The Newlyweds (40 page)

“Don’t throw away money at a hotel on their account. They’re leaving for Comilla on Tuesday.”

“Still,” Amina said. “We don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

“That’s exactly why—” Nasir began, but her father interrupted.

“Munni—did you call George? It’s twenty past seven.”

She had completely forgotten the phone call. She took her father’s phone into the bedroom and sat down on the yellow bedspread. There was enough light coming from the street, through thin, orange curtains, that she didn’t need to turn on the lamp. She remembered the way she and her mother used to idle away the hours on the days she and George had arranged to talk. They would watch television or play cards, but they wouldn’t go out within an hour of the call, in case he should be early and they should miss him. She thought of her last conversation with her husband and wondered if she should apologize
now. But for what? Wasn’t it right to be suspicious, after everything that had happened?

The dinner continued in the other room, her parents’ voices mingling with Nasir’s now that the food was finished. With George, of course, they would be shy, unlikely even to want to sit down at the table all together. George himself was inclined to go on at length—whatever his current preoccupation—but he would direct those monologues at Amina only, since her parents wouldn’t be able to understand. Would they slip into some routine she couldn’t imagine now, or would dinnertime be permanently awkward? She remembered how she’d dismissed these worries when they’d occurred to her in Rochester; only George had seriously questioned whether her parents would be able to adapt to life in the United States. How had he been able to see it more clearly than she had?

She let the phone ring six times, but there was no answer; when she heard the voice mail beginning, she had the impulse to hang up. Instead she left a businesslike message, explaining the problem at the embassy and asking George to call the free immigration hotline in Manhattan.

“It’s decided,” Nasir said, when she came out into the main room. “You’ll stay as long as it takes.”

“It will probably be only two weeks,” her father said. “This friend of Nasir’s is confident.”

“Which friend?” Amina asked. “Khuzaymah or Abdul? Did either one of them actually get to the U.S.?”

Nasir looked down at his plate and smiled. He probably didn’t share her father’s optimism, but he’d managed to convince them to stay. The three of them had finished her mother’s chicken curry, and her father was taking secret sips of whiskey and water from a glass Nasir had provided while her mother cleared the dishes and pretended not to notice. The alcohol was making him teary; Nasir had a photo album on the table, and her father had obviously begun reminiscing about his days with Nasir’s father as university students in Rajshahi.

“Come look at this,” Nasir said, and when Amina went around the table, there was a photograph she had never seen, of six stern-faced boys posing with rifles on a wooden porch. The rifles looked antique,
like the one Aunt Cathy had mounted over her fireplace in Brighton, and several of the boys were wearing sunglasses. Her father apparently hadn’t owned a pair, but his fashion sense was evident in a patterned shirt with an oversize collar, the points of which mimicked his widow’s peak, pronounced even in his twenties. He glared fiercely at the camera as if it were General Yahya himself.

“We didn’t know what it would be like,” her father said. “We thought we were men already.”

“How many in this group actually became Freedom Fighters?” Nasir asked, and Amina could see the eagerness in his expression as he leaned over the photo. How silly it had been for her to imagine that his hospitality had anything to do with her. Her parents were his last real connection to his own; her father was the only one who could tell him what his had been like as a young man, younger than Nasir was now.

“Four of us,” her father said. “Your father and I, Usman, and Tariq. Yusef and Alamgir went back to their families first; they were planning to enlist from home.”

“And what happened to the others?” Nasir asked gently.

“We survived, the four of us—isn’t that incredible? We were all posted in different places except for your father and me—you know all this. We trained together at Dehradun and then went back to Khulna. I got this”—her father rolled up his pant leg to show the scar again, a white boomerang just below his knee—“near Paikgacha. Then your father brought me home to Kajalnagar—I wouldn’t have gotten there without him. After it was over, we starting asking everyone we could find about Tariq and Usman. We found out Tariq had survived Boyra, and Usman got through the awful street battles here in Dhaka. When we heard we thanked God, and it didn’t even occur to us to ask about Yusef until days later.”

“What happened to Yusef?”

Her mother got up to clear the table. “Help me,” she instructed Amina, but Amina lingered in the main room, stacking the plates and wiping the table with a cloth.

“Killed,” her father said. “Massacred by those animals in his own home. You know his father was a lawyer, very successful, with a big house in Dhanmondi. His uncle was a poet—not very famous but well connected—and there would be gatherings at their place almost every
night.” Her father paused and took a sip of his drink. “We didn’t know about the atrocities right away, but a family like that was doomed. His mother was raped in front of him, and his sisters were carried off to the cantonment, to be used by the soldiers. Then all the men in the family were murdered.”

“Why?” Amina asked.

“Oh—they were important people, especially in the Language Movement. His brother and sister were at Dhaka University then, and his brother organized some of the student demonstrations. Those were the kind of people the generals were afraid of—intellectuals loyal to the nation.” Her father stopped and corrected himself: “Not even the nation, because it didn’t exist yet. They were loyal to the language.” Her father got up suddenly, knocking the table, and hurried into the bedroom, where he retrieved one of the few books he had kept, an analysis of the Language Movement written by a Dhaka University professor. It was one he’d encouraged Amina to read—about how the 1952 student protests against the government’s imposition of Urdu on the Bangla-speaking eastern wing of the country had given birth to the struggle for independence—and she was sorry now that she’d always put it off.

“You keep this,” he told Nasir. “No point in carrying it all the way to America.”

“I’m making Horlicks,” her mother called from the kitchen. “Who wants some?”

“Oh no,” Nasir said. “I couldn’t—it’s yours.” But her father waved his protestations away, padding into the bedroom in his slippers. The three of them would continue sleeping in there, while Nasir took the small room without complaining. Now he sat at the table looking through the book, which she was sure her father had shown him several times before. Her mother placed two glasses of Horlicks on the table for them and then took another two into the bedroom.

“Sorry about this,” Nasir said. “The power should be back soon.” He turned the flashlight on its end so that it made a squarish spotlight on the ceiling and half illuminated a free calendar from BRAC Bank, featuring a photograph of snowcapped mountains. He looked suddenly shy, but whether it was the light or the fact that they were alone together, she didn’t know.

“It hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten power cuts.”

“In England I found certain things very easy to get used to. Plumbing, electricity, clean water from the tap—it’s much harder coming back in this direction. At work we have a generator, of course.”

“How is your work?” It was exactly what she’d been accustomed to asking George every day when he got home, but she’d come to regret the habit after he lost his job. The same words to Nasir now felt like a small betrayal.

“It’s fine—it’s mostly making websites for small businesses. We use different templates, depending on the price, so it’s the same thing over and over again. But my boss is good, and I get on well with my colleagues.”

“Do they still think you’re crazy because of those articles?”

Nasir looked blank for a moment and then he blushed. “No—I took them down. I’m surprised you even remember.”

“I remember that e-mail very well. I was angry at you.”

“I overstepped,” Nasir said. “I don’t know why I thought I could tell you what to do.”

“You were being an older brother.”

But Nasir shook his head adamantly. “I wasn’t. I didn’t think of you that way. When I was in London—when Sakina Apu talked to your parents—” Nasir colored and stopped abruptly. She’d hardly ever seen him struggle for words, and maybe that was why she failed to look down modestly, as of course she should have. She was too eager to know what he’d said to Sakina all those years ago—she would have been nineteen or twenty then—if he’d encouraged or simply tolerated the idea that they might one day marry.

Whether it was her boldness or his own caution, Nasir seemed to think he’d gone too far: he grasped the table with two hands, as if he were going to stand up and walk away. Instead he tilted his chair backward just slightly, like a rebellious child, and then let his weight return it to the floor.

“I mean, Sakina Apu always liked you. That’s why she was hard on you back then.”

“She still is.”

He’d regained his self-possession and addressed her reassuringly,
as if she were the one who’d crossed a line. “But she’s that way with Shilpa, too. You should hear the fights they have.”

Amina nodded carefully. She didn’t know how they’d gotten onto the subject of his sisters, and she could feel her heart thudding against her ribs. Had he been about to say that he’d thought of her like a fiancée, rather than a sister? That he had thought of her in London and been disappointed to hear the news of her engagement? They both knew, of course, that a match between the two of them had once been discussed, but saying it out loud was something different.

“It’s getting late,” Nasir said, and just then the power returned: the ceiling fan ground into motion and in the bedroom the television came to life. A BBC broadcaster was reporting about the financial crisis in America.

“I was thinking I might fast next year,” Amina said hurriedly, to keep him at the table. “It’s been a while since I tried it.”

Nasir smiled. “That’s good.”

“Think of what our parents’ generation went through,” Amina said. “And I can’t even wait until sundown for a meal.”

Nasir nodded, tracing the faded gold tooling on the album’s leather cover with one finger. “You know, sometimes I envy them?” He glanced into the bedroom and then lowered his voice. “I mean when they were younger. Being part of the war and everything.”

“How could you envy
that
?”

“Maybe it sounds crazy,” he acknowledged. “But there was a purpose, then. Something beyond our own lives. It was much harder for my father after the war. He hated being a landlord—all the pressure when things broke down, and tenants always begging him for credit. My mother thought the anxiety was what gave him the heart attack—it doesn’t run in our family. And my sister thinks our mother stopped wanting to live after he died. So you could say that this building killed them both—I think that story is as sad as Yusef’s.” He looked defiant when he said this, expecting her to be shocked again. “At least Yusef and his father died for something.”

“What about his mother and his sisters?”

Nasir looked away and grimaced slightly, as if she’d used profanity. “I don’t think your father meant for you to hear that.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with living quietly,” Amina said. “We should be grateful for it. Why do we need to be part of history—what makes us so special?” She stopped short, embarrassed by the intensity of her voice.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “When I think about it. But sometimes I don’t think.”

“Like when you see Yellow Barrette,” she ventured, but that was the wrong thing to say. Nasir got up abruptly and took his glass to the kitchen.

“I shouldn’t have told you that,” he said. “Forget it.”

“I’m sorry—” she began, but he’d already disappeared into the bathroom, where she heard him filling the buckets, in case the water didn’t come in the morning.

Amina waited another minute, washing her own glass, but he didn’t come out of the bathroom. Finally she went into her parents’ room, where her father had fallen asleep on his back and was snoring loudly. Her mother moved to the center of the bed—Amina noticed how little space she occupied—and patted the place next to her. But Amina shook her head and indicated the pile of bedding folded in the corner, which Shilpa had lent in case Amina preferred sleeping on the floor. She unrolled the pad and quilts, not bothering with the mosquito net, and switched off the television and the light. Then she undressed and lay down at the foot of her parents bed, where her mother couldn’t tell if she was awake or asleep. Soon she heard her mother’s soft breathing in the intervals between her father’s snores.

From the faint glow under the door, she knew the light was still on in the other bedroom. She would never be so bold as to knock on the door, but there was nothing wrong with going up to the roof. The heat felt oppressive to her, although people had been saying it wasn’t as bad as usual this time of year—that she’d brought the cool weather with her from America. She listened to make sure her mother’s breathing was still steady (her father never woke in the night) and then slipped on the same blue sundress she’d worn this morning. She considered the rough, white polyester trousers her mother had given her to put underneath the dress—conservative by Rochester standards, with its cap sleeves and calf-length skirt—and left them hanging over the chair: she was ostensibly going up to be alone. She noiselessly opened
and closed the door to her parents’ room, but once she was in the main room she was intentionally careless, walking with her normal tread and stopping to get a glass of water from the filter next to the refrigerator. They had drunk well water in the village, and she could remember sitting by a similar filter as a small child newly arrived in Dhaka, marveling at the shapes the air took as it burbled to the top.