by Tahmima Anam
I rolled my eyes. ‘When I said everyone, I meant everyone I know.’
‘Zubaida doesn’t like us to have stereotypes about Bangladesh,’ Bettina said.
‘Like what?’
‘Like that it’s full of fatwas and poor people,’ Bettina said, looking to me for approval.
I was feeling contrary, so I said, ‘Except that it is.’
‘Oh, fuck that. You spend three years lecturing me and now you’ve what, changed your mind?’ The scent of Suzu’s clove cigarette enveloped us in a spicy, acrid fog.
‘Suzu,’ I said, ‘it’s like 1993 in your mouth.’
‘So you’re saying your country is portrayed accurately in the Western media,’ Bettina persisted.
‘It’s exactly like that. Political in-fighting, radicals on the loose, child marriage, and climate disaster around the corner. No one should want to go anywhere near it.’
Suzu turned her thumb ring around and around. ‘I have no idea what you guys are talking about,’ she said.
‘That’s because you’re smoking that shit,’ Bettina said, waving her hands in front of her face. ‘Zubaida met someone.’
Suzu dropped her cigarette and pressed it into the grass. ‘I thought you had a boyfriend.’
‘I did. I do.’ I wanted to change the subject, so I turned to Chandana. ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Dating anyone?’ She was one of those Indian women who adorned herself with enough silver jewellery to set off a metal detector. Her ears were pierced in multiple locations, her nose had a ring with a chain that connected to her earring, and her bangles chimed every time she raised her arms. Bettina hadn’t given herself permission to make fun of her until I started calling her ‘full bridal’, because, as far as I knew, only a fully decked out Indian bride would wear a nose-ring like that. I assumed Chandana had many sexual conquests, that she would marry an ethnomusicologist or a sculptor, but she said, ‘Oh, my parents will only approve if I marry a Tam-Bram.’
I knew what she meant, but Suzu and Bettina did not. ‘A Brahmin boy from my home state, Tamil Nadu,’ she explained.
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘So how does it work?’ Bettina asked.
‘Every few weeks I get a phone call, and it’s some banker or doctor on the other end, and he’s the nicest guy in the world, and so boring he could put a rabid dog into a coma. And then we go out on a date to an expensive restaurant, and then I go home and tell my parents he’s not the one.’
‘Do they mind?’ Suzu asked.
‘What restaurant?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’ve been to them all. Craigie on Main, Aujourd’hui. They like their French food, even if they’re vegetarian and can only order the cheese soufflé. Once a guy even flew me to Miami. And my parents like to see me trying.’
‘How do you get anything done?’
‘It’s very time-consuming. I almost failed my comps.’
‘What happens if you fall in love with someone?’ Bettina said.
Chandana and I rolled our eyes at each other. ‘I was dating this white guy last year, and my parents found out and they totally freaked. I mean, my mother had to double up on her blood pressure medication. It wasn’t worth it.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Suzu said.
‘Oh, it can’t be that bad,’ I said. ‘Craigie on Main is a really good restaurant. Rashid took me last year.’
‘So you’re going to marry this guy or what?’ Chandana asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. That moment of clairvoyance was finally catching up with me. ‘I’ve known him my whole life, my parents adore him. And he’s sexy as hell, everyone’s always telling me how lucky I am.’
‘You should’ve broken up with him years ago,’ Bettina said.
‘It just gets harder when your parents are attached,’ Chandana said.
I put my head on Bettina’s lap and thought for a moment about what it would’ve been like if I had ended it with Rashid. We had been together since high school. When he’d gone to college in London the year before I left for America, I had told myself I would give it six months, but I found Dhaka dull without him, and when I left for college myself, I found his telephone calls, made precisely on time every morning before I went to class, comforting through that first, long New England winter. In March, which your people call spring, but when the ground is still as hard and white as a funeral, he had come to visit, renting a car and driving up from Boston, bringing a suitcase full of things he had smuggled through customs and cooking khichuri and potato bhorta in the tiny kitchen in the basement of my dorm. That was when I think I decided – watching his fingers casually wrapped around the top of the steering wheel as he drove me through snow-banked roads. After he finished university, he moved home to join his father’s business. He was always there when I went back for the holidays, taking my parents out for their birthdays and anniversaries, filling something of the emptiness I had left behind. There were sometimes men I liked, men I flirted with, but no one I could ever imagine bringing home, because home is where I knew I must eventually end up, no matter how long or sweet the wandering.
And that, Elijah, is the story of our first meeting. I have had much time to dwell on it. I been able to recount every beat of our encounter, to revel in that moment of possibility. Perhaps the memory is as clear to you as it is to me; perhaps you recall that I had a bruise below my knee that you commented on at the café, and I explained that I had never learned to ride a bike and my roommate was trying to teach me before I left. Perhaps you recall our mutual love for Nina Simone and telling me that your parents had once taken you to a concert when you were six, that you regretted deeply when you were older that you had slept through the whole thing. Perhaps you will remember every detail, as I do, though the alternative is more likely – that you have erased the entire episode from your mind, because you never think of me, and even when you do – even if you remember picking up a ten-dollar bill from the sidewalk, a note that fell out when I took my keys out of my pocket – it won’t be with tenderness, but with regret. Either way: here, three years later, is the story of our meeting, and falling in love, and breaking up, and all the messiness in between. Here is every detail recorded in my mind and amplified by remorse. It is an ethnographic field study and an apology for the way I behaved, and a chance for me to give you a comprehensive account of exactly what happened – because, though we were together for so much of that time and I felt like I was telling you everything, I realise now that there was much you didn’t know, that even when you are closer to someone than you have ever been or thought you could be, there will always be silences and ellipses and things you should have said but were too afraid to admit. And somewhere along the way – I have not yet decided where – I will also tell you about Anwar, because his story is as important as ours, the three of us woven together in ways we could never have dreamt.
I had arranged to meet you in front of the Science Centre, but when I got there, ten minutes late, you hadn’t arrived. The heat had already sliced through the day; the fountains were on, and a few people were milling around the curved stone bench. There was a woman pushing a child in a stroller and a man in a black suit with a newspaper spread out between his hands, and the clown who usually hung around the entrance to the subway. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I circled back through the Yard, walking slowly, so that I could be sure you would have arrived by the time I returned. Then I thought, what if you didn’t show up, what if you walked away and I never saw you again? I rushed. When I crossed the gate out of the Yard, the man in the black suit looked up from his newspaper and I realised that you were him, and you saw me and you waved. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might crack a rib. I waved back.
‘Well hello there,’ you said, in a tone so warm and friendly it could have been the greeting of an old friend. You wore a formal white shirt and a striped tie. The comb-tracks were visible in your damp hair. I wanted to jump for joy but instead I stood
restless in front of you. ‘What were you just doing?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ you said. ‘Just sitting. In fact, I was thinking about you.’
‘I was thinking about you too,’ I said.
You broke into a smile. I decided not to ask why you had dressed up. You said you knew the best breakfast place in Cambridge, and I said I’d had a bowl of cereal but I could always eat again. I liked the fact that people in your country took their breakfast seriously. Back home I could get ice cream at midnight, and there were fruit stalls on Mirpur Road that sold mangoes until dawn, but there was never anywhere to go in the morning. No omelettes or hash browns or complicated types of toast. I followed you out of the quad, up Quincy and down Mass Ave, past the Korean café and the wine store that I had always been too intimidated to enter. You took off your jacket and folded it neatly over your arm. We ducked into a small, unlabelled restaurant with a blue awning that I must have passed a hundred times but never noticed. The air conditioner was on full blast. You found us a table at the back and sat down, careful to restrain your tie as you pulled your chair forward.
‘Mass Ave Diner,’ you said proudly, sitting with your face towards the sun. Against the backdrop of the undertaker’s suit, the blond tangle of your hair was electric. Eyes little moons of blue light. I forced myself not to stare at you, taking in the plastic tablecloths and the large, egg-shaped man behind a flat grill in the open kitchen. Rashid would have never brought me somewhere like this; he would have taken me to an upscale brunch place on the other side of the river after reading reviews on his phone. Now you were talking to the waitress, your tone intimate, meeting her smile. The waitress left with a wink and a sneaker-clad pirouette.
We talked. You started with the story of the time your parents had taken an extended sabbatical and moved your entire family to Vermont. You remembered breaking the ice by throwing rocks into the well, keeping bees and pigs and growing your own vegetables. Your parents tried to start a small business – Strong’s Sweet Nectars – selling honey and maple syrup, thinking that they might leave it all behind and stay out there for ever if things worked out. But the experiment failed: the bees swarmed and disappeared one day, and the syrup crystallised, and your mother grew tired of washing diapers by hand, and they packed everyone up and drove you all back to Cambridge, and central heating, and running water, and eventual divorce. You were nine. The place was still there. You returned occasionally and retreated from the world, not speaking or meeting another person for days, sometimes weeks, on end.
‘I could never be quiet for such a long time,’ I told you. ‘Doesn’t it make you crazy?’
You said something about how the world became very loud when one stopped talking. Then you told me about the trees in Vermont, how they gave up their sap, and the wild turkeys that roamed the valleys, and the ice-cold lakes into which you and your brothers and your sister liked to plunge. It was all very exotic to me, because I had never been camping with my parents or jumped into anything deeper than a swimming pool. Going on the dig was the most adventurous thing I had ever contemplated doing. Thinking about it now conjured an image of another person that lived inside me, someone to whom the word ‘intrepid’ would be frequently attached.
The waitress came back. We had forgotten to order. I think I may have reached for the menu, but you looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to order for you because there’s this sandwich and I know you’ll like it. Best sandwich in the world.’
‘A sandwich for breakfast?’
‘Not a sandwich for breakfast. A breakfast-sandwich.’
You turned to the waitress and ordered. ‘Just egg and cheese for me, Betty. Coffee? Orange juice? You drink coffee, right?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry. I hate the stuff. Do they have tea?’ You asked Betty for tea. ‘With milk and sugar,’ I said. Behind the open kitchen, the egg-shaped man poured a large spoonful of batter onto the grill.
You said, ‘Tell me about the whale dinosaurs.’
‘Well, the thing about whales is that they went the opposite way to everyone else, evolutionarily speaking.’
‘What do you mean, like they walked first and then swam?’
‘Yes. The whale’s earliest ancestor, Pakicetus, was almost entirely a land mammal. Sort of like a coyote. Ten million years later, you have Basilosaurus, who had nothing but a trace of the amphibian left in him. The intermediate species are what interest me.’
‘The intermediate species. I like that. So which ones are in between?’
‘There are a few, but the one I’m looking for is called Ambulocetus. It was discovered about twenty years ago, but no one has been able to bring back a complete skeleton. That’s why I’m going to Pakistan.’ We talked awhile about Ambulocetus. Even though I had explained this story many times, to many people, I felt as if I was revealing a secret about myself. This was a feeling that would return to me many times in your presence, of giving away more than I intended to. It was neither unpleasant nor comfortable.
The food arrived. The sandwiches looked small and pale sitting alone on their heavy porcelain plates. The tea was in a giant mug, the orange juice in corrugated-plastic cups. I picked up the sandwich, which was almost as high as it was wide, and took a bite. The egg came loose between the layers and spilled onto my chin, the plate. I was embarrassed, and tried to keep my lips closed, alarmed by the intensity of flavour and volume in my mouth.
At this point, I believe you may have thought you’d committed a faux pas. You said, ‘There’s sausage in that sandwich – you don’t eat pork?’
I allowed myself to hesitate a little before laughing. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘just don’t tell my parents.’
You pulled the plate from me. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I’m joking. Really, I am. My parents don’t care, they’re not religious. Give me my sandwich.’ I pulled the plate back. You asked if I was Muslim, and I said yes, I was, but that I came from a family of sceptics. Nationalism was the religion in our household. ‘They’re communists. Sort of. The Bangladesh war changed them.’
I think I may have mentioned at that moment, by way of explanation, that my mother drove an ambulance during the war. I wanted to bring up the subject of my adoption again. To repeat that my parents were not my only parents, that I had other parents, parents I had hardly thought about until last night. The image of your home – the cabin, the maple trees – was deepening in my mind. I could smell pine and hear the clamour of your family. Your story made my story into a sad one, and I began to regard you with some envy. Also, I could not understand why you were suddenly in limbo, after having had what appeared to be such a privileged life. You mentioned again that you’d been to India, that you might like to go again.
‘I had a friend from there, I went to visit her family. And then we travelled together to Nepal, and Bhutan.’
I sprang back into the moment. I wanted to ask you the name of this girl. I crossed and uncrossed my arms, trying to find the most casual, relaxed pose I could to express how much this story was not bothering me. I told myself that people fell in love with you all the time. You were cartoonishly handsome. Even your forehead was sexy, big and flat and serious. I tilted my orange juice till there was nothing left at the bottom of the cup, and then, not being able to resist, I said, ‘Was she your girlfriend?’
‘She was, for a long time. But it was over by the time I went to India.’
‘Did you break her heart?’ The longing to be that girl, drawing you towards me from across the continents, was so strong I felt a surge of blood to my legs.
‘No.’ I would learn, over time, that you were the master of the meaning-burdened one-word answer.
I looked into the pools of your eyes, the light ring of your eyelashes, allowing you to see inside me. ‘Last night, you looked so beautiful when you cried. I’ve never seen anyone cry like that,’ you said.
‘Can I ask you now why you are dressed so formally?’
‘Today is my grandmother’s funera
l.’
You told me you had sauntered into an internet café in Pondicherry, ready to write a long email to your family about that town, the fort and the little shacks on the edge of the beach where you had admired the sunset, each evening a different shade of pink, and you were thinking how different the sun was there, bigger yet somehow further away than in Vermont, where it stood alone without the frame of clouds. And then you discovered your father had been trying to reach you for days, calling all your friends and asking if they knew where you were. But you had travelled to Pondicherry alone – Reeva, the girl, had left you in Mysore and gone back to Delhi. As you told me this story, that lost expression came over you again, the one I had seen last night as the lights came on in the auditorium, and now I wanted to tell you I was looking for something too, something that couldn’t be found in the ankle bones of a whale. You pulled your chair forward and pressed your chest against the rim of the table.
‘How terrible for you,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And we stayed that way for a long time. And then I told you. I hadn’t meant to, not right then, but it just came out. ‘There’s something I should have said yesterday. About me.’
‘What’s that?’ I had slipped off my sandals and I was sitting cross-legged on the chair, but now I straightened up and planted my feet back on the ground.
‘I have a person – a boyfriend – back home.’
‘Really?’
‘His name is Rashid.’
‘Rashid,’ you repeated.
‘We’ve known each other our whole lives. We’ll probably get married or something,’ I said, letting it all come out in a rush. ‘Of course, not that you care, or anything, I just – I just thought, since we just met—’
‘I wish I’d met you before.’
‘I didn’t want to give you the wrong impression.’
Our sandwiches had been devoured, the mugs emptied. The waitress returned, tore a page from her pad, and left it on the table. I couldn’t tell if you were disappointed. Were you? Or perhaps, with the death of your grandmother, you were unable to register much of anything at that moment, your every feeling crowded by some other feeling. Even now, when I think back, I wonder if our story would have ended differently if I had told you at some other moment, or in some other way.