The Newlyweds Read Online Free

she almost laughed out loud. Why would any man hesitate to tell a woman he was courting that he had just acquired a three-bedroom house with two bathrooms, a garage, and a backyard with plenty of space for a vegetable garden? He e-mailed her a photograph, which looked to her like something from a magazine: a yellow house with a gray roof and white shutters, taller on one side than the other. (This design was called split-level, and it was one of several similar houses on the tract, a group of homes that had been built by a developer in the 1970s.) George also mentioned that the tract was a family-oriented community, and that the schools nearby were excellent.
    “My mother says he’s probably divorced,” Ghaniyah said when Amina showed her the picture of the house one day on her cousin’s home computer. “She says there are a lot of bad people online, and she’s worried about you.”
    “Please tell her not to worry.”
    “Otherwise, why is he unmarried?”
    “Because he hasn’t met the right person,” Amina snapped. “It’s not like here—where your parents have a heart attack if you’re not engaged at twenty-five.”
    Ghaniyah held up her hands in a defensive gesture. “It’s my mother who was asking. Personally I think you’re really brave.”
    Amina’s mother said she shouldn’t have told Ghaniyah anything about George, but by that time Amina knew that he was coming to Desh to meet her, and what if he mentioned AsianEuro or Heineken beer himself? Her aunts were crafty, none more so than Ghaniyah’s mother, her Devil Aunty. (Her mother used to reprimand her for calling Aunty #2 by that name, but when she laughed afterward Amina knew it was okay.) Her Devil Aunt was also the only one of her mother’s three sisters who spoke any English, and she had a special way of asking one question in order to get the answer to another. Evenbefore she met him in person, Amina knew that George wouldn’t be prepared for that kind of Deshi trick.
    She had expected disapproval from Ghaniyah and her aunt, but it surprised her when her cousin Nasir started visiting her. Nasir wasn’t actually related to her; her father called him nephew because Nasir’s father had been his closest friend. When his parents had died less than a year apart, Nasir was only eleven years old. Her father had treated him like a son, monitoring his progress in school, buying him presents (even when they couldn’t afford it), and taking him to Friday prayers at the Sat Gumbad Mosque. When Nasir started college in Rajshahi, her father had arranged a place for him to stay near the university, with one of her mother’s cousins and his family. (George asked her to use the word “relative” when she was describing her cousins in English; he said it made his head hurt, trying to understand who was who.)
    When she was a teenager, she had been in love with Nasir, who was six years older than she was. He had been studying computer science, but he was like her father in that he loved to read poetry, especially poetry about the liberation of Bangladesh. When Nasir returned from college on visits to see his sisters, he would ride his motor scooter over to have dinner with Amina and her parents, and often he would recite his own poems after they finished eating. Her aunts and her cousins had teased her about Nasir, who was unusually tall and handsome but very dark skinned. He allowed his thick, black hair to grow long and then cut it very short in order to save money at the barbershop. He always spoke English with Amina, and when she responded, even if it was only in a whisper, he would tell her mother how clever she was. A few years after he’d finished university, Nasir got his visa and left to work in his cousin’s restaurant in London. According to her mother, Amina had sulked for two months.
    She knew that there had been some discussion about the possibility of her and Nasir marrying, once she reached the right age, and also that those discussions