Dead: A Ghost Story (2 page)

Impatience builds inside
like steam from a boiling kettle as Maria also finds Matin’s locked
safe in the bedroom closet; and his bankbook on an overhead shelf.
She opens the bathroom cabinet and studies all the medicines and
tonics stored there. Nasreen looks over her shoulder and laughs at
Matin’s hair coloring kit. So little hair, so much
vanity.

At noon, Maria hurries
into the kitchen and grabs tomatoes, a cucumber, cheese and lunch
meat from the fridge.

Nasreen surges forward,
right into Maria’s face. “Don’t stop! There’s more to find. You
still haven’t found me!”

Maria stills and cocks her
head to one side. Her breath comes hard and fast as her gaze jumps
around the empty room.

Nasreen takes a deep
breath and tries again. “I’m here. I didn’t mean to scare you.” For
good measure, she gently caresses one of Maria’s plump
cheeks.

No reaction. Tears spring
to Nasreen’s eyes and her head bows in defeat. Even in death she
cannot control her existence.

After a moment, Maria
shakes her head and her stance softens. She hurries over to the
sink whispering a prayer. Once she sets the food down on the
counter, once the last word is uttered, she makes the sign of the
cross and focuses on lunch.

Maria’s glance flickers
between the kitchen clock and the office door as she slices onions,
tomatoes, and cucumbers.

Horror, cold and wet,
seeps through Nasreen. Oh God no. She’d spent her married life
stuck to Matin, now she was still stuck haunting him…that too
without satisfaction. She slumps into a chair at the kitchen table
and watches Maria work. This is where she spent most of her time
and now she’s been replaced. In a day.

She looks at Maria
closely, comparing herself to the other woman. Maria is short, with
curves and smooth roundness. She hums a happy tune as she works,
swaying her full hips to the music. Before her death, Nasreen’s
slenderness had concentrated into a haggard leanness.

Sex had become less and
less frequent between husband and wife. When Matin did get up the
effort, he always complained how hard and unresponsive she was.
“It’s like making love to a particularly bony fish that’s been dead
for a while,” he said. “There is no life there, but the bones they
stick you and they hurt.”

During those instances,
Nasreen would turn her face to the wall. She hadn’t enjoyed or
anticipated physical intimacy with Matin. Never once had she felt
loved, just used for sex —a conjugal right he demanded and she had
to comply with. When she did move, it was to shove some hard part
of herself – an elbow or a knee – into a soft part of
him.

Matin had been
disappointed when their couplings didn’t result in any children.
From time to time he brought up the subject. “Your father anchored
me with a barren cow,” he’d say. “He tricked me into marrying
you.”

Nasreen had learned the
hard way to keep quiet during such tirades. Matin believed in
discipline. Not about time, food or self-control, but in regard to
his wife. Sessions that started with slaps and name-calling, led to
yanking her by the hair and beating her with a shoe, and ended with
punches and kicks. She’d thanked God every day that there were no
children. What kind of life would she have brought them
into?

Since they’d arrived in
Sand Lake, Matin manned the front office of the motel and took care
of the paper work and money, while Nasreen served as the cleaning
crew. She went from room to room, vacuuming, making the beds,
scrubbing the bathrooms and emptying wastepaper baskets. Sometimes
she’d find gum stuck on the tables and she’d have to pry it loose.
A number of times she found used condoms, dirty magazines and,
once, red lace panties. In the beginning, Matin let her sit in the
front office in the afternoons while he napped.

Until one of the customers
asked about her later. “You’re flirting with those rednecks,” he
had screamed, spittle flying. “I’ll show you to disrespect
me.”

That night he’d beaten her
and barred her from the office forever. Purple and blue bruises
bloomed and spread across her skin like
shaplas
–those beautiful star-like
lilies--over the body of a lake.

Then a few weeks ago,
Matin had shown up with Maria.

“
She will help you
clean.”

Nasreen had stared. Matin
wasn’t one to spend money without complaining. When she asked about
it, he turned gruff.

“
Don’t worry about the
money,” he’d said. “Customers are complaining about the rooms not
being clean enough, so now it’s going to be Maria and
you.”

Her thoughts return to
Maria. Both of them have long hair and they both serve as maids for
Matin. Well,
she
is done with all that now, at least that is one advantage of
being dead.

Nasreen watches as Matin
slips in through the door separating the office from their living
quarters. He sits down at the kitchen table. Maria sets down
sandwiches for both of them.

“
What, no rice? I like
rice.”

Maria shrugs
carelessly.

“
It’s too hot,” she says.
“I didn’t feel like cooking.” That earns her a glare. She looks
away. “Ay, Papi! Don’t sulk. I’ll cook rice tonight.”

Matin turns to his
sandwich, taking large bites and chewing noisily. He doesn’t talk
and his eyes stay on his food as if it would escape if he looks
away. Nasreen gets up and walks back to look out the window, glad
she no longer has to sit with him, ready to refill his glass and
bring him the salt or whatever it is he might want.

“
So when is your wife
coming back?” Maria asks.

“
She’s not,” he says. “I
told you she left me.”

Maria laughs, a short
cynical snort.

“
They always come back,”
she says. “Mousy women like that don’t know where to go, what to
do.”

Nasreen looks over her
shoulder at Maria. Her anger flares up and disappears just as
quick. That wasn’t far from the truth. Forget coming back, she
hadn’t been able to leave. Now she wished she’d learned to drive,
but Matin had refused to teach her. In the village she’d walked
everywhere or taken a rickshaw. The one year spent in New York
she’d enjoyed riding around in the subway, jostling and swaying,
just one of the crowd. Now she wished she
had
flirted with one of the customers
and run away. Maria was wrong. If she’d left, she would never have
come back. If she’d left….

Nasreen’s thoughts drift
back to her arrival in New York as a new bride. Matin’s big
business turned out to be a cleaning service. He and three other
men cleaned office buildings after hours. Matin had invested the
capital and being the most confident of the lot, he hustled jobs
and contracts. In return, the others called him Boss. Besides
working together, the men also shared a tiny two-room apartment in
Jackson Heights.

When Nasreen arrived, the
three single men moved into one room. The boys, as she thought of
them, didn’t mind. She became the den mother -- cooking their
favorite foods, mending their torn shirts, and doing their laundry.
On their days off, they all went out as a group. The boys loved
playing tour guide to Nasreen. She’d known Matin didn’t like the
attention she got, but was surprised when, a year later, he sold
the business to one of the other men and moved to Sand
Lake.

Matin swallows his last
bite and leans back in his chair. Maria smiles at him. “So you’re
single again, Mr. Motel owner.”

Matin laughs. A big braying
laugh that reminds Nasreen of a
gadha
, donkey. “Looks like it. But
don’t get any ideas, I’m in no hurry to be married
again.”

Maria pouts, fans her
lashes and leans forward to show more cleavage. “Don’t worry, Maria
will look after you.”

He pulls her to him
roughly and presses his mouth down on hers. Nasreen looks away.
Matin’s always been one to grab and take. No asking, no preparing.
Maria finishes the kiss on his lap.

“
Did she take all her
things with her?” she asks.

“
Why?”

“
Well, if she left behind
some clothes, I could look through them,” she says. “Might find
something I could use.”

He shakes his head. “No,
most of them are
deshi
clothes. Saris, shalwar-kammezes. Things you don’t
wear.”

“
What about her jewelry?”
she asks. “I’d wear those.”

“
No, no, don’t ask about
the jewelry!” Nasreen cries out. Fear wallops her. She trembles as
she looks from Maria to Matin and back again. He stares at Maria
without any expression like a pale
tiktiki
-- a lizard --stares at a
fly, minutes before devouring it with a single lunge.

Not that she likes Maria
much, but it is the question of another life, another human being.
She knows Matin’s temper and doesn’t want another person
hurt.

When the woman first came,
Nasreen had tried making conversation in her broken English only to
be rebuffed by monosyllabic replies. Then, just yesterday, she’d
caught her and Matin having sex in one of the motel
rooms.

Maria and Nasreen,
following their regular work schedule, started at different ends of
the row of rooms and worked their way to the middle. When she’d run
short of Lysol, Nasreen had gone in search of Maria and her supply
cart. Instead, she’d found the two of them.

Shocked, Nasreen had fled
the scene. But she was even more surprised to realize that she
didn’t feel jealous or betrayed. The anger and sadness she felt had
little to do with Matin and Maria, and everything to do with
herself.

She missed real
conversations, the sharing of thoughts and ideas, laughing at jokes
and making someone else laugh at her jokes. She missed the familiar
village dirt roads winding between green fields, the shimmering
expanse of the Hoogly River crisscrossed by fishing boats and
packed ferries. She missed the cool monsoon rains, the smell of wet
earth and green grass, and the sour bite of green mangoes collected
after a storm. She’d given all of that up for what?
This empty
marriage?

Her heart ached for
another Bengali-speaking person, a person who understood her, a
friend. Anyone other than Matin. She wanted to go home.

Nasreen packed everything:
her clothes, her jewelry, a few tattered Bengali books that she’d
read over and over, and precious letters from her father that had
been unfolded and refolded many times.

Matin had found her with
her suitcase on the landing. He bounded up the stairs and tore the
suitcase from her hands. “Where do you think you are
going?”

“
I want to go home,” she
said. “Just send me home and you can live with that-- that whore.”
He’d slapped her then. His ring split open her lip. She could still
taste the warm, salty blood.

He opened the suitcase and
rummaged through the hurriedly packed contents. Saris, blouses and
petticoats-- faded and softened with use -- flew through air and
landed in sad heaps. Finally, he pulled out the bag with her
jewelry. “You’re stealing from me?”

“
Those are mine,” she’d
said. His fist smashed into her then and she stumbled against the
wall.

“
These are the only things
worth anything your father handed over,” he said.

“
Those are mine,” she’d
said again. “Those are the last gifts from my father to me. They
are mine.”

She’d tried to snatch them
back. As they struggled, Nasreen lost her footing when Matin shoved
her. Her body bounced from step to step, her head cracked against
the banister. A great rush of pain flooded through her, followed by
darkness.

Nasreen remembers Matin
standing at the top of the stairs and staring down at her. She
remembers him rubbing his hands over his face. She remembers the
keen wailing note of panic that tore through his grimacing lips.
She remembers his slow, shaky descent, how he’d reached out with
his right foot and given her a few half-hearted kicks. When she
didn’t respond, he’d dropped down and checked her pulse. She
remembers how his face had crumpled with distaste when his hands
touched her skin. She remembers him shaking her, demanding she
wake. Nasreen had watched it all from above.

Maria’s harsh laugh breaks
into her thoughts. Nasreen blinks back tears and focuses on the
present.

“
Nah, being a woman I bet
she took everything,” Maria says, hugging herself. She rubs her
arms as if cold. Her fear prickles the air around her. Maria
glances at the wedding portrait and then the clock on the wall. “Ay
yi-yii! I gotta be going.”

Hope skitters up Nasreen’s
spine. Had the other woman felt her presence? The more intense her
emotions, the more others seemed aware of her existence.

She rushes toward Maria.
Misses her target by a foot. Ooof! She forces her mind to calm and
drifts closer.

“
Where?” Matin
asks.