Watched

by Marina Budhos

  In Dhaka, we lived in an apartment on the sixth floor, looking out on a rubbled lot where they were supposed to build more. In those days, just around the time Amma needed to pull the curtains shut from the midday glare, he arrived for his rice and vegetables, which my mother would set out on the plastic tablecloth. I would play at their feet while they talked; before Abba left, he’d lift me onto his lap and they’d laugh. Naeem. Butter boy. I can eat you up, he’d say, nuzzling my hair, my neck, until I ran, squealing.

  Sometimes he came back and took us for walks, when the streets grew violet-quiet and everyone was scurrying back into their homes, and you could hear the propane tanks humming. Always my mother was so tired and gaunt—she used to cough into the end of her sari—and I remember after a while she did not go for those walks. More often, Abba came home from work early, holding a white paper bag stapled at the top, and then he would go into their bedroom where she lay resting, with her thin wrist across her eyes.

  And then my amma was gone. I was five; I remember people, so many people in the flat, and I would move around the forest of their legs. My abba told me that for weeks I walked around the rooms, pressing my palm to doors, poking my head in our tiny rooms, calling for her.

  “Amma?” I would cry. “Where are you?”

  I climbed up on the sill, stared out at the empty street, sure I would see her stepping off a bicycle rickshaw, her round face lifting to me. Sometimes I squatted by the kitchen sink to look, puzzled, into the dank cave of pipes.

  But she was not there.

  And so I was left remembering only a few things about my mother: how her thin wrists settled on the top of my head. How she sang to me in my bath, when she poured the warm water, sleeked my hair down like a wriggling snake. None of this Auntie and Uncle did for me, when I went to live with them. They were not bad people. But they did not sing. Uncle was old; he kept his teeth in a glass at night. Auntie’s feet were so dry they rasped like insects. Auntie and Uncle just waited. For the mail from America, with news of the next money transfer. For the news of my father’s remarriage, to Munna, the girl they had found for him through Auntie’s cousins in Elmhurst. And for the green card, so he could send for me.

  Now I was seven. Still Before-Naeem. Still so good, in my school shorts and blue shirt, my smudged-ash knees that knocked together when a grown-up spoke. Uncle would bring me to his friends and he’d thrust me forward into their circle. Listen to him! he would boast proudly. Father sends money so you go to English school. Show them what they’ve taught you!

  I shut my eyes, the sounds thrumming inside me. How do you do, sir? I said slowly, searching for each word. I am from Bangladesh, sir!

  Uncle and his friends would enjoy this, their laughter tucking into their bellies. Not bad. Soon you’ll be in America with your family! Maybe on TV someday and we watch you!

  Every Sunday, Uncle and Auntie and I would crouch over the computer Abba had paid for and Skype. His face floated up murky, and only once did I see my stepmother, Munna, before she moved off the edge of the screen. She looked shy, young. Soon, Abba kept telling me. You will join us soon. I promise. But one year passed, and another and another. First there was the delay with the visa. Then a baby was born—Zahir, my half brother. They were saving to take over a shop through a friend of a friend, in Jackson Heights. Munna is overwhelmed, Abba explained. Next year.

  Instead Abba sent me postcards, of New York City, the Manhattan skyline, its buildings wedged against each other. “Manhattan, yes, it is very tight,” he explained during our calls. “Streets are narrow, like Dhaka. But then you go to other places. So much space! One day I drive with my boss on a highway and I fall asleep for hours and still there is more highway!” I begged him to send me more cards, and so they arrived, showing places he’d never been to: the Grand Canyon, Yankee Stadium, the craggy Rockies.

  Once he sent a big package of books that he’d found in a Dumpster at a house in Brooklyn where he was working on a renovation. They throw away all the time here, he wrote. So much waste in this country! Inside were glossy, flat books with colorful pictures I liked to flip through. My favorite book was about the planets—stapled into the center was a foldout poster I taped to my wall. At night the planets glowed blue, silver. I’d stare at the rings around Saturn, practice my English, feel the hum of vowels on my tongue. In those days I was patient. I stayed calm. I knew one day, I too would be pitched far away, to a new continent, a new universe. Or tucked into a silvery building, high up, where my new family could begin.

  —

  I was eleven when I finally touched down on the ramp, my eyes sliding easy over the signs at JFK: INTERNATIONAL ARRIVALS. BAGGAGE. NON-U.S. RESIDENTS. I could barely sleep on the flight over; I was too excited. I didn’t know that the blanket sealed in plastic was for me, or even the meal that came rattling on a cart on a plastic tray. I thought you had to buy everything, and I had no money. Until the lady next to me leaned over and whispered, Your mother wouldn’t be happy if you don’t touch your food.

  When I got off the plane, I squared my narrow shoulders. I was brave. I knew what passport line to stand in. The man there, his name tag said Hernandez, and I tested it in my mouth. I liked how the z buzzed against my teeth.

  “Not bad.” He grinned. “You’ll do well here, man.” He knew I was Before-Naeem. Nice boy, reunited with his father.

  What happened?

  Was it the fright when I did see Abba—not in a photo, not on a hazy Skype screen—when I saw his sloping shoulders and thin gray hair, and that young girl beside him? She looked like my sister! In a purple shalwar kameez, a curly-haired boy hiked to her hip, waving frantically at me, as if they knew me. My heart shrank to a cold fruit pit. I did not know these people. I did not know the true sound of my father’s voice. The way his head did a shaky tilt to the right when he spoke. How he drove funny: one hand each at the bottom of the steering wheel, so the car jerked forward on the Van Wyck Expressway. He was a terrible driver, which made me ashamed.

  At night, I lay in my new bed, under crisp sheets decorated with rocket ships, and tried to memorize pieces of him. I heard his gargle-cough through the thin wall. Then my stepmother murmuring as she massaged the small of his back—a bulging disc, the doctor had said. I tried and tried to make the pieces hold. But still he was not mine. We were not a family. Not really.

  And then one night I heard a sound. Feet padding on the floor from across the room. It was my little brother, who had gotten out of his own bed and was standing over me. His eyes shone like buttons in the dark.

  “Bhayia?” Zahir whispered. Brother.

  He reached out and pressed a finger into my cheek, hard. As if to see if I was real. I smiled in the dark. Then he climbed back into bed. Ever since then, it’s as if I can always feel the indent of his finger in my skin.

  —

  A month, a year, middle school, slid by. I learned the rhythms of Elmhurst and Corona and Jackson Heights. I was fast, too fast, in all the wrong ways. I was snapping slang out of my mouth, easy. I knew how to twist away from the teachers, how to use my backpack like a shield. I went to a nearby middle school and hung with a bottom-feeder crowd, the ones who put firecrackers in garbage cans and ran away. The ones who slouched in the back of class, forgot their algebra books, their marked-up essays.

  Whenever the work got hard—when I landed in a tangle of questions I couldn’t answer—I gave up. My stepmother tried to help me with my homework, pushing her finger down the page.

  “It’s boring!” I protested.

  “Sometimes. But once you do the little things, it all starts to add up. Like here, just go over the verbs again—”

  “No.” I twisted away, tears swimming in my eyes. It was embarrassing, being tutored by my stepmother, who was only ten years older than me. Up close, I saw the mole at the side of her mouth. Her face is very round, like a pan, with a spray of freckles across her almond skin.

  “Naeem,” she urged. “You have to study. There’s no other way.�
��

  “I’m fine, Amma. It’ll work out. Really.”

  Sometimes they’d call Abba to school and he would stare at his shoes the whole time. “Do you want a translator?” the counselor would ask.

  “No,” he said at one of those meetings. As always, he kept his gaze on his shoes. I noticed a hole in the seam of one, which made me flush, angry.

  After, on the way back home, Abba kept his head bowed. “Jotha shaddo koro. Do your best” is all he could say as he shuffled into his bedroom. “Don’t make trouble.”

  In his eyes I could see that he didn’t know what to do with me. And I didn’t know what to do with him. We had no words for who we were. Who we were becoming.

  —

  Near?

  The text dings just as I’m at the bottom of the subway stairs. Up ahead, the noise and rush of Queens Boulevard.

  There was one thing that Abba was right about: I love Queens. I love its smells, its layout. Maybe because it’s so big and prairie-flat, that wild moody sky overhead. The blocks start to spread, stretching to all these other neighborhoods—Corona, Woodside, Flushing, Bayside. On and on the borough stretches. Northern Boulevard, past the frayed silver flags of the car dealers, the jagged skyline of Manhattan rises like some wrecked and far-off city, a jagged Kryptonite kingdom, comic-book surreal. All around, a shredded violet light, the sun’s rays bouncing off the slow-moving bumpers. You can slide and dream in a landscape like this.

  By eighth grade I learned to move fast. I could feel the energy thrumming electric in my veins. Like that broiling July day, everyone twitchy with heat, when me and my friend Jamal crashed the playground kiddie area. We knew we weren’t wanted. There’s a big sign on the kiddie fence that says ALL CHILDREN MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT. We didn’t care. Those sprinklers were streaming fans of cool water. The pavement glinted, hurt our eyes. As we loped through the gate, I saw the mothers tighten their hands on the stroller handles. We goofed around, splashing each other, until our T-shirts and shorts were totally soaked. I saw myself through the mothers’ eyes: Clumsy, too big. Trouble.

  I began to change my look. No one thought I was Bangladeshi anyway. Some of the guys on the street called me Niño instead of Naeem. My jeans pooled around my sneakers; I had a new hiked-up bounce in my walk. One summer I kissed Renata by the empanada truck her uncle drove. Her brothers saw—Dominican guys with serious thick necks—but I was faster than them both; my orange-tipped Adidas flew me, hard, over the fence.

  Niño, we’ll get you.

  They never did.

  I was out of there, shaking myself loose. I didn’t care where I went; I just knew that I had to keep moving. My earphones jammed in my ears, a few dollars in my pocket, and I swung myself up the elevated train stairs. Or I hopped a bus. I borrowed my little brother’s beat-up bike and swung it down Roosevelt Avenue, pumped my knees till they burned, just like the Salvadoran delivery guys with the huge chains looped around their seats. I knew a lot of neighborhoods. Sunnyside, Elmhurst, Flushing, even down all the way to Richmond Hill, where I kissed a Guyanese girl under a basketball hoop.

  I kept running. I was fly: winged high-tops, arrow-elbows. It’s as if I were still five, pressing my palm against doors, trying to find that lost part of me somewhere.

  —

  Up the stairs, bumping past shoppers streaming down. My elbows flinch as I spot a burly security guard near the entrance. A part of me doesn’t blame him for eyeing me. By high school I was doing stupid things. I went to a local high; the first two periods before homeroom could be wiped off your attendance, so I learned to dawdle a few corners away from school with my crew of guys.

  I hopped a turnstile. Swiped gum, candy. My fingers twitched. That expensive silver-etched pen? It twirled into my pocket at the Staples store, I swear I don’t know how. The lady took me by the elbow, steered me to a back room stacked high with cartons of printer cartridges. She wore a red polo shirt and tan pants, like all the employees. Her name tag said Hi, I’m Donna! She looked not much older than me.

  “You realize we can have you arrested?” she asked.

  “For a pen?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Um, yeah!”

  “Oh.” So much for thinking I might ask for a job here. Mostly I felt stupid.

  The next time it was a calculator. Calling to me at the Best Buy store. Beckoning, twinkling, with its padded buttons. All the fancy functions. I’d seen other kids swipe stuff now and then.

  They called the cops this time. While I waited in a back room, I heard the scratch of the walkie-talkie in the hall outside. Their shoulders bumping against the wall. They were big, like football players, grinning as if they’d just scored a touchdown.

  I shook so hard. It was the only time I’ve cried in front of strangers.

  “You’re a good kid,” one of the cops said. He had a little sleek black device fastened to his belt. “You did a damn idiot thing.”

  I gulped down the spit lump in my throat.

  “I messed up too when I was your age,” the other one said. He stood with his legs apart, hands latched to his belt. He reminded me of the passport man, Hernandez. The one who saw me Before. Who knew I was good.

  I mumbled, “Yes, please, sir. I am so sorry, sir.”

  They left me with a warning, nothing more. My name tapped into his little device.

  Ibrahim’s in the mall entrance, rocking back and forth on his shoes. Toe, heel, toe, heel. He does that a lot lately. Something’s jiggling loose in him.

  I met Ibrahim spring of junior year one night, trying to sneak into a bhangra club. A guy I knew in science class had told me how to get a fake ID. Thought I’d give it a try. I’d never done anything like that; I stood in line, anxious, turning the plastic card in my palm, watching those NYU desi girls with their sleek black hair swishing past. They are mermaids, those girls, all spangle and glitter and haughty looks. I ache for them something awful.

  The bouncer took one look at the card. His gold chain jiggled on his fat wrist.

  “Don’t insult me.”

  He didn’t even give it back.

  Behind me I heard a laugh. Then someone came twisting out the shadows. He was sucking down a Coke, tossed it to the curb. The metal scraped.

  “Don’t litter,” I told him.

  “Don’t fake it.”

  We grinned at each other, as if recognizing a cousin, an old friend. This guy was skinny, too skinny, his black jeans held up around his hips with a leather belt. His chest was scooped hollow. And he had a few pimples by his jaw, like a regular teenager. Shaving rash, he told me later, but I liked him better, thinking he was goofy-young like me, still dabbing on Clearasil.

  “I know of a party,” he said. “Not far from here. My cousin’s place. You can dance there too.”

  “Where?”

  “Elmhurst.”

  “How do we get there?”

  He shrugged again, pointed to a car. It was a taxi, a bona fide medallion taxi. The yellow pooled on the hood, almost blinded.

  “You a driver?” I asked as I slid inside. I noticed a tiny Pakistani flag dangling from the rearview mirror.

  “My dad’s. He owns a fleet of them.”

  “For real?”

  “Sure.”

  I knew it wasn’t true. But I liked him for saying such a crazy thing, seeing if it would fly. This guy showed imagination, guts. That night we didn’t even go to a party. We just drove around and talked.

  Ibrahim began to pick me up after school. Before, when classes let out, my friend Jamal and our crew would hang on the corner until we had to go home or help our families. We’d waste time teasing the cute-hipped girls coming down the block, or go to the mall.

  Then Ibrahim came driving right up to the corner, elbow over his door.

  And he fed me all kinds of ideas. We’d park in one of the lots at Flushing Meadows Park, stare out at the lake. Ibrahim lit some weed, smoke curling sweet in our lungs, and we talked about all we could do. Acting. How I was going to
model or go to California, audition for a reality show. How he had a friend who was a music producer.

  “Yo, Ibrahim,” I’d say. “You’re spending too much time online. Get your head out of there.”

  But Ibrahim was always in his head. ’Cause everything to Ibrahim was a great, unfurling possibility: Gucci and Apple stores and pretty girls and sleek office buildings. Sometimes we’d walk the streets of Manhattan, Ibrahim leading the way. I saw everything through his hungry eyes. The doormen with their gold-tasseled uniforms, women with their long legs emerging from taxis. We weren’t on the outside. We weren’t two kids in scuffed sneakers standing on a curb, watching rich people go into clubs, blue beams slanting on the pavement. Because of him, I began to feel that the city could be mine.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ibrahim assured me, when my grades began to dip senior year and I was put on academic probation. “What about Bill Gates? He never finished college.”

  Yeah, right. He never finished Harvard.

  Now, in the mall, Ibrahim seizes my arm. “You’re late,” he chides. “And we have a lot to do.”

  “We?” I shake him off. I don’t like how he looks. Sallow. His pupils thin as filaments. Today he’s dressed pretty nice, jeans creased, white oxford, open at the neck, a blue blazer, shiny loafers with no socks.

  “I gotta buy a suit.”

  “A suit?”

  He grins. “Interview.”

  I nod. Right. Like the McKinsey interview he dreamed up a few weeks ago. Said it was a summer internship, in the bag. When I asked about it later, at a taxi driver joint in the city, he dipped his kathi roll in chutney, crinkled his brow, and said, “It wasn’t for me.”