by Tahmima Anam
I turned to Nanu. ‘Did you know I was adopted?’
Her reply was immediate. ‘Yes.’
‘From where?’
‘I always thought your parents should have told you, but they had their reasons. They asked me not to talk about it.’
‘Did you know?’ I asked Sohail.
‘Your mother wrote to me. But she told me it was in confidence, and I haven’t spoken of it since.’
The doorbell rang. ‘Don’t answer that,’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’
‘I don’t know any more, jaan,’ my grandmother said. ‘Come, sit beside me.’ She patted the cushion, upholstered in pink.
I wasn’t sure how or where to direct myself. The doorbell rang a second time, and I found myself leaning against the door. ‘Are any of your children adopted?’ I asked Sohail.
‘Mine are not. But our Prophet, peace be upon him, was himself an orphan.’
I nodded, remembering what I had whispered to you that night at Sanders. The bell rang for the third time. Then, my father’s voice. ‘Sweetheart, open the door.’
‘Is Ammoo there?’ I asked.
A pause. ‘Yes.’
‘Let them in,’ Nanu said gently.
I opened the door and found my parents in the corridor, standing slightly apart but holding hands. ‘Sohail Mama is here,’ I said.
I stepped aside and they followed me in. Nanu rose from her seat, leaning on her walker. ‘I’m going to get more tea,’ she said. ‘Sohail, come with me.’
‘I can’t, the servant girl is in there,’ he said. He observed purdah and the only women he would glance at had to be related to him by blood.
‘For God’s sake,’ Ammoo said, ‘you haven’t changed.’
Sohail turned to Ammoo and hugged her, unoffended.
She shrugged him off. ‘I’m here for my daughter.’
‘Something of a daughter,’ I said.
Nanu closed the kitchen door behind her. Sohail, enormous, made himself invisible by looking up at the ceiling and mouthing something – a prayer, I assumed. Ammoo began to make galloping, strangled sounds into her hands. The noise echoed around the room and then was swallowed by Abboo and me. We looked at each other and I nodded to him so he would know it was okay for him to start explaining. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘You know, don’t you, sweetheart, that I was captured during the war.’
So he was going to start with that. I couldn’t be angry about that, could I, because he was a war hero with war wounds. Maybe that is how I should have been thinking of myself all along, as a war wound, a throbbing reminder of something bad and something good that happened all at once.
‘After I was released, and the war ended, and your mother and I married – well, we tried for a few years, but as it turns out—’
I was afraid he would detail his torture so I finished his sentence. ‘You couldn’t have children.’
‘Something like that,’ he said. Sohail finished his prayer and withdrew his gaze from the ceiling. We heard Nanu moving around the kitchen, the clatter of plates and cups.
‘Looking back,’ Abboo continued, ‘We made some errors, in the way we—’
‘It was my fault,’ Ammoo interrupted. ‘It was me. There was nothing wrong with your father. I was the problem.’ She stood up and circled the room. From the kitchen came the rising and rising sound of the boiling kettle.
‘Come here, jaan,’ Abboo said, and Ammoo obeyed, returning to sit beside him. I could see them very young now, their faces lean and tired, grappling with things beyond their control, images from the war, and the sparse, mysterious future before them.
‘For a long time I didn’t think about children,’ Ammoo said. ‘But then suddenly I did, and when I did I felt a sort of desperation. We tried everything, spent all our money.’ She smoothed the pleats of her sari. ‘Anyway, the point is, the silence – your father did it to protect me. We never talked about it. The few people who knew, they just assumed it was him, and because of the war, no one asked.’
‘But what about me?’ I said, wanting to remain angry. ‘You never wanted to tell me any of this?’
‘We wanted so badly for you to be ours,’ my father said. ‘We were selfish. We’re so very sorry.’
Nanu returned with the tea. She sat down and busied herself with pouring and adding powdered milk, sugar. Sohail passed around the cups, placing one in front of me, patting my head as he moved heavily back to his chair.
‘There’s more, I know there’s more. Dolly said she lost all the records of my adoption. How could that be?’
Ammoo’s eyes fell to the floor. ‘You tell her,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’
I could see Abboo struggling to form the words. I wanted to tell them I loved them, that my life wasn’t so bad, that I knew they had done their best. I wanted to feel sorry for Ammoo for the burden she’d been carrying around all these years, but the urge to be harsh was stronger. You, Elijah, of all people, will know that I was capable of being cruel. I looked around and they were all staring at me and the air seemed to wrap itself around my mouth. I ignored my father’s outstretched arms, the soft sobs of my mother. ‘You know what this makes me? Not knowing who I am? It makes me half a person.’
‘It was a terrible time,’ I heard Sohail say. His voice was steady. ‘We all did things in the war, and we’ve all found ways to make peace with those things.’
‘Did you kill anyone?’
‘That’s not what he means,’ Abboo said. ‘After the war, everyone was looking for meaning, for something that would help us to make sense of what happened. For some people, it was their work – lot of money people made. And sometimes’ – he looked at Sohail now – ‘it was religion.’
‘For us it was a baby,’ Ammoo said. ‘We wanted a baby to erase all our pain.’ I looked at her and saw that she was pulling it out of herself with tremendous pain and effort, like a demonic spirit that had lodged itself between her ribs and had to be exorcised. As she spoke, her voice grew in volume and confidence. ‘So when we couldn’t – when I couldn’t – you won’t understand, it’s something so deep, the inability to bear a child.’
I took a sip of tea, burning my tongue.
‘We didn’t want to have any contact with – her – your mother. It was too difficult. So we let Dolly and Bulbul handle everything, and then we asked them to destroy the evidence. Once you were legally ours, we just wanted to forget you had ever belonged to anyone else.’
I didn’t know what to say. Their reasons for wanting to erase the adoptedness of their child – me – was not unreasonable. It was born out of a need to love and be loved, I could see that now and I believed it. But it also meant they must have, on some level, been ashamed – not in the way some might have thought, and I had always feared – that my roots were somehow contaminated by poverty, or bad luck, or misfortune – but ashamed of themselves, and maybe ashamed was not even the right way to describe it – more that it was a terrible thing, the fact that I’d had to come from somewhere other than my mother’s womb, that I wasn’t made of them in the way they had so ardently desired, that their solution for the damping of their sorrow had collapsed around them and left them no option but to settle for someone else’s child. So although I was grateful for this truth, it made me think of all the nights they might have spent waiting, and wanting, and being denied, and perhaps even after I had come to them, they may have glanced down at my sleeping face and wished I were someone else, the someone who was never to be, and I could see now why they didn’t want me to know, because as soon as the image flashed before my eyes, I missed the time, just a few minutes ago, when the knowledge didn’t exist, not in the specific, tangible way it did now.
I looked at my uncle to see if he had something to say at this moment, something solemn and meant for moments such as these, but he was leaning back with his hands folded on the dome of his belly. ‘I have to find her,’ I said. ‘I’m going to keep looking until I find her.’
Sohail Mama hauled himself up and ambled towards me. ‘I am going now,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay at the mosque tonight.’ I saw a shadow crossing Nanu’s face, knowing he wouldn’t listen if she asked him to stay. All the mothers in the room were longing to cling to their children, I thought, lanced by the memory of my miscarriage. Sohail hugged me and I clung to him. ‘Allah sees everything and forgives everything, remember that.’ His soft shoulders smelled of rosewater. ‘Losing a child is like the end of the world.’ I let him whisper a prayer into my ear, knowing that I was betraying Ammoo as I lingered in his arms.
After he had slipped on his sandals and closed the door behind him, I said, ‘I’m going to spend the night here. Nanu, can I stay?’
‘We’ll stay also,’ Ammoo said.
I was too tired to protest. Nanu busied herself in the kitchen, emerging with a simple chicken curry and rice. She spooned the rice onto my plate. Once or twice she tried to raise various topics of conversation, but no one took her up on it. I ate with my head down, hungrier than I wanted to be, glancing occasionally at my parents. My mother was pushing her food around with a fork. Finally I went to bed without a word to anyone and fell asleep immediately.
When I felt Ammoo’s hand on my face, it must have been close to dawn, because the room was bathed in pale orange light. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but she was lying down beside me and her eyes were open. When I started to turn away from her, she stopped me, her palm firm on my cheek. ‘When you were a baby I would lie down beside you and pull your mouth open like this,’ she said, pressing her thumb down on my chin. ‘And I would put my face close to yours and I would try to smell your breath.’
‘How did it smell?’
‘Milky and sweet. Like custard.’
My mother could beat anyone at hard-luck stories. If you started a conversation with her about something bad that had happened to someone you knew, she would pretend to listen and tell you something so harrowing and dark you would immediately fall silent. I always thought of this as Ammoo’s superpower, the ability to make people feel simultaneously better and far, far worse about their place in the world. I realised now, listening to her frayed breathing, her story of catching the scent of the child that had come to her so late, and with such trouble, that she lived within these dark tales. They fed her and she fed them. She was in dialogue with the lives of others, breathing the very air they expelled, those invisible people who were nothing but a blur to the rest of the world, but alive, vivid, to her. I put my palm over her palm on my cheek, and we lay that way for a long time, circled by the years we had spent belonging to each other.
In the morning, after Nanu had fed us all breakfast and we went our separate ways, my mother back to Sirajganj to start another round of interviews, my father to the factory, I considered the failure of my search, casting my mind to the time my parents made the decision to adopt me. The country, at peace, must have been unsatisfying to my parents. They missed the people they had become when their names began with ‘Comrade’. Returned to ordinariness, they no longer hummed the protest songs as they fell asleep, now in unstrange places. Too quickly they forgot the tragedies of that hour, and what remained was a lingering sense of loss, because now they were citizens, and the business of citizenship was inferior by far to the business of revolution. What they wanted, more than anything, was an anchoring hope, and that anchoring hope was me.
And that is why I would never know who my mother was. They had destroyed the evidence and started a family in the new country.
I wandered around the city. I walked up road 27 and went into various shops, one displaying only black-and-white saris, another selling handicrafts, its walls decorated with rickshaw art. I bought a postcard. Elijah, I wrote, I will never know who my mother is. On an impulse, I took a rickshaw to the Dhanmondi Post Office and stood in line behind a string of men in identical pale-blue half-sleeve shirts and I wrote down your address and paid the severe woman behind the counter. Immediately I regretted it, wishing I could reach behind the metal grille and retrieve the postcard, but the lunchtime crowd swelled and I lost my will. Eventually, hunger drove me home, past the parliament building which sat like a giant grey crab on Manik Mia Avenue, past the planetarium and the tiny bookshop tucked behind the old airport, and finally into Banani, where I stopped at a cheap bakery to buy a chocolate Swiss roll that I knew would irritate Dolly. All the while I was thinking, my search is over. I was still the restless being I had always been, but now that I knew there was nothing left to discover, was the mystery greater, or did it shrink?
I could not decide this on my own. There was no one for me to ask, no one to tell me how to feel about this, the failure and resolution of my search, not my parents, not my husband, not the friends I had gathered over the years at home. I realised that I had spent much of my life parcelling myself out, giving a little to this person, a little to that, and there was no one to connect the dots, no one to understand the sum total of all the parts, the orphan, the scientist, the daughter of revolutionaries. Except you, of course. But, in spite, or perhaps because, of that, I had given you up.
I dialled Rubana’s number. I knew she would scold me for leaving the beach abruptly, but I suppose I wanted someone to tell me to follow through, to be better. She didn’t reply, so I sent her a text message, and about an hour later she called me back.
‘I’m filing a case with the High Court,’ she said, as if we had been cut off in mid-sentence. ‘I’ll be using your interviews.’
‘I thought they were just for the film.’
‘The case studies will make a difference. Put a human face to all the misery. You’ve done a good thing.’
A good thing. I thought about the way I had treated Mo. ‘Bilal told me you left,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry. I had some personal issues to deal with.’
‘I hope your mother doesn’t regret sending you to me.’ I heard a pause, then a clicking sound, as if she was pressing her lips together and separating them. ‘I’ve heard things, about an American boy.’
Of course Rubana would have heard. My face burned as I busied myself with a crease on my kameez.
‘You know I don’t really care about these things – your life is yours. But you can’t give people excuses for not taking you seriously.’
I felt guilty at the strength with which I wished this woman was my mother. I told myself it was time to stop doing this, a habit I had developed over the years – stop looking for her at every turn, imagining she was this person, or that. Strangers on the street. Women I had known my whole life.
As if she had read my mind, Rubana said, ‘You could go back and do a few more interviews.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, relieved. She was giving me a way out again, and I was taking it with both hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to everyone. ‘Rubana needs me to finish some work.’
Rashid refused the tub of pistachio ice cream being passed around the table. ‘When will you be back?’ he asked.
‘My baby-babu misses his bride,’ Dolly said.
‘A few weeks.’ Under the table, I reached for his hand.
‘Can’t someone else do it?’ Dolly said. ‘It’s so sad when newlyweds have to be apart.’
‘Why don’t we all go down for a weekend?’ Bulbul said. ‘We haven’t been to the house in months.’
‘It’s going to rain the whole time. You’ll catch a cold. Rubana is really being unreasonable,’ Dolly said.
‘I’ve missed the Chittagong golf course,’ Bulbul said. ‘If we go down I can play a few rounds.’
Dolly plunged her spoon into the ice-cream tub. ‘That’s it. You’ll drag me all the way down there and disappear for the whole day.’
‘Weathe
r is nice this time of year.’
‘No, it’s not. And Sigma and Pultu will be disappointed if we don’t invite them for lunch.’
‘Of course,’ Bulbul said, leaning back in his chair. ‘But Pultu can play a round with me and we can have lunch at the club.’
Dolly and Bulbul went back and forth a few times about whether they should fly or drive down to Chittagong, where they should have lunch, and Rashid excused himself, and we all dispersed before the tea trolley arrived. ‘You really have to go?’ he asked as soon as we had closed the bedroom door behind us. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, unrolled his shirtsleeves and threw himself down on the armchair.
Rashid had decided not to think about the depth of my entanglement with you, but simply about the fact that I had strayed, because it would then remain a problem to be solved. That had always been his way. And I knew that his main strategy was keeping me close, watching over me and treating me with great care, as if I had developed a hairline crack all across my body that would slowly heal, but only if my two halves remained pressed together for a long time.
‘You can come to Chittagong and visit, like your mother said.’
‘I wish you would call her Ammoo,’ he said, bringing up a conversation we’d had months ago, about what we would call each other’s parents once we were married. Rashid had slipped easily into calling my parents ‘Ammoo and Abboo’ after a lifetime of ‘Maya auntie and Joy uncle’, but I had been unable to make the transition.
I was in no mood to argue. ‘Like Ammoo said.’
He stood up, removed his watch, placed it carefully back in its case, and started to undress. ‘I need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘I feel like someone cut my anchor.’
He looked at me and I saw myself through his eyes, clouded and unreadable. ‘I don’t understand. You have everything in life. Everything.’
I wanted to tell him about the day before, about what my parents had told me, that I was giving up the search – I knew this would appease him – but instead I unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall to the ground, slipping my arms around him and stroking the ribbed cotton of his singlet. I raised my face to kiss him and he lowered his mouth towards me, but he stopped as our lips briefly touched, pushing my elbows away. ‘I can’t,’ he said. I nodded, stepping away, feeling rejected despite everything. He picked up his shirt from the floor and darted into the bathroom, and I cried while he brushed his teeth. When he came back he lay down on the bed and fell asleep quickly, letting me curl around his tense, bowed back.