Afzal’s face took on a serious expression and he lit a cigar. Blowing smoke rings, he said, “Something terrible happened a few days ago.”
“What?”
“Sebati came into my room in the middle of the night dressed only in a negligee. Then she took it off and lay down beside me, completely naked.”
“What are you saying?” I sat upright.
“‘Why are you here, Boudi,’ is what I said. And she said, ‘I’ve come to the end of my tether.’”
“Why do you think she said that?”
“I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to. I scolded her and sent her back to her bed. I can’t stay here anymore. Anwar would commit suicide if he found out.” Afzal was looking at me with those irresistible, wanton eyes.
“Why did Sebati come to you? You must have done something to encourage her!” I got dressed quickly and ran upstairs.
My breast bore the marks of Afzal’s love bites, and try as I could, I couldn’t prevent Haroon from noticing them. Throwing my sari aside, he rubbed his face against the marks.
“What’s all this?”
“What do you mean?”
“All these red patches on your breasts.”
“Love bites, I guess,” I said, laughing loudly to take cover in sarcasm. Haroon laughed too. “No hope of that really!” I added. “It must have happened in my dreams when an old lover came and kissed me.”
Haroon brushed his lips against the scratches. “Don’t eat prawns for a while,” he said. “They cause allergies.”
I kept away from Sebati’s place, and for Haroon I had stomach cramps, shoulder pains, or migraines.
14
I
t took only a month. Finally there were symptoms of a child. My period didn’t come, and then my head was reeling and the vomiting commenced. This time I didn’t have to complain to Haroon about my nausea. When he noticed the signs, he knew immediately what had happened, and from then on was forever embracing me, trembling with excitement, which, of course, was terribly uncomfortable.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said one morning. “Why are you hanging on to me like this?”
“You’re pregnant, you know.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I protested disingenuously. “I must have eaten something.”
“Have you menstruated this month?”
“I don’t keep track of those things.”
“You are such a baby! Don’t you know how to count?” He was smiling, delight in his eyes.
I am just as calculating as you are, Haroon, I thought to myself. He was deeply in love with me again, holding me snug in the warmth of his ardor, forgetting, as he had before
we were married, any obligation to family or business. I couldn’t believe it. He exuded contentment, comfort, and happiness, but I could barely keep tears of grief from welling up in my eyes as I remembered his outrageous demand that we destroy our first child and the wasted months I’d been virtually imprisoned, a captive to his jealousy, separated from my family and friends. I had told myself that I loved him, but now, knowing I was pregnant, all my doubts returned. How could I forgive him? How had I been able to submit to his insults? And how could he be so unaware as to presume I might not exact revenge for the treatment I’d suffered at his hands?
He was utterly impervious to the fact that he had violated me. He had shattered my dreams and destroyed my belief in love, which was my only excuse for marrying into a situation in which all that my life and education had prepared me for was wasted! Instead of taking a job in a physics lab, I took care of my in-laws. I had dreamed of a happy married life that would not deprive me of individual freedom, that respected differences, allowed contradiction—a venture built on trust, sympathy, honesty, and compassion. How naïve I had been! How blinded by desire! How stupid not to have asked ahead of time what Haroon’s dream of marriage was! Yet even in the midst of these thoughts, I was feeling a little bit sorry for him.
This time morning sickness brought a sense of triumph. Now, at last, I had achieved a modicum of power in my marriage. Because of my pregnancy, I was no longer the object of Haroon’s anger and spite, and I had become pregnant on my own terms.
Haroon lost no time in sending a sample of my urine to the obstetrician, and two days later he arrived home with a huge bouquet of flowers. As he swirled me around the room, my thoughts were elsewhere. I remembered the misery of my first pregnancy, the days I had longed to be carried aloft in his arms. I watched his joy now. It could not be contained. He pranced and shouted, making such a ruckus that Amma rushed into our room to see what all the fuss was about. When Haroon gave her the news she touched her head, crying “Glory to Allah,” a big smile spreading across her face.
“Lets have some pilaf and meat, Amma!” Haroon said, and my mother-in-law, no aching body now, raced immediately to the kitchen to make her special pilaf and curry, and, to judge from the fragrance that wafted from the direction of the kitchen, a cornucopia of other dishes. The next morning Haroon sent a message to the office that he wouldn’t be in. “I cannot put my mind to a thing,” he laughed, and dispatched Habib to the market for more flowers, to Allauddin’s shop for a cake and masses of pastry, and then astonished everyone by kissing me in public. Suddenly everyone’s gaze was upon me. By tea time, flowers filled our bedroom, and all afternoon relatives arrived in hordes to eat from a groaning board of sweets.
There was chatter to the effect that one shouldn’t celebrate with sweets until after the child is born, but Haroon would not be constrained. He sent sweets to his office, to my parents, even to Nupur on Green Road. He fussed over me with one hand and with the other called friends and business associates with the news. Auntie Kumud rushed over.
“Haroon is really carrying things too far! Let the child be born first! What if she miscarries?”
In the middle of it all, Dolon arrived, but without Anis. He was busy at home, she said; he had rented a new office and his business was flourishing, so he couldn’t be absent from work. Dolon was not here for the celebration of my pregnancy, but rather for Hasan, whose health still concerned her. But she would leave in a week—Anis had asked her to come back by then. “One mustn’t stay away from home,” she said.
“Indeed not,” I replied.
“Anis is so clever, Jhumur
bhabi
. He couldn’t run this business if he weren’t! I have always said that no one can compare with him once he gets down to work!”
“So fortune is again smiling on you, Dolon.”
“What are you saying? You must know how hard it is to be away from one’s in-laws.”
“I do,” I said, but I could not forget what Ranu had told me about how Dolon’s in-laws couldn’t bear the sight of her.
Haroon put on a recording of Tagore, set to music, and then, suddenly, Kanika Mukhapdhya singing
My heart ’s desire has been fulfilled
. . . was blasting and he was holding me and kissing me all over. To please him, I lifted my voice in that ridiculous song.
“Ask your friend Sebati to dine tonight,” he said.
“Why only Sebati? What about her husband?”
Haroon wanted Sebati to advise on my condition, but he invited both. I’d never before sat down to dine with Haroon, believe it or not. As tradition held, I’d wait for the men to
finish before I ate. Now I would be sitting at the table, not only with Haroon but with another man! As we ate Amma’s cooking and gossiped about Sebati’s patients and Anwar’s work, Haroon broke in with the news of my pregnancy. Sebati jumped from her chair. “Why have you hidden this from me?”
Haroon answered with a big smile. “We’ve only just had confirmation!—we’re celebrating!”
“Do you want a boy or a girl?” Sebati asked him.
“I want a healthy child,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or a girl.” Amma was serving us lamb curry.
“We’ll accept whichever Allah gives us,” she said. Sebati smiled.
“Does anyone want to know why at times X comes to match X and not Y? Probably no one. You know,” she continued, “when I was little we played a game. Two girls would stand, hands joined above their heads, and recite a poem while twenty other girls filed past. The last stanza of the poem was. ‘Here I bestow a pearl necklace on you,’ and the girl who reached you at the end of the stanza would become your special friend, only because she’d filed by at just that moment. Whether your baby is a boy or a girl is just like that!”
Suddenly I felt sick and left the meat aside to have some fish. “Why are you eating fish when you are allergic?” Haroon asked, then turned to Anwar, “You had a brother, didn’t you?” he asked.
“I still do,” Anwar said. “He’s not able to stay here though, so I’m sending him off to Australia to live with my sister. He’s a good painter, and maybe he can make a name
for himself there.” My eyes met Sebati’s as she quickly looked down and gulped a glass of water. It was strange that Sebati should feel so disconcerted at the mention of Afzal’s name when it was I who should be brokenhearted.
I wondered what Afzal would think if he knew I was with child. Of course he would learn about it sooner or later, but what if he knew I was pregnant with his child? I comforted myself that he’d never know. Then my demons began. What if Afzal wrote an anonymous letter to Haroon telling him he’d had an affair with me? I swallowed some water, but fear stuck in my throat.
Afzal was an accomplished lover I told myself, and he was passionate, truly present. Only a man indifferent to love would write such a letter, would think to cause such havoc. Afzal had roused me from sadness and despair, he had kissed every inch of my skin, had held me, trembling, after every sexual act. I didn’t know if that was love, but I was convinced that no matter how he felt, he would not want to ruin a woman he had held in his arms that way, whose image he had captured on canvas. Perhaps one day Afzal would fall in love with a blue-eyed blonde, and she, gazing at portraits of me, would question him, and he would say, “She was the upstairs daughter-in-law. I told her many times not to come and visit the downstairs youth . . . ”
“And then?” the blue-eyed beauty would ask.
And Afzal would answer that the upstairs
bou
had long ago left home and met up with a youth who had stripped her naked . . .
“Where is she now?” the blonde would inquire.
“In a land across seven seas and thirteen rivers.”
And I would remain forever alive in the landscape of his imagination, even though he might not remember my name, might even mistake another woman for me. I asked myself whether I regretted losing him, and came to the conclusion that I did not. Instead, I was glad that I would, perhaps, never see him again, except in my dreams. He had wanted me to run away with him. I could be nothing but relieved that he was going to Australia, I realized. Had I divorced and married him, he would not have made things easy for me. After all, what man could trust a woman who had come to him while still married to another man?
After dinner, Haroon took Anwar into the sitting room for an old-fashioned male conversation about politics and finance. Each taking
pahn
from Amma’s betel box, Sebati and I went up to the bedroom. Chewing on the aromatic nut, we stretched out on the bed and talked about my coming child.
“You’ve won,” Sebati exclaimed.
“And my reward from you?”
“Whatever you wish,” she said, her eyes shining.
“That I never, ever, lose your friendship.”
“Never, Jhumur. You will never lose me.” And then she began to speak as a doctor, advising me not to sleep with Haroon during the first three months of pregnancy.
“Wonderful! But of course,” I said laughing, “I may sleep with another man!”
“Absolutely!” she giggled. “I can say with considerable conviction that there is no harm in that!” And we both roared with laughter.
When we had calmed down, I took her hand.
“Tell me, is your brother-in-law really going away?”
Sebati sighed.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t want him to stay on with us.It has become quite intolerable.”
She lowered her voice. “You know that I sleep in another room these days. One night I was awakened by a sound, and there was Afzal at the foot of my bed without a shred of clothing. He lay down and began to pull at my sari. What more do I have to tell you? He wanted to sleep with me. I scolded him and sent him away.” Sebati was shaking all over.
“But didn’t you yourself tell me that you were very attracted to him?”
“Fantasizing and acting are not the same thing,” she said.
“In any case, I said all that because I was frustrated and angry at Anwar, but don’t forget, I am, after all, Afzal’s sister-in-law. And Anwar simply adores his little brother and would do anything for him. He’s arranging this trip to Australia for him! Do you think that Afzal could possibly work that out on his own?”
Sebati’s revelation left me at a loss for words. She went on. “I don’t want him to stay. I really don’t.” I could see tears in her eyes. “Anwar has no idea and he’d become murderous if he knew. Anwar and I—we rely on each other. We are close friends even though we don’t have sex. I treasure my relationship with him, and I wouldn’t want to damage it in any way.”
I had no idea which story, Afzal’s or Sebati’s, was the truth. I could not listen any longer and changed the subject.
“What should I take for morning sickness?“ I asked her,
and she said she would bring me a pill that wouldn’t harm the fetus, and also some iron tablets.
That night, in Haroon’s arms, I thought about Sebati’s situation. I felt such compassion for her. Then, in the dark, I stroked my own arm in the way Afzal had and tried to imagine him comforting Sebati, making her happy. How could she have refused him? Or had he refused her?
“Didn’t I tell you not to eat hilsa fish? Your arms get all blotchy and then you scratch them.” Haroon had burst into my reverie.
“Stop worrying,” I said, scratching some more. Haroon placed his fingers gently on Afzal’s love bites, now healing, but still slightly itchy. “A nice person, Anwar is,” he said.