“You didn’t tell me,” she explained.
“You didn’t know there was kissing at a wedding?”
Amina had to think about that for a minute, because of course she had known. She had known since she was nine years old and her Devil Aunt had bought a television. She had seen it on Dallas, and L.A. Law, and The Fall Guy, and so there was no way to explain her ignorance to George.
“I did know. I guess I just didn’t believe it would happen to me.”
“You’ve kissed me a hundred times,” George said, in a voice that suggested to Amina they might be about to have their first fight. She wanted to avoid that, especially tonight, because if there was anything she believed about marriage, it was that arguing the way her parents did was a waste of time.
“Not only kissing. The marriage in total.”
“You didn’t believe we were getting married? What did you think we were doing?”
It had started to rain, and that comforting sound lent the contents of the room a sudden, momentary familiarity, almost as if she’d seen them once long ago.
“In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed. But in America you make your plans and then they happen.”
To her relief, George finally smiled. “So you planned to kiss me, but you were surprised when it actually happened.”
“Yes,” Amina said. “I was dumbstruck.”
12Kim had invited them in June, but soon after the wedding she suddenly went abroad again, this time to teach at a yoga retreat in France. It wasn’t until September that they finally made a date to meet her for a cup of tea, in her apartment on Edgerton Street downtown. George had said that the houses in this area were cheaply built, and that the style of Kim’s building—pale stucco ornamented with dark wooden beams—was a reference to a type of architecture popular in England hundreds of years ago. He said it looked pretentious on these modern Rochester apartments. But Amina liked the street where they’d parked their car. They walked past a women’s clothing boutique where everything in the window was black and white, a bookshop, and a café with tables outside, where college students read and talked in intimate groups. The air smelled of burning leaves, a scent somehow sharper and more distilled than it was in their yard in Pittsford.
Kim lived on the fourth floor, and they were both breathing heavily by the time they got to the door. George had said that his cousin was twenty-seven, two years older than Amina, and so he could remember when his aunt Cathy and her husband, Todd, had adopted her. He had been seven when they brought her home—a nine-month-old baby girl—a year before Todd had gone off to Florida with another woman, abandoning his wife and child. George had said that Kim looked nothing like her mother, that she was tall and thin and dressed in an eccentric way, but when Amina pressed him for more details, he had become impatient and said that she was going to meet his cousin and could form an opinion herself.
George rang the bell, but Kim must’ve heard them coming up the stairs, because she opened the door almost immediately. She was certainly tall, almost as tall as George, but unlike most of the women Amina had met so far in Rochester, she was very thin, with a flat chest and narrow hips. George and his adopted cousin had similarly sandy blond hair, and light-colored eyes (though hers were more green than blue)—but no one would have mistaken them for biological relatives. Kim was unmistakably pretty, with regular features, a smooth, high forehead, and a perfect, bow-shaped mouth. Her hair was wavy and hung nearly to her waist, and her skin was fair, with undertones of pink and gold. Most extraordinary, she was wearing a long Indian shirt, a kind of kurta with a red and purple pattern, over a pair of black leggings. Her feet were bare, and her toenails were painted a brilliant royal blue.
“I can’t believe you’re finally here,” she said. Then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Amina—not the kind of hug George’s mother often gave her, which involved the arms and a glancing touch of the cheeks, but a true embrace, laying her head for a moment on Amina’s shoulder, as if for comfort, before she stepped away.
“I have all different kinds of tea—jasmine, green, tulsi. I know you prefer coffee,” she said to George, “but I don’t have any.”
Amina thought she’d misheard. “You have tea made from tulsi leaves?” Her mother was a particular believer in the beneficial properties of the tulsi leaf for ailments ranging from eye strain to stomach cramps and rashes and took it regularly, in both tea and tincture form.
“That’s what I’m having—let me make you some.” Kim disappeared into a galley kitchen, almost as small as the one in Mohammadpur, and George led Amina through an archway into the apartment’s single room. The room was dominated by a futon bed made up to look like a couch and a fireplace, which Kim had filled with houseplants. Amina recognized spider plants, aspidistra, and aloe, but there was one very beautiful species that she didn’t know, with a single, red waxy bloom. The apartment seemed bigger than it was because of three large windows, which Kim had outlined with strings of tiny white Christmas lights; beneath the windows was a long, low wooden table, with potted plants and a collection of jewelry and figurines, artfully arranged as if in a case at a museum. Among the miniatures Amina recognized the Buddha and several Hindu deities, their fierce expressions and odd many-armed postures crafted from silver, bronze, and jade. On the wall above the bed Kim had thumbtacked a Tibetan painting on silk, with an inscription below in that forbidding alphabet, the letters like tiny knives. Because there were no proper chairs (and George would have been uncomfortable on one of the colored cushions scattered over the rug), the two of them sat on the bed.
Amina knew of course that George’s cousin had lived in India, but somehow she hadn’t imagined that so much of that place would’ve made its way into Kim’s daily life. Her own idea of India encompassed the Taj Mahal, the great saint’s tomb at Ajmer (where her father had always dreamed of making a pilgrimage), and her youngest aunt, Sufia—who had won a vocal scholarship to a music school in Calcutta, married a Hindu, and was now the mother of twins. The rest of the country was simply colored shapes on a map, and she had only the vaguest notion of yoga as a Hindu religious ritual.
“You’ve been here before?” she asked her husband.
“I helped her move in,” George said matter-of-factly. “When she got back from India.”
“When was that?”
George thought for a moment. “She was back in the U.S. in 2001, but she didn’t come home to Rochester until ’03—about a year before I met you.”
“Is she a Hindu?”
“Who knows.” George was looking glumly at the rug, which was dotted with tufts of red and orange wool that was coming off on their socks. She could’ve guessed that this apartment wouldn’t be to his taste. Her husband was casual, even sloppy, about the state of the house, but he had a bias against the curios and mementos that had decorated his childhood home: he had taught her the word “knickknack,” a pejorative. He believed that if you hung something on your wall, it should be there for a reason, and so their walls were sparsely decorated: his own diplomas, a map of the world oriented to Asia (which he’d bought when she arrived), a photograph from his parents’ wedding, and one from their own. He preferred that everything be framed, in spite of the expense.
The exception to George’s general rule about souvenirs was the refrigerator, which was covered with magnets from each state he had visited. Although he’d had the opportunity for international travel only once before coming to meet her in Bangladesh, he had visited forty-five of the fifty states, and he hoped one day to see Alaska, Hawaii, Alabama, North Dakota, and Nebraska, too. His first trip out of the country had been to Mexico, where he had gone with other college students to build houses for poor people.
When Kim returned with the tea, Amina couldn’t help herself. “Excuse me, but do you practice some religion?” She had been afraid of offending George’s cousin, but Kim smiled as if this were a question she was eager to answer.
“I don’t, but I’
ve always felt the lack of it. My mom is pretty Christian—you’ve probably noticed already—and she still gets on me about going to church. Somehow it never made sense to me.”
“These are souvenirs then?” She was pleased she’d remembered the word and hadn’t had to resort to “knickknacks.”
Kim nodded. “That’s exactly right.”
“And what is that plant, please?” She pointed to the pot with the red flower, but Kim shook her head.
“I just went to the nursery and picked out whatever I thought was pretty. I don’t know anything about plants.”
“Amina’s been doing a lot of gardening,” George said. “Our grocery store isn’t up to her standards.”
Amina knew he was teasing her, but she flushed anyway. “The grocery store is the most wonderful I have ever seen, only the large-sized vegetables are not as tasty as homegrown.”
“Oh, I agree,” Kim said. “I wish I had a garden—I’d love to see yours.”
“I will be happy to show you. Only it’s not very beautiful right now.” Amina sipped her tea, which was both familiar and not—the bitterness of the herb masked by licorice and honey. She wished Kim had returned from France last month, when her dinner-plate dahlias were in bloom. George had said they were so beautiful that they didn’t look real. “But please come,” she said hurriedly. “Right now I have no job, so I’m free all the time.”
“Amina’s going to look for work as soon as her green card comes,” George said.
Kim looked very serious. “What do you want to do?”
“Any job,” Amina said. “I am not particular.”
“She was first in her class in Bangladesh,” George said. “She worked as a tutor for the college entrance exams.”
Kim looked impressed—the first person in Rochester who had, when George insisted on mentioning it. “I have a friend who teaches in the Monroe County system,” she said. “I can ask her if you want.”
“She has to get her degree first,” George said. “She passed her O levels—that’s the British system—just studying on her own.” George suddenly sounded as if he were back at the green card interview, reciting her credentials to the ICE officer. “But then she didn’t have the opportunity to go to college.”
“I dropped out,” Kim said. “I don’t know if George told you—pretty much the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Everyone warned me, George included, but I didn’t listen.”
“You convinced yourself you couldn’t do it,” George said.
“He used to help me with math when I was a kid,” she said. “But then he went off to Buffalo for college, and I think I just kind of gave up.”
“You didn’t need help with the writing,” George said. “I remember Aunt Cathy bragging about it—you always got As in English.”
“I liked to read,” Kim said. “But I was terrible in math.”
“I’m the opposite,” Amina said.
Kim nodded. “Well, but I’m sure you’ll keep going with school. I get distracted—I’ve always been that way. I wanted to go to India, which turned out to be the best thing I ever did. Have you ever noticed that—the way the best and the worst things in your life can be all twisted up, so you couldn’t have done one without the other?”
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand Kim’s idea, but that she knew this kind of abstract talking made George uncomfortable. He didn’t mind discussing his feelings, or even her own, but he liked them to be presented in a rational way that emphasized cause and effect. She might say, “I feel down today because I miss my parents,” and that was fine, but he didn’t want to hear, for example, about her mother’s peculiar moods, which had started even before she left home and had no one discernible trigger. As she often did with her mother, she tried to bring Kim back around to the concrete.
“When did you go to India?”
“In ’99,” Kim said. “Just backpacking around with a girlfriend. We’d been cocktail waitressing together in Manhattan for a while—she’d heard you could live there on five dollars a day. We budgeted ten and figured we could stay six months at least. She went home after three, but I decided to go down to the yoga place in Mysore—we’d met this couple in Varanasi who told us about it. I got completely hooked, obviously. When my course was done I didn’t want to come back to New York, and someone said foreigners could get work as film extras in Bombay. And so I went up there.” Kim cradled her teacup in her hands and looked at the rug. “And that’s where I met Ashok.”
Amina was fascinated. She thought about the dinners with Eileen and Aunt Cathy: in spite of their friendliness, and the satisfaction she herself took in executing such a normal American responsibility, there were always moments of strained silence in which she could tell everyone was trying hard to think of something to say. In all of those dinners, she wondered that no one had ever brought up Kim’s history in India, or the man named Ashok she now mentioned as if Amina already knew who he was.
Because George was obviously not going to do it, Amina asked, “Who is Ashok?”
Kim looked up at George, almost as if he had betrayed her.
“Why would I go around talking about you? I don’t do that.”
Kim turned to Amina. “Your husband is very moral. But this is important. And I want you to know, because I hope we’re going to be really good friends.”
“Kim,” George said, a kind of warning.
Kim closed her eyes and took a deep breath—her inhalation and exhalation took so long that there seemed to be something indecent about watching it—and then opened her eyes and fixed them on Amina. “I met Ashok at the Mehboob Studio in Bombay. People had told me you could get a job easily, and they were right. The minute I showed up, they cast me in something that would start filming the next day. There were about twenty of us—long-term backpackers, mostly, and also a couple of yogis—and we were supposed to be lying around this hotel pool in our bathing suits, drinking cocktails. Of course the cocktails were colored water, and they were disappointed that more of us didn’t have two-piece bathing suits, but we were all there for long stays, trying to be really respectful of local culture—we were proud we’d left our bikinis at home. Anyway, we were supposed to be lying there when the hero came running through, chasing the bad guy, and then they were going to fall in the pool. Two of the girls had to be swimming in the pool and look all scared and surprised—but they didn’t pick me for that, thank God.” Kim looked down at her chest and smiled. “They picked the busty ones, and I’m like, a double-A.”
Amina looked at George, who had taken out his Palm Pilot and was scrolling through his messages. For once she didn’t mind his inattention—she was embarrassed herself by the mention of bikinis and bra sizes. Still, she was eager to hear the details of Kim’s story, which she was already imagining relating to her mother tonight in the remaining forty-seven minutes on her Hello Asia phone card.
“I remember I was disappointed when I saw the hero. He was kind of short, and he had this weird facial hair—I thought all those Bollywood stars were supposed to be really cute.”
Amina had to keep reminding herself that Kim was two years older than she was. A certain openness in her expression, compounded by an especially earnest way of speaking, made Amina feel like an older married woman listening to the adventures of a girl.
“And then I saw these two guys standing over in the corner. One of them was sort of thin and awkward, with a mustache, talking to the other one like he was trying to impress him, and the other one—of course the other one was Ashok.” Kim gave Amina a small, sad smile. “He was much better looking than the star—the most handsome man I’d ever seen. I’d sort of made friends with the girls lying on the chairs next to me, and they were making fun of me because I couldn’t stop staring at him. I’m not usually like that”—Kim looked at George, as if daring him to contradict her—“in spite of what my mother might tell you. But I felt like I had to find out who he was. There was a servant, a kid, really, who ran over and brought them sodas—we were
all hungry and thirsty, but all we got was that colored water—and when he came back over to our side, the other girls waved him over and asked him. It turned out Ashok was the director’s son.”
Amina had finished her tea but didn’t know where to put her cup. George had set his carefully on the floor, undrunk, on top of a book with a red cover: Into the Heart of Truth. While Kim was talking it had gotten dark outside, in the uncannily sudden way of Rochester evenings.
“We should get going,” George said. “We’re going to hit the traffic.”
“On Saturday?”
“There’s always traffic down here.” George glanced at Kim. “I don’t know how you stand it.”
“I mostly walk or bike,” Kim said, getting up easily from her cross-legged position. “Everything I need is right here, even my studio.” She looked at Amina shyly, as if she were a celebrity Kim had been longing to meet. “I was thinking—tell me if this is too boring for you—but we’re looking for a new receptionist at Yoga Shanti. It’s probably not much more than minimum wage, but there would be perks—free classes and stuff. My guru is amazing, and I know he would love you.”
“Thank you,” Amina said. She imagined telling her mother that she was working in a yoga studio: it would be like saying she’d come to America and apprenticed herself to a Hindu priest. Although there was something very appealing about a job in this neighborhood, with someone she already knew, she was grateful to George for his habitual caution about jumping into things.
“Let’s wait and see once she has her green card. Convenience is going to be most important, since I’ll have to drive her.”
“I really wish you lived down here,” Kim said quietly, while George was using the bathroom. “Then we could meet all the time.”
Amina was touched by Kim’s overtures. After her failure with Min, the only women she’d met were Annie Snyder and Jessica. Annie was busy with her children, and according to George, Jessica had a very stressful administrative job at Strong Memorial Hospital. “Neither one of them is going to have a lot of time,” he’d told her. “Don’t take it personally.” She hadn’t taken it personally, but she had been disappointed, and she’d resigned herself to the fact that she would have no hope of meeting anyone before she got a job. She was almost glad for that disappointment now, since it made Kim’s enthusiasm even more thrilling: the most interesting person she had met in Rochester was also the one who wanted to be her friend.
The Newlyweds Page 6