Brick Lane (33 page)

Her voice gave no hint of joy or of thrill. It plodded nervously along, afraid that a sudden burst of intonation would derail the train of recall.

Chanu ceased his kneading. 'Ah,' he said loudly, and looked around the room. 'What thrill!'

Bibi twisted her head to look behind, and then looked at her father. His invisible audience was, for her, a perplexing yet palpable reality. She felt the presence though she could not see it as he did.

'Try it again,' he urged. He moved his attention to his left foot, probing a new bunion with tender fingers.

'Ah. What. Thrill.' Bibi joined her plaits beneath her chin as if to stop her mouth from opening again. She waited for clearance.

Chanu inclined his head to the side and remained philosophical. 'Can't expect the amra tree to bear mangoes.'

Now she raced:

'In autumn, oh mother mine
In the full-blossomed paddy fields, I have seen spread all over – sweet smiles!
Ah, what a beauty, what shades, what an affection And what a tenderness.'

There she halted, before a sudden precipice of uncertainty. Chanu looked at Shahana. She had her arms folded across her chest and her top lip tucked into the bottom lip. Nazneen moved about the room inventing chores and making brisk, everyday noises. From the dangerous set of her daughter's mouth, Nazneen divined a flogging ahead.

Terrible in the incantation and stunningly inept in the delivery, these beatings were becoming a frequent ritual. They took their toll on each member of the family but most of all on Chanu. It was inevitably Shahana who incited his anger and it was Shahana who appeared to suffer least.

'Tell the little memsahib that I am going to break every bone in her body.' Chanu never addressed his threats directly to his elder daughter. Nazneen was the preferred intermediary or, if a new and particularly lurid threat had been invented, Bibi would be chosen. 'I'll dip her head in boiling fat and throw her out of that window. Go and tell the memsahib. Go and tell your sister.' Bibi could be relied upon to convey the message word for ringing word, even though Shahana was rarely more than a couple of feet away. In this way she proved to be a more reliable stooge than her mother, who only murmured low soothings and tried to move the girls out of range.

Shahana did not want to listen to Bengali classical music. Her written Bengali was shocking. She wanted to wear jeans. She hated her kameez and spoiled her entire wardrobe by pouring paint on them. If she could choose between baked beans and dal it was no contest. When Bangladesh was mentioned she pulled a face. She did not know and would not learn that Tagore was more than poet and Nobel laureate, and no less than the true father of her nation. Shahana did not care. Shahana did not want to go back home.

Chanu called her the little memsahib and wore himself out with threats before launching a flogging with anything to hand. Newspaper, a ruler, a notebook, a threadbare slipper and once, disastrously, a banana skin. He never learned to select his instrument and he never thought to use his hand. An instrumentless flogging was a lapse of fatherly duty. He flogged enthusiastically but without talent. His energy went into the niyyah – the making of his intention – and here he was advanced and skilful, but the delivery let him down. Busy still with his epithets of torture, he flailed about as Shahana ran and dodged and dived beneath furniture or behind her mother's legs. And Bibi hugged herself and was covered in pain, and a hand reached inside Nazneen's stomach and began to pull entrails up her throat, and Chanu stopped shouting and stopped flailing and began a twitching that ran from his eyebrows to his fingers, and Shahana took on his temper and yelled the ending, which everyone already knew.

'I didn't ask to be born here.'

'Your sister will continue,' said Chanu, addressing himself to Bibi. Bibi opened her mouth, as if to show that she was on standby.

Shahana disentangled her lips, rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and recited in an even tone:

'What a quilt you have spread at the feet of Banyan trees and along the banks of rivers! Oh mother mine, words from your lips are like Nectar to my ears! If sadness, oh mother mine, cast a gloom on your face, My eyes well up with tears . . .'

Chanu closed his eyes as they spilled over. His stomach rolled a little further forward into its nest of thigh. He began to hum and took up the verse in song. The children looked at Nazneen and she agreed by a slow blink that it was finished. She spread wide her arms and herded them away to their room.

In the late evening, to the sound of the walls that buzzed their eternal prayer of pipes and water and electricity, Nazneen clipped hair from her husband's nose. The quiet made Nazneen alert. All day and into the evening she was aware of the life around, like a dim light left on in the corner of the room. They used to disturb her, these activities, sealed and boxed and unnerving. When she had come she had learned first about loneliness, then about privacy, and finally she learned a new kind of community. The wife upstairs who used the lavatory in the night. She and Nazneen had exchanged only pleasantries but Nazneen knew her by her bladder. The milkman's alarm clock that told Nazneen the gruelling hours her neighbour must keep. The woman on the other side whose bed thumped the wall when her boyfriends called. These were her unknown intimates.

Somewhere above, a man's muffled laugh slid into coughing and the coughing became muted by footsteps. From behind the wardrobe, a television hooted and applauded. Nazneen relaxed. She snipped a fat hair from the left nostril and watched it land on the sprigs of Chanu's chest.

'Finished,' she said. She knelt on the floor at the end of the bed and began on his corns.

'You see,' said Chanu, 'she is only a child.' His voice was grave. It was the voice a doctor might use to deliver bad news.

Nazneen sliced the waxy skin. Shahana was only half-child now. Or rather she was sometimes all child, and sometimes something else. The most startling thing possible: another person.

'She is only a child, and already the rot is beginning. That is why we must go.'

Nazneen worked around the corn. There was a time when it disgusted her, this flaking and scraping, but now it was nothing. Time was all it took. She looked up and saw the photograph of Raqib on the bedside table. The glass needed dusting.

'Planning and preparation,' said Chanu. 'The girls must be made ready. Fortunate for them that I am at home.' His mouth, pulling in different directions, looked sceptical. He picked up his book and lay back on the bed.

Nazneen gathered her parings. If they went to Dhaka she could be with Hasina. Every nerve-ending strained towards it as if the sheer physical desire could transport her. But the children would be unhappy. Bibi, perhaps, would recover quickly. Shahana would never forgive her.

In the picture Raqib looked a bit like Chanu. Or maybe all babies, fat-cheeked, looked a bit like Chanu.

They would go. Or they would stay. Only God would keep them or send them. Nazneen knew her part, had learned it long ago, and rolled the dead skin around in her palm and sat quietly, waiting for the feelings to pass.

When Hasina had been lost and found and lost again and returned to her once more, Nazneen went to her husband.

'My sister. I would like to bring her here.'

Chanu waved his thin arms. 'Bring her. Bring them all. Make a little village here.' He shook his delicate shoulders in a show of laughter. 'Get a box and sow rice. Make a paddy on the windowsill. Everyone will feel at home.'

Nazneen felt the letter inside her choli. 'There has been some difficulty for her. I only have one sister.'

He slapped the side of his head and he appealed to the walls. 'Some difficulty! There has been some difficulty! How can it be allowed? Has anyone here experienced any
difficulty?
Of course not! Anything we can do to stop the
difficulty
must be done. At once.' His voice, though it had become a squeak, lost no measure of volume.

She could not explain. Hasina was still working at the factory. This was all Chanu knew. She hovered for the postman, hid letters, invented bland statements of well-being and minor mishaps. All she could do for her sister was deliver her from further shame and this was all she had done. Nazneen turned away and walked to the door.

'My wife,' he called after her. 'Are you not forgetting something?'

She stopped.

'We
are going
there.
I have decided. And when I decide something, it is done.'

But they did not have money. And money was needed. For tickets, for suitcases, to ship the furniture, to buy a place in Dhaka.