The Newlyweds Read online

  She’d also confessed that she was twenty-four rather than twenty-three that year: her parents had waited to file her birth certificate, as many families did, so that she might one day have extra time to qualify for university or the civil-service exam. Her mother had warned her to be careful about what she revealed in her e-mails, but Amina found that once she got started writing, it was difficult to stop.

  She told George how her father’s business plans had a tendency to fail, and how each time one of those schemes had foundered, they had lost their apartment. She told him about the year they had spent living in Tejgaon, after losing the apartment in the building called Moti Mahal, and how during that time her father had bought a single egg every day, which her mother would cook for her because Amina was still growing and needed the protein. One night, when she had tried to share the egg with her parents, dividing it up into three parts, her father had gotten so angry that he had tried to beat her (with a jump rope) and would have succeeded if her mother hadn’t come after him with the broken handle of a chicken-feather broom.

  Sometimes she got so involved in remembering what had happened that she forgot about the reader on the other end, and so she was surprised when George wrote back to tell her that her story had made him cry. He could not remember crying since his hamster had died in the second grade, and he thought that it meant their connection was getting stronger. Amina wrote back immediately to apologize for making George cry and to explain that it was not a sad story but a funny one, about her parents and the silly fights they sometimes had. Even if she and George didn’t always understand each other, she never felt shy about asking him questions. What level did the American second grade correspond to in the British system? What had he eaten for dinner as a child? And what, she was very curious to know, was a hamster?

  It had felt wonderful to have someone to confide in, someone she could trust not to gossip. (With whom could George gossip about Amina, after all?) It was a pleasure to write about difficult times in the past, as long as things were better now. By the time she and George started writing to each other, Amina was supporting her parents with the money she made from her tutoring jobs through Top Talents; they were living in the apartment in Mohammadpur, and of course they had plenty to eat. She still thought the proudest moment of her life had come when she was seventeen and had returned home one day to surprise her parents with a television bought entirely out of her own earnings.

  The other benefit of tutoring, one she hadn’t considered when she started out, was the use of the computers that many of the wealthy families who hired her kept for their children’s exclusive use. All of her students were female, and most of them were between eight and fourteen years old; as they got closer to the O- or A-level exams, their parents hired university students to prepare them. Many of these parents told Amina that they’d chosen her because they’d been impressed by her dedication in passing the O levels on her own, but of course Amina knew that Top Talents charged less for her than they did for an actual university student.

  Amina had seen one of her students, a fourteen-year-old named Sharmila, three times a week; since her parents both had office jobs, they liked Amina to stay as long as she wanted so that their daughter wasn’t just sitting around with the servants all afternoon. Her mother confided that she thought Amina would be a good influence on her daughter’s character; Sharmila was very intelligent, but easily distracted, and was not serious enough about saying her prayers. She has been raised with everything, her mother said, her arm taking in the marble floors of the living room and the heavy brocade curtains on the six picture windows overlooking the black surface of Gulshan Lake, which was revealed, even at this height, to be clogged with garbage, water lilies, and the shanties of migrant families. She doesn’t even know how lucky she is. Amina nodded politely, but the way that Sharmila’s mother complained was a performance. She would put on the same show when her daughter’s marriage was being negotiated, exaggerating Sharmila’s incompetence with a simple dal or kitchuri, so that the groom’s family would understand what a little princess they were about to receive.

  Amina had sworn Sharmila to secrecy on the subject of AsianEuro.com, and then they’d had a lot of fun, looking through the photos in the “male gallery” after the lessons were finished. Sharmila always chose the youngest and best-looking men; she would squeal and gasp when they came across one who was very old or very fat. More often than not, Amina had the same impulses, but she reminded herself that she was not a little girl playing a game. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman whose family’s future depended on this decision.

  According to her mother, the man could not have been divorced and he certainly couldn’t have any children. He had to have a bachelor’s degree and a dependable job, and he could not drink alcohol. He could not be younger than thirty or older than forty-five, and he must be willing to convert to Islam. Her mother had also insisted that Amina take off her glasses and wear a red sari she had inherited from her cousin Ghaniyah in the photograph, but once it had been taken and scanned into the computer (a great inconvenience) at the Internet café near Aunty #2’s apartment in Savar, her mother would not allow her to post it online. “Why would you want a man who was only interested in your photograph?” she demanded, and nothing Amina could say about the way the site worked would change her mind.

  “The men will think you’re ugly!” Sharmila exclaimed when she heard about Amina’s mother’s stipulations. They were sitting on the rug in Sharmila’s bedroom at the time, with Sharmila’s Basic English Grammar open between them. Her student was wearing the kameez of her school uniform with a pair of pajama trousers decorated with kittens. She looked Amina up and down critically.

  “Your hair is coarse, and you have an apple nose, but you aren’t ugly,” she concluded. “Now no one is going to write to you.” And although Amina had the very same fears, she had decided to pretend to agree with her mother, for the sake of Sharmila’s character.

  As it happened, George did not post his picture online either. They sent each other the photographs only after they had exchanged several messages. George told her that her picture was “very beautiful,” in a formal way that pleased her: it was almost as if he were a Bengali bridegroom surrounded by his relatives, approving of their choice without wanting to display too much enthusiasm, for fear of being teased. Months later, once they had decided to become exclusive and take their profiles down from the site, George told her it was the day he saw her photograph that he’d become convinced she was the right person for him—not because of how pretty she was but because she hadn’t used her “superficial charms” to advertise herself, the way certain American women did.

  Their correspondence hadn’t been without its challenges. Normally she would go to the British Council in the mornings before her tutoring responsibilities began; since George often wrote to her at night before he went to bed, there was almost always a message waiting for her. But one afternoon a message had come when she’d happened to be at the library. It was 4:22 a.m. in Rochester (unlike most people’s, George’s e-mails always displayed the correct time), and she had been tempted to IM and say that she was online right at that moment. But when she’d read the message, she had been relieved she’d waited. She thought it was doubly disappointing to have gotten a message at a surprising time and then to have it turn out to be the message it was, startling in its curt brevity: George had been assigned a big project at work, he said, and wasn’t sure when he would be able to resume their correspondence. He hoped she understood and that she and her family continued to be well.

  She had received similar messages before, and it had always meant that the man had found someone else. She remembered the way that this particular message, more than any of the others, had closed down the day—so it seemed as if there would never be anything to look forward to again. She felt as if she had failed, and when she’d arrived home and reported what had happened, her mother’s obvious disappointment had made her own even more difficult
to bear. Even her father had held his tongue and kept himself from gloating about the unreliability of computerized matchmaking, and so she’d known he had been hoping this time, too.

  It had been ten weeks before George had written to her again. Much later she’d wondered whether it was this hiatus that had made her fall in love with him. The message had come at the usual time, but it was even more unexpected than the last one, since she’d assumed he would never write again:

  Dear Amina,

  First, I should apologize for not writing for so long. I wouldn’t blame you if you’d found someone else, or were even engaged by now. (I wouldn’t blame you, but I would be very disappointed.) I promised myself I would write to you tonight and explain, but I’ve been sitting here a long time. I keep writing things and then deleting them.

  It wasn’t only the work, as you probably guessed. I do have a big project (I’ll tell you about it if you’re still interested), but believe me when I say I was still thinking about you. My friends have asked how I could be serious about someone I’ve never even met, but I think in some ways we know each other better than we would if we just went on dates. Do you know what I mean? I think I’ve been worried about getting serious because I thought you might just disappear or stop writing. I know doing the same thing to you was really stupid, and I’m sorry about that. I guess what I was thinking before I stopped writing is that I’m falling in love with you. There—that’s something I wouldn’t have said if we’d been face-to-face.

  Well, Amina, I’m not sure you can forgive me, but I feel better having written it. How is your grandmother’s health? Is your father working these days? And what have you been doing for the last two months? If the answer includes writing to someone else … that’s what I get, I guess. I know I don’t exactly deserve it, but please let me down easy.

  Sincerely,

  George

  She had wondered if she ought to wait a day or so to write back, and then she had chastised herself for thinking about strategy. George had said that he liked her because she didn’t play games; she wouldn’t be like the women he remembered from college. If he liked her, she wanted it to be for the way she really was, and so she wrote back and told him that she hadn’t been corresponding with anyone else. She didn’t say anything about the disappointment (her own, or certainly her parents’) but simply filled him in on the events of the last few weeks: her father’s temporary employment at a shipping office and the pain in her grandmother’s knees. Then she had printed out his note and brought it home like a gift to surprise her parents.

  3She hadn’t believed there was a man on earth—much less on AsianEuro.com—who would satisfy all of her mother’s requirements, but George came very close. He was thirty-four years old, and he had never been married. He had not only a bachelor’s but a master’s degree from SUNY Buffalo and had worked as an electrical engineer at a company called TCE for the past nine years. He liked to have a Heineken beer while he was watching the football game—his team was the Dallas Cowboys—but he rarely had more than two, and he would think of converting to Islam if that was what it would take to marry Amina.

  In his next e-mail, George told her about his “big project”: he had been busy buying a house. He hadn’t wanted to tell her about it until he was sure they were serious, because he was afraid it was “too soon” and she might think he was “moving too fast.” When Amina read that she almost laughed out loud. Why would any man hesitate to tell a woman he was courting that he had just acquired a three-bedroom house with two bathrooms, a garage, and a backyard with plenty of space for a vegetable garden? He e-mailed her a photograph, which looked to her like something from a magazine: a yellow house with a gray roof and white shutters, taller on one side than the other. (This design was called split-level, and it was one of several similar houses on the tract, a group of homes that had been built by a developer in the 1970s.) George also mentioned that the tract was a family-oriented community, and that the schools nearby were excellent.

  “My mother says he’s probably divorced,” Ghaniyah said when Amina showed her the picture of the house one day on her cousin’s home computer. “She says there are a lot of bad people online, and she’s worried about you.”

  “Please tell her not to worry.”

  “Otherwise, why is he unmarried?”

  “Because he hasn’t met the right person,” Amina snapped. “It’s not like here—where your parents have a heart attack if you’re not engaged at twenty-five.”

  Ghaniyah held up her hands in a defensive gesture. “It’s my mother who was asking. Personally I think you’re really brave.”

  Amina’s mother said she shouldn’t have told Ghaniyah anything about George, but by that time Amina knew that he was coming to Desh to meet her, and what if he mentioned AsianEuro or Heineken beer himself? Her aunts were crafty, none more so than Ghaniyah’s mother, her Devil Aunty. (Her mother used to reprimand her for calling Aunty #2 by that name, but when she laughed afterward Amina knew it was okay.) Her Devil Aunt was also the only one of her mother’s three sisters who spoke any English, and she had a special way of asking one question in order to get the answer to another. Even before she met him in person, Amina knew that George wouldn’t be prepared for that kind of Deshi trick.

  She had expected disapproval from Ghaniyah and her aunt, but it surprised her when her cousin Nasir started visiting her. Nasir wasn’t actually related to her; her father called him nephew because Nasir’s father had been his closest friend. When his parents had died less than a year apart, Nasir was only eleven years old. Her father had treated him like a son, monitoring his progress in school, buying him presents (even when they couldn’t afford it), and taking him to Friday prayers at the Sat Gumbad Mosque. When Nasir started college in Rajshahi, her father had arranged a place for him to stay near the university, with one of her mother’s cousins and his family. (George asked her to use the word “relative” when she was describing her cousins in English; he said it made his head hurt, trying to understand who was who.)

  When she was a teenager, she had been in love with Nasir, who was six years older than she was. He had been studying computer science, but he was like her father in that he loved to read poetry, especially poetry about the liberation of Bangladesh. When Nasir returned from college on visits to see his sisters, he would ride his motor scooter over to have dinner with Amina and her parents, and often he would recite his own poems after they finished eating. Her aunts and her cousins had teased her about Nasir, who was unusually tall and handsome but very dark skinned. He allowed his thick, black hair to grow long and then cut it very short in order to save money at the barbershop. He always spoke English with Amina, and when she responded, even if it was only in a whisper, he would tell her mother how clever she was. A few years after he’d finished university, Nasir got his visa and left to work in his cousin’s restaurant in London. According to her mother, Amina had sulked for two months.

  She knew that there had been some discussion about the possibility of her and Nasir marrying, once she reached the right age, and also that those discussions had gradually stopped. The rumors were that Nasir had antagonized his cousin, the owner of the London restaurant, and that he was unlikely to move to any more promising employment there. His elder sister Sakina, still unmarried at thirty-six, was encouraging him to return to the small apartment building in Mohammadpur that their parents had left them. Sakina was a formidable woman, more than 1.7 meters tall, with a streak of white in her inky hair. Most of their acquaintances had expressed reservations before Amina left for America, but Sakina was the only one who had come to her mother directly, demanding to know how she could take such a risk with her only child. They thought of you for Nasir, her mother had said at the time—that’s why they’re so offended. Whomever Nasir married would be in thrall to Sakina, who was certain to act more like a mother-in-law than a dependent spinster. Amina didn’t think her parents’ feelings about Nasir had changed, but simply that they hoped for a better lif
e for her. She hoped for it herself.

  She hadn’t thought of Nasir in months when he showed up at their door one afternoon with a book for her. She had been at Sharmila’s, staying late in order to e-mail George, and by the time she returned home, Nasir was gone. He had stayed for two hours, her mother said, and drunk six cups of tea; even more surprising, while he was in London Nasir had grown a full beard and started wearing a prayer cap.

  “I expected a Londoni, and instead I found a mullah at the door,” her mother joked. Her father, who had come in at the same time, took Nasir’s book eagerly from her mother and read the title aloud: The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam. Amina could tell he’d been hoping for poetry and was disappointed.

  “He left this for Munni?”

  “And this.” She handed Amina a sheet of lined blue paper from a schoolchild’s copybook, folded three times. When she opened it, she found an Internet address for something called the Islamic Center of Rochester.

  “A mosque in Rochester, isn’t it?” her mother asked Amina excitedly.

  “Islamic Center,” her father corrected. “Not mosque.”

  “A place to meet other Muslim women, then.”

  Her father took the piece of paper away from Amina. “Your husband will find a real mosque for you.”

  Amina wanted to keep the address anyway, but her father took it and stuck it in Nasir’s book. He flipped through the pages, stopping here and there. Then he asked her mother whether you had to be a guest to get a cup of tea in this house. Her father drank his tea and read the book until it was time to eat, and then when they were finished, he picked it up again. When Amina went to bed, he was still reading.

  In the morning Amina was studying at the table when she noticed that something was different. It took her a minute to figure out that she didn’t have to put any weight on the Southern Hemisphere in order to read; even when her mother set down her omelet and Horlicks (right in the middle of the Arabian Sea) the table didn’t wobble.