The Newlyweds (32 page)

“Yeah.” George laughed. “I was so stressed out.”

“Me, too,” Amina said. “But I mean, did we ever really decide?”

George assumed a familiar, patient tone. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, did we ever say ‘Let’s get married’ or anything?”

“Of course,” George said. “We already knew we were getting married that day in your parents’ apartment. Otherwise why would you have tried on the ring?”

But Amina couldn’t recall a particular moment.

“Why are you worried about this now? Is everything okay over there?”

“Yes.” Something clattered to the floor in the kitchen, and her aunt’s voice floated, querulous, from the other end of the apartment.

“So I’ll talk to you in a few days.”

“Yes, okay.”

After they had said good-bye and hung up, she sat on the cushion-less window seat holding her uncle’s phone, looking out the window at a brick interior courtyard that had flooded in the rain. Leaves and other detritus were floating in the water, which had already acquired a greenish-brown algal scum, and as she watched a newspaper drifted into view, opened neat and flat, as if there were some underwater reader turning the pages. Its front and back covers faced the sky, and of course you couldn’t read the text from this distance.

She had breakfasted with her aunt, who was in a mild, generous mood, almost as if the conversation the night before hadn’t happened. She’d given Amina three clean handkerchiefs, as well as several containers of food in a neat Jamdani Sarees bag. To Amina’s surprise, she had also apologized for not offering her parents an alternative to the village when they’d decided to give up the apartment, and begged her to not to let her mother change her mind about staying in Savar when they returned.

“She says you might also stay with that relative of your father’s—some Nabil or Nasim?”

“Nasir,” Amina corrected. “Not a relative, just a friend.”

“But he’s a single man, no?” her aunt persisted. “His place couldn’t
be comfortable.” She added that she was going to buy another bed just in case the furniture didn’t come in the next few days. “Then you’ll have to stay with us,” she had said triumphantly, and Amina had promised that they would.

The bus hit a jam in Savar, and they were stuck for almost an hour. But once they left the suburbs behind, the traffic abated, and soon the bus was careening west toward the Padma, which they would cross by ferry. They passed the last factories, and then the red fields of the brickyards:
HOME BRICKS
in solid black letters across the kilns. Her seat was in the first row, but she didn’t like to look straight in front of her; the driver played chicken with the oncoming traffic, swerving and laying on the horn at the last minute. Instead she looked out the side window as they rushed past field after field of jute and paddy. She had forgotten the saturated color of the rice shoots, bottle green, as if they had a light inside them.

After two hours they reached the river. She got off the bus with the other passengers and climbed a steep, rusted staircase to the top deck of the ferry for some air. She thought George would’ve liked to photograph the spindly bamboo fish traps that jutted out of the river like giant sprung bows and the fishermen, oblivious to the crowded car ferry, crouching on the rafts to check the nets. She had told her husband again and again that Bangladesh was beautiful once you got out of the city, but in the nine days he’d spent in her country they hadn’t had the chance to go farther than the National Martyrs’ Memorial in Savar. Now she wondered if he would agree with her. There was a thick haze, but you could just make out the vegetation on the bank opposite; clumps of water hyacinths floated like tiny islands in the ferry’s path. If you stood very close to the rail and trained your eyes directly in front of you, it was possible to see a landscape with absolutely no people: just a large black cormorant, gliding low over the water, its improbable blurred shadow the only evidence of the hidden sun.

Amina tried her father’s phone again, but now she got no signal. When she returned to the bus, she found she’d lingered too long on the deck: the only seat available was at the very back, next to an old woman eating pungent dried fish from a newspaper packet, making
satisfied sounds with her lips. They eased off the ferry and onto the road, and Amina turned resolutely toward the window opposite, concentrating on the trees to avoid nausea. Could she still identify them? Guava, mango, and jackfruit were easy, date and coconut palm, but which were the betel palms? Could she spot a
krishnachura
without the telltale red blossoms it would have lost this late in the monsoon? She remembered how she’d dreaded this uncomfortable trip as a teenager, how she’d stayed up the night before so that she could pass most of it asleep. Now everything—the birds, the trees, the sight of a young man just standing by the road, watching the traffic as if it were his job—was a picture to take back with her and own forever. Compared with this, the junk she’d brought along in her suitcases was nothing.

The old woman finished chewing and began interrogating her. Where was she going? Was she married? How many children did she have? Why was she traveling alone? Amina told her that she’d been married only six weeks ago and was now going to visit her grandmother, who had been too sick to come to the wedding. Her husband had wanted to travel with her, she said, but he had taken so much time off from his work at the bank for the wedding that it had been impossible. Of course she would have preferred to travel with him, but she couldn’t wait to taste her aunt’s cooking, which was the best in the village. Even her own wedding food couldn’t compare: the mutton had been overcooked, and the sweets had not been fresh enough.

The woman, who had seemed as if she might keep prodding Amina for information all the way to Satkhira, was satisfied with this topic. For the next hour she talked to Amina about the deficiencies of meat and produce in the capital compared with what you could find in the villages, particularly in the south. She had been in the city visiting the family of a girl, a possible match for her son. Her son was tall and fair and had inherited land near Satkhira from his grandfather, but this girl’s family was haughty and demanding, even questioning the value of a degree from Khulna University.

“She is fair, but short—as short as I am,” the old woman said. “Who are they to be so picky?”

Finally, after nearly an hour, the old woman fell silent; a few minutes later, she was asleep. It was getting toward the hottest part of the day, and the air in the bus was so wet and thick that any movement
was uncomfortable. They passed a herd of small brown-and-white goats, and a man with a stick who stopped to stare at them, but the rest of the landscape was perfectly still. Everything was so green that you almost expected to look up and see a green sun in the sky, igniting sparks in the flat, glass paddy. At intervals you could see a woman with a basket at her feet, an orange, yellow, or turquoise figure crouched double, harvesting rice or dal or mustard. Amina had never been in danger of becoming one of those women; her nanu and even her dadu’s status in their villages mitigated against that. But she’d been born in the same type of village: it was extraordinary to think of how different her life had become.

Amina looked at her watch—a stainless-steel Seiko that George had given her for her first Christmas in Rochester—and discovered that they were ahead of schedule. Not surprisingly, the driver had made up the time he’d lost at the beginning of the journey, and she wondered if her father would’ve thought to come early. She couldn’t imagine standing in the road with the two large suitcases, but she knew everyone at home would berate her for acting like a fool if she tried to negotiate the fare alone.

They crossed the last small river, swollen at this time of year and smothered in a green profusion of water hyacinths. There was no indication of water at all; if not for an abandoned wooden skiff, half submerged, the river could be an overgrown path or even a flower bed. She thought of the yard in Rochester, and the way Kim had arrived that frigid February day—insinuating herself into Amina’s life with a gift and a confidence. Kim would like that useless boat and the children crouched by the bank poking something in the water with a stick, who stopped to wave at the bus as it passed. Unlike George, photography wouldn’t be her main motivation: she would want to get down and talk with those children, even if the only way they could communicate was with their hands, to admire and to be admired by them. She was a person, Amina thought, who couldn’t resist putting herself into every vista she encountered.

Satkhira was as she remembered it. First came the furniture makers, carving chairs and bed frames in the shade of the cotton trees. There was a new Emma Motors showroom, with a sleek row of motorcycles
behind glass, but otherwise the open shops were the same as they had always been—pharmacies, dry goods, sweets—overrun with flies, always with more proprietors than customers. She scanned the taxi rank for her father several times and felt the panic squeezing her chest: he wasn’t there. The old woman next to her had woken up and was collecting her parcels; now that they were here, her interest in Amina had evaporated.

“Hurry,” she hissed. “Push. There’s my son—the handsome one right over there.”

With a sick feeling, Amina got up and started making her way to the front: she was being jostled from every side, and it was a struggle just to keep her feet. She saw the bus driver standing outside, smoking a cigarette, and she knew she would have to approach him to get her suitcases; of course he would ask for more money. She was so focused on what she had to do that it wasn’t until her feet were on the ground that she noticed the gaunt figure in pink standing by a cluster of rickshaws. As she watched, the woman took two hesitant steps forward, into the sun, and an anxious, hollow face peered out from under the orna.

“Amma!” she cried, but of course her mother had already seen her.

4
The drivers crowded around her when they saw her luggage, but her mother had already arranged their transportation. A man who’d been squatting in the tented shade of a mechanic’s shop bounded forward to collect Amina’s suitcases. He was small, almost black, with a threadbare lungi and hard, ropy muscles in his arms and legs, and he ignored the taunts of the drivers:
Bhai, bhai—where’s your car? Are you going to carry those all the way to Shyamnagar?

“Where’s Abba?” Amina asked. “You didn’t come alone?”

Her mother shook her head. “Wait just a minute, just wait. When we’re on the bus.” Her mother was clutching her arm, as she had since they’d found each other, allowing Amina to support her but also guiding her in the direction she wanted to go. The bus was already there waiting, a small blessing, and they boarded with the porter, who sat in the front with their suitcases. Amina and her mother took seats a few rows back.

“His van is at the market in Shyamnagar,” her mother said. “It will be much cheaper.” Amina regretted for the hundredth time in only a few days telling her mother about George’s job. She had plenty of money, and she dreaded another hour on another bus, this time over the decaying local roads. But it didn’t seem worth arguing with her mother, who was obviously concentrating fiercely, in the midst of executing a complicated plan.

“Where’s Abba?” she demanded again. “Why isn’t he with you?”

“Your uncle Ashraf accompanied me,” her mother said. “But he has some business in Satkhira. He hired this van-wallah, and then he waited with me until it was time for his appointment.”

“But how did you know I would be on that bus? Did my uncle Omar reach you?”

“We came early in the morning. We arrived before seven a.m.”

Amina was incredulous. “You’ve been standing there for seven hours?”

“Standing and sitting,” her mother said. “Ashraf bought me two cups of tea. And I went to the good shop to buy shondesh.” Her mother produced a small white box from the plastic bag she was carrying. “Eat, eat. I bought three boxes.”

It was all Amina could do not to shove her mother’s hand away.

“Why didn’t my father come to meet me?” Her voice was louder than she intended, and the other passengers on the bus—country people clutching all manner of bundles—turned to look at them.

“Hush,” her mother said, as if she were still a child. “Your father is fine. He is in Dhaka now, but he’ll call us on your nanu’s phone tonight. After supper.”

“In Dhaka?”

“We’ll talk about it.”

“Why wasn’t he answering his phone? I called three times.”

“You didn’t want him to come to Dhaka. You told him you would be angry if you saw him at the airport.” The bus dipped into a hole in the road; Amina wasn’t paying attention, and she came down hard on the hard seat.

“Hold on to me,” her mother said.

“But where is he staying?”

“With Nasir. He’ll shift to Moni and Omar’s when we arrive. I’d like
to go tomorrow, but your nanu is already upset about your visit being so short.”

“But why is he in Dhaka, if he wasn’t going to meet me?”

“He was supposed to meet you—but he was worried it wouldn’t be safe.”

Amina heard her aunt’s voice again in her head. She’d hoped there would be some easy explanation for Moni’s warnings, and now her mother was reinforcing them, being equally cryptic. It wasn’t that she thought anything her mother was saying was untrue, but only that she wished she wouldn’t tell the story so dramatically.

“Safe from
what
?”

Her mother adjusted her orna. Then she wrapped her arm around Amina’s waist, pulling her toward her and cushioning her from the jolt that came a moment later, as if she could somehow see the road ahead of them. She didn’t let go after the bad patch was finished and spoke in her smallest voice, further muffled by the cloth across her face.

“Your father went to Dhaka three days ago. He wanted to be there when you arrived. I didn’t mind—it was a good thing for him to do. It’s not so bad living with your nanu when he’s not around. I can manage her. But she drives him crazy, and then he drives me crazy about it. If I’m crazy, I’m always telling them, it’s because of the two of you.”