‘It’s OK, I’ll have cereal.’ I grabbed the box of Coco Pops that I had hidden behind the rice tin. In this house, if I don’t hide my stash, my younger brother Malik will eat it all. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve reached for my cereal, or anything really, like the bread, or milk, to find it’s gone. The worst part is, he leaves the empty boxes and cartons where they are, so I don’t realise it’s finished until it’s too late.
‘Aren’t you meeting Dina today?’ Ma asked as she washed the dishes, moving with speed and accuracy despite the early hour. Everything Ma does, she does quickly. She never dawdles or lingers. She’s always been on the go, from as far back as I can remember.
My parents aren’t well-off. They do all right but Ma always has to work; we need the extra income. She is a Special Educational Needs teacher at our local primary school, which is a pretty tiring job. When we were younger, her days were always a whirlwind of school runs, work, batch cooking, cleaning, mending, activities, extended family responsibilities. I don’t think I ever saw her sitting around and relaxing when I was growing up.
‘I was supposed to,’ I replied. ‘But she’s got family stuff going on. She’s having another baby.’
‘A baby? Mashallah! That’s wonderful news!’ Ma put down the tea caddy. ‘How many weeks is she? How is she feeling?’
I shrugged, trying to keep the misery from showing on my face. ‘She’s fourteen weeks and she’s OK, Alhamdulillah.’
‘Wow.’ Ma fell silent as she steeped the teabags in hot water, making the drinks the usual English way. I knew she was wondering when I would take a leaf out of Dina’s book. Not by getting knocked up obviously, but by progressing in life. Every so often she’d tell me off about how I was getting older and I needed to find a husband and did I need her to set me up the Bengali way? I probably did, to be honest, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to. Most of my Muslim and Asian friends had parents who were so traditional that finding their own spouse wasn’t an option. They’d shave their heads for a mother like mine; young, sort of cool, with the perfect East/West balance. And most importantly, who actively encouraged her daughter to find her own marriage partner.
‘I’m going to take this to the other room,’ I muttered, putting my bowl and tea onto a tray and then carrying it over to our living room. Baba was there, watching Bangla TV as usual, and he nodded to me as I sat down on the other end of the cream leather sofa with my tray on my lap.
‘Kita khobor?’ he asked. What was new? Dina had a foetus; I had a notebook and met a boy on the Tube. I couldn’t tell him any of those things. My mum might have wanted me to date, but my dad certainly didn’t. I knew this, without him ever explicitly saying it, through the random comments and observations I’d heard over the years: Girls from good families don’t talk to boys; Look how Polly’s daughter married an English boy, tawbah tawbah; Chi chi chi, it must have been a love marriage, God forbid.
I opened my mouth to reply with something trivial about work when Ma called out, ‘Hoonrayni, the cha is done, breakfast is ready,’ and I was saved by the yell. Baba got up from his place and straightened out his lungi before strolling to the dining room like a boss man. Despite being ‘modern’, Ma was also traditional in many ways. She still made breakfast for my dad nearly every day and she also never called him by his name. Not in front of anyone, anyway. Like many Bengali women from previous generations, she called him variations of ‘listen’ or ‘are you listening?’ If she was speaking about him, then he was ‘Maya’s dad’. I was used to it now, of course, but as a child I thought ‘Hoonrayni’ was Baba’s real name.
I turned on the TV and mindlessly flicked through the channels as I ate my cereal. Was this it? Was this how my life was going to be for the next ten years, until someone was desperate enough to marry me? Was I going to be living with my parents in my thirties, eating the same cereal from my childhood Peter Rabbit bowl and watching them potter around and live their lives while letting mine dehydrate?
‘Why do you look so miserable?’ Malik poked his head round the door and raised an eyebrow at my fluffy onesie with the bunny ears on the hood. He was dressed for the day in a bomber jacket over a hoodie, expensive-looking jeans and one of his many pairs of exclusive trainers that littered the porch. Malik got onto a graduate scheme at a top firm as soon as he finished uni with a first in business and he now had a really good job that paid ridiculously well. So well, in fact, that he recently brought an architect round to draw up plans for a kitchen and loft extension to the house that he was planning on paying for himself.
‘It’s Saturday, Affa. Shouldn’t you be going out, doing something fun?’ Despite how generous he is to our parents, calling me ‘Affa’ – the respectful title for an older sister in Sylheti – is about the only respect my brother shows me. He spends most of his time taking the mick, bossing me around or lecturing me. He’s two years younger than me, but the way he carries on, you’d think he was a decade older.
‘I’m not in the mood to go out,’ I shrugged, turning my attention back to the TV. I didn’t bother telling him that I did have plans, but my best friend of sixteen years was too busy popping out babies to bother with little things like shopping.
Malik sighed. ‘All right. Well, if you change your mind, a bunch of us are going out this evening. Why don’t you join us?’
I stared at my brother like he had grown a third eye during our conversation. He never invited me out with his crew. To be fair, if I was a tall, good-looking, immaculately coiffured twenty-five-year-old Bengali boy, I wouldn’t want my unfashionable and boring older sister cramping my style either.
‘What?’ he said, a little defensively. ‘I always ask you out, but you never come!’
He didn’t. But I didn’t want to start a fight so early in the morning. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I replied eventually. ‘Where are you off to now?’
‘Breakfast, shopping, you know, the usual.’
‘With that girl you’re hiding from me?’
‘No!’ Malik glared at me, nodding towards the partially open sliding doors that joined the living room to the dining room, where our parents sat eating their breakfast. He clearly didn’t want them to know that he was dating someone. He probably didn’t want me to know either, but it was obvious from the way his face lit up when she called and how his voice became all soft and mushy when he answered.
‘All right, calm down,’ I said. ‘What’s the big secret, anyway? Has she got a droopy eye? Is she an older woman? Is she divorced with three kids?’
Malik rolled his eyes. ‘Your imagination is insane. You’re in the wrong line of work, Dimple.’
‘Well, something must be the matter, otherwise you would have told me about her,’ I shrugged. ‘Come and chill for a bit and fill me in.’
‘Can’t. I don’t want to be late. Bye!’
My brother left the room and, once again, I was alone with the TV for company. The fragrance of his expensive aftershave lingered in the air and my pitiful bowl of Coco Pops was getting soggier and more unappealing by the second. I could hear the faint sound of Ma’s laughter through the door. Everyone, it seemed, had things to do with people they loved. Everyone except me.
My phone beeped and I took it out of my onesie pocket to find a message from Lucy:
LUCY WORK: Have you read the rest of the notebook???
I smiled and tapped a response:
MAYA: No . . .
LUCY WORK: Why the . . .?
MAYA: Huh?
LUCY WORK: The . . . The ellipsis. It implies you’re about to do something with the notebook.
