Authors: Monica Ali

Brick Lane (24 page)

'It's good,' said Razia. 'Save some for your husband.' Nazneen was eating like a zealot. Razia put down her plate and spoon. 'Something I didn't mention to your husband about Mrs Islam.'

'She hasn't called. I offended her. Chanu doesn't know.'

'Something else he does not know.'

'You didn't want to gossip about her.'

'No.' Razia lowered her heavy eyelids. She leaned in. The lashes curled up like insect legs and the lids squared off the tops of the irises, which were, Nazneen noticed now, spattered with gold lights deep down in the black. 'It's not gossip. It is the truth.' She paused a while, the better to hook her audience. 'The woman is a usurer.'

'Tcha!'

'I check my facts. It is the truth. In the eyes of God, I say it again. The woman practises usury and she will be the companion of fire.'

'How can you say it?' Nazneen was forced to put down her plate.

'Listen to me. I had my suspicions. I said something to her about money difficulties and she offered a loan. Nothing specific. Then I was not sure. I thought – maybe she offers loans from the goodness of her heart. Maybe she carries bundles of five-pound notes in that big black bag, just for handing out to poor people.'

'Stop.'

'I'm not joking. You know me, always willing to see the good side.' She smiled like a jackal. 'If you don't believe me, ask Amina. Ask her what interest she is paying. Thirty-three per cent.'

'Razia!'

'You look a little scandalized. I don't make scandal. I just report what I see. It's not me who is going to hell on the day we are judged.'

'If she repents, God will forgive her.'

'Repent? Mrs Islam?' Razia dived in her bag and came up with a handkerchief. She pinched it between thumb and forefinger and waved it with her little finger cocked in the air. 'When I was a girl, no one dared to offer such insults! The best family in all of Tangail, do you not know that everyone bows before us?'

Nazneen could not speak. She stared at her friend.

Razia's gaze slid around the room. Then she became brisk. 'Amina could not make the last payment. If she doesn't come up with it next time, plus extra interest as punishment, the sons will break her arm. What kind of penance will God accept for this?'

'Who knows about it?'

Razia shrugged her large shoulders. 'Some people. Perhaps many people. They are all hypocrites. That is the thing about our community. All
sinking, sinking, drinking water.'

At the English words, the teenager – as flaccid in his chair as a virgin balloon – raised himself up a little and wasted a half-glance on Razia.

'You hear all sorts of things about the sons,' Razia said. 'But for all I know, those things are just rumour.'

The boy rolled his head on the pimpled stalk of his neck and settled back. His mother looked at him as though this were the final straw and began to cry into the back of her hand.

'Time for me to go,' said Razia. 'Some things to do before I collect the children.'

'Kiss them for me. Give my salaam to the estate.'

'OK. I do it'

'Your English is getting good. Say hello to the tattoo lady from me.'

'Thank you.
But the tattoo lady is gone.'

This was barely credible, even following the hard-to-swallow news of Mrs Islam, which should have made anything seem possible.

'Gone to an institution,' said Razia. She tapped at her temple. 'At the end she was sitting in her own . . . you know.'

'Oh,' said Nazneen.

'Someone should have got to her sooner. Always sitting there in the window, like a painted statue. Did no one see?'

Chanu had brought her tasbee. She held the beads and passed them. Subhanallah, she said under her breath. Subhanallah. Subhanallah. Subhanallah. When she passed the thirty-third, her fingers loitered on the big dividing bead. She breathed deeply and ploughed on. Alhamdu lillah. Thanks be to God. Yes, she thought. But would He not wish me to return to my son now? Her fingers raced through to the ninety-ninth.

There had been no chance to make her prayers in the usual way. She had offered up her personal, private pleas. Now she was giving thanks. It was God alone who saved the baby. It was His work, His power, not her own. Her own will, though it swelled like the Jamuna and flowed like a burst dam, was nothing as to His. She began the cycle again, pressing the mild wooden balls fiercely. Subhanallah. Glory to God. Alhamdu lillah. Thanks be to God. Allahu Akbar. God is great. She dropped the beads and they rolled beneath a radiator, out of reach.

With a long-handled dish cleaner, borrowed from the kitchen area, she poked the tasbee out and dusted it off. Perhaps it would be better if Chanu took it home, where it would be safe. Anyway, all the repetition made her feel drugged when she needed to be alert. It would be better if he took the beads home again.

From now on when she prayed it would be in a different, better way. She realized with some amazement that, while she had knelt, while she had prostrated herself and recited the words, she had never fully engaged in them. In prayer she sought to stupefy herself like a drunk with a bottle, like a fly against a lantern. This was not the correct way to pray. It was not the correct way to read the suras. It was not the correct way to live.

She had wanted to make a barren space inside. To stop the discontents, the bellyaches, the intemperate demands from breeding. To stop them setting up home. It was like curing a case of tapeworm by starvation. Entirely possible, and unavoidably lethal.

On the eighth day, out in the corridor, she made her silent classifications. Patient. Parent. Distant relative. Friend. Doctor. Nurse. Orderly. The adult patients were easy. They were the ones in slippers and slip-on, ill-fitting smiles. They smiled to show there was nothing to worry about, that they themselves were not worried, and that they were enjoying this healthful, restorative circuit-walk of the sick lanes. Passing down the corridors of the children's wards they smiled especially hard to signal their knowledge of just how lucky they were. The parents were easy too. Every dark imagining had come upon them, and their eyes and lips were pinched by shock. The worst of it – how shallow their imaginations had run. The other relatives and the friends were sometimes difficult to tell apart, except that the relatives trod more lightly while the friends took the burden of clowning, of bringing cheer and huge teddies, small chattering toys. Doctors wore their authority on their white coats and in their urgent, forbidding strides. Stop me now, and you put a life at risk. The nurses doled out nods and brief, encouraging smiles that ignited in the parents a look of expectancy, as if they had remembered something to say; on the tip of their tongue and gone again. Orderlies were a variegated bunch. They scowled and slouched along, they bustled like the doctors, they sang a fantastic kind of anti-music, howling out fragments and lapsing abruptly into silence.

Raqib's room was being cleaned. She waited outside and watched out for Chanu. Chanu had been to work this morning. The first time in over a week. Here he was. Scuttling along, turning at a right angle to pass a trolley and moving sideways like a big, soft-shelled crab. He came next to her and leaned on the radiator. If there was a solid surface in sight, Chanu would rest against it. Mental toil, he said. That is the real exercise. No harder work than mental toil.