Brick Lane (69 page)

Chanu exhaled and took a deep breath, as if he could smell the wet paddy where he sat with his turrets of books. 'The simple life, you see. That's what we have lost.' He grew brisk. 'And will gain again. After we have the Dhaka house sorted out, we will build a place in the village. Nothing like your mansions that these Sylhetis are building, just a little simple house. Something rustic.'

Nazneen was sitting at the table. She often sat now and it seemed that the less time she spent doing things, the less there was to do. Sometimes she would sit down with a thought in her mind – the fridge needs cleaning, for instance – and find that half an hour, an hour or more had passed and it was still as if that thought had just come into her head.

'Of course, I don't mind the Classical Music Committee,' conceded Chanu. 'But I will argue – and I have taken a short course in debating – that the Bauls are also part of our classical heritage, although of course it is folk music that they sing. I would even consider offering my own humble voice as an instrument.' Here he began to tune up:

'The mirror of the sky
Reflects my soul.
O Baul of the road, O Baul, my heart, What keeps you tied To the corner of a room?

'As the storm rampages
In your crumbling hut, The water rises to your bed.
Your tattered quilt Floats on the flood Your shelter is down.

'O Baul of the road, O Baul, my heart, What keeps you tied To the corner of a room?'

During the rendition, Chanu had closed his eyes. The girls got to their feet, stealthy as cats, but they did not go. Something in the song kept them. When he had finished, Chanu's eyes remained closed, prolonging his dream. Still they did not go. Nazneen thought, we are all tied to our corners of the room. This thought stayed at her breast like a sucking baby for the rest of the day.

August 2001
Betty have picture in newspaper for HIV Innocents. This has cause of grief for Lovely. Same page also have picture of Shafin Ahmed. Do you know? Is top celebrity of Rock Band name Miles. Lovely say Betty think she getting too famous now. She confide me also Betty husband have never stop her from get the modelling job but beauty standard in Chittagong not so high as rest country and Betty have never got any job whatsoever.

She say 'What can I do? All best Charity is taken.'

She walk around toss the head make you think many camera point on her. Then she get idea. 'I must start own Charity.' She suck on fingers and think for while. She say 'As a mother I think would be best to start children Charity.'

Betty is not yet mother. Lovely tell me she will start Charity for stopping the child worker. Which ones you will stop I asking to her. Oh she say all of them. The maid next door? I asking her this. She look surprise. But really she like daughter to them. The boys on roof who is now mend gutters sweep leaves? She look bit cross. That different she say. Which are the ones? The boy who come round sell butter? Lovely say are you washing that floor or not?

Something have bother Lovely too much. Instead lie down look magazine she walking around and around. Zaid say just keep her out of my kitchen. But she wander around everywhere. One day I helping her with dressing and she look in mirror and big big sighs come. 'I wish I wasnt beautiful. I wish I didnt have all this beauty and nothing to be done with it. I wish I was plain like you.'

Driver blowing horn and she go out take children for visit. When she gone I wander round house like her. Then go in guest room pull sheet down. Instead go out again I get inside the bed. This is such bed! Sheets all white cotton smooth and crispy. White lace on pillows. Many many pillows. Mattress hold me like lover. Few seconds I feel sleep will come but when close the eyes so many things I remember so long kept from mind.

I get up go in master bedroom. Sit at her table and present the face in mirror. It look like a stranger face to me. I take brush. Brush the hair. Take cream. Cream the cheek. Take kohl. Dark the eyes. Take earring. Dress the ear. Then I feel is someone watching. Zaid have creep up but he stay quiet this time. He look at me and I know this look.

Sister what shall I say? It as the poet did write.

My heart is not to my hearts liking.

I wish I knew

How to unite the two.

Some days she was so tired that she went back to bed, and the days were short and the nights were long. 'She is convalescing,' said Chanu on those days. Other days she was filled with a kind of brittle strength and spilled caustic words on her children and husband. 'She mustn't overdo it,' said Chanu on these days.

'I'm going to run away,' moaned Shahana. 'If he tries to get me on an aeroplane, I'll bite his hand and run.'

'Better wear your training shoes, then,' said Nazneen. And to Bibi, slack-jawed and watching, she said, 'Your grandmother was also a saint.'

When the girls were back at school, Karim came in the afternoon. His beard was thick. 'My husband will be back soon,' she told him. When he had gone, she lay for hours on the soiled sheets, smelling him. When you have fallen low, she told herself, what hurts is pretending you are high. She rolled herself up in the sheets and when the girls came back from school that was how they found her.

Chanu bought her an ivory comb. He bought a length of lilac silk with silver threads in the border pattern. She told him to take it back. He found a romantic Bengali novel and read to her in bed, and kept his interjections to a bare minimum of three or four per page. She told him to go back to his own books. One evening, he scanned the newspaper and discovered that there was ice skating on the other channel. 'Your mother is a fan,' he explained to Shahana. 'When she was younger, she thought of taking it up herself.' The girls knew he was joking, but they didn't dare to laugh. They made room on the sofa, and patted the cushion where she should sit. Nazneen looked at the couple on the television screen, the false smiles, the made-up faces, the demented illusion of freedom chasing around their enclosure. Turn it off, she said.

Mrs Islam came, billowing Ralgex Heat Spray and self-pity. 'Take it,' said Nazneen, stuffing ten-pound notes into her hand. 'Take everything. The righteous get their rewards.' But she shrank a little under the hard black eyes.

She began to spend time at the window, as she had in those first few months in London, when it was still possible to look out across the dead grass and concrete and see nothing but jade-green fields, unable to imagine that the years would rub them away. Now she saw only the flats, piles of people loaded one on top of the other, a vast dump of people rotting away under a mean strip of sky, too small to reflect all those souls. She lowered the net curtain and watched the groups of boys who drove endlessly around the estate, even on the parts where cars were not supposed to go. There were faces she did not recognize. They got out of their cars and approached other cars. They formed in fours and fives and got back in their cars. They carried an air of violence with them, like a sort of breeding, good or bad, without ever displaying it. Sometimes she saw Tariq. He walked with his head down, and he did not get in the cars.

Razia came round and sat with her. 'He says I should be grateful. He didn't take my bride's gold.'

'Did he go to the doctor yet?'

Razia clamped her legs together and stiffened her back. She spoke in a whisper. 'If the boy does not
want
to give up the drugs, that is his choice.' It was a poor imitation. She lit up a cigarette and two smoke ropes hung from her nostrils. 'The doctor has the English disease,' she said. 'If I have to lock him in his room then that is what I will do.'

She smoked intensively, barely releasing the cigarette from her lip between drags. 'I saw the boy – the middleman. He was coming down the stairwell.'

A familiar heat began to kindle at the back of Nazneen's neck. It crept up around to her cheeks and flushed down her spine. 'Yes,' she said, 'he was here.' And she tingled with shame, a kind of pins-and-needles of the soul, roused again after a crooked sleep.

Feeling returned to her slowly, like blood beginning to circulate. Anxiety, which had been unable to bite through the blanket of her depression, began to maul and chew. An eternity in hell, she told herself. That is already done. She drew no comfort. Is there not a life to get through first? She thought she had been sharp with the children, and fussed over them until even Bibi pulled away. Chanu's corns had flourished. She sliced and scraped. His toenails had begun to curl over the ends of his toes. She clipped them. Chanu said, 'She is feeling better,' and presented his nasal hair for grooming.

She realized that the little bit of money she had put aside to send to Hasina had been used up for the payments to Mrs Islam. She returned to her sewing and worked until her eyes swam. Chanu had said he would make a plan for Hasina, but had never mentioned her again. Hasina had gone the way of all his plans. Nazneen bent to her work, all her concentration for that moment pulled into a buttonhole.

Chanu slammed through the door as if he would take it off its hinges. This man, who would not sit if he could lie, would not stand if he could lean, moved faster than Nazneen had ever before witnessed.

'Quick. Be quick!' he shouts. 'Put on the television.'