by Monica Ali
As if to dispel their silent doubts he took a tattered piece of paper from his pocket. 'Driving licence,' he said, in English. He inspected the document. 'Nineteen seventy-six. Never had it framed.'
So Chanu became a taxi man and ceased to be a middleman. And on the first hot day of the year, when the windows were closed against the ripening of waste bins and the flat hummed to the tune of its pipes, and Nazneen had mopped up the overflow from the blocked toilet and washed her hands and sighed into the mirror, a new middleman appeared. Karim, with a bale of jeans over his broad shoulder.
This was how he came into her life.
CHAPTER TEN
It was a strange thing, and it took her some time to realize it. When he spoke in Bengali he stammered. In English, he found his voice and it gave him no trouble. Having made the discovery, she went back to the beginning and made it afresh. She considered him. The way he stood with his legs wide and his arms folded. His hair. Cut so close to the skull. The way it came to a triangle at the front, and the little bit which stood up straight at the centre of his forehead. He wore his jeans tight and his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. No. There was nothing there. No clue to the glitches in his Bengali voice.
And he was sure of himself. He took a strong stance. Sometimes his right leg worked to a random beat. He wore white trainers and a thin gold chain around his neck. He said, 'My uncle owns the factory.' He said, 'The sweatshop. My uncle owns it.' And he bounced his leg and fiddled with his mobile phone, waiting for her to count up the linings.
He wore the phone at his hip, in a little black leather holster. He felt the length and breadth of it and tested the surface with his thumb as if he had discovered a growth, this tumorous phone on his side. Then he refolded his arms. They looked strong, those arms. His hair. Razored short against the skull. It was odd, that the shape of a skull could be pleasing.
When his phone rang, he took it out to the hallway. She caught only fragments. A word, a phrase, a word repeated, a word struggling for release. The caller would not let him speak. So it seemed. It took some time to work out that it was his voice, not his listener, that had failed him.
'My husband had a mobile phone,' she told him. 'But he gave it up. Said it was too expensive.'
'Y-y-your husband is right.'
She switched to English. 'Very useful thing.'
'Y-y-yes, but t-t-too expensive.'
She saw at once that she had made a mistake. She had drawn attention to the very thing she had thought to hide. He would not speak English now. He would not disown himself. She thought of what to say and how to say it. But by then he had put money on the table and left.
She still had five more hems to do when he came the next time. Opening the door she knew that something was wrong. The look on his face. He rushed past and into the sitting room. He held the window frame. 'Gone,' he said. 'They've gone.' His head and shoulders slumped forward, and he began to pant just then though the action was over.
'What it was?'
He turned round. Sweat across the top of his lip. Sunshine in his hair made it sparkle. Some kind of oil. Or more sweat. He told her about the two men pushing leaflets through front doors. Pushing their filthy leaflets through letterboxes. He picked up the box – right under their noses – and he ran with it.
He got into position now. Legs wide, right leg working, and she saw the thigh strain inside the denim and she looked down at her sewing, which she had not finished. They had chased him but he was faster. He put the box, the filthy leaflets, in the bin where they belonged. He looped the estate, they didn't see where he went, he looped back again to check, and nobody saw him come up to the flat. It was safe. Quite safe.
'They'll get what's coming to them, man. That ain't the end of it.'
'What they say? The leaflets.' She had forgotten to cover her hair.
He sat down, across the table from her, and now the sun was directly behind him so that from the corner of her eye she saw him as a silhouette. It was the first time he had sat down in her home. She thought about tea but she was unsure what it would mean, to have tea with this boy. He was not a relative.
'I know who they are.'
'These men.'
'I know them, man. I know them.'
'Yes.'
'Lion Hearts. They are behind it. We are going to make them pay, man.'
'Who they are?'
'Just a front. They are only a front. We know everything about them. Everything.' He had his hands palms up on the table, slightly cupped, vibrating. Weighing it all up, or asking for trouble.
He put his hands under the table. She watched him obliquely.
'In our country,' she said, 'everyone would stop. Come and help you.'
He rocked back in his chair. 'This is my country.'
She told him she still had five hems to do and he said that he would wait. Though she kept her eyes to her work, she felt his gaze. Sun on the needle surround flashed iridescent prisms over her fingernails. She machined in bursts and thought of drawing the curtain but the thought was, somehow, confusing to her and she did not do it. The last hem snagged and she had to get up for the scissors.
She saw then that he had been reading all this time and a heat came into her face. He looked up and she looked away.
'That sari,' he said. 'My mother had one. Same material I mean.'
It was soft blue with a deep green band around it. Chanu had picked it out. He called it subtle and he said it was like her, subtle beauty, which she liked though she knew it was the words that pleased him.
She said nothing.
'She's dead now. Man.' He looked at his magazine, as though his dead mother were nothing to him.
'I sorry.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'Man.' And he turned the page. 'Are you a good Muslim? Twenty ways to tell.' He held up the magazine, and Nazneen saw that it was no more than a few flimsy pages in black and white, stapled at the side.
Driver one-six-one-nine was frequently on duty in the evenings. Evenings in the flat became more relaxed. The girls did their homework in front of the television. Shahana said it helped her to concentrate. Bibi chewed the end of her pen. The laughter on the soundtrack never made her smile although Shahana developed a sophisticated giggle. Nazneen continued with her piecework. If she worked fast, if she didn't make mistakes, she could earn as much as three pounds and fifty pence in one hour. Maybe a little bit more. She heard the television and she caught glimpses of Shahana on her tummy, legs in the air, crossing and uncrossing. She thought about the five-pound notes inside the jar, wrapped in a cloth, inside a plastic bag, snapped into a see-through container that sat in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. She reminded herself of the money in an envelope on the high shelf, near the Qur'an, and decided it was haram and would have to be removed. She counted the money pushed into the foot of a pair of tights, wound up in a ball at the back of her underwear drawer. Another five pounds put away today. Fifteen more pounds wrapped in clingfilm, inside a sandwich bag, pushed into the hole in the wall next to the boiler. She would take it to the Sonali Bank in the morning. Hasina would have it before the end of the month. Some she would give to Shahana for the things she coveted, shampoo and lotion and slides for her hair.
Sometimes Chanu was out for the whole night. Then she would rise early and have the food heated, rice cooked fresh, ready for him on the table. 'I'll eat now.' He said it as he came through the door and he sat down with his coat still on and ate, jumping up when he remembered he had not washed his hand, preparing another mouthful before he had even taken up his place again, calling for pickle and chutney and a slice of lemon, some chopped onion on a side plate, a glass of water. 'Oh, well put it here,' he said when she told him it was already on the table. 'Put it just here so I can reach it.'
'These people,' he would say. 'Ignorant types. What can you do?'
She never learned anything about Kempton Kars. She did not hear about any Mr Dalloways, any Wilkies. The customers retained their mystery. All she knew was what h
e told her, that they were ignorant types.
But he was philosophical. 'You see, all my life I have struggled. And for what? What good has it done? I have finished with all that. Now, I just take the money. I say thank you. I count it.' He put a ball of rice and dal in his mouth and held it inside his cheek. 'You see, when the English went to our country, they did not go to stay. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it out of the country. They never left home. Mentally. Just taking money out. And that is what I am doing now. What else can you do?'
These speeches he made in the simple language of a simple – though not ignorant-type – man. But when he took out his books in the evenings he spent at home, he began to speak differently.
He had Shahana turn pages as he lay on the sofa. Bibi was in the bedroom, twisting her ankles together beneath the desk and worrying a bit of paper. Shahana's face was pulling in on itself, setting into a mask of utter disregard. She knelt by the sofa and held the book at an angle to her father's face. He raised his eyebrows. Then he raised them again, further this time so that they untangled from each other at the centre. Shahana turned the page.
'Ah,' said Chanu. 'The search for knowledge. Is there any journey more satisfying? Call your sister.' But he called her himself. 'Bibi. Come quick.' She came running and stood behind Shahana. Chanu took the book in his own hands, sat up and chewed over some knowledge that he planned to share with them.
'I will tell you something. All these people who look down onto us do not know what I am going to tell you. I have it here in black and white.' He waved the book. 'Who was it who saved the work of Plato and Aristotle for the West during the Dark Ages? Us. It was us. Muslims. We saved the work so that your so-called St Thomas could claim it for his own discovery. That is the standard of our scholarship and that is the standard of their gratitude.' He held up a finger and it trembled with emotion.
Bibi took the end of one plait and tucked it into her mouth.
'Dark Ages,' said Chanu, and his face flinched from the insult. 'This is what they are calling it in these damn Christian books. Is this what they teach you in school?' He threw the book on the floor. 'It was the Golden Age of Islam, the height of civilization. Don't forget it. Take pride, or all is lost.' He lay down again, exhausted by the slander, and the girls began to back away.
He called after them. 'Do you know what Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western civilization?'
The girls hovered at the end of the sofa.
'He said he thought it would be a good idea.' Chanu laughed and Bibi smiled. 'I'll teach you,' he said, 'more about our religion. And we will study Hindu philosophy. After that, Buddhist thought.' And he put a cushion beneath his head and began to hum.
Nazneen was helping the girls to tidy their room. A piece of wallpaper had begun to peel away from the wall above Bibi's bed and was turning itself into a scroll. She picked up a doll from the floor and put it on the end of the bed. There was a man doll under the chair, eyeless now and one-armed, naked and imprinted with dirt. Nazneen looked at it but did not pick it up.
'I'm not going,' said Shahana. 'I'll run away.' She opened a cupboard and pulled out a bag. Inside she had put a nightdress, a pair of shoes, jeans and a T-shirt. 'I'm ready to run.'
Bibi rubbed her fists into her cheeks. Her eyes went red. 'I want to stay with her.'
'Shush,' said Nazneen. 'No silly talk.'
'It's not silly,' shouted Shahana. 'I'm not going.'
Nazneen straightened up the desk. She picked up a small pile of dirty clothes and held it to her chest. Bibi tested the thin carpet with her toes and Shahana was busy scratching her arms.
'We just have to wait and see.' Nazneen sat down on Bibi's bed with the dirty clothes on her lap. 'We do not know what God has in His mind.'
It was not enough and Nazneen looked for something else. For one dizzying moment she was flushed with power: she would make it right for the girls. It strained her insides, as if she would vomit. And then, just as quickly, it left her.
Bibi came and sat next to her so that she felt the heat from her body. There was an ink stain on her school blouse and a white sheen of dry skin across her shins.
'Do you want to go?' Bibi turned her broad face to look up at her mother, as if she would catch the reply between her own lips.
Nazneen told the girls a story. The story of How You Were Left To Your Fate. It was not the first time they had heard it but they both listened well. She began with the words I was a stillborn child, and she ended with that was God's will. It was the way she always told it.
Bibi discovered a scab on her knee and played with it. Nazneen began to fold the clothes on her lap, remembered they were dirty, balled them and stood up. As she reached the door, Shahana called to her.
'You didn't answer. It wasn't an answer.'
'It was my answer,' said Nazneen.
The village was leaving her. Sometimes a picture would come. Vivid; so strong she could smell it. More often, she tried to see and could not. It was as if the village was caught up in a giant fisherman's net and she was pulling at the fine mesh with bleeding fingers, squinting into the sun, vision mottled with netting and eyelashes. As the years passed the layers of netting multiplied and she began to rely on a different kind of memory. The memory of things she knew but no longer saw.
It was only in her sleep that the village came whole again. She dreamed of Mumtaz that night, and her mynah bird. The bird lying on its back in Mumtaz's palm while she stroked its shining black chest. The clatter of its feet across the top of an oil can and the collar of white around its throat. 'You make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha.' It put back its head and ducked it, ducked again. 'You make me laugh.'
Mumtaz fed it with her own hand. It slept on the roof of her hut and she swept up its droppings each morning. For a couple of years they were inseparable.
Amma sucked on her large curved teeth. 'Treat it like a baby, but it will fly away. Waste your love on a bird, but it cannot love you back. It will fly away.'
'You're bad,' Mumtaz told the bird. 'Go away.' But she smiled at Amma. 'If it is God's will, he will fly.'
'It's a terrible thing,' Amma told Nazneen. 'A widow and childless and she had to return to her brother. Giving her love to a bird. Depending on a man like that.'
'Terrible thing,' said Nazneen.
But Mumtaz did not seem to know how terrible it was. She sang to the bird and the bird made her laugh. 'You make me laugh,' she told it and the bird laughed back. They played a game with a small rubber ball. Mumtaz threw it and the bird caught it in its beak.
'It will fly away,' said Amma, grinding the spices and testing her teeth against her lip. Her toes curled into the soft mud floor of the yard. From the shade of the pomegranate tree she withstood a few minutes more of her luckless life. She shouted at the servant boy because the yard was not properly swept and she shouted at the new widow (a relative taken in but a lesser relative who was suffered as long as she served) because the fire was not properly set. Groaning, she continued to grind.
'You're bad,' the bird told Nazneen one day. 'Go away.' Obedient, she went.
Everyone laughed and Nazneen made up her mind to return and join the laughter but her legs still carried her forward. She went to the edge of the village and looked across the fields, the river; watched a sampan with its ragged sail lazy in the still air, the boatman unconcerned on his haunches. When the smoke began to rise from the mound of the furthest village, the thought of dinner pulled her home. Mumtaz said, 'Well, my serious friend. Still glad you came back to life?'
The bird did not fly away. Someone taught it a bad word. Amma was furious. Abba laughed and said, 'Naturally she is upset. She comes from a family of saints.' He went away for a few days and when he returned there was a bounce in his step. The bird learned another bad word. It called out to everyone that passed and it had a new laugh, a chuckle at the back of its throat, and when Abba laughed as well they sounded like brothers.
A table had been brought ou
t into the big yard. Stools set around. The women kept to their quarters and the men chewed their pipes. Nazneen and Hasina watched the elders arrive and take their seats. Hasina pulled on her imaginary beard and coughed and spat. Nazneen thumped her on the arm. Abba began to speak and the men sucked with all their strength on the hookahs and cups of steaming tea. Abba finished and another man began to speak, another joined in and another until soon they all struggled to be heard. A scream from the women's quarters scattered their words like a handful of seed; they fell and were lost and if anything grew from them it would be later. For now it was quiet, and Abba rose and walked quickly across the yard and Nazneen and Hasina darted around the back so that from different directions they reached Mumtaz at the same time. She held the bird, on its back, in the palm of her hand and she stroked its black chest. They went closer and they saw the way the head hung down. It was certain now. It would not fly away.
She woke from the dream and looked at her husband's face, squashed against the pillow. Her legs were involved with his and she reclaimed them. Then she went to the sitting room and began to sew. After a short time the machine was idle and she only sat.
A heap of sequined vests lay to the side. She had put zips in three of them. She picked one up and held it out. The little plastic discs caught the light, wavering between pink and white. She took it to the bathroom and locked the door, unbuttoned her nightdress and removed her arms from the sleeves, tied the sleeves around her waist. The zip went at the back and it was difficult to do it up, but she managed. She looked in the mirror and looked away quickly. In the cabinet she found a band for her hair and piled it on top of her head. Facing her reflection once again she saw that her breasts looked flat. She put her hand inside the top and pulled her left breast up and then the right one so that they sat together at the sequined neckline and made a deep valley between them. She looked in the mirror but she did not see herself, only the flare of the sequins, and then she closed her eyes and the ice smelled of limes and she moved without weight and there was someone at her side, her hand in another, and they turned together, arms around waists, and through her half-closed lashes she saw him. The fine gold chain about his neck. And then she opened her eyes and took off the top. She held it out again and she saw that the sequins were cheap. She turned it over in her hands. The sequins looked like fish scales.