Brick Lane (13 page)

The city shattered. Everything was in pieces. She knew it straight away, glimpsed it from the painful-white insides of the ambulance. Frantic neon signs. Headlights chasing the dark. An office block, cracked with light. These shards of the broken city.

At the hospital she felt the panic. Lobby doors crashing, white coats surging, bright trolleys clanging, coffee machine snarling. She ran with her son, carried him down long corridors while the walls fled before them. And then they took him out of her hands.

Raqib lay in the glass-walled cot like a flower that had been held inside a fist and released, not crushed but crumpled. His arms were wrongly arranged, the skin around his mouth puckered, and the area beneath his ribs hollowed out.

Nazneen pressed her fingers against the incubator. He was the centre. The world had rearranged itself around this new core. It had to. Without him, life would not be possible. He was on the inside and all else looked in. The nurses and doctors who rustled and sighed, and bunched around. The hospital building with its smothering smells, its deathly hush and alarming clangs. The crystal towers and red-brick tombs. The bare-legged girls shivering at the bus stop. The hunched men and gesticulating women. The well-fed dogs and bloated pigeons. The cars that had screamed alongside the ambulance, urging it on, parting in waves.

And the city itself was just a glow on the dark earth, beneath the heaven that bent down to touch the troubled oceans, and he was beside her but no longer of her and the noise that filled her head and heart and lungs was so great that if she but opened her mouth the windows, the walls, could not withstand it.

For three days Chanu ate only cheese sandwiches from the canteen. On the fourth day he went home and cooked rice, and potato and cauliflower curry. He brought the food in flat round tins to the hospital and they ate in the room set aside for the refugee families of the gravely ill. The warm, heady smell of spices blanketed the air, twitched noses and lifted heads. A gaunt old couple, who held hands and whispered together all day as if making an infinitely complex suicide pact, halted their plans for a while and stared openly. A teenage boy, who came to be with his mother and hand her paper tissue after paper tissue, sat up straight to get a good look. The whiskered man with the flat, blank eyes of a bandicoot rat, who came alone and slept beneath the chairs, slowly licked his lips.

Nazneen ate and ate. She scraped the tins clean and put them on the floor. 'I should have brought more,' said Chanu. He closed a hand around her wrist.

'Yes. Next time, bring more.'

'Do you want to go home for a while?'

'No. I won't go yet.'

'I brought some things for you. Socks, soap, whatever I could find.'

'His blanket?'

'I've got it.'

'He needs his special blanket.'

Nazneen thought about getting up. She would wait until Chanu released her, so that she did not pull away from him. She did not want to pull away from him.

'A letter came from home,' said Chanu. His chin was grey with stubble and his hair – without coconut oil – lay like clumps of moulted fur. He spoke only a little and his voice was soft as clay.

'Hasina!'

'No, no. A letter from one of my relatives. A begging letter.'

'Another.'

'I have not heard from this man in nearly twenty years. When I left he was a young policeman with enormous moustaches, and he was feared far and wide.'

A doctor opened the door and spoke to the teenager's mother. She blew her nose and handed the sodden tissue to the boy. As she left with the doctor she glanced back at the room as if it had betrayed her. The boy sniffed. He slipped so low in his chair he threatened to fall off. Chanu tightened his grip on Nazneen's wrist.

'I've heard about him from time to time. He built himself a big house with all the bribe money, and he rose through the ranks. He had four or five servants and his wife gave the best parties. Not only that. He imported an American car. Chrysler or Chevrolet, something like that. It was talked about all over town.'

Nazneen smiled at her husband. For now, he was speaking only to her. There was no one over her shoulder. The audience had finally gone home. She put her free hand briefly across his round cheek. To touch like this was permitted here, among these stateless people, where the rules were unknown and in any case suspended.

'Now it looks like the bribe money has dried up. He's too old to wield the stick. Or he's been kicked out altogether. It's not clear what has happened. But now he only has one servant, and he is in need.' Chanu let her go. He rubbed his thighs. 'He asks me, in the name of God, not to let his family suffer. He asks only for them, not for himself.'

'Don't answer it,' said Nazneen. He read these letters over and over. He spent longer on the replies than he ever spent on his studies, and most often left them in the drawer. 'Just throw it away.'

'He just has the one servant now.'

Nazneen felt a bubble of laughter rise from her belly. She let it out behind her hand. 'Don't let his family suffer,' she said, choking.

Chanu pressed his woolly eyebrows together and looked at her. She could not stop. He smiled. She felt the others looking at them, the strange brown couple who laughed and smiled. With the end of her sari, she wiped at her eyes.

There was a mask across Raqib's face. It brought him oxygen because, Chanu explained, he needed something purer than air. Needles stuck into his arms like great javelins, and wires and tubes sprung around him, thick as coiled rope. Raqib spread his tiny limbs wide. The rash that had nearly killed him, those little red seeds, was not so livid now. The marks had changed their shape and colour, and spread beneath his creamy skin like crushed berries. His arms reached across the cot. His face was screwed into a determined ball. Nazneen thought of a game she played with Hasina, leaning into the wind that whipped off the lake and held them in a ragged embrace, flapping at their baggy trousers and holding up their arms.

Raqib was still asleep. Sometimes he opened his eyes but they were not seeing eyes. Nazneen put his special blanket inside the cot. She settled in the hard moulded plastic of the chair. Chanu sat on the other side, arms folded across his chest. Whenever a nurse walked by he half unfolded them and looked up.

Abba did not choose so badly. This was not a bad man. There were many bad men in the world, but this was not one of them. She could love him. Perhaps she did already. She thought she did. And if she didn't, she soon would because now she understood what he was, and why. Love would follow understanding.

Some things had become clear in the long, halogen-lit nights and the slowly dissolving days. The din that had crashed around inside her, like a giant bee in a bottle, had gone. And the quiet that came in its wake was profound. Nazneen sat and watched her son, and watched her husband rattling around the place: fetching things and returning them, bumping into carts and nurses, questioning the doctors, accosting the cleaners, poring over charts and articles, dragging chairs out of place and back again, going for coffee, going for tea, collecting the undrunk cups and spilling them on the way to the sink.

Her irritation with her husband, instead of growing steadily as it had for three years, began to subside. For the first time she felt that he was not so different. At his core, he was the same as her.

All the while, when Nazneen turned to her prayers and tried to empty her mind and accept each new thing with grace or indifference, Chanu worked his own method. He was looking for the same essential thing. But he thought he could grab it from outside and hold it against his chest like a shield. The degrees, the promotion, the Dhaka house, the library, the chair-restoring business, the import-export plans, the interminable reading. They were his self-fashioned tools. With them he tried to chisel out a special place, where he could have peace of mind.

Where Nazneen turned in, he turned out; where she strove to accept, he was determined to struggle; where she attempted to dull her mind and numb her thoughts, he argued aloud; while she wanted to look neither to the past nor to the future, he lived exclusively in both. They took different paths but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.

'He's going to be all right now,' said Chanu.

'I know.'

'We'll take him home soon.'

'As soon as he's ready.'

'I thought it was all finished.'

'I know,' she said, and knew that she would never have allowed that.

Though she spent hours sitting at the cotside she was not just sitting. Her hands lay folded in the pleated lap of her sari, hard brown knuckles against the soft pink. She was as still as a mongoose entranced by a snake. Stiller than a storm-cleared sky. But more animated than ever before. She willed him to live and he did. In the quiet she realized many things, most of all that she was immensely, inexplicably, happy.

Nazma and Sorupa came and rested ten fingers each on the sides of the cot.

'It has pleased God to make all my children strong and healthy,' said Nazma. 'The fourth one also, I feel his legs. So strong!' She rubbed her round belly.

Nazneen looked at her. Another child was coming, but with Nazma it was not easy to tell. The pregnancies came and went but the roundness always stayed.

Sorupa said, 'Also it pleases Him to make my children in fittest and healthiest of disposition.'

Nazma touched her fingers to Raqib's forehead. She glared at Sorupa. 'What is wrong with you? Have you come to gloat and boast at the sickbed?'

Sorupa nibbled her lip and looked away.

Jorina came on her way to work and could stay only a few moments. She said, 'I can sit with him at night, let you rest. These days I don't sleep so well. It would be no bother.'

In the family room, Razia clasped Nazneen against her hard chest. 'You are in an agony, I know. My sister's third child, peace upon his soul, died after a long illness. The illness was the worst part. When they are gone they are gone, but when they are ill you suffer with them.'

'I am sorry for your sister. But I am OK.'

Razia looked sideways at the old couple who faced each other and held hands. 'This woman is the bravest one you will ever see. In her youth, she wrestled crocodiles.' She looked at Nazneen. 'Shall I tell them in English now?'

'I'm glad you came.'

'Listen, I've got something for him. For when he's a bit older.' She jiggled a man-doll from a plastic bag. 'He can pull the head off this one all by himself.'

'I won't let him. I'll keep it until he knows better. Give my respects to your husband.'

Razia pulled down her headscarf. She rubbed at her strong jaw. Now that she wore trousers she sat like a man, right ankle resting across left knee and the big black shoe nodding up and down. 'I can't. We are not speaking. We are arguing. We are having, in fact, an unspoken argument.'

'Then how will you know who has won?'

'That son-of-a-bitch!'

'Razia—'

'He works all day and night. He keeps me locked up inside.'

'You go out. You came here, to the hospital.'

'If I get a job, he will kill me. He will kill me kindly, just one slit across here. That's the sort of man he is. For hours, for days, he says nothing at all, and when he speaks that's the kind of talk I get.' She held on to her foot, restraining it from further bouncing.

'But you go out. You go to the college.'

'The children are at school. What am I supposed to do all day? Gossip and more gossip. The children ask for things. Everything they see, they want. And I don't have money. Jorina can get me a sewing job, but my husband will come to the factory and slaughter me like a lamb.'

'Talk to him.' Nazneen watched the door open. She hoped it would be Chanu with more food from home. A nurse came in and touched the old couple lightly on their shoulders. They looked up at her with guilty faces. Enclosed in their sorrows, they had forgotten why they were here.

Razia pointed to the doll. 'I might as well talk to him. My husband is so miserly he will not waste even words on me. Now he has the night job, driving around with animal carcasses. If he has anything to say, he says it to them.' Razia blew hard out of her long nose, exhaling her anger. She uncrossed her legs and laced her fingers together. 'Anyway, you don't want to hear my troubles. You have enough of your own.'

'Raqib is getting stronger. I can feel it.' It was possible now to leave him alone for a while. She had tamed the machines that stood guard by talking to them softly, like a mahout calms an angry elephant.
This is my son. This is my son. Take good care of him.
The machines no longer frightened her. In the night they purred like civets and their bellies lit up like fireflies. By day they droned with efficiency and the flat screens made lines and curves in modest shades of green.

'The next time I come I will be allowed to pick him up,' said Razia. She smiled but she could not recover her temper. 'I found out where the money goes. Shall I tell you? It goes to the imam. He is going to build a new mosque in the village.'

'God will bless you.'

'If he was God-conscious, I would not mind. But my husband is not God-conscious. Listen, is this how a God-conscious man acts?' Her husband was mean. It was getting worse. After much brooding in the kitchen, sorting through the shelves and cupboards, he denounced his wife as a wanton housekeeper. Too many jars, too many packets, too many tins. All shouting abundance, luxury, waste. There would be no more money until every last thing on the shelves was eaten. Now they were down to Sun Maid raisins and Sainsbury's Wheat Bisks. For three days the children had eaten only Wheat Bisks in water and handfuls of raisins. This will teach you, said the husband. Will teach you to buy Sun Maid, fancy packets, penny-waste here, penny-waste there. Tariq came home from school. Ma, Shefali going to the toilet nine times every day. She is getting ashamed to put her hand up.

Razia tackled him. Building mosques and killing your own children. Holy man.

He did not flinch. What you want me to do? Kill my own self, working and working, for you to spend it all on penny-thing here, penny-thing there and nothing to show at the end? I am working for bricks. When I am gone to dust, they will be standing.