by Monica Ali
'I'll join you,' said Chanu to Mrs Azad, 'in a beer.' He made the offer as if he were proposing to lend her a kidney. She shrugged and kept her eyes fixed on the screen.
My husband does not say his prayers, thought Nazneen, and now he is drinking alcohol. Tomorrow he may be eating pigs.
'Of course, all the Saudis drink,' said Chanu. 'Even the royal family. All hypocrites. Myself, I believe that a glass every now and then is not a bad thing.'
'As a medical man, I do not recommend it. As for the religious aspect, I hold no opinion.'
'You see,' said Chanu, in the voice of a man who has deliberated long and hard, 'it's part of the culture here. It's so ingrained in the fabric of society. Back home, if you drink you risk being an outcast. In London, if you don't drink you risk the same thing. That's when it becomes dangerous, and when they start so young they can easily end up alcoholic. For myself, and for your wife, there's no harm done.' He looked over at his hostess but she was engrossed in a scene of frantic and violent kissing. Chanu still had his coat on. He perched on a chair with his knees wide and his ankles crossed. He looked like the gardener who had come in to collect his wages.
Not for the first time, Nazneen wondered what it was that kept bringing Dr Azad to see Chanu. They were an ill-matched pair. Perhaps he came for the food.
'We will be in Dhaka before Ruku is in any danger. I've drawn up plans for the house, did I tell you? Very simple, very classical in design. I intend to be the architect myself.'
'Yes,' said the doctor, 'why not be an architect?'
'Exactly. What is the point of paying out to someone else?'
'Be an architect. Be a designer. Be a rocket scientist.'
Chanu looked puzzled. 'Design I could consider, but in science I confess I have very little background.' He spread his hands modestly. 'Anyway, I don't quite have sufficient funds for the house yet.'
'Ah, but when the promotion comes . . .' Dr Azad sat rigid on a stiff-backed chair. He held on to the arms as if he were trying to squeeze blood from them. Since the business with the drinks he had not looked at his wife one single time.
'I have been at the council too long. Long service counts for nothing. The local yogi doesn't get alms. But I have some things in the pipeline. One or two ventures I'm developing. The furniture trade, antiques, some ideas for import-export. They're cooking away slowly. The problem is capital. If you don't have money, what can you do?'
The doctor smiled in his peculiar way, eyebrows up, mouth down. 'Make some?'
'I don't need very much. Just enough for the Dhaka house and some left over for Ruku's education. I don't want him to rot here with all the skinheads and drunks. I don't want him to grow up in this racist society. I don't want him to talk back to his mother. I want him to respect his father.' Chanu's voice had grown impassioned. Mrs Azad tutted and held up her purple-taloned hand. Chanu assumed a loud whisper. 'The only way is to take him back home.'
A girl walked in and stood with her hands on her hips in the middle of the room. She had inherited her mother's sturdy legs, but her skirt was shorter by a good few inches. She spoke in English. Nazneen caught the words pub and money. Her mother grunted and waved towards Dr Azad. The doctor quivered. He spoke a few sharp words. His shoulders were up around his ears. Chanu shifted in his chair and coughed. The girl chewed gum. She twiddled the stud on her nostril, like a spot she was about to squeeze. Her hair was discoloured by the same rusty substance that streaked her mother's head. She repeated her request. Chanu started to hum. The back of Nazneen's neck grew warm. The doctor began to speak but his wife threw up her hands. She struggled out of her armchair and fetched a handbag.
The girl took the money. She looked at Nazneen and the baby. She looked at Chanu. The doctor gripped his seat. His feet and knees pressed together. His helmet-hair held a circle of light. He would never let go of that chair. It was the only thing holding him up. The girl tucked the money into her blouse pocket. 'Salaam Ale-Koum,' she said, and went out to the pub.
Mrs Azad switched off the television. Let's go, thought Nazneen. She tried to signal with her eyes to Chanu, but he smiled vaguely back at her. 'This is the tragedy of our lives. To be an immigrant is to live out a tragedy.'
The hostess cocked her head. She rubbed her bulbous nose. 'What are you talking about?'
'The clash of cultures.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'And of generations,' added Chanu.
'What is the tragedy?'
'It's not only immigrants. Shakespeare wrote about it.' He cleared his throat and prepared to cite his quotation.
'Take your coat off. It's getting on my nerves. What are you? A professor?'
Chanu spread his hands. 'I have a degree in English Literature from Dhaka University. I have studied at a British university – philosophy, sociology, history, economics. I do not claim to be a learned gentleman. But I can tell you truthfully, madam, that I am always learning.'
'So what are you then? A student?' She did not sound impressed. Her small, deep-plugged eyes looked as hard and dirty as coal.
'Your husband and I are both students, in a sense. That's how we came to know each other, through a shared love of books, a love of learning.'
Mrs Azad yawned. 'Oh yes, my husband is a very refined man. He puts his nose inside a book because the smell of real life offends him. But he has come a long way. Haven't you, my sweet?'
He comes to our flat to get away from her, thought Nazneen.
'Yes,' said the doctor. His shirt collar had swallowed his neck.
'When we first came – tell them, you tell them – we lived in a one-room hovel. We dined on rice and dal, rice and dal. For breakfast we had rice and dal. For lunch we drank water to bloat out our stomachs. This is how he finished medical school. And now – look! Of course, the doctor is very refined. Sometimes he forgets that without my family's help he would not have all those letters after his name.'
'It's a success story,' said Chanu, exercising his shoulders. 'But behind every story of immigrant success there lies a deeper tragedy.'
'Kindly explain this tragedy.'
'I'm talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I'm talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one's identity and heritage. I'm talking about children who don't know what their identity is. I'm talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I'm talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one's sanity while striving to achieve the best for one's family. I'm talking—'
'Crap!'
Chanu looked at Dr Azad but his friend studied the backs of his hands.
'Why do you make it so complicated?' said the doctor's wife. 'Assimilation this, alienation that! Let me tell you a few simple facts. Fact: we live in a Western society. Fact: our children will act more and more like Westerners. Fact: that's no bad thing. My daughter is free to come and go. Do I wish I had enjoyed myself like her when I was young? Yes!'
Mrs Azad struggled out of her chair. Nazneen thought – and it made her feel a little giddy – she's going to the pub as well. But their hostess walked over to the gas fire and bent, from the waist, to light it. Nazneen averted her eyes.
Mrs Azad continued. 'Listen, when I'm in Bangladesh I put on a sari and cover my head and all that. But here I go out to work. I work with white girls and I'm just one of them. If I want to come home and eat curry, that's my business. Some women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in the kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English.' She looked at Nazneen who focused on Raqib. 'They go around covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons, and when someone calls to them in the street they are upset. The society is racist. The society is all wrong. Everything should change for them. They don't have to change one thing. That,' she said, stabbing the air, 'is the tragedy.'
The room was quiet. The air was too bright, and the hard light hid nothing. The moments came and went, with nothing to ease their passing.
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'Each one has his own tragedy,' said Chanu at last. His lips and brow worked feverishly on some private business. Raqib thought this conclusion unsatisfactory. He gazed at his father with cobra-like intensity, and then he began to cry.
'Come with me,' said Mrs Azad to Nazneen. 'I've got something for the baby.' In the bedroom, she looked at the back of a cupboard and pulled out a chewed teddy bear. She tried to interest the baby but Raqib just rubbed his eyes and rolled off to sleep. Nazneen changed his nappy and put his pyjamas on. He did not wake. Mrs Azad smoked a cigarette. She stroked Raqib's head with one hand and smoked with the other. Watching her now, Nazneen felt something like affection for this woman, this fat-nosed street fighter. And she knew why the doctor came. Not for the food, not to get away from this purple-clawed woman (although maybe for these things as well), not to share a love of learning, not to borrow books or discuss mobile libraries or literature or politics or art. He came as a man of science, to observe a rare specimen: unhappiness greater than his own.
She woke from a dream. Hasina, in the garment factory, ironing collars in place, laughing with the girls. Hasina laughing with the girls, ironing her own hand. Hasina, laughing on her own, ironing her face.
The baby was hot. His head was burning. Even in the dark, she could make out the flushed patches of his cheeks. For a while she lay with his curled hand in hers. Moonlight shredded the curtains and streaked the wall. Chanu breathed through his mouth, and sent a stale breeze across his family. The wardrobe squatted like a large and ugly sin beside the bed. Two more chairs, in pieces, were stored within its belly. The alarm clock winked its red eye. Nazneen sat up and put Raqib against her chest. She kissed the place of infinite softness at the back of his neck. She felt his boneless body mould to hers. This was all. This took the place of everything and drove out questions.
The realization itself stole the moment from her. She lifted the baby and held him out, expecting him to wake so that she could then settle him back to sleep, reassured.
Raqib's head hung forward. Nazneen scrambled out of bed and took him into the hallway. She flicked on the light. 'Baby,' she said. 'Wake up.' She tickled him on the cheeks, under the chin, beneath the arms. 'Raqib,' she said sternly. 'Wake up now.'
Chanu appeared, scratching in between his legs. His hair stood on end and his stomach fought free of his pyjama shirt. The baby opened his eyes and looked ready to make some urgent enquiries into the situation. But he was kidnapped suddenly by sleep and seemed to make a willing hostage. A smile twitched his cheeks.
'What is it?' said Chanu.
'He's sick. I can't wake him.'
'Let me try. Here, Ruku, time to get up. Open your eyes. Ruku! Ruku! What's wrong with him? Raqib! What's happened? Why does he not wake? Why doesn't he wake?'
CHAPTER SIX
The city shattered. Everything was in pieces. She knew it straight away, glimpsed it from the painful-white insides of the ambulance. Frantic neon signs. Headlights chasing the dark. An office block, cracked with light. These shards of the broken city.
At the hospital she felt the panic. Lobby doors crashing, white coats surging, bright trolleys clanging, coffee machine snarling. She ran with her son, carried him down long corridors while the walls fled before them. And then they took him out of her hands.
Raqib lay in the glass-walled cot like a flower that had been held inside a fist and released, not crushed but crumpled. His arms were wrongly arranged, the skin around his mouth puckered, and the area beneath his ribs hollowed out.
Nazneen pressed her fingers against the incubator. He was the centre. The world had rearranged itself around this new core. It had to. Without him, life would not be possible. He was on the inside and all else looked in. The nurses and doctors who rustled and sighed, and bunched around. The hospital building with its smothering smells, its deathly hush and alarming clangs. The crystal towers and red-brick tombs. The bare-legged girls shivering at the bus stop. The hunched men and gesticulating women. The well-fed dogs and bloated pigeons. The cars that had screamed alongside the ambulance, urging it on, parting in waves.
And the city itself was just a glow on the dark earth, beneath the heaven that bent down to touch the troubled oceans, and he was beside her but no longer of her and the noise that filled her head and heart and lungs was so great that if she but opened her mouth the windows, the walls, could not withstand it.
For three days Chanu ate only cheese sandwiches from the canteen. On the fourth day he went home and cooked rice, and potato and cauliflower curry. He brought the food in flat round tins to the hospital and they ate in the room set aside for the refugee families of the gravely ill. The warm, heady smell of spices blanketed the air, twitched noses and lifted heads. A gaunt old couple, who held hands and whispered together all day as if making an infinitely complex suicide pact, halted their plans for a while and stared openly. A teenage boy, who came to be with his mother and hand her paper tissue after paper tissue, sat up straight to get a good look. The whiskered man with the flat, blank eyes of a bandicoot rat, who came alone and slept beneath the chairs, slowly licked his lips.
Nazneen ate and ate. She scraped the tins clean and put them on the floor. 'I should have brought more,' said Chanu. He closed a hand around her wrist.
'Yes. Next time, bring more.'
'Do you want to go home for a while?'
'No. I won't go yet.'
'I brought some things for you. Socks, soap, whatever I could find.'
'His blanket?'
'I've got it.'
'He needs his special blanket.'
Nazneen thought about getting up. She would wait until Chanu released her, so that she did not pull away from him. She did not want to pull away from him.
'A letter came from home,' said Chanu. His chin was grey with stubble and his hair – without coconut oil – lay like clumps of moulted fur. He spoke only a little and his voice was soft as clay.
'Hasina!'
'No, no. A letter from one of my relatives. A begging letter.'
'Another.'
'I have not heard from this man in nearly twenty years. When I left he was a young policeman with enormous moustaches, and he was feared far and wide.'
A doctor opened the door and spoke to the teenager's mother. She blew her nose and handed the sodden tissue to the boy. As she left with the doctor she glanced back at the room as if it had betrayed her. The boy sniffed. He slipped so low in his chair he threatened to fall off. Chanu tightened his grip on Nazneen's wrist.
'I've heard about him from time to time. He built himself a big house with all the bribe money, and he rose through the ranks. He had four or five servants and his wife gave the best parties. Not only that. He imported an American car. Chrysler or Chevrolet, something like that. It was talked about all over town.'
Nazneen smiled at her husband. For now, he was speaking only to her. There was no one over her shoulder. The audience had finally gone home. She put her free hand briefly across his round cheek. To touch like this was permitted here, among these stateless people, where the rules were unknown and in any case suspended.
'Now it looks like the bribe money has dried up. He's too old to wield the stick. Or he's been kicked out altogether. It's not clear what has happened. But now he only has one servant, and he is in need.' Chanu let her go. He rubbed his thighs. 'He asks me, in the name of God, not to let his family suffer. He asks only for them, not for himself.'
'Don't answer it,' said Nazneen. He read these letters over and over. He spent longer on the replies than he ever spent on his studies, and most often left them in the drawer. 'Just throw it away.'
'He just has the one servant now.'
Nazneen felt a bubble of laughter rise from her belly. She let it out behind her hand. 'Don't let his family suffer,' she said, choking.
Chanu pressed his woolly eyebrows together and looked at her. She could not stop. He smiled. She felt the others looking at them, the strange brown couple who laughed and smiled. With the
end of her sari, she wiped at her eyes.
There was a mask across Raqib's face. It brought him oxygen because, Chanu explained, he needed something purer than air. Needles stuck into his arms like great javelins, and wires and tubes sprung around him, thick as coiled rope. Raqib spread his tiny limbs wide. The rash that had nearly killed him, those little red seeds, was not so livid now. The marks had changed their shape and colour, and spread beneath his creamy skin like crushed berries. His arms reached across the cot. His face was screwed into a determined ball. Nazneen thought of a game she played with Hasina, leaning into the wind that whipped off the lake and held them in a ragged embrace, flapping at their baggy trousers and holding up their arms.
Raqib was still asleep. Sometimes he opened his eyes but they were not seeing eyes. Nazneen put his special blanket inside the cot. She settled in the hard moulded plastic of the chair. Chanu sat on the other side, arms folded across his chest. Whenever a nurse walked by he half unfolded them and looked up.
Abba did not choose so badly. This was not a bad man. There were many bad men in the world, but this was not one of them. She could love him. Perhaps she did already. She thought she did. And if she didn't, she soon would because now she understood what he was, and why. Love would follow understanding.
Some things had become clear in the long, halogen-lit nights and the slowly dissolving days. The din that had crashed around inside her, like a giant bee in a bottle, had gone. And the quiet that came in its wake was profound. Nazneen sat and watched her son, and watched her husband rattling around the place: fetching things and returning them, bumping into carts and nurses, questioning the doctors, accosting the cleaners, poring over charts and articles, dragging chairs out of place and back again, going for coffee, going for tea, collecting the undrunk cups and spilling them on the way to the sink.
Her irritation with her husband, instead of growing steadily as it had for three years, began to subside. For the first time she felt that he was not so different. At his core, he was the same as her.