The Newlyweds (33 page)

Amina laughed, but her mother was immediately serious again.

“He was planning to stay with Moni and Omar, of course—and then they called to warn us. Apparently they had a visit from Salim.”

“My father’s cousin?”

“Everyone in your father’s village knew you were coming to take us to America. Of course Bhulu and Laltu must’ve assumed your husband was coming, too—we all did.” Her mother gave her a pointed look, which Amina tried to ignore. “They thought we’d be staying with Moni and Omar, so they sent Salim to Savar the week before you arrived. He told your aunt and uncle lies—they didn’t believe him, of course—making threats to your father. He said Abba wasn’t safe if he stayed in Dhaka.”

“What kind of lies?”

Her mother looked at her sharply. “Why would I repeat that nonsense? He’s insane—everyone knows it. What
wouldn’t
he say?”

Amina looked at her mother: she couldn’t believe what three years had done. She was emaciated—her aunt hadn’t been wrong about that—and the hair that Amina could see coming out from under the scarf, which had been mostly black when she left, was now almost entirely gray. The bright pink outfit had the effect of making her look smaller and much older than she was, as might happen if you tried to pack some treasures from this country into one of the brand-new purple suitcases from Kmart.

“But what does he want from my father?”

Her mother looked at her with a trace of exasperation. “Money, of course.”

Amina was about to ask why anyone would come to her father for money, but her mother was already standing, pushing to get off the crowded bus. The van-wallah had gotten down and was loading her suitcases into his makeshift vehicle. Her mother chided him gently about the position of the suitcases, suggesting a different configuration to balance the weight. She nudged Amina into the back of the van, where she had to bend her neck slightly to accommodate the curve of the roof. The frame was covered on the inside with layers of newspaper and paste to make a smooth canopy, and the outside was protected with sheets of plastic, carefully stitched into a waterproof cover. As girls she and Micki had loved sitting at the very back, letting their legs dangle off the edge and making faces at other children they encountered on the road.

Her mother let her hand rest carefully on top of one of the purple suitcases. She looked as if she were going to speak, then stopped herself. All around them were fields of paddy, wet and green after the rain. They passed a small, square fish pond enclosed by mango trees. A woman was squatting there, collecting water in a open-mouthed copper jug. The water was so still, you could see her reflection on the surface of the pond.

“That’s the road to Babur Bari,” her mother said, as if Amina might not remember it. “So much looting these days. This country is very bad.”

“What are they looting?”

“Bricks. Women take bricks from the ruins, and then they sell them to the foremen at the construction sites.”

“Amma, what do they want from us? Abba doesn’t have any money.”

“But they don’t know that.” Her mother spoke slowly, as if she were addressing a child. “They think your American husband can give them whatever they want.”

Amina thought her father’s cousins were a nuisance, nothing more, and that her mother was imagining the worst as usual. But she couldn’t free herself from the idea that her father had unwittingly involved himself in something unscrupulous. She was afraid that if she cornered her mother and demanded to know about the gold jewelry, she might lie out of shame or embarrassment.

“Abba will be angry I told you about Salim. He wanted to spare you all this.”

“Of course you needed to tell me.” Amina tried to sound soothing. She thought the whole story would come out, if she could simply be patient with her mother.

“But your father always felt terrible about how frightened you were that time at Long Nose’s. After he got home that afternoon, I remember he said he’d never seen you so scared.”

“I don’t like being shut in. I’m not afraid of
people
.”

“That’s when Long Nose gave you your nickname.”

“I was Munni before Long Nose.”

Her mother shook her head impatiently. “Not Munni—don’t you remember? He used to call you Mynah.”

They passed the turnoff to the rest house, with its artificial lake and miniature zoo: a failed tourism scheme by the local MP. Up ahead was the familiar silhouette of the primary school and then, before she expected it, her uncle Ashraf’s new concrete house and the path into the village.

“ ‘Little Mynah, you will fly away one day’—he would say that when we saw him in the corridor. You hated it, of course.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“But he was right,” her mother said.

5
Parveen was waiting when the van stopped outside her grandmother’s gate. As soon as Amina stepped down, her aunt began to cry. She clutched her niece and then pushed her away to examine her, holding her head between two hands so Amina could hardly hear.

“So skinny still,” she said. “Don’t they feed you over there?”

“That’s the fashion,” her mother put in. “They want to be that way.”

“I’m not a good cook like you, Aunty.”

Her aunt beamed. “Wait until you see what I’ve made.”

Her mother handed the package of shondesh to her aunt, who confirmed the shop it had come from, nodding her approval. Then she turned back to Amina.

“We thought you might not arrive.”

“I told you I was coming,” Amina said. “Where’s Nanu?”

“She was napping,” Parveen said, “
Ai
, Amma! Come and see. Your granddaughter is back from America.”

“Don’t wake her,” Amina protested, but her grandmother was already coming around the corner of the house. The house had been painted recently, mustard with dark green shutters, and the new palm fence extended around the pond and garden. It was the time of day when the light turned orange, dappling the pond, and the trees thrust sharp, black shadows over the path. Nanu was walking toward her—so slowly!—in an old lavender sari translucent with wear. Once her grandmother had bathed her at this hour, holding her wrist so that she wouldn’t slip on the slick, submerged steps of the pond.
Hold still
, she would scold, combing Amina’s hair while she squirmed and complained. Then twenty years had slid away like water.

Her grandmother grabbed her arm and half buried her face in her shoulder.

“We thought you were gone forever. Like everyone else.”

Amina couldn’t help looking at the garden, where you could just see her grandfather’s grave in the sun, between the beans and the tomatoes. Her uncles were deeper in the shade, under the mango tree. If they had lived, her grandfather would have taken that perpetually
shady spot; by the time anyone else was old enough to die, the tree would’ve grown big enough to accommodate their tombs. As it was there had been two unexpected deaths so early that there was no good place for her grandfather when he passed at the appropriate time.

Her grandmother peered around her at the van, where the driver was still holding the heavy suitcases instead of setting them down in the dust, in anticipation of a tip.

“You didn’t bring your husband,” her grandmother said.

“He wanted to come. Only—”

“He was too busy at his job,” her mother interrupted. “You know what Americans are like, always working.”

“Your aunty cooked extra for him.”

“But I told you he wasn’t coming. Why would you do that?”

Parveen smiled. “So that you can tell him we did. Then maybe he’ll be ashamed and come the next time.” She and Nanu both laughed, and Amina couldn’t help smiling. Her aunt and her grandmother were stubborn, but they were always completely themselves. You were never surprised by anything they did or said.

“You’ll want to bathe,” her grandmother said, taking her arm. “Then you’ll eat.” The smell of her nanu was so familiar that she wondered she hadn’t once thought of it in America. Betel nut, rosewater, cook smoke, and something harder to classify, the mineral tang of pond water dried on your skin. If you took a little of each element in a Ziploc bag, she thought, you could keep it even in the pantry in Rochester, with the canisters of flour, sugar, and salt. It would be there forever to be opened, but you could also choose to keep it sealed.

She had wanted to get in and out of the pond before the news of her arrival reached the rest of the village, but it was too late. When Amina and her mother came out of the house with thin, checked towels over their shoulders, and the hard slivers of Lux soap her grandmother saved for occasions—ordinarily Nanu washed with clay—there was already an audience collected in the courtyard. She greeted Itee Nanu, her grandmother’s elder sister, and her uncle Ashraf, who’d returned from town; she searched the faces in the courtyard for Micki, but her favorite cousin wasn’t there. Her teenage cousins Trina and Mokti
were standing shyly behind Itee Nanu, as if they thought she wouldn’t remember them. Someone had even pulled an old string bed into the courtyard for her ancient great-uncle Sudir Haji, who was surrounded by a crowd of neighbors, servants, and children. There was a general cry of disappointment when it was clear that the American husband hadn’t come.

“Maybe she was afraid to bring him. He likes Bengali women, and look at all these pretty cousins!” Itee Nanu laughed, showing a red mouth full of paan, and Amina was grateful for the distraction of her teasing.

“How is your health, Uncle?”

“
Alhamdulillah
, fine, fine. But you should be asking about the health of the village. We aren’t well these days.” Her uncle Ashraf was the tallest man in the village, and the most learned; he taught the oldest boys at the madrassa down the road. A dog had mauled him as a child, leaving a shiny white scar like a crescent moon on his neck—a mark from God, some people said. Now he switched to English to impress the crowd. “The water situation is very bad. Rainfall is less, even since you left. You must tell people. Go home to U.S.A. and tell your husband: there is not enough water in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh.”

Her uncle wasn’t finished, but he stood aside so that she could greet Sudir Haji, who was squatting on the string bed in a lungi, vest, and prayer cap. Her grandmother’s pretty servant Kamla had fetched him a cup of water, but now she stepped back to whisper with a friend. Amina couldn’t hear the words, but she could guess that the girl was disappointed. She’d expected someone dressed like the Western women in the glossy pages salvaged from magazines or calendars, which some of the poorer villagers pasted up inside their houses. Instead, here Amina was in an old shalwar kameez of her mother’s, on her way to bathe in the pond.

Sudir Haji’s voice had grown high like a child’s. He stroked her head and asked if her marriage was a happy one.

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Your husband is good to you?”

“Very good, thanks be to God.”

“Engineer,” her uncle said. “How much does he earn per month?”

“He wouldn’t like me to say,” Amina said. “Americans are different that way.”

Her great-uncle laughed. “Does he eat our food?”

She nodded. “Only I can’t cook it so well.”

“Ah—your aunty Parveen killed a duck. He’ll be sorry he isn’t here.” Kamla had disappeared, so the old man snapped his fingers at a child with a shaved head and kohl-rimmed eyes, naked except for a tiny cotton shift. The baby ran back behind the fence, where her great-uncle lived in a small concrete room, and returned with a glass jar: dried dates from his pilgrimage to Mecca fifteen years earlier.

“One for you and one for your husband. To keep the marriage sweet.” He took her hands, then bent his head and prayed aloud. She could see Trina and Mokti slipping away, now that the excitement was over. She couldn’t believe those children she had rocked and combed and wiped on twenty years of visits had been too shy even to say hello.

“Come, Munni,” her mother said. “Before it gets too late,” and they were finally permitted to continue on to the pond, with only a trail of small children in attendance.

“Where’s Micki?” she asked her mother. “She didn’t even come.”

“She’s in Khulna registering one of her boys for school—her father’s taking him in. I think that eldest one is twelve already.”

They passed under the archway and set their things down on the bench next to the steps. The pond was cool in the shade of the big mango tree, and a palm leaf screen further shielded them from the eyes of anyone passing on the path. Still Amina found it awkward, once they got in the water, to separate her wet clothes from her body in order to wash properly underneath.

“Three healthy boys, and she’s only a year older than you are. She hasn’t lost her looks either.” Her mother sighed theatrically.

“And still here in the village,” Amina said. She was hurt that Micki hadn’t come, and she allowed herself to be carelessly cruel.

“Exactly,” her mother said. “If they can manage here in the village, what is stopping you?”

Her mother was vigorously soaping her hair, working a lather from even the tiny shard of soap. She couldn’t help watching for signs of madness, but so far her mother’s behavior was perfectly normal. Her
opinions came as directly and forcefully as they always had; there was no sign of the frightened, obsessive person Amina had been listening to on the phone for the past three years.

“Now you,” she said, handing Amina the soap.

“I’ll wait to wash my hair inside.”

“There’s no water at the indoor tap. Your uncle’s right—this is a bad year.”

“What does he think George can do about it?”

“He doesn’t want to ask you directly,” her mother said. “He’s being polite.”

Amina looked at her in amazement. “What could I do?”

“Give money, of course. For a tubewell or something else—some foreign solution, maybe.” Her mother dipped her head in the water, and when she came out, with her eyes closed and her hair streaming down her back, for just a moment, you could see the beautiful girl she had been.

“Amma? You know George doesn’t have money now. You understand, right?” She lowered her voice, in case any of the children were paying attention. Then she wondered why she bothered. Wouldn’t it be better just to tell the truth, to say to everyone that George had lost his job, and that they might even lose their house? She could employ some of these children to run around the village, and then someone could go spread the news in Shyamnagar Bazar. She would lose face, certainly, but people would also welcome her more easily. Not only foolish Itee Nanu but all the rest of them would joke and tease her. Misfortune had that advantage. No one would envy or threaten them, and they would be safe again.