The Newlyweds (45 page)

As a girl Amina had been in the habit of dreaming she was in love. Although the dreams were different, she recognized the lover each time. Their history was so rich and complex that its residue would still be with her when she woke up. She would lie in bed running through the list of people she knew, sure that she would be able to identify him eventually. She refused to believe that her brain had the capacity to invent someone so palpably real. Now, as she stood in Mrs. Rahman’s doorway, she felt as if she were mourning that phantom lover all over again. It was only in losing her idea of Nasir that she realized how much he meant to her; by showing her one photo, Mrs. Rahman had sucked all the brightness from her life. She had killed Nasir, or worse, she had somehow led Amina to understand that he’d never existed at all.

Amina put her old schoolbook back into Mrs. Rahman’s hands. “Please tell Mokta to keep it,” she said, and then she was moving down the stairs. She knew Mrs. Rahman was still talking to her and would be confused by her sudden rudeness. The woman probably would’ve liked to bring her daughter to visit them anyway, to talk about Mokta’s prospects—a contact abroad was well worth an afternoon visit—but
the thought of the girl in Nasir’s apartment was suddenly repulsive. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, her phone was ringing. She looked down to see if it was George, calling about his interview, and then remembered that the interview was Tuesday morning Rochester time and hadn’t happened yet. Her phone displayed a Dhaka mobile number she didn’t recognize, and so she ignored it, hurrying out of the building in case Mrs. Rahman should take it in her head to follow her.

15
When she got home, her father wasn’t back from the market, and she was startled to find Nasir at home in the main room. Her mother was fixing him something to eat in the kitchen, and he was sitting at the table with the newspaper open in front of him. He smiled broadly when he saw her, as if they could have no secrets from each other.

“Nasir took his sisters to the bus stand, and now he’s eating something before he goes in to work,” her mother said, as if this information would be of the utmost interest to Amina. “Did you see Asah?”

The name startled her: for a moment she’d forgotten the pretense she’d used this morning. “No,” she said.

Her mother’s brow immediately folded in on itself, in anticipation of another misfortune. “What happened?”

“I decided to visit someone across the street instead. A young woman.” Nasir looked up mildly from his paper, and she could see that he really didn’t know what she was going to say.

“Which young woman?” her mother asked. Amina addressed herself only to her mother, trying to keep her voice calm and even.

“Another possible match. I thought it might be nice to invite the family—for tea. They’re very respectable. Her father teaches math at St. Joseph’s.”

“But how—” her mother began.

But Nasir interrupted: “Where did you go?”

“Don’t worry,” Amina said. “Mokta was out—at high school. She’s only sixteen, so she won’t start university for another two years.”

“But that’s too young,” her mother protested. “And anyway—”

Nasir stood up from the table. She had wanted to unsettle him, but
she was suddenly afraid she’d gone too far. He was looking at her as if she’d said something obscene. “You’re joking,” he said coldly.

“I was trying to help you. I didn’t realize you’d thought of someone so young.”

Nasir just stared at her, but her mother looked baffled.

“What’s this Mokta? I thought she was called—”

“Munni misunderstood,” Nasir said. “There was never any question of a girl across the street.”

Her mother nodded, relieved. “Because Sakina seems set on this girl in Comilla. They’re planning to finalize everything on this trip.”

Nasir stared at her coldly. “You thought I was serious about a girl across the street?”

“You said—”

He exploded: “I said I admired a girl with yellow barrettes.”

“Who lives across the street.” But her face was burning, and she knew she’d made a humiliating mistake.

“Across the—who knows if she even lives there?” Nasir exploded. “Maybe she was just walking by. My God, Munni—I can’t believe you went to see some stranger!”

“But why did you say there was a girl?”

“What if there had been? What gives you the right? You think you can just come back here and play with people’s lives—and then disappear back to America?”

Her mother was looking worriedly from one of them to the other. “The girl from Comilla will be more suitable. Sixteen is way too young these days. I was seventeen when I married, and even then—”

“I’m not marrying any Mokta!” Nasir spit out the name as if it were bitter to him.

“I thought—” Amina began, but he was gathering up his things, shoving his paper in a messenger bag with a British label that was hanging over the back of the chair.

“Sorry, Aunty,” he muttered, and then hurried past them out the door.

“He forgot to change his shoes.” Her mother looked at the door, where Nasir’s leather shoes were waiting neatly on the rack.

“He has a temper,” Amina said, but it was no use reminding herself of Nasir’s faults. She couldn’t believe what she had done.

“Like your father.” Her mother smiled, then immediately became serious again. “But I hope he won’t tell Sakina. She’d be so angry if she thought we were interfering in this marriage business of theirs.”

Her mother’s cheeks were so sunken, you could see the shadows in them. Her hair was pulled back in a braid, and her clothes hung off her body as if they belonged to someone else. She rocked unselfconsciously from heel to toe, doing the television strengthening exercises that had become second nature to her. Apart from what she’d seen on TV, everything her mother knew about the United States was from Amina’s description. Had she been honest enough? Or was her mother still imagining only another Desh, reputedly colder, where she would have to wear a sweater even in the month of April?

She hesitated, watching her mother begin to clear the table, using a cloth with one hand while she balanced the dishes in the other. “But is it really settled with the girl in Comilla?”

“Nasir hasn’t said yes or no,” her mother said. “It’s very delicate. But Sakina is confident that once he sees—”

Amina’s phone rang again in her purse, and this time she reached for it. It was the same unfamiliar number, but anything was better than hearing from her mother the attributes of the great beauty in Comilla.

“Hello,” a man’s voice came on the line. “Hello?”

There was noise in the background, as if people in a crowd were yelling at once. “I think you have the wrong number,” Amina said.

“Hello! This is Amina—Munni?”

“Yes?”

“There’s been an accident—at the bazaar. Your father’s injured. We’re taking him to DMCH.”

“What kind of accident?” Amina demanded. “Hello?”

“It’s bad,” the man said. “Your father’s been hit with acid.”

16
No one could find her father at the hospital. They went to every floor, ward, desk, and waited in clusters of other anxious relatives. When a nurse finally deigned to look at them, her mother would say her father’s name; slowly, a clipboard would be produced, pages riffled, and then a bland, faint smile, satisfaction of
a duty completed. “No, no—not on our floor.” Amina fought back tears each time they got a no, but her mother remained firm and efficient, suggesting they call the number that had appeared on Amina’s phone to see if the man had any more information about where her father had been taken after they’d arrived at the hospital. But no one answered, and Amina had neglected to ask even his name.

It was also her mother’s idea to call Omar, and after what seemed like several hours, her uncle appeared. The nurses at the desk snapped to sulky attention at the sight of Omar’s fine shirt, his large gold wristwatch, and his impressive girth. A male orderly appeared from behind the desk, called Omar “Sahib,” and went to check with the OT nurses. He was back less than five minutes later, smiling broadly and saying that her father was in surgery. He had no information about the progress of the operation but asked whether they wouldn’t please come and wait in a private room. Amina couldn’t see how much Omar tipped him, but they were soon sitting on brown metal folding chairs in a small, unventilated supply room that smelled of formaldehyde and antiseptic. The bottles on the shelves were dusty, the boxes yellowing, as if the medicines and supplies they contained had been sitting there for years. Omar looked through the messages on his phone, and her mother began to pray:

Amina recited The Opening with her mother, but she didn’t feel any calmer when it was finished. She longed suddenly to go into the hallway and call George, but it was the middle of the night in Rochester; she would have to wait until late tonight. Her mother hadn’t wanted to call or text Nasir before they knew more; how strange to think he was at work, not even aware of what was happening.

If it was a punishment, it was meant for her. How careless she had been! She’d betrayed George with Nasir and then betrayed Nasir’s trust as well. Worst of all was what she’d done to her parents. She’d felt invincible, going blithely on her invented errands, as if her passport were a shell protecting her from harm. Her father, of course,
hadn’t felt the same way. Perhaps he’d even guessed that something like this might happen, that as they got closer to their departure, Salim would have gotten bolder and more reckless. Salim’s more clever elder brothers—Bhulu and Laltu—might have instructed him not to risk harming Amina, the one with the American bank account, and so he had attacked her father in a last, desperate attempt at extortion or revenge.

And yet her father had taken a needless risk—for what? For a gift he imagined presenting to his American son-in-law: a piece of silk George would look at once, pretend to admire, and then put away on the top shelf of a closet, along with the stained trousers he could no longer wear to work. When she thought of their conversation about Long Nose, she was nauseated to think of how she’d made her father feel. Abba often joked about his own failures, his gift for making the wrong decision again and again. Had they ever corrected him? Had he taken this chance because he valued his own life so cheaply, or was it because he thought they did, too?

Her mother had finished her prayer, and Omar stepped into the hall because he wasn’t getting reception.

“I’m sorry, Amma.” She pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder. “It’s my fault.”

But her mother didn’t touch her, or move to accommodate the embrace, and so Amina lifted her face. Her mother gave her a strange, distant look.

“It’s God’s will,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Let me go ask again,” she begged. Her mother shrugged, but Omar stopped her at the threshold.

“That boy will inform us,” he said. “Better to wait here.” She could remember joking with her parents in the past about her uncle’s worldliness. Her aunt would ostentatiously complain that she couldn’t even send him to the market anymore, because his size and fine clothes led people to assume he was a
bideshi
and give him the foreigner’s price. Now it was a shock to see how much more of an insider Omar was than she herself. The way he failed to make eye contact frightened her, as if he knew something about her father’s condition she didn’t. The pictures she had seen in newspapers and on TV over the years came back to her: faces misshapen and caved in on themselves;
a child’s mouth shrunken down to a tiny O; a woman with one eye missing, simply swallowed up by flat, white skin. And those were the ones who survived. She tried to picture her father’s face as it had been this morning, when he’d put her into the rickshaw, but what came to her was a much older memory—of a childhood visit to her dadu’s village. She was living with her parents in Dhaka then, so she must have been seven or eight. They’d gone down for one of their rare visits to Kajalnagar. Amina had wanted a coconut—the young, green variety that grew in clusters from the skinniest palms—and her father had said he would show her how to climb it. She’d never seen him do that, and she’d watched in amazement as he rolled up the legs of his city trousers, put his glasses on the ground at the base of the tree, and began to climb, hand over hand, closing his feet adeptly around the trunk. When he was almost at the top, he grinned down at her and, without grabbing the nut, started his half-scrambling, half-sliding descent.

“But you didn’t get it,” she’d said, disappointed, and her father had said:

“Now you try.” He’d given her a boost, holding on to her feet while she tried to pull with her hands. She had been frightened but excited, and eager for the prize at the top. She thought now that there was no way she could have made it that high, but her father didn’t stop her; it was her mother who came out of the house, her orna pulled over her head as it almost always was in her husband’s village, yelling at her father and demanding to know if he was crazy.

“She’s a little girl,” Amina remembered her scolding him: “What will people say? You want her to grow up to be a coconut seller?” She also remembered the way the smooth-looking bark had made long, thin scratches in the soles of her feet, and how her father had bent down to whisper, as they followed her mother back to the house:

“You were almost there—next time.”

Her mother knew how to plan for every contingency, and Amina had always been able to execute those plans. But her father was the one who’d had the inspiration for their boldest ventures—the only one of the three of them who knew instinctively how to hope. If she’d accomplished anything, she saw now, it was because her father had made her believe that she could.

It was another forty-five minutes before the orderly returned to say that her father was being brought out of surgery. They left the airless little room, and Omar took out his wallet again: there were no beds in the ward, but Omar spoke to the orderly in private, and when they returned, it turned out that one would become available as of that evening.