Brick Lane (21 page)

'And he was right. I know enough.' Her hand hovered above her daughter's shoulder. 'But when I was younger I was always worrying about everything.'

Shahana turned round. Her eyes, mouth, nose pinched up. 'So what? What are you talking about? What do I care? I hate him. I
hate
him.' She jumped up and clenched her arms and teeth. And she kicked her mother's shins with her little soft feet.

Two weeks was enough to learn all the features. She mastered basting stitch, hemming, button-holing and gathering. Razia came to supervise and set homework. Nazneen put in zips, flew through seams. She stay-stitched the flabby end of Chanu's vest and understitched the collar on a doll's dress. No more broken needles. No more snarled-up tea towels. Every spare piece of cloth in the house had been stitched together and taken apart and married to another. To practise on a long length she took down the curtains and sewed them into tubes. They lay across the dining table like deflated sails. Spools of coloured thread sat on Chanu's books, bright flags signalling the way to knowledge. Nazneen bent to her task while Chanu read and tapped the keyboard, sang and muttered, remembered his dislike of chairs and got to the ground, remembered his stiff knees and got up, hummed and read, tapped and talked.

Today he had gone to buy food. Shahana, leaving for school, requested Birds Eye burgers. Chanu was planning fish head curry, dried hilsha if there was no fresh. Nazneen, with cloth reserves depleted, was unpicking the lace edge of an underskirt and thinking she would get a finer needle when a knock came at the door.

Mrs Islam was propped up in the communal hallway, Ralgex Heat Spray in hand. Nazneen carried the cavernous black bag for her and put an arm beneath Mrs Islam's elbow as they walked inside. Mrs Islam had surprisingly sharp elbows. Nazneen cleared the sofa and the visitor lay down. She tugged her sari at the hip, applied the Ralgex and moaned. She sprayed her stomach, inserted the tin into the sleeve of her cardigan and sprayed again. Then she sprayed a handkerchief and placed it over her face. It was understood that these exertions must be made in silence and a proper recuperative period be allowed. Nazneen stood by.

Although she appeared in no way older than when Nazneen was a young bride, Mrs Islam had declared herself to be in her dotage. The black bag, which had itself aged severely, was a pharmaceutical cornucopia – as if, late in life, the bag had found its true calling. It carried a stockpile of tablets, lozenges, powders and bottles. There were jars of ointment and packets of mysterious granules. And there were canisters of medicinal spices and a few loose sheaves of herbs. But all these were merely held in reserve, for emergency procedures perhaps. Whenever Nazneen was ordered to delve for a medication it was invariably Benylin Chesty Coughs.

Mrs Islam waved weakly towards the bag and Nazneen leaped forward and undid the de–stoned clasp. She handed over the bottle and Mrs Islam drank deeply beneath her handkerchief. During the past ten years, Nazneen could not recall a single occasion on which she had heard Mrs Islam coughing. Benylin Chesty Coughs was very effective. Sometimes, in an afternoon visit, she would drink an entire bottle and fall asleep for an hour or so. Chanu would creep around and speak in exaggerated whispers to Nazneen. 'Isn't it an honour? See how relaxed she is here. I knew her husband.'

The Ralgex Heat Spray she carried around. The smell, mixed with the mints she kept under her tongue and the sweet syrup cough preparation, produced about her an aura of the sickbed. But her eyes were hard and bright and her voice came like darts.

'Gold mine,' she said, removing the handkerchief from her face and casting a glance in the direction of the sewing machine.

'I have been practising,' said Nazneen. She sat in the cow–dung–coloured armchair and held up a gather-stitched duster as evidence.

'When I was a girl we learned to stitch by hand. We did not have things so easy.'

Nazneen, who had a bit of cramp in her right hand and was toying with the idea of borrowing the Ralgex, could only agree. 'Yes. It is very fast. Good machine.'

Mrs Islam wiggled her carpet slippers. 'Are you going to start sending the girls? Your husband said you would send them but they have not been seen.'

'Oh,' said Nazneen. 'Yes.'

Through a fug of Ralgex Heat Spray, applied to the collarbone, Mrs Islam said, 'I am a sick woman now. Very, very sick. Anyone can say anything to me. They know how weak I have become. You tell me "yes, they will go" but you do not send them. But to sick old women it is possible to say anything.'

She was talking about the madrassa, the new mosque school. It had been established with a generous endowment from Mrs Islam. Shahana and Bibi were supposed to go after ordinary school had finished for the day but Chanu forbade it. He raged. 'Do they call it education? Rocking around like little parrots on a perch, reciting words they do not understand.' He would teach them. The Qur'an but also Hindu philosophy, Buddhist thought, Christian parables. 'Don't forget,' he told Nazneen, 'Bengal was Hindu long before it was Muslim, and before that Buddhist, and that was after the first Hindu period. We are only Muslims because of the Moguls. Don't forget.' And to Mrs Islam, he said, 'Yes, my wife will send them. I remember your husband. He was the most respectable-type man. One time we thought of doing some business. Jute industry. Import-export sort of affair.'

Nazneen opened her mouth to protest but Mrs Islam cut her off. 'You do as you please. I tell my sons – Mrs Ahmed always does as she pleases, I don't interfere. I tried to look after her son, loved that child like my own but she slapped me down and I don't interfere.' She took a swig of Benylin and a little red ooze appeared down the side of her chin. 'Only I can tell you this. A sick woman still has ears. If you think I have gone deaf, let me tell you my ears are good. I hear what goes on.' In her excitement she had half sat up but she remembered now her invalid status and rested with her forearms across her forehead. The bottle and the spray can framed her face.

'I will speak to my husband,' said Nazneen. She looked for a way out. 'How is your hip? Is it giving much trouble?'

Mrs Islam hitched down the side of her sari to expose a large, perfectly smooth brown hip. She grunted as if to say, satisfied now? 'My sons tell me to go for a hip replacement, but I say no. Do not waste a good new hip. I do not want to be buried with a new hip. God does not love a wasteful woman. Save the good hips for those who can use them. Give the money to the mosque and give me only a little for the Heat Spray. That's all I ask.' She paused a while and then said it again, more gently. 'That's all I ask.' Then she tried once more, attempting softness, the suggestion of fading, a hint that now – even now – she might be slipping from life. 'That's all I ask.'

Nazneen sat on the edge of her chair, within reach of the black bag.

'Open the bag for me, child,' said Mrs Islam, her voice still feeble.

Nazneen knelt and opened it.

'Place the money in the side pocket. I don't count it.'

'You don't count it?' Nazneen ran her fingers over the tarnished, twisted clasp. She looked inside among the packets and tubes to see where the money might be. It would clearly be more convenient to keep the money in the side compartment where it would be easy to find, rather than hiding somewhere in the depths of this pharmacy. She fished around. Something sticky on the lining. Some powder bursting through from a thin cardboard pack. The whole contents needed sorting out. She was just about to offer when Mrs Islam said, 'Ah, to be young and strong again.'

A packet of throat sweets was lying crushed at the bottom of the bag. Nazneen pulled it out and held it up. 'Look. Leaking honey.'

Mrs Islam twisted herself round and propped herself up on an elbow. 'Did you put the money in?' Her voice came sharp, and immediately she added in a weaker tone, 'Did you, child?'

'I can't find it.'

'Look again, child. Fifty pounds. As arranged.'

Nazneen looked closer, her head practically in the bag. The smell was overpowering, an essence of ill health.

'What are you doing?' screeched Mrs Islam. 'Get out of my bag.'

She sat up and the back of her neck had been branded. Heat spread around her skull and into her cheeks. 'You asked me . . .' she said slowly.

'Do I look like a dead woman to you?' said Mrs Islam, suddenly very alive.

Nazneen could only open her mouth and close it.

'Are you trying to rob my grave? Get. Me. My. Money.'

She knew now. Everything was clear. Chanu took a loan. Mrs Islam had come to collect. But still Nazneen did not move. She had no money to give. As arranged. Gesturing towards the sewing machine she gave her only defence. 'Still practising. No work yet.'

Mrs Islam considered for a moment. Her small black bird eyes fixed on Nazneen's burning face. 'I understand. Forgive a sick and anxious old woman. This arrangement is between friends. Pay when you can.' She made a show of struggling to her feet and Nazneen helped her so that when she was up they stood in a sort of embrace. Mrs Islam kissed her, hard mouth to soft cheek. 'We understand each other. I will come again. My salaam to your husband.'

They went to the door. Mrs Islam tucked a fresh mint beneath her tongue, applied a general mist of Ralgex, a prescription of perfume, and took her bag from Nazneen.

'You will find a way,' she said. 'God always gives a way. You just have to find it. And I will bring my sons next time. They would like to see your husband again.'

On his computer, Charm could access the entire world. 'Anything,' he said. 'Anything you want to see. Just tell me and I'll find it. This little wire that goes into the telephone socket – do you see it? – it all comes down the wire.'

'We go on the internet at school,' said Shahana, in English.

Chanu pretended not to hear.

Bibi held on to her plaits. She tried so hard that she could not think of anything.

'I'd like to see kadam again,' said Nazneen.

He held up a finger. 'So you shall.' He jabbed away. 'I am typing it in. Key words: Flowers of Bangladesh.' The computer thought for a while. Bibi looked over her shoulder at Nazneen. Shahana blew up at her fringe, a new development that Chanu read as insolence. The screen flickered into life. 'One hundred and sixteen entries,' marvelled Chanu. He fiddled with the mouse and a picture wove itself, strand by thick strand. Clustered over the screen was an array of pink prickly balls.

'Kadam,' said Nazneen.

'Bor-
ing
,' sang Shahana, in English.

Chanu remained calm. 'Bangla2000 web site. Who wants to take a look?'

Bibi stepped closer to her father. But he was waiting for Shahana.

Nazneen put her hand on Shahana's arm. 'Go on, girl,' she whispered. Shahana did not budge. 'Take a little look.*

'No.
It's bor-
ing
.'

Chanu jumped up and turned round in one movement so that the dining chair toppled. His cheeks quivered. 'Too boring for the memsahib?'

'She's going to look now,' said Nazneen. Bibi backed away from her father, a barely perceptible shuffling that gave the impression that she was responding to the tug of her mother's force field.

'What is the wrong with you?' shouted Chanu, speaking in English.

'Do you mean,' said Shahana,' "What is wrong with you?"' She blew at her fringe. 'Not "the wrong".'

He gasped hard as if she had punched him in the stomach. For a few seconds his jaw worked frantically. 'Tell your sister,' he screamed, reverting to Bengali, 'that I am going to tie her up and cut out her tongue. Tell the memsahib that when I have skinned her alive she will not be looking so pleased with herself.'

Bibi began to repeat, 'He is going to tie you up and cut out. . .' She squinted up at Nazneen. 'I don't want to tell her. You can tell her for me, can't you?' Anxiety pressed on her forehead and lowered it against her eyes.

Inside Chanu, a tornado was at work. It shook his body and twisted his face. 'I'll kill you now,' he shrieked. He ripped the mouse from the computer and launched himself at Shahana. The wire caught Shahana across the cheek and she ran for cover behind the sofa. Chanu approached but stood indecisively in front of it. He moved to the right and Shahana feinted left. He took a step to the left and she dodged the other way. Suddenly he lunged across the top and grabbed hold of a skinny wrist. He began to flail with the mouse while Shahana wriggled and lashed out with her free arm.

If only she would cry, thought Nazneen. She should cry now and save his tears.

'Don't touch my computer,' yelled Chanu. 'You are forbidden.' He slowed down. Shahana risked putting her head above the sofa back. He stopped. 'Your sister is forbidden as well. Do you hear me?'

'Yes, Abba,' said Bibi smartly.

'Yes, Abba,' said Shahana. 'I won't touch it.'

Nazneen took the girls to their room. A redness circled Shahana's wrist. She pulled her arm away from her mother and sucked her lips inside her mouth.

'Time for bed,' said Nazneen. She kissed Bibi and she tried to kiss Shahana. Leaving the room she turned around in time to see Shahana land a kick on her sister's behind. Bibi rubbed her bottom and sat down on her bed. Shahana flung herself face down and began to kick the mattress.

Chanu rubbed his hand hard over his face and shook his head. He wobbled his fleshy nose with the centre of his palm. 'Gone to bed?' he asked.

'Yes,' said Nazneen.

The computer was turned off.

A chair scraped overhead.

'These girls,' said Chanu, baffled by their very existence.

'Mrs Islam came today.'

'These girls.'

'Mrs Islam.'

He was annoyed. 'Don't keep telling me "Mrs Islam"!'

'She came today.'

'Yes. You told me that.' He put his hands beneath his stomach and lifted it up and down.

'For the money.'

With his vest riding up over his chest, Chanu pressed his stomach up as high as it would go. The effect was startling. It became taut as a water-filled balloon and exposed a band of purplish flesh, eager to greet the air. He let go and the flesh cascaded onto his lap. 'Money? Oh, yes. I'll take it next week.' He smiled unevenly and rubbed his hands together. 'You look a bit hungry. Why don't you make some shimai? Let's have a little sweet something before bed.'

Later, when the shimai had been made and Chanu had eaten while Nazneen washed the dishes, they went together to watch them sleep, to hear them breathe, to rearrange limbs beneath blankets and administer secret doses of love. Chanu smoothed Shahana's hair away from her face. He sat on the edge of the bed and put an arm across her insensible form. His small eyes were lost in creases. Then they swapped places and Chanu went to Bibi. He kissed her cheek and he held her hand and Nazneen saw him and saw that he was not just baffled but afraid. They went out together and she turned from closing the door and leaned into him so that her head rested on his shoulder and his chin brushed against her hair.

There had been a period, weeks or perhaps months but to Nazneen it seemed an infinity, when he had gone to bed and stayed there. He stopped making plans. His plans, to which he gave his all and from which he expected so much, had deserted him. Before that, each collapse of ambition, though it dented his surface, had goaded him to new determination, a more urgent reaching. He started every new job with a freshly spruced suit and a growing collection of pens. His face shone with hope. And then greyed with frustration, with resentment. He began businesses with a visit to the shoe repairer and made outlays on hard-sided, brisk briefcases. Energetic numbers on his furiously written and rewritten business plans showed the way to fortunes. And he worked hard; worked late on his plans; joked with Nazneen; became indulgent with the children.

But he was slighted. By customers, by suppliers, by superiors and inferiors. He worked hard for respect but he could not find it. There was in the world a great shortage of respect and Chanu was among the famished.

Finally, he lay down on the bed and began a monotonous grumbling. Then he took his certificates and spread them around and looked at them day after day. He stopped the grumbling. He stopped eating and his stomach became alarmingly small, puckered and loose, a depleted rice sack. When he stopped reading, Nazneen was overpowered with worry.

The Job Centre called him for an interview. He was offered a job washing dishes in a restaurant. He went back to bed but he was in some way galvanized. Some vestige of fight was reignited within him and he began setting tasks for his daughters.

'Shahana,' he would call. 'Quick, girl. Look. Be quick.' When she arrived in the bedroom, scratching intensely at her arm, he ordered her to fetch his slippers. She picked them up from the foot of the bed and dangled them by the heels.

'OK?' she said.

'Put them on. Quick.' He lifted his feet.

On her way out she was recalled to arrange his pillows, pass the water jug, find his pen, pull the curtains or draw them back.

Or he would call out for Bibi. 'Bibi, everything in this bedroom is in a muddle. How many times do I tell you to help your mother?' And Bibi would scurry around, banging between bed and dressing table and standing on the mattress, which was the only way for her to reach into the wardrobe to rearrange trousers and shirts and saris.

But the execution of these tasks was unsatisfying. The girls hurried through them and when he could think of nothing more, they left. Eventually he hit on something. He took up his books again and employed the girls as page-turners. It was perfect. Lying against a bank of pillows, Chanu had one of the girls hold up a volume while sitting on the edge of the bed. They had to watch his face for signs that he was nearing the end of the page and then turn to the next. He was fair with them. He gave signs, little anticipatory raises of his tangled eyebrows. Only an inattentive daughter could fail to see. A disrespectful daughter. Who fully deserved the lashing, verbal or otherwise, that followed such dereliction of duty.

Nazneen thought about it now, as she undressed. The eternal three-way torture of daughter–father–daughter. How they locked themselves apart at this very close distance. Bibi, silently seeking approval, always hungry. Chanu, quivering with his own needs, always offended. Shahana, simmering in – worst of all things – perpetual embarrassment, implacably angry. It was like walking through a field of snakes. Nazneen was worried at every step.

She had to concentrate hard to get through each day. Sometimes she felt as if she held her breath the entire evening. It was up to her to balance the competing needs, to soothe here and urge there, and push the day along to its close. When she failed, and there was an eruption, a flogging or a tantrum or a tear-stained flat cheek, she felt dizzy with responsibility. When she succeeded, she made it a mantra not to forget, not to let it go to her head.
Be careful, be careful, be careful.
It took all her energy. It took away longing. Her wants were close at hand, real and within her control. If only she focused sufficiently. When she drifted she thought of Hasina, but she made her thoughts as efficient as possible. How much could she save? How much could she send? How would she hide it from Chanu?

Sometimes, when she put her head on the pillow and began to drift into sleep, she jerked herself awake in panic. How could she afford to relax? Then she would go into the kitchen and eat without knowing what she put into her mouth. On bad nights when her thoughts could not be submerged by rice or bread or crackers she began to wonder if she loved her daughters properly. Did she love them as she had loved her son? When she thought of them like this – when they grew distant – her stomach fell down through her legs and her lungs shot up against her heart. Which was exactly the feeling she had when, on a cool winter night, she went down to the pond with Hasina. It was the feeling she had when she was about to jump, knowing that the water was cold enough to make her scream.

And she squeezed Raqib from her mind. That way lay the abyss. So she swallowed hard and prayed hard, and she used prayer, in defiance of her vows, to dull her senses and dull her pain.

Back from collecting the girls, Nazneen made a cup of tea and mulled over the school-gate gossip. She picked up only Bibi now that Shahana went to big school and preferred to walk back with her friends, but she still thought of it as 'collecting the girls'. Jorina said that police had been to the mosque and questioned the imam for two hours. No one had any idea why, although many predicted trouble and everyone doubted that a church had ever been treated with such flagrant disrespect. Nazma was talking about Razia with Sorupa and broke off mid-sentence when Nazneen approached. Most intriguing was an overheard conversation between two white women discussing how to slim down their dogs. One favoured a home-enforced diet while the other took her animal to a weight-loss clinic. Although English words did not come easily from her mouth, Nazneen had long been able to follow conversation. Not much surprised her any more. But some things still did.

She was making a second cup of tea and thinking about the emaciated piebald curs of Gouripur when Chanu came home with a plastic-wrapped bundle.

'No time for tea-drinking,' he said. 'Come on. Come.' He hurried through to the sitting room and Nazneen followed.

He ripped the thin sheath of plastic and unfurled the legs of a dozen or so pairs of men's trousers. 'Hemming,' he announced to the world at large. 'Test batch.' He tugged at the other end of the bundle. 'Zips,' he said. 'All will be inspected.'

Nazneen wanted to begin at once but Chanu insisted on calling the girls.

'When I married her, I said: she is a good worker. Girl from the village. Unspoilt. All the clever-clever girls—' He broke off and looked at Shahana. 'All the clever-clever girls are not worth one hair on her head.'

Bibi opened and closed her mouth. Her white lacy socks had fallen around her ankles and her shins looked dry and dusty. Shahana had begun to use moisturizer. Yesterday she had refused to wash her hair with Fairy Liquid. She wanted shampoo now.

Nazneen held on to the casing of the sewing machine. Chanu waggled his head and beamed at her. She fixed the thread and began. One trouser leg, then the other. When she had finished, they clapped and Bibi became sufficiently carried away to venture a small cheer, and Chanu's applause was emphatic, and Shahana smiled fleetingly and marched back to the bedroom.

Chanu brought home holdalls of buttonless shirts, carrier bags of unlined dresses, a washing-up tub full of catchless bras. He counted them out and he counted them back in. Every couple of days he went for new loads. He performed a kind of rudimentary quality control, tugging at zips and twiddling collars while probing his cheeks with his tongue. Chanu totted up the earnings and collected them. He was the middleman, a role which he viewed as Official and in which he exerted himself. For a couple of weeks he puzzled feverishly over calculations, trying to work out the most profitable type of garment assignment, the highest-margin operation. But he had to take what was going and the calculations were themselves a low-margin endeavour. Then he had time to supervise in earnest and he made himself available at her elbow, handing thread, passing scissors, dispensing advice, making tea, folding garments.

'All you have to do,' he said, 'is sit there.'

She got up to stretch her legs. She picked up one of his books and blew off some lint, hoping something in him would respond to the call of neglected type.

'We're making good money this week.' He pulled at his lower lip, working it out. 'Don't worry. I'll take care of everything.'