“I’m going to. Haroon cannot wait—”
Pulling closer, she asked, “Do you have sex regularly?”
I blushed and turned my face away. Sebati had no inhibitions. “Are you getting your period on time?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“I get mine regularly too. Lets see who gets pregnant first! Listen,” she said, her eyes glistening, “you must not miss having sex on the thirteenth day, even if you feel like abstaining on other days.” I was still blushing, but Sebati went right on. She told me how Anwar came home to make love to her every afternoon following the tenth day of her cycle. “I rest during the remaining days,” she said, giggling.
Sebati made even my most tedious days more endurable. A group of relatives from Noakhai came for a visit and I was formally introduced—all kinds of uncles and aunts of Haroon’s. I had to keep my head covered, and touch their feet, which were filthy and wet with mud. And then Amma made me stand next to the window so that they could see in the light how fair my skin was. Lifting my head covering, she took my long braid in her hand and boasted of its thickness and sheen. I could see her mimic a sigh of relief as she declared how pleased she was that Haroon had brought
home such a good-looking bride. She could rest in peace, she declared, now that she had such a perfect
bou
to run the household and do all the cooking!
“Bouma”—how deftly she tacked on the suffix that made “
bou
” an endearment!—“Bouma, will you pass the betel nut box!” As Amma chewed the
pahn
, she continued her list of praises. I belonged to a rich and educated family, she said as I passed
pahn
in silence. My father was a great university professor who had a house in Dhaka itself! We, his daughters, had all gone to college.
This speech was nothing new. Amma always praised me to the skies when people from outside the house were present. But when we were alone and I sat pulling gray strands from her thinning hair, she invariably complained that I had come to her house empty-handed. To marry me for love, Haroon had turned down such a rich proposal! The girl would have come with furniture, a new refrigerator, even a color television! And such a lot of gold they had promised—12 grams of it!
“But Amma, why didn’t he marry her?”
“Haroon would marry no one but you. We couldn’t do a thing about it!”
I knew part of what Amma was saying was true, but the rest of it was a lie. Our relationship was a big lie—I certainly could not trust her, but I now had a friend with whom I could be myself. I was so relieved whenever I heard Sebati’s step on the stairs, I would embrace her, even cry, or we would laugh together until tears ran down our cheeks. How I loved to hear her talk of the big outside world! How bracing it was to have a friend who understood my entrapped life when so
many things I had gained from my enlightened family were slipping from my grasp. My mother and father had exhorted their daughters to become educated, to stand on our own two feet. When I was growing up in their house, such ideas seemed to go without saying. What was there to strive for, I’d ask my father. Wasn’t I on my own two feet already?
But now, these few years later, it seemed I was bent over on all fours. I was merely an animal; I had nothing to call my own. I had allowed others to undercut my well-being, and in order to have Haroon’s unsatisfactory love, I had trained myself to be happy only when his family was happy, sad when they were sad.
And so, one day, when everyone was plunged into gloom at the news that one of Haroon’s big deals had fallen through—a loss of one hundred thousand rupees—I too was plunged into despair, taking my place next to Haroon when he came home, pushing a plate of food toward him, and comforting him in a voice full of exquisite sympathy.
Haroon did not respond but sat there glum-faced, barely eating.
I tried again, putting a couple of pieces of tikka on his plate. “How did this happen?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
In the days following, whenever Haroon came home, I could hear Dolon give a soft moan. It made me curious, but no one would fill me in. Amma was now always beside Haroon to console him, Ranu to bring him a cold drink. I was asked to do nothing. “Dolon has lost everything, poor girl,” Amma sobbed one day. “Anis hasn’t sent us any word since he left, so now Haroon must go after him to get back
his money. After all, Dolon is his only sister.” So it was an investment with Anis that Haroon had lost!
Amma was a very devout woman, and though I was well-versed in matters of religion, I was not as disciplined as she was, and now she was insisting that, for Haroon’s sake, I do the
namaz
five times a day. When I protested I didn’t know how, she flew at me. “You don’t know how to read the Koran? How is that possible? What kind of woman are you?”
I looked at Haroon, hoping he would come to my rescue, get me off the hook. But he kept quiet and the next morning sent a messenger from the office with a little booklet of instruction on how to read the Koran. And so I began to perform the
namaz
five times a day.
“Pray to Allah,” Amma directed, “that Haroon will be delivered from this mess.” Good wife that I was, I became adept at praying to Allah for everyone’s well-being and for my husband’s health and wealth.
As for asking of Allah anything for myself, no one taught me how.
9
I
saw him whenever I went out onto the balcony. Long-haired, sad-eyed, he sat in the garden below smoking or lying on the grass gazing up at the sky. Sometimes he had a paint brush in his hand and a canvas in front of him, sometimes not. Who was this beautiful man? I couldn’t stop staring, and it seemed that whenever I was drawn to the balcony, which was soon every evening, he was drawn outdoors. Once it happened that our eyes met, and after that, we stared every evening. No matter how often Amma or Dolon called for me, I remained outside on the balcony, their voices hardly penetrating, so mesmerized was I by the languorous eyes of the man in the garden.
After a few days, I learned he was Sebati’s brother-in-law, her husband Anwar’s younger brother. “Afzal is a painter,” Sebati announced. “He abandoned his studies to go to Bangalore to study art, and now that’s what he does.” I wanted to meet him, and one day managed to ask Amma if I could walk in the garden. She insisted I take Dolon and Somaiya with me.
Calling it a garden was a joke; it was more a swath of earth where Sebati had planted rosebushes and a few marigolds. We walked about, the three of us, staying longer than we intended, but Afzal was nowhere to be found. Why had he chosen this day to disappear? The bolted door of Sebati’s flat made me feel empty. Heaven help me, I thought.
While Dolon chatted on about Anis’s improving business affairs, about finally joining her husband, I daydreamed about those melancholy eyes. “Don’t disturb the flowers, little girl!” It was a man’s voice, Afzal’s voice—Somaiya was on a spree, pulling petals from roses. I could feel his eyes on me, as Dolon picked up her little girl and headed for the house. “So soon?” I said. “Can’t we stay a little longer?”
“It’s nearly evening! Who knows what will happen if we remain in the garden with our hair loose.
Bhabi
, a stranger is staring at you, let’s go . . . it’s not nice.” And so Dolon took the virtuous
bou
back home, unaware that my heart had already been pierced by the stranger’s melancholy eyes.
I don’t know who sets rules for the body or the mind. My husband was the only man with whom I had gone to bed—of course I had been attracted to others, but no one, including Haroon, had given me the kind of thrill I now felt. Had I fallen in love? Or was I, in my state of incarceration, attracted to someone as a promise of freedom? Or was it that, in close quarters for too long, I was claustrophobic and seeking relief in the attentions of a stranger?
My father had always told me to seek solace outside the family only if I was certain I could be totally secure. I wondered what he’d say if he knew the daughter he had raised to be as strong as a man had become merely an educated
housewife, a clinging vine. But my father was no fool—he understood how the world worked, that a docile woman was what society endorsed.
When Dolon and I came into the house, Haroon was there. He produced two letters for me from my old friend Arzu. They were unsealed and I assumed Haroon had read them. I didn’t ask why, and he didn’t consider it necessary to explain. In the world I inhabited, it was normal for a husband to read his wife’s letters, for a husband to decide if a letter was fit for his wife to read. Arzu had sent two copies of his letter, one to Haroon’s office and another to me at home. Not much correspondence had come to me since I’d married—sometimes my parents called me on the telephone, but I never asked after my friends.
The letter had news of the death of Subhash’s younger brother, and Arzu wanted to know how I was, whether I had forgotten my old friends entirely. He didn’t give details of what had happened to Sujit, but he included news about our friends Nadira and Chandana, and how they all missed me when they got together for a movie or lunch. He was still working for his father’s company, he reported, and our beloved Subhash was job hunting. My mother, he wrote, felt sad about me, though he didn’t explain why. “I would love to come visit, but how can I when neither you nor Haroon has invited me!”
I read Arzu’s letter over again to see if it in any way hinted that he and I had been lovers, even though we had never been more than friends. Haroon was standing right next to me, studying me to see, I suppose, if my expression changed, if a smile came to my lips, if my eyes brimmed with tears.
As I read, I kept myself impassive. I could see he was not pleased that my friends missed me or that my mother worried on my account. I folded the letter and put it in a drawer. “You’ve read the letter already,” I said, “haven’t you?”
“What do you care?” Haroon was frowning.
“I don’t care.”
“Then?”
“I’m grateful to have the letter. I wouldn’t have known Sujit had died.”
“And you wouldn’t have known that Arzu was madly missing you!”
That last remark was something to add to the list of things I couldn’t forgive. Haroon had made up his mind that I’d had affairs with Arzu and Subhash, and there was no way I could free his mind of that. And for my part, I was learning that even though my husband’s behavior was governed by irrational beliefs fueled by jealousy, I had to take it seriously.
I was a prisoner in my own house, forbidden to step outside to see friends, and forbidden to seek a job, even though I was more than qualified. If I went out alone, Haroon would certainly accuse me of carrying on with someone else and allege, when I became pregnant again, that I was carrying another man’s child. Under those circumstances, asking permission to wander the city on my own was not worth the cost. I was not willing to risk again submitting my body to the ruthless scraping of an abortionist’s instrument. Would Haroon ever understand how wantonly he’d destroyed the truth and purity of our love? I could expect no such miracle. He was as jealous as Othello: without a shred of evidence I
had been condemned. If I did not abide by the limitations Haroon now placed on me, I might find myself divorced, a condition no thinking woman would enter unless there was absolutely no alternative.
As my sense of powerlessness grew, my anger smoldered, and I could feel Haroon move away from me. I felt the distance between us grow, and at the same time I found myself thinking of the handsome artist in the garden more and more. One day, using the excuse that my shoulders hurt, I asked Amma to allow Sebati to examine them. “Certainly,
bhabi
. Ask her to come up!”
Sebati’s flat was just down the stairs, but I could never get over the feeling that it was miles away. To be able to travel those twelve steps, I had to track Amma’s moods, waiting for an opportune moment to make my move. When I got her permission, I went skipping down the steps like a ten-year-old, anticipating the moment I would be face-to-face with Afzal, as if meeting a lover I hadn’t seen for years. I knocked at the door. “Is Sebati in?”
I knew Sebati was at the hospital and that she wouldn’t be home until morning. Yet there I was, wrapped in my sari, veiled and bejewelled, the upstairs
bou
, unaccompanied. Afzal’s long hair fell across his face, and his unbuttoned shirt revealed a bare chest, thick curls a pattern against pale skin. His black trousers were rolled up, just above his knees.
“She’ll be here any minute,” he responded. “Come in! Sit down.”
He led me to one of four wicker chairs at the table in the center of the room, and I sat, supposedly to wait for Sebati.
How could Afzal not know that Sebati had night duty? Perhaps he did know. Perhaps we were engaged in a game.
The head covering slipped off my head and I let it, as Afzal sat facing me, watching me with intensity. I had never, even in my dreams, imagined that I would contemplate those moody black eyes from so close a vantage point. But now his eyes were merry, and a smile of pleasure played at the corners of his mouth.
“I have decided to call you Melancholia,” he said.
I jumped, feeling as if a steaming fluid had emptied itself within my breast. My ears hummed with a sound that seemed deafening, but I calmed myself down, and ignoring his comment, said, “I see you love flowers. I see you in the garden very often.”
Afzal laughed.“You love flowers, too, I think,” he said.
I didn’t reply. Who doesn’t love flowers! I had to have something to talk about, though I knew I didn’t need to talk at all. I could sit as I was, enraptured in front of him, for days and nights, something I couldn’t imagine ever doing with Haroon. Though it was foolish to compare Haroon to this stranger, I proceeded to do exactly that. I set Afzal’s natural-looking stubbly cheeks against Haroon’s blueish, clean-shaven ones. I compared Afzal’s poetic eyes to Haroon’s hawklike gaze. Afzal spoke in a deep voice, Haroon had a sort of bark.