She recalled vague memories of her mother lining her eyes with kohl to stave off the evil eye; standing on her father’s feet while he ran like a madman through the house. She had a fleeting sensation—being enveloped in her mother’s arms, lost in her dry hennaed tresses.
As quickly as it came, it was gone.
5
Weekends are no fun anymore, thought Anwar. He wandered from the bedroom and hesitated to knock on Charu’s door to see if she wanted some breakfast, even though it was noon. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he could poach an egg. Hashi had stopped making breakfast on weekends and holidays, since these were her busiest days. Today she was at work in the salon tending to a gaggle of bridesmaids. She’d been rather quiet in the morning, but Anwar didn’t probe her for the source of her discontent. Weekends were precious; he had the time to enjoy a home-cooked meal. He was hungry, angry, lonely, and tired—also known as HALT, something he’d picked up from a self-help book lingering in the bathroom a while back.
He preferred Hashi’s heavy sighs to conversation. Those sighs were indicators that required shamanic intuition to decipher. Sometimes they were related to slow business or joint pain; other times it was a forgotten Mother’s Day present or anniversary (they’d said “I do” on a telephone call, so the day didn’t quite stick in Anwar’s mind). He knew that she worried about Charu’s indiscretions, whether she’d done her duties as a mother and a Muslim. It affected their sex life. Even in sleep Hashi cocooned far away on the bed, and Anwar could hardly get a good cuddle. Sex was not something Anwar had ever fathomed talking about with their daughter, and he trusted that Charu had a strong will and plenty of smarts to be on the right side of trouble.
Anwar went to the bathroom to splash some water on his face, plus a spritz of his special rosewater tonic. Further discouraging was that in a couple of hours his brother, Aman, would arrive. His elder brother was the successful owner of three pharmacies, childhood tormentor of Anwar, and now, most recently, a divorcé. Anwar noticed a pile of hibiscus petals in the bathroom wastebasket. He removed the petals and set them into a small bowl he found under the sink. Dried hibiscus wasn’t the best choice for potpourri; it smelled musty, with a dash of tomato. His obsession with olfaction masked the smell of mud and shit from the garden. While he was oblivious to his own fishy odor, he used a surgical mask when setting mulch and manure for his plants. He spaced out in a squatting position, sniffing the petals.
“Baba, what are you doing?” Charu interrupted his meditation, pinched her bath towel tight across her chest. She wore that damned Tibetan bell around her neck. He cleared his throat, embarrassed. He wished that this middle stage in their relationship would hurry up and pass. He longed to be white-haired and holding a grandchild already.
“Charu, you look like a holy cow. I am thinking,” Anwar said. “What are you doing up oh so early? I worry about you making it to classes on time.”
“Aw, Baba, c’mon. I went to bed without dinner.”
“That was your choice.”
“Well, hurry up; Maya needs to use the bathroom, and I’ve got to shower,” said Charu.
“Maya?” Anwar hadn’t seen the girl behind Charu.
“Thank you, sir,” said the girl.
“Remember I said she’d stay over last night?” asked Charu. “Remember?”
Anwar suspected that anytime Charu said, Remember . . . I told you, most often he did not remember because she had never said a thing. He raised an eyebrow. “I pretend you are singing when you are lying. It is nice to meet you, Maya. A short, sweet, and powerful name.”
“My father’s a weirdo,” said Charu.
“I am not a weirdo.” Anwar gestured up to the ceiling. “Gods and demons conjure the world’s illusions with Maya—”
“I thought you don’t believe in gods or demons.”
“Good point. Shouldn’t you two be outside? Isn’t it summertime or something?”
“Where’s Ella?” Charu asked, winking at her friend. “Did she go into the room last night?”
“I was knocked out. I didn’t hear anything,” said Maya.
“Ella is home?” Anwar hopped up out of his squat, wincing at his strained knees. “Fantastic news!”
“Yeah, yeah, we know you’re all smiles now,” said Charu. “Bye!”
“Yes, bye. Now, hurry and shower so you can make us lunch.” He stood up and stroked Charu’s hair; a hibiscus petal crumbled in his hand. “Petals are everywhere today!”
He shooed the girls away. “Ella is home,” he said, smiling. There were two places she might be—her room, or the gardens. Like her uncle, she was a creature of habit.
Anwar walked downstairs and peeked into Ella’s bedroom—the bed was neatly made, sheets tucked under the mattress, pillow fluffed. He shook his head with admiration—if there was any proof she was an Anwar, not a Saleem, it was that neat streak. He turned in to the living room. The floor bumped with the sounds of music from Hashi’s salon. He continued on to the kitchen, which smelled like last night’s onions. His stomach growled.
Someone really needed to do something about lunch.
He took a quick peek through the kitchen’s sliding glass door. No sign of Ella. He decided to go upstairs to sulk in his studio.
* * *
On his way upstairs, he heard the vestibule door wiggling. Did Aman somehow have keys to the apartment? Anwar opened the door to let the struggling fool inside.
“Ah! Ramona Espinal,” he said. His tenant wore dandelion yellow scrubs, her face bright and symmetrical as a honeycomb.
“Hello, Anwar,” said Ramona, smiling. “How’s your Sunday?”
“Wife is busy, kids are nowhere to be found—typical. And yours?”
“Had an overnight birth at the hospital.”
“Wonderful color,” said Anwar. “All colors are good colors—I don’t have a favorite—but yellow suits—”
“Ha. Yes. This is my Comadrona Ramona jumpsuit. Need to do laundry.”
“Coma-what?”
“Midwife. Another word to add to your Spanish.”
“I will, La Enfermera,” said Anwar.
“Very good. I’m a nurse-midwife, so you will be even more precise.”
He’d learned the word for nurse, but here she was, throwing wrenches into his lessons. “Any plans for today?”
“I should do laundry at some point. I don’t want to disturb Hashi,” said Ramona, nodding toward the salon, where the washing machine and dryer were housed. “Sounds like a busy day. I’ll do a load later in the evening. I’m so tired. It’s time for a long bath.”
“Very good idea. I am right behind you,” he said, gesturing for her to go first up the stairs. “I mean, not for the bath; I just meant, for you it’s good, and I, too, am going upstairs—arré, never mind me, please.”
“I wrote a note to myself,” said Ramona, raising her palm to Anwar. PAY RENT, it read, in blue ballpoint pen. “If you don’t mind, I can write you a check now, before I pass out.”
Her apartment was a replica of the first floor, without access to the backyard. Walls painted in marigold and tourmaline evoked picturesque adobe haunts. Everything was messy, complicated, indulgent. A vintage Schwinn Le Tour, much like his first bicycle in America, leaned against the wall. It is the same weight as a third-grader; how does she carry this upstairs by herself? Some things never went out of style: a cartoonish plastic Polaroid 600 camera and a scattering of self-portraits shot one-handed, with rather uncreative titles scribbled with black Sharpie pen: Ramona at the park, Ramona in her scrubs, Ramona eating a hamburger. Anwar noticed the dictionary refrigerator magnets, and went over for a closer look. He mouthed the nonsensical strings of words:
rugged-mariner-betrothed-never
corrupt-curmudgeon-lover-escape
“No need to stand, Anwar,” said Ramona. “Please sit at the table.”
<
br /> He sat at the little table for two. Ms. Espinal wasn’t hosting a dinner party anytime soon—the table was littered with Mexican pesos; postcards from San Juan and Lagos; a tiny red, black, and green flag; coffee rings and a half-drunk bottle of red wine.
“Mal-bec,” he mouthed. He wanted to have a taste. He was a smoker these days, and hadn’t had a sip of wine since Charu was a young child.
Ramona pulled out a checkbook from the clutter and wrote, Eight hundred and fifty dollars and no cents. They could have easily charged a thousand or more for the location and condition of the apartment in their neighborhood, but he suspected the quality of the person went down as the rent went up.
“Here you are,” she said, tearing along the perforated line.
At that moment, the downstairs doorbell rang. Two seconds later, a loud pounding on the front door.
“Shit, it’s my brother,” said Anwar.
“Not the most patient dude, huh?”
“Definitely not.”
* * *
Anwar opened the front door. “You’ve got just one bag, bhai?”
“Well, I don’t plan on staying here forever,” said Aman. He stood wearing a long-sleeve button-down shirt and slacks—his uniform—though it was ninety degrees outside. Their features were distinguishable—Aman’s rounder and cherubic, Anwar’s wiry and mischievous. Only their mustaches made them look like brothers.
“You’ll be downstairs, here in the living room. It’s not much privacy, but that’s what we have,” said Anwar. “Besides, Ella lives on this floor, and she’s quiet as a librarian.”
“In my day, a younger brother would offer his own bed,” said Aman.
“We are three years apart.”
“Smells in here, man.”
“It does?”
“Perhaps it’s just the mess.”
“Brother, this is a living room, a room for living. You have all the amenities a man could ask for. This is an indecently comfortable corduroy sofa and reclining chair—directly staring at a big-screen television box affixed with surround sound. This carpet, woven by Turks, is lush enough to fill the spaces between your toes. Not in the mood for TV? Read anything on this coffee table: books, clothbound and colorful—Rand McNally’s 1979 edition of An Atlas of the World; A Beginner’s Book of Knots; and the last seven issues of Newsweek. Goodness, man, smell the fresh flower arrangements from our garden—”
Anwar paused. He wondered how his brother could condemn slovenliness when Aman himself was so remarkably offensive! He reeked of an indecipherable unpleasant odor. Anwar ascribed this to a criticizing nature tinged with the misery of irritable bowels.
“How are you feeling, bhai?”
“Like I’ve been struck by a train car. This is very hard.” Aman looked grayer, and softer, than Anwar had ever seen him. In fact, the man looked damned vulnerable. “I tell her that my business is what keeps our family together, alive. But Nidi is a stubborn woman.”
“She was so serene,” said Anwar. Aman had married a songstress, a woman of great classical training. He’d plucked her out of a crowd of young first-year girls at Eden College, back in Dhaka, pursuing her like mad, writing love letters and leaving roses in front of her dorm room. Instead of running from his obsession, Nidi ran headfirst into it, and now she’d had enough.
“Bah! Serene. The woman’s driven me mad over the years. Just as well.”
They heard a furious clanging bell from the kitchen.
“What the hell is that?” said Aman.
“Charu is announcing lunchtime.”
* * *
They found Charu and Maya setting the old elm wood dining table. Anwar marveled at the spread of plates: cinnamon and sugar French toast adorned with berries, scrambled eggs with greens straight from the garden. His mouth quivered. When had this happened? His daughter appeared thoroughly demure and Anwar loved this temporary shift in her character. Watching her quelled his annoyance at his brother’s negativo vibe.
As Charu garnished the French toast with powdered sugar, she reminded Anwar of his childhood maid Hawa. She had served him lunch with a tacit smile—she was young enough to be his sister, and their father raised her as lovingly as one would raise a servant, without trespassing the bounds of class—she was performing her duty; her performance gave her pleasure. With their mother dead after Anwar’s birth, they’d had a few girls take care of Aman and Anwar as babies. Hawa lasted longer than any others he could remember. But one day, she ran away and never returned. A few years later, Anwar had heard that Hawa was still alive, living in a different border town, Jaflong, in Sylhet. Their father had died soon after the girl’s departure, perhaps of a broken heart.
Anwar noticed his brother straighten a folded napkin fallen on its side, appraising the girls’ work, as if they were servers in a restaurant. He shook his head at Aman’s perpetual obsession with order. It struck Anwar how little a person changed in half a century. He imagined Nidi had grown tired of Aman, a mean-spirited curmudgeon at best. After twenty-plus years together, it was his unhealthy want for control. As a boy, Aman had been skinny, jaundiced, and bitter as a stalk of young sugarcane. He’d been a miniature adult as young as ten, adept at farming and raising chickens and goats, but also excelling in sports and studies. The person he cared to impress was their father, a self-absorbed anthropologist who was oblivious to the violent changes happening in their country. Aman assisted their father with small tasks, filing and chronologically labeling the artifacts. The elder Saleem encouraged his son to pursue studies in archaeology, but Aman dreamt of wealth. When it was evident the old man would die, Aman left Jessore forever to attend Dhaka University, and Anwar followed him to university in 1969, the year he first met Rezwan. While Aman became a pharmacist, Anwar found himself more and more entangled in the country’s politics. Aman kept his distance from Anwar, Rezwan, and their rabble-rousing comrades, keeping to his books and nursing his obsessive desire for Nidi.
As they neared middle age—Aman had turned fifty-five in early April; Anwar celebrated his fifty-second birthday in late April—Anwar realized that his brother’s troubled nature had not found peace with age. Those old rages lay dormant inside the unreachable parts of his heart.
“Anwar, you don’t care that she dresses like that?” said Aman, glancing at Charu.
“I think she looks quite nice,” said Anwar. He looked over Charu’s dress. She revealed just her shoulders and slim calves. Everything else worth covering seemed to be covered.
“My darling, you should not dress this way at home,” said Aman, wagging a finger at Charu. “It’s not very—modest.”
“Well, I’m sure as hell not wearing this outside of my home,” said Charu.
“Be careful, brother. Girls are not easy,” Aman said. He smiled at Maya, who had not said a word, as she filled glasses of water.
“Now, now—Aman, it’s harmless. Besides, I don’t bite the hand that feeds me,” Anwar joked. Dealing with Aman required different levels of patience, ranging from the empathy of a masseur to the scorn of a correction officer. Anwar stood up and twirled Charu around, as if they were waltzing. As they twirled about, he noticed Charu’s friend Maya staring at them. Something genuine, something lost, about this girl. Her look touched him. Her eyes darted between Charu and Anwar, then away from Aman.
Anwar reached his arm to her and said, “May I have your hand, dear Maya?”
The girl looked at Charu, who sashayed aside and nudged her friend toward him. Maya swallowed a deep breath. Her fingers were cool and trembling—perhaps from cutting vegetables, or maybe it was her natural condition; Anwar didn’t know—but he steadied the child with his own warm hands. She veiled herself in hijab. She was plain at first, but was fresh-faced and unmarred, a graceful bend in her nose, eyes brown as coffee grounds—
Maya flinched as he swung her once around.
“Don’t be afra
id, child. My brother has a pagan’s heart.” Aman shook his head.
“I’m not afraid,” said Maya.
Anwar felt dizzy and certain he’d lightened the young girl’s mood—he so missed the days when happiness was effortless.
“Arré! I remember you from the masjid, a few Fridays ago,” said Aman, snapping his fingers. “You . . . you are the daughter of Sallah S., no?”
The girl clenched Anwar’s fingers, and then let them go. Sallah S.? The owner of A Holy Bookstore?
Maya did not answer Aman. She glanced at Charu.
“Where the fuck is Ma and Ella?”
“Charu!” Anwar scolded her along with his brother, and stopped himself, surprised at their unison more than Charu’s vulgarity.
“What a household you run here, Anwar,” said Aman. He sighed and sat down at the table, leaning back as if waiting to be served. “Learn a thing from your friend, Charu.”
Anwar cleared his throat to admonish Charu further. Before he could say a word, he heard footsteps in the living room. Hashi’s strut was aggressive, but then he heard another. Anwar stopped to listen. There was something extraordinary about Ella’s gait, a distinctive poise and purpose.
“My god,” Anwar whispered. He did not hear Charu’s expletives of disbelief.
Ella, at six feet, was a couple of inches taller than her parents, who had been gargantuan by Bangladeshi standards. Her messy hair was gone—instead, she had a short hairdo, manly yet much more suited to her. She emanated the same reckless sensuality and cleverness that her father had possessed. Anwar was beside himself with a strange pride. It was in that moment he decided that one day, everything he had would belong to her. She was not a son, but she was the closest thing he had to one. Ella could preserve this prosperous and fertile house he had built.
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