The rain pooled outside the house in Katy as Simi poured the food into warmers for the party. This was the problem with Katy that she had discovered when they moved to Houston: if it rained, floods became an immediate concern. All their Bengali friends had recommended buying a house in Katy, the suburb to the west of the city which had become home to the never-ending flow of fossil fuel engineers to Houston. The subdivision had expanded past Cincho Ranch to new territories, over prairie lands and rice paddies where field mice had once roamed. Simi and Sumon had bought a modest house in Cinco Ranch, three bedrooms, one extra to accommodate an occasional guest. Sumon thought they could have bought something grander. The houses in the new subdivisions were much larger: six bedrooms, three garages, two stairways, Roman Columns, and Mediterranean balconies reaching out to the sky. Whenever he drove past these new mansions, Sumon stared at them with awe. They seemed to him to be death defying, as if the massiveness of the houses and the sheer number of rooms could secure one from the world outside.
Sumon poked his head in the kitchen. “Everything ready?”
Simi nodded. She was used to working quietly and steadily, like a squirrel. Everything was planned and neatly done. She had bought a dozen warmers for parties just like these when they had lived in Louisiana. She had brought the warmers with her to Houston when they had moved.
“Don’t mention to anyone that it’s Maria’s birthday,” she reminded Sumon as she set candles under the warmers and lit them with a stove lighter.
Had she been around, Maria, just turned eight, would have protested and made a fuss at hearing this, and Simi would have had to turn on her and scold her. Thankfully, the child had settled down to play on the computer in her room. Usually, Maria refused to do anything quiet, like watch TV. She liked to prance about the house and make a mess, pulling flour out of the pantry for her chemistry experiments or cutting up paper in odd shapes and spilling them all over the floor. Her anticipation of the birthday party and her friends arriving had helped to buy her cooperation for a few hours.
The sky darkened, and the rain drummed more loudly, sounding ominously in the dark. The wind whistled, lashing the saplings in the yard. The crepe myrtle, the only mature tree on the lot, creaked dangerously. Just a few weeks ago, acting on advice from her neighbors, Simi had made Sumon call a tree service company to cut down the two oak trees, lest they fall on the house during a storm. She was glad of it now.
As it grew closer to eight, Simi began to worry that the rain would upset everything. No one would be able to drive through the heavy downpour and the party would be canceled. But the first guests began to arrive on time, right on cue, at eight, running from their cars with umbrellas, shaking off wet saris and squishy shoes, the men carrying the children, one in each arm. There were umbrellas everywhere. Sumon hurried to get these off the wood floor and find a place for them, because Simi was particular about such things. He dragged a big plastic sheet for the wet shoes and dripping umbrellas. It was a mess, and most of the guests were flustered and out of temper.
“It was impossible to see on the road. So dangerous!”
“Almost got into an accident!”
Simi and Sumon stood at the door, receiving their guests, commiserating and soothing.
“Maria, your friends are here!” Simi called. “Take them to your room.”
It was the custom for the children to disappear upstairs to the den or into various rooms, separated by age and gender, where they would pose no trouble.
Maria, a stout and pretty girl, came out of her room now wearing a heavy brocade party dress and scratching her neck from the itchy fabric, her mouth downturned and her thick eyebrows raised, her little brown hands poised on her hips in an extreme expression of suffering. She was under orders not to reveal that this was her birthday party. Her bright black eyes pooled with intelligence, expressing everything, if only someone would ask.
Simi’s closest friend in Houston was Bithi. Bithi’s two daughters, twins, were Maria’s age and her best friends. The other children had arrived with tablets and chargers and were already demanding the password, which Sumon had presciently taped onto the back of the front door so that he only had to point. But Bithi’s two children liked to play without technology, like Maria. The three got along well.
Bithi entered the house complaining of a sore throat. “Sorry we’re late. I had to take a Tylenol to lie down first.” She was dressed in a heavy blue sari and blouse, with a silver choker at her throat, her hair pulled back from her round face in a ponytail.
“You look very nice,” Simi said, taking her by the hand to ease her inside her home.
Bithi paused near the shoes and umbrellas to talk more. “Oof. It was so difficult getting the twins ready. One ran this way and the other said I have to play first. One said, I have to finish my dolls’ birthday party! I had to lock them both up in a room in the end and dress them by force while they were screaming!”
Simi laughed. Bithi was always telling funny stories about her travails with her children. But Bithi was blocking the door to other guests, so Simi nudged her gently toward the kitchen.
Soon, the inner quarters of the house pooled with women in silk saris and three-piece satin outfits and dangling fashion jewelry crying out in mutual admiration, until no one could hear the rain anymore.
“Appetizers are served,” Simi said, bringing down plastic bowls and spoons from the high cupboards, standing on a metal ladder.
“Need any help?” one of the women asked.
“No. Everything is ready. Being tall, I’m able to reach the high cupboards easily, and being thin, I can bend down to the low cupboards,” Simi joked. She was overly skinny, so she wasn’t bragging.
“How is the gym going?” someone asked.
“Good. I go every day to build muscles, so I can carry you all in case of a flood,” she said, working as she talked. She was dressed efficiently, in a no-nonsense kameez and shalwar and house slippers that would allow her to work fast without obstruction.
“Ooh, it’s warm in here. Come, let’s sit down for a little.” Bithi withdrew from the heat of the kitchen, where the other women were still serving themselves fried spicy things and tomato chutney. She walked to the adjacent dining area and sank into one of the tall chairs arranged around the high round table. “Sit, sit.” She waved some women to her, who hesitated before sitting down at the table.
She poured herself lemonade from the jug into a blue plastic cup placed on the table. Her hands shook. “No one knows how difficult it is to raise two kids. It’s very hard on me.”
“Are you all right?” a young woman asked as Bithi raised her trembling hand with the cup to beaded lips. “Your hands are trembling.”
“I have had hypertension since the twins were born. It was so difficult when they were newborns. I had tremendous heartburn, so I could not lie down at night. I would walk around all night with one of them in my arms. Oh, those days…what shall I say? They were terrible. I cannot describe them to you.”
“Are those real glass bangles?” the young woman interrupted her.
Someone snickered and moved away. Bithi was fond of talking about her difficult pregnancy and childbirth. It was a constant refrain with her. Her face was swollen, and her body heavy and round. She had difficulty breathing in the heavy silk sari and blouse and panted to get her breath back. Simi’s other friends often gossiped about her, that she should just exercise instead of reveling in her bad health. Others joked and said, “She acts like she’s the only one raising kids. Haven’t we raised kids ourselves?”
When she had laid out the dinner, fanned out on the kitchen counter in a mixture of colors and steam, topped by cilantro, vertically positioned red and green chili peppers, and chocolate-brown caramelized onions, Simi asked Sumon to call the men first. Sumon’s mother had just passed away two months ago after suffering for years from kidney failure, so Simi checked his face to see if he was holding up okay. He had flown back to Bangladesh in June when she had been taken ill and turned right back after the funeral. He had never spoken a word about it after returning to Houston. She hadn’t seen him shed a tear. They were throwing Maria’s birthday party two weeks after her actual birthday, as soon as they could manage after he returned from his mother’s funeral.
The women had served the children the pizza from boxes flayed open on the island. Now they took plates of rice and meat for themselves, slipping into the living room next to the open-plan kitchen carrying foaming Coca-Cola in red plastic cups. As they ate, they watched a Bengali serial on satellite TV and talked idly. But they could hear the conversation in the men’s drawing room near the front door, loud and heated. It often happened this way at parties: the women exchanging pleasantries, trying their hardest to talk about nothing, while the men exploded into conflict immediately. The women considered it unseemly to let politics invade their drawing rooms, or to even consider what was going on in the world outside. If someone surfing through channels accidentally crossed a news channel, with scenes of war and mayhem, people looked away quickly. Someone might remark, “I don’t understand politics.” Others would nod.
“No! A coal plant cannot be clean. A coal plant in the Sundarbans forest would destroy the habitat!” Someone was shouting, arguing about a project plan in Bangladesh to build a clean coal plant to export power to India.
The women recognized the voice as belonging to Mr. Haidar Khan, an elderly graduate of their engineering university in Bangladesh. The men were all engineers and had all graduated from the same university in Bangladesh. Then they had all come to America to get their master’s degrees before getting jobs in oil and gas. Mr. Haidar, a thin man in his fifties who wore glasses held together with scotch tape, was always creating conflict. He would get agitated debating some point that went over everyone else’s heads, causing unpleasantness. Whenever he expressed one of his explosive opinions, the other men looked away and started talking about something else.
Once, Sumon had explained to Simi that Mr. Haidar’s frustrations sprung from the fact that he was an unsuccessful scientist at the university, earning very little money, compared to the younger men, who worked at various oil and gas companies. Even in appearance, Mr. Haidar stood apart from the others. While the younger men had assimilated into American society, eating chips and drinking Coca-Cola, rounding out, their receding hairlines and their rice bellies announcing their newly acquired American wealth and prosperity, Mr. Haidar had held onto his indecent, famine-like figure from Bangladesh. His sunken eyes, stretched taut skin over his forehead and cheeks, and skeletal, stick-like arms and legs appeared almost indecent.
“Why is it bad? It’s called clean coal, after all,” someone laughed.
“You think technology can solve everything?” Mr. Haidar shouted, getting more excited.
This objection was so laughable that the other men could only guffaw in response. Everyone who lived in Katy had a deep faith that technology could solve everything. Sumon had often explained to Simi that to ignore the man was the best thing. Any response got him only more excited.
“Is the food okay? Is it edible?” Simi asked the women in the living room, to drown out the men’s voices.
“First class.”
“It’s raining much harder than before!” Bithi exclaimed. She stood up from the round table where she had been sitting and walked to the window by the table to look out into the dark yard. “Oh, my God. I can’t see anything!”
Mr. Haidar Khan’s wife Pansy joined Bithi at the window. She stood looking out through the glass, burying her face in the darkness. Her cool bare arm under her sleeveless blouse brushed Bithi’s hot arms.
“That crepe myrtle tree is rolling around dangerously. Its branch could break,” she cried, turning her head. “Simi, look!”
To the other women, Pansy was an embarrassment like her husband. She wore long, dangling earrings and green nail polish, and frosted pink lipstick, at her age! She pulled her hair up high on her head, drawing down tendrils at either side of her face. And when she talked, she mentioned smoking and drinking and old boyfriends and wild parties in her youth. Of her two sons, both grown, one had married an older woman with a child and another was living together with a woman, according to rumors. Whenever Pansy spoke of her youth or her sons, the younger women at the parties, clad in modest blouses with sleeves covering their upper arms and saris covering their navels, who had higher aims for their own children, would stand up, their ears burning, and walk away before they heard too much. It was clear to the other women that Pansy wanted to talk. She had a lot to say, and she didn’t mind spilling her scandalous secrets. In fact, she might have no idea that these were scandalous things to say.
The two women stood together in companionable silence, staring into the darkness outside, witnessing the horrifying theater of nature outside. The crepe myrtle swayed dangerously toward the house, as if lending evidence to their constant fears about trees and all things in nature. They feared snakes in gardens, the infestation of squirrels and mice.
“Once, I saw a bright, leaf-green lizard on the pine tree,” Bithi said to Pansy. As she had stared at it, through a glass window, from inside the house, the lizard unfurled its disgusting red dewlap. Bithi had screamed and had her husband Ali cut down the tree within the week, she said.
“Oh, my God!” Pansy put her hands to her lips. “Those things can be poisonous.”
“Do you know what happened a few weeks ago?” Bithi continued, staying away from the subject of coal and her offensive husband (she was an engineer herself and excited about clean coal). “I came home with my two children and parked in the garage, and my twins said, ‘Something is moving, Mummy!’ I scolded them and said, overactive imagination! But later I saw that they were right. There was a snake in the garage! Like a ribbon. It was caught in the trap I had set out for the rats. Our house is built on what used to be rice fields, so we are always getting rats.”
“Oh, my god. What did you do?” Pansy balled her eyes into black beads and made her mouth into an O, touching Bithi’s sleeve.
“I ran inside, locked the house, and called animal control. They took hours to come. And when they came, would you believe it, they scolded me, saying it was a rare snake, blah blah, and I shouldn’t have set the mousetraps in my garage because they are a danger to snakes.”
“Good for you that you trapped it. Oh my, I don’t like snakes at all.”
The men’s raised voices burst over the air again, Haidar Khan’s shouting voice piercing above all others. “What do you think all you young men are doing here? Do you think you are helping this society? Hmm? Do you know how many poor people sleep on the streets of Houston? Do you know how often we have a h…h…hurr…hurricane or flood, because of you guys and the work that you do?” The older man was stuttering, his words coming out in angry, guttural barks.
There were coughs, a clearing of throats.
“Oh, Haidar Bhai, calm down!” someone said in a honeyed voice.
“Noooo! I will not stop! You think you can stop the world outside, the c–c–climate change, by carrying on, going to your f–f–fancy jobs in your suits and living in these massive houses?” Haidar Khan stood up and started gesticulating with his arms, loosening the top buttons of his shirt.
Still the responses were polite. “Calm down. You don’t have to insult people. We can be civil to one another,” someone said.
“Did you know a reservoir was supposed to be built here in Katy to hold the flood water? But the city abandoned those plans and sold the land to developers to accommodate you guys. This is prairie land. It’s supposed to be barren to let the water flood it! Now where will that water go, huh? You’re scientists, for God’s sakes!”
The children ran out of a side room to see what the fight was about, their eyes wide and mouths open.
“What’s going on?” Maria clapped her hands and jumped up and down, the heavy party dress bobbing with her. The plastic band Simi had placed on her hair had come off, and her curls fell over her face in wild disarray.
“Nothing. Go and play,” Sumon said.
Maria skipped to him and put her plump arms about his neck, rubbing her soft cheeks against his rough skin. “Are you sure?” she said tenderly, reminding him through this caress that his mother had died.
“Yes.” Sumon smiled and sent the children back.
In the kitchen, Simi froze. She had been serving the dessert quietly. Now, at the sound of Mr. Haidar Khan’s yelling, she stood with her two hands raised and clasped in front of her chest. She had invited all these people to serve them, to make sure that everyone had enough to eat and a good time. Sumon entered the kitchen, smiling brightly at his wife, and went up to her, standing close til his perfume, fresh like the ocean breeze, hit her nostrils and persuaded her to lower her arms. Sumon had a round, fair face, handsome, with long eyelashes, pink lips, and even teeth. Everything about him was pleasing, his manners matching his pretty features, his words with her as gentle as the face he presented to the world.
“Is the dessert ready?”
“Yes. I’ll get it right out,” Simi said. She started to move again, with purpose.
Pulling open the fridge doors, she lifted out an orange caramel custard she had made, yogurt and pink custard with little bits of colorful fruit. Sumon started the percolator, expertly getting out teabags, sugar, and condensed milk from the cabinet for the evening tea that would complement the dessert.
Slowly, the raised voices faded away into murmurs. When the men filed into the kitchen to serve themselves sweets and tea, the waft of sugar and warm milk in the air, talking about salaries, work, and the share market in low voices, the rain could be heard again.
As usual, Bithi and Ali and the twins stayed behind long after the other guests had left. Their children liked to play with Sumon and Simi’s daughter, and the men were classmates. The adults got along as well as the children. Besides, the other guests lived nearby in Katy, whereas Ali and Bithi would have to drive further off, an hour’s drive down to Clear Lake, so it was worth their while to stay longer and make most of the trip.
“Sit, sit,” Simi said, settling down herself on the sofa that had been occupied all evening. She had just said good-bye to Mr. Haidar and his wife Pansy, who had both shuffled out into the wet night in an embarrassed and angry way, without any umbrellas. She felt easier now, having got rid of the trouble.
Bithi, who had been hot under her silk sari after eating and from the overcrowding of guests (she often became overheated and breathless after eating), wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and breathed more easily. “Oof, it feels much cooler now.”
The children had been huddled together all night in one room watching TV and playing on their devices, but now Maria and the twins, freed from the party decorum, rushed upstairs and started to jump up and down noisily, banging the pool sticks on Sumon’s pool table.
“Never mind, let them play,” Simi said, suppressing a yawn with her hand and raising the same hand to stop Bithi, who was about to get up. “Do you want another cup of tea?”
“The other children don’t play with real things,” Bithi agreed. “This is why your house is the only place I feel comfortable. Here they can be normal and run around and be naughty.”
“Yes, children need to play,” Simi agreed, her eyes heavy with sleep.
“I have grown so fat. I need to exercise. Do you work out, Simi?”
“Yes. I go to the gym. You look very nice. The lipstick is very nice.”
“You always look like you are going to work out,” Bithi said. “That’s what I like about you. You never dress to impress, as if looks don’t matter. Don’t take it the wrong way. I really admire it, that you’re not overdressed like the other women.”
Simi laughed. When she went to work, as a pharmacist, she dressed in efficient clothes, blouse and slacks. When at home, she adorned an apron and got down to cook in her tidy, clean kitchen. She swept the floor and mopped it with wet water from an automatic swirling bucket, at the end of every day. Her only purpose in life was to raise her daughter, to work, to keep in good health and keep her family in good health.
“But of course, you look good because you are slim. I was skinny myself before my marriage,” Bithi said. “I should say before having the twins. It’s hard raising two children.”
Simi nodded sympathetically. She spoke little, but she was a good listener. The rainwater guttered down the drainpipes. There was a drumming on the ventilator and on the glass of the narrow skylight upstairs. A large window upstairs, beside the pool table, led to the roof. Sumon had walked out onto the narrow ledge from this window to rake the leaves on the roof before the guests arrived.
Bithi was telling a story. “When I was a young girl, my parents lived in Iraq. My father was working there in oil. They were employing a lot of foreigners all over the world. I remember going to the hospital with my mother when my little sister was born. It was during the Iraq war. These soldiers had gone off to fight, and their young brides were having babies. These poor girls. One of them had given birth to two premature babies. The hospital didn’t know what to do with the babies, so the young mother placed them in cotton under the bed on the floor. They were like little mice, smaller than my palm.” She held out her swollen, pink palm. “I don’t know what happened to the babies. I was too scared of the whole thing. I still remember that pale young girl giving birth to those little creatures mewling under the bed.”
Simi nodded wordlessly.
“Maybe they died…” Bithi continued to muse.
Sumon came inside the house with Ali. They had been standing outside having a smoke, checking out the weather. “Just this morning, I went out on the roof through the open window in the den upstairs and cleaned out the leaves on the roof. Now the roof is covered with fallen leaves again!” Sumon was saying to his friend.
When the two men entered the living room, Sumon said to Simi, “Turn on the news. My phone just went off with a flash flood warning.”
“I remember when the twins were born. That night, too, it was raining like this. Do you remember, Ali?” Bithi asked her husband. Her voice rose, searching for sympathy.
Ali, a tall, silent man, was as stoic as his wife was talkative, willing to bear the burden the world had given him on his wide shoulders. He nodded slightly, giving his head a shake to the side.
Bith shivered and closed her eyes while recounting the horrors of that night. “I can never forget it. The long labor, the emergency C-section. My parents had both passed away, and there was no one to help us. It was just the two of us. It is too cruel being alone in a new country, with no family around to help.”
Sumon rolled through the cable channels until he found a local channel with weather news. His pretty face crumpled into a frown. All the highways were under water. Bithi shrieked at an image on the screen: The water on I-10 in one place had reached the highway sign on the bridge!
“In this situation, we cannot go home!” she cried.
“You must stay,” Simi insisted at once. “We’ll have a party.”
“An after-party party,” Sumon joked. “More tea? Simi, put some tea on.”
“Yes, I’ll put on a proper kettle on the stove now,” Simi said, standing up. She was tired and needed some strong tea with milk and sugar to stay up with her guests.
The children could be heard jumping on the pool table. There were thumping and scratching sounds.
“Ei!” Sumon called up to them halfheartedly. “No jumping on the pool table. Also, too much jumping will make you cough again, Maria.”
Once, a kid had dropped a pool ball from upstairs in the middle of a party at Simi and Sumon’s house. The ball had crashed into a glass table directly in its path, and the table had shattered, spewing glass among the women sitting with their handbags around the table. Luckily, no one had been hurt. But since then, Sumon always confiscated the pool balls before a party.
“I didn’t think they would think to jump on the table,” he said, shaking his head.
“These children!” Bithi said. “They are not human. Monkeys, I say.” She said it proudly.
They heard Maria coughing again upstairs.
Sumon said, “Her allergies are acting up again. We are worried about her. The doctor said to put her back on steroids.”
“Steroids!” cried Bithi. “They are very bad for you. I was on steroids. Don’t you see, my body is all swollen up? Steroids save you, only to kill you. Never put her on steroids.”
“She’s been on them on and off, her whole life. There were complications when she was born…”
Sumon began to tell the story, but Bithi, who had been feeling hot again, stood up to go to the kitchen, where Simi had put a silver kettle on the stove.
“Do you have a cotton nightie or something?” Bithi whispered to Simi. “I have hypertension, so I can’t wear these rich clothes for too long you see.” She laughed.
“Wait, I’ll give you a whole selection to choose from. A whole wardrobe. You can have your pick!” Simi joked and took Bithi into her bedroom.
“What kind of complications does Maria have?” Ali asked Sumon politely in the living room. He had been sitting with his legs crossed, hands on his knees, watching the news of the worsening weather on TV.
Other than the sound of the TV, the room had fallen silent. Sumon had stopped talking. He was thinking of his parents. If he turned his head around to face the back windows of the living room, he would be looking at the crepe myrtle tree in the backyard. After his mother’s burial and some legal work that he had to take care of, he had flown back immediately, as soon as he could. Then he went right back to work. He would sit in his den on the second floor, working at his desk all day and night. He even carried work home from the office, determined to bury himself in work. One day, he found himself staring at the crepe myrtle full of pink flower, bursting with life. The tree had not been in bloom the day before. The flowers had appeared out of nowhere. Staring out the window, he had felt the tree to be a startling reaffirmation of life. Life had crawled back after the violence of what had happened to his mother– the frightened hospital run, being stuck in traffic in the ambulance, the cold, sallow skin of his mother after her death.
When Simi had been pregnant, they had discovered that she was going to have twins. But she had developed pre-eclampsia. There were complications, so the doctors decided to get the babies out early. During the surgery, the doctor came out to Sumon and told him that they didn’t know if they could save both the babies and the mother. Both babies survived in the end, but the doctors said that they were in poor health. The doctors had had to get them out two months early. They were tiny, two pounds each, in NICU.
Sumon had been startled by the terrible news. And his mother had come to the rescue for him. In the old days, they used to speak of raising such babies in cotton balls. They stayed in the hospital for months, it seemed. Up to that experience, Sumon had been a sheltered boy, raised by two loving parents. Like Bithi’s father, his father had worked in oil in Iraq during the seventies and made his money there. They were upper middle class, well-to-do. Sumon could not recall a moment’s sorrow in his life.
The worst memory of his entire childhood was from a time before the family had lived abroad in the Middle East, when they used to live in a tiny flat in Dhaka. The building had a flat roof on top, like the roofs in Dhaka were in those days, lined by flowerpots, red peppers and mango laid out on mats on the ground to dry in the sun, and clothes lines overhead, and no guard railings. A child who had accompanied his parents, visiting someone at the building, had escaped to the roof and had been walking around the edge of the roof one day and had fallen off. It had happened in the afternoon, a little before the time they used to call bikel, before the children woke from their naps and went down to play, before the descent of the sun, before the decent time that guests could arrive for tea and fried snacks. He had been sleeping in the enormous, solid wood bed he shared with his parents. He awoke to his mother screaming. She ran into the bedroom, picked him up from the bed, and clutched him to her bosom, crying, “Sumon, Sumon! You are alive!” She had been young then, perhaps younger than he was today, her cheeks soft against his, damp with tears, the wetness transferring to his skin, her sari bright green and soft cotton, warm against his chest and neck.
Later his mother said that death had been calling to that child that day. His mother’s relief that Sumon had escaped death, that it was not he who had died, was the only concept Sumon had of death until his wife gave birth to two premature babies. It was too much for him. They used to live in New Orleans then. He was a graduate student. He would walk by the levee, smoking one cigarette after another. Simi was at home. Two creatures he could not fathom were waiting for him at NICU.
Sumon and Simi went to the hospital every day to touch the babies. The nurses said contact was good for the babies.
“The babies need to be touched, comforted, listened to, understood,” the nurses said. “It’s a human need.”
But that human need of his babies took everything from him. Then, one baby died in NICU. Only Maria came home. The doctors said they didn’t know if she would live.
At the time, his parents were comfortably ensconced in their retired home in Gulshan. They took daily walks on a lane lined with krishnachura flowers, with other retired people, who had also made their money in the Middle Eastern oil, whose children were also comfortably settled in America. Their proud greetings to one another were about their offspring settled abroad.
“How is your son?”
“My daughter bought a big second house in California!”
“My son just got his PhD.”
A nod of the head, canes raised in the air, the smile of parents whose children had made it. Sumon always chose the brief period when the krishnachura bloomed blood red to visit Dhaka. His parents called him early in the morning to walk with him and their retired friends under the krishnachura (Sumon was up anyway from jetlag), showing him off proudly to his friends–their American son.
Hearing news of Maria’s illness, his parents decided to come out of retirement. They offered to fly to America to take care of their son’s child for him. Simi, too sick to stand, got up in the morning and went to work, while his mother took care of the baby all day. His mother taught Simi how to feed Maria, how to hold her, and how to give her a bath. His mother stayed up all night holding the vomiting baby, listening to its mouse-like wails, forcing herself to stare back at those large eyes staring out of that horrifying bony face, with no flesh on it. There was no flesh anywhere on that body, so they had to be careful not to break her bones. It was his mother who had saved Maria, had given her last strength to her granddaughter. No one had asked anything of Simi. She had been dumb, mute.
Sumon missed his dead mother. The last time he went home, to attend her funeral, he had walked on that path under the krishnachura trees again, but they were not in bloom.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Ali said. He did not have many words, so these words were meant sincerely.
Sumon nodded. His black eyes shone like jewels. They went on quickly to talk about his job. Sumon had just been promoted. He was ambitious and was rising rapidly through the ranks.
“I have five engineers working under me.”
“Wow. That must be a lot of responsibility.”
“I have to work till at least eight every night and on weekends. But Simi manages at home…”
The men talked, with the women gone. Sumon grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume on the TV. There were loud noises upstairs, of dragging, scratching, and jumping.
“Stop it! No naughtiness,” Sumon shouted.
There was a thud. Even this invasion of their tranquility the adults would have ignored, had it not been followed by screams. The twins ran downstairs to them in a fright of limbs, scurrying across the carpet like squirrels.
They burrowed their heads in their father’s chest, crying, “She fell! She fell down!”
The men rushed upstairs. Simi and Bithi had not heard the screams because of the heavy insulation of the master bedroom. But upstairs was the wrong way to run. The child had fallen out the window that Sumon had unlocked earlier in the day to go out on the roof and clean it out for Maria’s birthday party. The men ran downstairs again. Maria had fallen by slipping on the wet roof and cracked her head on the concrete road and broken her neck. She lay under the water, a foot deep on their road, until they found her. Sumon called 911 and could barely answer the barrage of questions. His friend Ali had to seize the phone from him and speak calmly, walking up and down, pants soaked in dirty water up to his knees.
“Sir. Sir? We can’t get there soon. There is high water on all the roads. A lot of people are stranded and looking for help. Meanwhile, what you do is…”
“Oh god, oh god!” Sumon kept crying, standing on the road in the rain and holding Maria in his arms. Her neck and limbs were twisted at an impossible angle to her torso. He tried to check her breath the way he used to when she was an infant and he had to check every night if she was alive. He couldn’t hear anything.
Simi came out of the house, screaming, “What happened? What happened?”
They carried Maria inside and set her wet body on the carpeted floor of the formal drawing room where all the men at the party had sat a few hours earlier arguing about the disaster of climate change and overbuilding in Katy. Where Haidar Khan had been shouting, taking up space ungenerously at the house where he had been uninvited and breaking every decorum. Simi had been trained as a pharmacist in lifesaving. She bent down to take the child’s pulse and her heartbeat.
“Give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation!” Sumon shouted.
Simi nodded and worked hard, blowing into the child’s blackened mouth again and again. She pounded on her chest and started again. And then again. But the child was already dead.
The fire truck didn’t come till the next day. Simi had been pounding Maria’s chest and blowing into her all night. She had refused to give Maria cake and candles to blow out at the party, so she thought it a little painful that now she was doing all this blowing of air. The next day, there was still water on the road. Sumon and Ali had moved their cars into the garage earlier. Other cars lay submerged in the water. Water had crept into neighbors’ yards. The firefighters came to their house first. They said they had orders to do so. They checked with their instruments and confirmed that the child was dead.
Simi and Sumon didn’t miss a day’s work. They had a funeral at the mosque, a burial, all as should be done. After forty days passed, and people stopped bringing food, they cooked as normal people do. They ate facing each other at the high kitchen table, looking out at the crepe myrtle tree in the backyard.
Once, Simi said, “The next time there is a storm or rain like that, that tree could fall on the house. You better cut it down.”
Sumon nodded.
Simi had a sister in New York and another in New Jersey. But she never called them to cry or tell little anecdotes about Maria. She found the candles and balloons Maria had insisted on buying for her birthday, that had never gotten used, and threw them away in the trash can without tears. Only sometimes, when she returned home from her job before Sumon, after she had worked herself to the bone washing the kitchen floors and all the bathrooms of the house, Simi sat down with a steaming cup of milk tea and stared out through the double-glass window at the backyard, where the rain had dried up, and the sun shone in the new and bright suburb of Katy, covering up all the things that had passed a month ago.