The Newlyweds (8 page)

Amina knew of course that George’s cousin had lived in India, but somehow she hadn’t imagined that so much of that place would’ve made its way into Kim’s daily life. Her own idea of India encompassed the Taj Mahal, the great saint’s tomb at Ajmer (where her father had always dreamed of making a pilgrimage), and her youngest aunt, Sufia—who had won a vocal scholarship to a music school in Calcutta, married a Hindu, and was now the mother of twins. The rest of the country was simply colored shapes on a map, and she had only the vaguest notion of yoga as a Hindu religious ritual.

“You’ve been here before?” she asked her husband.

“I helped her move in,” George said matter-of-factly. “When she got back from India.”

“When was that?”

George thought for a moment. “She was back in the U.S. in 2001, but she didn’t come home to Rochester until ’03—about a year before I met you.”

“Is she a Hindu?”

“Who knows.” George was looking glumly at the rug, which was dotted with tufts of red and orange wool that was coming off on their socks. She could’ve guessed that this apartment wouldn’t be to his taste. Her husband was casual, even sloppy, about the state of the house, but he had a bias against the curios and mementos that had decorated his childhood home: he had taught her the word “knickknack,” a pejorative. He believed that if you hung something on your wall, it should be there for a reason, and so their walls were sparsely decorated: his own diplomas, a map of the world oriented to Asia (which he’d bought when she arrived), a photograph from his parents’ wedding, and one from their own. He preferred that everything be framed, in spite of the expense.

The exception to George’s general rule about souvenirs was the refrigerator, which was covered with magnets from each state he had visited. Although he’d had the opportunity for international travel
only once before coming to meet her in Bangladesh, he had visited forty-five of the fifty states, and he hoped one day to see Alaska, Hawaii, Alabama, North Dakota, and Nebraska, too. His first trip out of the country had been to Mexico, where he had gone with other college students to build houses for poor people.

When Kim returned with the tea, Amina couldn’t help herself. “Excuse me, but do you practice some religion?” She had been afraid of offending George’s cousin, but Kim smiled as if this were a question she was eager to answer.

“I don’t, but I’ve always felt the lack of it. My mom is pretty Christian—you’ve probably noticed already—and she still gets on me about going to church. Somehow it never made sense to me.”

“These are souvenirs then?” She was pleased she’d remembered the word and hadn’t had to resort to “knickknacks.”

Kim nodded. “That’s exactly right.”

“And what is that plant, please?” She pointed to the pot with the red flower, but Kim shook her head.

“I just went to the nursery and picked out whatever I thought was pretty. I don’t know anything about plants.”

“Amina’s been doing a lot of gardening,” George said. “Our grocery store isn’t up to her standards.”

Amina knew he was teasing her, but she flushed anyway. “The grocery store is the most wonderful I have ever seen, only the large-sized vegetables are not as tasty as homegrown.”

“Oh, I agree,” Kim said. “I wish I had a garden—I’d love to see yours.”

“I will be happy to show you. Only it’s not very beautiful right now.” Amina sipped her tea, which was both familiar and not—the bitterness of the herb masked by licorice and honey. She wished Kim had returned from France last month, when her dinner-plate dahlias were in bloom. George had said they were so beautiful that they didn’t look real. “But please come,” she said hurriedly. “Right now I have no job, so I’m free all the time.”

“Amina’s going to look for work as soon as her green card comes,” George said.

Kim looked very serious. “What do you want to do?”

“Any job,” Amina said. “I am not particular.”

“She was first in her class in Bangladesh,” George said. “She worked as a tutor for the college entrance exams.”

Kim looked impressed—the first person in Rochester who had, when George insisted on mentioning it. “I have a friend who teaches in the Monroe County system,” she said. “I can ask her if you want.”

“She has to get her degree first,” George said. “She passed her O levels—that’s the British system—just studying on her own.” George suddenly sounded as if he were back at the green card interview, reciting her credentials to the ICE officer. “But then she didn’t have the opportunity to go to college.”

“I dropped out,” Kim said. “I don’t know if George told you—pretty much the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Everyone warned me, George included, but I didn’t listen.”

“You convinced yourself you couldn’t do it,” George said.

“He used to help me with math when I was a kid,” she said. “But then he went off to Buffalo for college, and I think I just kind of gave up.”

“You didn’t need help with the writing,” George said. “I remember Aunt Cathy bragging about it—you always got As in English.”

“I liked to read,” Kim said. “But I was terrible in math.”

“I’m the opposite,” Amina said.

Kim nodded. “Well, but I’m sure you’ll keep going with school. I get distracted—I’ve always been that way. I wanted to go to India, which turned out to be the best thing I ever did. Have you ever noticed that—the way the best and the worst things in your life can be all twisted up, so you couldn’t have done one without the other?”

It wasn’t that she didn’t understand Kim’s idea, but that she knew this kind of abstract talking made George uncomfortable. He didn’t mind discussing his feelings, or even her own, but he liked them to be presented in a rational way that emphasized cause and effect. She might say, “I feel down today because I miss my parents,” and that was fine, but he didn’t want to hear, for example, about her mother’s peculiar moods, which had started even before she left home and had no one discernible trigger. As she often did with her mother, she tried to bring Kim back around to the concrete.

“When did you go to India?”

“In ’99,” Kim said. “Just backpacking around with a girlfriend. We’d been cocktail waitressing together in Manhattan for a while—she’d heard you could live there on five dollars a day. We budgeted ten and figured we could stay six months at least. She went home after three, but I decided to go down to the yoga place in Mysore—we’d met this couple in Varanasi who told us about it. I got completely hooked, obviously. When my course was done I didn’t want to come back to New York, and someone said foreigners could get work as film extras in Bombay. And so I went up there.” Kim cradled her teacup in her hands and looked at the rug. “And that’s where I met Ashok.”

Amina was fascinated. She thought about the dinners with Eileen and Aunt Cathy: in spite of their friendliness, and the satisfaction she herself took in executing such a normal American responsibility, there were always moments of strained silence in which she could tell everyone was trying hard to think of something to say. In all of those dinners, she wondered that no one had ever brought up Kim’s history in India, or the man named Ashok she now mentioned as if Amina already knew who he was.

Because George was obviously not going to do it, Amina asked, “Who is Ashok?”

Kim looked up at George, almost as if he had betrayed her.

“Why would I go around talking about you? I don’t do that.”

Kim turned to Amina. “Your husband is very moral. But this is important. And I want you to know, because I hope we’re going to be really good friends.”

“Kim,” George said, a kind of warning.

Kim closed her eyes and took a deep breath—her inhalation and exhalation took so long that there seemed to be something indecent about watching it—and then opened her eyes and fixed them on Amina. “I met Ashok at the Mehboob Studio in Bombay. People had told me you could get a job easily, and they were right. The minute I showed up, they cast me in something that would start filming the next day. There were about twenty of us—long-term backpackers, mostly, and also a couple of yogis—and we were supposed to be lying around this hotel pool in our bathing suits, drinking cocktails. Of course the cocktails were colored water, and they were disappointed that more of us didn’t have two-piece bathing suits, but we were all
there for long stays, trying to be really respectful of local culture—we were proud we’d left our bikinis at home. Anyway, we were supposed to be lying there when the hero came running through, chasing the bad guy, and then they were going to fall in the pool. Two of the girls had to be swimming in the pool and look all scared and surprised—but they didn’t pick me for that, thank God.” Kim looked down at her chest and smiled. “They picked the busty ones, and I’m like, a double-A.”

Amina looked at George, who had taken out his Palm Pilot and was scrolling through his messages. For once she didn’t mind his inattention—she was embarrassed herself by the mention of bikinis and bra sizes. Still, she was eager to hear the details of Kim’s story, which she was already imagining relating to her mother tonight in the remaining forty-seven minutes on her Hello Asia phone card.

“I remember I was disappointed when I saw the hero. He was kind of short, and he had this weird facial hair—I thought all those Bollywood stars were supposed to be really cute.”

Amina had to keep reminding herself that Kim was two years older than she was. A certain openness in her expression, compounded by an especially earnest way of speaking, made Amina feel like an older married woman listening to the adventures of a girl.

“And then I saw these two guys standing over in the corner. One of them was sort of thin and awkward, with a mustache, talking to the other one like he was trying to impress him, and the other one—of course the other one was Ashok.” Kim gave Amina a small, sad smile. “He was much better looking than the star—the most handsome man
I’d
ever seen. I’d sort of made friends with the girls lying on the chairs next to me, and they were making fun of me because I couldn’t stop staring at him. I’m not usually like that”—Kim looked at George, as if daring him to contradict her—“in spite of what my mother might tell you. But I felt like I had to find out who he was. There was a servant, a kid, really, who ran over and brought them sodas—we were all hungry and thirsty, but all we got was that colored water—and when he came back over to our side, the other girls waved him over and asked him. It turned out Ashok was the director’s son.”

Amina had finished her tea but didn’t know where to put her cup.
George had set his carefully on the floor, undrunk, on top of a book with a red cover:
Into the Heart of Truth
. While Kim was talking it had gotten dark outside, in the uncannily sudden way of Rochester evenings.

“We should get going,” George said. “We’re going to hit the traffic.”

“On Saturday?”

“There’s always traffic down here.” George glanced at Kim. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

“I mostly walk or bike,” Kim said, getting up easily from her cross-legged position. “Everything I need is right here, even my studio.” She looked at Amina shyly, as if she were a celebrity Kim had been longing to meet. “I was thinking—tell me if this is too boring for you—but we’re looking for a new receptionist at Yoga Shanti. It’s probably not much more than minimum wage, but there would be perks—free classes and stuff. My guru is amazing, and I know he would love you.”

“Thank you,” Amina said. She imagined telling her mother that she was working in a yoga studio: it would be like saying she’d come to America and apprenticed herself to a Hindu priest. Although there was something very appealing about a job in this neighborhood, with someone she already knew, she was grateful to George for his habitual caution about jumping into things.

“Let’s wait and see once she has her green card. Convenience is going to be most important, since I’ll have to drive her.”

“I really wish you lived down here,” Kim said quietly, while George was using the bathroom. “Then we could meet all the time.”

Amina was touched by Kim’s overtures. After her failure with Min, the only women she’d met were Annie Snyder and Jessica. Annie was busy with her children, and according to George, Jessica had a very stressful administrative job at Strong Memorial Hospital. “Neither one of them is going to have a lot of time,” he’d told her. “Don’t take it personally.” She hadn’t taken it personally, but she had been disappointed, and she’d resigned herself to the fact that she would have no hope of meeting anyone before she got a job. She was almost glad for that disappointment now, since it made Kim’s enthusiasm even more thrilling: the most interesting person she had met in Rochester was also the one who wanted to be her friend.

When they got in the car, George was quiet, but he didn’t seem sorry to be leaving. They had been planning to go to a restaurant for dinner, but once they got back on Monroe Avenue, George asked whether she would mind just picking up a pizza on their way home. Amina said she wouldn’t mind.

“Kim is wonderful,” she said. “Thank you for taking me to meet her.” Sometimes George said nothing, and in order to continue the conversation, she had to play both parts, at least until something she said elicited a response. She thought that was better than having a husband who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, the kind of boasting, posturing husband she might have found in Desh.

“And she’s very beautiful.”

“Do you think so?”

“Of course—don’t you?”

“She’s my cousin.” George sounded slightly offended. “I don’t know what it’s like over there, but we don’t think of cousins that way.”

“We don’t think of cousins that way either,” she said quickly. “At least modern city people don’t.” Amina thought of Nasir. “But Kim isn’t your real cousin—you said she was adopted.”

“That’s where all her problems come from.”

“Does she have many problems?”

George gave an expressive snort. “She means well, but she’s too forward. You’ve heard this expression, ‘dirty laundry’? She’ll tell you all her business the first time she meets you.” He turned up the heat, and a blast of hot air shot out around Amina’s legs. She put her hands up to the vents greedily, and for once George didn’t say anything about “allowing the mechanism to do its job.” The car heater was one of the small Rochester pleasures that she couldn’t have imagined before she left Bangladesh; she loved the feeling of being sealed into the cocoon of the Honda, looking out at the lights of the city, which were sharp and distinct in the cold, so different from the hot, hazy nights at home. She found that George was most relaxed when he was driving, and there was no better time to ask delicate questions than when he was keeping his eyes on the road.