“It’s fine—it’s mostly making websites for small businesses. We use different templates, depending on the price, so it’s the same thing over and over again. But my boss is good, and I get on well with my colleagues.”
“Do they still think you’re crazy because of those articles?”
Nasir looked blank for a moment and then he blushed. “No—I took them down. I’m surprised you even remember.”
“I remember that e-mail very well. I was angry at you.”
“I overstepped,” Nasir said. “I don’t know why I thought I could tell you what to do.”
“You were being an older brother.”
But Nasir shook his head adamantly. “I wasn’t. I didn’t think of you that way. When I was in London—when Sakina Apu talked to your parents—” Nasir colored and stopped abruptly. She’d hardly ever seen him struggle for words, and maybe that was why she failed to look down modestly, as of course she should have. She was too eager to know what he’d said to Sakina all those years ago—she would have been nineteen or twenty then—if he’d encouraged or simply tolerated the idea that they might one day marry.
Whether it was her boldness or his own caution, Nasir seemed to think he’d gone too far: he grasped the table with two hands, as if he were going to stand up and walk away. Instead he tilted his chair backward just slightly, like a rebellious child, and then let his weight return it to the floor.
“I mean, Sakina Apu always liked you. That’s why she was hard on you back then.”
“She still is.”
He’d regained his self-possession and addressed her reassuringly, as if she were the one who’d crossed a line. “But she’s that way with Shilpa, too. You should hear the fights they have.”
Amina nodded carefully. She didn’t know how they’d gotten onto the subject of his sisters, and she could feel her heart thudding against her ribs. Had he been about to say that he’d thought of her like a fiancée, rather than a sister? That he had thought of her in London and been disappointed to hear the news of her engagement? They both knew, of course, that a match between the two of them had once been discussed, but saying it out loud was something different.
“It’s getting late,” Nasir said, and just then the power returned: the ceiling fan ground into motion and in the bedroom the television came to life. A BBC broadcaster was reporting about the financial crisis in America.
“I was thinking I might fast next year,” Amina said hurriedly, to keep him at the table. “It’s been a while since I tried it.”
Nasir smiled. “That’s good.”
“Think of what our parents’ generation went through,” Amina said. “And I can’t even wait until sundown for a meal.”
Nasir nodded, tracing the faded gold tooling on the album’s leather cover with one finger. “You know, sometimes I envy them?” He glanced into the bedroom and then lowered his voice. “I mean when they were younger. Being part of the war and everything.”
“How could you envy that?”
“Maybe it sounds crazy,” he acknowledged. “But there was a purpose, then. Something beyond our own lives. It was much harder for my father after the war. He hated being a landlord—all the pressure when things broke down, and tenants always begging him for credit. My mother thought the anxiety was what gave him the heart attack—it doesn’t run in our family. And my sister thinks our mother stopped wanting to live after he died. So you could say that this building killed them both—I think that story is as sad as Yusef’s.” He looked defiant when he said this, expecting her to be shocked again. “At least Yusef and his father died for something.”
“What about his mother and his sisters?”
Nasir looked away and grimaced slightly, as if she’d used profanity. “I don’t think your father meant for you to hear that.”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with living quietly,” Amina said. “We should be grateful for it. Why do we need to be part of history—what makes us so special?” She stopped short, embarrassed by the intensity of her voice.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “When I think about it. But sometimes I don’t think.”
“Like when you see Yellow Barrette,” she ventured, but that was the wrong thing to say. Nasir got up abruptly and took his glass to the kitchen.
“I shouldn’t have told you that,” he said. “Forget it.”
“I’m sorry—” she began, but he’d already disappeared into the bathroom, where she heard him filling the buckets, in case the water didn’t come in the morning.
Amina waited another minute, washing her own glass, but he didn’t come out of the bathroom. Finally she went into her parents’ room, where her father had fallen asleep on his back and was snoring loudly. Her mother moved to the center of the bed—Amina noticed how little space she occupied—and patted the place next to her. But Amina shook her head and indicated the pile of bedding folded in the corner, which Shilpa had lent in case Amina preferred sleeping on the floor. She unrolled the pad and quilts, not bothering with the mosquito net, and switched off the television and the light. Then she undressed and lay down at the foot of her parents bed, where her mother couldn’t tell if she was awake or asleep. Soon she heard her mother’s soft breathing in the intervals between her father’s snores.
From the faint glow under the door, she knew the light was still on in the other bedroom. She would never be so bold as to knock on the door, but there was nothing wrong with going up to the roof. The heat felt oppressive to her, although people had been saying it wasn’t as bad as usual this time of year—that she’d brought the cool weather with her from America. She listened to make sure her mother’s breathing was still steady (her father never woke in the night) and then slipped on the same blue sundress she’d worn this morning. She considered the rough, white polyester trousers her mother had given her to put underneath the dress—conservative by Rochester standards, with its cap sleeves and calf-length skirt—and left them hanging over the chair: she was ostensibly going up to be alone. She noiselessly opened and closed the door to her parents’ room, but once she was in the main room she was intentionally careless, walking with her normal tread and stopping to get a glass of water from the filter next to the refrigerator. They had drunk well water in the village, and she could remember sitting by a similar filter as a small child newly arrived in Dhaka, marveling at the shapes the air took as it burbled to the top.
Outside there was an occasional, gusting breeze that seemed to bring only more humidity; she thought the rain could come again at any moment. The roof was deserted, and Amina realized she’d forgotten the pleasure of going out after dark in light clothing, the softness of the air on her skin. The roof was divided in two levels: the upper, where Sakina’s plants swayed gently in the dark, and the lower, where she went now, sitting down on the concrete next to a squat, domed black water tank, leaning her back against the brick barrier wall. The brightest part of the city was to the southeast, haloed in the smog. The roofs around her were mostly dark, although electric lanterns still burned at the construction site down the road; away from the lights, she knew the men who had finished their shifts had already unrolled their bedding to sleep. It was impossible to distinguish the building materials—stacks of bricks, bags of plaster and cement—from the softer clusters of human shapes collapsed outside the rings of the lanterns. Those men were dreaming of their villages, and Dhaka seemed as strange to them as Rochester once had to her.
When she heard his feet on the stairs, she covered her legs with her skirt. She turned to face the other direction and felt stupid, with the result that when Nasir opened the door to the roof she was looking right at him. He didn’t smile, and she wondered if he was still angry at her for mentioning Yellow Barrette. She couldn’t tell whether he noticed her clothing; if she’d wanted to please him, she might have put on the shalwar kameez she’d worn to the embassy, but even now she wasn’t sure what her purpose was. She had been anxious lying in the room with her parents, and she’d known th
at the only thing with the power to relieve that anxiety was Nasir. Now that he was here, it was enough. She thought that she’d like to prolong this moment before they’d spoken to each other, that if there were a way to live a whole lifetime in this proximity, without the complications of speech or action, that was how she could be happy.
But he was walking toward her, ruining it, and she spoke from a nervous compulsion.
“I hope I didn’t wake you—going out.”
He stopped and considered her, sitting against the wall.
“You look like an advert.”
“What?”
“Soap powder or packaged food or something. Modern conveniences for the modern wife.”
She knew the type of ad he was talking about—in magazines or pasted up on hoardings in the roads. They were more present in Dhaka than they’d been when she’d left, which she took to mean that things were improving, at least for city people. The houses pictured in the backgrounds of those posters, affixed by men like the ones sleeping just across the road, were more perfect than any Amina had seen in America, or indeed anywhere but in the frothiest kind of Hindi movie. Here there was no room for verisimilitude, no humor—simply a shiny prosperity, desperate and false. The fair-skinned father and children (always an elder boy and younger girl) in sporty, Western dress, surrounded the mother, congratulating her on the sparkle of the glassware or the tastiness of a frozen pakora. Everything was modern except for the dress of the woman at its center, who would be sumptuously attired in modest, traditional clothes. In that sense, Nasir had gotten it wrong.
“In an advert I’d be wearing a sari.”
“I mean you look out of place.”
“These are the kind of clothes I’ve always worn,” she reminded him.
“To be provocative?”
This was the kind of comment that might have infuriated her in the past, but she couldn’t muster the same indignation. She felt as if she were looking at Nasir through a glass wall, which ensured they wouldn’t get close enough to hurt or even touch each other.
“I preferred Western clothes even as a girl—I always covered my arms and legs. Even my hair sometimes—when the other girls I knew weren’t doing it. My mother didn’t have to encourage me.”
“Why not wear our own clothes and save yourself the trouble?”
It was a question she’d been asked before, and she didn’t have an answer. Why were some people attracted to what was unfamiliar, and others to what they knew? She thought it might have to do with how comfortable you were in your own life, how well you felt you belonged.
Nasir glanced at her ankles protruding from under the skirt, her feet in her mother’s sandals. “You’re not covered now.”
“I expected to be alone.” She was glad it was dark enough that he couldn’t see her blush.
“You can’t be alone,” he said roughly. “Do you know what you’re risking? Do you want to see pictures of what someone like Salim can do?”
She could tell immediately that he was serious, but the fact of the two of them on the roof together made it exciting rather than frightening. “You really believe that?”
He looked at her curiously. “You forget because you’ve been abroad. It’s different here.” He took the last few steps to where she was sitting, leaned against the wall.
“It’s more dangerous, you mean.”
“Everything’s different,” he said. “You know that.” He looked away from her as he spoke, and she could see the smooth skin on the back of his neck, where his hairline had been neatly shaved. “Even men and women—the way they look at one another on the street there. It’s okay to chat or flirt because it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Cheating means something though,” she said. “Americans are obsessed with it.”
“Americans in particular?”
“I think they worry about it more—so it happens more.”
“Is it mostly the men?”
“Seventy percent of men and sixty percent of women.”
Nasir laughed. “They keep records, then?” He dropped down suddenly next to her, rocking back and forth on his heels. She could feel the wall behind her through the thin fabric of her dress.
“You’ll get your dress dirty,” he whispered, and then he put his hands under her arms and lifted her to stand against him. For a moment he did nothing, just looking at her as if for some cue, and she couldn’t believe what she felt, a charged readiness more intense than anything she’d ever experienced, except in dreams. Finally he put his arms around her waist, and she let her hands go up to touch that place at the back of his neck, softer than she’d imagined. He looked certain of what they were going to do, and she wondered about the women he’d been with before this. Her own promises and responsibilities were distant and indistinct, as if they belonged to a different person. At the same time she felt as if she’d entered herself again, the left-behind self who’d been waiting for her so long.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s go,” and then he kissed her. How startling it was, the difference in the way two people could kiss. She had always resisted the feeling of George’s tongue, the wet softness of it—intrusive and strange. Nasir kissed her so gently that she wanted more, found herself opening her mouth for him. His tongue had a slightly salty taste, as if he’d been swimming in sea water; his mouth was warm and rough and she wanted to go farther inside it. The idea that you might have a taste for certain people, just as you did for foods, was new to her.
He pulled her closer, and kissed more deeply, until she felt she had to pull away.
“Is this what you learned in London?” It was an unpleasant thing to say, and she regretted it as soon as it was out. She was delaying, she knew, because she was scared. She wasn’t shy with Nasir, the way she’d once been with George, but she was afraid of what the consequences might be. Could they do this, and then go on as before?
“No. I told you—in London I spent most of my time off at the mosque.” He ran one hand lightly up and down her back. He didn’t release her waist, and she could feel his erection pressing against her dress. It was strange now to think all men were the same this way, in spite of their remarkable differences.
“Does George go with you to the mosque?”
She realized it was the first time she’d heard him say her husband’s name. She didn’t feel ashamed, or even vengeful—the world in which George and Kim existed seemed so far from this one that she doubted any one person could inhabit both. She had the strange thought that it might not be wrong to cheat with Nasir, just as long as they did it silently. She felt safer embracing him here than she had when they were talking at the table.
She hadn’t answered his question, and he persisted: “He refuses?” His tone was light, not yet aggressive. He was gathering information.
“He would take me—but I’ve never asked.”
“Not since the wedding,” he corrected. A light went on in a window across the street, and Amina worried again that they could be seen.
“Not ever.” She was close enough to see a small red pimple starting at his hairline, like a teenager. Even this endeared him to her. She moved against him, wanting to be kissed again. She would go downstairs with him now, be in his room.
But Nasir let go of her waist and took a step back. “Then where did you get married?”
She couldn’t believe he wanted to talk about it now. “At city hall.”
He shook his head impatiently. “I mean the Muslim wedding.”
Something scuttered across the roof, a piece of tarpaper or a rat. The wind distorted the traffic sounds—now just below them, now far away.
“We told my parents we did it, but we didn’t. We planned to do it at the ICR, and then we never got around to it.”
“You mean, you aren’t—”
“Legally we are.”
“In America.” Nasir was shaking his head, a strange animation lighting his familiar features. “You aren’t. Not really.”
“Marriage counts
everywhere. Just because you travel doesn’t mean you aren’t married.” But she thought of the way George had dismissed Kim’s marriage in India—some kind of ceremony—and felt suddenly cold.
“We can go downstairs now,” she said. “My parents won’t wake up.” But she could feel the moment was slipping away. Whatever pleasant dream they’d been existing in was gone.
“We can’t,” he said. “I won’t. We have to be careful now—both of us.”
As they descended the stairs Amina tried to convince herself that the thing clogging her throat was guilt. Simply because George had deceived her about his life before their marriage didn’t give her the right to betray him now. What she was doing was worse: it was happening within the bonds of matrimony. Any impartial observer would take George’s side.
But it was no use. Guilt was remorse for something you’d done, and she didn’t feel that at all. She wished herself backward in time only so that she could act more decisively, and compound her crime. When Nasir opened the door to the apartment, she turned to stand in his way.
“We could still—”
He shook his head, and together they listened for sounds from her parents’ room. When he’d ascertained that it was quiet, he took her shoulders in his hands and kissed the top of her head.
“Get some sleep,” he said, and then disappeared into his room, leaving her standing in the main room alone. The apartment was dark, but the power was on: the refrigerator hummed loudly, and downstairs she could faintly hear the drone of a television.
Did he believe they could marry? That would explain his behavior, but she couldn’t imagine that he’d considered it clearly. Everyone knew about her marriage in America: she would have to get divorced, whether Nasir thought her marriage was valid or not. Even if he could accept the idea of a divorced woman for a wife, could his sisters? She thought again of how Sakina had criticized her mother for letting her marry abroad, and how her mother had said it was only bitterness. What were the chances that she would soften toward Amina now? Even if Nasir was determined enough to go against convention, there would be a thousand ways his sister could retaliate, with the support of a whole web of friends and relations. Amina imagined the way those women would look at her, when she walked down the lane to buy a phone card or eggs from the market. Could she stand to stay here under those circumstances?
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