Just then, the doorbell rang.
“It’s the pizza,” said Anwar.
No one moved to answer the door, transfixed by Hashi’s outburst.
“Charu, please,” said Hashi. “All of you, go.”
“No . . .” started Charu, but she stopped as her father handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
“Keep the change,” joked Anwar. “Now, shoo! This is adult talk.”
Charu, Ella, and Maya left the room, feet lagging to answer the door.
“After what I have been through,” said Aman, his voice cracking. His eyes became watery, then narrowed.
“Maybe once was not enough for you to learn,” said Hashi.
“It is my birthday in two days. Never did I think you would throw me out.”
Hashi looked struck at that instant, by a thought that had just occurred to her. “Y-you are welcome to have a party and invite us,” she stuttered. “Excuse me.” She rushed past Anwar, upstairs.
“Ha. Well, I have very few articles.” Aman gestured to his suitcase, packed as if never opened, a small travel bag perched on top. “Call me a cab service, Anwar.”
Aman left without the promised slices. Anwar carried the pizza box upstairs to their bedroom.
“We can eat in bed?” asked Anwar, from the doorway. Hashi lay curled in bed, reading a passage from her Quran.
“Today we can.”
He lay with her on their multitude of pillows and nibbled at a slice of pizza. She closed her book and joined him. But their appetites had waned.
“Are you all right?”
“I . . . I realized that it’s Rezwan Bhai’s birthday,” said Hashi. “I had forgotten. Our brothers couldn’t have been more different. But their birthdays are so close. He would be fifty-two.”
Anwar shook his head. “I remembered late last night, and then forgot again. I forget that technically I was older than him. He always seemed so much older. He wasn’t a man for silly celebrations. I never remembered even back then.”
“This is true.” Hashi nuzzled Anwar’s shoulder with her cheek. He pulled away from her and sat up.
“Are you—upset with me?” asked Hashi.
“No, my love, no. You did what I couldn’t do.”
“Should I have sent Maya home?”
“You’re right; the girl is eighteen. It seems like she could use a place to get things in order.” Anwar paused. “You know there’s something to what you say.”
“What’s that?”
“That maybe I’ve had an inferiority complex.”
“That is because he has so much money. Which doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“It doesn’t.”
“You know, when we were younger, growing up in Jessore, I looked up to him.”
“I looked up to my brother as well—”
“I did that, too,” said Anwar. He fell quiet.
“Please talk to me.”
“We were two rail-thin boys with big mustaches. My father was a self-absorbed anthropologist, and a widower, oblivious to the world around him. Aman was Baba’s precocious assistant. But when Baba died, Aman left Jessore forever, and moved to Dhaka University. When he got to Dhaka he never wanted to know a damn thing about me, or Rezwan.”
“Rezwan Bhai never liked Aman.”
“Who could blame him? Before long, Aman was obsessed with Nidi, a lovely songbird. Aman sulked if another man so much as complimented her singing. I pity her for spending the best years of her life with a man like my brother.”
“Poor Nidi.”
“Aman has done terrible things,” whispered Anwar.
“What things?”
He looked down at his half-eaten pizza.
“Let the origins of her seams keep her steady,” he said.
“I don’t get you,” said Hashi.
“I have mentioned, of course, the servant girl, who lived with us as children, a girl named Hawa, yes?”
“She was your servant? I thought she went to school with you.”
“We were in school together until class five. My father hired her when her family could no longer afford the books to send her.”
“What does this have to do with Hawa?”
Anwar started to get off the bed. “Never mind, dear. I’ll be in my studio.”
“No. You will talk, Anwar.”
He removed the pizza box and rested it on the side table. He crept back into bed, this time under the covers, and held her body close to him. Her chest rose and fell, and in his own chest he felt a tightening. For so long he could not bear to trespass the walls he had built for her sake. “Much of my adulthood I have hated my brother. We two, born of the same mother and father, me being the reason my mother died. I’ve yearned to join my adopted brother, Rezwan my comrade, in the afterlife. I scan my memory for a glimpse of good in my brother.”
“It is hard to find.”
“Hawa hailed from the hills of Sylhet—”
“Near where we stayed? In Jaflong?”
“Yes. Thereabouts. In the Khasi village just beside the Piyain River. She stayed in her small room, fitted with a woven mat upon which she slept, prayed, dreamt.”
“A child with that name carries the burden of the world on her shoulders, na? The world’s first woman?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“What did she look like?”
“Not brown like me, or yellow brown like you, but honey skinned, cut from the Pahari fabric. Unfortunate thing for natives the world over: They appear as strangers, when in fact, they are the originals. Moonfaced-almond-eyed-narrow-hipped-Hawa from Sylhet.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen, like her.
“But Khasis in Jessore? I’ve never heard of such thing.”
“Her family had mixed origins. Her great-grandmother had married a Bengali from Jessore. The fellow worked in the Shillong government under the British, at the turn of the nineteenth century. He ran a few large plant nurseries in Jessore, and I’m sure some of the descendants still do.”
“You’ve always loved this sort of thing.”
“I do. But my brother’s a cold, saturnine fellow, with a heart of rock. I’ve never been like that. Our father had converted to Buddhism, a great source of shame for my brother. I rather loved it. Before he left for a trip to Pala to research idols on Moheshkhali Isle, he wanted me to build him a structure. A safekeeping place for his antique collection of lithic statues, ornaments, and coins from the Pala period. This structure resembled an igloo made of dirt and grass. I was outside, planting a small betel tree inside of it, a tree of life. This had practical use, since my father chewed paan like mad. I promised to make a home for the artifacts. When I had finished, I wanted to share my masterpiece with the one person who mattered—
“Hawa.”
“Yes. I tried to open her door, just a little room off to the side of our kitchen, but it was locked. When she came out to prepare our evening meal, she would not look at me, but her lip had swollen, and she did not speak. I saw Aman, laying inside the room, tying up his lungi, smoking a cigarette.”
“He—he took her?”
“To rape a girl after Friday jummah prayer is an unimaginable horror. It is hardly as simple as taking something.” Anwar paused and closed his eyes. “She ran away before dawn’s prayer, as we slept. The next morning, over the breakfast she had left on the table, Aman told me, never trust a tribal broad.”
“You didn’t say anything to him? Or me? What if he would’ve tried something with Charu? Or Ella?”
“No, I didn’t say anything. And yes, I should’ve said something.”
“You are younger than him. At that age the difference is pronounced. But I wish I’d known. I’d have kept him far from us. I never would have lived with him.”
<
br /> “At the time, perhaps I thought he might kill me. Did I know this evil was the first of dozens I would witness during the war? Was I any better at stopping those evils from happening?”
“Where did Hawa go? Did you ever try to find her?”
“Some said she traveled farther north than Sylhet, to India, disappeared into the mountains. To live on her own, in her ancestral forests, back to the origin of her seams.”
“Did you look for her when we lived in Sylhet?”
“I found you there. My wife of great talents and whims, my beloved brother Rezu’s little sister, parabola drawer, maker of smiles and frowns. You have blessed me with a darling daughter. I cannot have asked for a better outcome. But I am a man of simple desires with complex memories. I have never said any of these things aloud, nor will I, again. But I pray—”
Anwar paused. He had told Hashi the story as truthfully as possible. But it had exhausted him.
“Let the origin of her seams keep her steady.”
He realized that perhaps she understood him better than he knew.
* * *
Charu excused herself from Ella’s room, leaving her sister and Maya to the pizza. She’d lost her appetite. Aman had somehow seen her sneak out last night. But her parents hadn’t believed him. Would they pry further? Her mom had run out so suddenly, without acknowledging them as she flew up the stairs. What the fuck was happening?
All morning, Charu had been rocked with a sensation of dread. Last night she’d lost her virginity. In a motherfucking van. If her mother or father knew, it would sicken them. She hadn’t told Ella, sure that her sister would respond with something snide, judgmental; she didn’t seem to like Malik. Charu just wanted a hug for her latest move toward womanhood.
The constant lying took its toll on her. She caught herself in the vanity mirror on her desk, which stood right next to her sewing machine. Sometimes, while sewing, she just looked at the mirror, so as to not feel lonely. Did it look like she’d had sex? Had her face changed? Ma once mentioned that girls who were sexually active broke out in pimples from the hormones; indeed, Charu had a constellation of zits on her cheek, probably from putting her face on Malik’s chest. Maybe this was some Dorian Gray–type shit—the more she dived into the forbidden the more marked her face would become. Did other people tell their mothers about having sex? Heart-to-hearts and whatnot? Charu was still bleeding, and was pretty sure this was what happened after your first time. She hadn’t yet turned eighteen, and didn’t want to go to Planned Parenthood, in case she was ordered to tell her parents. People talked about how great Planned Parenthood was, but the prospect of going alone freaked Charu out. It was impossible to find the words with her parents to communicate her feelings with precision and honesty. She’d tried to explain this dilemma to Maya once, but Maya dismissed this as a common affliction for all teenagers. Muslim teenagers got a score of zero on a one-to-ten scale of being able to talk about sex with their folks. But Charu felt it had to do with language. She never could express her love or her sorrow in Bangla, the language of her parents. She had English for that. If she tried to say, “I want to explore a number of relationships before I’m ready to commit myself to one person entirely,” it was like screaming into a ravine.
Charu turned on her sewing machine and started working on a sundress pattern she’d found online. Zippers were a challenge. She preferred invisible zippers—if she messed up the stitching, who would know? She was so distracted, her sewing machine jammed. Malik hadn’t called her yet. Should she call him? She dialed his number and was met with his voice mail:
Hey yo. Leave a beautiful message.
Mustering up her best soft and husky tone, she said: “Malik. It’s Charu. Last night was the jam. Want to see you, soon. Lunch at Mike’s Diner, soon?”
The jam? What the hell is wrong with me? That was as smooth as my bumpy-ass face. She resisted the urge to immediately call him again.
“Charu! Ay, Charu!” She heard her father’s voice, sounding old and far away, as if he were calling her like she was a child.
“I’m coming,” she called back, her voice hoarse.
She found Anwar and Hashi, snuggled next to each other like two black-haired paintbrushes, side by side, a pizza box full of uneaten crusts beside them.
“Come here, baba,” said her father. “We just wanted to see you.” He patted the bed next to him.
Charu sat down, gingerly, but Anwar pulled her into his arms. Hashi rubbed her back. Charu buried her face into her father’s underarm.
“Baba, you stink!”
“Why are you crying? Hugs and stink are supposed to make you smile.”
“I—I guess . . . I’ll miss you guys,” she cried.
Charu remembered this curious feeling as a child around five or six. Ella would have therapy appointments, and for that hour, Charu, Anwar, and Hashi would go eat at Wendy’s, or she’d get a gift from one of the stores at Fulton Mall. On those days, she felt that she was their real daughter, that they three were a unit. Just Ma, Baba, and Charu, without the worry of whether or not Ella was okay. And, as she had back then, Charu quickly shook the thought out of her mind.
“You guess? I suppose that’s the best we can ask for!” joked Anwar.
12
July turned into August and the neighborhood grew hot with petty lootings and street brawls in the dead of morning. One such argument, regarding a stolen ten dollars, woke Anwar in the middle of the night. The scuffle was over as soon as it had begun—maybe the ten dollars had been sorted out, or maybe he’d dreamt the whole thing. He put an arm around Hashi, feeling a sudden chill take over him. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep all month, not since his brother had left the house, and when he’d admitted the secret of Hawa. He had assumed that this would relieve a terrible burden, which had clung to him for more than thirty years. By speaking the memory, he no longer had to feel a sense of duty to his brother, and even Hashi disavowed Aman. Have I wronged my brother? Anwar wondered. He had not heard a word from him.
Bic’s tale about the House of Bright had also unsettled him, and now, Anwar thought he heard a skittering in the vents. Spooked, he clutched Hashi even tighter. A sliver of moonlight cut across her face. The clock read five a.m. He felt like writing or smoking something. He opened the drawer of his nightstand for his quick-fix one hitter—just a drop of ganja would relax him—but he’d left the little pipe at the shop. He didn’t have the energy to climb up to his studio. He decided to write letters on the veranda instead.
* * *
The letters were for his children, to be read after his death. He realized that perhaps this meant they would lie unread for many years, but there were stories he wanted to tell his children, stories that he felt too embarrassed to utter aloud. The stories themselves were not embarrassing. But the act of telling them about the past, when he’d been in the company of his best friend, the handsome, rebellious Rezwan Anwar, this made him feel like a fool. Where had he ended up? A shopkeeper in Brooklyn, far away from the country he’d have once died for, just to see it born.
On the veranda, he lay back on one of the canvas lawn chairs. Hashi had purchased matching pairs for both the garden and the veranda, but the ones up here were rarely used; he preferred the privacy of the attic. Price tags—SUPER DUPER BLOWOUT SALE $15.99—still dangled off the armrests. He fiddled with the tag on his chair, but the plastic tie refused to be ripped off. He gave up, his fingers raw from pulling. He hovered over the paper, afraid of penning anything less than brilliant.
1971—In the Sylheti forest, Rezwan and I travel by night to ensure our safety. I have neither the stomach for killing nor the propensity for destruction as my dearest friend, but I watch, praying what I witness will not make me lose my mind.
He stopped writing. He didn’t have the stomach to write the story and he let the pen linger too long on the word mind. The inky mark bore a hole in the paper
. He set the papers and pen aside and decided to enjoy his lawn chairs. The air was sticky and it would be a hot day, the hottest yet. The sun still had not peeked out. He looked up, as the sky often held an answer to the moment. He watched the electric blue sky between the branches of the hibiscus trees. Then, he noticed Ella down below, swinging like a pendulum on the hammock, heavy with terrible loneliness. He had not had a decent conversation with her since the evening Aman Bhai left the house. She spoke little, kept busy in the garden. She’d be leaving for Cornell in a matter of weeks, and he wouldn’t see her again until Thanksgiving at the earliest. From where he stood, he saw the wonder of her green thumb upon his garden. White blossoms of different shapes and sizes glowed still in the dawn.
He wanted to comfort her now. He was tired of being so considerate of her solitude.
* * *
“Come with me to the apothecary today, child,” said Anwar, poking Ella’s shoulder. “Let your old uncle make you a special cup of coffee.”
“Well—”
“C’mon. We’ve hardly had a chance to talk properly since you’ve been home.”
“All right, Anwar. I’ll come.”
They walked back into the house through the sliding door. Ella sat down at the dining table, and Anwar began making his “special coffee.” He heated up a cup of skim milk (this skim-tim was Charu’s idea; everyone else liked 2 percent). Meanwhile, into mugs he measured one teaspoon of Folgers instant coffee and two teaspoons of sugar, with a splash of water. He stirred this mixture fast to make a paste, and then poured the warm milk into it.
“Here you are, dear.”
“Thanks.” Ella took a sip, and pursed her lips.
“Too hot?”
“It’s real sweet.”
“Well, you liked it as a child—”
“Charu did. I like it black.”
“Ah, well,” said Anwar, at a loss for what he should say. He swiped a couple of eggs from the refrigerator and poached them with a dash of salt and pepper. Ella ate her egg so hungrily that Anwar let her have his. He settled for a slice of toast. She raised an eyebrow at his liberal use of butter.
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