses, cooking, cleaning, smoking and talking together in their own little enclaves.
The few Asians at Oxford were coconuts, Bounty bars: only brown on the outside, and in every other respect living the gora lifestyle, drinking alcohol, eating haram food and squiring around white girls. They were embarrassed to be seen wearing or eating anything too ethnic, or even associating too closely with those like themselves. They seemed to his eyes to have acquired the status amongst their white friends not of equals but of mascots, secure only if they were the only one.
His choices of art history and philosophy of aesthetics, of which he’d been so proud, not running with the usual Asian ambitions, had started to feel like a curse, and Oxford itself a mistake. He was singled out in all the tutorials, having to explain who he was and where he was from, before the usual interactions were allowed. Then, when people started to relax around him, the jokes they were too inhibited to tell before, about being good at cricket and not seeing him in a dark room, would start to come out.
That was okay, he wasn’t naive, had endured much worse at school, but here, somehow, he’d expected better. At school, acceptance of a sort was inevitable, and he was no great novelty. At Oxford, he remained an exotic oddity, like the Rhodes scholars hosted from far-flung countries. No one wanted to know what made him the same as them: if anything there was a sense of disappointment that he was not exotic enough with his jeans and his local accent; not wandering around in Punjabi-pyjamas, or smoking a hookah in his study. These people, England’s intellectual elite, still saw him through the lens of Tom Brown and Billy Bunter.
And everyone he saw seemed to be dating, holding hands with girls, kissing in public, living with them, breaking up, kissing someone else. The goras’ relationships disgusted Tariq with their irresponsible, often alcohol-fuelled self-indulgence, seemingly devoid of tenderness and respect. And he also recoiled from his old Asian friends’ relationships, with their moonish hypocrisy. All that swearing of true love and eternal fealty in the full knowledge that, after graduation, they would each dutifully walk the prescribed path into separate arranged marriages, and never see each other again.
So he had become a minority on two fronts: not only an Asian Muslim in England’s whitest university, but a man with no lalmunni, no sweetheart, however temporary, to yearn for and protect. He became preoccupied with thoughts of his family, how much he missed looking after his sisters and being looked up to by them, how dear their innocence and admiration was. In that first year, his weekend trips and phone calls home had had all the frequency that even a Bangladeshi mother could desire. And he felt that his special bond with Rohimun, where, childlike, she still told her baiyya everything and asked his advice and opinion on all matters, was most precious of all.
But gradually he went home less and less on weekends, and Rohimun headed to London to study at the RCA. He withdrew into his studies and worked ferociously, achieving academically as he no longer seemed to be able to socially. The walks to lectures and to the library became solitary. He started to avoid the college bar and eat in his room instead of the hall, with only his books for company. His loneliness became terrible, deforming.
Jesus, what a mess he’d been in then: even worse than what Munni was in now. It was up to him to fix it, fix himself, fix everything, make them all a family again. He ran his hands through his hair, started up the car and headed back to the cottage.
—
ROHIMUN SAW TARIQ again that evening, carrying a full tiffin container and a bottle of water as well as a shopping bag packed with other things that Mum had thought of in the meantime. And he came again on Sunday morning, with more food, staying to chat, but with an uneasy manner that spoke of continuing hostility at home.
In the afternoon though, it had, to Rohimun’s shock, been her father who’d delivered the tiffin. She’d heard a knock and opened the door to find him standing there. He didn’t come in, or say a word, just stared over her into the room behind her, then passed her the tiffin and left.
Yet he must have seen more of her boredom and loneliness than he appeared to. Soon after noon on Monday, Tariq turned up with a full set of Winsor & Newton oil paints, bought in London early that day to replace her old paint set from school, telling her it was Dad’s idea. And then, pride and pleasure in his face and his voice, Tariq lugged into the room a large raw stretched canvas, about six feet by four.
“I got this myself. Saw it at the HobbyCraft in Swindon.”
She folded her arms and scuffed the floor with the tip of her sandal, refusing to look at it. “Thanks, Bai.”
But after he’d left, she could not help eyeing it, though indirectly, like a passerby trying not to stare, wary of the hopelessness that had gripped her whenever she had looked at her canvases in Simon’s flat. After a while, and just for something to do, she primed it, taking her time to make the job last, enjoying the feel of painting without the pressure of creation, but eventually the job was complete. After an equally elaborate cleaning of brushes and folding of rags, she was left again with nothing to do.
Rohimun still couldn’t bear to think of her disastrous Thames series attempts, sitting in the London flat: the only other big canvases she’d ever worked on. She had a creeping feeling, when she looked at this large, pristine canvas, that her studies of that cold river had been generated more by her agent’s comments about the corporate need for foyer-size paintings, than anything more visceral. And it had been obvious: sweeping landscape was not for her.
But neither could she bear to revert to painting some version of the society portraits that had made her such a success in London. The very thought sickened her. And she had never been drawn to abstraction: it had to be figurative. But of what?
After hours of trying to ignore the canvas completely, her toes curling with boredom, Rohimun accepted that the cheval mirror was showing her the one subject that she had never attempted, never wanted to attempt, in all her years of training and practice. She didn’t want to analyze why this had been so: it was enough to grapple with exactly what, or who, she was intending to paint just now.
Initially it was a process of elimination. It would not be the old Munni who hated photos and tradition and dressing up, and worshipped her brother. And certainly not the lumpish, resentful woman, Simon’s love, who only wore Western clothes and couldn’t manage without him. Someone different again, still forming perhaps. Well, then, it wasn’t going to be a real portrait: just a painting with her in it. And she wouldn’t even go full-faced or three-quarter: profile only. The real subject would be something else entirely. For a while Rohimun was stuck again.
The night was warm and still, and the darkened room with its oversized furniture and heavy drapes, felt claustrophobic after a day of doing nothing, with no television to lose herself in.
Finally, with her heart in her mouth, and jumpin
g at every noise, Rohimun crept down the pitch-black stairs and unbolted the outer door. With the night air on her skin, she went for a cautious wander and found a walled garden area at the side of the building. Inside, an enchanted place, hidden from the world by its outer walls and further divided inside by little tiled streamlets. A garden out of Rossetti, or an illustration in a medieval hymnal. It reminded her of something else too, just outside her grasp.
She smelled the roses before she saw them, surprised by the strength of their heady night-scent. The roses themselves, bleached by moonlight into silver and grey, were far less spectacular than their fragrance, but for the sake of the exotic perfume she worked her nails into the thick stem of a two-headed specimen until it broke free, and carried it back to her room to sit in her water bottle.
When Rohimun woke the next morning, her roses revealed themselves. The outer half-inch of each petal was a coppery yellow that deepened to apricot and finally a dark, almost burnt orange at the center. She had her real subject. Rohimun stood at the window and slowly pulled apart one of the blooms, petal by petal, down to the stamen and beyond, examining each piece, then laying it on the sill. Each petal was a work of art in itself. She remembered the injunctions the RCA first-years had been constantly given: to look properly, to really see. She’d always applied it to people’s faces, their hands, how they sat and stood as indications of character and personality: never to nature.
The diaphanous quality of each petal, combined with the reflected internal light of the whole: how could this be painted? She wished she’d paid more attention to van Aelst and Redouté, those masters of the rose, and tried to re-create in her mind’s eye some of their paintings: how they showed both the fragility and the depth of the bloom, its pigmented translucence.
For the first time in more than two years she felt excited about painting, and when her father unexpectedly arrived again that morning with his mournful, averted face and her tiffin, she passed him last night’s supper container with a note tucked into its lid that listed the additional paint colors, mediums and brushes that she would need. He opened it, and she saw his face startle before returning to its resting expression of noble suffering.
A Matter of Marriage Page 9