Fatema Haque

[one]

On the flights from Dhaka to Detroit, the flight attendants insisted Jannatul stuff her purse under the seat in front of her. Inside was the Quran her parents gave her to commemorate her learning to read Arabic. They had presented it to her on a Friday before jummah prayers while her sisters made tusha shinni to pass out at the mosque. The house smelled of toasted flour, cardamom, and ghee. Her parents looked proud, and when she kneeled to touch their feet in respect, her father caressed his hand over her head and helped her rise.

The Quran was wrapped in a kantha casing made from her mother’s prayer saris. Her mother had worked on it between asr and maghrib while she was still purified from wudu. She had measured and cut the worn-soft saris, layering seven sheets, smoothing the wrinkles out with her palm. Date-palm thorns secured the edges and long, temporary stitches held the case together. Then her mother had covered the case in its permanent, shorter stitches, running vertically from one end to the other. The final detail was a ribbon made from sari scraps, repeatedly folded and stitched till it was taut and strong.

Jannatul could never desecrate the Quran, not when her mother had taken such care to keep it unsullied by faulty humans. Another attendant walked past, shutting overhead compartments, checking for properly secured seatbelts. He paused when he noticed the purse on her lap and refused to move down the aisle until she tucked it under the seat in front of her. She waited till the man was out of sight before pulling the purse back onto her lap. For the remainder of the flight, she prayed for forgiveness, thinking of her deceased mother.

When she arrived at her husband’s home, he showed her the china cabinet where all the family Qurans sat on the topmost shelf, and she added hers to the stack. Relief, at last.

[two]

Beef, spiced, smoked, and dried. Knowing her penchant for the jerky, Jannatul’s father spent days drying and packing several kilograms. In Boston, US Customs ransacked her suitcases, tossed the jerky into a trash bin. She wanted to protest, but exhausted and frustrated from 18 hours on planes and unfamiliar terrains, she said nothing. The Bangladeshi family she met in Istanbul en route to Boston pulled her along to the next terminal. “They could’ve fined you heavily, but they were kind.” She saw no kindness; they could’ve taken everything else and she wouldn’t have been as angry.

[three]

Five tabeez, each bronze amulet carrying a different verse of the Quran and sealed with wax. The huzoor who made the amulets was known for his unimpeachable piety. His prayers had sealed protections for Jannatul’s entire village for several generations. Thinking ahead, she’d asked for specific things: protection during pregnancy for her and her unborn child, courage to travel new paths and adjust, peace to ease nightmares, of which she was quite prone to, invocations to heal a variety of ailments, and finally, protection from the evil eye.

None of them worked, and her hopes shriveled up like orange peel left out to dry. The world came to a standstill with her first American spring, 2020, and she never even had a chance to test the tabeez meant to protect her from the evil eye. Bound to their 1200 square foot Detroit home, Jannatul slept during the day, stayed up all night talking with her sisters on WhatsApp, and sobbed as former neighbors, friends, and relatives fell ill and died. She heard of doctors in her village shutting their doors, refusing to provide care. Her sisters-in-law bickered constantly: why was one allowed to travel back and forth between her parents and in-laws, why was another allowed guests, who felt disrespected because certain family members chose isolation over greeting visitors. Then there were the aunties who denied the disease entirely, or insisted they were less exposed in the village. The aunties in the city complained about neighbors in their building falling ill, refusing to disclose or isolate. Some argued that only those with preexisting conditions fell ill: “She was diabetic and had high blood pressure.” Others claimed helplessness in the face of divine will: “Allah’s will. May He show us mercy.” No one blamed the men who took no precautions, who came and went as they pleased, no masks, no social distancing, who were the first to get sick. When vaccines became available, Jannatul listened to their fears from an ocean away: the vaccine wasn’t real; people were being injected with saline so they’d get back to work;

hospital workers were selling the real vaccines to the highest bidders. Meanwhile, her husband drove her to a pharmacy near their Detroit home and she received both doses exactly three weeks apart.

Jannatul’s feet stopped feeling the ground; she had no body, not in America nor in Bangladesh; she hardly existed at all. “I wish this pandemic had started before I left Bangladesh,” she told her eldest sister. Her husband, overhearing the comment, left their bedroom. They didn’t speak for three days.

[four]

Bad eggs. The first miscarriage happened six weeks into the pregnancy. Jannatul thought she was late because she hadn’t been sleeping or eating much. The second miscarriage was at ten weeks. She bled late into the night. Alone in the emergency room, her husband unable to accompany her inside because of COVID protocols, she tried to communicate with the Bengali interpreter who couldn’t understand Sylhetti. “Husband, husband, husband,” she repeated in English, hot, sobbing breaths trapped under her mask, overheating her face. They let him into the hospital.

Afterward, her sisters berated her for climbing stairs and not sleeping enough. “It’s not your fault,” her husband said. “Your sisters are being bitches.”

“They’re not bitches.”

“Who blames their sister for a miscarriage? This shit happens sometimes and it’s not your fault.”

During Jannatul’s third pregnancy, her husband put a twin bed in his office near the kitchen and she avoided stairs. She lost the baby seven weeks into the pregnancy. She didn’t take calls from her sisters for a week.

[five]

A child-size set of aluminum cookware. Jannatul had bought them in a fit of nostalgia from a traveling salesman. They reminded her of the ones she’d played with growing up. She imagined her daughter playing with them one day. No daughter, certainly no child, ever came along. Through multiple miscarriages, she used the pots to boil single cups of tea. Her in-laws preferred instant coffee, her husband Red Bull, and there was never anyone else to brew a second cup for. On rare occasions, she used the handis in a double boiler, making individual servings of egg pudding. She caramelized sugar to a golden brown, poured it over the pudding. Each bite, sweet and silky in her mouth.