Brick Lane (9 page)

She enjoyed seeing Razia the most. Razia always had stories to tell. She was a mimic, a big bony clown. And there was no harm in her. She looked funny and she looked at you funny too but really she was kind-hearted. It took Nazneen's mind off Hasina when she went to visit Razia. The last letter she got from Hasina had been nearly six months ago. It was short and it was written in a scrawl, not her usual neat hand.

My sister I have your letter. It mean so much to me know you are well and husband also. Love is grow between you I feel it. And you are good wife. I maybe not good wife but is how I try for always. Only it very hard sometime. Husband is do very well at his work. He have already promotion. He is good man and very patient. Sometime I make him lose patience without I mean to. He comes soon to home and I getting ready for him now. God bless you. Hasina

Nazneen had written three more times, but nothing came back. It's the postal system, Chanu told her, maybe she doesn't get your letters either. It was beginning to eat her. Razia was a good distraction.

'You know the one – with the big puffed-up fringe that goes over to the side like this.' Razia made a dramatic sweeping gesture across her forehead with her big-knuckled hand. 'He hangs around the staircase on your block, even though he's supposed to be at college.' She broke off to cuff Tariq around the back of the head for pulling his sister's hair, then cuffed at Shefali for trying to grab her teacup. The children ran off to console each other.

'His father saw him in a pub with a white girl. He was just walking down the street and there they were in the window, drinking and everything in full view. You'll recognize the boy next time you see him. He has two black eyes.'

'These kids!' said Nazneen.

Razia smiled and looked sideways at her through narrowed eyes. Nazneen felt her neck get warm. The boys were probably her age, maybe a year or two younger.

'Well, Jorina's boy is in trouble. I heard that he drinks alcohol every day, even for breakfast. He can't get out of bed unless he has a drink first, and then he's good for nothing.' Razia shivered her large bony shoulders. 'It makes me fear for my own children.'

'But Jorina goes out to work, and you are at home. Anyway, Tariq and Shefali are so well behaved. And only very small.'

'Yes, but growing so fast. Did you see Tariq's trousers, up around his ankles?'

'Jorina has a daughter as well, I think.'

'Aaah,' said Razia. Her eyes lit up. She crossed one ankle over the other, both legs sticking straight out in front of her on the floor. She adjusted the folds of her sari. The folds were never right: too bunched, too loose, too far to the side, too low or too high. Razia would look better in overalls. Overalls would match her big shoes. 'She does have a daughter. You met her. She was here one day when you came. She had her school uniform on – maroon jumper and grey skirt. You remember? But she won't be coming any more. They have sent her back.'

'To be married?'

'Of course, to be married and to live in the village.'

'They took her out of school?'

'She is sixteen. She begged them to let her stay and take her exams . . .' Razia went quiet and knocked her shoes together. 'Anyway,' she said briskly, 'the brother has gone bad, and they wanted to save the daughter. So there it is. Now she can't run off for a love marriage.'

Nazneen put her hand on the radiator. It was off although there were icy patterns on the window. The room was almost square, like her own sitting room, with a door to the hallway and another to the bathroom. Half the space was filled with children's paraphernalia: plastic toys, colonies of dismembered dolls, a small and rusting bike, a high chair folded against the wall, two neat piles of children's clothes, an array of footballs in various states of deflation, a child-size wooden table covered in crayon scribbles. A single bed stood against one wall, and the other furniture crowded together beneath the window, so that the arms of the chairs and sofa touched one another. Tariq slept in the single bed, and Shefali still slept with her parents. There was space to grow.
'Three point five people to one room. That's a council statistic,' Chanu told Nazneen. 'All crammed together. They can't stop having children, or they bring over all their relatives and pack them in like little fish in a tin. It's a Tower Hamlets official statistic: three point five Bangladeshis to one room.'

'The heating's broken. My husband called the council but no one has come.' Razia shrugged and pointed to a two-bar electric heater in the corner. That's it, for now.'

'My sister made a love marriage.' Nazneen looked at the lacy frost on the glass.

'Wait,' said Razia. She got to her feet. 'Let me check on the children. I want to hear everything. So when I come back, you can start at the beginning.'

Nazneen told her everything. About Hasina and her heart-shaped face, her pomegranate-pink lips and liquid eyes. How everyone stared at her, women and men and children, even when Hasina was only six years old. And how the older women began to say, even before she turned eleven, that such beauty could have no earthly purpose but trouble. Amma would cry, and say it was no fault of hers. Abba looked grim, and said that was certainly true, which made her cry harder. And, all in all, it was a fact that being beautiful brought hardship, though nobody would think it, and it was sheer good luck that the marriage turned out all right. 'Her husband has a First Class job with the railway company.'

'Any children?'

Nazneen hesitated. Perhaps there was a baby. That was why Hasina was too busy to write. She might have sent another letter saying she was expecting, and the letter got lost and then she didn't have time to write again. 'Perhaps. Yes, that's possible,' she said, and wanted to add something more but did not.

Razia was not really listening. She sighed. 'It's so romantic.' She stiffened her back, then pretended to rummage in the sleeve of her cardigan and blow her nose. 'But when I was a young girl,' she said, making her voice hard and pumping out the words like darts from a blowpipe, 'we didn't have any of this nonsense. I only left our family compound with my mother and we rode in a palanquin. Four bearers carried us to the house of my mother's father. And it was a journey of six hours. If one of them had dared lift the curtain and catch a glimpse, that man . . .' Razia made a strangled screech and slashed a finger across her throat.

Nazneen laughed. 'But poor Mrs Islam. We shouldn't make fun.'

'Poor Mrs Islam, nothing,' said Razia, dabbing her eyes. 'So romantic' She got up because her daughter was calling from the bedroom. 'But Shefali will make a love marriage over my dead body.'

Regular prayer, regular housework, regular visits with Razia. She told her mind to be still. She told her heart, do not beat with fear, do not beat with desire. Sometimes she managed it, when she stopped thinking of her sister. If she wanted something, she asked her husband. But she deferred to him. Like this:

'The bed is so soft. Does it make your back ache?'

'No.'

'It is not too soft for you?'

'No.'

'Good.'

'I am making a sketch.'

'Let me see. What is it?'

'A plan for the house I will build in Dhaka. What do you think of it?'

'What shall I say? I am only a girl from the village and I know nothing of big houses.'

'Do you think it is too grand?'

'I don't know anything about houses, or beds.'

'What about the bed? Is it too soft for you?'

'It does not matter.'

'Tell me if it makes your back hurt.'

'It does not matter.'

'Can't you tell me anything?'

'I don't mind. I can sleep on the floor.'

'Now you are being ridiculous.'

'I'll get a bedroll. That is what we village girls are used to. Of course, when our child is born, he will sleep on the floor with his mother.'

'What? Are you . . . ?'