When they were first married, Shumi’s husband Pavel went out for a smoke on the roof after sex, standing in the dark, leaning over the parapet. They lived on the roof of Pavel’s parents’ house at the time, in a single-room apartment. She watched him from the back, the red glow of his cigarette a lone light against the black sky. Sometimes, she went out to join him, hastily dressed in a cotton kamiz and shalwar, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. He turned around and gave her a smile with his stained yellow teeth, then turned back to gaze at the street below with his large, almond-shaped eyes.
What was it about young eyes? Why did they appear different from older eyes, innocent and joyful? Was it simply because the muscles that held them up at the corners were tighter? A doctor might know, but Pavel was a terrible doctor. He did the bare minimum, only fulfilling his hours at the P.G. hospital, while his friends studied for their FCPS exams and earned extra money by putting in hours at various private clinics around Dhaka, shirking their duties at the government hospital to do so. Pavel, on the other hand, would return home by five or six at the latest, slicing through the traffic on Mirpur Road in a three-wheeler baby taxi, parting buses and trucks in front of him. Paying the baby-taxi driver with wrinkled cash from his pant pocket, he raced up the stairs, his sandals slapping on the cement steps, stopping on the first floor to say hello to his parents, then bounding in the front door of their home a few minutes later (the young girl who worked for them unbolted the double-panel, painted doors and stood aside hastily when she saw him from the roof), tearing out of his office clothes, shedding shirt, socks, and shoes, down to a sleeveless, white, ribbed undershirt, and sat down at his desk to write.
The desk and the bed were the only furniture in the bedroom. Besides the bedroom, there was a square kitchen to the side that doubled as the maid’s sleeping area, and a small bathroom outside (consisting of a toilet standing next to a shower that rained on the commode seat). The heavy mahogany writing desk had belonged to Pavel’s grandfather, then served as Pavel’s desk when he had been a student. Now it was pushed against the window of their marital bedroom, with a view of the evening sunset.
It was Pavel’s habit to break out a fresh packet of local cigarettes, lift out one crisp stick, insert it in his mouth, and inhale, then open up his nostrils and inhale again, before picking up a ballpoint pen and a stack of newsprint paper and applying the pen to the mottled grey sheet, sighing with pleasure as the nib scratched the cheap, rough surface. Pavel wrote plays for his theater group as well as for Bangladesh radio. Before they were married, he had boasted to Shumi that he was an A-list artist, enlisted by audition, but that was not why Shumi had married him. She had been attracted to him because he was brilliant, a good student, a doctor, a young man with promise, on his way to big things.
Pavel’s writing drove Shumi to distraction, along with all the other things about him that she had discovered only after marriage, such as his lack of ambition and direction. She had been a young bride–an M.A. student at Dhaka University in the English Department when Pavel’s parents had picked her out for their son–with a small, pretty face, soft and pliant, as young faces are before they harden into their natural character. She complained to her university friends about his writing, smoking, and lack of ambition.
“What are you doing with your life?” Shumi asked Pavel one night, when they were in bed, the lights turned off and the maid tucked in her bedding on the floor of the dark kitchen. “Don’t you have any care that you have to rise in your career? Without a higher degree, what will you be? How will you feel when all your friends are big doctors and you are nothing?” She might have shouted these words. Her cheeks were red and her nose inflamed, her pretty dark eyes swollen with the injustice of life.
Pavel left the bed, rising angrily and slipping his feet into plastic slippers, going out to stand on the roof, dressed in an undershirt and a cotton lungi tied at his navel, the breeze playing on his face as blew smoke, while Shumi cried audibly in bed. She was still conscious, her chest heaving, her eyelids shut from exhaustion, when she heard him scraping past her to the writing table, dragging out the wooden chair, and pulling the scratchy newsprint paper toward him in the dark.
Luckily for Shumi, one day a senior professor of Pavel’s also gave him a lecture about his career.
“Give up this play-acting business!” the professor shouted to his favorite student. “The radio is standing in your way. How will you pass your medical exams like this, by giving so much time to your plays?”
Shortly after receiving this lecture, Pavel gave up theater. He passed the FCPS exam and went on to become a respectable doctor at P.G. Hospital, with a private side practice at a small clinic in Gulshan. Shumi congratulated herself, thinking that it was perhaps her change in tactic that had done the trick.
Shumi had been bothered by his smoking habit since the day she had discovered Pavel with a cigarette. They had gone to New Market together, sitting together on a rickshaw with the hood down, a light breeze playing in their hairs, to buy the latest Bengali novel that had just come out. Pavel wanted to read the book so badly that he had put in an order for it with his favorite bookseller, at the narrow shop that stored most of its books in boxes upstairs. As they waited on the footpath outside the shop for the doors to open, standing beside the drain, Pavel wrestled a cigarette packet out of his pants’ back pocket and pulled out a slim, white cigarette, a local brand named Boss, with tobacco-stained fingers. The sight of the yellow tips of his fingers and his bared, mud-orange speckled teeth turned Shumi’s heart cold.
She began to cry, standing in the open public market. “I never imagined that I would be married to a smoker, someone who would smoke himself to death day by day!”
He laughed loudly, then started to hack, his lungs rasping.
With advice from friends, Shumi had gone hard after Pavel’s smoking habit, crying about it at dinner at his parents’ house, where they ended up eating on several days of the week, in front of Pavel’s doctor friends and childhood friends and cousins, and in front of her own friends, who were in on the plan to make him quit smoking. At the slightest cough or clearing of Pavel’s throat, Shumi cried about his health. She convinced his doctor friends to force him to get a chest X-ray, which showed dark smudges on his lungs. To help him quit, she bought him peanuts, sunflower seeds, and dried chickpeas roasted in sand and packed in newspaper packets, until one day he stopped smoking.
Soon after passing his FCPS exam and getting promoted, Pavel completely changed his appearance, thanks to Shumi. Now he was clean shaven. He did not hack to clear his throat and chest like he used to do. Nor did he gaze at the world with wide eyes, laughing idiotically. Shumi bought him Western shirts and pants from the new export shops in Gulshan and imported socks and shoes. Under Shumi’s expert navigation to prepare him for the world, Pavel applied to American schools and gained admission to a master’s degree program in public health.
Shumi and Pavel moved to Texas, where some of Pavel’s doctor friends lived, and, like them, borrowing their books and notes, Pavel took his US Medical License Exam to practice as a doctor in the US, passing quickly with high marks. He completed his residency with ease, going on to become a surgeon at a big hospital in Houston within a few fast-moving years. It was remarkable how disciplined he could be now that he was focused on the serious business of life, after he quit smoking. Often, in group chats with friends or with his parents on WhatsApp, Pavel credited Shumi with this improvement in his life.
One day, Shumi had been clearing out their old suitcases in the attic of the house they had just bought in the Woodlands. They had hauled the suitcases from their first apartment to two successive houses, filled with things that they had never bothered to throw away. Today she was determined to get rid of the last of their unnecessary belongings. She came across a tube of newsprint paper, bound with a yellowed elastic band. The bent top page was crowded with neat little rows of small, upright handwriting in Bengali.
“Do you want to keep these?” Shumi confronted Pavel in the kitchen when he returned from the office, at eight in the evening, crisp in a laundered shirt and blue blazer, his eyes small and glittering with success.
He looked intently at the bundle in her raised hand, then shook his head. “No.”
“Do you want to look through the pages first?” she asked.
“No,” he said, shaking his head again fervently, closing his eyes.
“All right,” Shumi said, smiling, and threw the papers in the kitchen trash can. Late at night, she thought that the old papers might be infested with silver fish, so she rose from bed to pull out the trash bag from the kitchen trash can and dump it in the city trashcan parked outside the kitchen door.
Shumi and Pavel had two strapping boys, a big house in the posh suburb of the Woodlands, with two staircases, five bedrooms, and a backyard that backed up to the woods. They had a landscape gardener, a housekeeper, and a nanny to help them maintain their lives, but Shumi often felt impatient, pacing the shiny floors of her house, looking in mirrors, searching for meaning. She wasn’t young anymore. Her face had settled into thick lines. She had spent her life pushing Pavel and the boys to success, but what had she done for herself? She was driven to distraction by these questions, which pestered her even at night, making her get out of bed in a hot sweat, to go stand outside on the second-floor balcony, staring out at their manicured lawn shrouded with dark shapes. A bug, a small moth, floated near her on the floor of the balcony and moved around in circles, hopping randomly, as if it was lost, or trapped, with no sense of direction. She watched it for a long time, with tears in her eyes, then stepped on it and crushed it.
She pulled out her cellphone in the dark, the light from the phone lighting up the dust in the air, trying to remember the old parts of her floating about her. “I used to read Shakespeare,” she typed out on the WhatsApp group chat among her university friends. “Remember, one semester Hamid Sir taught us Beowulf for three weeks, covering it in detail from every angle? And remember, we read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? You remember how much I loved songs, how I used to listen to the songs of Jon Bon Jovi?”
One day, while out shopping for groceries at Costco, she felt faint, seeing the shelves and the boxes of food around her at a great distance, floating away from her, out of reach. She clutched the shelf near her and sat down on the floor so that she would not fall. That evening, she waited in the kitchen for Pavel to return home, with the lights turned out, while the children played upstairs with the nanny.
The minute Pavel walked in the front door, she faced him with folded arms. “I want a divorce,” she said.
They parted ways, splitting time with the kids so that Shumi would have them on the weekends only, because the schools in the Woodlands were better than the inner city schools. Shumi moved into a small garage apartment at the back of someone’s house in the city, where she took a poetry class at a community college, signed up for a Groupon group to take photographs in Central park, and joined a small writing group of ragtag, middle-aged people in their forties and fifties, men with greying hair and expanding foreheads and women with bulging bellies and sunken faces. Her new writer friends came over sometimes after work, with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes. They hung out on the narrow balcony outside Shumi’s garage apartment, leaning over the railing, on top of the world, staring down into all the other houses below.
One day, someone handed a cigarette to Shumi.
“I never smoked in my life,” Shumi said, taking the cigarette between two fingers. “But after fifty years of never having smoked, here I am–”
She held the cigarette in her mouth. Another woman lit it with a hot pink lighter, and told her to inhale, then inhale again.
“Life is too short!” Shumi said, taking a long drag and blowing smoke. “I’m fifty now! Everything I’ve been told, everything I believed, is a lie! I’m going to die soon! If I don’t live now, then when?” she cried, her eyes red, a cough rising in her throat.
“Exactly,” her friends said, lighting up their cigarettes, too.
Together, they stared into the night sky, little bobs of light in a vast, dark universe. And for a moment, the world was still.
***
Gemini Wahhaj’s novel Mad Man will be published in Fall 2023 by 7.13 Books. She is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, Chicago Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, Allium, Valley Voices, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship. Her short story collection Katy Family was a finalist for the Acacia Fiction Prize by Kallisto Gaia Press and the Hudson Prize by Black Lawrence Press, her novel was a finalist for the Big Moose Prize by Black Lawrence Press, and her YA novel was a semi-finalist for the Leap Frog Global Fiction Prize in YA.
Camilla Gibb is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels: Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life, Sweetness in the Belly, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, and most recently, The Relatives, as well as a memoir, This Is Happy. Camilla has been the recipient of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award and the CBC Canadian Literary Award and has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the RBC Taylor Prize.