Bright Lines Read Online Free

ceased. He took another toke. Laughter. He chuckled along. Was Ramona Espinal with a lover? He pictured a sweaty, stubbly mariachi, riding the spur of his boots down her tight, voluptuous hips. I must have seen this on TV , he thought. Ramona was a Mexican nurse-midwife at Brooklyn Hospital, and nearly half his age. He checked his watch. It was a quarter to midnight. She shouldn’t be home at this hour.
    Drumming commenced. A man laughed. It is the headboard , Anwar realized.
    “Anwar!” he heard Hashi shout from below.
    “Yes, darling!” As soon as he said it, he clasped his hand over his mouth. Abruptly, the drumming stopped.
    “Bedtime, na ?” called Hashi. “And the shampoo!”
    “Yes, darling.”
    He rolled away from the wall and opened his eyes. Ah, my old friend. Rezwan’s severed head floated around Anwar. He blinked several times and Rezwan’s head did the same. Ghastly bits of spinal cord and purple-black windpipe trailed from Rezwan’s neck. A machete scar sliced open cheek into mouth, yellow half-moon smile. How many times can I answer for your death? I am sorry for abandoning you.
    As if hearing Anwar’s thoughts, Rezwan’s head nodded yes. Anwar nodded back. He had loved Rezwan, his brother-in-law and comrade, more than any man before or since. Years after the war, in 1985, Rezwan and his wife, Laila, were both shot to death by an unknown gunman. They had planned to settle near Laila’s hillside family home in Rangamati, away from the decaying city Dhaka had become.
    They were killed mere days before the move.
    Rezwan’s anti-government views about President Ershad werewell known in Dhaka. But Anwar did not believe the gunman was an unknown assassin or a government operative.
    He suspected it was an act of revenge.
    Yet Anwar was too far away to investigate. There were weightier matters involved. Ella had been spared, having slept over at her grandparents’ flat that evening. Upon hearing the news, Anwar and Hashi begged to bring Ella to New York, to live as their daughter. It took two years for Hashi’s parents to agree to let them take her.
    Today would have been Rezwan’s thirtieth wedding anniversary, Anwar remembered. Married on a pristine beach in Cox’s Bazar, barefoot upon the striated black-and-white sands. Save for Anwar, Hashi, and their immediate family, all the other guests were villagers whom Rezwan and Laila had met while installing tube wells in the surrounding villages. That day, one of Anwar’s happiest—rice wine, song and dance aplenty—was etched in his mind forever. He realized that besides the bride and groom, many of those in attendance had suffered for years afterward, poisoned by arsenic-laced well water.
    “We die. Memory is fragmentary. I believe in nothing,” said Anwar to his friend. “But there are times when scripture relieves a sense of flailing.”
    They moved their lips in recitation, Arabic into Bangla into Arabic again, scraps of Surah al-Noor (The Light) .
    See how Al—h created the Seven Heavens and Earth
    Made the Earth, a niche
    Made the moon, a lamp
    Made the sun, a glass, a brilliant star
    Lit from a blessed tree neither of the east nor west
    Its oil luminous though no fire touched it
    Light upon light
    Speak to us in parables, knower of All—
    I must be with your sister now , thought Anwar. Rezwan stuck out his tongue and disappeared into an air vent. Anwar wanted to hold the closest thing to his dead friend, his daughter, Ella. But she had not yet come home.

2
    A quiet backpack-clad figure walked to 111 Cambridge Place. Ragged from a bus ride, Ella considered turning back to the steep hills and collegiate abandon of Ithaca, where night skies held the ancient grand stars like Alphard the Solitary, in the constellation Hydra. Down here in Brooklyn, stars lay stitched under a veil of gray-black clouds and light pollution, lost to city dwellers.
    The wrought-iron front gate was unlatched. Ella paused for a minute. It didn’t seem like anyone