Brick Lane (19 page)

He just wanted to be rid of me, she thought. He wanted me to go far away, so that I would not be any trouble to him. He did not care who took me off his hands. If I had known what this marriage would be, what this man would be . . .!

What? What, then? I would have run away, like Hasina? I would have eloped with the sweeper? Hah. I would have wept on my wedding day. I did! I did weep. What good did it do?

She held Raqib in her lap and rocked him back and forth, although he was not sleepy. A sharp, hot smell came from behind as a new passenger sat down with a meal wrapped in paper. The light inside the bus was furred up. It buzzed and crackled and leaked a yellow pollution. Even Raqib's face looked sickly in this light. The bell rang twice, quickly and smartly, and it sounded impatient to get on. The bus ground along and the seats vibrated grimly, as if a tornado had passed just barely out of range.

It was her place to sit and wait. Even if the tornado was heading directly towards her. For her, there was nothing else to be done. Nothing else that God wanted her to do. Sometimes she wanted to get up and run. Most of the time she did not want to run, but neither did she want to sit still. How difficult it was, this business of sitting still. But there was nothing really to complain of. There was Chanu, who was kind and never beat her. There was Raqib. And there was this shapeless, nameless thing that crawled across her shoulders and nested in her hair and poisoned her lungs, that made her both restless and listless. What do you want with me? she asked it. What do
you
want? it hissed back. She asked it to leave her alone but it would not. She pretended not to hear, but it got louder. She made bargains with it. No more eating in the middle of the night. No more dreaming of ice, and blades, and spangles. No more missed prayers. No more gossip. No more disrespect to my husband. She offered all these things for it to leave her. It listened quietly, and then burrowed deeper into her internal organs.

Perhaps, she came to think, everyone has one. The trick was to ignore it. Turn your back on it. Like Amma. 'I don't want anything from this life,' she said. 'I ask for nothing. I expect nothing.' Hasina jumped up and down at that. 'If you ask for nothing, you might get nothing!' But she had proved her mother's point. 'How can I be disappointed?' It made sense to Nazneen. Only one thing was not clear. The cause of Amma's suffering.

'We will suffer in silence.' Amma's sister paid a long visit in the summer of Nazneen's tenth year. The air was hot and wet, as if it had absorbed the sweat of countless bodies. It dripped also with scandal. Mustafa, the cowman, had become possessed. This little man, with his matchstick arms and legs, a walking splinter, had kidnapped a girl from a neighbouring village and taken her into the jungle for three days and nights.

'In silence,' said Amma. Her sister spat thoughtfully and inspected the proceeds. The two women sat inside away from the sun. Nazneen stood in the doorway in a lozenge of light.

What were they suffering? Nazneen wanted to ask. Her father was not the richest man in the village, but he was the second richest.

That is all that is left to us in this life,' said Auntie. She had clung to Amma when she arrived and the two of them wept so long and so hard that Nazneen feared that someone had died. Nazneen preferred Mumtaz, Abba's sister, who was not one for crying and who made herself scarce during these long visits.

'We are just women. What can we do?'

'They know it. That's why they act as they do.'

'God has made the world this way.'

'I told him I will not go back.'

'That's what you said.'

'If he carries on this way, that's it.'

'You said it last time as well.'

'What else can I do?'

The conversation went on, circling round and round, and Nazneen listened, breathing quietly and hoping that if they forgot about her they might reveal the source of their woes. It was something to do with being a woman, of that much she was sure. When she was a woman she would find out. She looked forward to that day. She longed to be enriched by this hardship, to cast off her childish baggy pants and long shirt and begin to wear this suffering that was as rich and layered and deeply coloured as the saris which enfolded Amma's troubled bones.

Hasina tugged her away and they raided the store for tamarind sauce and henna. They stuck their fingers in the tamarind and sucked it off, like sweet and sour toffee. They drew circles and stars on their palms with the henna, and then smudged them doing handstands in the dust. Hasina plaited Nazneen's hair and Nazneen made two thick braids of Hasina's hair and wound them on top of her head. Hasina looked like a princess. Her face was flawless, symmetrical, mythical. She hardly belonged to this world. A lotus on a dung heap. She was not made to suffer.

That afternoon, when the rest of the village was drugged by the sun and stretched out on chokis, bedrolls or the ground to sleep it off, Nazneen was not tired. She walked round the pond and stepped over the silvered back of a snake, which slid into the water and became itself a glittering ripple. She climbed a little way up an amra tree and wedged herself into a forked branch to look out across the flat fields. The closer ones were lavish green, dense and deep, but the far fields filled with golden jute flowers were slick as mirrors. The sun polished them until they shone. She wondered if, when she married, she would have to go as far away as those fields. She thought she would not like to go that far. Then she got down and walked a little way along the track that led to the school that took students from the three nearest villages. Her sandals made clouds of dust and a haze of mosquitoes blacked the air over a gully. The shirt stuck to her back and her face was wet, as if she walked in an invisible shower. Only the mosquitoes moved. The birds slept. Even a mighty dragonfly that had tumbled onto the track lay stunned in the heat, wings aglow.

'Psssh!'

Nazneen turned round. She turned back again.

'Psssh!'

There was a dead man tied to a tree. His wrists were lashed to a branch and his feet dangled a few inches above the ground. His head fell forward, as if his neck were snapped. 'Come closer,' he croaked. Nazneen heard herself swallow. She felt the saliva trickle down the back of her throat. The man wore a tattered white loincloth. His legs were hinged with joints that were much too large. His ribs looked like a chicken carcass. It was Mustafa the cowman, and he was not quite dead.

She stepped closer to the tree. Silence. She walked forward again. Still nothing. Only when she was close enough to smell him did he speak again. He raised his head this time. His eyes stood out of his face and the corners of his lips were caked with something white. 'Untie me. Good girl.' He spoke as if he had enjoyed their game but it was time for the prank to end. Nazneen put her hand against the tree trunk. She could not see any way to climb the tree to reach his wrists. She did not know if she would climb it anyway. Mustafa was being punished. 'Roll a rock over here then. Or a log, that will be lighter. Put it beneath my feet.' His voice cracked and broke, but he sounded angry with her now. His head dangled again, and she heard him rasp out his breaths. She walked round the tree and sat down on a stump. From the back, Mustafa looked like a wooden puppet with some broken strings. She wondered if he would die as she watched and whether she would know when he died. She did not want him to die but it did not seem possible to intervene in such a momentous event. It occurred to her that people might be angry if she freed this man who was being punished, but that was not what stayed her hand. Matters of life and death were simply beyond her scope.

After a while, when her backside was numb from sitting and she was beginning to get thirsty, she thought of something she could do for him. She would go and fetch some water. Mustafa appeared to have fallen asleep. She shook him by the ankle and he moaned. 'I'm going for water,' she said. 'I can bring you some coconut ice as well,' she added.

She set off at a run and decided that if Mustafa was still alive when she got back, she would find a way to climb the tree and let him down. If he is still alive, she reasoned, then he has survived anyway and I won't be spoiling anything. She would let Hasina in on the secret if she could find her, but she would not tell Amma. If Abba was there she would not look at him in case he read something in her face. He might have ordered the punishment. She did not want to be punished as well.

Three men passed her on the track, carrying lathis. One was the brother of the man from the next village whose daughter had been kidnapped. They laughed and joked as they went by and swung their big sticks cheerfully, as if they were off to play cricket. When Nazneen turned round she saw them gather by Mustafa's tree, three small blank figures in the distance doing a slow dance with one spinning partner.

They had come to a small front garden paved with multicoloured flagstones in random shapes and sizes, as if a huge vase had been dropped from a great height and the shattered fragments had landed directly in front of the house. Beneath the window a plaster goose in a red spotted bonnet peered into the darkness. Just to the side of the door a three-foot-high policeman bowed his jolly legs, and faked a smile. Other figures crouched in the gloom, outsize animals and stunted humans. The house itself gave nothing away. The lights were lit and the curtains were drawn.

'A substantial property,' said Chanu. He spoke in a whisper. 'This area is very respectable. None of your Sylhetis here. If you see a brown face, you can guarantee it's not from Sylhet.'

Nazneen held Raqib on her hip. She wondered if Chanu would ring the doorbell, or whether they would just leave again and get on the bus.

'We won't stay for very long,' said Chanu. 'We'll say a few words and then go.' He pressed the doorbell and it played a startling tune. 'Of course, if they ask us to stay for dinner, I don't mind.'