Watched

by Marina Budhos

  “Asalamu alaikum,” I greet her, moving near.

  “Alaikum asalam.” She’s all dressed up in a blue shalwar kamize, matching eye shadow on her lids. We sway there a few minutes, embarrassed, several feet between us. I can’t stay here too long, the two of us unaccompanied. Usually when we’re at the camp, we can use the excuse of gossiping about the kids, or telling the other to go fetch some more paper rolls and markers. Now the words sit in our throats.

  “These your sisters?”

  “My nieces.” She points to one of them, who is dressed in a magenta and yellow outfit. “She’s really smart. Takes after my sister-in-law.”

  For a brief instant, I wonder if Ishrat’s parents have already arranged a marriage for her. She’s my age, maybe even a year older. Though she told me she wants to finish her degree first. Go on to be a social worker. Why, I wonder, do I even care?

  “I saw you the other day. Talking to Noor. You’re really good with all the kids.”

  I feel a pinch of guilt. “Thanks.”

  “In group, what you get out of them. You don’t let them stay on the surface. You dig down to the hard feelings.”

  “It’s nothing.” I shrug. “Just some stuff I learned from acting.”

  “You going to do that acting class? The kids would love it.”

  “I guess.” I pause. “You know what happened to Noor?”

  She shrugs. “Her parents said they’d rather she stay home.”

  I remember how pale Noor became when I asked her about the website. I scared her off. “Are your parents like that?” I blurt out.

  Ishrat laughs, hugging her elbows to her chest. “You must be kidding. My mother? She was a singer in college and used to hang around the Alliance Française smoking cigarettes and talking cinema. Anything European was better.” She adds, “It was me who decided to cover my head.”

  “Really?”

  “In high school I decided. My parents, they didn’t care. Maybe even they’d rather I didn’t. Not to draw attention to myself.”

  “So why did you?”

  She stiffens, lifting her chin. “It’s not the same as it was for my parents. They belonged, back home. They could watch Bengali and French cinema and talk politics or skip a lecture or kiss in a park after dark. Basically everyone knew who they were. Middle-class kids, rebelling a little.

  “But us? Forget it. How can we ever feel like we belong when we’re treated like would-bes?” She tugs on the edge of her scarf. “I do this to let them know. It’s who I am. Take it or leave it, right?” She slaps her thighs, straightens. “Well. Now you know all about me.” I hear that trace of a Brooklyn accent curling her vowels—tough and hurt at the same time. It’s so familiar. We’ve all got that in us.

  For the first time I see how strong Ishrat is: her broad shoulders drawn back, an almost muscular fierceness beneath her dress. I never would have guessed her parents were once college sophisticates smoking cigarettes. But that’s what it’s like for us: we’re the little pots that got smashed up in our family’s journey over. We’ve got to pick up the pieces, with different accents, make ourselves new. Hope the cracks don’t show. I know I should go fetch my stepmother and brother, but it’s nice, just standing here under the branching shade. Ishrat’s nieces are weaving in and out of the trees, their colorful outfits like vivid flames, shaking their wrists so their glass bangles tinkle.

  She leans toward me. “Who’s that?”

  “Who?”

  “That guy.” She gives a little shake of her head. “That one. He’s staring at us.”

  Across a stretch of grass, under another stand of trees, is a thin figure. He’s holding his arms across his chest, cupping his elbows. Our eyes catch before he looks away. But the profile is familiar: light lashes stroking down on a pale cheek, uneven long nose. He’s wearing a maroon kurta over jeans. When he turns back, his face catches under the streetlamp: haggard, more gaunt than I remember.

  Ibrahim.

  A furious racket starts up in my chest. Ibrahim? The guy who left me standing by that pinball arcade of alarms, pink and blue shirts fanning out of my backpack? Who set my whole life in a different direction?

  “Ibrahim!” I call out.

  He drops his arms and starts moving away, stumbling a little on the tree roots.

  “Ibrahim, wait!” I half run, reach out, grab the tail of his shirt and tug. He twists around, surprised. We stare at each other. He looks different, his eyes two blots of shadow, his cheeks hollow. I’ve still got some shirt clumped in my fist.

  “Naeem.” Then he embraces me, patting me warmly. “Asalamu alaikum! How are you?”

  My jaw goes tense. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Around.”

  “I tried calling you—” I stop. All around, families are greeting one another, parents scooping up their children. No, I tell myself. It’s Eid. I can’t get angry here.

  “What happened to you?” I ask instead.

  Ibrahim leans closer and grasps both my shoulders. “I was not myself,” he whispers, and the whole time I can’t stop staring at his eyes: they are light-colored, darker at the edges. It gives him a sad, gentle look.

  “I did many things,” he repeats. “I wasn’t myself.”

  I can’t believe this: Ibrahim at prayers? Ibrahim’s been many things: Club boy. Wannabe business consultant. Manager for me. But never devout.

  “I’ll call you,” he whispers in my ear. Before I can say anything more, he’s slipped into the milling crowd. I’m so stunned I can’t move. Ishrat has come up beside me.

  “Who was that guy?” she asks.

  “A friend,” I say dully.

  “I get a weird vibe off him.”

  “Yeah,” I whisper. Still I don’t move. Cars honk; the crowd is moving thickly toward the street. It’s all I can do to watch the little girls spinning round and round the tree trunk, their ribboned braids a shiny blur.

  The phone dings, really late. A text message. I’m sprawled out on my bed, sleep-heavy from the big meal Amma made for Eid Ul-Fitr. Crabs again, and deep-fried peppers, and luchis, perfect bread ovals that pop with sweet steam. My favorite. I’m sure she made them for me. After, trays of sandesh, milk sweets, cut on a slant, layered with silver foil, trembling cups of milky chai. Friends came and went all through the day; we ate and drank until we could have no more. Now the living room is littered with steel tumblers and glass teacups smudged with fingerprints.

  Zahir is already asleep, curled shrimplike under his sheet. One of his presents was a big terry-cloth Spider-Man towel, and it’s draped over his covers. The apartment lies still: dishes scraped, cleaned, and stacked on the drainboard. Zahir’s new sneakers with fluorescent laces ready by the door.

  I figure it must be Taylor, though he rarely texts me at this hour. Disoriented, I pull the phone from my side table.

  The screen glows, showing an unfamiliar number. Sorry bout bf. Had to go.

  Who is this?

  A pause. The silver-blue rectangle flickers: Ibrahim.

  My hands start to twitch. Where are you??

  Busy.

  Meet?

  Soon. Inshallah. It will happen.

  Furious, I tap: When? Where? But the screen has gone blank. I flop back down on my bed. I keep seeing Ibrahim under the shadowy tree branches; I can feel his fingers tightly gripping my arms. I wasn’t myself, he’d whispered. His breath had been sour, his cheeks rough with a new beard. But I don’t believe this devout business. I’m sure he’s faking it, just like me. He has to be.

  Now I definitely can’t sleep; my mind pulses, anxious. Tossing off the sheet, I put on my jeans. Just as I’m slipping toward the door, I hear Zahir call out, “Where are you going?” His eyes are like tiny flashlight heads, combing the walls.

  “Out.”

  He’s up now, considering, his cheek tracked with creases, resting on an elbow. “Your job?”

  “No. Not now.” I wince. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’ve never really ex
plained to my family what I do, how it is I come home with clumps of money that I leave tucked between the salt and pepper shakers.

  “What’s your job?”

  “A friend of mine. His dad has an electronics shop. I help out.”

  “Can I come sometime?”

  I bend over and rumple his hair. “Someday, sure.”

  “What about Taslima-auntie? Do you work for her too?”

  I hesitate. Should I tell him the truth? “I help out there too. You know. Community stuff.”

  “Is that where you’re going now?”

  “No.” I feel a dry exasperation rising up in me. But this is the way Zahir is—he latches on to something and he won’t let go. He sits for hours poring over the charts of the Avengers, trying to figure out what happened when.

  I laugh, patting the sheet. “Go to sleep, Zahir. Give your brain a rest.”

  —

  Once outside, I head toward Seventy-Third Street, where the air is carnival-soft, melted pastel. People are out; cars move sluggishly on Roosevelt Avenue. Each store is a blazing lozenge of light, candy-bright. Strands of tiny blue bulbs wink in the tree branches. Young wives with their husbands, still out from celebrating, totter on strappy high heels, clutching their beaded purses. Some of the old men are sitting at the outdoor tables, chewing paan or nursing chai in paper cups. Everyone can feel it: how after the prayers, the fast, the relief lets go into the summer night.

  Only I can’t touch it. I’m whirring and confused, thinking of Ibrahim. What I felt before—me, a winged protector—has been peeled off. I’m brought back to my raw beginning: the evening at the mall, three lousy shirts in my backpack. The bleeping alarms. Taylor and Sanchez in a rain-smelling car, the bag of weed. How did I get here? Maybe it’s the long days of fasting and then eating too much today. No. It’s seeing Ibrahim under the shifting shadows of the leaves by the masjid.

  I bump through the crowds, lost. The old men, their hennaed beards and hair glaring like copper, don’t like me. They know I’m an outsider, a crack in the flawless glass of night. A family in a restaurant leans in to each other, laughing. Their eyes slide over me. They know. I used to be one of them.

  Someone taps me on the arm. “Hey.”

  I jerk backward. It’s Jamal with his poufed-out hair and braces. I can’t believe a kid who’s eighteen still has braces. He’s grinning wide. “Naeem!”

  “Hi,” I say feebly. I’m amazed that he’s being so nice to me. “How are you doing?”

  “Workin’ a lot at the store.”

  I wince, thinking about how I used him for my lie to my family about my job. I remember suddenly how the two of us used to save up coins we’d scoop from our parents’ bureaus and buy plastic water guns. Then we’d go to the little stretch of concrete in the back of his building and squirt ourselves silly. One time we got in trouble because we accidentally soaked an old man who was here from Kolkata visiting his daughter. Amma boxed my ears, then put me in fresh clothes and made me and Jamal deliver a package of sweets as an apology. The old man, who was very lonely, was so glad to see us.

  “Gotta sign up for classes soon. Hope I’ll get the programming ones.” He adds, “You still taking that class?”

  I nod, about to tell him more, when someone shouts, “Hey, Jamal! We gotta go! Chalo, man!”

  Behind Jamal a group of guys is shifting under the awning of a cell phone store. I recognize some faces—Sameer, Ashik. In years past, for Eid Ul-Fitr, after we ate at home, we’d head out to meet our friends. Sometimes the girls would join, still in their stiff, starched outfits. Or we’d break onto a rooftop. Firecrackers popped in the distance. I could see Manhattan, the city a twinkling code to master. Then we scattered, one by one, to different paths.

  They wave. But there’s some kind of hard divide between us.

  He smiles, embarrassed. “I should go.”

  He headed back to the others. In the fall he’ll be off to City College, to programming classes, a future I can’t imagine. An ache spreads hard in my chest. I’d give anything to be him. To worry about registration, some job, and how to pay for my textbooks.

  There’s a buzzing in my pocket. The phone lights up with a new message from Taylor. What do you have?

  I don’t answer, but turn back into the night, wondering how I got here and what happens next.

  A few summers ago, I was woken by a call in the middle of the night. I heard my father shouting into the receiver, as he always does, as if he doesn’t trust a telephone to carry what he means. Especially when it’s an overseas call. He used to do the same when I was still in Dhaka and we’d Skype: he’d lean toward the screen, his nose and eyes enlarged, his face distorted. To him, nothing—words, computers—can ever bridge the distance between people.

  After that call I could hear my stepmother crying in the bedroom. Her father, who had moved back to Bangladesh several years before, had just died. There were more calls and whispers into the morning hours. Then she was gone, with Zahir.

  Abba and I lived like two bachelor brothers. Neighbors and friends came and dropped off dishes, spoons balanced on the cover plates. Abba managed the store pretty well; I helped in the afternoons. Evenings Abba and I would either eat the boiled rice and dal and fish left for us or we’d go to a kebab house and watch soccer and cricket games.

  But the hot days grew harder, longer. I couldn’t bear to watch another TV show or listen to his complaints about the store or the piles of paperwork, which Amma usually handled. I began to make excuses about plans at night. When I stepped from the shower, doused in cologne, my hair gelled into spikes, Abba glared at me. I was an affront to his orderly but pained life.

  “Restless,” Abba would grumble. “Always so restless, this boy. Why must you go out all the time?”

  “I just do.”

  Early in the morning, I could hear Abba arguing with my stepmother on Skype. He wanted her back. The store, it was too much. I was too much. He needed her to make the doctors’ appointments and fill out the school forms for me and Zahir, to take over handling me, the strange creature he could not comprehend. She tearfully agreed.

  The weekend before Amma was to return with Zahir, Abba abruptly announced that on our day off, a Sunday, we were going to Rockaway to go fishing.

  I groaned. I still had hours of sleep ahead of me. I dove my face into my pillow. “Abba, no! Not today! Please!”

  He tapped me once on the soles of my feet, told me I was not to bring my cell phone, pointed to the shower, and that was that. By the time I’d had my breakfast he’d already dragged out his fishing rod and a cooler, where he’d put bottles of ice water and rutis and potatoes in foil.

  I was embarrassed on the bus, Abba sitting erect on the seat, holding his rod like a spear. The other passengers glanced, laughed; a little boy pointed until his grandmother slapped his wrist.

  We emerged from the ride sweaty, stinking of fumes. He bought a few plastic bags of bait and then we made our way along the beach, stepping around the sunbathers. He told me nothing—where we were going, how long we would be. I traipsed behind, thinking about how I could be on the handball court instead of here.

  Abba walked to a jetty made of stones heaped up in overlapping piles. Balancing the empty bucket and rod, he slipped every now and then in his rubber sandals, then regained his balance. I carried our small cooler. He sat down at a far end, wedging an empty plastic bucket into a seam in the rocks.

  We said nothing.

  I was furious at first, thinking, Just like him. He doesn’t say anything. He just expects me to just be.

  For a while I sullenly tossed stones into the ocean, or I wandered up and down the slick jetty, staring at the pretty girls in bikinis, their flat stomachs shiny with lotion. My father was a still figure, casting his rod, occasionally reeling it in.

  When I returned, I saw only two wriggling fish in the bucket.

  “That’s all?” I asked.

  “Ra’ Sono,” he replied. Patience.

  At lunchti
me, we had finished off our supply of water and bought a bottle from a man who wheeled and bumped his covered cart across the sand. He kissed the dollar bill we gave him and then made the sign of the cross. We drank it down with our rutis and potatoes, which were cold from the cooler. Then Abba resumed his fishing from another rock.

  I was surprised to find that my impatience had settled. The sun beat on the back of my neck, but it was not unpleasant. A good wind blew at us. Sometimes Abba would let out a laugh as he pulled in a fish, grappling with the breeze rippling across his long shirt, throwing him off balance. I occupied myself digging out old bottle caps and collected them in a stack for Zahir. I arranged some worn glass shards too. Abba spoke, nodding approvingly. “When you were little, you were this way,” he said. “So resourceful. For hours you played by yourself. Your mother and I were so surprised and amazed.”

  I grinned.

  “You remind me of Rasul.”

  I started, the smooth glass in my palm. Abba never speaks about Rasul. Abba was the younger brother, the one left behind, who watched his mother fist the curtain and stare out at the street, praying, waiting for Rasul. Everyone knew the terrible stories: the villages torched, the boys who lost their eyes and limbs and youth. She didn’t want a hero. She just wanted her son back. But in our family, when Rasul returned, he was not the same. Funny in the head is all my grandmother would say. As if he never came back to us.

  “It’s so easy,” Abba remarked now.

  “What’s easy?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment. “To forget what your true nature is.”

  Then he swung the rod over his head and said no more until late afternoon, when he had finally caught a good number of fish, sealed the bucket with a punctured top, and gathered up his rod.

  “There,” he said. “We take this back and clean it for your mother for tomorrow.”

  And that’s how I understood how he wanted me to remember this day. Abba didn’t trust words or Skype or computers. He trusted only these, the small tasks that matter: Bait on a hook. My collection of bottle caps and glass. The man who kissed his dollar bill.