Reunion

When her message popped up, the name Nita Moinuddin didn’t ring a bell. After several exchanges, she coaxed my memory enough that I remembered. I’d had my first beer with her, down in her parents’ basement many moons ago, and been rather taken by her unabashed, adolescent grit. 

“How about the Café Kopi at five?” she asked.

I wouldn’t have known her if I’d passed her on the street, not least because seventeen years had passed since our last, and only, meeting. 

She set down her drink and purse and waited a moment before taking a seat, giving me a quick and cautious glance, as if she was reconsidering coming, or wondering if I was the right person, then slowly began pulling out her chair. 

“It’s nice to see you again,” I said. 

She took the tiniest sip of her mocha, holding me with suspicious eyes.

“How’s your mother?” she asked.

“She’s fine, thank you for asking. Yours?”

“Dead.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. When…?”

“What does it matter when? She’s dead.” She glowered but only for moment. 

I drank my coffee like an act of penance.

“Your mother owed my mother an apology,” she said. “At the very least a returned call. The courtesy of acknowledgment. What kind of a heartless bitch is she.”

A patron and the barista gave us looks. 

Nita reached into her purse and brought out a folded letter envelope, from which she arranged four old black and white photos on the table. 

“Recognize anyone?” she asked.

I took a closer look. “I think that’s my mother. And that. And here.” 

“And these here, are mine.”

Both women, young, shyly grinning, stared at us through time. 

And yet,” she said, “your mother pretended like my mother never existed.”

“You’re bringing up something that happened so long ago now, after all these years? I don’t understand.”

She took a breath, composed herself. She let go of her purse and set it aside.

“She died two weeks ago,” she said. “She never stopped bringing up your mother. She knew that night at our house your mother didn’t remember her. Then when your mother wouldn’t take her calls, she just couldn’t get over it, till the end.”

“I had no idea her friendship meant so much to your mother,” I said. “Before the day your mother called, mine had never mentioned her.”

“Why did she accept her invitation?” Nita asked. “She didn’t have to. She could’ve nipped it in the bud. You remember the state you left her in?”

We were still new to Chicago. My mother had no friends. My father’s endless complaints and bullying regrets were the only things she had by way of conversation. The call from Nita’s mother had come out of the blue, and my mother hadn’t the faintest clue who this woman was, even though she told my mother they were friends in Bangladesh, but it was an opportunity for an outlet, the start of a potential social life. Also, I encouraged her. I went with her. I needed her off my back. She’d become impossible with her fears. She snooped in my room, went through my things, and wanted to know every detail about my life. Junior year, she’d discovered my porn mags and would’ve burned down the house if I didn’t stop her. My mother needed a life. 

“Little bit,” I said. “It was a long time ago.” And, if memory served, it was Nita’s mouthing off that night that had pushed her mother over the edge. “But you’ve forgotten a few details yourself.”       

“Really. Such as?”

“You mother called out of nowhere. Freaked my mother out with all the family history that she knew. We didn’t know who she was, how she got our number, and the next thing, she’s insisting we come over for dinner.”

I hadn’t looked at her, really looked at her, until then. The traces of the young girl were still there, missing the braces and the glasses. The face was longer and more chiseled, the high forehead offset by beautiful almond eyes. 

“You can justify shitty behavior all you want,” Nita said. “It’s still shitty.”

“I also didn’t know your mother called. I didn’t keep tabs on my mother’s phone calls.”

“We told her to forget some random woman she’d mistaken for someone else, but she wouldn’t. The pictures proved she wasn’t lying.”

“I didn’t think she was either. People forget. It’s natural. I’m sorry, again. I wish there was more I could say or do.”

“There is,” said Nita. “Your mother can acknowledge her in death.” 

“Okay…how?”

She looked around the restaurant, then down into her cup, then back at me.

“There’s a prayer service at my parents’ house next Friday, after Jumma. My father and my brother will be there. So will my aunts and uncles, my mother’s siblings. She can come and pay her respects.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“It’ll have to do,” said Nita. 

“What if my mother doesn’t want to go? I mean, I’ll tell her, but I can’t force her.”

“Then she’s a lousier person than I thought.”

After she left, I sat in the café turning over the possibility that my mother had unintentionally contributed to Nita’s mother’s death. 

Telling Ellie about it later, I surprised myself with the details I remembered about that night: It was winter and there was ice-rain. Nita’s father came to pick us up, as my father refused to use our shitty car for anything other than errands, and later after dinner brought us back. My mother had dressed up in one of her fancy saris and put on jewelry. For me, the highlight of the evening had been Nita. I was older by a year but she had the confidence of someone twice her age. She popped beer caps like an expert, dished out family drama, and guzzled like a veteran. My impression was of a dispirited younger sibling, a girl to boot after a boy, in a Bangladeshi family, constantly relegated to second-class status over her ambition-carrying brother. That brother, away at college at Princeton, I later understood, was mentally ill. 

Ellie whistled. “What the fuck.”

“I know.”

“And you actually went to meet this chick?”

“I was curious.”

“I’m curious about a lot of things but I also have limits.”

“I guess we’re different that way,” I said.

“So, wait, you like this chick or something?”

Ellie’s nature often seemed to contradict her will. She was strict about not wanting anything serious. When we met, she was fresh out of a very long and trying relationship and didn’t want so much as a peek in the direction of another anytime soon. I wasn’t, I assured her, looking for marriage either. 

“No,” I said, too tired for this. “And if I did, so what? I thought it wasn’t supposed to matter.”

“Oh, so you do like her.”

“I don’t. I didn’t have to tell you any of this, you know.”

“You sure didn’t, you’re right.”

“Are you jealous?” 

“Would you like me to be?” 

“I thought that was off the table.”

“It sure is. You never know, I might see an old flame myself tomorrow night.”

“She’s not an old flame.”

“If you say so.”

Ellie had obscured the line between serious and joking, and now was one of the times I didn’t find it cute.

“I do say so. If you’re not going to listen seriously, then let’s forget it.”

She made claws and meowed. Then she started laughing. 

“You’re in a mood,” she said. “Okay Mr. Grumpy, I’ll leave you alone.”

Once I’d sat in my glumness for a while, I said, “You never need to tell me anything about your life you don’t want to. No, I’m serious. We have certain rules and I want to honor them.”

Ellie touched her napkin to her mouth and placed it back on her lap and gave it a smoothing stroke and without looking up again said, “Wow,” under her breath.

I’d begun by mentioning casually that I’d recently talked with Nita, a named that meant as little to my mother as it had me, and then I asked her if she remembered the night we were there. 

My mother evaded answering me at first. 

“I was a senior in high school,” I said. “We still lived in Rogers Park.”

“Yes, yes, I know when my own son was in high school and where we lived. I don’t know, I think so.”

“Mom, please, think hard. You got a call from this woman, Nita’s mother, and she knew everything about you. Said you were neighbors in Chittagong. Her husband came to get us. Oh, and also, I drank beer that night. First time. With Nita.”

My mother pretended not to hear me. 

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “How would I remember.”

“Just think. We were still living in the city. Her father came and got us. Large house in Schaumburg. The daughter was home but the son was away in college. The daughter, Nita, made her mother upset.”

My mother’s eyes enlarged. 

“Oh, yes, yes, that crazy woman, yes, I remember.”

“She died two weeks ago.”

“Oh. What happened?”

Nita hadn’t mentioned. 

“I don’t know. Her daughter contacted me, that’s why I brought it up.”

My father sauntered in, switched on the tv, and pretended he didn’t care what we were talking about. 

“That’s very sad,” said my mother, and went out of the room. In recent years, she’d taken up walking, and we heard her putting on her shoes and the front door opening and closing.

My father made a grunt and turned the tv up. A well-known Fox News kook was purple-faced and bug-eyed about the socialist US President and his secret Muslim life.

“Dad, seriously, how can you listen to that rot.”

“With these,” he pulled his ears. 

I caught up with my mother two blocks away. She didn’t stop or slow down, and we walked together in silence for a while. It was a bright, nippy October day, the sky blue from end to end. The trees were amber, orange, and yellow, and front yards were decked out in Halloween decorations. Smoke from burning leaves rose in wisps above a neighbor’s roof.

“What else did she say?” my mother asked, shielding her complexion from the sun. 

“Nothing more,” I said. “She’s very upset.”

“At me?” My mother stopped.

“I don’t know, I think so.” 

“Some child is upset at me for not remembering her mad mother?”

“Mom.”

“Your grandmother knew everyone,” she started walking again. “People were coming to the house all the time.”

“You were always good with names and faces,” I said.

“Once, yes. I’ve forgotten a lot with age.”

“She showed me pictures,” I said. “You were in them, with her mother.”

When we got back to the house, my mother set the kettle on the stove, and went upstairs to wash up and change. My father was asleep on the couch, with the tv muted and the channel switched to CNN.

My mother came back down, poured us cups of tea, and we took them to the dining table.

“I didn’t know who she was then, I don’t know who she is today. Her daughter is as crazy as her.”

“Mom, I know what you look like in old family photos. It was you in the ones she showed me.”

“I want to see myself,” said my mother. 

“You can do more than that,” I said. “Next week there’s a prayer service. Nita wants you to go. I’ll go with you if you want. I doubt Dad will.”

“You think I should?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know. But I promise you that that was you in those pictures.”

We heard my father in the kitchen getting tea. 

“Going where?” he said, joining us at the table, his thinning hair leaping off his head and his eyes puffy with sleep. 

“Nowhere,” my mother said. 

I messaged Nita later that evening.

“She said yes?” Nita asked.

“She did. I’ll be there too.”

“Okay.”

I was hoping for more – excitement, perhaps enthusiasm. 

“See you then,” I wrote. 

“K.”

At one in the morning came another message. 

“Up?”

Light sleeper that she was, the buzz awakened Ellie. 

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“No one.”

“Your new girlfriend.” She tittered, though the underlying disapproval was loud. “What’d she say?”

“When did you become so nosy?” I said. To Nita, I wrote, “Yes. Can’t sleep.”

“What’re you, going to do some sexting?” 

“I don’t even know what that is,” I said.

“Me neither.” Nita’s next message. “I was a bitch, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not nosy,” Ellie said. “I don’t care who you’re texting with at,” she verified the time, “one-oh-five in the morning, but I do like my sleep.” She fluffed her pillow and resettled under the covers. 

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll go out in the living room.”

“It’s too late now. Don’t bother.” She switched on her lamp and picked her laptop off the floor by the bed. She put on her glasses and started working. I still got out of bed. “I’m serious,” Ellie said.

“I know,” I said, and came out of the room. “Don’t worry about it,” I told Nita. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

“I’m tired of carrying her baggage.”

“I get it.”

“She’s dead, I know, but I’m alive, and I feel like shit. It’s not fair.”

“It’s not.”

“Shit. Sorry. Dumping all this heavy shit on you. After treating you like crap. Parents right?”

“Parents.”

“Any chance you drink on school nights?” 

“I prefer to.”

“Wine?”

“Wine is good.”

“Webster Wine Bar, tomorrow, 8-ish?”

“Love Webster.”

“K. Going to force these eyes to sleep. Need them functioning bright n early. Night.”

“Night.”

Ellie was deep in her work when I got back into bed.

“Date all set?” She sat chin forward, eyes screwed to the screen on her lap. 

 “Give it a rest.”

“If it’s tomorrow night, it’s fine.”

“Thank you for your permission.”

“Wow,” Ellie’s head half-turned. 

“Well. I didn’t know you had plans.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“Now I know.”

I wanted to send her a message in the morning, just saying hi, wishing her a good day, and spent showering, dressing, and getting my things together composing and recomposing a one-line, friendly note. Over a distracted cup of coffee, I evaded Ellie’s small-talk, she knowing full well I wasn’t a morning person, that no matter how well we got along, that difference between us would never find a happy compromise, then left with a hurried peck and without a properly uttered goodbye. 

By the time I boarded my train, there was a text from her.

“Mad???”

“No. Tired. Didn’t sleep well.”

“Me neither.”

To cleanse the palate, I tapped out a message to Nita: “Hey, hope you got some sleep & the day’s halfway decent. Looking fwd 2 2night. F”

We had a semi-strict rule about cell phones at work, which meant we ignored it as often as we could. Given an inch, we gobbled ten miles. My habit was to place mine in a drawer first thing when I got to my desk, activate Do Not Disturb, then take periodic looks that made it seem I’m searching for work-related stuff. An hour after sending Nita the text, I saw a message waiting.

From Ellie: “Not me.”

My text to Nita had gone to Ellie.

I didn’t make a big deal of it. Didn’t apologize and cause a string of avoidable back and forth that would help exactly nothing. Neither did Ellie. I think we’d both lived enough by then to feel the shifting contours of an already hazy outline, the outline that contained our lackadaisically extended tryst. 

I left work an hour early, and far too early for my – date? – with Nita, telling myself despite my glee that it was not a date, and the facts that made it so: we didn’t know each other; there was a specific reason she’d contacted me, and once that was concluded in four days, bye again; she could have a person in her life; she was Bangladeshi. 

I checked in with Ellie. She didn’t respond, not until the next day. “Had a nice time I hope,” it said. One of those messages that left no doubt about its tone.

Nita was waiting outside the bar, staring absentmindedly across the street, where nothing was going on. I’d noticed at the café that she had that tendency. She’d seemingly zone out, boring those intense and lovely eyes right through me as I was talking, without missing a word. I cleared my throat.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

She wore a maroon pullover sweater and relaxed-fit jeans and lived-in winter boots that looked like a much-loved pair. At the café she had had a beanie on her head the whole time, and now her hair hung loose in coils past her shoulder to her waist. 

“You’ve grown up so much,” she said, after we took our seats. That broke the ice. 

Nita’s senior year in high school, her brother dropped out of Princeton and came back home. The doorbell rang late one night and there he stood, without a suitcase, without a backpack, without any of his belongings. He went up to his room and didn’t come out again for three days, when he announced he was walking over to the gas station ten minutes away to apply for a job, where he still worked.

After high school, Nita waged a war of wills against her parents. She’d be damned if she would squander her college years in Chicago, in Illinois for that matter, or anywhere in the Midwest. No Ivy League either. She didn’t want to go to college at all, but it was, if nothing else, a ticket out of home. 

  Which took her to UVA. Her grades maybe weren’t Ivy League good, but they got her in to three of the six places she applied. She studied political science, graduated summa cum laude, and went straight to law school. 

“You’re a lawyer?” I said.

“That’s usually what people go to law school for.”

“I mean, I would never have guessed.”

“Lucky you, I didn’t ask.”

“What kind of law?”

“Patent.”

My knowledge of corporate law was limited but patent I was certain was the highest paying kind.

“Good for you,” I said, raising my glass. “You didn’t want to do something with the political science degree?”

“That’s what I did,” said Nita. “I studied law. Otherwise, I’d be what? writing papers that three other political scientists read? Studying election polls? Teaching?”

“None of those sound bearable,” I said. 

“And you?” 

“Still pushing a novel manuscript on agents. But keeping the lights on with a corporate paycheck myself. Nowhere near patent lawyer territory though. Tech writing.”

She took the information with a nod. I was rather glad she didn’t ask about my writing or the novel. 

Nita didn’t want another round. She wanted to go for a walk. We settled our tab and stepped out into the chilly night and started walking east toward the lake. 

“This is a serious question,” Nita said, after we’d gone about two or three blocks. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“As in like the supernatural?”

“Yes.”

“I can, I guess.”

“Do you or don’t you? As a matter of belief? Like there is a god or there isn’t.”

“I’ve been an atheist for a while.”

“Really?” she slowed and turned her head. “Huh.”

“Why?”

“No, nothing. I figured you grew up in Bangladesh, so maybe you were, I guess more religious.”

“I’m definitely not religious. Guess how many times I’ve prayed in my life, not counting Eid and funerals and prayer services? Won’t add up to five in total.”

“So then, ghosts? You believe they exist?” she asked.

“I believe people have ghosts,” I answered. “Like the past. Like memories.”

“No,” said Nita, “I mean ghosts taking over people. Demon possessions.”

“Oh. That’s a whole different category.”

“And?”

“I used to hear stories when we lived in Bangladesh. I like movies about possessions.”

“I asked if you believed, not what stories you heard. I heard stories, too. And seen the movies.”

 “I don’t know,” I said. “Last time I heard something like that I was very young. I probably believed it, you know, like a kid would.”

At the next intersection, Nita paused. I could tell she was cold. Her lips were trembling. 

“If you laugh or ridicule anything I say, we’re done.” I didn’t ask done with what.

She told me her mother was certain she’d been touched by a malevolent presence when she was a child in Bangladesh, and that, despite countless rituals, prayers, and cleansings, had never been fully rid of it. She fell quiet for a block or two, perhaps to gauge my reaction. I was intrigued. I was in. I wanted more. 

I’d witnessed a horrendous scene one night at my mother’s parents’ house that had never left me: a young maid writhing on the floor, howling in what had to be some excruciating pain, while an old male servant thrashed her with a broom. He was beating the demons out of her. It was my ayah that had told me when I left her no choice bugging her to death for an explanation. How did the demon get in her, I wanted to know. When she went out back to use the servants’ latrine, which stood under the jackfruit trees that lined the property, unmindful that her was hair was down and flowing, attracting evil.

“Still with me?” she asked.

“Why’d you stop?” I said.

Nita sniffled and wiped her nose. I, too, was starting to feel the chill, more when we stopped. 

“She had imams at the house,” Nita went on, picking up her pace with her story, “held prayers, did all the stuff they did in Bangladesh,” Nita said, “but she was convinced it would never leave her. So, if your mother, or you, thought she was nuts, well, I doubt she’d disagree.”

“My mother never said any such thing. I don’t think it either.” 

“If you did, I’m saying, it wouldn’t be without reason.”

She seemed to want me to have a low opinion of her mother. 

We were nearly to the lake. The temperature had taken another dip, and the sweat I’d worked up was being unkind in league with it. 

“Think we should head back?” I asked. 

“Right about the time you met me,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, her pace now brisk and demanding a rise in heartrate, “I’d clued in, but I was also terrified.”

“Terrified?” I said.

“I was scared shitless, of living in that house. My dad was as good as nonexistent, and my mom would have her episodes, I swear, I’d believe it if someone told me there were demons inside her.” 

The water, dark and still, was before us. We had no choice but to stop. Nita’s cheeks were flushed, the cold and her inner heat giving her skin a ravishing glow. 

“Did she ever get help?” I asked.

“She refused to believe she was mentally ill. About herself or my brother. My brother finally got the help he needed. He’s been doing really good. But she rejected the thought to the end.”

“But she was still convinced about that time when she was young in Bangladesh?”

“As far as I know. She stopped talking about it when her mind started going. I think that was more a memory issue than anything. That should also explain why she was convinced she knew your mother.” But she wasn’t herself persuaded completely by this theory. A streetlight shone in her eyes. She turned toward the water, then back at me. “Her memory was always incredible. She remembered things about my father’s family that he didn’t remember. Anyone that saw her near the end would think she was a babbling old looney off her marbles. I’m sure that’s what you’re thinking of me right now.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

Nita Moinuddin was not the woman I’d marry. We wouldn’t even date. But for the flicker of an eyeblink, the flash of a lightning bolt, I imagined us together. Then, in a scene fit for a romantic comedy, we stood facing each other in that moment before the kiss. Nita sniffled, then sneezed.

“You’re catching a cold,” I said.

“Okay, Bengali parent.” She gave me a push.

The brisk night air had me tingly by the time we made it back to where her car was parked, three cars away, as it happened, from mine.

“Thanks,” she said, unlocking and opening the door. “See you Friday?” 

“We’ll be there.” 

She got in and drove away.

I went back to my place instead of meeting Ellie at hers and, tired from the fresh air and the walk, fell into a sound sleep. 

Dreams came and went, diluted and disturbing, so that it felt like I kept waking up every few minutes when I didn’t. I’d slept deeply for the better part of four hours and it was the buzzing of my phone on the nightstand that really woke me.

“Hey you,” Ellie said, very drunk. “Where are you?”

“In bed.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes. I was sleeping.”

“Oh. Shit. Okay. Go back to sleep. Bye.”

I didn’t. I couldn’t. And then I saw three messages from Nita, the last one sent an hour ago, “It felt good to talk. Tx for listening.”

“No problem,” I wrote back. 

“Wake you?” she asked.

“Nah. Couldn’t sleep. Been reading, but really thinking about what you said.”

The three dots appeared and disappeared several times. 

“Where do u live?”

“Uptown.”

“No shit. I’m Edgewater.”

“Small world.”

“Alone?”

“Just me.”

“Me too.” The dots rose and fell, rose and fell, and then, “Come over?”

“Over there? Now?”

“No?”

“Sure.”

She was still dressed in the clothes she had on earlier. On the coffee table was an open bottle of wine and a wineglass with a drop at the bottom. She got a glass for me and filled it to the top. 

“I talked too much before,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I told her.

“You didn’t talk too much, why should you.”

We were sitting side-by-side, her profile outlined in the corner of my eye. 

“I don’t mind that you did,” I said.

“I know what you mean. I’m not dense. I’m…” she took a drink. “I don’t have anyone to talk to.”

“You do now,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“You do.”

“You’re – who are you?”

“A friend. A friend you found again after years.”

“What was I thinking. My mother was…I should be one apologizing to you and your mother.

“Forget them.”

“I try. All the time.”

She patted my thigh and stood up. 

“You hungry?” 

“Starving.”

We made scrambled eggs, toast, and turkey sausage links, and Nita brewed a fresh pot of coffee. The kitchen filled with daylight as we ate. We were too hungry to talk and when we were done there was nothing left. We sat at the table drinking coffee until Nita checked the time and said she had to get ready for work.

I didn’t want to see Ellie that night. I let her texts sit for hours before answering them. I told her I was tired, didn’t sleep well the night before, had a stressful day at work, all the excuses that would take her no time to see through. 

“Tired of me too,” she wrote. 

The next day, I met Ellie for lunch. The Thai restaurant she went to with her colleagues was midway between our offices, and the lunch hour crowd was predictably thick. I saw her as I approached, behind the plate glass window with the restaurant’s name etched in gold, facing the host’s podium, her back to the street, and slowed down. She went into her purse and brought out her phone. I wasn’t late. In thirty seconds when I reached the restaurant’s door I’d still be early. She answered a call. It was quick. And the phone went back in the purse. She turned, made sure it was me she was seeing, smiled, and waved.

“Your last text last night,” I said, once we were seated. “I’m confused.”

“Are you really, Faheem,” she said, tilting her head, her sapphire blue eyes reflecting movements of people behind me. The perfect ski-slope of her nose, tightly pursed lips, chapped from the cold, her exposed neck over the v of her sweater, made me reconsider ending things as I had planned. I should perhaps have suffered a pang of guilt, but our coming together was based on purely physical attraction, making what I was feeling and thinking at the moment perfectly legitimate. 

“I guess not,” I said.

“Then tell me. How was your date?”

“It wasn’t a date.”

“Faheem,” she touched my hand, the bracelet on her wrist clicking on the glass top. “Don’t. Insult me.”

I walked her to her building. Of all the things I could be, I was aroused. Again, completely in keeping with our arrangement. When we hugged, I held onto her, pressing her to me.

“You are such a fucking pig,” she whispered in my ear.

When she called later, we were both a few cups in and I went over to her place with my half-finished bottle.

“This is hard,” she said. Her head was on my thigh, tangled sheets snaking around our bodies. The radiator clanked in the corner, overheating the room. “It wasn’t supposed to be. I bet it isn’t this complicated with your new girlfriend.”

“Ellie,” I moved my leg, causing her head to slide off, “she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Not yet. Hey, where’re you going.”

“Bathroom.”

“You can’t stop thinking about her and she’s not your new girlfriend?” Ellie said when I got back into bed. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Fine, I won’t.”

            Ellie got on top of me. Before I could protest, she was guiding me inside her. I wasn’t properly hard. I closed my eyes. I saw Nita.

Friday when I showed up to get my mother, I found her in her robe, drinking tea. She wasn’t going. She refused. I poured myself a cup and sat down next to her. I told her about spending time with Nita. She couldn’t care less. I was talking to a wall. I went back and forth on whether I should tell her about the possession stuff, for Nita’s sake, for the confidence she put in me, and out of respect for the dead, then decided, given the circumstances, their out-of-the-blue appearance, it was fair. 

“I know,” my mother said when I was done. She set down her cup and lowered the volume on the tv. “Why do you think I don’t want to step foot in that house again.”

“What do you mean, you know?” I asked.

“In there,” she pointed to the cubby under the coffee table, “the orange album, bring it out.”

She opened it on the table and began turning the stiff, card stock pages with great care. She was almost to the end before she stopped. 

“Are these the pictures that girl showed you?” she asked. 

“Yes. This one, this one, and these two. Mom, all this time you knew her?”

“No,” said my mother. “I didn’t remember her then, when we went to their house, not until – just now. Those pictures were the last time your grandmother allowed us to go to that house. It was that woman’s birthday. Yasmine Samad. That was her unmarried name.”

“Why weren’t you allowed to go back?”

My mother took a breath. 

The Samad house in Chittagong had a reputation. Mr. Samad, who’d been a decorated magistrate, was said to have lost his mind when the British left. He terrorized his home and carried around a shotgun. Some nights a blast would wake the neighborhood and he could be heard stomping around the courtyard yelling and cursing god. 

Mrs. Samad, to my mother’s recollection, was a frail, kind woman. The times my mother went over to their house, Mr. Samad was never there, and Mrs. Samad seemed in a daze herself, even as she managed a birthday party and made certain over and over that every child was properly fed and safe. 

Yasmine was hard to read. Her rank was somewhere in the middle of a houseful of siblings, all of whom, including Yasmine, were normal enough to outside eyes. It was my grandmother’s insistence that my mother try to befriend her, have her to the house for lunch or tea, that had my mother going over there, until after, by all eyewitness accounts around the neighborhood, Yasmine’s possession by an evil spirit.

For a week’s worth of nights the house became a hub of holy men and keening, crying prayers, and unheard of rituals, while somewhere inside its walls, poor Yasmine thrashed and screamed. My grandmother kept all doors and windows locked. Once, my grandfather went down the hill to check, but the crowd around the house was so thick he couldn’t reach the gate. 

When the commotion finally ended, a silence as ringing as the chaos fell over the house. There was no news, no updates about Yasmine for a while. Next my mother saw her was briefly at the Chittagong Club. My grandmother made sure she kept her distance.

“Didn’t she say you two were also friends in school?” I asked. 

“That is not true,” said my mother. “She never went to my school.”

“Do you believe she was possessed?” 

“It happened. So, yes, I believe it.”

My father’s car pulled into the driveway. He walked in carrying bags of groceries and I helped him unload the rest. 

“What are you two still doing here?” he asked. “Don’t you have some prayer thing?”

“No,” I said. “Mom’s not going. You want to come along?”

He laughed all the way up the stairs.

“I just find it really hard to believe that you didn’t remember her at all that time,” I said to my mother. 

“I was barely thirteen the last time I saw her,” she said with a touch of resentment. “We moved away from that house. You know this. You even saw the house where we lived until I got married.”

Then she gave me a look that sealed the final word on the subject. 

 

Nita opened the door and knew right away my mother wasn’t with me. I mouthed Sorry. 

“Ma, who is it?” a man’s voice asked from inside.

“It’s Faheem, Dad,” Nita answered. 

She led me to the dining room, where her father sat with a group of men with cups of tea and snacks. 

Masood Moinuddin stood up and shook my hands. He had aged into a graceful, white-haired elder and now also wore a beard. The beard was henna-red. He’d done the pilgrimage to Mecca. He introduced me around the table, ending with the only other young person there, his son. 

“Hey man,” Nafeez Moinuddin gave my hand a throbbing shake, pulses of energy radiating down his arm and up through mine. He was wearing a Princeton sweatshirt. “Here, take this chair. I’ll get you some tea.” 

“How is your mother, Uncle?” Mr. Moinuddin asked.

“She’s fine, Uncle, thank you. I’m sorry she couldn’t make it.”

“No, it’s okay. And your father? He’s an engineer, no?”

“Yes. He’s also doing well.”

Nafeez brought my tea and I noticed Nita gone. She was probably with the women in a separate part of the house. 

Soon, the imam who would lead the prayer arrived, and we gathered in the living room where a white sheet was spread out wall to wall, and sticks of incense burned in a vase at its center. On the wall across from where I took my seat on the floor was a framed portrait of Yasmine Moinuddin. 

“Grab a plate and let’s go sit outside,” Nafeez said over my shoulder. 

There was still enough sunlight and a touch of warmth to sit out on their patio. An insect lamp hung from a hook above the sliding doors, and Nafeez lit the tiki torches mounted on the railing of the deck. 

“Eat, man, there’s enough food for an army,” he told me, and dug into his own food with his fingers. “It isn’t homemade. From Devon. You know that place Ghareeb Nawaz?”

“One of my favorites,” I said.

We were almost to the end of our plates before Nafeez, with a grain of rice sticking to the corner of his mouth, said, “Strange, right?”

“What,” I asked.

“Life.” 

After the other guests left and Mr. Moinuddin went up to bed, Nita, Nafeez, and I went down to the basement. It was as I remembered, and was, in fact, the only part of the house I recalled with any clarity. Nothing had been changed. The furniture was the same, the pool table the same, the barstools, the bar, the dated electronics, encased and preserved. We were in a museum. 

Nita took off the covering her head had been under and dropped it on the bar. Nafeez had turned the ancient tv on and was flipping channels. Nita went behind the bar and brought out three bottles of Amstel Light from the fridge below. 

“Any chance there’s a Heineken?” I asked. She opened the Amstel Lights and for me a Heineken, grinning the whole time.

The things she’d said to me the last time we stood there rushed back. Her parents’ hypocrisies. Her brother being the prince of the family. Outing his mental health. All he got away with. Her own sense of self. And now, there she was, accomplished, confident, rude, holding her beer aloft, while Nafeez muttered obscenities, and sweet, pungent incense from above spiced the air.