The Newlyweds (47 page)

“Did you reach him?”

She hesitated for a moment and then understood he was talking about George. “He was very upset. He couldn’t believe it—he asked if we wanted him to come.”

“They don’t have acid throwing in the U.S., do they?” Her mother’s
tone was curious and detached, as if she were asking about events in a book.

“Of course not,” Amina said, although she didn’t know for sure. It would be something to ask George.

Her father spoke again: “What did he say exactly?”

“He says he’s praying for you.”

Her mother smiled, pleased by this, but her father blinked in an irritated way.

“Praying!” he said. “Didn’t you tell George how lucky the doctors said I was?”

17
As her father recovered, he was able to tell them the story. He and Omar guessed that Salim would have bought the liquid and the jar for fewer than fifty taka at Tantibazar, where it was sold to the jewelers and leather workers, and carried it to Mohammadpur, where he must have hidden himself somewhere in sight of Nasir’s apartment. He had waited until he’d seen her father passing, on the way to pick up George’s kurta, and followed him to the Kaderabad Bazar. At that point an accomplice, whom her father described as a thin, very young man, overdressed for the weather in a formal shirt and trousers, had told him that the shop immediately behind the one where they were standing was selling phone cards at a deep discount; not being able to resist a bargain (and imagining there might be many more calls to Rochester before his visa was secured), her father had followed the young man into the narrow alley between two rows of shops, where they had heard the chugging of a scooter and paused to let it pass. The scooter had instead stopped right in front of them, and the young man had jumped on the back; in spite of the cloth pulled across the lower half of the driver’s face, there was no mistaking Salim. The acid had felt for the first few seconds like water, but her father had known what was coming: he said it was as if whole minutes had passed while the scooter roared away and he waited to feel the fire on his skin. He said that now he knew what it must have been like for the Hindu widows who were thrown into the flames of their husband’s pyres.

Her father had spent another three nights in the hospital, and then they’d moved to her aunt and uncle’s. Omar called the men who’d saved her father, but they never answered their phone; her father and uncle thought it was likely that they were afraid to be involved, in case Amina and her family asked them to be witnesses in court. It was ironic, Amina thought, that they’d spent thousands of taka on bribes in the hospital, while the men who’d actually saved her father’s life wouldn’t even allow them to say thank you. Her mother frowned when Amina said this out loud. She said that those men were true Muslims, who hadn’t done it for her father but for God. Their reward was waiting for them, and they wouldn’t ask to be repaid on earth.

It wasn’t until they were settled at her aunt and uncle’s that her mother thought to check the messages on her father’s phone. On Wednesday morning, the day after the attack, the embassy had called and left a new number. When Amina called back, a young Deshi man with a convincing American accent said that her father’s visa had been approved and that he or his agent might bring his passport to receive the stamp at window number 3 any afternoon between two and four.

Her father had immediately begun worrying about the bandages, speculating about the possibility of removing them for the trip, and so Omar had gotten in touch with a lawyer friend. The lawyer had said that Abdul Mazid would be examined at both airports in New York and that he should say it was a “workplace accident.”

“Then you can explain that he’s had a skin graft,” Omar instructed Amina. “But be sure to say he doesn’t require any further surgery. All that’s true enough.”

“Nasir also believes it will be all right,” her mother reported, as if Nasir were a high authority on U.S. emigration. Her mother had called Nasir as soon as he was home from work that evening, and—Amina couldn’t help having noticed—just when she’d left her father’s bedside to call George. Nasir had told her mother that at first he’d thought they might have gone to a hotel, because of his quarrel with Amina, and it was only after he’d failed many times to reach them that he’d started to worry.

“But you’ll all have to stay indoors until you leave,” her uncle added now. “Nothing but the trip to the embassy, and Fariq will take you there.”

Amina didn’t need encouragement. Ever since the attack, she’d been having nightmares. Several times she and her mother were in the old apartment at Long Nose’s—or in the very similar Mohammadpur apartment they’d had when she’d first started e-mailing with George—watching as flames licked the walls. Once, however, she’d found herself in the Rahmans’ apartment, waiting to see the photo of Mokta. While Mokta’s mother was in the other room, Amina sat down in one of the two empty chairs by the chess set, next to an open window framed by heavy, green drapery. She knew the window was dangerous, but she longed to look out; when she stood up she saw that the view wasn’t of the alley in front of Nasir’s building but of the pond in the village, where Micki was bending to fill a copper pitcher. She called out to her cousin, but just then the wind ruffled the drapery, which moved to reveal a man’s bare foot in a plastic sandal protruding only inches from her own. That time she jumped so violently in bed that her mother had to shake her awake to calm her.

Her aunt had made her father’s bed in a small, bright guest room behind the kitchen, where Borsha prepared special foods: biryani, korma, and the sweet lassis he’d always loved. Ghaniyah had gone back to her in-laws, and Omar was at work all day, so her mother and her aunt spent most of the time her father was asleep in the kitchen, talking to each other in low voices. Her aunt was one of those people who was electrified by tragedy; their residence in the apartment gave her a sense of her own generosity. The attack had cast a prescient glow on both her aunt’s and her mother’s sense of impending danger—as well as her parents’ desire to leave Desh, which was even stronger than before.

The night before she went to get the visa, she sat down at her uncle’s computer, and IM’ed with George until they found the best fare. She and her parents would leave in ten days, provided her father’s doctor gave permission, flying Emirates with a six-hour stopover in Dubai. She’d already accepted that the Starbucks job was gone, and she tried not to think about how long it would be before her parents were independent enough that she could begin to look for a new one. She checked her e-mail on her uncle’s computer several times a day: she was corresponding regularly with no one apart from George, but there were long, empty stretches of time while her father was asleep,
and her mother and Moni were together in the kitchen. She hadn’t had so much time to do nothing since she’d first arrived in Rochester, and perhaps it was that feeling—the day stretching drearily in front of her—that made her go back and reread the first messages Nasir had sent her. Floating in the strange limbo of the last days before their departure—now six, now five, now four—she returned especially to the e-mail in which he’d compared the “past and present Munnis.” She felt she was on the verge of another transformation, but of course she couldn’t rely on Nasir to tell her what it would be.

Her aunt Parveen once told her that if you spent a great deal of time waiting around to hear from one person, another, less desirable one was sure to show up in his place. And so the e-mail that came three days before they left had the air of the inevitable.

Dear Amina
,

Oh well. It looks like it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Now I’m under a kind of house arrest—even worse than before. I’m not sure if you’ll believe me when I tell you the reason, but here goes. I’m pregnant—for real this time. So it turns out that not only am I not allowed to get a job, I’m not allowed to go ANYWHERE, especially places that might be dirty or unsafe. They laughed when Ashok brought up the idea of a trip to Bangladesh
.

Of course I know Desh is perfectly safe. I might have fought with them if you’d said okay. But since it doesn’t work for anyone, I’ll give up my little Friendship Express dream. I guess there isn’t really any friendship express—I’ve thought a lot about how I might prove that I’m your friend, and I hope that someday I’ll find a way to do it
.

With love
,

Kim

Amina wondered what it was that made Kim write to her now. She didn’t think it was simple cruelty (though the word “pregnant,” she discovered, still had the power to rip a jagged seam in her chest). Kim had exactly what she wanted, and if things went as she planned, there would be few opportunities in the future for the two of them to meet. And yet Kim had pursued a friendship with this desperate intensity from the beginning, as if there was something she hoped to get from
her. What fascination had she held for the American woman, beyond her exotic provenance? Men, she thought, could make a clean break with a woman, could leave in the way Parveen’s husband had, or could even be left, like George, and determine to make a life another way. It was women who longed to retain ties and connections, to mix things up in complicated ways. She thought again of her visit to Mokta’s apartment, and felt a creeping shame.

There was no trouble at the embassy, but when she got back with her father’s passport, her parents hardly looked at it. They examined it for a moment, her mother turning the pages for her father to see the immigrant visa, exactly like her own, before quickly returning it to Amina for safe keeping.

“Nasir came to say good-bye. This was the only time I told him not to come—I knew you’d be out—so we were surprised to see him. He said he’d wait until you got back, but then there was an emergency at his office.” Her mother watched her curiously as she said this, and for the first time Amina was afraid that she guessed something about what had happened between the two of them.

“We forgot to give back his extra key,” her father said. “But you’ll want to go see him again.”

“And leave some kind of gift,” her mother said. “You and I will go together—we’ll be safe with Fariq.”

“Why go all the way back there?” Amina asked. “You’ve said good-bye. Fariq can drop off the key—it’s simpler.”

She felt she’d successfully clothed her feelings in irritation, but she was sorry when she saw the way her father looked at her; she hadn’t spoken to him that way since the attack. There was a part of her that was relieved Nasir had managed the farewell for her, and she thought she might have done the same if the situation were reversed. Still, it was painful to think about the lengths to which he’d gone to avoid her, leaving work in the middle of the day and then inventing a premise to flee. He would have had an obligation, as well as a genuine desire, to visit her father and say good-bye to both of her parents. She thought of him getting on his scooter with a quick backward glance, his relief in feeling that he’d fulfilled his obligation.

She resolved to forget everything to do with Nasir, but her parents
couldn’t stop talking about him. Both her mother and father were especially concerned about how they were going to manage an appropriate parting gift, now that there couldn’t be any more trips to the bazaar.

“If only we’d known how much we were going to rely on him—you could’ve brought something special from over there.”

“What about the watch?” her father said. They were sitting in the guest room. Her mother had sent Fariq to Savar Bazar as soon as they’d gotten back from the hospital, with instructions to buy four ready-made shirts for her father to wear in Rochester; her father had joked that with his bandages, he finally required a large. But he was saving the new shirts, wearing one of the old ones unbuttoned to give them easy access to his bandages, which slowly acquired a rust-colored tinge until they needed to be changed. Borsha had dragged two of the living room chairs into the room, so that whoever was watching her father would have a place to sit, but her mother was pacing the floor instead.

“That old watch is worth nothing—except to you. Keep it.”

“I have a travel alarm clock and some socks,” Amina said. “And a New York Yankees baseball cap.”

“That will have to do,” said her mother. “Someday we’ll meet someone who’s going back, who can carry something else for Nasir. Something electronic.” She glanced at Amina. “I mean, when things are better.”

And then, as sometimes happened, a casual prediction of her mother’s became reality right before their eyes. Amina’s phone began to tremble on the table, as if it were cold, and the home number in Rochester scrolled across the screen.

“Amina—can you hear me?” The signal was clear, and it would’ve offended her parents if she’d moved to another room, and so she told George she could hear him and stayed where she was.

“How’s your father?”

“He’s the same.” She made the mistake of looking at her father, who frowned.

“Tell him how much better I am today,” he said. “Tell him how much I’ve been eating.”

“I have good news and good news,” George said. “Which do you want to hear first?”

“What?”

“I got the job at SLR—the better job. They had two positions open—I thought I was interviewing for the other one, but it turns out they had me in mind for the more senior one. I’ll be managing a team on a new data center in Gates—it’ll take at least five years, and they’re big enough that layoffs shouldn’t be a risk even after it’s done. We haven’t discussed compensation, but Ray—that’s the guy I know in aeronautical—he thinks it’s probably going to be more than I was making at TCE.”

“That’s wonderful,” Amina said. It was everything she’d been hoping for in the months before she’d come to Desh. She thought it must’ve been her fear for her father that kept her from feeling the expected joy and relief.

“The nice thing is, they’re a Rochester company, and they only work in the region. There’s no risk of transfer the way there was at TCE.”

Her parents were looking at her inquisitively, and so Amina fixed her eyes on the window. “What’s the other good news?”