by Arif Anwar
“What’re we doing today?”
“It’s Friday. You know what that means.”
She groans. “Not Bangla school again?”
“It’s only been a month. Is it really that bad?”
Anna’s body slopes in a hangdog manner. “Those Bangla letters are so hard to draw. I’m still stuck on talibo shaw.”
“That’s the prettiest letter in the Bangla alphabet. Two loops and a straight line at the end.”
“Can’t you teach me instead?”
“I’m not as good a teacher as your grandfather, but I can help you practice. Besides, don’t you like the songs and dances you get to do at Bangla school?”
“They’re okay,” Anna looks up. “I like the food, though.”
“Spoken with the true honesty of a child. Let’s hurry up and get on the bus then. I think they’re supposed to have chicken biryani today.”
“Yay!”
THE DC Bangla School operates out of a community center on Glebe Road in Arlington. It takes them an hour and two buses before they get there. They are a few minutes late for the first class—watercolors—so he takes Anna’s backpack as she runs and joins one of the groups circling large chart papers laid out on the floor. He sits near the entrance, selects a copy of Desh magazine from a stack on the table and begins to read, hoping no one will ask questions about which child is his. About her mother.
The other parents are in an amiable clump near the back, the women in saris, some with hijabs covering their hair, as is the new fashion. They lay out long aluminum trays of steaming food, the silver bodies bending from the weight of biryani, chicken curry, cucumber salad or fish dopiaza, the paper lids spotted with grease.
“You look new here,” says the man one seat over from him, in Bangla. He is thin, with a thatch of straight hair that would be salt and pepper if not hennaed red. The suit he wears is tailored with care, silver-gray with a slight sheen.
“Which one is your daughter?”
Shar curses silently. “The girl in the green shirt, over there.”
“Oh, she’s a lovely child. Such fair skin and pretty eyes. Pardon me for asking, but is her mother . . .”
“Yes, she’s American,” Shar says, trying not to be curt. It is a dance, the Bengali conversation, with broad parameters that allow it to whirl blithely into the personal, yet retaining a delicate balance that even a touch of rudeness could upend.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to get personal. My first wife was American as well. My daughter from that marriage is named Rebecca. She has blue eyes. I know all about looks and strange questions when you’re walking with your half-American daughter.”
“First wife. So you’re . . .”
“Divorced. Food, language, upbringing, culture. These differences add up to a lot. No matter how in love you are. They live in California now. My daughter is a junior at UCLA. I’ve remarried since. A Bengali woman the second time. I’ve had two more children.”
He points to a teenage boy playing table tennis at the far end. “My son, Sumon. I drive him here after school so he can play with his chums.”
“How often do you see her? Your daughter from your first marriage, I mean.”
The man’s smile is melancholy. “Not often enough. She’ll visit during Christmas. Or I will. She’s met her step-siblings. The years we can’t meet, I FedEx a gift. She calls every now and then. Sometimes it feels like she’s ticking off a box.”
Shar struggles for a response, finding the man’s revelations to be more burdens than gifts. He wonders how deep into his own history he must dive to reciprocate.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No, listen. I’m the one who should be sorry. We just met and I unloaded half my life on you. You can take the Bengali out of Bengal but not the reverse, eh?”
He extends a hand and Shar shakes it. It is warm and dry. “I’m Faisal Ahmed.”
“Shar Choudhury.”
“What do you do, Shar?”
“I just finished my doctorate last year. Now I’m doing policy research for the federal government.”
“How wonderful.”
“And you?”
The man hands him a business card in response, and when Shar reads it, Faisal Ahmed—Faisal Ahmed Esquire—suddenly gains a full hold of his attention.
“I think we need to talk,” Shar says.
Zahira
Calcutta, India
AUGUST 1946
In a grand house in Calcutta called Choudhury Manzil, Rahim and Zahira Choudhury sit and have breakfast.
On the table before them are plates of jam and toast, butter and fruit, but also grander things that fill the spaces between conversations. The moment for deciding is drawing near. The British, their exechequer drained through war, resented by Indians who will no longer tolerate their rule, are close to announcing their departure from the subcontinent, leaving their empire behind to return to their small, gloomy island to lick their wounds. But it will not be the clean break that they desire. In light of their departure, Hindus and Muslims have already begun squabbling over the future of the nation. Once unthinkable, a fracture of India along the lines of religion now seems inevitable.
“Have you given it more thought?” Zahira asks.
Rahim lowers his copy of the Statesman. Even this early in the day, his face gleams with sweat.
“Wipe your face, then answer,” she says.
He does as he is told. She knows that he likely hides a smile underneath the handkerchief, finding her assertiveness endearing. Not until the day of their marriage, three years before, had they met or spoken to each other. At eighteen, she was at that age when her marriage was a topic of active and urgent discussion in her family. One day, after classes at college, she came home to find a group of expectant people gathered in their drawing room. Seeing the flash of her sari through the door, her mother rushed to pull her aside before she could stumble into the guests, who were unprepared to see her unprepared.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered. “A very good family has come from Calcutta to look at you for their son.”
A month later, Rahim rode a piebald horse into the wedding festivities, wearing a turban with a screen of flowers. Zahira knew little about the man she was about to marry; Rahim’s father had forged a friendship with Zahira’s at Hare School, the two promising upon parting to join their families through marriage should circumstance allow it one day. So when Rahim was twenty-three, his father informed him that he was to marry the daughter of his childhood friend Abu Bakar, who lived on the other side of the river Padma, in East Bengal.
In response, Rahim had uttered the only words permissible—Yes, Father.
On her wedding night, she sat with her henna-branded arms folded on her lap, her face hidden behind the cowl of her sari, a face he would not get to glimpse until later, while upon their wedding bed. And when he finally did, she could see him struggle to contain his disappointment.
Her plainness was not news, but she was still surprised by how wretched she felt at that moment, a sense that only deepened when she overheard him speaking to his mother, a legendary force in the family and a reluctant signatory to the marriage, having set her sights on a less educated but more conventionally attractive Calcutta girl for her son. It is better to marry a plain woman, she told him, the words of comfort a slap to Zahira. Other men won’t covet her, and her devotion to you will be greater.
Rahim was tall and handsome, polite, quick to kindness toward others and seemingly immune to the arrogance that his lavish upbringing would breed in others. So, despite his misgivings about her appearance, she fell quickly for her husband. She vowed to mitigate the handicap of her looks, leaning on her quick wit, her abilities as a conversationalist, her singing, her knowledge of Chaucer, Blake, Keats, Yeats, Dante and Russell.
That first year of pursuing his affections was a prolonged dawn, the light of their love growing stronger until she could see the reward for her dogged efforts—when the face Rahim ha
d once thought plain became one to which he was increasingly drawn. But what she had not expected was that three years into the marriage they would still be eating breakfast alone, their dreams of having children yet to be fulfilled despite many visits to the best physicians Calcutta had to offer—both allopaths and homeopaths. After exhausting their knowledge of this army of medicine men, Rahim and Zahira made their way to the soldiers bringing up the rear—to a ragged company of Ayurvedic experts, kobirajes, pirs, sadhus and outright hucksters and charlatans who prescribed remedies ranging from eating blessed fruits to bathing in the light of the moon. Eventually the couple acquiesced to their fate, the emptiness of Zahira’s womb echoing the cavernous house in which they live.
“Sorry, what were you saying?”
“You heard me.”
He sips water to buy time. “Please don’t tell me it’s about leaving Calcutta again.”
“I thought we’d agreed on this?”
“We said that we’d consider it. Even if the country is to be divided it’s at least a year away.”
“And you want to wait until that moment of madness to make decisions? We’ll be caught short, without a home and without options if we decide too late that we do want to move out of West Bengal.”
He counters with questions that have been an effective line of defense against this issue. “Where would I work? What would I do in East Bengal?”
“Dhaka. The biggest city. You could work there. Maybe you won’t get a comparable position, at least not in the beginning, but that will be temporary uncertainty we can live with.”
He grimaces. “Maybe you can live with it. Dhaka’s such a backwater. It’s barely a city compared to Calcutta. If we have to go to East Bengal, I’d rather just live in the country.”
“All of it is a backwater, Rahim. And will be for some time. At least at first. That’s why they need people like you. You think there’s much hope for East Bengal if the best and brightest Muslims stay back here?”
He raises the newspaper to his face. “We don’t even know if it’ll happen,” he says, and she knows what he is referring to immediately.
“Sure, maybe Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi will wake up one morning and magically decide to get along with each other. But the British are leaving, sooner or later. All I’m asking is that we have a plan in place if we do. Do you want to stay or go? Just give me a clear answer.”
He lowers the paper again, sighs. “All I know is that I’d rather risk the unknowns here than in a place I’ve never been.”
“That’s fine. But I’m from there, and I tell you if we go you will fall in love with the East.”
Zahira’s arguments have established beachheads on his psyche and now, as they advance, he reaches for a weapon of desperation. “What about my mother and father?”
Rahim is one of three children, with an elder brother and sister. The latter is settled in Bombay with her physician husband; the former manages a prosperous steel mill in Lucknow. A few years back, with Calcutta’s heat no longer tolerable for them, his parents moved to live with his brother. Since then, Rahim and Zahira take the train twice a year during the Eid holidays to see them, visits during which they make clear to him that the weather in Lucknow agrees with them, and that they have no intention of returning to Choudhury Manzil, or Calcutta.
“If you really wanted to be close to them, we’d have already moved to Lucknow.”
He rises and brushes crumbs from his jacket, looks around to see if any of the servants are near, and circles around to Zahira’s side of the table to lay a quick peck on her head. “We will decide soon. I promise you. You crossed a border for me, maybe it’s my turn. I have to run now. I’m late for my meeting with Drake.”
FOLLOWING his departure, she goes up to her bedroom on the second floor, walks out to the expansive balcony that looks out on a Calcutta about to enter its noontime somnolence. Leaning on the sun-warmed railing with one hand, she lets the other caress her belly. Taut and strong like the skin of a drum, and like it, just as empty. Maybe that will change if they move back east. Maybe the air and water here conspire to keep her barren, rip off life before it can take root. She laughs. Desperate women will convince themselves of anything. And then convince their husbands.
Something catches her eye.
A bird sits on the railing. At the far end. Massive and fearless. Black feathers. Claws and eyes. It studies her with an immortal patience, the sunlight dappling its plumage dark violet. This is no timid gray-hooded crow but a great dar kaak. Carrion crow. Raven. As a child, the stolidity of these creatures, their inscrutable gaze, frightened her, a phobia she now discovers time has not diminished. Jah, jah. She yells to dissuade the bird from its perch, stomps her feet as accompaniments. Seemingly bemused, the raven lets out a mocking gronk as it flies away, a single feather spiraling down in its wake.
Shaken by her wildlife encounter, she retreats to the cooler environs of her bedroom, lies down on the bed with the intent of calming her racing heart, which it does, but only at the expense of a great lethargy that overtakes her. She begins nodding off as though drugged, and before long a darkness that looks to her like raven’s wings spreads before her vision. It threatens rather than lulls her into black dreamless sleep.
SHE is woken by the sound of a throat clearing. One of her maids stands at the doorway.
She scrabbles up on the bed, feeling as though she has been dipped in treacle. “Nargis, oh my goodness. How long have I been asleep?”
“A few hours, begum sahiba. It’s noon.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Noticing the fearful look on her face, she adds, “What’s the matter?”
“I . . . I don’t know, begum sahiba. Please come down.”
She rushes down the stairs, to the solarium. Motaleb stands in the middle, encircled by household staff speaking in low concerned tones. Their faces are grave; a few of the women cover their mouths in distress.
“Motaleb, what’s happened?”
The old man bursts into tears.
“What are you all waiting for? Get him a chair.”
The seated Motaleb is handed a glass of water. Trembling like a leaf, he recounts the events of the afternoon, ending with, “They told us we have until the end of tomorrow to get them the money.”
She speaks in a daze. “Or what will happen?”
He does not answer. Some members of the staff—both men and women—start softly weeping.
She whirls on them. “Stop with your childish tears! How will that help the master?”
The edge in her voice and its volume have an electric effect, ending the murmurs and incipient wails as though a radio has been switched off. She puts a hand on the wall to steady herself. Fear and weakness can spread like a plague if unchecked.
She looks to Motaleb. “Who are they and how much do they want?”
“I don’t know who they are, begum sahiba, but they had a mark on their foreheads. Some manner of Hindu gang. They want one lakh.”
Taking a piece of quicklime, then dipping his finger in powdered cayenne for the dot, Motaleb recreates on the floor the symbol he saw on the foreheads of the men.
Zahira stares at it as her world spins anew. One hundred thousand taka is an astronomical sum, even for a family as affluent as Rahim’s. She does quick mental accounting and estimates that in the safe upstairs there is at most a third that. She must find a way to make up the rest.
“Have you gone to the police?”
“They said they would hurt sahib if we did. I was told to come home with the message right away.”
She subjects the elderly man to a withering gaze, not feeling the least bit of pity for his state. “You have failed your master, Motaleb. You have failed me. If your loyalty to this family meant anything, you would not have let him fall into the hands of those thugs, but since you did, you should have stayed behind.”
He does not meet her eyes.
She rushes back upstairs, locks the bedroom door behind her and opens the safe to do
a hurried count of the notes within, punctured and bound together with thick red and white bank threads. Forty-three thousand two hundred takas. A bit more than she thought they had.
Recessed in the far wall of the first safe is a second one; she opens this and sweeps out its contents with her palm into a velvet bag. There is the glint of gemstones, the clink of metal as the objects fall in. Most of the jewelry belonged to her mother-in-law, and a small portion to her own mother, brought over when she married Rahim. Looking at the velvet bag, she reconsiders and swaps it for a plainer cotton one. The stacks of money she wraps in brown paper and places in the bag along with the jewelry. Combined with the cash, she should have enough to meet the ransom.
Her next stop is Rahim’s study, where she opens his address book, thumbs to “D.” She picks up the receiver of their phone. They have had it for less than a year, one of the few households in Calcutta with their own line.
“How can I place your call?” Asks the woman’s voice at the other end, in English.
Zahira recites the four-digit number.
“Just a moment. I’m connecting you.”
The line is answered on the second ring. “Theodore Drake.”
She freezes. She has studied English literature, read hundreds of books in the language and has even practiced speaking to her father in English, but now she must converse with an Englishman in his native tongue.
She composes the sentences in her head first. “Mr. Drake, my name is Zahira Choudhury. I am the wife of Rahim Choudhury,” she says finally, the words stumbling over each other.
Drake is silent long enough to make her wonder if she made a mistake in calling, but then he says, “Mrs. Choudhury. This is a most pleasant surprise. I don’t believe we’ve spoken before. Is anything the matter?”
“Yes, Mr. Drake,” she says. “I am afraid that my husband has been abducted.”
DRAKE, as it happens, is a good friend of D. R. Hardwick’s, the police commissioner; a car arrives in a half hour, bearing an inspector and two constables. She sits the men in the drawing room.