The Newlyweds (30 page)

“If your aunt is unfriendly, don’t mind her,” Amina’s mother said. “She’s just envious that you’re bringing us to America. She keeps asking why George isn’t coming with you. And she wants to know why you haven’t had a baby yet.”

“It’s only one night,” Amina said. “They had Fariq buy me the bus ticket. I’ll have to leave the house at seven in the morning.”

“We’d still like to come and meet you,” her mother said. “What if something happens to you at the airport? And I don’t feel safe here, even another two nights.”

“I have schoolwork to do,” Amina said. “I don’t have time to talk anymore tonight.” She had to e-mail Jill her Amy Tan paper before she left, and she still didn’t have a conclusion.

“Maybe a hotel is better,” her mother said, as if she hadn’t heard her. “Could you still reserve one?”

“George lost his job four months ago,” Amina said. “We had to ask his cousin Jessica to sponsor you. She went to a lot of trouble, and who knows if we’re even going to be able to keep this house.”

Her mother was silent on the other end of the line, and even as she knew she’d done something drastic, there was some relief in confessing
the bad news. It had been more than two weeks since the dinner party, but the shame of it wouldn’t leave Amina. She didn’t know whether Kim had actually left when she’d planned, and yet it would have been humiliating to ask George for information. She had a crazy urge to tell her mother about the look on her husband’s face when Kim had appeared, soaking wet and begging forgiveness, but even if she’d had the nerve to do it, her mother never could have understood.

“You see how much stress we’ve been under,” she said instead, sounding harsher than she’d intended. “What are you so frightened of? You’ve lived in that village almost half your life.”

Still her mother was quiet, and she worried that she’d gone too far. Had her mother put the phone against her chest and gone in tears to find her father? She knew this was only her pride, but she hoped there was a way to keep her father from learning about George’s failure.

“Amma,” she said. “Are you there?”

She heard her mother breathing.

“Promise you won’t tell Abba. Promise me.”

“Engineering job?” her mother said in English.

She hadn’t known her mother knew those words. From the easy way she pronounced them, Amina could tell that her mother had repeated that formulation again and again, to combat other people’s skepticism and quiet her own doubts. George’s “engineering job” had been like a piece of magic, powerful as anything her
pir
could give her, and the loss of it now was as wrenching as it had been to Amina.

Her impulse was less to comfort her mother than to be comforted by her. As a child on the long bus rides to Haibatpur, she would curl her body over her half of the seat and put her head in her mother’s lap. Something about that position allowed her to sleep for hours, even through the madness of the horn, while her mother sat quietly, shifting every once in a while under her weight and running her fingers through Amina’s hair.

“Is my father there?”

“No, no.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s gone to the pharmacy with your uncle Rana.” Her tone made Amina think she was lying, but she didn’t have time to draw it out.

“Your nanu and Parveen are in the kitchen. No one knows I’m calling you again.”

“Never mind.” Amina tried to make her voice soothing. “Hang up the phone and don’t tell them anything I said. Don’t even tell them you called me. Everything’s going to be fine, I promise.”

She expected her mother to argue: How could everything be fine if George didn’t have a job? But it was almost worse to hear her meekly agree.

“I’ll be on the plane in eleven hours,” Amina said. “I’ll see you in less than three days.”

Her mother didn’t warn her about being careful at the airport, or the danger of her bags being ransacked by thieves. She didn’t ask whether the food on the plane would be such that Amina could eat it, or speculate about the best answers to the questions her aunt would surely ask. She said good night and quietly hung up, just as her daughter had instructed, and from this Amina understood that her mother no longer believed they were going to be reunited. She thought she was going to die in that village, pursued by whatever ghosts she was so frightened of, because her only daughter hadn’t arrived in time.

1
The stale air of the terminal, heavy with mildew and insecticide, gave way to the more powerful organic rot of the August night. The humidity was almost twice what it had been when she got on the plane in Rochester, and she felt the weight of it on her skin. It had been raining, and there was the smell of things burning: garbage, diesel, refuse, and cooking oil. Amina had been in no hurry to return to it, but in dreams this odor was the one thing you couldn’t reproduce, and so now it was the difference between thinking of home and being here.

A sea of disembodied arms reached through the iron bars of the barrier, grabbing the air. It was democratic at least: relatives and drivers jostled right up next to the taxi men, con artists, and thieves. The airport police held the crowd back with their sticks, but they didn’t make eye contact with the passengers. Once you were outside the terminal, you were on your own. Amina was carrying four hundred American dollars and the credit card in a money belt against her stomach, a trick she’d learned from George when he’d come here to meet her. He’d had all sorts of ideas about securing his valuables on that trip, and she remembered at the time feeling privileged to hear about them, as if it were somehow flattering that he mistrusted every citizen of Bangladesh apart from her.

An hour before the flight landed, she had slipped into the toilet and changed into a shalwar kameez, the same one she’d worn for her interview at Yoga Shanti. Kim had admired it then, but perhaps there was something wrong with the way it hung on her body now, because all of a sudden she noticed that the men calling out to her had switched to English.

“Here, madam! Good clean car—”

“Your bags, madam. Allow me.”

“My taxi, yes, okay miss, this way.”

She scanned the crowd, but her parents weren’t there. She realized suddenly that she’d expected them to disobey her instructions and appear. Good, she thought,
good
—but she couldn’t conceal her disappointment even from herself. She’d been ready to be exasperated, to chastise them for making the long trip, and instead she felt loneliness bubbling up in her like water into a well. What was worse than going home to find no one you knew?

She finally saw her uncle’s driver, Fariq, a few paces behind the barrier. As soon as he spotted her, he swept in and relieved her of the suitcases with a darting, practiced movement. There was nothing aggressive about it, and at the same time he made it clear that she was his. The taxi drivers—dark, bony men with reddish teeth, shirts hanging loose on their bodies—stepped back. She’d known Fariq for years, but she was struck now by how modern and prosperous he looked in a fashionably patterned shirt and black jeans, his mobile phone clipped to his belt.

“Your uncle has a new car,” he said. “The black one over there—an Acura.” His phone rang, and he answered it; she reached instinctively into her purse for her own to call her parents, before remembering it was useless here. She listened to Fariq instead, heard him telling her aunt that he’d found her without any problem.

“Two large ones,” he said—of course her aunt was eager to know how much luggage she’d brought with her.

“Your uncle will have gone to bed, but your aunty is sitting up for you,” Fariq said when he hung up.

Her whole body was tired, but her mind had the jangly, wakeful feeling that sometimes came over her when she was lying in bed at night in Rochester. As soon as they left the airport, the traffic was stop and go, and she thought of how exasperated George had been four years ago, describing his trip back to the airport. What could’ve been going on at that hour? he had wanted to know. She’d explained that it wasn’t any particular thing, that the city simply hadn’t been built for cars, or for the number of people who currently inhabited it. He had
wanted to see the famous parliament buildings lit up at night, but his driver hadn’t understood and had taken another road.

For a while they crept through the cantonment area past the high, white walls of the military buildings, some studded with broken glass. She would have liked to continue south on a tour of her childhood: Tejgaon, Motijheel, Mirpur, and Mohammadpur, where they’d lived for various lengths of time; the genteel neighborhoods where she’d taught her students; and the university district where she’d gone with her mother to visit the British Council. It felt wrong to be cutting across the city in her uncle’s new car, heading west toward Savar.

She turned around when they reached the Mirpur Road, looking back toward Dhanmondi. Maple Leaf was all the way on the other side of the lake, but that was the way her mother had taken her by rickshaw to school each day. It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

She was still looking out the window when a motorcycle went by, and two young men ducked to look at her—to see what kind of woman was being chauffeured in the fancy new car—before cutting Fariq off and continuing to weave in and out of the creeping traffic. Instinctively Amina pulled the scarf over her head, and at once the urge to sleep became too powerful to resist. For the rest of the two-hour drive, the scenery went by without Amina to notice it.

2
It was nearly midnight when they arrived at her aunt and uncle’s new apartment in Savar, but all the lights were burning. Her uncle wasn’t sleeping after all, but sitting at a long wooden dining table drinking tea. Apart from the table, and twelve chairs with green satin cushions, there was no other furniture in the room. A telephone sat on the floor next to the jack, and through one door she could see a
massive canopied bed with a modern red-and-gold spread—her aunt and uncle’s room.

She heard her aunt’s voice in the kitchen: “Has she arrived? It took so long—all the dishes are cold. Munni, come here, let me look at you.” But her aunt came to her, wiping her hands on a towel and embracing her, then stroking her hair, as if she were a little girl.

“All by yourself. So far. I can’t believe it.” Her aunt was shorter and smaller than she remembered; her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and she was wearing an olive-green shalwar kameez, finer and more ornamented than Amina would’ve expected given that she was the only guest.

“We called your parents as soon as we heard from Fariq that you were safe. We knew it would be too late by the time you arrived here.”

Amina nodded, but she hadn’t thought there would be a “too late.” Of course she talked to them all the time, but a phone call from inside the country was different. She’d expected to hear her mother’s voice tonight, and all of a sudden she was afraid she might cry. She went to her suitcases quickly and spent a few minutes rummaging (although the appropriate gifts were at the very top, where she’d been sure to pack them): the perfume for her aunt, and the pocket-sized travel alarm clock for her uncle. She could feel her aunt looking from across the room, trying to get a glimpse of what else was inside. While they were opening their gifts, she found the box of Christmas ornaments and chose the robin for Ghaniyah: a bird that always seemed to Amina to be calling out for attention, hopping and stamping like a spoiled child.

“This is just a trinket for my cousin,” she told her aunt. “The most famous American bird. Please tell her how sorry I am to have missed her.”

Her aunt was still looking at the bags. “How did you manage all of this on your own?”

“Emirates is very comfortable. And I didn’t want to ask George to come here again—he’s so busy with work.”

“Such a shame the two of you weren’t able to come for their wedding. And now bad luck—the two of them off touring. They said they never had a honeymoon—
honeymoon! We
didn’t need honeymoons when we were young, I told them—the wedding was enough for us.
But they just laugh at me. And India is so expensive these days.” Her aunt looked at Amina pointedly. “You didn’t take a honeymoon, I’m sure.”

“I had just arrived in America. I didn’t need to go anywhere.”

“You’re much more practical than my daughter. Now you’ll eat. We’ve finished, but you must be starving.”

Her aunt brought a knife and fork with the food, even though they’d always eaten with their fingers when she’d visited in the past. She wasn’t hungry: the nap in the car seemed to have produced only a desire for more sleep, but her aunt was carrying dish after dish from the kitchen.

“My parents said the wedding was beautiful,” Amina said. “They said the food was delicious.”

Her aunt frowned. “The sweets weren’t fresh enough. They should’ve been made just that afternoon. And the mutton was dry. I’m sure they said so.”