I hope you will eventually be happy with Ashok’s family. Indian families are probably similar to Deshi ones—they like to keep visitors safe. Of course you aren’t really a visitor, but you look like one. Something I found out in Rochester is that it’s hard for people to remember that you belong to one place when you look like you’re from another.
Best regards,
Amina
She hit SEND and logged off, hoping that the brevity of her message would signal that she didn’t expect to hear anything further from Kim.
They did receive two other visitors. Her aunt came twice, talking sternly to her mother about the lack of security at Nasir’s building, the vicissitudes of foreign immigration policy, and the need to prepare for disappointment—advice Amina had to admit was sensible and that her mother clearly didn’t hear. She smiled and nodded at her elder sister and then speculated to Amina once Moni had gone about what sort of gift they might send back to her and Omar after they were settled in Rochester.
And then on Monday, the day before she was to leave for Comilla, Sakina came to see them. Amina had gone out with her father to Kaderabad Bazar, to check on the tailor who was making George a wedding kurta of traditionally woven, bright-colored silk. Her parents believed that the ceremony had happened three years ago, but they still wanted to take the wedding photographs they’d talked about so long ago. Her mother worried about the safety of the market, even in the middle of the day, but Amina’s primary concern was the wastefulness of the errand. She had tried to dissuade her father on the basis of the expense—George would resist such a showy, foreign costume, she told him, and prefer to be photographed in his own clothes—but her father had insisted. Now he wanted to determine that the tailor was making progress.
When she and her father returned from the bazaar, her mother was full of Sakina’s news.
“They’ve been matchmaking for Nasir,” her mother reported excitedly, coming in from the balcony where she’d been hanging laundry. “She says there are several candidates—one very beautiful girl in particular. That’s why they’re going to Comilla. If this girl is as promising as they expect, things should be settled very soon.”
Amina took her mother’s place and began helping to wring out the wet clothes in the bucket. Most children grew out of the notion that their mothers could see what was in their heads, but with her mother’s reputation for clairvoyance, she’d never been able to discount the possibility entirely.
“What does Nasir say about it?” she asked, from the relative safety of the balcony.
“She said he’d be angry if he knew she was talking about it with us. I got the feeling that they disagree about the candidates. But she said that once her brother meets this girl, he’ll fall in love—any man would, she said.”
She suddenly saw why Nasir had been trying to prevent his sister from visiting them. Sakina had obeyed her brother’s wishes to a point, but her pride wouldn’t let her forget the alliance that had once been considered between their two families, nor the fact that Amina’s parents had held out for something better. Now she was eager to demonstrate that no one in Nasir’s family regretted Amina’s foreign marriage, since an even more suitable bride had been found.
But what did Nasir think? He might not have been enthusiastic, but his sisters certainly wouldn’t be proceeding with their negotiations without at least a grudging approval from the bridegroom-to-be.
“But Sakina is excited, of course,” her mother continued. “With no family of her own, this match will mean a lot to her.”
“I don’t think Sakina wanted to marry,” Amina said, and then dared to go further. “She didn’t want a mother-in-law—she wanted to be a mother-in-law. She’s just waiting for some poor girl to terrorize.”
Her mother glanced up quickly, but then nodded. “That’s true.” She brushed a strand of hair behind one ear: a nonchalant, girlish gesture. “That’s the only reason I wouldn’t have been completely happy with him for you, Munni.” Amina froze, her hands in the bucket of water, but her mother continued from the other room unaware of how closely her daughter was listening. “Otherwise Nasir is perfect—so handsome and so kind.”
“And now that he’s given up this religious nonsense …,” her father put in.
“And Sakina says this job has great potential. He doesn’t make much now, but his boss is talking to foreign investors—you know eventually all this outsourcing will be outsourced again. It’ll move from India right here to Desh!”
Amina couldn’t help herself. She came back into the main room, an undershirt of her father’s still dripping in her hand. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “You’re the one who kept telling me to write to America.” She could hear her voice becoming shrill, and her mother looked at her in surprise. She turned to her father: “You weren’t happy with him when he returned from London, unemployed and bringing us that book.”
Her father raised his eyebrows and put up his hands. “I was always happy with Nasir. You’re the one who wanted to go abroad. And now, you see, it’s all worked out.”
Amina went into the bathroom, because she was starting to cry. At least in the bathroom it wasn’t strange to shut the door. She thought of the night they’d kissed each other on the roof, how Nasir had gone into his room and telephoned someone. Why hadn’t she seen the significance of that before now? At his age, and with his parents dead, he wouldn’t leave the selection of a bride entirely to his sisters. He would be pursuing his own favorite candidate in the modern fashion. The unceremonious way Nasir had begun that phone conversation she hadn’t been able to overhear, hardly pausing for a response from the person on the other end, suggested that he’d been talking to someone he knew well.
The bathroom was painted an unpleasant shade of lentil green, and in the humidity the smell of sewage was unmistakable. The only relief came from a square vent in the wall to the outside, through the patterned opening of which it was possible to see jigsaw cutouts of the buildings opposite, including the blue stucco façade with the iron grille. She remembered how angry Nasir had gotten when she joked about Yellow Barrette that night at the table. Of course he wouldn’t have reacted that way if she were just a girl he’d seen on the street. Could Amina have been a distraction from the stress of a genuine courtship, an outlet for the constraints inherent in wooing a truly virtuous woman? The other night at the table, she’d let herself believe they had a secret—one that they had to keep quiet for “now.” But couldn’t he just as easily have been trying to tell her to forget it? What had happened between them was the result of simple nostalgia, and she would ruin everything now—at the moment of his courtship—if she were to let it slip.
“Munni—are you all right?” her mother asked, and so she was forced to open the door.
“I’m fine,” she said, brushing past her mother and going into the bedroom. The more she thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that Nasir was in love with Yellow Barrette, against the wishes of his sister. He might have amused himself with Amina on the roof, because she’d made herself available—she nearly groaned out loud, when she thought of how forward she had been—but he’d stopped them both at the crucial moment. Then he’d hurried to his room to call the woman he hoped to marry. “Yellow Barrette” had been dissemblance; he would not only know her name, but probably her pet name too. If they were in the habit of talking so late at night, it was likely they had even arranged to meet alone. These secret meetings would happen in the entryways of buildings, at a stall in the market, or on the bus, the public nature of which would allow only longing looks, the exquisite accident of an occasional, glancing touch.
From the bedroom Amina could see the outer gate to the building, enclosing a modest courtyard. Eventually the girl would have to come or go from there, but Amina’s parents would question her if they saw her standing at the window for hours. The angle would make it difficult to see the girl’s face, and of course it would be impossible to be sure. If she wanted to see Nasir’s beloved
, she would have to cross the street and knock on the door. She sat there thinking for several more minutes—she could hear her parents moving around in the living room, no doubt wondering whether she was sick—and all at once a strategy came to her, so simple and inspired that it seemed to belong to someone else. It was as if she’d been deceiving people all her life.
14On Tuesday morning, after Nasir left for work, she showered and dressed carefully in one of her mother’s best shalwar kameez: a black-and-white print appropriate for Language Day. She wore her engagement ring (which she’d been keeping hidden since the interview at the embassy, in an interior pocket of her suitcase) and tied her hair up in a twist. Then she came into the main room and told her parents casually that she was going to visit her old student, Asah.
Asah’s family’s apartment was even closer to Nasir’s than it had been to their old Mohammadpur flat, but Amina’s father still argued with her until she promised to go by rickshaw. Even then he insisted on accompanying her to the end of the lane—he would go on to the market to pick up George’s kurta—and negotiating the fare before he would let her go. As soon as they had turned the corner and she was sure her father was on his way to the market, she told the rickshaw driver she’d forgotten something.
“Take me back around the other side,” she instructed him. “The road that way is better.” The rickshaw-wallah, a young man in a lungi and a threadbare black T-shirt with a picture of the Sydney Opera House in neon green, obeyed her, and soon she was back at the opposite end of Nasir’s road. She paid the full fare and told him he didn’t have to wait; he put his palms together to thank her.
It was the middle of the morning, and she expected Yellow Barrette to be at her university. She was interested to know which one it was: it wouldn’t be Dhaka University or BRAC, certainly, but it might be one of the second-tier institutions—Jagannath or Jahangirnagar. She was also curious to find out how big the family was, where they came from originally, and of course to see Yellow Barrette herself. She would be pretty, but how pretty? If Nasir really preferred this girl, what was it about her that gave Sakina pause? It had sounded from his description as if Yellow Barrette were pursuing a master’s degree, and so she was likely twenty-three or twenty-four—a reasonable ten years younger than Nasir. He’d said they were “simple people,” and so they weren’t likely to own the building as his family did. Still, Sakina had dismissed other families for being interested “only in taka.” Amina was curious enough to feel her own heartbeat and her body temperature rise as she approached the entrance.
The apartment building was modest but respectable, similar to Nasir’s, with a large courtyard half shaded by its cantilevered first floor. Behind a second gate, this one locked, was a set of stairs. She stood in the shade under the overhang and opened her purse, into which she’d put only one hundred taka and a book called Conversational English. This was one of the primers she and her mother had used, and her father said he’d kept it so that they could review before going to America. But she hadn’t seen him open it since they’d been at Nasir’s, and this morning when she’d proposed giving it to her former student as a memento, he hadn’t argued. Now she took the book out and pretended to study it until she heard footsteps on the stairs above her.
She was lucky: it was only a fish vendor, a diminutive man of indeterminate age, dark skinned and southern in aspect, carrying an aluminum box on his head. The cooler would contain silvery-pink hilsa or plump, brown perch, and he would know which fish was preferred, and in what quantity, by each of the ladies in the building.
“Bhai, excuse me.”
She put her hand on the gate before he had a chance to close it. The vendor misunderstood and raised a hand to his box, preparing to lower it to the ground for her inspection.
“Is there a young woman who lives here, a college student?”
The vendor looked slightly alarmed, as very poor people did when you made an unusual request. It was something she’d forgotten since going away. She reached into her purse to give him an incentive.
“I don’t know every family.”
She handed him a twenty-taka note; she was afraid it wouldn’t be enough, but he pocketed it with a nod. “There’s a girl on the top floor—her mother just bought a half kilo of hilsa.”
“Is the girl at home?”
The man shook his head. “Only the older lady.”
“Thank you,” Amina said, and then shut the gate behind her as if she had every right to be in the building.
There were two apartments on the top floor, both with nameplates: Razzak and Rahman. Amina hesitated for a moment, listening. In Razzak she could hear a couple arguing mildly, but the fish man had intimated that Yellow Barrette’s mother was alone. She chose the other and knocked.
The woman who answered was at least ten years younger than Amina’s mother, and beautiful in a completely different way. While her own mother’s looks had always been dramatic, with her sharp cheekbones, sunken eyes, and long, perfectly straight hair, Mrs. Rahman had a soft, childlike quality to her features, enhanced by naturally thick eyelashes. She had pinned her hair up in back, in an unsuccessful effort to control her curls; black ringlets escaped around her face. Her cheeks were flushed from whatever labor she’d been engaged in before Amina had arrived, and her feet, in white plastic house slippers, were tiny under the hem of her sari. Yellow Barrette’s mother took in Amina’s fancy shalwar kameez and the ring on her finger.
“Yes?”
“Excuse me, is your daughter an English student?”
Mrs. Rahman looked wary. “Yes. But we’re not looking for a tutor. She helps the other students.”
“Oh no.” Amina smiled, switching to English and speaking fast. “I’m not looking for a job. I think your daughter may have dropped this outside the gate.”
Her mother was flustered by the fluent English, as Amina had expected. She took the book, hardly glancing at it. “Excuse me,” she said in Bangla. “I don’t speak English well—it’s only my daughter. You’re very kind to return it. She dropped it in the road?”
“She was getting into a rickshaw,” Amina said, taking a chance. She didn’t know of a college within walking distance. “I was all the way down the lane, and by the time I reached it, she was gone. I used to use this book myself.”
Mrs. Rahman frowned. “This was just now?”
“Some time ago,” Amina improvised. “I had to stop at home first.”
The woman shook her head, smiling. “Lazy girl—she could easily have walked. Please let me give you tea. Mokta’s always been careless.”
Mokta, Amina thought: of course. She smiled at Mrs. Rahman. It was impossible to know whether Mokta really was careless or if the criticism was a rote politeness. “No, I can’t. I just wanted to return the book.”
“You went out of your way,” Mrs. Rahman said. “Please. Are you an English teacher?”
Amina shook her head. “I used to be, before I married. We live in the U.S.—I’m only here for a few weeks to see my family.”
Mokta’s mother gave her a frankly curious stare. “Do they live nearby?”
“We’re staying with a friend just down this lane. Actually, I’ve come to bring my parents back to America.”
“I’ve just put the water on,” Mrs. Rahman said. “You’d do me such a favor to keep me company for a minute.”
Amina finally agreed, as if hesitantly, and entered a living room, modestly furnished but with abundant light from two large windows. The room was immaculate, but Mrs. Rahman had been dusting anyway; a feather broom was hastily stashed beneath a small table. The table was covered with an embroidered cloth like the ones Parveen made; on top of the cloth was a fancy portable chess set, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the pieces indicating an interrupted game. Amina looked around the room, but the only photograph she could see was on a chest of drawers in the bedroom, angled away from her. On the wall above the dining table was a small oil painting in a deliberately naïve style, covered with a sheet o
f protective plastic. The painting showed a village scene: a girl in a green sari bending over a palm-fringed pond to fill a copper jug.
“Is this a painting of your village?” Amina asked when Mrs. Rahman returned, apologizing for the plate of packaged biscuits. They sat in the two wicker chairs, facing two walls of bookcases. Amina was surprised to see that several shelves were devoted to mathematics, along with a collection of Russian novels, translated into English rather than Bangla; an Oxford English Dictionary; and many volumes of poetry, among which she recognized Tagore, Mukhopadhyay, and Nazrul Islam.
“Oh, that’s just something Mokta did,” Mrs. Rahman said shyly. “She’s always amused herself with drawing and sketching. I like that scene because I think it looks southern, but our village is in Rajshahi.”
Working within a simple idiom, Mokta had somehow managed to indicate the shadows of the palm trees on the pond, the light on the copper jug, and a faraway expression on the girl’s face. Amina had noticed the painting because it reminded her of Haibatpur, but there was no doubt that Mokta knew how to paint.
“If only you’d come later,” Mrs. Rahman said. “We would’ve had sweets for you. Mokta’s stopping on her way home because my husband’s bringing a colleague for supper.”
“What kind of work does your husband do?”
“He’s a mathematics teacher,” Mrs. Rahman said with evident pride. “Do you know St. Joseph’s School?”
“Of course.” A part of Amina was surprised to learn that the family was so respectable—cultured, educated, and industrious—and again she wondered why Sakina wasn’t more enthusiastic about the match. Why was she still considering other candidates, if this was the girl her brother admired? It occurred to Amina that Sakina might not like the idea that Nasir had discovered the young woman himself; she would want to exercise complete control, to select her brother’s wife as she’d selected her little sister Shilpa’s husband. Sakina was someone who’d been thrust into a responsible position at a young age, and instead of collapsing under it, she’d determined to execute her responsibilities to perfection, so that no one could find a single error. Some people mourned a loss like the one she’d suffered; others spent their whole lives defying it.
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