The Halfways, page 14
It is only when they are preparing to taxi down the runway, and Nasrin picks up her phone to switch it off, that she sees the text from Riaz.
‘Naz, are you sure about this?’
She is so angry that she wants to throw the phone on the floor and stamp on it. Who was Riaz to ask her such questions?
Suddenly, all the emotions she has held at bay thunder open within her. As the plane throttles down the runway and sprints into the air, dread flattens itself against her just as the gravity pushes her back against her seat.
Marrying Richard is freedom. It is release, from the brown in her life. Since university, Nasrin had been living a dual life; white in London, brown in Wales. By picking Richard, she is confirming her allegiance to a stable identity.
But she thinks of her mother’s words, how she will be exiled from her community, and no longer welcome in Desh. She will miss the sight of those turquoise tiles every summer, the delicious tart of the first kala jams, the call for prayer soaring over the bamboo forest, the sounds of crickets lulling her to sleep … how will she make up for losing all of this? How will she fill the gap it will leave behind?
She stares out at the layered night, and the swathes of grey cloud. The familiar vista that usually fills her with awe constricts her tonight.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached our cruising altitude of thirty-three thousand feet. I’ll go ahead and turn off the seat belt sign …’ She hears Captain Townsend say, and she checks the autopilot settings and gives him the thumbs up.
As the flight wears on, her restlessness increases. ‘Will he convert?’ her parents had asked, and she couldn’t tell them that Richard did not believe in any God, much less believe in The One. ‘You’re going to give up your parents, your upbringing, even God, Naz, is he worth it?’ Riaz had asked. She was unable to respond that when she watches Richard’s boyish face light up, she feels a surge of joy within herself. When he is proud of being an Aussie who has successfully infiltrated the old boys’ network at his English law firm she feels the pride warm her own chest as though these achievements are hers. She wants this synchronised existence. The friendships and hook-ups from university have not lasted into this phase of her nomadic lifestyle, and Richard, along with her family, is her only constant. But unlike her family, there is a sense of freedom in her relationship with Richard. He is both foreign to her and as foreign as her. In their relationship, Nasrin thinks that she has finally glimpsed an acceptable place to call home.
And yet, as the flight draws near to its destination, she feels farther from her own journey’s end than when she boarded the plane. She thinks again of all that she will lose, and distress gnaws at her. There is a sudden tingling in her shoulders and Nasrin stretches her neck this way and that.
Henri and the Captain are discussing the approach sequence, but Nasrin hears the exchange as if from beneath a crashing wave.
The tingling in her shoulders is an old but familiar sensation. Its unyielding force brings with it a deafening buzz that crescendos down her arms and her torso. Nasrin sits up. It cannot be! she whispers to herself, as though this will stop it from being. It cannot be!
But even as she thinks this, she feels herself jerk. It has been so many years since her last seizure that she feels she could laugh. How it has fooled her! How stupid she has been for thinking it gone! Then she feels control draining out of her. Her body is a puppet, played by a cruel puppeteer, crashing her about on the apparatus around her.
‘Nasrin, what’s wrong? Captain!’
‘Jesus, she’s fallen on the control column, Henri, move her!’
‘I’ll get the crew!’
‘Speedbird,’ the radio crackles, ‘BA flight 109, do you copy? Why are you descending?’
And somewhere in that exchange, Nasrin loses herself.
* * *
A week later, Nasrin sits up in bed. Her T-shirt is soaked with sweat and her throat is parched. She has woken every morning in this way since that terrible flight, with the sun, already high, stubbornly pushing through the gap in the curtains. She hears her mother downstairs in the kitchen, moving about her tasks, singing a melancholy nasheed. The one about following the prophet (pbuh) to heaven. Read namaz. Do your fasts. Give Zakath. And then follow the faithful to heaven. Nasrin closes her eyes and lets the familiar melody bounce off her. Something about the simplicity of it soothes her soul. She wishes she believed in it.
‘Naju,’ her father calls as he comes up the stairs. ‘It’s after midday, re futh, come and have lunch with us.’
She refuses to engage, as she has done the last several days. He opens the curtains and moves the duvet gently away from her face.
‘Come, come,’ he says as he pulls on her arm gently. ‘Life is long. There are many mistakes we will have to make before we can rest.’ He is so sure of this that Nasrin lets him guide her down the stairs, lets her mother place a plate in front of her. They talk over her, enticing her to believe that nothing has changed. They talk of Sabrina’s first Thanksgiving in New York, the fact that she would like the family there with her. They talk of Afroz’s impending nuptials and that they should book their flights. Lindsay arrives, smelling of marmalade, and goes into the garden to call over the fence to Riaz and Mustafa.
‘I’ve brought homemade amber pudding,’ she hollers and comes back inside to slice it. Nasrin eyes the pudding; she is aware of the effort they are all making for her, but she is deep inside a cave of her own mortification, and their efforts are in vain. Snippets of the interview with BA Human Resources whittle away at her.
‘In the screening report, you specifically wrote Not Applicable against history of seizures, Ms Islam.’
Yes, she had.
‘But at the time, you were aware that you’d had approximately twelve epileptic seizures from the age of seven to the age of thirteen.’
Yes, she had been.
She lacked the words to explain why she had lied: how the emotionally draining years of study and struggle against her parents’ expectations pressed in on her as her fingers quivered over the questions on her medical history. These questions had been the only barrier between her and the life she wanted for herself, of airports, planes and passport controls. This is not lying, she had told herself: I haven’t had a seizure in almost a decade, it’s gone for good now.
‘Naz,’ Lindsay says, ‘aren’t you going to try some? You love my amber pudding.’
‘She has eaten hardly anything in the last week,’ Nasrin’s mother says. ‘I am watching my child shrink in front of my eyes.’
‘You children make mountains out of molehills,’ her father says in English, a language he rarely uses with his daughters except in moments of indulgence.
‘Eh, Naju!’ Mustafa places his hand on her head. ‘This is nothing. When it is over, you will laugh, hai? The English and their bureaucracy!’
‘The English and their silly bureaucracy,’ Lindsay agrees.
Nasrin bursts into tears.
They are all silent as her sobs fill the room. The incongruousness of the cloying smell of marmalade against the smell of her mother’s fish curry seems somehow to accentuate everyone’s disquiet. They sit still for long minutes, afraid to look at each other, even at Nasrin.
Then, suddenly Riaz speaks: ‘Richard’s been calling you, hasn’t he?’ Nasrin looks up at him in surprise. ‘Have you called him back? Think how worried he must be.’ Riaz swallows hard, looks from her mother to her father, shakes his head at them encouragingly.
After a moment’s silence, her father clears his throat. ‘Oy, oy, call him. Tell him to come for lunch tomorrow.’
Mustafa claps his hands. ‘Tik kotha. Bhabhi!’ he says. ‘Lunch!’
‘Can’t wait to meet him, man! Shame Sibby can’t be here.’ Nasrin stares at Riaz, and then looks down at her pudding. She looks up at her mother, who turns away.
‘I don’t have anything in the house to make for a good lunch,’ Jahanara says, getting out of her chair. ‘Riaz, when you do the cash-and-carry tomorrow, get me a mutton leg.’
‘Oh, Fufu, I love your mutton roast!’ Lindsay says.
Nasrin takes the forkful of pudding Mustafa smilingly holds out to her, and watches her parents exchange meaningful looks.
Later that afternoon, she follows Riaz and her father into the Peacock, and begins to lay out the salmon-coloured tablecloths. She sets the tables, slipping the silverware into place, polishing the glasses and folding the napkins into peacocks. It is only four o’clock, but the wintry night is beginning to fall. The passing headlights give temporary respite. Nasrin moves to the bar and begins to clean the ashtrays, stacking them up next to a copy of the Daily Mail. In between cleaning, she flips the pages. Suddenly she stops dead.
BA First Officer jeopardises lives of 283 passengers by lying about epilepsy.
The ashtray she holds drops out of her hands and falls on top of the stack she has yet to clean. A cascade of ashtrays hurtles to the ground, but she is unable to tear her eyes away from the newspaper. She stands amid the debris of ash-smeared porcelain and reads and rereads the short article, reliving the pain of its quick condemnation. The pins and needles of her epilepsy tingle at her elbow. No more flying. It is a loss made all the heavier with shame, and it sinks heavily into her. She looks around, wide-eyed with panic, and realises that there is no way for her to escape any of this anymore.
Her trembling fingers undo the clasp of the chain she is wearing around her neck.
By the time Riaz finds her, cleaning the broken ashtrays, he immediately notices the yellow diamond that glints malevolently from her ring finger.
He silently untangles the hoover lead, and watches as Nasrin telephones Richard.
3
Just after 6 p.m. on the day of the Khatm, shortly before Nasrin found her sister’s room vacant, Afroz sat in the middle of a room full of swaying women, all reciting verses from the Quran in feathery murmurs. She had been allotted Chapter 13, but her Quran Sharif stood open before her in its ornate rehal. Though she knew the verse by heart, she sat mutely. Her mind, too full to focus, was stuck in a painful loop of the night before.
It had been past midnight when Afroz had stepped out of the Peacock’s kitchen into the calm night. The square was deserted and Afroz had turned her face up to the smooth indigo velvet of the sky, letting it soothe the adrenaline that still pumped through her from the night’s exertions. She felt a surge of inexplicable happiness. She had never cooked like this – with such fanfare, to such acclaim – and the unexpected experience of it had been thrilling.
But as she approached her aunt’s house, the forbidding darkness of its windows reminded her of the morning’s argument with Sabrina and of spending the afternoon vacillating between her shock and her urge to flee back to Desh. Anxious about entering a house that unsurprisingly wanted to spit her out, Afroz sat for a while on the wall outside, watching the cars pass. A man locking up his café across the road waved at her and Afroz lifted her hand uncertainly. It occurred to her how unexpected this experience was; sitting outside in the middle of the night, on full display to the world, without any disapproving glares or blasts of car horns to disturb her solitude. How worlds apart her and her cousins’ – sisters’ – lives had been. Why had she been singled out as the one to miss out on this way of life where every action was not measured against the yardstick of honour and reputation, izzath and shomman? Why only her and not them?
She heard the Peacock’s kitchen door open and bang shut, the shuffle of a plastic bag being dragged across the tarmac, and Lindsay came into view. Afroz watched as she bent over to pick up chicken bones from the ground.
‘Which idiot leaves raw meat out for the bleeding foxes to find?’ Lindsay asked her, and Afroz, surprised that she was noticed at all, was at a loss for words. ‘You must be shattered. You’re coming tomorrow too, right?’
Afroz nodded mutely and watched Lindsay heave the bag into the wheelie bin and stalk back to the kitchen. This time, the door was left open, and the sounds that escaped it reminded Afroz of all the Eid al Bakhrs of her childhood, when lungi-ed workmen would stir gigantic industrial saucepans with metre-long bamboo spatulas, and the smell of Eid beef curry lingered in the night air. She remembered the clamminess of Nasrin and Sabrina’s arms against her own as they sat huddled together on the little footbridge, batting away mosquitos, their faces bathed in the amber glow of the gasoline lamp that the cooks used.
Cheered by this memory, Afroz jumped carefully off the wall, and walked into her aunt’s house. Not wanting to disturb the sleeping household, she closed the door as softly as she could and groped her way up the stairs in the darkness. Suddenly, she heard a sharp zipping noise as she came to Sabrina’s room. She stopped, gazing down at the cut of light at the bottom of the closed door. She reached out and knocked on Sabrina’s door.
Without waiting for an answer, she opened it.
She wasn’t sure what she would do once she saw Sabrina, except that she wanted to do something, share a word, or a smile, to show her awareness that she was the cause of all this distress, that she would never ask for more than they had already given her. She wanted Sabrina to know that she was fond of her. That Sabrina was important to her. And part of Afroz, the greedy, idiotic part of her, wanted Sabrina to return that affection. As children they had been friends one moment, and enemies the next, but they had always been bonded in some incomprehensible but tangible way. And she wanted Sabrina to acknowledge that bond – for Sabrina to say yes, we are sisters!
But her dreams had sped way ahead of her, and Afroz stood for a moment, blinking in the lamplight, trying to register what she saw. In front of her stood Sabrina in her coat, and a pair of pristine tan loafers. Her suitcase stood next to her, while behind her the open wardrobe revealed rows of shelves.
Empty shelves.
‘Are you leaving?’ Afroz asked, but even as she said the words, she understood that her question was a rhetorical one.
Sabrina wanted nothing more to do with her.
She looked at Sabrina and Sabrina looked back at her.
Neither said a word.
What more need Sabrina say, when she showed it so well in the way that she pushed past Afroz, dragging her suitcase down the hallway and stairs without so much as a glance back.
And now, seated in front of her open Quran Sharif, Afroz brooded on the cocktail of joy and pain that the night before had delivered to her. From the corner of her eye she saw a shadow on the stairs. Thinking it might be her aunt, she looked up in earnest only to see Nasrin bound down the stairs, two at a time, her brow lined in distress, her beautiful tresses unfurling from the loose bun at the nape of her neck. She had obviously just discovered Sabrina’s disappearance for herself.
Why was it, Afroz wondered, that some women are given such beauty, such grace. And that this beauty and grace then deliver the world to their feet: a marriage of love, a beautiful child and home, and all the freedom one could ever want. Afroz raised her hand and touched the edge of her hijab.
For the first time, she wondered what her adult life might have been like if she had grown up in the Beacons like Sabrina and Nasrin, without this piece of cloth. She had worn a scarf since she had been a child, she couldn’t remember her exact age – eleven or twelve – but she remembered the morning her veiled life began. It had been one of those cold winter mornings that Bangladeshis are never prepared for. She had walked to her Islamic studies, hugging her exercise book to her chest, trying to warm herself. But it hadn’t worked. The teacher had noticed and called her to his desk. In low, even tones, he berated Afroz and reminded her of the importance of Islamic modesty. She felt the eyes of her classmates digging into the very core of her more than the sting of her teacher’s words. Shame was being watched: shame was exposing yourself to voyeurs waiting to observe all the ways in which a woman could stumble into dishonour and ignominy.
She couldn’t now remember the name of the teacher, even his face was a blur, but she remembered his words: shame, shoythan, sinful, repeated again and again.
And all because of the small protrusions of her chest, and the fact that the silhouette of her kameez was no longer smooth and flat, but offensively voluptuous.
When she reached home, still red-faced and mortified, Ma had been surprisingly sympathetic, showing her how to tie a thin muslin cloth around her head so that the edges trickled delicately over the chest.
‘The trick is to hide the hair. There’s no point if the hair shows.’
‘Is hair sinful too, Ma?’ Afroz had asked.
What she had really wanted to ask was about the sinfulness of breasts. But those moments of camaraderie with Ma had been so rare that Afroz anxiously avoided any words that might bring back that other Ma, who was constantly on the brink of rage.
‘So many things are sinful these days,’ Ma had complained, her lips swimming in the harsh blood-orange of the betel juice from the paan she chewed. ‘But see, you use your dupatta to cover both your hair and your breasts, so people can’t shame you, like this teacher did today.’
As she stared at the Quran before her, Afroz realised that even though she had spent her life learning to keep shame at bay, it now overshadowed her: she was a bastard, born outside of a legitimate marriage, to parents who hadn’t wanted to keep her. What bigger shame could there be when her entire existence was steeped in it?
It had only been three years since Baba had turned up at her house, unannounced, and hesitantly unravelled her childhood. She had not been shocked by what he told her – the news that she had been adopted seemed, in some way, the last piece in a jigsaw she had long ago started putting together.
There had been many signs over the years. Masoom had never raised his hand to her, but it was different with her mother. Afroz’s childhood had been dominated by the bamboo cane that Amina kept behind the kitchen door: it was used to administer punishments ranging from whippings that merely stung to beatings that drew blood.
