Amina waited for one of her parents to mention the visas, but neither did.
“And how are your children?” her mother asked.
“Both married,” Long Nose said. “Six grandchildren—four boys and two girls.”
“You are blessed,” her mother said. She put her hand out, palm up.
“It’s starting,” her father said, although Amina didn’t feel anything. “We’re going to dinner at my nephew’s.”
“Is his place nearby?” Long Nose asked. “I could walk with you.”
“Nonsense!” her mother said. “It’s a ten-minute walk in the wrong direction; you’ll get soaked.” She smiled. “But we’re so glad to have met you.”
Long Nose looked around uncomfortably; they were standing in the middle of the street. “Could I speak to you?” he asked her father.
“Right now?” her father said.
“Just for a moment,” Long Nose said. “Perhaps the ladies would like to start back?”
“Go,” her father said, speaking English again. “I will catch you.” Her parents exchanged significant looks, and then her mother said good-bye to Long Nose. She had pulled her scarf over her head, nearly covering her face.
“Let’s go.”
“But Nasir’s—” Amina began, but her mother was hurrying her in the opposite direction. They turned the corner and then doubled back around, approaching Nasir’s from the other side.
“I didn’t want him to see where we’re staying,” her mother said. “He’s probably asking your father for money. Now George’s job gives us an excuse.”
They let themselves in the gate with the key Nasir had made for them and climbed the stairs. Amina flicked the wall switches without thinking, but the power was out. They moved around in the dim rooms, her mother putting away the bread and then going into the bathroom.
“Do you mean we never paid Long Nose the back rent?” Amina asked cautiously, once her mother was sitting at the table with the potatoes and onions to chop for the curry.
Her mother didn’t look up from her vegetables, as if she were a small girl who needed to concentrate to work with a knife. “Let’s see what your father says.”
She could remember in elaborate detail certain pieces of the furniture they’d given Long Nose: the bed with a headboard stained dark to look like teak, a lamp with a patterned glass shade, and a pair of upholstered chairs, the antimacassars embroidered with spotted deer. She had begged her mother to save those, but one had to be left behind to cover a stain. At the time it had seemed as if they were losing untold riches—Amina hadn’t been able to understand how seven months of rent could possibly equal all of that—and she would never forget the moment they’d stepped into the one-room flat in Tejgaon, the blistered walls, the cracked linoleum, and the roaches lazily arranged on the walls of the kitchen and bathroom, as if they were the flat’s rightful owners. She had cried, and her mother hadn’t smacked her (as she’d deserved, for that kind of behavior at twelve years old) but had taken her in her arms and pressed her face against her chest, so that she wouldn’t have to see where they would live.
Now, suddenly, she calculated the relative values with adult eyes. That cheap furniture that her parents had brought as newlyweds from the village would have been worth at most two months of rent. Even if Long Nose didn’t demand sixteen years of interest, they owed him perhaps six or seven hundred dollars—a small fortune at that time in Dhaka.
She and her mother both turned when her father opened the door. He didn’t say anything, but his face was troubled, and he went directly to the sink to do ablutions. They’d missed the duhr because of the embassy, and it was almost time for maghrib.
Her mother sighed. “What are the chances, after all these years? Did he give you some number?”
Her father emerged from the bathroom. “Number? Oh, no—he didn’t mention money.”
“Only the debt,” her mother said.
“Not even the debt.” Her father brushed her mother’s doubts aside with an impatient gesture. “I believe he’s forgiven it.” Then his face darkened. “But Salim was there—that’s what he wanted to tell me.”
Her mother put down her knife, startled. “What? At the market?”
“At Long Nose’s building—the day after Munni arrived. Salim must’ve known we weren’t at Omar’s, and so he went back to the place he found us the last time. Long Nose said he told him he hadn’t seen or spoken with us in years. Of course he never saw Salim the night he locked you in, but something about him made Long Nose wary—that eye unsettles people. And so he didn’t tell Salim anything. But Salim kept haranguing him, asking for our phone number. Finally Long Nose said he’d call the police, but Salim just laughed at him.” The set of her father’s jaw was fiercely determined—for a moment, a soldier’s face again. “He said he wanted to warn us, but he didn’t have our number.”
“And then Allah brought us together, like that,” her mother said. “A miracle.”
“I think the miracle is that Long Nose was so kind,” Amina said. “Especially after how we’ve treated him.” She was ashamed of herself. Six hundred dollars was three weeks at Starbucks, after taxes; not nothing, but certainly possible. Why had it never occurred to her that she might repay what they owed?
“If Long Nose wants to forgive an old debt, that’s his choice,” her mother said. “You’ll insult him by offering money.”
Amina turned to her father. “We should pay him.”
Her mother looked up from the vegetables and spoke mildly. “What can he do?”
She didn’t think her mother had meant it as anything but a statement of fact, but her father stood still as if he’d been hit. The light remaining in the apartment was yellow-green, and the rain had finally begun, a steady thrumming on the roof. Nasir’s few possessions stood out in the gloom: a white refrigerator, a black plastic computer table, a dining table covered with a cloth printed with tiny Dutchmen holding apples—a loan from one of his sisters, Amina was sure, in anticipation of their arrival. The Dutchmen looked like corpses with their glassy, wide-open eyes.
Her father put his bare feet into a pair of black dress shoes sitting beneath the rack at the door.
“I’m going out.”
“I’m sorry,” Amina said. She bent down and touched his feet in the old-fashioned way. “Stay, Abba. I’ll say the prayers with you.”
Her father shook her off. “Get up, Munni.”
“Nasir will be home soon. He’ll have information for us.”
Her father didn’t say anything.
“Sit with me and read the form. I might need your help.”
He looked to determine whether she was being disingenuous.
“Technical vocabulary,” Amina said quickly. “I’m never good at that. I know the individual words, but I don’t always get the sense.”
For a moment he seemed ready to walk out the door, and then he softened. “Make some tea,” he told her mother roughly. “If there’s no power, at least Nasir should have something to drink when he gets home.”
Her mother disappeared obediently to light the gas cooktop in the kitchen, and Amina and her father sat down to read the blue form. The room was warm and the air dead still. Eventually it became too dark to see even the apples in the Dutchmen’s hands. Amina hunted until she found a flashlight in a basket on top of the refrigerator, and then they continued to work it out, line by line together.
12Amina had been waiting, and she jumped when she heard Nasir’s key in the lock. It was nine o’clock, almost dinnertime, and Nasir had been downstairs at Shilpa’s, helping his nephews with their homework, since their father worked an evening shift. He went straight to the sink to wash, but as soon as they sat down at the table, he began discussing the visas.
“Your uncle is right,” he told Amina. “It probably has to do with his name more than with the questions.” Nasir ate the way her parents did, maneuvering the rice in neat balls to his mouth with his right hand. The nails on both hands were sho
rt and clean.
“But if I’d answered the questions,” her father lamented.
“You still might not have gotten it. I talked to a friend of mine whose nephew goes to business school in the States—in Arizona. His name is Khuzaymah Menon, and his visa was approved right away, but he knows another guy, a Sylheti, who won an H1-B visa in the lottery. He was all set to go, and then they gave him this same blue paper. His name is Abdul Haq, so you see—it took them six months to approve him.”
Her mother gasped. “Six months.”
“You have to use the immigrant visa within six months,” Amina reminded Nasir. “If we have to wait too long, my mother’s visa will have expired—we’ll have to start all over again.”
“I did some research online,” Nasir said. “I can do more tomorrow. It doesn’t always take that long—sometimes it’s only a week or two.”
“Even two weeks,” Amina said, thinking of her job.
“You can stay with me as long as you want.”
“We’ll go to a hotel,” Amina said, more to see what Nasir would say than out of any real conviction.
“They would have security there,” her mother said, but she looked doubtfully at Amina, obviously thinking of the expense of a hotel and George’s job.
But Nasir ignored both of them, and addressed himself to her father. “Did something happen?”
“It was nothing,” her father said. “We ran into our old landlord—the one with the building right around here. He said my cousin Salim had come looking for us there.”
“He was threatening you?” Nasir’s irises were dark brown with a black ring, exactly like her own. What would be happening right now, at this moment, if she had married him? The thought was pleasurably transgressive, and she could entertain it without consequences. She could pretend to be paying attention to her mother’s paranoid fears, her father’s empty assurances, and instead imagine the four of them sitting at this table as two couples, two generations of a family, just to see what it would be like. No one—not George, not her parents, and certainly not Nasir—had to know she was doing it.
“We can’t put you and your sisters at risk,” Amina said, but the sense of danger was less palpable than her curiosity about how much Nasir wanted them to stay and whether any of that was due to her.
“Don’t throw away money at a hotel on their account. They’re leaving for Comilla on Tuesday.”
“Still,” Amina said. “We don’t know how long it’s going to take.”
“That’s exactly why—” Nasir began, but her father interrupted.
“Munni—did you call George? It’s twenty past seven.”
She had completely forgotten the phone call. She took her father’s phone into the bedroom and sat down on the yellow bedspread. There was enough light coming from the street, through thin, orange curtains, that she didn’t need to turn on the lamp. She remembered the way she and her mother used to idle away the hours on the days she and George had arranged to talk. They would watch television or play cards, but they wouldn’t go out within an hour of the call, in case he should be early and they should miss him. She thought of her last conversation with her husband and wondered if she should apologize now. But for what? Wasn’t it right to be suspicious, after everything that had happened?
The dinner continued in the other room, her parents’ voices mingling with Nasir’s now that the food was finished. With George, of course, they would be shy, unlikely even to want to sit down at the table all together. George himself was inclined to go on at length—whatever his current preoccupation—but he would direct those monologues at Amina only, since her parents wouldn’t be able to understand. Would they slip into some routine she couldn’t imagine now, or would dinnertime be permanently awkward? She remembered how she’d dismissed these worries when they’d occurred to her in Rochester; only George had seriously questioned whether her parents would be able to adapt to life in the United States. How had he been able to see it more clearly than she had?
She let the phone ring six times, but there was no answer; when she heard the voice mail beginning, she had the impulse to hang up. Instead she left a businesslike message, explaining the problem at the embassy and asking George to call the free immigration hotline in Manhattan.
“It’s decided,” Nasir said, when she came out into the main room. “You’ll stay as long as it takes.”
“It will probably be only two weeks,” her father said. “This friend of Nasir’s is confident.”
“Which friend?” Amina asked. “Khuzaymah or Abdul? Did either one of them actually get to the U.S.?”
Nasir looked down at his plate and smiled. He probably didn’t share her father’s optimism, but he’d managed to convince them to stay. The three of them had finished her mother’s chicken curry, and her father was taking secret sips of whiskey and water from a glass Nasir had provided while her mother cleared the dishes and pretended not to notice. The alcohol was making him teary; Nasir had a photo album on the table, and her father had obviously begun reminiscing about his days with Nasir’s father as university students in Rajshahi.
“Come look at this,” Nasir said, and when Amina went around the table, there was a photograph she had never seen, of six stern-faced boys posing with rifles on a wooden porch. The rifles looked antique, like the one Aunt Cathy had mounted over her fireplace in Brighton, and several of the boys were wearing sunglasses. Her father apparently hadn’t owned a pair, but his fashion sense was evident in a patterned shirt with an oversize collar, the points of which mimicked his widow’s peak, pronounced even in his twenties. He glared fiercely at the camera as if it were General Yahya himself.
“We didn’t know what it would be like,” her father said. “We thought we were men already.”
“How many in this group actually became Freedom Fighters?” Nasir asked, and Amina could see the eagerness in his expression as he leaned over the photo. How silly it had been for her to imagine that his hospitality had anything to do with her. Her parents were his last real connection to his own; her father was the only one who could tell him what his had been like as a young man, younger than Nasir was now.
“Four of us,” her father said. “Your father and I, Usman, and Tariq. Yusef and Alamgir went back to their families first; they were planning to enlist from home.”
“And what happened to the others?” Nasir asked gently.
“We survived, the four of us—isn’t that incredible? We were all posted in different places except for your father and me—you know all this. We trained together at Dehradun and then went back to Khulna. I got this”—her father rolled up his pant leg to show the scar again, a white boomerang just below his knee—“near Paikgacha. Then your father brought me home to Kajalnagar—I wouldn’t have gotten there without him. After it was over, we starting asking everyone we could find about Tariq and Usman. We found out Tariq had survived Boyra, and Usman got through the awful street battles here in Dhaka. When we heard we thanked God, and it didn’t even occur to us to ask about Yusef until days later.”
“What happened to Yusef?”
Her mother got up to clear the table. “Help me,” she instructed Amina, but Amina lingered in the main room, stacking the plates and wiping the table with a cloth.
“Killed,” her father said. “Massacred by those animals in his own home. You know his father was a lawyer, very successful, with a big house in Dhanmondi. His uncle was a poet—not very famous but well connected—and there would be gatherings at their place almost every night.” Her father paused and took a sip of his drink. “We didn’t know about the atrocities right away, but a family like that was doomed. His mother was raped in front of him, and his sisters were carried off to the cantonment, to be used by the soldiers. Then all the men in the family were murdered.”
“Why?” Amina asked.
“Oh—they were important people, especially in the Language Movement. His brother and sister were at Dhaka University then, and his brother organized some of the s
tudent demonstrations. Those were the kind of people the generals were afraid of—intellectuals loyal to the nation.” Her father stopped and corrected himself: “Not even the nation, because it didn’t exist yet. They were loyal to the language.” Her father got up suddenly, knocking the table, and hurried into the bedroom, where he retrieved one of the few books he had kept, an analysis of the Language Movement written by a Dhaka University professor. It was one he’d encouraged Amina to read—about how the 1952 student protests against the government’s imposition of Urdu on the Bangla-speaking eastern wing of the country had given birth to the struggle for independence—and she was sorry now that she’d always put it off.
“You keep this,” he told Nasir. “No point in carrying it all the way to America.”
“I’m making Horlicks,” her mother called from the kitchen. “Who wants some?”
“Oh no,” Nasir said. “I couldn’t—it’s yours.” But her father waved his protestations away, padding into the bedroom in his slippers. The three of them would continue sleeping in there, while Nasir took the small room without complaining. Now he sat at the table looking through the book, which she was sure her father had shown him several times before. Her mother placed two glasses of Horlicks on the table for them and then took another two into the bedroom.
“Sorry about this,” Nasir said. “The power should be back soon.” He turned the flashlight on its end so that it made a squarish spotlight on the ceiling and half illuminated a free calendar from BRAC Bank, featuring a photograph of snowcapped mountains. He looked suddenly shy, but whether it was the light or the fact that they were alone together, she didn’t know.
“It hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten power cuts.”
“In England I found certain things very easy to get used to. Plumbing, electricity, clean water from the tap—it’s much harder coming back in this direction. At work we have a generator, of course.”
“How is your work?” It was exactly what she’d been accustomed to asking George every day when he got home, but she’d come to regret the habit after he lost his job. The same words to Nasir now felt like a small betrayal.
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