by Monica Ali
No money now for Monju drugs. Praise Allah most time she go unconscious.
Late late Syeeda came on back veranda watch rains. We hardly speak two word. Side by side we smell the earth. When she leave she say 'Right. Thats it.' Like we discuss all things under moon and decide every move for life.
The next day Chanu did not go to work. He stayed at home and in the way. Nazneen began, bit by bit, to restore order to the flat. The girls attacked each chore that she set them with unusual vigour. Chanu directed operations and philosophized about the nature of housework. It was a little like God, without end or beginning. It simply was.
'Are you not nervous any more, Amma?' asked Bibi, chewing on a fingernail.
'Nervous?' said Nazneen.
'Nervous exhaustion,' Chanu pronounced. 'She had a condition known as nervous exhaustion.'
'Why?' said Shahana.
Chanu, very briefly, looked unsure. Then he rallied. 'Nerves. Women's thing,' he said. 'You'll know about it when you get older.'
'But not any more?' Bibi insisted. 'She doesn't have it any more?'
'Not any more,' said Nazneen. She looked at her daughter's wide, flat cheeks, her heavy forehead. Her soft brown eyes filled with anxiety. It was an open face, neither plain nor pretty but pleasing in its willingness to please. How like her mother she looked. Nazneen flushed, first with pride and then with worry. 'Don't be anxious. Don't even think about it.'
'I won't,' said Bibi promptly, and looked worried when Nazneen laughed.
They worked together as a kind of unrehearsed circus team, with too many leaders and frequent missteps. Shahana complained that Bibi had pulled everything out of a kitchen cupboard. 'But I'm cleaning it,' said Bibi. 'But I just put everything in there,' moaned Shahana. Chanu chuckled and slapped his stomach. 'You think your mother has an easy job? How many times do I tell you to help your mother? It's not easy. Not easy at all.' He ate slices of bread spread with ghur and saw no necessity for a plate. Nazneen swept around him.
'Razia came to see you,' he told her. 'Do you remember? I think you spoke one or two words to her, though you would not speak to me.' He smiled to show her there was no accusation involved.
She did not remember.
'Yes, she came,' he continued. 'Not a respectable type, you could not call her that. But she is genuine in her affection.'
Nazneen went on with her cleaning. In these activities, the scraping and scouring and sweeping and washing, within their sweet-dull void she found the kind of refuge she had – the night before – sought and lost in the Qur'an. Razia looked in on her and Nazma came with Sorupa and fed her with choice morsels of gossip that passed through her undigested. A day slipped by in this way and at night she slept a dreamless sleep.
As she cleaned the bathroom the next day, Nazneen thought of Hasina. Fate, it seemed, had turned Hasina's life around and around, tossed and twisted it like a baby rat, naked and blind, in the jaws of a dog. And yet Hasina did not see it. She examined the bite marks on her body, and for each one she held herself accountable. This is where I savaged myself, here and here and here.
She dusted off the sewing machine and settled down to work. Chanu, who seemed to have slipped out of the work habit, fussed around.
'She must not overdo it,' he said. Whenever he wanted to emphasize her fragility, he put her at this linguistic remove.
'She will not overdo it,' muttered Nazneen. I've already overdone it, she thought to herself.
'She is still under doctor's orders.'
Whatever I have done is done. This thought came to her, as fresh and stunning as the greatest of scientific breakthroughs, or ecstatic revelations.
'She is supposed to be taking bed rest.'
Now I have earned myself a place in hell for all eternity. That much is settled. At least it is settled.
'Her husband also recommends it.'
A degree or two hotter, a year or two more or less. What does it matter?
'She really ought to listen to him.'
Good. That's it, then. That is it.
'She doesn't seem to be listening.'
'Oh, she is,' said Nazneen, 'she's listening. But she is not obeying.'
Chanu smiled expectantly, waiting for the joke to be explained. The smile lingered a while around his lips, while his eyes scanned her face and then the room, looking for clues, for changes. 'All right then,' he said, after a while. 'I have some reading to do. Shahana! Bibi! Quick. Who is going to turn the pages for me?'
It was an August afternoon, warm and sunless. The estate seemed muffled by the thick grey sky, dense as a blanket. Nazneen looked out and up and watched as an aeroplane smeared the grey with white and disappeared behind a coagulation of buildings. She had come to London on an aeroplane, but she could not remember the journey. All she remembered now was being given breakfast, a bowl of cornflakes which had broken some sort of threshold and released a serving of tears. She had borne everything but this strange breakfast. Chanu, she remembered, seemed to understand. He took the bowl and hid it somewhere and promised her this and promised her that and made so many promises that she had to beg him to stop.
That was a long time ago, when she took such things too seriously. She looked over at the old flat in Seasalter House and saw that the window was filled with potted plants. She should have bought plants and tended and loved them. All those years ago she should have bought seeds. She should have sewn new covers for the sofa and the armchairs. She should have thrown away the wardrobe, or at least painted it. She should have plastered the wall and painted that too. She should have put Chanu's certificates on the wall. But she had left everything undone.
For so many years, all the permanent fixtures of her life had felt so temporary. There was no reason to change anything, no time to grow anything. And now, somehow, it felt too late.
She looked across at the brickwork, flaking beneath the windowsill, black within the cracks like dirt caught beneath fingernails. She had spent nearly half her life here and she wondered if she would die here as well.
Into her reverie broke the sound of knocking at the door. Before she even opened it she knew it would be him, knew the way that he knocked with gentle impatience. Karim had a bale of jeans over his shoulder, tied together with thick cord. He set it down on the floor and folded his arms. They did not speak but regarded each other with caution, each wondering who would offer an explanation and what would be explained.
Looking became unbearable and, as if by mutual agreement, both lowered their eyes. Nazneen breathed air that was choked with things unsaid, their suspense caught in molecules like drops of condensation. She was aware of her body, as though just now she had come to inhabit it for the first time and it was both strange and wonderful to have this new and physical expression. A pulse behind her ear. A needle of excitement down her thigh. Inside her stomach, a deep and desperate hunger.
She did not know who moved first or how but they were in the bedroom and locked together so close that even air could not come between them. She bit his ear. She bit his lip and tasted blood. He pushed her onto the bed and tore at her blouse and pushed the skirt of her sari around her waist. Still dressed, she was more than naked. The times when she had lain naked beneath the sheets belonged to another, saintly era. She helped him undress. She felt it now: there was nothing she would not do. She drew him in, not with passion but with ferocity as if it were possible to lose and win all in this one act. He held a hand across her throat and she wanted everything: to vanish inside the heat like a drop of dew, to feel his hand press down and extinguish her, to hear Chanu come in and see what she was, his wife.
Karim lay on his back with his arms behind his head. Nazneen did not move, her limbs strewn around like the result of a traffic accident. She lay and waited for disgust to stalk its way over and into her. But nothing came. Only the warmth of his body radiating into hers. She had begun to drift into sleep when Karim turned on his side and started to talk. He uttered caresses, whispered promises, moaned and mumbled hi
s love, sweet with the stupidity of youth, humbled by his stutter. She got up and went to wash and rinsed away his words.
Later, he sat on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table while she worked. There was a hole in his sock and a big toe poked out of it. Nazneen tried not to see this. She brought him a glass of water. She brought him some dates. All the time she tried to keep her eyes away from the white socks with the grey bits at the heel and ball and the extra hole.
A couple of times he punched numbers into his mobile phone but there seemed to be no one to speak to. He stretched his arms and fidgeted. 'Got to get things going,' he said, to nobody in particular.
Nazneen worked on her zips. If he asked her, she would tell him everything – about her illness, about the impossibility of continuing – and then they would talk, and out of the talking would come an ending.
'You angry with me?'
She looked up, to check he was not speaking into his phone.
'Are you angry because I haven't been here for a while?'
'No.'
He smiled. 'OK, I can see that you're angry.' He seemed amused. 'I've been away, up to Bradford to see some family.'
'I am not angry.'
'I'll make it up to you.'
Suddenly, she was furious. 'Why do you not believe me when I tell you I am not angry?' She spoke in Bengali and she hissed the words.
He enjoyed the joke. 'I believe you, sister. I can see that you are happy.'
She did not answer and for several minutes she shoved silence at him. After a while she wanted something to say but nothing seemed suitable.
'Better go, man,' said Karim, and he took his feet off the table. He spoke lightly, as if they were just fooling around. 'Places to go, people to see.'
'No,' she said. 'Don't.'
'Things to do. Jeans to deliver.' But he didn't get up.
'The girls will be here tomorrow. And the next day.'
He paused a while. When he spoke again he had dropped the tone. 'Maybe it's, like, time I got to know them.'
She had wanted to talk and now she did not want to talk. She wanted things to go back to the way they were, not the old way but the new way: just two weeks ago, or ten minutes ago.
'Who did you see in Bradford?'
He shrugged, as if it were impossible to say. 'Family. Cousins and that.'
'How many cousins?'
He shrugged again. 'Loads.'
She worked on him, and it was not difficult to make him stay. He decided to use Chanu's computer. She wiped the dust off the screen. While he fiddled around with plugs and wires he began to talk about the Bengal Tigers.
'We've got to get things going again. Nobody bothers to turn up. It's pathetic.'
She ran a damp cloth over the keyboard. He was close enough to smell: limes and cloves and the lingering afterburn of sex, washed away but still there if you knew about it, like a removed stain.
'Everyone was coming, you shudda seen it,' he told Nazneen, as though she had not. 'Then – smack' – he clicked his fingers – 'all gone again.'
His beard had grown in. Even a beard could not hide how handsome he was. She remembered the meeting in the community hall at the edge of the estate, sitting below the stage, flaming inside her red sari, watching him pull the audience to his side, running home and waiting for him, knowing yet scarcely believing he would come. That was how she wanted him, like that, not with his feet on her coffee table and holes in his socks.
'When we were going to organize that march . . . different story.' He bent down and unravelled some wires.
'Make another one.'
'Lion Hearts were going to march against us. We were going to march against them. But they bottled it. They knew they were going to be outnumbered. We were going to hammer 'em.' He banged his head on the table coming up again, and rubbed it with his fist.
'Make another march. Why you have to do it against someone?'
He looked at her and transferred his fist to his beard and rubbed that as well. 'It don't work like that.'
'Why not?'
'You can't march for no reason. That's like – like just walking around, man.'
She grew stubborn. 'Why?'
He looked her slowly up and down, as if she might be an impostor. 'Because,' he said with quiet emphasis, 'it is.'
'You want people to come back in the group?'
'Bengal Tigers is dying out. We need new blood.' He pressed a button on the keyboard and the computer made a whirring noise, like insects at nightfall. He sat down and pressed more buttons.
'Make it into a celebration,' she said. 'People always come out for a celebration. Some singing, some dancing.'
'What, like a mela?' He looked round at her, and gave her the kind of smile that substituted for a pat on the head.
'Yes,' she insisted. 'Like that.'
He was absorbed in the screen and she could not say any more. She stood by his shoulder and demanded his attention silently. After a few minutes he spoke again without turning his head.
'You know, it could be like a mela.'
'Oh, but do you think so?' said Nazneen.
'It don't have to be a negative thing. It can be positive.'
'Well,' said Nazneen, 'if you say so.'
Karim spent an hour or so in front of the computer screen and Nazneen blunted two needles on the zips. From time to time it occurred to her that Chanu, who had gone back to the taxi-driving early in the morning, might arrive home and find them in this compromising domesticity. The thought of it left her indifferent. He comes, he doesn't come, she said to herself. By this attitude, she was vaguely shocked and nearly thrilled for it seemed at once wanton and sublime, the first real stoicism she had shown to the course of her fate.
'What are you looking at?'
'Day in the life of a typical Bangladeshi village.'
She got up and looked over his shoulder at a picture of a bullock cart and driver, both animal and man jutting bones like rude gestures.
'When was the last time you went there?'
'N-no,' he said, and his stammer grew worse than ever. 'Never been there.'
She went out to the kitchen and made tea. Somehow, she felt sorry, as if she had asked casually after a relative, not knowing that he had died.
When she returned the picture had disappeared and the screen was filled with English text. 'What's this?' she said, and was surprised at how she sounded, almost as though she had a right to know.
'Hadith of the day, on an Islamic web site.'
'Go on – what does it say?'
He read in English. 'On the authority of Abu Hurairah (may Allah be pleased with him) who reported that Allah's Messenger (may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) had said: A man's share of adultery is destined by Allah. He will never escape such destiny. The adultery of the eye is the look, the adultery of the ears is listening to voluptuous talk, the adultery of the tongue is licentious speech, the adultery of the hand is beating others harshly, and the adultery of the feet is to walk to the place where he intends to commit sins. The heart yearns and desires for such vicious deeds. The loins may or may not put such vicious deeds into effect.'
After the first few lines Nazneen heard only the blood in her ears. She watched Karim as a mouse watches a cat; when he turned she would be ready.
'Lot of good stuff on here, sister.' Karim did not even look at her. His voice was unchanged. What form was this punishment to take? Was she to believe that he had found this hadith at random?
'An Islamic education – open to everyone.' He worked the mouse and kept looking at the screen. Even if he had chanced upon it, what then?
'The Islamic Way of Eating, or Sleeping the Islamic Way.' He looked at her now, and she saw that nothing had changed. 'Which you want to hear first?'
'It's time for you to go,' she said, and she took his tea back to the kitchen and poured it away.
All around the Dogwood Estate posters began to appear, drawn in red and green felt-tip pen and attached like some late-f
lowering blossom to the lampposts and litter bins. Shahana brought one home.
'Can we go?' She delivered this like an ultimatum. 'Everyone's going,' she added, and managed to sound as if she was already sick of explaining.
Chanu took the piece of paper from her hand. 'What is this rubbish?'
Shahana blew up at her fringe. 'Everyone's going.'
'Bengal Tigers,' said Chanu, and chewed it over.
'And Bengal Cubs.'
'You see, I think I remember this name.' He put his head this way and that, trying to roll a memory out of the corner of his brain.
'They're organizing a festival. Everyone who wants to help has to turn up next Monday.'
Chanu remembered. 'Those idiots who were putting the leaflets through my door.' He cleared his throat and folded his arms on top of his stomach. 'In this society—'
'Can we go or not?'
'Bibi,' shouted Chanu, 'tell the little memsahib that she is going to get beaten to a bloody pulp. Body parts will not be identifiable.'
'It's not fair,' shouted Shahana.
Bibi, who was standing near the doorway, slipped out of the room.
'Nothing will be left,' screamed Chanu, 'only a little bit of bone.'
Nazneen stood between her husband and her daughter. 'I say she can go,' she said, but as they were both shouting she could not be heard. 'I say she can go,' she yelled. They were silent and shocked, as if she had ripped out their tongues. 'And Shahana, show respect to your father.'
'Yes, Amma,' said Shahana.
'And you,' she told Chanu, 'should be careful what you say to such a small girl.'
Chanu's mouth worked silently. 'That is true,' he managed, after a few moments. Father and daughter looked at each other, caught in a conspiracy. The conspiracy transpired to be one of amusement. They smiled and fought against laughter. Neither of them looked at Nazneen. Then Chanu winked at Shahana and said, 'We must remember, she has not been well.'
'Amma,' said Shahana, still avoiding her eye. 'Would you like to sit down?'
'I will sit down,' Nazneen told her. 'And shouldn't you be spending some time with your schoolbooks?'
Chanu wobbled his cheeks and made some restrained hand gestures to Shahana. Better escape from this madwoman while there is still a chance.