Brick Lane by Monica Ali Read Free Book Online Page B

when it had been boiled all day with sugar. Abba sat on the choki, sang and clapped. He called out to them and took them on his lap, and sent them away with a rough kiss on the cheek. Then they walked around the lake to watch the fishermen pulling in great nets of silver fish, and saw the muscles knot on their arms and legs and chests. When she woke she thought I know what I would wish but by now she knew that where she wanted to go was not a different place but a different time. She was free to wish it but it would never be.
She did not often go out. 'Why should you go out?' said Chanu. 'If you go out, ten people will say, "I saw her walking on the street." And I will look like a fool. Personally, I don't mind if you go out but these people are so ignorant. What can you do?'
She never said anything to this.
'Besides, I get everything for you that you need from the shops. Anything you want, you only have to ask.'
She never said anything to this.
'I don't stop you from doing anything. I am westernized now. It is lucky for you that you married an educated man. That was a stroke of luck.'
She carried on with her chores.
'And anyway, if you were in Bangladesh you would not go out. Coming here you are not missing anything, only broadening your horizons.'
She razored away the dead flesh around his corns. She did not let the razor slip.
The days passed more easily now than at first. It was just a matter of waiting, as Amma always said. She had waited and now they passed more easily. If it wasn't for worrying about Hasina, she could call herself calm. Just wait and see, that's all we can do. How often she had heard those words. Amma always wiped away her tears with those words. When the harvest was poor, when her own mother was taken ill, when floods threatened, when Abba disappeared and stayed away for days at a time. She cried because crying was called for, but she accepted it, whatever it was. 'Such a saint,' Abba said. And then she died, and in dying proved life unpredictable and beyond control.
Mumtaz found her, leaning low over the sacks of rice in the store hut, staked through the heart by a spear. 'She had fallen,' said Mumtaz, 'and the spear was the only thing holding her up. It looked . . . It looked as if she was still falling.'
At the funeral Mumtaz said, 'Your mother was wearing her best sari. I think that's nice, don't you?'
After a mourning period, Abba took another wife. She appeared suddenly out of nowhere and Abba said, 'This is your new mother.' Four weeks later, just as suddenly, she went. She was never mentioned again.
'Your mother was wearing her best sari,' said Mumtaz. 'It's strange. It wasn't a special day, after all.'
She never spoke to Abba after that, not that Nazneen saw. She always kept back the choicest bits of meat for Nazneen and Hasina. She kissed them all the time, even though they were fourteen and twelve. And she talked about Amma, over and over, as if you could change something by talking about it. 'I don't know why those spears were in the store, and wedged like that. So dangerous.' Hasina always ran off when she started, but Nazneen just stayed and listened.
Razia moved to Rosemead block, two floors beneath the tattoo lady. Staying on the estate did not count as going out. Nazneen, on the short journey over from Seasalter House, began to strike up acquaintances. She nodded to the apoplectic man in vest and shorts who flung open his door every time she passed it in the harshly lit corridor. She smiled at the Bengali girls who chattered about boys at top volume on the stairs but fell silent as she passed. Razia introduced her to other Bengali wives on the estate. Sometimes they would call and drink tea with her. She enjoyed the company although most times she did not mention it to Chanu. She did not look at the group of young Bengali men who stood in the bottom of the stairwell, combing their hair and smoking or making loud, sudden hoots so that their voices bounded around the concrete shell of