The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  Amina looked at her mother: she couldn’t believe what three years had done. She was emaciated—her aunt hadn’t been wrong about that—and the hair that Amina could see coming out from under the scarf, which had been mostly black when she left, was now almost entirely gray. The bright pink outfit had the effect of making her look smaller and much older than she was, as might happen if you tried to pack some treasures from this country into one of the brand-new purple suitcases from Kmart.

  “But what does he want from my father?”

  Her mother looked at her with a trace of exasperation. “Money, of course.”

  Amina was about to ask why anyone would come to her father for money, but her mother was already standing, pushing to get off the crowded bus. The van-wallah had gotten down and was loading her suitcases into his makeshift vehicle. Her mother chided him gently about the position of the suitcases, suggesting a different configuration to balance the weight. She nudged Amina into the back of the van, where she had to bend her neck slightly to accommodate the curve of the roof. The frame was covered on the inside with layers of newspaper and paste to make a smooth canopy, and the outside was protected with sheets of plastic, carefully stitched into a waterproof cover. As girls she and Micki had loved sitting at the very back, letting their legs dangle off the edge and making faces at other children they encountered on the road.

  Her mother let her hand rest carefully on top of one of the purple suitcases. She looked as if she were going to speak, then stopped herself. All around them were fields of paddy, wet and green after the rain. They passed a small, square fish pond enclosed by mango trees. A woman was squatting there, collecting water in a open-mouthed copper jug. The water was so still, you could see her reflection on the surface of the pond.

  “That’s the road to Babur Bari,” her mother said, as if Amina might not remember it. “So much looting these days. This country is very bad.”

  “What are they looting?”

  “Bricks. Women take bricks from the ruins, and then they sell them to the foremen at the construction sites.”

  “Amma, what do they want from us? Abba doesn’t have any money.”

  “But they don’t know that.” Her mother spoke slowly, as if she were addressing a child. “They think your American husband can give them whatever they want.”

  Amina thought her father’s cousins were a nuisance, nothing more, and that her mother was imagining the worst as usual. But she couldn’t free herself from the idea that her father had unwittingly involved himself in something unscrupulous. She was afraid that if she cornered her mother and demanded to know about the gold jewelry, she might lie out of shame or embarrassment.

  “Abba will be angry I told you about Salim. He wanted to spare you all this.”

  “Of course you needed to tell me.” Amina tried to sound soothing. She thought the whole story would come out, if she could simply be patient with her mother.

  “But your father always felt terrible about how frightened you were that time at Long Nose’s. After he got home that afternoon, I remember he said he’d never seen you so scared.”

  “I don’t like being shut in. I’m not afraid of people.”

  “That’s when Long Nose gave you your nickname.”

  “I was Munni before Long Nose.”

  Her mother shook her head impatiently. “Not Munni—don’t you remember? He used to call you Mynah.”

  They passed the turnoff to the rest house, with its artificial lake and miniature zoo: a failed tourism scheme by the local MP. Up ahead was the familiar silhouette of the primary school and then, before she expected it, her uncle Ashraf’s new concrete house and the path into the village.

  “ ‘Little Mynah, you will fly away one day’—he would say that when we saw him in the corridor. You hated it, of course.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “But he was right,” her mother said.

  5Parveen was waiting when the van stopped outside her grandmother’s gate. As soon as Amina stepped down, her aunt began to cry. She clutched her niece and then pushed her away to examine her, holding her head between two hands so Amina could hardly hear.

  “So skinny still,” she said. “Don’t they feed you over there?”

  “That’s the fashion,” her mother put in. “They want to be that way.”

  “I’m not a good cook like you, Aunty.”

  Her aunt beamed. “Wait until you see what I’ve made.”

  Her mother handed the package of shondesh to her aunt, who confirmed the shop it had come from, nodding her approval. Then she turned back to Amina.

  “We thought you might not arrive.”

  “I told you I was coming,” Amina said. “Where’s Nanu?”

  “She was napping,” Parveen said, “Ai, Amma! Come and see. Your granddaughter is back from America.”

  “Don’t wake her,” Amina protested, but her grandmother was already coming around the corner of the house. The house had been painted recently, mustard with dark green shutters, and the new palm fence extended around the pond and garden. It was the time of day when the light turned orange, dappling the pond, and the trees thrust sharp, black shadows over the path. Nanu was walking toward her—so slowly!—in an old lavender sari translucent with wear. Once her grandmother had bathed her at this hour, holding her wrist so that she wouldn’t slip on the slick, submerged steps of the pond. Hold still, she would scold, combing Amina’s hair while she squirmed and complained. Then twenty years had slid away like water.

  Her grandmother grabbed her arm and half buried her face in her shoulder.

  “We thought you were gone forever. Like everyone else.”

  Amina couldn’t help looking at the garden, where you could just see her grandfather’s grave in the sun, between the beans and the tomatoes. Her uncles were deeper in the shade, under the mango tree. If they had lived, her grandfather would have taken that perpetually shady spot; by the time anyone else was old enough to die, the tree would’ve grown big enough to accommodate their tombs. As it was there had been two unexpected deaths so early that there was no good place for her grandfather when he passed at the appropriate time.

  Her grandmother peered around her at the van, where the driver was still holding the heavy suitcases instead of setting them down in the dust, in anticipation of a tip.

  “You didn’t bring your husband,” her grandmother said.

  “He wanted to come. Only—”

  “He was too busy at his job,” her mother interrupted. “You know what Americans are like, always working.”

  “Your aunty cooked extra for him.”

  “But I told you he wasn’t coming. Why would you do that?”

  Parveen smiled. “So that you can tell him we did. Then maybe he’ll be ashamed and come the next time.” She and Nanu both laughed, and Amina couldn’t help smiling. Her aunt and her grandmother were stubborn, but they were always completely themselves. You were never surprised by anything they did or said.

  “You’ll want to bathe,” her grandmother said, taking her arm. “Then you’ll eat.” The smell of her nanu was so familiar that she wondered she hadn’t once thought of it in America. Betel nut, rosewater, cook smoke, and something harder to classify, the mineral tang of pond water dried on your skin. If you took a little of each element in a Ziploc bag, she thought, you could keep it even in the pantry in Rochester, with the canisters of flour, sugar, and salt. It would be there forever to be opened, but you could also choose to keep it sealed.

  She had wanted to get in and out of the pond before the news of her arrival reached the rest of the village, but it was too late. When Amina and her mother came out of the house with thin, checked towels over their shoulders, and the hard slivers of Lux soap her grandmother saved for occasions—ordinarily Nanu washed with clay—there was already an audience collected in the courtyard. She greeted Itee Nanu, her grandmother’s elder sister, and her uncle Ashraf, who’d returned from town; she searched the faces in the courtyard for
Micki, but her favorite cousin wasn’t there. Her teenage cousins Trina and Mokti were standing shyly behind Itee Nanu, as if they thought she wouldn’t remember them. Someone had even pulled an old string bed into the courtyard for her ancient great-uncle Sudir Haji, who was surrounded by a crowd of neighbors, servants, and children. There was a general cry of disappointment when it was clear that the American husband hadn’t come.

  “Maybe she was afraid to bring him. He likes Bengali women, and look at all these pretty cousins!” Itee Nanu laughed, showing a red mouth full of paan, and Amina was grateful for the distraction of her teasing.

  “How is your health, Uncle?”

  “Alhamdulillah, fine, fine. But you should be asking about the health of the village. We aren’t well these days.” Her uncle Ashraf was the tallest man in the village, and the most learned; he taught the oldest boys at the madrassa down the road. A dog had mauled him as a child, leaving a shiny white scar like a crescent moon on his neck—a mark from God, some people said. Now he switched to English to impress the crowd. “The water situation is very bad. Rainfall is less, even since you left. You must tell people. Go home to U.S.A. and tell your husband: there is not enough water in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh.”

  Her uncle wasn’t finished, but he stood aside so that she could greet Sudir Haji, who was squatting on the string bed in a lungi, vest, and prayer cap. Her grandmother’s pretty servant Kamla had fetched him a cup of water, but now she stepped back to whisper with a friend. Amina couldn’t hear the words, but she could guess that the girl was disappointed. She’d expected someone dressed like the Western women in the glossy pages salvaged from magazines or calendars, which some of the poorer villagers pasted up inside their houses. Instead, here Amina was in an old shalwar kameez of her mother’s, on her way to bathe in the pond.

  Sudir Haji’s voice had grown high like a child’s. He stroked her head and asked if her marriage was a happy one.

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Your husband is good to you?”

  “Very good, thanks be to God.”

  “Engineer,” her uncle said. “How much does he earn per month?”

  “He wouldn’t like me to say,” Amina said. “Americans are different that way.”

  Her great-uncle laughed. “Does he eat our food?”

  She nodded. “Only I can’t cook it so well.”

  “Ah—your aunty Parveen killed a duck. He’ll be sorry he isn’t here.” Kamla had disappeared, so the old man snapped his fingers at a child with a shaved head and kohl-rimmed eyes, naked except for a tiny cotton shift. The baby ran back behind the fence, where her great-uncle lived in a small concrete room, and returned with a glass jar: dried dates from his pilgrimage to Mecca fifteen years earlier.

  “One for you and one for your husband. To keep the marriage sweet.” He took her hands, then bent his head and prayed aloud. She could see Trina and Mokti slipping away, now that the excitement was over. She couldn’t believe those children she had rocked and combed and wiped on twenty years of visits had been too shy even to say hello.

  “Come, Munni,” her mother said. “Before it gets too late,” and they were finally permitted to continue on to the pond, with only a trail of small children in attendance.

  “Where’s Micki?” she asked her mother. “She didn’t even come.”

  “She’s in Khulna registering one of her boys for school—her father’s taking him in. I think that eldest one is twelve already.”

  They passed under the archway and set their things down on the bench next to the steps. The pond was cool in the shade of the big mango tree, and a palm leaf screen further shielded them from the eyes of anyone passing on the path. Still Amina found it awkward, once they got in the water, to separate her wet clothes from her body in order to wash properly underneath.

  “Three healthy boys, and she’s only a year older than you are. She hasn’t lost her looks either.” Her mother sighed theatrically.

  “And still here in the village,” Amina said. She was hurt that Micki hadn’t come, and she allowed herself to be carelessly cruel.

  “Exactly,” her mother said. “If they can manage here in the village, what is stopping you?”

  Her mother was vigorously soaping her hair, working a lather from even the tiny shard of soap. She couldn’t help watching for signs of madness, but so far her mother’s behavior was perfectly normal. Her opinions came as directly and forcefully as they always had; there was no sign of the frightened, obsessive person Amina had been listening to on the phone for the past three years.

  “Now you,” she said, handing Amina the soap.

  “I’ll wait to wash my hair inside.”

  “There’s no water at the indoor tap. Your uncle’s right—this is a bad year.”

  “What does he think George can do about it?”

  “He doesn’t want to ask you directly,” her mother said. “He’s being polite.”

  Amina looked at her in amazement. “What could I do?”

  “Give money, of course. For a tubewell or something else—some foreign solution, maybe.” Her mother dipped her head in the water, and when she came out, with her eyes closed and her hair streaming down her back, for just a moment, you could see the beautiful girl she had been.

  “Amma? You know George doesn’t have money now. You understand, right?” She lowered her voice, in case any of the children were paying attention. Then she wondered why she bothered. Wouldn’t it be better just to tell the truth, to say to everyone that George had lost his job, and that they might even lose their house? She could employ some of these children to run around the village, and then someone could go spread the news in Shyamnagar Bazar. She would lose face, certainly, but people would also welcome her more easily. Not only foolish Itee Nanu but all the rest of them would joke and tease her. Misfortune had that advantage. No one would envy or threaten them, and they would be safe again.

  “I’ve been thinking of that apartment in Moti Mahal,” her mother said, as if she hadn’t heard the question. “Those weren’t such bad times. Long Nose was kind, and your father sometimes had work from Omar. And you were funny at that age—very serious. Everything had to be just so, even your clothes. Do you remember that red-and-yellow dress I made, from the pattern you found? ‘Tea dress.’ And then you hung around in the hallway, waiting for the across-the-hall neighbors to see you in it—do you remember those people? I ran into them at Kaderabad Bazar just before we moved down here. The little boy was called Shajar.”

  They climbed out of the pond and stepped into a narrow shelter constructed from woven palm, open to the sky. Her mother was out of her wet clothes and into the dry ones almost instantly, without revealing anything—a trick Amina had never mastered.

  “Shajar’s mother was buying three hens at once, for a feast. She said she couldn’t afford them, made all kinds of excuses, but I could see she was trying not to shame me. I had only vegetables in my bag.”

  “But you told me I sent enough. You told me more than enough!” It came out more fiercely than she’d intended, and her mother’s face exhibited a familiar injured expression.

  “Why would I buy three hens for your father and me? I’m only telling you—Shajar’s family is doing well.”

  “And I’m only saying if you need money—tell me.” The shelter gave the illusion of privacy, but anything they said would be overheard easily by someone standing outside. Amina struggled to keep her voice low. “Don’t talk to others.”

  Her mother looked at her sharply. “Which others?”

  She hadn’t meant to repeat what her aunt had said. There was no way it could be true, and she was waiting to hear the truth from her mother unclouded by gossip.

  “Ai, Munni!” Her aunt’s voice came from the direction of the house, loud and teasing. “Have you gone back to America?”

  “She wants to feed you,” her mother said. She pulled Amina gently out into the open, but Amina hung back.

  “What jewelry was it?”


  Her mother spoke in an undertone. “Nothing valuable. Some wedding gold that belonged to your dadi—he said he wanted us to sell it in America.”

  “Dadu gave you the jewelry?”

  “Of course. What did you think?”

  Amina’s relief came out as anger. “But you know you can’t do that—I’ve told you a thousand times! You can’t bring things in for business purposes, especially on the kind of visa you’ll have. Why did you agree to take it?” She’d forgotten to lower her voice, and her aunt was watching them with interest from the porch.

  “Your father knows all that,” her mother said calmly. “He was only being kind. He said we could take it to a shop in Dhaka and sell it for your dadu there. He wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “And then what happened? The jewelry was lost?”

  “Stolen,” her mother said. “Before we even left your dadu’s house. We packed it in your father’s suitcase the night before, and then Bhulu and Laltu came by late that night with whiskey. I told your father not to join them—but his own father and his cousins, how could he not? All the men sat and drank, and the suitcase was in the room. In the morning we left, and we didn’t discover the jewelry was missing until we got back here.”

  “You never told me.”

  Her mother looked down, but a proud smile nudged the corners of her mouth. Amina wondered how many other things she’d been protected from.

  “Does Dadu know?”

  “It was a trick.” Her mother’s voice was electric with indignation. “Of course your dadu must’ve bragged about how we would sell his gold in America. Bhulu and Laltu knew we had it, and so they decided to take it themselves—so that we couldn’t sell it at all.”

  She hadn’t seen her grandfather since she was fourteen or fifteen years old. Their visits to her father’s village happened only every few years, and she could remember the arguments Dadu and her father had once had—mostly over the land being sold and occasionally about the senselessness of spending all one’s money on educating a girl. If they couldn’t have sons, her dadu said, they might at least have held on to the land.