by Tahmima Anam
Komola put her arms around me, her body as soft as a whisper. ‘She followed you like a hawk.’ She kissed the top of my head and retreated. I had embarked on what I must have thought was a heroic journey, but all I had done was wound the people I loved, starting with my mother, that wild bird who had been tamed and chastened by her desire for me.
An hour passed. I waited in the bedroom, draped in the green silk, until I heard Dolly and Bulbul at the door, and then I descended the stairs to the living room.
Komola and Joshim had gone to great trouble with the house. The furniture was primped; the glass cabinets that housed the family’s baubles – the porcelain shepherdess that Dolly had collected on a trip to the Wedgwood factory, the blown Venetian glass, the gold painted Thai woodwork – were dusted and polished so that their contents gleamed from within.
The formal living room was opened and I was able to see it for the first time. It was such a large room that Dolly had made four separate seating arrangements within, each with its own colour scheme and design. There was the leather suite on the eastern side, where the coconut trees cast their narrow shadows; the blue sofa and loveseat looked west; along the north–south axis of the room, a grey corner unit and a French-looking suite with carved wooden armrests faced each other. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did, in the peculiar way of excess. When I entered the room, I asked myself how Dolly chose between one sofa and another. Did she enter the room and think to herself, I’m going to enjoy the sun on the leather settee today, or today I want to pretend to be Marie Antoinette so I’ll make myself at home on the gold-tipped chair? Now Dolly was sitting upright on the blue loveseat, and when I entered the room, not for the first time I was a little afraid of her. She was heavily made up, a pair of thick gold bangles wrapped around her wrists, reading the newspaper with her Pomeranian, Clooney, draped across her feet.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How was your flight?’
‘Fine. But your father-in-law is exhausted, he went to take a nap.’ She folded her hands on her lap. ‘Tea, darling?’
‘All right.’
Dolly pressed a button on a small rectangular object – her calling bell – and Komola appeared. ‘Bring bou-ma her green tea. And snacks.’
‘Aren’t we having dinner?’
‘It’s early,’ she said, looking at the slim gold watch on her wrist. ‘Baby Babu isn’t even home yet.’
Dolly watched me lift a roast-beef sandwich from the trolley. ‘You skipped lunch, didn’t you, sweetheart? I told you, you have to eat.’
I nodded, taking a large bite.
‘And I’ve heard all about your … friend.’
The white, crustless bread swelled in my mouth. I remembered reading a story about how several people die every year in Japan while attempting to eat mochi rice cakes. I had tried mochi once, and found it quite disgusting. I wished now that it had killed me.
‘I thought you looked a little unsettled. So I made a few phone calls. Everyone knows everything, my dear. You should have been more careful.’
I felt the sting of tears behind my eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’ How many times had I said that?
‘Does Rashid know?’
I took a sip of tea. The lump of sandwich travelled slowly, painfully, down my throat. ‘Yes.’
Clooney shifted, raised himself up, and reapplied his torso over Dolly’s feet. Dolly lowered a bangled hand and scratched behind his ear. ‘Poor Baby Babu.’
‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘Of course you didn’t. But you did.’ She sucked in her lips, redistributing her lipstick. ‘People warned us, you know. But I told them there was no way you would disrespect Rashid, or us.’
Lately there had been a few stories in the papers about how Bangladesh was built on a major fault line. That the apartment buildings in the big cities were too close together, put up without any regard for safety, and even a tiny tremor would be catastrophic. If ever there was a time for an earthquake, this would be it. The house would slide down the hill and this conversation would end. The rest of the sandwich sat in my hand. ‘It was a mistake,’ I said, using my free hand to wipe my mouth. For a few minutes, there was only the sound of me sobbing, and the rustle of my sari as I shifted to find a tissue on the side table.
Dolly summoned Komola again. ‘Take the trolley away,’ she scolded. ‘Can’t you see she’s finished?’
When the tray was cleared, she turned to me again. ‘I’ve been trying to protect you all these years. Making you feel it didn’t matter where you came from. Treating you like you were my own daughter. But you have disappointed me. And I can only assume it’s your bad background.’ She dropped it in casually, like a cube of sugar into a warm mug of tea. I looked up to see if she regretted the words as she uttered them, but she looked at ease with herself as she always did.
I was emboldened by this revelation of fact and prejudice. ‘If it was so bad, why did you agree to the marriage?’
Dolly ran her hands up and down the armrest of her chair. ‘You’re not a mother, you wouldn’t understand.’
It would be easy to assume she had hated me all along, but I knew this was not the whole truth. There was loyalty in her acceptance of the match, a genuine regard for my parents, and not a small amount of affection for me. I had squandered all of this.
‘Anyway, what’s done is done. I don’t know if Rashid will forgive you. That is between you. But you will never be the same to me. And I’m no longer willing to protect you.’
I wasn’t sure what she meant; I could only assume she would speak openly and publicly about who I was, so that if word got out about what I had done, or if Rashid and I were to break up, she would have an easy explanation.
‘I had a servant girl,’ she continued. ‘She heard us talking about your parents – we talked about it all the time, the tests, the doctors. They tried so hard. This girl came to me and told me a girl in her village was – that she needed help. We went to Mymensingh, we met the girl. The husband had abandoned her. She had no money, nothing. We paid her twenty thousand.’
‘You bought me?’
‘Don’t be naive. The girl needed money.’ It was hard – impossible, really – to imagine myself at the centre of this drama. That money would have exchanged hands. And then, me, a salve for my mother’s wounds. Komola appeared at the periphery of my vision, switching on a lamp in a corner of the room. I heard the distant rumble of thunder. In a few minutes, I would hear water pounding the trees and the lawn. Dolly shifted; she was going to get up and leave me there in the dark room with my red face and the sandwich still in my palm. ‘And there was one more thing,’ she said, pointing her toe. ‘I haven’t wanted to mention it, but like I said, I don’t consider you mine any more, so you might as well know. The girl didn’t tell us at first, but when we got to the village, there were two babies.’
The breath stopped in my chest. ‘Twin girls,’ she said. ‘Everyone in the village was talking about it, two babies and not one of them a boy.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I said. Surely if I had been a twin, I would have known it. I would have felt an emptiness, like a phantom limb, throughout my life. There would have been the imprint of this womb-sister, a voice inside my voice. My loneliness would have multiplied; my loneliness would have been halved. Dolly was lying.
‘We wanted to take both, of course. But she refused. So stubborn. Insisted on keeping one of them. We argued but there was no persuading her. Idiot girl. What could we do? We couldn’t tear the child from her arms.’
‘Did you tell my mother?’
‘Of course we didn’t. She’d been through enough.’ Dolly turned away, dismissing me, and now it began to rain, dark sheets of water pouring off the guttering, and the sound, a hush, like a mother trying to quiet her baby. I smoothed the folds of my sari and got up, feeling myself crumble from within. I turned to leave. ‘Please can I go now?’ I whispered.
Dolly regarded me for a minute, looking me up and down with naked distaste. ‘Poor Baby Babu
,’ she said. ‘Ruby was right.’ And then the door closed behind me.
I went upstairs and lay on the bed. I should pack a suitcase, I thought. Call the driver and ask to be taken to the airport. But I couldn’t move. I stared up at the track of lights on the ceiling. The blouse of my sari was tight under my arms and around my chest. I thought of the pair of Shakoor paintings that hung in the bedroom in Dhaka. Two similar-looking women, strong faces, big noses, bands of primary colour across the top and bottom edges of the frame. A parrot sat on the head of one, a flower adorned the hair of the other. Twins. I hardly allowed myself to think about what might have happened if my parents hadn’t adopted me. Of the life I might have had. Hunger and cold. Want and lack. The absence of comfort. But now not only was it possible to imagine this life, there was actually someone out there living it, someone who looked exactly like me, same curly hair and wide mouth and long, elegant fingers, fingers that may have never known the gentle weight of a pencil. I wondered, if I lay here, very still, without moving, if this new knowledge might disappear from my mind, in fact, history itself might be altered, so that all of this truth telling could be reversed. I might stay here until there was no longer a twin, no longer a woman who took money for one child so she could raise another, but time moved in only one direction, though I wished it were not so, wished it could be anything but so.
It rained and rained, and the sky grew darker until it was night, and still I lay there. After a long time I heard the door opening and footsteps approaching. A warm, dry hand was cupped over my forehead, and I saw the cufflink and smelled the familiar scent of leather and aftershave on his sleeve. Rashid.
‘I’m leaving,’ I said, pulling myself upright.
‘Don’t go,’ he whispered into the dark. He leaned over me, pressing my face into the collar of his shirt. My sari rustled as the fabric collapsed between us.
‘I’ve ruined everything.’
‘Stay with me. Stay and don’t leave my side.’
I was comforted. He held me tighter and I considered falling asleep in his arms. But I wondered how he could be so easily duped, that he could imagine me returning to him and continuing with our lives as if nothing had happened. Erasing you from our history. How naive he was, how foolish.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nine thirty. Are you hungry? I can have something sent up.’
‘I have a sister. Did you know that? A twin sister.’
He sighed. ‘This again.’
I sat up. ‘A sister, Rashid. There is a woman out there in the world who looks just like me. And your parents never told me.’
‘You know everyone was just thinking of you. What’s best for you.’
‘Your mother said I had a bad background.’
‘She’s upset.’
‘I should at least know for myself. How bad it really was.’
He released me. I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face, and when I returned he was calling someone. ‘Here,’ he said, handing me the phone, ‘your father wants to talk to you.’
‘Putul,’ Baba said, ‘what’s going on? You don’t answer your phone.’
The tears came back, fresh and bitter. ‘Dolly’s angry. She hates me.’
‘Come home, sweetheart, we’ll talk.’
‘Did you know about my sister?’
I heard him take a deep breath. ‘A sister? What do you mean?’
‘Dolly said there were two of us. Twins.’
A pause. Maybe he was wondering if I’d gone mad, whether I was making the whole thing up, but he didn’t let on if he did. ‘I didn’t know, sweetheart – your mother and I – we would have never kept something like that from you.’
‘I want to say sorry to Ammoo.’
‘Please don’t cry. Take the first flight, I’ll pick you up at the airport.’
‘I don’t know. Let me think about it.’
Rashid extinguished his cigarette and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. I suddenly felt the need to be anywhere but in that room, in that moment, with the rain outside and the smoke inside and Rashid with his face puffed up with forgiveness. I looked out the window, and I was angry now that I couldn’t just go outside and take a bus or walk on the pavement, because I didn’t come from the sort of place where someone like me could open the gate and let the dust of the road onto my shoes. I wanted to be somewhere else, not just away from this house, but from this country. What if I had been adopted from some other country? China, perhaps. Or Vietnam. Anywhere was better than here. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, trying to imagine the next few days, the silence around the table, the words ‘bad background’ echoing in my ears, and later, if we patched things up, living with Dolly and Bulbul and hoping she wouldn’t run into me on the stairs, wondering idly if Rashid had ever considered building a separate entrance for us, or if we might, at some point, move into our own place, or if he just assumed I would live with his parents for ever, eating Friday breakfasts around the big table, entertaining guests in a living room with four sofas.
Finally I fell asleep, only to wake a few minutes later with an image of my twin, a beggar on the street, her palm out, her lips drawn tight around a mouth that had never known anything of pleasure, not a kiss, or a teaspoon of sugar. I told myself I was assuming things, that perhaps she had enjoyed a perfectly all right life – maybe not a life of privilege, but a comfortable enough life. Maybe she had a home. A pond. Laying hens. A vegetable patch. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. She would have at least known her own mother, which is what I, with all the money in the world, had never had. This is what kept me awake, long into the night, as thunder pounded the sky overhead.
In the morning I packed my bag and went downstairs to see if Joshim would drive me to the beach. It was pouring as I stepped out onto the terrace, and I watched for a few moments as the lime tree and the bougainvillaea danced with the weight of the rain. When I turned back, my hair plastered against my forehead, I found Bulbul lying back on an old rattan armchair in the living room.
‘Come here,’ he said, waving his hand.
He was holding a small tumbler of whisky. I sat down on a chair as far from him as possible without seeming impolite. He pointed his drink at me and held my gaze for a few moments. Then he said, ‘Your mother was a shit-poor woman from nowhere. And now you are the daughter-in-law of this house.’
I smiled, delighted by his rudeness. ‘Lucky me.’
‘We were worried you would turn out ugly. Or a darkie. Who knows who your father was – he could have looked like anything.’
I had burned my bridges with Dolly and there seemed little left to lose. And he would probably not remember any of this tomorrow. ‘I hate you,’ I said.
‘But when the girl brought you to us, we all fell in love with you. Me, Dolly, your parents. Sweetest baby anyone had ever seen. How does a woman like that have a baby like this? It’s one of God’s mysteries. And two of you.’
There it was again. My sister. ‘Did you see her?’
Bulbul put his drink on the flat wooden armrest of his chair. ‘We did. Spitting image.’
‘And what did you do? I asked, my voice shaking, ‘Choose one?’
‘Something like that.’
Again I questioned my own ignorance. I knew all the clichés about twins, how they sensed one another’s presence, how if one was injured, the other would feel pain. I had never felt anyone’s pain but my own – did this mean my sister had lived a life as untrammelled as mine? I knew this could not be. There had been pains and wounds and injuries: I had just been ignorant of them. And what about my mother – what did my mother do? Try and love one child as if she was loving us both? Put one mouth to her breast and imagine the other mouth on the other breast? Take some comfort in knowing that one would never go hungry, while the other would know her love?
‘Did I have a name?’ I asked. ‘Did she?’
He slid further down the chair. I could see the roof of his mouth when he spoke. ‘Your name was Mohona,’
he said. ‘And her name was Megna.’
Megna and Mohona. Mohona–Megna. Mo and Meg. Megna.
‘Megna what?’
‘Oh, people like that don’t have surnames. Of course your mother wanted to choose a new name for you, so then you became Zubaida. Our little Zubaida.’
Mohona. Megna. Where had I heard that name before? I couldn’t remember. Megna–Mohona. Then I did. Shouted across a street by a stranger. Could it be? No. It was a common enough name. A common mistake. But he had been so sure. He had looked at me and seen someone else. I tried to remember his face, but it was getting dark and I had just wanted to get out of there, afraid of his heavy hands on my shoulders, the way he looked at me, hungry, as if he knew something about me, something buried. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he had seen the me that was in someone else, a me that had been lost until this very moment. No, it couldn’t be. But what a thought. What if I were to run into this man again – ridiculous to think that he had known my sister, but what if? I imagined myself clinging to a window ledge, my fingers slipping, and this man holding out an arm, a small gesture of hope. I would never find him again, I knew, and even if I did, the chances were – well, they were minuscule. But if no one had kept track of my mother, if none of the people who were responsible for my life had thought that I might someday want to know something more about my past than simply that I had been saved, my only chance was to do something for myself, to go somewhere I might have a scrap of hope.
I turned to go. Bulbul’s eyes were closed. I almost felt sorry for him, seeing for the first time the smallness of his life, how he was hemmed in by the legacy of the rich father who had built this house and founded all the businesses he so diligently managed, that every time he entered a warehouse, or factory, or office building, he would be watched by the framed portrait of the patriarch who had started it all. I left him there with his hand still curled around the tumbler, the tiny blossom of possibility springing up inside me, giving me hope, that most mercurial of things. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered to his sleeping form.