The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  She ate until she was so full that she thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Then she excused herself and threaded her way through the assembled guests to call George. She ran into her uncle Ashraf talking with a visitor from a nearby village, an old man on leave from some government post. He considered himself an important local personage and buttonholed Amina for some time, telling her how he had gone abroad as a young man to stay with his uncle in Hamburg. He’d been most impressed by the autobahn, and it was his opinion that if Bangladesh had been colonized by the Germans rather than the British, many of the country’s current problems wouldn’t exist. When she finally escaped with the phone Omar had lent her, she went around the house to her grandmother’s garden, where she crouched on a low wooden stool near the makeshift graveyard. It would be where her nanu sat, when she came outside to talk to the dead—her husband and her sons.

  George answered after several rings. He sounded breathless. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” The connection was perfect: she could hear water running and then the soft suck of the seal on the refrigerator door. “Where were you?”

  “What?”

  “Are you by yourself?”

  George sounded confused. “Of course—I was just down in the basement.”

  He sounded sincere, and Amina had to admit that even if Kim were to stop by, it was unlikely to happen exactly at the moment she called.

  “What’s going on there?” she asked him.

  “I had coffee with a guy I know at SL Associates. He does aeronautics—he doesn’t know what they have in electrical, but I guess I’ll send a résumé.”

  “You guess?” She could feel his hurt surprise, even before he spoke.

  “Jesus, Amina—what’s your problem? I’m doing my best here.”

  She’d almost given up on the fantasy that he would be employed again by the time they returned. It wasn’t about the job—didn’t he know that?

  “Has Kim left?”

  George hesitated. “How would I know?”

  “You haven’t heard from her?”

  “No.”

  “Or from Cathy?”

  “I think my mother said something about her leaving,” George admitted.

  Somehow she hadn’t really believed Kim would go, in spite of all her talk at the dinner party. If she were in Bombay now, she and Amina were only a half hour apart, inside the same night, while George languished in the middle of a day that was already history here.

  “Is she living with Ashok’s family?”

  “I told you—I have no idea,” he snapped. There was a pause, and she remembered again their early conversations, when it had always seemed like there wasn’t enough time to talk before the connection faltered. Now that they didn’t have anything to say, the line remained surprisingly clear.

  “There are some complications here.”

  “Take as long as you need,” George said, obviously relieved to move away from the subject of Kim.

  It wasn’t about taking more time, of course. She had to be back in eleven days if she wanted to keep her job; given what her mother had confided in her, she thought it would be best to leave as quickly as they could.

  “I don’t know where we’ll be staying, once we get back to Dhaka.”

  “Just let me know when you get there. Are you wearing your money belt? Make sure not to leave your passport lying around.”

  “Nothing would happen to it.” She wasn’t convinced that was true, but she resented George for making assumptions. He’d never been to any village, much less hers.

  “Still,” George said.

  “They’re having a party for me,” Amina said. “I should go.”

  They said a stiff good-bye, but she wasn’t eager to rejoin the party. She thought of her husband sitting in the near-silent kitchen in Rochester. She could hear the raised voices and laughter from the party, the wind scraping in the dry palms, and the call and response of a million insects. The men were singing a song with the refrain “O la la”—some new movie hit she didn’t recognize—and she sat on her grandmother’s stool for a few more moments, listening. As a girl she’d often imagined a sort of magic that could give her a glimpse of the person she would one day marry. The likelihood that he existed somewhere made this fantasy even more irresistible, and she could spend hours daydreaming about it in the opulent apartments of her students, waiting for them to arrive at the solutions to simple problems. How thrilled she would’ve been if she’d been able to see George then: a man already, hardworking and reliable, decent looking if not overly handsome, sitting at a computer in an American office. The desire to be sixteen again was suddenly so powerful that a sound escaped her, something between a gasp and a groan.

  Her back was to the house, and all of a sudden she was uneasy. You were never alone in this country: there were so many warm bodies in such a small space that it was extremely unlikely to find a view without a human being in it. A ragged half-moon hung low above the grain shed; when a lizard chirped in the tree above her head, she nearly cried out. You were once afraid in Rochester she told herself, as she stood up and walked slowly in the direction of the courtyard—it’s only that this is what’s unfamiliar now. Her own bedroom window was open, but just as she put her hand on one of the shutters, there was a whooping sound behind her. She spun around and saw two pairs of eyes: two small boys, one in a pair of green shorts, the other wearing only a T-shirt with a cartoon character on the front.

  Amina screamed, out of relief rather than fear, and the boys crept slightly backward into the trees, their eyes wide.

  “What are you doing, sneaking around people like that? I nearly had a heart attack. Why are you out so late? Where’s your mother?”

  “Hello?” the bigger one said. “Howareyou?”

  The little one giggled and hit his brother on the back. “I’m fine, I’m fine!”

  “What is your country?”

  “Bangladesh,” Amina said, and the little boys laughed as if she’d made a joke specifically for their amusement. She switched to Bangla. “I was married in the U.S.A. In the state of New York. Can you say, ‘New York’?”

  The older one attempted it; his brother jumped up and down as if he had to pee.

  “U.S.A., U.S.A.!”

  “Clin-ton!”

  “Osama bin Laden!”

  Amina heard footsteps in the house behind her; Nanu had come to her bedroom window and was yelling at the little boys to get home before their fathers came out and beat them. The boys turned and ran with high, joyful strides, bare legs white in the moonlight.

  “Uneducated people,” her grandmother said. “Allowing their children to run around all night.”

  “They were trying to speak English to me.”

  Her grandmother hadn’t carried a lantern into her bedroom, but there was light from the front room and the courtyard, where the singing continued. It illuminated the four-poster bed, where her grandmother and Parveen slept, and her grandmother’s curio cabinet, which Amina had loved to look through as a child. She remembered in particular a box of Russian candies wrapped in paper printed with bears (how she’d once longed to taste them!); stern, individual photographs of her uncles and her grandfather in tiny silver frames; and trial-sized plastic bottles of Pantene shampoo. Now a Casio clock, displaying the correct time from inside its original cardboard and plastic packaging, hung above the cabinet. It was eleven thirty; one thirty in the afternoon in Rochester.

  “Your mother is asleep,” Nanu said. “She gets tired easily, especially in a crowd of people.”

  “We’ll take her to the doctor when we get back to New York.”

  Nanu brushed that abstraction aside. “She says you won’t stay with Moni.”

  “They don’t make my father welcome.”

  Her grandmother tilted her head slightly in acknowledgment, her hooded black eyes glossy and sharp.

  “My mother and I were talking about that time in Dhaka—when those men locked us in. I was thinking of how you invited him
to stay that night.”

  Her grandmother took a hand broom from the dresser and began sweeping dead leaves off the sill into the yard. The skin on her hands was as creased and dry as the leaves dropping around Amina’s feet.

  “What did you think of my father, Nanu—back then?”

  “A bad family. I never would have agreed to that match.”

  “But the first time you saw him?”

  “I’d seen him before that.”

  “I mean, when you met him properly?” She expected Nanu not to answer, the way she often did when a question wasn’t to her taste, and so she was surprised by the old woman’s vehemence.

  “Skinny. Dark. And a watcher—with his eyes on everyone all the time.” Her grandmother’s hair was white now, but her eyebrows were still pure black. It was hard to look away when she was talking. “But your father could talk to anyone—laughing and joking. Said he would share your Itee Nanu’s bed, since Ashraf was in Jessore and she was all alone. We laughed all night.”

  “You liked him, once you met him.”

  Her grandmother frowned. “I opposed the match, and you see what bad luck has followed. Even that night—look what happened.”

  “My mother said they might have set the house on fire, but God protected us.”

  “Your grandfather might have kept the marriage from happening, but he was ill by then. And Khokon was gone. Still, I had Emdad. When he died, I went to that wife of his. I said, ‘Tell me you’re expecting.’ Stupid woman—she just sat there and cried.”

  Amina tried to picture her uncle’s pretty widow, Botul, but the face wouldn’t resolve in her mind.

  “Have children right away, Munni,” her grandmother said. “Or you might wind up alone like me.”

  “You have four living children. Eight grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Four, once Rashid has his child.”

  “None for my house.”

  “I lived in your house.”

  Her grandmother looked at her curiously. It was hard to know whether Nanu thought it was a foolish argument—Amina had lived there, but then she had gone—or whether she simply didn’t remember. It was possible that one granddaughter blurred into another.

  “And Micki didn’t leave,” Amina added.

  “Micki made a good match, under the circumstances. Parveen is fortunate.”

  “And my match,” Amina couldn’t help asking. “What do you think of it?”

  She wondered if the two little boys had run back home, or if they’d cut through the fields and doubled back around to the house, hoping to sneak a sip of whiskey from one of the old men’s flasks.

  “Oh, who can say?” Her grandmother pulled her orna across her chest, squinting into the shadows around the makeshift graveyard. “God knows what will happen to you, all the way over there.”

  8She woke up in Nasir’s apartment on the morning of the visa interview to the sound of her parents’ arguing. The window was open, and the noise from the lane was such that she couldn’t believe she’d slept as long as she had; the air had an unmistakable metallic thickness that would’ve let her know she was in Dhaka, even if she hadn’t opened her eyes. Nasir had given them his bedroom, in spite of their protestations, and her parents had gone into the tiny attached bath in order to talk without waking her. The door was shut, but the knob was missing, and she could see a piece of her father’s hand through the empty hole.

  “It’s just a hen,” she heard her father say. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “And you’re already selling its eggs!”

  “You’re overexcited because of the interview.”

  “I won’t pass, I might as well not go.” Amina could hear her mother opening the mirrored chest above the sink, selecting one of the neatly labeled tinctures. “I need something to calm my nerves.”

  “What if they test us?”

  “Test us?”

  “Urine test for drugs.”

  “Drugs!” her mother exclaimed. “Everything Mufti Huzoor prescribes is natural.”

  “I never thought you would follow that kind of nonsense. Your sisters or your mother, maybe—”

  “My mother! Where would we have stayed, if not for my mother? Where would we have lived without my sister’s husband? What would we have done all of these years?” Her mother burst out of the bathroom and glanced at Amina as if she were startled to find her there.

  “Your father wastes our last taka on a hen for dinner. Before we’ve even got the visas.”

  “I’m only thanking Nasir for all he’s done for us. Not celebrating yet.”

  “We have enough money,” Amina said, as quietly as possible. “It’s fine.”

  Her mother turned to face the wall. She started doing a frantic set of exercises, rotating her arms from the shoulders in circles and lifting her legs in a stationary goose-step. Her father stayed in the bathroom another moment, gargling loudly with water from a plastic bottle next to the sink, and then came out holding his wallet. He began shuffling through a stack of old business cards, as if there were someone he needed to contact immediately. Had these arguments between her parents started right away, when they were newlyweds in Dhaka, before she was born? Her father would have had no model for married life, barely remembering his parents together before his mother died, and her mother would’ve been living in a city for the first time, attempting to execute her wifely responsibilities as she’d seen them performed in the village. She thought they would have played these unfamiliar roles with painful awkwardness, relishing their time apart more than the time together—if only because it allowed them to relax into their familiar, singular selves. But wasn’t that what it was like for all newlyweds? Certainly she and George had been no different. It felt strange until one day it didn’t, until that abstract partnership finally seemed more solid than the lives they’d left behind.

  She heard Nasir discreetly moving around in the main room, not wanting to disturb them before they were ready. There was another toilet, but it didn’t have a shower; no doubt he was waiting to get ready for work until they’d evacuated the bedroom. She herded her parents into the main room, where her father announced that he was going out to buy the Daily Ittefaq. Nasir had just finished shaving and was standing at the sink holding a small green towel.

  “Hello,” he said. “How did you sleep?”

  The bus had gotten in at ten the previous night, and Nasir had been waiting up for them when they arrived at his apartment a half hour later. She’d been remembering him the way he’d been when he came to bring The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam, with beard and prayer cap, and it was strange to see him clean shaven again, looking almost the way he had when she was a teenager.

  “Munni,” he had said, with mock gravity, but had paid most of his attention to her mother, asking about the bus ride and making her a Horlicks drink himself. Amina had been free to examine him, moving expertly in his tiny kitchen—his broad forearms beneath rolled-up white sleeves, the square, sharp line of his chin—and wished she knew whether he found a change in her.

  “We’ll make breakfast,” her mother said now.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Nasir loves Bombay toast—you won’t do it right.” Her mother laughed unnaturally, but at least she went into the kitchen, where Amina hoped a familiar task would calm her down.

  “They’re worried about the interview,” she told Nasir, who nodded politely, although she was sure he’d overheard every word of her parents’ argument. He was wearing jeans and a dark red T-shirt, and she wondered how he dressed around the house when he was alone. Most urban young men would wear shorts in this weather, but something about Nasir made her think he might put on a lungi like her father.

  She waited for him to shower and change, and then sat with him while he ate breakfast. Her mother had made her a plate of toast as well, but the thought of the heavy fried bread made her stomach turn over.

  “You remember we’re going to your aunt and uncle’s this afternoon, after the embassy,”
her mother said. “I promised we would. We’ve already insulted her by not staying there.”

  “Did you tell them we didn’t know how long it would take?”

  Her mother nodded. “We’ll just call when we’re on our way. Moni wants to show off her new furniture.”

  Nasir had eaten quickly. “She’d be horrified if she saw this place.”

  “This is a wonderful building,” her mother said diplomatically, taking the plates to the sink. “Munni, have you seen what Sakina did to the roof?”

  “It’s a real garden up there,” Nasir said shyly.

  “Squash and peppers and everything!” her mother said from the kitchen. “You should see it.”

  “If you want to come up,” Nasir offered.

  “Won’t you be late for work?”

  “Our boss doesn’t arrive until eleven. As long as I’m there at ten thirty.” It was nine thirty, and the interview wasn’t until two, so Amina allowed herself to be led up to the roof, where there was a surprisingly fresh breeze. Nasir’s younger sister Shilpa lived on the ground floor with her husband and children, while Sakina had taken a smaller, one-bedroom flat on the fifth floor.

  “She likes to be close to the plants,” Nasir said. “I thought we’d find her up here, actually.” Amina wondered if he were apologizing for the fact that they were alone on the roof together—a courtesy that seemed quaint to her now. Sakina’s pots were arranged in rows; someone, perhaps Nasir, had built a long trellis at the southern end to accommodate runner beans, melons, and gourds.

  “We shouldn’t have taken your bedroom,” Amina said. “I was so tired last night—I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Actually I prefer the small room,” Nasir said. “I would sleep there all the time, only it feels silly when I’m alone. Sakina Apu insisted I have this flat when she started looking for a bride for me. Little did she know it would take so long.”

  Nasir smiled down at his feet—in black plastic sandals, the kind of shoes George refused to wear because he found them feminine—and Amina saw that he was making fun of himself; he was so different than he’d sounded in his e-mails. Then again, she’d often winced when she reread her own saved e-mails, especially the first ones she’d sent to George. They seemed so labored and were riddled with the kind of tonal mistakes that you could only correct once you lived your daily life in the language in which you wrote. She wondered if the difference between Nasir on paper and Nasir now in person was the result of those same constrictions.