The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  She finally saw her uncle’s driver, Fariq, a few paces behind the barrier. As soon as he spotted her, he swept in and relieved her of the suitcases with a darting, practiced movement. There was nothing aggressive about it, and at the same time he made it clear that she was his. The taxi drivers—dark, bony men with reddish teeth, shirts hanging loose on their bodies—stepped back. She’d known Fariq for years, but she was struck now by how modern and prosperous he looked in a fashionably patterned shirt and black jeans, his mobile phone clipped to his belt.

  “Your uncle has a new car,” he said. “The black one over there—an Acura.” His phone rang, and he answered it; she reached instinctively into her purse for her own to call her parents, before remembering it was useless here. She listened to Fariq instead, heard him telling her aunt that he’d found her without any problem.

  “Two large ones,” he said—of course her aunt was eager to know how much luggage she’d brought with her.

  “Your uncle will have gone to bed, but your aunty is sitting up for you,” Fariq said when he hung up.

  Her whole body was tired, but her mind had the jangly, wakeful feeling that sometimes came over her when she was lying in bed at night in Rochester. As soon as they left the airport, the traffic was stop and go, and she thought of how exasperated George had been four years ago, describing his trip back to the airport. What could’ve been going on at that hour? he had wanted to know. She’d explained that it wasn’t any particular thing, that the city simply hadn’t been built for cars, or for the number of people who currently inhabited it. He had wanted to see the famous parliament buildings lit up at night, but his driver hadn’t understood and had taken another road.

  For a while they crept through the cantonment area past the high, white walls of the military buildings, some studded with broken glass. She would have liked to continue south on a tour of her childhood: Tejgaon, Motijheel, Mirpur, and Mohammadpur, where they’d lived for various lengths of time; the genteel neighborhoods where she’d taught her students; and the university district where she’d gone with her mother to visit the British Council. It felt wrong to be cutting across the city in her uncle’s new car, heading west toward Savar.

  She turned around when they reached the Mirpur Road, looking back toward Dhanmondi. Maple Leaf was all the way on the other side of the lake, but that was the way her mother had taken her by rickshaw to school each day. It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

  She was still looking out the window when a motorcycle went by, and two young men ducked to look at her—to see what kind of woman was being chauffeured in the fancy new car—before cutting Fariq off and continuing to weave in and out of the creeping traffic. Instinctively Amina pulled the scarf over her head, and at once the urge to sleep became too powerful to resist. For the rest of the two-hour drive, the scenery went by without Amina to notice it.

  2It was nearly midnight when they arrived at her aunt and uncle’s new apartment in Savar, but all the lights were burning. Her uncle wasn’t sleeping after all, but sitting at a long wooden dining table drinking tea. Apart from the table, and twelve chairs with green satin cushions, there was no other furniture in the room. A telephone sat on the floor next to the jack, and through one door she could see a massive canopied bed with a modern red-and-gold spread—her aunt and uncle’s room.

  She heard her aunt’s voice in the kitchen: “Has she arrived? It took so long—all the dishes are cold. Munni, come here, let me look at you.” But her aunt came to her, wiping her hands on a towel and embracing her, then stroking her hair, as if she were a little girl.

  “All by yourself. So far. I can’t believe it.” Her aunt was shorter and smaller than she remembered; her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and she was wearing an olive-green shalwar kameez, finer and more ornamented than Amina would’ve expected given that she was the only guest.

  “We called your parents as soon as we heard from Fariq that you were safe. We knew it would be too late by the time you arrived here.”

  Amina nodded, but she hadn’t thought there would be a “too late.” Of course she talked to them all the time, but a phone call from inside the country was different. She’d expected to hear her mother’s voice tonight, and all of a sudden she was afraid she might cry. She went to her suitcases quickly and spent a few minutes rummaging (although the appropriate gifts were at the very top, where she’d been sure to pack them): the perfume for her aunt, and the pocket-sized travel alarm clock for her uncle. She could feel her aunt looking from across the room, trying to get a glimpse of what else was inside. While they were opening their gifts, she found the box of Christmas ornaments and chose the robin for Ghaniyah: a bird that always seemed to Amina to be calling out for attention, hopping and stamping like a spoiled child.

  “This is just a trinket for my cousin,” she told her aunt. “The most famous American bird. Please tell her how sorry I am to have missed her.”

  Her aunt was still looking at the bags. “How did you manage all of this on your own?”

  “Emirates is very comfortable. And I didn’t want to ask George to come here again—he’s so busy with work.”

  “Such a shame the two of you weren’t able to come for their wedding. And now bad luck—the two of them off touring. They said they never had a honeymoon—honeymoon! We didn’t need honeymoons when we were young, I told them—the wedding was enough for us. But they just laugh at me. And India is so expensive these days.” Her aunt looked at Amina pointedly. “You didn’t take a honeymoon, I’m sure.”

  “I had just arrived in America. I didn’t need to go anywhere.”

  “You’re much more practical than my daughter. Now you’ll eat. We’ve finished, but you must be starving.”

  Her aunt brought a knife and fork with the food, even though they’d always eaten with their fingers when she’d visited in the past. She wasn’t hungry: the nap in the car seemed to have produced only a desire for more sleep, but her aunt was carrying dish after dish from the kitchen.

  “My parents said the wedding was beautiful,” Amina said. “They said the food was delicious.”

  Her aunt frowned. “The sweets weren’t fresh enough. They should’ve been made just that afternoon. And the mutton was dry. I’m sure they said so.”

  Amina began the ritual denial, but her aunt cut her off: “Your mother looked so skinny. I gasped the last time I saw her.”

  “She’s always been thin,” Amina said. “She’ll be very fashionable in America.”

  “That’s what I tell everyone, when they ask.” Her aunt tapped her forehead: “It’s only up here that I worry.”

  “Sit, sit,” her uncle said. “At least we have chairs.”

  “The furniture is coming,” her aunt said crossly. “They made a mistake with our order. We’re getting everything new—I don’t know if your mother told you. All of the old things were shipped to Chittagong for Rashid. Your mother told you about his job at the new international university? And Marin is pregnant—they’ll do the ultrasound in two weeks to determine the sex.” Amina had always been a little frightened of Ghaniyah’s older brother, who’d been a math prodigy as a child and gone to college to study computer science when he was only sixteen years old. She knew her aunt and uncle had counted on Rashid going into business and making a terrific fortune and were disappointed by this university job. But naturally her aunt didn’t complain about the things that really bothered her.

  “One son all the way in Chittigong, and my son-in-law is such a big, important man—he never has time for dinner with his in-laws. Why do we need this huge apartment? I asked your uncle. Who will ever come to see us? Except you,” s
he added, looking Amina over. “And you look so tired. How many jobs do you have over there?”

  “Only one,” Amina said. “With Starbucks, the international coffee chain store. It’s close to my college campus.” She was about to say something about Starbucks’s ranking in Fortune’s top 100, but she caught herself. It no longer mattered what her aunt or anyone thought. In nine days she and her parents would be at the airport, inshallah, out of the family’s reach forever.

  Her aunt was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning. There was moisture on her upper lip, darkening the mustache that she’d been struggling to eradicate for as long as Amina could remember. Moni and Amina’s mother shared their nanu’s elegant features, but her aunt was so much more substantially built that on her that kind of beauty looked almost masculine. Amina thought of her mother, who would be cold at this temperature, and experienced another wave of longing. Now that she was back, all of the bickering they’d done over the phone could be forgotten. That had been the stress of being separated; secretly she believed that her mother’s anxiety was only because she missed her. In Rochester they called it empty-nest syndrome. Now that she had come for them, her mother would return to normal, and they would never be separated again. A night and day seemed too long to wait.

  Her uncle yawned and folded his paper. “I’m ready for bed. I hope you ladies won’t keep each other up too late gossiping.”

  “She comes here for one night only,” her aunt complained. “Less than two weeks to spend at home. And I had to beg her mother to stay with us when they return to Dhaka.”

  When her uncle had gone to bed and she had finished eating, Amina suddenly felt better. It was midmorning in Rochester, and she had a surge of energy: her body must’ve gotten the idea that she’d just fed it breakfast. She could see that her aunt was exhausted but didn’t want to go to bed yet. There was something in particular that she wanted to say to Amina.

  “I hope the excitement of seeing you won’t be too much for your mother. Parveen’s been worried, too.”

  “She’s been under a lot of pressure, waiting all this time,” Amina said. She was aware that she was defending her mother for exactly the kind of behavior that had driven her crazy over the phone in Rochester; now that her aunt was needling her, however, it was impossible not to take her mother’s side. “She’ll be better once we get to Rochester.”

  “I only hope there are no problems,” her aunt said darkly. “Of course they have to leave Shyamnagar as soon as possible. I was hoping you might come earlier.”

  “It had to do with the paperwork. It wasn’t up to me when I came.”

  “I only wonder if you’ll be safe there.”

  “Safe in the village?” She felt she was taking her aunt’s bait, but there was no other way to find out what she meant.

  “You know I respect your father.” Her aunt pleated the hem of her orna, which she now wore even in the house. Her mother said that Moni was becoming more religious, that she’d started putting an abaya over her clothes when she went out shopping. But her father laughed and said his sister-in-law was only trying to hide the fat.

  “But I can’t help worrying when your mother calls me in such a state. This was right after they returned from your dadu’s, after the storm. It’s gotten much worse since then.”

  “What’s gotten worse?” Amina demanded.

  “If your father had taken something that wasn’t his, no one could protect him. Especially if he’d taken it from his own people.”

  It took several moments for her brain to absorb the strangeness of what her aunt was saying. She was looking at Amina in a probing way that made it almost impossible to think, since she was concentrating on concealing her thoughts as much as she was on having them.

  “My father is the most honest person I’ve ever met,” she said finally. “Too honest—he’s not crafty or clever, the way you have to be to succeed in business.”

  She wouldn’t have said it if her uncle had been in the room; she liked her uncle Omar, who had always been kind to them. She thought he’d succeeded not out of any deviousness, but because he was the type of person whom God willed to be successful. Others were not meant to be so. It didn’t mean that God loved them any less, but the world couldn’t be full of only one type. The sooner you knew which type you were—and which were the people in your family—the sooner you could accept your lot and be happy.

  “Of course you don’t want to think about that,” her aunt said. “You’re his daughter, so it’s natural.”

  “I don’t like gossip,” Amina said. “That’s what I like about America. People say things straight out.” She felt herself flushing as she said this; once, she had believed it.

  Her aunt was looking at her carefully. “No one will believe that gold was stolen from them. Even if it is true.”

  Suddenly Amina remembered her last phone conversation with Nasir, coded because her parents were standing right there.

  “Are you talking about jewelry?”

  But now that her aunt had ascertained that she knew more than Amina, she was satisfied.

  “I don’t know your father’s family. How should I know what they have?”

  “But what gold do you mean? You know my mother sold the things Nanu gave her years ago. And she never had any wedding gold.”

  “Of course this wasn’t your mother’s. Why would your father have to steal that? But you’d better ask your parents—I don’t want to repeat hearsay. Especially since you seem to dislike it so much.” She gave Amina a tight-lipped smile. Her aunt’s complexion was sallow in the overhead light, and Amina could see their two miniature figures reflected in the black window across the room. “You must be so tired, and you’ll have to be up early to catch the bus.”

  Amina didn’t say anything.

  “You barely ate, Munni. Maybe our food isn’t up to your standards anymore.”

  “The food was delicious, Aunt.”

  “Oh, I hardly cook anymore. It’s Borsha—my new girl from the village. These girls are lazy, but at least they’re good in the kitchen. They’re too ignorant to take shortcuts.”

  Her aunt and uncle did have a second bed, a narrow twin with one of the plush blankets Amina remembered, printed with moons and stars. She had thought it would be difficult to sleep in Dhaka now that she was accustomed to Rochester’s deep nighttime hush, but Savar was quieter than Mohammadpur, and her aunt and uncle’s generator drowned out what noise there was. She couldn’t blame her wakefulness on the city, and she hadn’t brought a book to read, and so she lay in bed thinking of what she’d heard from Nasir and her aunt. Both stories had several pieces missing. It was impossible to think that her father could’ve stolen anything, much less gold jewelry, but she had an uncomfortable feeling that there might have been a misunderstanding. Her father had a tendency to leap several steps ahead in his own financial dealings, so that he often believed an agreement had been reached or a partnership struck before there was good reason to do so. The gold jewelry was the detail that bothered her, since it had appeared in both her aunt’s and Nasir’s accounts. Coming from two such disparate sources, it was hard to believe it was a fabrication. And if her father had come into possession of gold in some legitimate way, why hadn’t she heard of it?

  She was awake for nearly three hours and fell into a deep sleep only just before morning. She dreamed she was back in Rochester; it was raining hard, and the red geraniums she had planted in pots were getting crushed. As she began to bring in the geraniums, she noticed two small figures coming up the hill where Skytop curved and disappeared toward Wood Hill, fighting with an umbrella that was turning inside out in the wind.

  Amina retrieved the big golf umbrella from the hall closet and started out into the storm to help her parents. Her mother was in only a thin shalwar kameez, without even a sweater over her shoulders. They were calling her—oddly they weren’t using her nickname—and she yelled that she was coming. She had almost reached them when the wind lifted her parents several
feet off the ground, where they hovered eerily. And it was only then that Amina realized, to her horror, that she was looking at a pair of jinnis, who had craftily adopted human forms in order to lure her out of her house.

  The calling got louder and more insistent—Amina, Amina—until she finally managed to open her eyes and see a young girl, her aunt’s new servant, Borsha, looking shyly at her own bare feet on the marble floor.

  3It was raining when she arrived at the bus depot with Fariq, who told her to wait in the car. He’d reserved her seat yesterday, and now he was negotiating with the driver, giving him a tip from her uncle to look after the showy foreign suitcases and make sure that her father received them safely on the other end. She used the few moments alone in the car to dial her father’s number from the phone her uncle had lent her—a spare—and was startled when it went on ringing. Even when she called too late or too early from Rochester, he only very rarely missed it; sometimes there was a problem with the phone itself, but her parents were always available. She wondered if that was the trouble today, although her uncle had said he’d been able to reach them easily last night. Of all the mornings in the world, this was the one she expected they would keep the phone turned on. How could she be sure her father knew which bus she was on and that her parents would be waiting for her at half past three in Satkhira?

  Fariq and the driver had agreed upon a price, although Amina didn’t see the money change hands, and her uncle’s driver returned to the car looking relaxed: he had fulfilled his duty for the morning. There was already a crowd around the Satkhira bus, and Amina found that the depot looked much worse to her than it had in the past. A mob of people clamored at the ticket counter, and there was a wide lake of black sewage between the station and the street, over which a mother and father were in the midst of passing three small girls in hair ribbons and stiff, garishly ornamented dresses. She wondered if her reaction to the scene was the effect of her time in America or simply of arriving in her uncle’s air-conditioned car, which made the transition to the street much more dramatic than it was if you traveled by rickshaw.