“Yes,” I said. “Just laughing.”
“It’s not wrong to laugh,” he said, “but you mustn’t laugh so loud. You sound like a man!”
Not only did he now disapprove of my laughter, he was at pains to track whatever else I did. Had my head been covered when I stood out on the balcony? He was horrified when I said I couldn’t remember. “What will our neighbors think?” he snapped, sounding for all the world like a mother-in-law. “Have you ever seen women staring from those balconies?” he asked, pointing to the apartment building across the courtyard. “A good woman stays indoors,” he said. “The more hidden a
bou
, the better her reputation.”
So, I would not stand again on the family balcony. Truly, until that moment, I’d had no idea that people in Dhanmundi worried about women on balconies. I’d expected as much in Wari, where my parents lived. In that overcrowded old neighborhood, people poked their noses into the affairs of others twenty-four hours a day. But here, in the heart of the city?
It became a mystery to me what had happened to the man who had courted me. One day, soon after Shipra gave birth, I asked to visit her at the clinic. Haroon raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why Shipra?”
“Because she is my friend and she’s just had a child, and I have given the child her name.”
Haroon refused.
“Your life has changed, Jhumar,” he said, with a smile on his face I hardly recognized. “Your new life must bear no traces of the old.”
“What has happened to you?” I asked him. “I barely recognize you.”
“Why can’t you figure it out? You are now Mrs. Haroon Ur Rashid,
bhabi
to Hasan, Habib and Dolon. Your address is Dhanmundi not Wari and you no longer carry your old name. It is not proper for my wife to gallivant the entire day! You are the elder
bou
of the house.”
Bou
indeed, I thought. I remembered the days before we married, the two of us adventuring for days on end and into the night, traveling outside the city. We had walked village pathways and watched the sun drop into the Kansa river, and, sitting on a rocky mount one evening, had watched the stars. I remember Haroon that night. “I want to go through my entire life like this!” he said, his eyes bright, full of love. “I want to talk deeply with you, about the mysteries of existence.” I could hardly believe my good fortune. “I hate the struggle of business, the idea of running a household. Oh Jhumar . . . ” He seemed never to have his fill. “Why has the day gone so suddenly?” he would exclaim. I too wanted to stretch time. How I looked forward to married life, when the days would extend to weeks in a new life together.
But it was as if the wedding wine had transformed my beloved companion. Dreamy Haroon overnight became someone I did not know. “Work is all there is to life,” he
would say, standing in front of the mirror, adjusting his jacket. Suddenly he was a cartoon of the working stiff. “One cannot reach the top of the ladder of success unless one works,” he’d say, smiling cooly, the door closing behind him, leaving me to hours of loneliness. Gone was my stargazing suitor. Now he was tied to a nine-to-five routine. If I suggested he take a day off, it was as if I’d spoken to him in foreign language. “I cannot afford to lose the money. Those days before the wedding have already cost me.”
“Have we no need for each other,” I asked him, “just because we are married?”
“My darling, I can have you whenever I want! I know you’ll be there when I get home.”
Now Rosuni was in my room and, closing the door, she pulled the curtain back. The sun poured down my back. “
Bhabi
, come and have breakfast,” she whispered.
“I’m not well, please go away . . . ”
She drew close and speaking in a hushed voice asked what was wrong. Her quiet tone reminded me of my precarious position. Even a servant did not want to be caught gossiping with a woman who was failing at her duty. Those with more authority were allowed to be indisposed, but the
bou
had to remain forever healthy. How could she be in a sickbed if someone else got a fever? Rosuni couldn’t be seen chitchatting with such a slacker, even if she felt compassion. She had been a
bou
once, constrained to stay in good shape; I could see she understood the drill, her eyes darting toward the door as she made me comfortable, pulling the curtain
closed again so I could rest in the shade. I felt a surge of gratitude—in a sense Rosuni and I, maid and
bou
, were in the same boat. Even though a gulf separated us socially, we did the same work—she cooked and so did I, she tidied up, but so did I. As she moved quietly in the half-darkness, I watched her with something approaching envy. She could remove her head scarf whenever she pleased; I had to keep my head covered whether I liked it or not.
I had barely a second for this reverie before Amma burst into the room. Why was Rosuni gossiping with me, shirking her work? “But Madam,” Rosuni said quietly, “Hasan is asleep, Habib is out of the house and Ranu is knitting a blanket.” She had come to persuade Miss Jhumar to eat. Amma felt my forehead and declared I did not have a fever; Rosuni quickly covered her head and made for the door.
It was past ten o’clock and I was still in bed, but Amma had no sympathy for how I felt. It annoyed her that I wasn’t in the kitchen, if not cooking then at least supervising the afternoon meal. Slowly I got up. “I may not have a fever, Amma, but I have a headache and I’m sick to my stomach.”
“Headache!” She suffered from it often. “Dousing your head with cold water will banish it soon enough!” she exclaimed. She felt nothing for me I was sure, but I took her advice, making my way to the bathroom to splash some water on my face and neck. I knew she was concerned about Dolon, Haroon’s younger sister, whose husband had lost his tobacco company job and was sitting at home. If only Haroon could spare some money and set his brother-in-law up in business, then Dolon could have some peace.
And she was always worried about her other two sons. Hasan, the older one, had dropped out after high school, and Habib had completed his university matriculation only for appearance’s sake. Hasan, now living at home, content to eat whatever was set before him, never worried his head over household matters, but a few weeks ago he had appalled us all, producing a thirteen-year-old girl in a red sari whom he proclaimed his wife! The girl, Ranu, was weeping, wiping her tears with a white handkerchief, the red from her lips running down her chin. Who was she? We all wanted to know. And where had Hasan found her? Was she a gentleman’s daughter he had kidnapped, or a novice hooker from the red light district?
Haroon and his father attacked Hasan the second he brought the girl into the parlor, setting upon him with their fists, pushing him to the floor. The young girl herself began to howl in fear and horror at the bloody mess her husband had become. What had happened? Words soon tumbled out through a deluge of tears. She had left her military father’s house to come away with Hasan, who’d kept her hidden for six months. And then she howled some more. “We are leaving the country,” Hasan blubbered, welts and bruises rising on his cheeks, blood dribbling from his nose. “I cannot live here.”
Habib was quite the opposite. He had no aspiration to travel. He relished the idea of living in one’s own country and carrying on like a lord. Nor did he show any sign of falling in love or preparing to marry. Such traditions, he declared often, were futile in the extreme and bothersome. Strutting through the house, he sang with abandon,
strumming the guitar that hung from his neck. He was in love with music, he proclaimed. “Life is short,” he’d say in response to any criticism. “One may as well sing or dance!” And sing he did, no matter how his parents worried.
But now Amma seemed more disturbed about the destiny of her only daughter’s hapless husband Anis, whose problems she confided in me because she thought I might broach the subject to my husband. But Haroon knew only too well the misfortunes of all his siblings. Night after night, he would sit, lost in thought, smoking one cigarette after another.
“Why do you worry so,” I once asked.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
I had never been successful in convincing Haroon that I was quite capable of coping with the problems that afflicted his family, although I tried reminding him, with added emphasis, that I had been a student of physics. I may cook, but I am better educated than Rosuni, I would say. One night, sensing he would be receptive, I approached Haroon about Anis, and he listened. “Perhaps I could bring him into my firm,” he said. “We’re collaborating with the Koreans, and I need a new man.”
As for Habib and Hasan, I also obediently raised that issue. “It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll send them abroad to earn a living!” But he did not consider me capable of real discussion. There were hours of meetings in the drawing room—he and his parents, brows furrowed, considering the fates of his ne’er-do-well brothers—but I was invited only as the
bou
, gracefully sweeping in and out serving tea and biscuits.
Why, I wondered, had Amma been so eager for my assistance with Dolon’s husband? Did she imagine that Haroon, caught up in his marriage, had no time to spare for his family, that her only access to her oldest son was through his new wife? And why was her most passionate concern for me that I cook when I showed all the signs of being pregnant with her grandchild? Yes, there was the custom of the
bou
of the house preparing certain foods, but wasn’t it also the custom that the daughter-in-law reproduce?
I pulled myself from bed and entered the kitchen. Garlic, onion, raw fish, and turmeric, smells I’d always loved, suddenly intensifying my nausea. Rosuni had already cut up the fish and onion and measured out the garlic, and Sakhina, the second maid, was grinding the spices into a paste. I steadied myself and set about placing the pan on the fire, throwing in the onions and garlic, turning the chillies and spices. Why, I asked myself, does this family pant for my cooking when in a sane world I could barely qualify as Rosuni’s assistant? Was it because my hands were fairer than hers? Because I had gold bracelets while Rosuni wore bangles of glass? Or was it that my knowledge of the great formulas of physics gave me a gift for refining the flavors of Bengali cuisine?
When he got back from work that day, Haroon behaved as if he had no memory of my morning agony. Sitting down for supper, he chattered on about his new Korean colleague, how the gentleman could not speak English, and had conversed with Haroon for an hour in his own language, which Haroon, of course, could not speak and for which he had
no respect. He’d arrange for a translator, he said, and then sat down in front of the television to watch Mumazzudin Ahmad, who had cast himself in the role of an absentminded teacher. Haroon laughed and laughed. I would have laughed too, but my head was throbbing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My stomach again.”
“Of course,” he said, barely looking up. “You must go and lie down if you feel unsteady.”
When he came to bed, I was still awake, and soon he was loosening my sari. I sighed deeply as he began to make love to me. How could a man who was so indifferent to his wife’s discomfort be such a sensitive lover? Afterward, Haroon lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings as he always had, as he had in the early days of our marriage when our love was still new. “You see, I’m no longer tired,” he said, his entire frame loosened and calm. But I was hardly calm and I’d had no pleasure in spite of the precision of his touch. Haroon had simply used my body to relieve his fatigue.
When I returned from the bathroom, Haroon had stopped smoking. He was lying with his back turned. I lay down beside him. Perhaps now he would listen to me, but when I moved closer to him, the sound of his snoring greeted my ears.
2
A
s Haroon brushed his teeth, I vomited. To my surprise he reached for me, and steadying me from behind, gave me some water to drink. Such comfort, I thought, closing my eyes and letting my head rest against his shoulder. Quickly he helped me to our bed, and as soon as I lay down, fetched a couple of Pepto-Bismol tablets. “Here,” he said, jabbing them at me. “Swallow them now.”
“Will I stop vomiting?”
“Of course.” And then he went into the bathroom, only to return minutes later, wrapped in a towel. I watched as he dressed, knotted his tie and touched cologne to his neck.
“I’m not feeling better,” I said. “I feel strange.”
“How?” Now he was slipping into his shoes.
“I’m pregnant.”
At first he didn’t answer and then he said, “What rot!” and turned toward the door. In a second he was gone and I was alone with the burning sensation in my stomach, making trips into the bathroom where only moments ago he had showered. How had the charming boy I’d met at the academy musicale become such a cruel insensitive man? How could an
accomplished and intelligent man of twenty-two deny that morning nausea was a sign of pregnancy? I remembered our first phone call barely two years before.
“Remember me?” a young man’s voice had asked.
“Not really,” I replied.
“We talked once in the park . . . ”
“Possible, I guess,” I answered. “I’ve talked to so many men, I can’t remember them all. What’s your name?” I admit I was harsh, but I’d often been harassed by strange phone calls—we all were, my friends and I, in those days.
“What’s the point of giving you my name?” he said. “There are scores of Haroons in the world. You must know at least ten!”
I tried to recall him, but I could think of only one Haroon, a distant cousin. This Haroon would not get off the phone, even after I insisted I knew no one by that name.
And then, suddenly, I recalled a man I’d seen, lurking at the periphery of the terrace as my friends and I chatted before a concert. I remembered his wonderfully evocative voice—he’d made an excuse to say hello. With his crisp, starched panjabi and pyjama, he didn’t look at all like one of those boys who walked about, rumpled and careless, with the gaze of a poet, a sling bag over his shoulder. Rather, he looked like someone sent from the Ministry of Culture to report back about the quality of the concert. I remembered that Arzu had persuaded me to sing, and when I took up the song, I’d seen the man take note. Soon he barged into our midst and demanded I sing more, encouraging Arzu, Subhash, Chandana, and Nadira to join in.