The Newlyweds (3 page)

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.

3
She 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 life 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.

“See what Nasir has done for us,” her father said, turning from the sink with his face half shaved. “A perfect fit.”

Amina looked down and saw that Nasir’s book was neatly wedged underneath the left side of the table’s round base.

“That book is about Islam,” her mother said.

But her father spoke English, as if her mother weren’t even there. “Something happened to Nasir’s brain in London,” he said. “Maybe he is leaving it over there. That is why I am glad my daughter will be going to U.S.A.”

4
When Amina had arrived in March, she’d met the majority of George’s very small family right away. They had dinner with George’s mother, Eileen, every Sunday night, and often Eileen’s sister, Aunt Cathy, would show up to join them. One of the first things Amina noticed about Cathy was the way she kept glancing at the diamond engagement ring on Amina’s left hand. The ring was a family heirloom—it had belonged to Eileen and Cathy’s mother—and so of course she could see how Cathy resented it going to Amina.

“That looks so lovely on your hand,” Eileen had said, perhaps because she’d noticed Cathy staring, too. She turned to her sister: “George had to take it down two sizes, and I always thought Mother’s fingers were thin.”

“Eileen and I always said it would go to George when he married,” Cathy informed Amina. “He was the boy. Even if Kim were going to marry”—she gave a short, barking laugh—“and I’ve given up hope,
she
wouldn’t wear something like that. A blood diamond, she called it.”

“It’s an antique,” George said. “You can’t put it back in the ground.”

“Exactly,” Cathy had said, smiling tightly. “That’s what I would’ve told her.”

Aunt Cathy and her husband, an alcoholic and a “deadbeat dad,” had divorced soon after they’d adopted Kim, and so Cathy had raised her daughter almost entirely on her own. Because she couldn’t rely on Kim’s adoptive father for money, she’d started her own business washing other people’s dogs. That had seemed to Amina like a poor, almost Deshi sort of enterprise—something you invented with your own hands because you didn’t have any other capital. But George said that Cathy didn’t wash the dogs herself: she had three trucks and six Cuban employees who traveled around Rochester from house to house.

Amina had been extremely eager to meet Kim, not only to thank her for prompting George to look online for a mate, but simply because George’s cousin sounded so interesting. She’d been disappointed to learn that Kim was away when she arrived and wouldn’t be back until just before the wedding. Aunt Cathy and George had both apologized profusely for Kim’s absence, though in different ways.