Chapter 19
Contrary to my expectations, almost no one is attempting to eavesdrop in the living room. I bet I can thank Nanu for that. She must have roped Resna and Arif into helping her wash the dishes. But Amma is sitting on the couch.
The hopeful butterflies fluttering in my belly gain wings of wax when our eyes meet, hers ablaze with grim determination. I clutch my stomach as I force my legs to take me to the couch and sit. Her hand splays across my back, rubbing up and down my spine.
“Amma, please—”
“Don’t make me do this, Zahra,” she pleads. “Don’t force me to be the evil mother who has to tell you no.”
“Why do you have to, though?” I demand.
“You’re so young. You don’t understand the ways of the world yet.”
“That didn’t stop you from setting me up with Harun!” I yell, surging to my feet despite my original intention to keep it down so no one else could listen in. I can’t help it, though. Her hypocrisy makes me fume. “Why am I old enough for marriage with Harun, but not getting to know Nayim? I like him and he believes in my dreams.”
“It’s because of your dreams that I want Harun for you,” she replies quietly.
My eyelids fly apart. It’s the first time in years that I’ve brought up writing with her, though she’s seen me working on it recently and has only bothered to comment that I shouldn’t stay up too long doing it, clearly prioritizing my job. What could she possibly mean about Harun making my dreams come true? “How does that make any sense? How would becoming his wife at eighteen help me with college or writing?”
“Harun can take care of you!” When I start at her harsh words, she grows soft again, reaching to take my hand in hers. I’m too shaken to stop her from pulling me back down next to her. “You don’t think I’ve seen you writing by the light of your laptop so late at night? You think I haven’t seen those pamphlets of universities you hide around your room? Of course I have, and I’ve always wished I could give you those things, Zahra, but I can’t. Not by myself. I also know, if Harun loves you, he can. Let you go to college. Support the family while you write.”
In a convoluted way, it makes sense.
Baba took care of her when he was alive. When she lost him, she lost more than just her husband. She lost her entire sense of self and had to find it again. Remake herself again. She’s a very different person now from the one she was two years ago. Overnight, she went from a housewife to a single working mother.
In her generation, it’s not uncommon for many women to want nothing more than to be mothers and wives. Sometimes because they choose it, to which I say more power to them. But many times, because it’s all they know. It’s all she knows.
It’s the only future she can imagine where I’ll be safe and happy.
“But I don’t want someone else to let me do things, Amma,” I answer, glaring at the coffee table, which was cleared of everything but her sewing machine when Nayim came. “I can support myself, the way Nayim does, if I have to. I’ve already been working—”
“I know,” she interrupts. “How do you think I feel, seeing you throw your childhood away to help me keep a roof over our heads? I don’t want to watch you struggle forever, shuna. I refuse to. What’s more, I don’t think you will feel the same way about Nayim when you’re, what, following him from Paterson to his next destination, begging for change on the streets? You won’t feel the same about writing, either. You’ll be too tired for dreams.”
My whole body goes cold. “How long have you known about Nayim?”
“Long enough,” Amma replies wearily, pupils flitting toward her phone on the coffee table. I glare at it. Of course, the Auntie Network has always been a step ahead of me. “When I first heard about it, I hoped he was just a passing curiosity, but after the way you looked at him tonight…” She shakes her head. “You’re more like me than either of us want to admit. I couldn’t let go of your father, either.”
“What?” I gasp. “Baba?”
My mother’s smile is tired and sad. “We met when he came to my boro sasa’s bari to meet my oldest cousin. Although his family couldn’t offer much money, your father would go to America someday, like his brother. We all knew that. How could we not, with how often my Jui Afa boasted about how he’d bring her along once they married?”
A dozen responses claw up my throat, only to dissolve like acrid salt on my tongue. She’s avoided talking about Baba since his death, but even before then, neither of them revealed much about how they met. Anytime I’d prompted them, their wedding album in my lap, my father would only chuckle and say he’d tell me when I was older, while Amma would claim their parents introduced them, as was good and proper. I would then lug the heavy thing back to my own bed and stare in wonder at their unlined faces.
As I grew older, it became clear that they hadn’t had a luxurious ceremony. But despite the old Bengali adage that a bride should cry on her wedding day, in mourning for her previous life, beneath the veil of Amma’s shari, her crimson lips had been curved in a subtle smile.
“What happened?” I finally ask, curiosity stamping out my anger enough that I unintentionally scoot closer to her on the couch. “How did you two meet?”
“We bumped into each other on the way to Jui Afa’s,” Amma whispers like a confession. “I knew it was wrong to like him, especially when I’d been tasked to make a dress for Jui that would take his breath away. But he was so handsome, and he looked at me, listened to me, in a way no one else ever had with my pretty cousin around. He saw me as more than the always-underfoot, fatherless burden I’d become to my family, so when he asked my boro sasa if I was of marriageable age, I begged him and your nanu to let us be together.”
“So you and Baba were… a love match?”
My voice sounds distant to my own ears. The living room spins as I peer around it without truly seeing, my thoughts tumbling.
After everything she and the other aunties proclaimed at that wedding, after the way she’s been intent on matchmaking me with Harun and orchestrating our future marriage, could it be true that she and Baba were a love match all along?
When I try to think back to how they acted with each other before his death, the memories surface bloated beyond recognition. I try to remember a sign of affection—of true love—between them and come up short.
“Yes,” she replies. “We couldn’t ‘date’ like you are with Harun. Within a week of knowing each other, arrangements had been made for us to marry. Jui Afa seethed, but her father had the final say, and he would no longer have to take care of his brother’s widowed wife or daughter if I became someone else’s responsibility.” A humorless laugh escapes her. “It was because of my cousin’s stories that I imagined America would be some fairy-tale land. That we would never want for anything in such a plentiful place.” Her eyes lift and hold mine. “She never forgave me until your father died. I’ve often wondered if her bodwa tainted our future together from the start, because in America, we found only hardship.”
Her words send a pang of hurt through my chest.
“Were things that bad?” I grit out.
Sure, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows when Baba was alive. He worked six days a week at a local factory and we barely saw him, but while we still rented too-small apartments and I still couldn’t splurge on the latest phones or clothes, we ate out whenever Amma didn’t feel like cooking, went on trips together during vacations, never worried about the power getting cut off.
Back then, I used to ask if I could get a job for extra spending money, and he wouldn’t let me, wanting me to focus on my studies, on being his little girl for a while longer.
The whole rest of your life will be full of struggles, he’d say, so let me protect you from them for a little while longer. For as long as I can.
My mother’s revelation that our life was not simply imperfect, but bad for her, feels like a betrayal of my father and everything he did for us.
For her.
Amma reaches for me again, but I shrink against the opposite arm of the couch. Her hand freezes midair as she gusts a sigh. “I know you’re a romantic, shuna. But love isn’t the same in reality as it is in your books or Nanu’s natoks. It can’t fill your belly or give you a comfortable life like becoming an Emon could.”
A thick lump rises in my throat. I shake my head to dislodge it, refusing to fall under her spell this time. “You can’t decide what I want for me. I can’t be happy as no more than some rich guy’s prize, no matter how much he might dote on me.”
Amma falls silent, and I hope that’s that. That she will let me march off to bed and maybe tackle the issue again tomorrow, or let it go altogether, if I’m lucky.
Then she says, with all the velvet gentleness of a rose’s petals, “As the oldest, you can’t only think of your future, Zahra. Especially without your father to help us. As an Emon, you’ll have status and someone to take care of you the way I can’t, yes, but so will Arif and Resna. When it’s time to find them suitable matches, people will remember their brother-in-law, the engineer, whose family owns several successful businesses.”
“But—”
Her grip tightens on her knees and the thorns come out. “If, instead, you fool around with a boy like Nayim, lost in your happiness now , there will be a black mark on our family’s reputation forever. We’ll always be the Khans who lost their money in Bangladesh and their self-respect out West. Don’t give up a perfect match for a summer fling.”
“Amma…” My voice breaks. It takes several minutes to piece it back together into some semblance of comprehensibility. “I think I could love him.”
“But I know you love our family,” she answers. “I know this is for the best. Love comes with a price like everything else. I don’t want you to end up like your grandmother and me, paying it for the rest of your life.”
She moves to hold me, and I almost allow it, because my heart is splintering into a million jagged shards that I can’t possibly pick up all by myself without cutting my fingers on them. But I’m too angry, and she’s not the one I need right now.
“I’m tired,” I tell her coldly, raising my palms to halt her in her tracks. “I’m going to bed, if you don’t need me to give up anything else for you.”
She flinches but doesn’t stop me as I march off to the bathroom and lock the door. Only then do I let the tears fall, but I’m already calling Harun.
He picks up after three rings. “Khan? Are we call-each-other friends now? Because my parents might get the wrong idea if they catch—” All traces of teasing evaporate, however, when he hears my shuddery inhale. “What’s wrong?”
“We have to crank Operation Zahrun into high gear,” I say. “We have to break up now .”
Because until he’s out of the picture for good, Amma will never give Nayim a chance.