Sweeping Judgments
What Matters
By Nadeem Zaman
Our hosts, my childhood friend Amman Islam and his wife Sonia, had spent a week helping retire the fifteen-year marriage of their friends Rochelle and Abeer in California, two people they looked to as the epitome of nuptial bliss, and asked my wife and me to come over for an evening of decompressing from the trip. We had met Abeer and Rochelle when they visited Chicago and stayed with Amman and Sonia, which was the extent of our acquaintance. The wine had settled in dregs in our glasses, our plates left with crumbs spoke of another, distant hour, when we first sat down, and our softened gazes watched the light fade from the sky as the sun dipped in a final burst of fire in the west.
Sonia had spoken of the divorce with an edge of indignation in her voice. How Could They, Why, When Did It Start, How Could They Miss the Signs?
“I’ll say what’s going to be controversial,” Amman pulled the string on our silence. “They were incompatible. Not just on a personal level, on a cultural level, too. Abeer was rice-and-dal Bangladeshi and Rochelle couldn’t be expected to embrace it the same way. I don’t think anyone from one culture can wholly become a person of another just by association, even immersion, as it were.”
My wife angled her eyes at me, which I pretended not to see. Sonia gave us both a look, which Amman missed because his attention was turned upward while his next thought came together in his head. One could easily imagine his class periods filled with such moments. He’d been a professor since his late twenties, and it showed. At forty-five, he had the demeanor of a distinguished, young-looking emeritus.
“He tried everything,” Amman went on, “including making her live in Bangladesh for a year.”
“Which she liked,” Sonia said.
“Maybe for a week,” Amman laughed.
“So, what exactly are you saying?” Sonia asked.
“I’m saying they had differences that were irreconcilable both on personal and cultural levels, and the two issues together ended in their divorcing. Not one more or less important than the other. Roll your eyes all you want, my sweet, but I speak from observation and deduction.”
“Okay,” Sonia said, “that’s it.”
“Wait,” said my wife, “go on, Amman.”
“Yes, do go on,” said Sonia, in jest, whereas my wife was serious.
“Don’t be offended,” Amman said to my wife and me, “and I’m not speaking generally here. But it’s true that the differences Rochelle and Abeer thought would bring them closer did the opposite in the end. Abeer, to put it plainly, should have married a Bangladeshi woman. And he should have remembered how Bangladeshi he was and not try to become something he’s not.”
“Which is?” said my wife.
“Forgive my crude bluntness,” said Amman, “white.”
“Are you saying he ‘became white’ for Rochelle?” said my wife.
“In a way, yes,” said Amman. “You two, on the other hand, are the opposite. He knows who he is and is comfortable, and so are you. Abeer had a part of him that was constantly at war with itself, his entire life in this country, since the day he set foot here.”
Sonia’s teasing mood had smoothed out. She was listening to Amman with the careful distance of an interloper, an eavesdropper at a party who had hovered closer at the mention of her own name.
“If Rochelle had gone along and become more Bangladeshi, would that have satisfied him?” my wife asked.
Amman laughed genially, as he would at a student making a valorous but simple-minded attempt at a complex answer.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Abeer, like I said, was too Bangladeshi, Bengali, for his own good. I don’t remember him being like that in Dhaka. But then I left to come here long before him. When I saw him again, he looked and sounded the same, but each time after that something was changed. His English, his mannerisms. He even insisted on being called Abe for a while.”
“I remember that,” Sonia said. “When people asked if his full name was Abraham, he just said yes.”
“I think that’s the name he might have told Rochelle,” said Amman.
“He did,” Sonia said. “That’s exactly what he did.” She said it the second time as though her claim had been disputed.
“He sure did,” Amman said thoughtfully.
“And didn’t correct her for months, almost a year,” Sonia said, “until they were getting a place together.”
“How did it never come up before that?” my wife wondered.
Amman and Sonia made identical shrugs.
“That wasn’t all,” said Amman.
My wife leaned forward, like a keen interviewer with the subject of a lifetime.
“He told her a whole story about himself,” said Amman, “starting with him being born here in the US, then going back for several years to Bangladesh, and coming back as a teenager.”
“Stop,” said my wife.
“It’s true,” said Sonia.
“It doesn’t add up, though,” said my wife. “How does he go from being too Bangladeshi to faking his American identity?”
“That happened later,” said Amman. “He sort of made a full circle back, and then some. I think it was the fact that he never thought he’d meet a girl like Rochelle, or that she’d go for him.”
“And she was nuts about him,” said Sonia.
“When he dropped the game, came out, confessed, told her the whole truth, he went extra hard on reclaiming himself,” said Amman. “Which included going heavy on the Bangladeshi. He started speaking to her in Bangla. He’d have entire conversations with her not knowing a damn word he said.”
“Happened right here,” Sonia said. “Last time they visited, I heard him in the morning and I thought he was talking to Amman, but no, Amman was still in bed. Then I thought he was on the phone. And then I hear ‘Abeer, will you please stop?’ She was begging him, but he didn’t stop. Kept on going, like it gave him some sadistic pleasure. Of course, I knew what he was telling her. It was pretty shocking.”
My wife waited.
“That she was close-minded, small-minded, and a typical ignorant American who didn’t know how to see past her own nose.”
“He was saying all that to her in Bangla?”
“All of it.”
“Sounds horribly abusive,” said my wife, sitting back. “Sounds just terrible.”
“Love,” said Amman.
“Bullshit,” said my wife.
Sonia gave a small laugh.
“Fifteen years,” said my wife.
No lights had been turned on. The city, spread on three sides of us like a glittering tapestry, gave the room a spectral lighting.
“How much more did he do that they finally had to end it,” my wife wondered.
“Rochelle met someone,” said Sonia.
A long, brutal silence fell over us. Horns and bus exhausts, the distant rumble of the El, police whistles, and a street drum player’s banging crescendo at the corner, filled the void.
“What,” said Amman.
“She didn’t tell you, I’m sorry, and asked me to keep it to myself until we were back,” said Sonia.
“When?”
“About two months ago.”
“Two months? She’s been having an affair for two months?”
“They were separated, Amman, did you forget?”
“Still.”
I excused myself to use the bathroom, and when I came back, lights were on, and chairs were empty. I saw my wife out on the balcony, trying to keep an errant strand of hair from playing with the wind and whipping at her eye. Amman was on one end, leaning on the railing. Sonia appeared from the kitchen with a newly opened bottle of wine, and we stepped out together.
“Which was it then?” my wife asked, like a meeting was reconvening after a break. “His mendacity or her infidelity?”
“I had no idea about the infidelity,” said Amman, not hiding his resentment.
“It was both,” said Sonia. “And they’re both better off.”
Her wine glass dropped and shattered. Wine splattered the floor like blood, flecked my pants at the cuffs, and most of it drenched my wife’s bare left foot. Amman went inside and returned with paper towels and a broom and dustpan. Sonia was cursing and apologizing. I helped my wife to safety by lifting her by the waist and clearing her over the scatter of broken glass. I held on after I put her down, inhaling her scent of wine and lavender, until she gave me a peck on the cheek and pushed me away to go wash her feet and put on shoes.
“I’m so sorry,” Sonia kept saying, more distraught than breaking a wineglass should have made her. She went on cleaning, too, trying to erase the wine stain like it was evidence of a crime, until my wife took her by the shoulders and stood her up.
Amman was hunched over the railing, facing south. After my wife took Sonia inside, I went and stood next to him.
“I didn’t know a thing about the infidelity,” he said.
“Would it have mattered?” I asked. “If she hadn’t been? They’d still divorce, wouldn’t they?”
Amman sighed.
“I wish we’d never gone out there,” he said. “Ever since we got back, she’s been like this. Back to losing her mind at the smallest things. Just when we’d finally made progress.”
I gave a glance over my shoulder. Sonia and my wife were in the living room. Sonia no longer looked upset. She was talking animatedly, and my wife was listening with humoring attention as she would with a child recounting a birthday party with magicians and clowns.
“It was her idea,” Amman said. “One call from Rochelle, and she had our tickets bought.”
“Why did you go?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me? The only time she lets me out of her sight is to go to the bathroom and to teach. I can’t get through office hours without her texting and checking if I’m home. If I’m any more than five minutes late texting back, the whole day goes to shit.” He checked the living room. His instincts were sharp. Sonia was fixed on him, despite the darkness that obscured our features, reducing us to outlines.
“Jesus,” Amman said, “listen to us. After what you two went through. We have to sound like a bunch of whiny assholes.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “Pain is pain.”
We headed inside.
Sonia watched Amman take a seat and didn’t take her eyes off him until he was properly in the chair. My wife is far better than me at subtlety. She allowed that small, incredibly intimate and volatile exchange its space without intruding on it from start to finish. I gawked at the whole scene like a mouth-breathing idiot.
About three months ago, long before they had the first inkling of Abeer and Rochelle’s marriage nearing an end, Amman and Sonia had had their own disaster. My wife called me at work, which she never does, and which made me think she had far worse news. No, she’d said, as hyperventilation waited in my lungs to spring, it was Sonia, devastated and losing her mind after having walked in on Amman in their bed with one of his colleagues.
I knew about this colleague. Not by name or even what she taught, but from Amman mentioning her more times than someone would casually mention a colleague. Still, I thought nothing of it. Amman and Sonia had a strong marriage. Them cheating on each other was as unthinkable to me as my wife or I doing the same. But that’s how it happens. Our world cracks without warning. We flail and try to recover like the aftermath of a crisis, a natural disaster, a breakdown on the road that leaves us stranded and wondering why we deserve such calamities after leading a good and decent life.
My wife was outraged that I hadn’t said something to her about what I had noticed. I didn’t know what there was to say, I told her. I’m sorry, I said, if I was supposed to have been on guard for signs. No, she told me. I wasn’t. Sonia had no idea either, until she did.
The colleague was no longer at Amman’s university. One of the last times he mentioned her was to say that she was fed up with her department, and the university, and had taken a job on the West Coast, where she preferred to be. He’d said the last part with a lament in his tone, as if it was because of him she wanted to be as far away from Chicago as possible and still be in the country. Sonia had overseen Amman as he erased her number, email, social media, any and all channels of communication from his life.
“I know where she’s teaching,” he’d told me on one occasion. “If I wanted to, I could contact her, but I don’t. I want Sonia.”
II
Amman’s thesis about the dissolution of Abeer and Rochelle’s marriage stood on the brink of disproval. On one level it was about cultural incompatibility, but the introduction of infidelity left that theory confounded, and on another level it was about identity, specifically Abeer’s, whose journey had not been unlike the ones of many before him. I could empathize.
Throughout my childhood and young adult life, my parents spent almost as much time and money making sure I learned how Bangladeshi and Muslim I was as they hammered into my brain the irrefutable fact that college, and no place else, was where I was headed straight out of high school. Bengali lessons at the home of a friend who terrified me with her fiery eyes and shattering voice, which I learned later were the result of a horrendous marriage to an abusive man; Quran studies at the Muslim Community Center, where I learned more Urdu than I did the Quran, and horrified my father, who believed Pakistanis were evil and their language filth because of what they’d done to Bangladeshis during the war that liberated the country. We visited Bangladesh on holidays. I was forbidden during those trips to speak in English. Aunts, uncles, cousins, relatives constantly irritated my father by flouting this rule.
Some of it worked. My Bangla became shakily conversational, which made me entertaining to my Bangladeshi kin. I went back and forth between not wanting ever to speak Bangla to reconciling with it, often forced by my father, until as an adult I read the translated works of several Bengali writers and began to see how their works reflected me and who I was.
It was my wife’s eager interest that drove it home. The day she said with intrigue how much she appreciated who I was and wanted to know about Bangladesh, Bangla, even Islam, my pride exploded. Exactly the result my parents had failed to inspire.
My parents had in mind for me a Bangladeshi-Muslim wife and grandchildren with whom I’d visit weekly, go to the mosque, and attend community functions, and whose family they could trace back to the village in Bangladesh from which they came. They had wanted an educated wife, with a distinguished pedigree, someone respectable and pious. I brought them a daughter-in-law of Irish, German, and Swiss descent, who was able to go back six generations in her hometown of Rockford, Illinois. My wife’s father was a toll booth operator and her mother an assembly line worker at a meat processing plant. Neither of them had finished high school, and they were devout Catholics.
Five minutes after my mother met my wife, when we were still dating, she’d shed every last one of her reservations. She was teaching her Bangla, and making plans to go shopping on Devon Avenue for recipes she wanted to teach her. My father asked me privately if she would consider converting. Not unless I was thinking of becoming Catholic, I told him. My wife and I breathed in relief, and were quite impressed when neither set of parents brought up Allah or the Holy Trinity and started a religious war.
It was after midnight when we left. The night was too lovely to go home just yet and my wife wanted to walk part of the way. We headed east on Harrison and made a left on Michigan Avenue going north. My wife was hugging my arm with her face pressed to my shoulder, like she was trying to stay warm against a murderously chilled wind. I kissed the top of her head.
“Not a cultural thing then, I guess,” she said after we’d walked another couple blocks in silence, breathing in the night, thinking our thoughts. Mine had nothing to do with Amman and Sonia, or Amman’s theories, or their friends. I’d happily left that tension back at their place. “According to Amman’s theory.”
“He’s chockful of theories, if nothing else,” I said. “No. I never agreed with notions like that. Bangladeshis are full of them. Half of my parents’ friends married non-Bangladeshis, as did their mixed children. Go figure.”
“What would have happened, do you think, if your parents didn’t accept me, or wanted me to become Muslim?
“I wouldn’t have let it happen.”
“But what if it did? If both you and them were unwilling to compromise?”
“It would be very difficult,” I said.
“Which part?” My wife stopped. We were in front of Columbia College. I saw her back reflected on the window. Over her head was my face, unwilling to go further into this conversation, trying not to look myself in the eye. The window display was of a young white woman in a winter cap and bright yellow shirt accompanied by Live What You Love written in large yellow letters.
“Both,” I said.
“Yes,” said my wife. “Of course it would. As it would for me.”
We started walking again.
“I’d choose you,” I said.
“I don’t think you need to say that,” my wife said.
“Why? What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
This time I stopped. We were at the end of a block and didn’t have the walk signal. A jogger, huffing and panting and running in place, came to a stop, a serious young woman for whom this part of her life’s routine was non-negotiable. She checked both ways and started across the street before the light changed.
“You don’t know?”
“No. I honestly don’t. You’re right. It would be difficult. I think for me it would be impossible. To have to choose between my parents and you.”
“What would help your decision? If I became Catholic?”
She chuckled and gave a headshake.
“No, silly.”
“Then what?”
She could take long silences while putting her responses together. Five minutes passed. Our pace was already slow and we’d slowed down even more.
“I hope you won’t hate me, or my parents,” she finally said. “They do love you. And I hope you don’t question that I do, too. I’m sorry I never told you before, but I... no, there’s no excuse. I kept it from you. That’s as bad as lying about it. You remember how that day when you first met them, my father had gone to the store for over an hour to buy cigarettes?”
I said I did.
“Well, when we… he and I… were outside before he left, we had a small fight. If such fights can be small.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“No, you didn’t. And I’m sorry that I kept it from you for so long.”
“What happened?”
“He said, I quote, ‘Of all my kids of course it was you who had to go find the foreigner.’”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“He went on and on, our babies were going to be half-breeds, whatever god you worshipped was vile and anti-American, that you’d turn me into a slave to your whims.”
“All that happened and I or your mother didn’t hear a thing?” I asked.
“We’re good at keeping our rage quiet in my family,” my wife said. “Entire nights of fights between my parents happened in whispers.”
“But your dad’s always been cool with me.”
“He can put on an act very well.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s the obedient wife,” she said.
“So hers is an act as well?”
She looked at me for a long time, as if studying my face to draw it, and then we started walking again.
I opened a bottle of wine while my wife ran a bath, then took her a glass and set it on the lip of the tub.
“I hope you can forgive me,” she said, taking my wrist. I sat next to her wineglass. The water was hot. My glasses steamed up and I took them off and set them on my knee.
“You didn’t do anything,” I said. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t unsettled. I have my own prejudices. When I learned about her family, I was not above having thoughts of them being small-town, small-minded people who talked exactly the way her father had talked about me. I knew nothing about Rockford or its people, except that it was a blue-collar town filled with families like my wife’s, but that didn’t stop me from drawing them as a type. But I also didn’t need to go as far as Rockford to find that type. Just beyond the southern city limits of Chicago were suburbs and beaches where racial tensions had deep historical roots, and racialized violence had taken place in decades past with all the hatred and evil of the Jim Crow South.
“I’d be very displeased with you,” said my wife. “I’d take it as a betrayal.”
“What would you like me to feel? It wasn’t you who said those things. It was your father. We can’t help who other people are.”
She drank her wine.
“The first time my mother met a Black person,” she said, “was when she was fifteen. The daughter of a family that moved into their neighborhood, not far from where they live now. They became friends. She came over, my mother went to their house. One time my mother saw a dress she liked and the girl told her she could try it on. My mother did, and when she took it off she checked herself to see if any black had rubbed off on her.”
I couldn’t help a laugh.
“I know,” said my wife. “We’re horrible. White people I mean. Really.”
“That’s a sweeping judgment, too.”
“We are, though.”
“I think I’ve told you many times how horrible Bangladeshis are about skin color. But that, too, has its place.”
“Oh stop it,” she splashed water at me, “Mr. Goody Pollyanna.”
“That’s a strange mix of analogies, but okay,” I flicked the surface of the water at her. It struck her eyes a little too sharply and caused them to water. “Sorry. See? I’m not so goody after all. I’m violent.”
“Get out,” she sprinkled my face and commanded.
III
I sat out on the back porch with my wine thinking about how we’d made it out of what happened less than two years ago, and the state we were in that left both of us certain our marriage would not last. She left to go stay with her parents for a month, which we’d agreed was best, and I went back and forth between staying at my parents’ house and having them over to spend nights with me. They would take turns keeping watch through the night.
I didn’t sleep much anyway. When my mother was on watch she told me stories of them living in Dhaka during the war I’d heard all my life but couldn’t get enough of. Stories of my grandfather listening to Free Bangla Radio on a small transistor at a volume just loud enough for him to be able to hear but low enough to not be picked up by a passing patrol of the Pakistan army; of my mother’s two older brothers’ friends who had joined the liberation forces, digging graves in their backyard to inter weapons they’d confiscated after ambushing an army convoy; of nighttime raids by the army in neighbors’ homes; of the army banging on their gate one night near the end of the war and the standoff between my grandmother and the young captain leading the patrol looking for “miscreants”, while my uncle’s friends with the liberation forces – said “miscreants” – hid out on the third floor after burying a new cache of weapons in the yard, and my grandmother defying the captain to ransack a respectable home with three young and unmarried daughters and their aging parents; of the round-the-clock bombing of Dhaka for two straight nights by the joint Bengali and Indian forces before the surrender of the Pakistan army, and then watching from the roof the next morning the liberation forces entering the city victorious.
My father spoke little. He mostly asked if I needed anything every few minutes.
He’d lost a brother when he was twelve. Being the eldest in the family, he shouldered the burden of his own grief and of his siblings. The brother that died was the second child after him, two years younger. They’d been out in a cold December rain late into the evening because my father had an argument with their father and ran out of the house. His brother, devoted to him, had followed. By the time they returned, they were soaked and the brother had caught a chill. He fell into a burning fever that rose to a staggering one-hundred-five degrees, slipped into a coma, and was pronounced dead the next morning.
I didn’t know this story in full until I was in my twenties. I knew I had an uncle that had died very young, about how sweet he was, how gentle and kind. I’d seen old black and white pictures of him, mostly with my father, a good-looking, healthy child with a full life ahead of him.
At the end of the month, my wife was ready to come home. We’d find out, she said, if we were meant to stay married or not by staying with each other and married until we weren’t.
Her father had been horrible to her throughout her stay, accusing her and, by association, me, of criminal negligence as parents, of living in a city full of “colored gangs” and “lawlessness,” and trying to raise a child in an America he wouldn’t spit at.
Our first week back together was rough. If one of us wasn’t crying we were trying to comfort the other. We were snapping one second and apologizing the next. I went for walks, long ones, and despite all efforts ended up at the very place I needed to stay away from.
It had been show-and-tell day at school. His object was a model airplane he’d spent the month making, to which he’d attached a wing made of Styrofoam and a dime to the tail that helped balance the weight and keep the plane in flight. It was quite a feat for a boy his age.
We put him on the school bus and went about our days. My company was going through yet another phase of downsizing, leaving my mood rotten. I went to work, did my job, talked very little to my co-workers, spoke only when needed to my boss, and left the moment four-thirty struck.
Around noon, when my floor was clearing out for lunch, I heard a rabble of murmuring voices. I was in the breakroom heating water for tea, my one way of managing stress on the job that wasn’t smoking, and almost slammed into a co-worker on my way out. Her face was a mask of shock. I asked her what the matter was. She pushed past me into the breakroom and turned on the TV. And then she broke down.
Thirty minutes earlier, as I was coming out of a meeting with my boss, and my wife was at the checkout line at Jewel, a seventeen-year-old white man named Randall Carter was entering our son’s school armed with an M16, and one hundred rounds of ammunition belted to his waist. Carter’s stepmother was our son’s teacher. Their relationship, as it would come out over the following days and weeks, had reached a point of no return for Randall, and he retaliated by opening fire on her in her class. Randall filled the classroom with a burst of bullets for less than ten seconds before he was tackled to the ground by two other teachers from neighboring classrooms. One of his bullets found our son. His stepmother survived.
IV
My wife brought the bottle of wine with her and refilled my glass. Her skin gave off the heat of her bath. She pressed her head to my arm. We’d made it. Passed whatever test of time we should have failed according to research. Every day there was a different struggle. There were days that made us ache being under the same roof, just the two of us. There were nights my wife didn’t want me around, and I’d take myself to a motel. She would tell me without scruples why. I never wanted to know, but she’d insist. She needed to be alone to be able to listen. She told me that if I ever needed to do something similar, to just say the word. I never did. I was too terrified. I could barely stay on my feet when we went to the cemetery. My knees buckled and my head grew light.
We’ll be going next week, for his birthday, and, as always, I’m not ready. I will likely never be. Neither is my wife. But she’s better at being present. I stalk the past. A past in which we’re sending Faizan to school and something causes a delay. The bus breaks down. Faizan gets sick all of a sudden and has to stay home. Randall Carter’s plan is foiled, he’s pulled over for speeding, and his weapons are discovered. Faizan is still here, and we don’t have to be quiet and still to listen for him in the house.
Nadeem Zaman is the author of the novel In the Time of the Others (longlisted for the 2019 DSC Prize in South Asian Literature) and the story collection Up in the Main House & Other Stories. His fiction has appeared in Roanoke Review, The Wilderness House Literary Journal, Copperfield Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Dhaka Tribune, Bengal Lights, and other journals. His novel The Inheritors is forthcoming in 2022.
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