WHEN PIYA AND HASSAN met the younger couple at the New Year’s picnic of the Bangladesh Association, they were delighted to have found another Bangladeshi family who lived inside the loop.
“All the Bangladeshis live in the suburbs,” Piya complained, standing on the dry grass in her red georgette sari and heels. They were surrounded by food stalls, and Bangla music blasted in the air. “They never come into the city. They don’t go to the parks or the museum or anything. Until today I thought we are the only ones living in the city.”
Hassan smiled at the younger couple in apology for his wife. “No need to judge,” he said.
A month later, Piya and Hassan were invited to visit their new friends. They pulled up in front of the brick colonial mansion in River Oaks, a wealthy neighborhood with its own country club, where the senior Bushes had lived. They hesitated before going inside. They themselves lived beside Brays Bayou in a modest, low-slung ranch house with rotting siding, a relic that had survived the sixties.
The younger woman stood at the door, smiling. “Come in, come in.”
“What is your name again?” Piya asked with an awkward whinny, and Hassan shut his eyes in embarrassment.
“Sruti. Apu, come in.” The woman spoke in a smooth, generous voice. A jasmine scent rose from her hair, which was cut to her chin, glossy and rich. She was dressed in a long black kaftan and high heels that clicked on the smooth floor. They stepped inside, awkwardly pulling off their shoes.
“What a big house!” Piya cried, raising her eyes to the high ceiling and almost falling on the slippery white marble.
Hassan had to catch her elbow in an ugly way. Beyond the foyer was a party hall that could hold at least fifty people, with draped sofas and shut curtains.
“Let’s sit in the informal family room. It’s cozy there,” Sruti said, leading the way.
Piya and Hassan followed mutely, their necks swiveling. Hassan, an architect, took in the layout. A staircase led upstairs. To the left, an open kitchen sparkled with chrome, leading to a wide family room overlooking the backyard through French doors.
“Very nice furniture!” Piya said appreciatively. She looked a little faint.
“Apu, I had all the furniture custom made and shipped from Italy,” Sruti said, tossing her hair. “It took several months.”
Sruti’s husband Nayeem came downstairs, clean-shaven in a collared polo shirt. His face was pale, with pretty white teeth. “Hello. Hello. Why are you standing? Please, sit.”
At his command, Hassan and Piya sat down at once on one of the smooth white sofas.
“Hassan Bhai, this house is a unique piece designed by a famous architect. You will appreciate this, as an architect yourself,” Nayeem said, clapping his thighs.
“Very nice,” Hassan agreed in a dry voice. He didn’t know why he suddenly felt gray in this bright, almost blinding open space.
Beside him, Piya rocked nervously on the edge of the luxurious white sofa, her hands laced in her lap.
Then things started to flow more smoothly. They had a tasty dinner of kebab and naan ordered from a Turkish restaurant, eating from plates on their laps in the family room. Afterward Sruti served dessert, placing floral teacups and matching dessert plates on the low coffee table. A glutton for sweets, Hassan stabbed a forkful of pastry and stuffed it in his mouth. The taste of cream, sugar, and flour with a hint of powdered milk catapulted him into childhood memories.
Nayeem had studied at the same school in Dhaka as Hassan, although they were four years apart. Both had played football in Abahani Field and walked to Nilkhet to buy secondhand textbooks, standing in the narrow alleys under shop canopies, haggling with shopkeepers as the scent of rain and earth mingled with the aroma of old books. Hassan described these memories, sitting with his legs apart and slurping his milk tea, sweet and comforting, the very best tea.
There was a pause in the conversation. The windows behind the sofas had darkened. Nayeem stood up and switched on the tall, shaded floor lamps, then sat back down opposite Hassan and Piya. “Do you know Bob T—? He is one of the brothers who own T—. He is our next-door neighbor.”
“Who are they?” Piya squeaked, her neck straining like an elastic band.
“Apu, you haven’t heard of them?” Sruti exclaimed. “They are the biggest construction company in Houston. They build everything!” She held Piya’s gaze steadfastly with narrow eyes. “They are an elderly couple, husband and wife. Such polite people, with regal necks and foreheads. Looking at them, you would know they are big people from a good family.”
“Anyway.” Hassan tried to turn the conversation back to the past, to what had brought them together in the first place, their shared memories of home. But Sruti and Nayeem appeared more interested in talking about Houston, the restaurants where they had dined, their wealthy neighbors—heirs of old families, tied to names of prestigious law firms and big companies. Hassan indulged them, trading names of places he knew, coffee shops, a barbecue shop that served halal meat, and a farmers market where you could pick up fresh vegetables.
Piya turned away and exhaled loudly. Hassan could tell she found this line of conversation dull. She looked down on small talk about the prices of onions and dal and practical advice about how to find an immigration lawyer or Bengali grocery items.
Hassan ignored Piya’s contortions and addressed Nayeem. “Do you remember the Aladdin sweetmeat shop on Mirpur Road, opposite Sukrabad? I used to stand there and ask for one roshogolla after another, gulping them down in their syrup.”
Sruti’s eyes lit up. “Nayeem bought our wedding sweets from that shop!” she cried. “He had sixty boxes of sweetmeats delivered to our home, because I love mishti!” Sruti began to tell the story of how she and Nayeem had met and married, how they had come to America together. They had gained admission to the same master’s program—extremely lucky—and then they had been hired by the same company—lucky again. Now they both worked at Lockheed Martin.
The room was dark, even with all the lights on. The backyard was covered in blackness. Hassan kept nodding. He slumped and sat up straight. He did not know what to do with his body in that space.
“We are very busy. One week, Nayeem is traveling. The next week I am gone,” Sruti bragged. She appeared prettier for being sharp, dealing in lethal weapons.
Nayeem threw his head back and laughed with his pretty little teeth. “As a senior person, there is no end to trips! I have to go see operations all around the world, in Germany, Tel Aviv.”
Piya chewed a chipped nail, bit off a tiny piece, and spat it out. Then she asked in a harsh voice, “What kind of work do you do?”
“I design. My work is classified.”
Piya’s eyes were fixed on Nayeem’s face, his gleaming teeth. Hassan was aware of her capacity to be rude, to throw a spanner in their relations with other people. He remembered now that even at the Bengali New Year’s picnic she had remarked that Nayeem was frightfully polished. “For every remark, the man responds with a glistening sentence. He has the appearance and manners of a wax doll,” she had said. Hassan didn’t know where Piya had acquired such a critical outlook on life. She had left her studies after her intermediate exams to accompany him to America, but for an uneducated person, her opinions were sharp and obstinate.
“This pastry is first class!” Hassan shouted before Piya could open her mouth again.
“Bhai, have more,” Sruti urged him. “The pastry is from an Israeli bakery in West University.”
She went on speaking, but Hassan’s ears were buzzing. His mind started to go blank. Perhaps he had eaten too many sweets.
“Are you all right, bhai? Shall I bring water?” Sruti asked, rising.
He took a sip from the glass she handed him and started to cough uncontrollably. Beside him, Piya sat immobile, clutching her purse, not uttering a sound of concern. “I’m all right,” Hassan replied with tears in his eyes.
“I’ll get more water,” Nayeem said, rising. “Or some other drink? Coca-Cola? Fanta? Jalisco? Topo Chico? We also have a SodaStream.”
“It’s okay. I just need some fresh air. May I?” Hassan headed for the French doors.
Outside, the lawn was dark, the air heavy with the scent of roses and wet grass.
Sruti shut the door behind him. “Mosquitos,” she said apologetically.
Alone in the fresh air, he felt better. If only he could vomit, he would really improve. He bent his knees and put his head down and remembered his architecture classmate Tamar. Tamar and her husband Noam used to rent a house in West University, near his apartment complex on North Braeswood. Tamar used to give him a ride to school every day, pulling up in her red Hyundai below his window and honking her horn, engine running, glamorous in her cheap black sunglasses. Tamar was the only student in the architecture studio who could pronounce Hassan’s name correctly, the only one who understood his English accent, so naturally they became close.
After Piya arrived in Houston to join him, Tamar and Noam would drop by the apartment, dark haired and slim, with big eyes and long lashes, carrying meals they had cooked, kibbeh or falafel or kebab. Piya and Hassan offered them fried piyaju, dal, and rice with deep-fried fish dipped in turmeric and salt. The four of them sat around the rickety dining table on folding chairs and put their fingers in the food greedily. Their foods were similar, Tamar said, with spices, with depth, and mutually comforting. After dinner, they sat lazily in their socks on the threadbare rug, hugging their knees and talking of back home.
But one day Piya said she felt uncomfortable consorting with Israelis, who had occupied the land of Palestinians, kicking them out of their homeland.
Hassan said, “What are you saying? Be broadminded!” He felt ashamed of her.
Piya pointed out that her Bangladeshi passport did not let her travel to Israel. Hassan got angry, saying she was provincial, these were their friends, they were in America now!
“Where are your Palestinian friends?” she taunted him, twisting her soft pink mouth. “You could also choose to make Palestinian friends in America! But why didn’t you?”
“Where will I find Palestinian friends? Do you expect me to go out on the road and grab a Palestinian friend? You become friends with those you are in proximity with!”
Piya rotated the gold ring in her nostril. “I don’t feel comfortable,” she repeated in a girlish, nasal voice.
Hassan was learning that Piya, pretty, shy, and docile as she was, her young body pliant under his, was also obstinate. “Do you want to attend the mosque? Perhaps you want to be with religious people? I am broadminded and not that religious.”
“You don’t have to insult me just because I am uneducated,” Piya said. “And whose fault is it that I have done nothing with my life?” She locked herself in their only bedroom for the rest of the day. His books were inside.
Nine months after this argument, Piya had an emergency C-section. A cancerous tumor had been growing in her womb with the fetus. It was Tamar and Noam who drove Piya and Hassan to the hospital. Two weeks later, Piya was still in the hospital. When Piya’s mother arrived to take care of the baby, it was Tamar and Noam again who drove Hassan to the airport to receive his mother-in-law. A month later, after Piya returned home, Tamar and Noam showed up at their apartment with a cake in a plastic box, a helium balloon, a plush monkey for the baby, and a bouquet of wet white lilies for Piya. They were dressed in identical thin T-shirts and faded blue jeans. They had walked all the way from their home in West University. Their necks and hair glistened with sweat.
“Hello, hello,” Tamar greeted Piya’s mother, her narrow face radiant and open.
Piya’s mother had been feeding the baby from a bottle, sitting on the stained blue sofa that Hassan had picked up from a dump. She stared at Tamar and Noam without recognition.
“Do you remember me?” Tamar asked, tossing her short, dark hair. “I brought you here from the airport.”
When Hassan reintroduced them as his friends, telling his mother-in-law that they were from Israel, she pulled her chiffon sari tightly around her body and clipped her lips together. Like daughter, like mother. She was a backward woman from a mofassal town, he thought, who had studied only up to class ten, but how could he explain all this to Tamar and Noam, to whom she was being so rude?
But Tamar only laughed. “That’s okay. I brought you some biscuits. Here they call them saltine crackers. Hassan said you like to bite these with your tea.”
The cool night breeze washed over Hassan’s face as these memories flooded him. What was Tamar doing now? After graduation, she had returned to Israel. To design new settlements? Or new prisons?
Nayeem emerged from the house, shutting the glass door behind him. “I thought I would join you, bhai. Just had to finish the tea first.” He reeked of perfume. “That’s the T—’s house. The family I was telling you about. Wherever you see construction equipment, check the logo. It will have their name. Builders of the future!” The stainless-steel band of his expensive watch gleamed in the dark as he pointed. The two-story mansion rose to meet the black clouds, a formidable castle.
To appear friendly, Hassan said, “There are a lot of exciting constructions happening in Houston. Houston is a rapidly changing city.” He chatted lightly about the expansion of parks, of sustainable urban spaces with native plants and structures made of recycled materials.
“Really?” Nayeem said with admiration in his voice.
“Houston is fast becoming a hip city like New York, a new metropolis,” Hassan went on, warming to his subject, the urban planning concepts he had studied in architecture school. “You can rent red bikes almost everywhere inside the loop and go cycling along the trails. Each year, they are connecting more and more of the bike paths, to make a walkable city with attractive public spaces, with farmers markets, music festivals, and art installations!”
“But bhai, aren’t there homeless people in these places?” Nayeem asked.
Hassan shook his head. “No, no, it is safe. They cleared all those places.” He himself had been surprised to see all the homeless settlements gone. Only a few years ago, homeless people used to shelter in makeshift tents under I-45 near Buffalo Bayou, but now their shopping carts, bags, and blue tarps were gone. When their son Jewel was in fifth grade, Piya had struck up a friendship with the mother of one of Jewel’s classmates, Margaret. Margaret got Piya involved with her project to feed homeless people. She used to buy bananas and distribute them to men and women who would come to the public library. Piya had become friends with some of them. She had cried when the program ended abruptly one day. The homeless people had been evicted overnight and were nowhere to be seen.
Once, when Hassan had been going on as usual about what he had studied in school, Piya had laughed in his face. “Your urban planning is flawed!” she shouted at him. “You have to clear out people to make a city beautiful!” Hassan was used to Piya making offhand remarks without thinking, but he could not get her words out of his head.
The door opened again, and Piya and Sruti came outside to stand on the porch with the men.
“That’s the T—’s house.” Sruti pointed at the dark fence dividing the two houses. Her jasmine scent spread in the air. “They have such beautiful trees. Camellias, Texas redbud, magnolias.”
“We need to get going.” Hassan gestured to Piya. She was the only one he could bear to face now. He felt tender toward her suddenly. He was remembering her face when he had married her, a young bride with red lips, her hair tied in two braids with red ribbons. He turned to Nayeem and Sruti. “Our son Jewel is at home alone. We just recently started leaving him by himself. He turned twelve,” he explained.
“You will leave already?” Sruti said, disappointment in her face. “First have another cup of tea, bhai. You have to drive a long way. Better get some caffeine in your system.”
“No, no, most kind. Have to work early tomorrow.”
“He has to go to Acres Homes early in the morning to take some pictures. His firm is starting a new project,” Piya explained.
Nayeem’s black pupils shone with interest. “Really? I have heard there is a lot of empty land there, just horses and chickens, pristine land for the taking. Hassan Bhai, do you recommend buying a property there as investment? I have a bit of extra money—”
Hassan nodded mildly, as if to say yes to all the questions. Last time, he had gone to the project site in the middle of the day. Foolish idea. Acres Homes was a historically Black neighborhood going back to at least the First World War. Each acre-sized lot was green, girded by tall trees, with children, horses, and chickens running free under the bright spring sun. Loud music blasted from a carwash, and a few elderly men had been sitting outside a rundown house smoking, beer bottles in their palms, laughing. The old men resembled Hassan’s father, with their scraggly beards and shining eyes and white undershirts. Seeing Hassan with his rolled-up shirtsleeves and clean-shaven face, the only person there who was not Black, not a known face, they had asked him what he was doing, encircling him. He didn’t have to say anything. His camera gave him away, and the company name on his baseball hat. They shouted angry words about gentrification at him, spit flying, and seized his camera.
At the office, he received a big talking-to from his boss for getting caught. They were nervous because a year ago another project had to be stopped, a multipurpose high-rise in the upscale museum district, because the residents didn’t want a high-rise in their neighborhood. But Hassan didn’t feel this was the same situation. The people of Acres Homes were poor. They didn’t have the political clout of the owners in the museum district. When those men in Acres Homes had been shaking their fingers at him, he had felt inflamed by their passion. He wanted to join them outside that shack, with bottles in their hands, legs apart, just chatting. Their raised voices ringing in his ears reminded him of his architecture professors’ words and the theories of urban planning he had studied with an expanding heart, about the displacement of poor people and people of color from historic working-class neighborhoods as the rich started to move back to city centers. For the first time since he had started working at the architecture firm, Hassan felt light, buoyed by the angry voices of the men of Acres Homes. His mind cleared and he saw the city as it could be, people living together, laughing and talking outside among trees and overgrown grass, raising their glasses to one another and keeping an eye out for one another. He wanted his firm’s project to fail.
Nayeem was still talking.
“We have to go!” Hassan croaked.
Thankfully, Piya followed him immediately as he marched to the door. Sruti and Nayeem followed them to the driveway, calling after them to stay a little longer.
“Bhai, at least take some coffee to help with the drive,” Sruti called. “Are you sure you will be all right?” She held her hands together below her chin, as young and sweet as Piya had once been.
But no. Piya had never been sweet. Young, yes, but a thorn. “Get in!” he whispered to her. “No, no. Ei to,” he called back toward the house. “It’s just twenty minutes away.”
Piya and Hassan climbed into the weather-beaten Hyundai. He had bought the car from Tamar and Noam ten years ago when they left Houston. He and Tamar had been sitting together in the graduate architecture studio on the yellow sofa they had shared over two years, cleaning their materials, when Tamar said he could have their car. When Hassan asked why she was leaving—she had job offers from several leading firms in Houston—her answer had been simple. “It’d be so boring to work here. I would be doing the same job as everyone else. I want to go home, where I matter, where what I do matters.” Then she asked, “And you? Will you live here?”
Why was he still here? Because Piya had been scared her cancer would come back. She was convinced that she would die if she lived more than a few miles from Houston’s medical center. And that was it, his whole existence, boiled down to a restricted space, as if they had never left the hospital, never put away that incident. It was such a colorless way to live, compared to the future Tamar had painted, of going back home to build one’s country. And yet, as Piya had pointed out, building meant building over.
The car rattled as he backed down the driveway. Piya waved to their new young friends, whose shining faces glowed in the headlights. Then she rolled up the window and remarked, “We don’t have much in common with them. I hope we never see them again.”
“They were being nice! Why do you have such a caustic tongue? If you socialize, just socialize. No need to analyze every little thing!” he cried angrily.
They were quiet for a while.
“Sorry,” Hassan said when they were on the main road, their lonely car passing under the muted streetlights of the wealthy neighborhood with its tall trees.
“For what?” Piya asked in a small voice.
“For everything,” he said in the dark. “For bringing you here to America, away from your family and everything you knew, so I could study architecture.”
Again, he remembered her lovely young face when he had married her, red and sundrenched, her oil-soaked hair tied in a thick plait at the back of her head. She had been nineteen, had just sat for her intermediate exams and gained admission to the sociology department at Dhaka University, had started taking classes. He felt gripped by a longing for that innocent girl. Perhaps they could make love that night. He could hold her close and run his hands over her body and forget all else, the rest of the world, all the inconvenient questions.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked, touching his forehead with the back of her hand.
He nodded. “I was thinking of Tamar and Noam,” he said softly. He had meant to say, I was remembering my architecture professors, all the hope I had, how bright -eyed I was. But Tamar and Noam were shorthand for all these dreams.
“What were you thinking about them?” Piya asked. She didn’t remind him of how she had disliked them, how she had been opposed to their friendship.
“I wonder what she is doing now,” he said simply.
“My God!” cried Piya suddenly, as if she had not heard him. “That Sruti and Nayeem are unbelievable! They are designing weapons for Lockheed Martin to murder Palestinian children!”
“I was thinking about Tamar and Noam,” Hassan began again, trying to get the conversation back on stable ground.
Before Tamar and Noam left America, they had walked over to the apartment one day, with a plastic toy for the baby, a John Deere bulldozer. They sat in the dark living room on the stained blue sofa talking in soft tones about the Iraq war that threatened to start at any moment, the four of them held by the halo of a cheap plastic lamp.
Noam thought the war was a travesty, that the WMDs were a lie, a pretext for invasion. Tamar laughed, raking her long fingers through her black hair. “Of course they don’t have WMDs. But it would be very good for Israel if the US bombed Iraq.”
Hassan had laughed with Tamar. He found her funny—and honest. But Piya had fought with him after they left, and she refused to see them after that, not even for their goodbye party.
“Please,” he had begged. “They invited everyone. They wanted to see you and Jewel, especially. They love you.”
“Oh? What do you think they will do now? Tamar is going back to her homeland to build it by kicking Palestinians out of their homes with bulldozers and making way for more settlements. Why don’t you go? Enjoy yourself. I’m going to bed. I have a headache.”
How could he have forgotten she had said that? How could he expect her to understand his despondence now, or even care? He had brought her here to America. But also, he was stuck here because of her. He was nothing now because of her, not even a real architect putting his vision to use. Or had he simply misunderstood the world, mistaken theory for practice? He glanced at her. Could he forgive her? Were they just two helpless people caught in a world they could only gape at, as they had gaped at that young shining couple’s house, as he had done at Acres Homes, taking in the slow beauty of the place he and his firm were about to destroy? She sat shrouded in shadows, her dark lashes covering her cheeks, which were raised in a half smile.
She began to speak again, in a high voice. “My friend Margaret told me about how European settlers colonized America and killed the native people, and now we live on those lands. We immigrants ignore everything, occupation and massacre and gentrification, and just focus on our careers! The only people I respect are the ones I used to meet at the homeless project. Do you understand? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Yes,” Hassan agreed, rubbing his forehead. “You are right about everything. I just have a headache.”
“Are you feeling guilty about that project at Acres Homes? Are you having second thoughts?” Her eyes bored into his profile in the dark. “I think that’s why you have a headache, from a guilty conscience.” She laughed at her own joke, a raw, high sound.
Hassan laughed too. Her cruel words made him feel better. He loosened his grip on the steering wheel. “I was thinking of the big dreams I had when I studied architecture and the small job I have now. I don’t even earn enough to give you a house like Sruti and Nayeem’s.”
“No matter what job you have, I’m sure it’s not as small as theirs,” Piya said with emotion. She patted his arm.
They exited River Oaks at the crossroads with Shepherd and turned left. Ahead, a group of police officers was gathered under the Plexiglas shade of a bus stop. A line of police cars blocked the right lane, lights flashing.
Piya pressed her forehead against the window. “What’s happening?”
Hassan could make out a skeletal man in ragged clothes lying on the pavement. His long hair hung about his face like a crown. One of the officers prodded him with a baton to wake him. The man rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
“Ish,” Piya cried. “The poor guy. Slow down a little so I can see.”
Hassan tapped the break, but after a moment he kept on driving, because there was nothing they could do. They had to keep moving forward with the traffic.
Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13 Books) and the story collection Katy Family (Jackleg). Her fiction is out or forthcoming in Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener Award for Fiction and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship.
Photo by Getty Images, obtained from Unsplash+
