Read an excerpt of Home of the Floating Lily by Silmy Abdullah below, one of our featured summer reads! Don't forget to save 25% off this book when you use code LILY25 from August 1 - August 7, 2024.
A Secret Affair
The dreadful ringtone repeated itself. Abid Siddiqui looked up at the wall clock to confirm the time. Whenever his phone rang on a Sunday afternoon, he knew who it was without checking the caller ID. By now, he was well aware of Reena’s schedule: she didn’t work on Sundays, and late in the afternoon — when she had the house to herself for a few hours while her husband and children went shopping — she would call him to curse him, to remind him what a vile man he was. This routine began on the day she first learned about his marriage.
Abid picked up the phone. Although he’d never bothered to resist the verbal abuse, he did, at times, try to divert the tirade by asking Reena about her job or the weather in New York. But today, different words came out of his mouth, words that surprised him.
“Listen, Reena. Think whatever you wish,” he said. “But please don’t call me anymore.”
“Oh, so now you’re running away?” she hissed.
Without replying, he hung up and placed the phone on the hall table, and when it rang again he turned it off. Passing the suitcases that leaned against the wall of the hallway, he walked into the family room to give it a final sweep. The house looked much larger, now that the furniture was gone. He pushed the broom against the floor and spotted an empty pill bottle lying in a corner. He bent down, took it in his hands, and sat down to catch his breath. It was Ruby’s.
In the final month of her life, his wife had been shifted to the family room. The chemo had made her too weak to get up and down the stairs to the bedroom, and the hallway on the second floor was too narrow for her to roll her wheelchair to the bathroom on the other end. From her new room, she could also access the kitchen easily, where she’d started to spend hours looking at the pantries and shelves she’d meticulously arranged over the years.
Within days, the futon, the television, the speaker system, and all the Tagore CDs that normally took up the space had been replaced by a single bed and an IV pole, turning the room that once echoed with laughter and music into a hospital ward. And then, in no time at all, the bed was gone, too. Abid had disposed of it the day Ruby died, on a snowy December morning, transforming the family room once more. Through it all, only one thing from that room had stayed — the pots of pink bougainvillea, Ruby’s favourite flowers. They hadn’t moved an inch from the foot of the window, until it was time to take them to the back porch in spring. By the time winter came knocking again, they were back in the empty family room, in the exact same spot as before. Even today, on the verge of shutting the doors of his home, Abid couldn’t bring himself to get rid of them.
This house, compact, old, and poorly maintained by the previous owners, had received its first makeover from Ruby. “Our dream home!” she’d excitedly declared the day they closed the deal. Sara, their only daughter, was in high school at the time. Within a week of moving in Ruby had painted the blotchy walls with warm beige and installed white curtains in every room. The carpet in the second-floor hallway was shampoo-washed and embellished with Turkish rugs. Little by little, she’d marked the house with their family photos — hanging them on walls, pasting them on the fridge, placing them carefully on tabletops. The summer before she died, it was she who’d filled the back porch with the bougainvillea, and instructed Abid, just before frost hit that year, to bring them into the family room so they could be revived the next season. For days they’d argued about it. He’d wanted her to forget about them and let them die. Eventually he’d relented, and begrudgingly watered the shedding stems through the winter.
Their house was on the periphery of Crescent Oak Village, a hub of Bengali immigrants, dense with towering high rises. It stood on the corner of a street next to the busy Danforth and Victoria Park intersection. From every room, Abid could hear the grunting engines of cars and buses, wheels screeching before going silent in front of the red light, sirens crying out as fire trucks rushed to emergencies. The Bangladeshi convenience stores were minutes away, as were the corner eateries where immigrant professionals turned cab drivers and security guards gathered to talk about their broken dreams over milky tea and dal puri.
“At least we have a house of our own,” Ruby would say whenever Abid complained about the neighbourhood. “So many of our friends are still struggling.” It was her simplicity, her carefree nature, that had made him fall in love with her. Because of her, his taxi drives at ungodly hours turned pleasurable, making him forget that he once worked day and night to achieve a master’s in biochemistry from Dhaka University. In the evenings, when he returned home, all his worries would dissipate. Every corner, touched by Ruby’s presence, felt like a piece of paradise.
Abid wished she’d never put so much effort into decorating the house, that she’d instead let it stay the way it was when they’d bought it. It would have been easier to see it transition into a hospital ward, filled with medicine bottles and vomit. It would have hurt less if Ruby had ignored the leakage and dull paint on the walls as one did in a cheap motel, rather than become a guest in her own home. And for this reason, there’d been times when Abid felt a surge of appreciation for his new wife, Tahmina, who had taken it upon herself to give the house another makeover, this time with bright accent walls, darker curtains, and new china. She’d also tended to the bougainvillea — under his strict supervision — shifting them to the porch when the sun returned the heat and bringing them back to the family room in the winter.
Now, Tahmina was standing at the entrance to the family room, lightly tapping on the open door. Abid quickly wiped his face, glad that his back was to her. Today was the one day he didn’t want her to catch him crying.
“My cab should be here soon,” she said.
He stood up, holding the pill bottle, and faced her. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a pale-yellow shirt instead of one of the fancy, bright-coloured blouses she normally wore. The grey streaks of hair she usually covered with dye were prominent near the front of her head.
“What about your boxes? Is the mover here?”
“Yes. They are loading them,” she replied.
He walked out into the hallway and observed his own boxes leaning against the wall. Tahmina followed him.
“Abid,” she said, “there’s no confusion. I’ve labelled mine. I won’t take yours.”
“Ok. Thanks.”
It had been a while since he’d said “sorry” and “thank you” to her. In the early days of their one-year-long marriage, when he was extra careful about not hurting her, these two phrases were always at the tip of his tongue. On their first night together in this house, when she’d caught him stealing a glance at Ruby’s photo on the bedside table while they undressed, he’d immediately walked over and shoved the frame inside the drawer. “I’m so sorry,” he’d said. He remembered how embarrassed he’d felt, wondering how he’d forgotten to put it away. He’d been meticulous about storing away all the other photos of Ruby. Before Tahmina’s arrival, he’d tucked them inside the various shelves in different rooms, refusing to put them in boxes and seal them with tape.
Tahmina had come into his life at a time when he’d lost the ability to anticipate or be surprised by anything. Ruby had been gone for two months, and the house still swarmed with friends who brought large quantities of both food and sympathy. They wondered aloud how he would spend his life alone, especially when Sara had also left home, eloping with her Hindu boyfriend, Amit. At the same time, they would say with admiration that he loved Ruby too much to ever remarry. “We know you won’t be able to do it, Abid Bhai,” they said to him as he sat quietly. “You love her too much. You have too much respect for her memories to replace her.” Ruby’s sister, Reena, was the only one who’d never said anything on the subject. For Reena, Abid’s eternal loyalty to her sister was the most sacred truth of her life. She didn’t need to proclaim it.
At night, once the guests left, Abid would lie down in his bed, staring at the ceiling for hours. He would wonder what to do with the stillness and the storm that had struck his life. He’d become desperate to escape the haunting silence of his home and, equally, the ringing voices of his friends. All it had taken was a single phone call from his mother on an icy February morning. “Enough is enough,” she’d said. “I want to see you. Immediately.” Within the next two days, he’d packed his bags and flown to Dhaka. A week into his visit, his mother told him that she would never forgive him if she died without seeing a wife by his side.