Circus

Things were going well for Monirul until his mother-in-law came to Houston.

A few weeks before she arrived, Monirul’s wife Sheila led her friend Farzana to their master bedroom, saying lazily, “Monirul received a big promotion at his job recently. He is doing really well in his job, Mashallah.”

“Congratulations to Bhai!” Farzana cried in a tinny voice.

Sheila showed off the remodeled bedroom. She had hired men to paint the walls a mauve shade and install white shutters on the windows.

“Beautiful!” Farzana gasped, clasping her hands together and widening her eyes.

“Sit up on the bed. Get comfortable!” Sheila said, tucking her own feet beneath her on the king-size bed on top of the new floral comforter she had purchased at Kohl’s. “It was a lot of work, took two weeks. This whole carpet was covered with things for weeks. But the room looks brighter now, with the light streaming through the windows, reflecting off the walls.” She looked around the room, her eyes resting fondly on her handiwork. Her face shone pale and pink.

“I chose the color from a color swatch. I matched the room to a picture I saw in a magazine. I bought these two stone-colored fabric armchairs and the table is from Pottery Barn,” pointing to two chairs arranged around a coffee table cluttered with magazines and paperback novels.

“Very beautiful, Bhabi,” Farzana said. She gaped at the circular table. “Is that glass?”

Sheila nodded. “Tempered glass, and the edge is iron. I had my eye on that table for a long time. I was looking for a table with a shelf on the bottom, to put my magazines.” She gave a little laugh, holding her pretty, bony hand to her thin lips. “I wanted to create a cozy corner for myself. I’m trying to recreate my youth. Before my marriage, I used to laze around and read magazines all day.”

Farzana gave a little shiver, sitting on top of the new floral comforter. She and her husband had arrived recently from Bangladesh. She did not own a house yet, or even a nice car. Farzana’s husband had come to America on an F-1 visa for his master’s degree, and Farzana was on an F-2 visa for dependents. She dreamed of the day when she would live in a big, solid house like this, and be able to afford to buy new furniture. She could not even imagine such a day!

“Are you feeling cold?” Sheila asked. Both women wore thin, cotton shalwar kameez, wrinkled and soft, with cotton dupattas hugging their shoulders and breasts. “Slip under the comforter. Let me make you my special tea, with thickened milk. It’s rich and sinful, but I love it!”

Farzana nodded.

“But first, let me show you the best thing.” Sheila sprang from the bed, ran to the line of windows overlooking the backyard, and pushed open the broad louvers, revealing six plastic flowerpots flaunting an explosion of pink rose, marigold, and zinnia blooms.

~

After a decade in America, Monirul and Sheila had reached a comfortable position. Only five years ago, Sheila had passed her USMLE and completed her residency in Louisiana, where she spent three long years apart from her family, before returning to Houston to practice at a clinic. She had accomplished it all while raising two children. Her Bengali friends said that her husband Monirul had been very supportive, that Sheila could not have done it without him. When Sheila had to leave for her residency in Louisiana, her elder son Robby was only a year old. Monirul had raised their son by himself.  Both the kids had turned out all right. The elder boy Robby had graduated as top student in fifth grade, earning the president’s prize, and the younger one Sunny, just five, was already able to say his multiplication tables and identify scores from Mozart and Chopin. Monirul and Sheila had bought a modest house at first, then a bigger, two-story house in Richmond, with a separate wing for the children, a swimming pool at the back buttressing a forest with a green canopy, and a guest bedroom.

In anticipation of Sheila’s mother’s visit, Monirul and Sheila spent the summer buying furniture for the guest bedroom, a matching high bed, dresser, and desk, all in a black chrome finish. The delivery men pulled up in a big truck and hauled the new furniture up the stairs. Monirul and Sheila went together to Macy’s and purchased a pink painting to go over the bed (like the paintings that hung over the beds in hotel rooms). The pink painting complemented the sage color of the wall. Monirul hammered a nail into the wall and stepped back to stand beside Sheila with his hands on his hips, panting. Their naked arms touched as they stared open mouthed at the painting.

“Does it look okay?”

“Perfect.” Sheila let out a sigh of satisfaction. 

~

According to Monirul, his relationship with Sheila had been fine until his mother-in-law meddled in their lives. It was Sheila’s mother, he said, who poisoned Sheila’s mind against him. Soon after the old woman came to stay with them, Sheila began to grumble. Monirul and Sheila began to have frequent fights, Sheila complaining about all the ways Monirul had failed her as a husband. In the evening, when he entered through the front door, enveloped in a sagging suit, carrying his heavy leather briefcase containing his work laptop, half spent from a day at work that had required his full concentration and the long battle with traffic on the backed-up freeway, Sheila was waiting for him, perched at the high table in the breakfast nook, arms folded at her chest, a storm rising in her eyes. Sheila complained that Monirul didn’t take the children for a walk, that he didn’t teach them anything, and that he didn’t spend enough time with her doing the things she liked. She spoke through a tight mouth.

“What things do I not to do with you?” Monirul growled.

“You never do anything romantic, like sing to me. I always thought I would marry someone who would sing to me, take me for walks, go to concerts, pay me attention!”

“Do you want me to earn a living or romance you?” Monirul hissed. He found himself scowling, his face contorted in an ugly way, his fists balled and clenched on either side of his sagging belly.

Later he said, he knew that his mother-in-law was sitting in her bedroom upstairs and could hear everything through the thin walls of the American house, but he could not have suspected the role she would ultimately play to break his marriage.

~

Later, Monirul admitted that he should not have responded like that to her, little as he understood Sheila’s complaints. When Sheila’s mother was in town, Monirul and Sheila invited friends over. They had many close friends in the Bangladeshi community in Houston. Sheila was a phenomenal cook. She cooked five different kinds of river fish, three kinds of vegetable bhaji, and polao fried in fragrant ghee and colored with saffron. For dessert, she served a three-layer pineapple cake that she had baked herself, using full cream, six eggs, and vanilla icing. No one could deny that Sheila was good-looking, pale and slender, with delicate features. Every woman in their circle thought that she was pretty, although Monirul and Sheila barely looked at each other these days. Even before his mother-in-law came to live with them, Monirul had to admit, he had stopped looking at Sheila or paying her compliments when she got dressed for a party.

Monirul still remembered the first time he had seen Sheila. He had fallen in love with Sheila the moment he had seen her. He had gone home to Bangladesh for two weeks to get married. He had seen fifty women in two years and flipped through a hundred biodata with attached color photos of prospective brides, none to his liking, but the moment his eyes alighted on Sheila, his heart muscles tightened. He was sitting in her parents’ dusty drawing room on their ugly velour sofa, surrounded by dusty bookshelves, sweating under a cranking ceiling fan, flanked by his parents and two murobbi uncles who had come along. She entered the room, and the remaining air was sucked out of the room. She sat down on a hard chair with the floral shiny curtains behind her and cast her eyes at the floor, so he could lift his own and stare at her as much as he liked. A slim, pale young girl clad in a tight cotton kamiz with a print of small red and white blossoms, her freshly washed face soft and pliant, her hair parted in the middle, the long, thick braid tied at the end with a looped red ribbon.

When Sheila first arrived in America, her thick hair fell to her hips. Nowadays, she wore it short, cut above her nape, soft and silky, shampooed and conditioned. When she went to Bengali parties, she liked to show off her long and slender neck by wearing chokers and wide-neck blouses with saris. She was completely transformed from her work self–the lab coat, the flying hair, and the tired, drooping eyes behind dark spectacles. She could carry off a sari in the most elegant way, her back straight, her feet encased in ten-inch-high heels, her waist tiny and her hips jutting out, thin gold bracelets winking on her slender wrists. That was why they liked attending parties, sometimes, two a day, on Saturday and Sunday, because they were transformed, they came to life, for a few hours.

All their friends liked Sheila, like them both, and thought their parties were fun. But now with Sheila’s mother in the house, something shifted. When guests came to the house, Sheila and her mother were cold to Monirul (so Monirul felt). A few times, he walked into the living room where the women were seated and heard an audible hush. He saw their necks springing into place, backs straightening and eyes widening, blood corpuscles dilating on their cheeks. Monirul was sure that he had been the topic of their whispered conversation. His neck and shoulders felt tight. He felt dread flowing in his veins.

~

“I’ll fix everything,” Monirul muttered every time Sheila accosted him.

For a time, truly, Monirul made a valiant effort to mend his marriage. After returning home from work, instead of crashing on the couch as his body longed to do, he chased the children out of the house, making them ride the new bicycles he had bought them. He ran after them, panting. Sometimes, he mounted their bicycles on the bike rack behind his Toyota Highlander and drove them to the nearby park. In August, the air was hot and saturated, even at seven in the evening. Monirul sweated under his T-shirt, his hairy legs sticky and matted under his polyester shorts, his thick, squat body shaking. After an hour of this ordeal, Monirul returned home triumphantly with his sons, carrying their bicycles on his shoulders, sticky sweat pouring from his cheeks, neck, and arms, expecting to see Sheila and her mother happy with him. When his boys were young, they would ask, with wide, searching eyes, are you happy at me? Now he wanted to ask his wife and his mother-in-law the same question. He found them sitting together at the breakfast nook with pursed lips, their heads close together, sipping tea and snacking on homemade singara. They did not offer him any.

To please Sheila, Monirul enrolled his two sons in tennis, swimming, and basketball lessons. He signed up for a boy scout group for each of his sons. On the weekends, he drove them to Kumon and sat outside the tutoring center in his car, with the air-conditioning on, as the temperature climbed past one hundred degrees outside. He shut his eyes and snored, his arms crossed across his chest, his belly rammed against the steering wheel, his back aching, waiting for his sons to come out, to drive them back home, a half hour’s drive, looking forward to the moment his family would come together again.

To satisfy Sheila’s other demand, that he should be more romantic toward her, Monirul learned an old Bengali film song, playing the song on a CD in his car on the jammed road home. One hour in traffic was plenty of time to memorize a song. Sheila liked sentimental, old Bengali film songs. One night, ready at last, Monirul burst into the master bedroom and sang the film song to her, his voice cracking on the high notes. Sheila had been sitting on the king-size bed, turning the pages of a glossy magazine. She listened with an upturned, quivering nose, an expectant expression in her bright eyes, but her face fell quickly when she realized that despite her best efforts to pretend, he was not the hero of the movie, or the melodious singer of the original song.

~

Sheila and her mother ate dinner together after feeding the kids burgers or other fast food from their favorite restaurants. He lay on the couch in the TV room changing channels, listening to them talking as they chewed on rice, slurped daal, and complimented each other on how tasty the fish was. After the rest of the family had gone to bed, Monirul sat alone in the breakfast nook, perched on a tall chair, and spooned cold food out of lidded Tupperware.

The dirty secret of their marriage was that Monirul did not sleep in the master bedroom with Sheila. Neither of them knew when they had begun to sleep separately. Even when they used to be together, when he made love to her, she stared at the ceiling with her eyes open, as if this was not what she had expected. Neither of them knew before marriage what to expect from each other. Monirul was happy enough, sexually and otherwise. Sheila was not, although it had been she who had insisted come to bed, when she wanted to have babies, only those times.

Monirul didn’t think there was anything wrong with their marriage. He had become used to the routine of their lives. He returned from work, fighting the traffic all the way on I-45 and 59, so tired he could drop down in front of the door and snore. He dragged himself through the house, shedding clothes, showering, smelling good from the soap, pulling the garden hose and showering all the plants in the backyard. After eating dinner he watched TV, laughing to himself, and promptly fell asleep on the couch.

In the early days of their married life, Sheila used to cry and complain about Monirul falling asleep on the couch. He was relieved when she stopped grumbling, but then she would not let him into their bedroom, which became her bedroom. She decorated the room to her liking, kept it shut and dark, a secret, private space inside their home. One time, he had come in to fix a light and was startled to find the dingy room filled with romance novels that she had checked out of the library, spilling off the edge of the comforter, the little crafted iron table, and the top of the black polished dresser, a shock of naked bodies with moaning expressions piled on top of one another.

This had been going on for years, really, before Sheila’s mother arrived. Now Monirul remembered the whispered phone conversations, Sheila’s frequent late-night calls to her mother, and suspected that Sheila’s mother had had a hand in their sleeping apart as well. Perhaps his mother-in-law had begun to dig a grave in his home long before she had arrived. Now she had come to finish the job.

~

Sheila’s hostility became unbearable to Monirul. He sighed heavily each time he caught sight of his grim-faced wife and mother-in-law, sitting side by side. Monirul’s boss at his IT company suggested that Monirul take his family out to the circus that had come to town, Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey. A circus, with its colorful clowns, acrobats, and prancing animals, was just the antidote to please a disgruntled wife, his boss said. Monirul’s boss had square shoulders and wore expensive dark suits and had money in the bank, so he was just the person to know what to do.

When Monirul returned home from the office that day and mentioned to Sheila that he had bought tickets to the circus, her eyes sparkled as if he had thrown glitter on them. She had been standing in front of the stove, stirring daal with clenched lips. He had strolled up to her, loosening the button of his suit jacket, and, standing behind her, towering above the top of her head of smooth, black hair, he had given her the news, whispering into the whorl of her ear. For the first time in months since her mother had arrived, a smile appeared on Sheila’s pink lips. Her dark brown eyes relaxed and became larger.

Even Monirul’s mother-in-law appeared excited when she heard about the circus. Sitting on the couch (Monirul’s couch where he lay and watched TV and slept at night) in front of the giant TV in the living room, she began to research the Barnum Bailey circus on her iPad with her black glasses on her nose, using one finger at a time to tap the letters on the screen, peering at the pictures that came up and commenting on them. “This man P.T. Barnum was a great American showman!” she squealed.

From that day, things shifted dramatically in their home. Sheila dimpled her cheeks and called Monirul to dinner for the first time since her mother had arrived. He wolfed down the rice and daal and spicy beef, dipping his fingers and sucking his fingers, making loud noises with his mouth. After dinner, Sheila brought him tea and a single shondesh of thickened milk and date molasses that she had made herself, plopping down beside him on the couch with a cup for herself. As he swallowed the white sweet self-consciously, his mouth moving, tears streaming down his eyes, she asked in a tender voice, “Did it come out good?”

He nodded wordlessly, bobbing his chin up and down.

Sheila called the boys to the living room and commanded them to find out about the Barnum and Bailey circus. “Your father is taking the family to the circus. What a great treat, isn’t it? You must do your homework about the circus first, the way people read up about a place before visiting.”

“Okay, Ammu!”

Monirul followed the boys to his office, where they logged onto his computer. They clicked through exciting photos of lions and lion tamers, trapeze artists floating from a bar suspended in the sky, and careening motorcycles. He left them to their pleasure. After some time, the boys ran back to their mother and told her gleefully that they had found out that Mr. Bailey was a very bad man, a trickster!

“What are you saying?” Sheila became angry, telling them that they were ungrateful, after their father had gone to so much trouble to buy tickets to the circus for them!

“Your father is taking you to the greatest show on earth,” their grandmother shouted, adding her voice to her daughter’s, shuffling into the living room in her fluffy slippers. She was just coming off her jainamaz, fondling a prayer bead. “Naughty boys, why do you lie about Mr. Barnum?”

~

There was a 2017 movie about P. T. Barnum, The Greatest Showman, where he was featured positively. But other sources show that he was a terrible person who ran a traveling freak show and menagerie in the late 1800s before he started his circus business with Bailey and Ringling Brothers, making money off human curiosities, kidnapped animals, and hoaxes. He was a trickster who believed that a sucker is born every minute. Among his exhibits was the Fiji mermaid, created by sewing together the body of a monkey corpse and the tail of a fish. He also exhibited a dwarf boy, the four- or five-year old Charles Stratton, whom he called Tom Thumb, the sight of whom saddened even Queen Victoria. Perhaps this account of the small boy who was used as a human freak was also what had saddened Monirul and Sheila’s sons. Barnum also made money from exhibiting a black woman named Joyce Heth as a 161-year-old nanny of George Washington, extracting her teeth, getting her on lease when slavery was unlawful in the north.

For his circus, Barnum shipped elephants in tight holds. Some of the elephants died on the journey. During training, he tortured the elephants with a hot poker. The elephant Jumbo was born in Sudan, his mother was killed by poachers, and he was sold to dealers who transported him to Germany, Paris, and London. P. T. Barnum bought the highly disturbed elephant from Britain and made enormous profits off him. Jumbo was killed by a train while crossing a train track after a show. P. T. Barnum donated his remains to the museum. P. T. Barnum’s circus operated by torturing and degrading animals and people to entertain his American audience and earn him enormous profits. All this information can be found in articles online and, also in the BBC Radio 4 podcast You’re Dead to Me, which aired in September 2023. It is very good news that the Ripley and Barnum circus was closed in 2017, proof that the public no longer accepts the cruel treatment of animals in circus, but there was a time when it was still a popular family outing in Houston, advertised on billboards all over town. In fact, the circus has now returned in a modified form.

~

That Saturday evening, the family dressed in nice clothes. Sheila had gone to the mall to shop for outfits appropriate for a circus–boots would be good, since they lived in Texas, matching Polo shirts for all the boys, including Monirul, and a knit blouse and white slacks for herself. Even Monirul’s mother-in-law dressed up in a georgette sari, smelling of flower notes, her cheekbones flushing pink, powder on her chin, shedding talcum in the air around her.

“Ready?” Monirul inquired, bowing his head and smiling, and his family smiled back. Today, he was the benevolent head of the household.

They headed out in Monirul’s Toyota Highlander (Monirul and Sheila each had one), reversing onto the road and lumbering onto the highway after driving for four miles. All would have gone well, had it not been for a road closure due to road work going on that weekend. They ended up sitting in backed-up traffic for an hour. Sheila and Monirul both glanced at the clock, nervous that they would miss the circus. Sheila began to fidget in her seat. Monirul kept stealing glances at Sheila. Sweat built on her upper lip, although the A/C dial was turned to the maximum setting. She had bothered to dress up for him after so many years–scented her neck and shoulders and lined her eyes with kohl. Even a moment ago, she was giving him shy smiles. But now she tapped her foot on the car mat and bit her nails.

“You don’t worry at all. We will reach there in time,” Monirul said, tapping her thigh with one hand.

Sheila pressed her lips together till they disappeared, an expression she had picked up since her mother had come.

Sheila’s mother began to make moaning sounds from the backseat, where she was seated between the two boys. “How much longer?” she cried peevishly. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“There will be bathrooms at the circus, Ma,” Monirul said soothingly. He was careful in his interactions with his mother-in-law. He moved with a measured caution around her so as not to agitate her.

The boys were the only ones unperturbed. They were engrossed in their iPads, jumping on their seats in their excitement.

~

By the time they reached the circus and parked, after driving round and round looking for a parking space in the dirt lot, almost ramming into another car coming from another direction, competing for the same space, and made their way to the entrance, a line had snaked all the way to the road. There must have been forty, fifty people in line.

“Don’t worry. It will move fast,” Monirul assured his family. But his heart sank.

To tell the truth, his heart normally slumped close to the ground. Every day, driving to the office, fighting traffic on Hwy 59 and I-610, he felt in low spirits. He revived himself by drinking the stale office coffee, standing in the break room, trading jokes about the Sunday game on TV. He supposed that life was meant to be dull and colorless, unlike P. T. Barnum’s circus, which, even from the outside, promised grandeur, fireworks going off, little yelps and screams rising from the crowd. The spectators were as much a spectacle as the wares within. He looked around at the teenagers wearing heavy makeup, large families who had come out as a big group, fat dads and moms, stooped, elderly grandparents, and kids carrying soda in lidded cups and the pink candy floss, and the clowns with red-button noses, round bodies, and big feet.

At last, after they had been waiting, waiting, waiting, falling more and more silent, not speaking to one another, stranded on their own private islands, cut off from one another, when even all the exciting sounds and pops of the circus had receded into the distance, they reached the ticket checker.

“Sir. There’s a problem. This is a half ticket for under twelve-year-old kids. But your kid is clearly older twelve,” the man said.

“No, no! Eleven! My son is eleven years old!” Monirul cried, shaking his head from side to side to make his point. The few strands of hair on his head flopped to his forehead, weighed down by the humid atmosphere. He used to have thick, black hair, but his hair had thinned since he had started working.

“Dad! I’m twelve,” his older son Robby whined.

Monirul’s mother-in-law started grumbling. “See? What kind of man he is! A cheapskate, buying a half ticket, breaking the child’s heart like that.”

The old woman started such a scene, crying and fanning herself, that it didn’t matter that the man at the gate let them through in the end. They entered the circus with clouded faces, their jawbones set. In the end, the boys, who had pontificated the evils of the circus, enjoyed everything. Monirul saw nothing. Sheila sat with lowered eyelids, compressing her pink lips together throughout the show. Neither of them could describe later what they had seen at the circus. They had no memory of anything except the heavy smell of disappointment and waste around them, a dank, sour smell rising in the air. Sitting ineffectually beside Sheila, unable to touch her, Monirul felt like a clown himself.

At the end of the evening, they walked back to the dirt lot in damp spirits. Monirul and Sheila marched at a clip at the front, trailed by Monirul’s mother-in-law, who hobbled because of the arthritis in her knees, and the boys, who kept getting distracted, pointing to this or that. Neither Monirul nor Sheila talked in the car. They both scolded the boys, who talked too loudly, and moved too much, until Monirul’s mother-in-law slapped the boys on their shins, and they fell silent, their lips shaking. Monirul trained the rear-view mirror to see, furrowing his forehead and chewing his lips. His hands gripped the steering wheel. Monirul’s mother-in-law sighed with satisfaction and leaned back against her seat, as if, it appeared to Monirul, this was what had she had come to accomplish, this sad scene, Sheila not talking to him and the boys whimpering silently.

When they reached home, Monirul slammed the brakes of his Toyota Highlander on the sloped driveway and shot out of the car, slamming the driver-side door behind him. He strutted to the front door of his house, not waiting for his family. Standing on the dark porch under cover of a clouded sky and the branches of the pine tree hanging over him, he fumbled with the key, trying to get the door open before the others could reach him. He had had enough of their voices, which sounded shrill in his ears. He marched through the dark hallway, plopped his keys and phone with a clang, and dropped his body on the couch, at last, as he had been wanting to do all these days and years. His shoes were still on. He shut his eyes. A little later, he heard his family come in. Sheila was speaking in a nasal, caustic voice, his mother-in-law was complaining as usual, blathering in that bitter octave, and the boys were weeping quietly. Then he didn’t hear anything more. His heart rate and breathing slowed, and he succumbed to blissful slumber.

~

In the middle of the night, he heard shrieks, elephants crying. He had been dreaming of that Disney movie Dumbo that his sons used to watch, that he had watched a hundred times with him, till he had memorized every scene. His sons had said, from their research on P. T. Barnum, that Dumbo was based on a real elephant named Jumbo, an elephant P. T. Barnum had kidnapped from Africa and exhibited as the largest elephant in the world, whose remains Barnum later donated, trapping the animal’s spirit even after its death. The living room was ablaze in lights. Monirul shot up to a seating position and dropped his bare feet to the carpet. Sheila was shrieking. Her mother was shrieking.

“What? What?” Monirul cried, jumping up from the couch like an accused criminal. What had he done now? He snatched a look at his wristwatch on his hairy hand, which looked like lumpy paws, unfit to touch Sheila’s silky face. It was three in the morning. In three more hours, Monirul would have to get up for work. Sheila would be boiling water for tea, singing tunelessly in her stained lab coat, herding the kids into the car, to drop them off at their schools before driving to her clinic.

“Sunny is missing! Robby woke up and went to Sunny’s room to check on him because Sunny had said in the car that the clowns had scared him. But Sunny wasn’t there. Sunny isn’t in his bed! Oh!”

“What are you saying? Where can he be? Of course he is in his room! Are you mad?”

But Sheila was right. Sunny wasn’t in his bed. They buzzed through all the rooms in the house, shouting Sunny’s name, the youngest member of their household, their baby, a beloved boat bobbing in an angry ocean, growing pudgy, downing the sweet cakes and greasy parathas his mother cooked for him as compensation, in love with the iPad his father had bought for him. One day, he would grow long in his limbs and fly out, but not yet. Now was not his time.

Sunny was nowhere to be found. Monirul’s mother-in-law began to shout at Monirul, accusing him of being responsible for his son being missing. Monirul squeezed his eyes and squared his shoulders, lumbering to the bathrooms methodically, ignoring her shrill ululations. His memory of the night poured back into him, and he pieced together what had happened. He swung on his feet and catapulted to the front door. Outside, the night was quiet. Here in the suburbs, there was never any sound, no snatch of conversation from next door, no animals scratching, no people passing by on the street. Sometimes, weeks went by, and they never saw a neighbor, except the people from the homeowners’ association, who came by to make sure they had mowed the lawn or to give them notice that they should plant some nice flowers out front. This late at night, the air had cooled. The branches of the pine tree trembled slightly. Monirul ran to the Highlander. Sheila was shouting behind him. Their minds were connected, for once. The temperature had climbed to hundred degrees in Houston that day! Sheila was screaming, and Monirul was screaming back, go get my car keys!

They found Robby on the backseat, lying on his side, his body twisted in his car seat. He was unconscious, his mouth a gaping hole. Monirul reached inside and pulled out his son’s body. Sunny’s long legs and head flopped over Monirul’s hairy arms. He carried Sunny’s lifeless body inside the house, from the dark into the light.

“It’s your fault!” Monirul’s mother-in-law screamed. “Murderer!”

Monirul wheeled around. “Shut up!” he shouted savagely. His lips were twisted, and spittle bubbled his lips.

~

Monirul and Sheila raced Sunny to the hospital. Heat-related deaths were common in Houston, where children routinely perished in the summer after being left in the car. But why make Sunny die? What difference does it make whether a child lives or dies? Long before they forgot their child in their solid metal vehicle, Sheila and Monirul had felt as if they were corpses dancing slowly through a dull void. Their future stare back at them, a long, dull trek through the rest of their lives. So Sunny lived, but the marriage died. Sheila and Monirul lingered together for a more months. Their chests dropped to the ground as soon as they returned home from work and spied each other’s stony faces. Eventually, they separated, and Sheila moved to another house, on the next street. After a year’s separation, finally, they divorced. To Sheila, the divorce seemed the easiest way to fix everything that was wrong with their lives. Monirul blamed his mother-in-law for destroying his marriage.

After the divorce, Sheila furnished her new home with a velvet mauve couch and her own TV with cable. At the end of a long day at the clinic, she would put her feet up on the mauve couch with buttons and watch a series on Netflix, leaning against the back of the couch with a cup of milk tea in one hand and the remote control in the other, until she fell asleep on the couch.

~

By then, Monirul’s mother-in-law was long gone. She was back in Bangladesh, ensconced in her bungalow in the quiet town of Mymensingh, far from the capital city Dhaka, a property her husband had bought while he had been alive. In the summer, the jum trees in her garden shed squashed purple fruits on the earth below. She told the servant girl to go out and gather the fruits. The girl, dressed in Sheila’s old frocks, with a silver pin in her nose and red, unoiled hair, ran to the garden, scurrying with a tin bowl in the wind, and ran back inside with her bounty, laughing. The girl and the old woman split the bruised, purple jum, rubbed in salt and shaken in a bowl, popping the fruits into their mouths and spitting out the seeds, laughing together through stained teeth as they watched television together.

~

For a long time after they got divorced, the Bangladeshi community of Houston discussed Monirul and Sheila’s divorce. Why did they get divorced? For Monirul and Sheila, figuring out the answer was an act of recovering memory. When Sheila closed her eyes, she could barely remember who she was before she married Monirul and started her life in America. After graduating from Dhaka Medical College and completing her internship, she had gone with her mother to a clinic near their home, to apply for a job. That memory was moist and fresh as morning jasmine in her mind. She sat across from the interviewer, tongue tied and shy, wrapped in a soft, wrinkled pink shalwar kameez that was her favorite, while her mother did the talking and the ceiling fan rotated slowly overhead in the tin-shed office.

When it rained in Houston with black clouds, Monirul remembered the April storm in Dhaka, the kalboshekhi banging doors shut and felling photographs from the wall. At other times, suddenly, while talking to his mother on the phone and hearing the background noise from the street outside her flat in Dhaka, he could hear again in his mind the honking of horns on the streets of Dhaka, cars riding neck and neck with rolled down windows, the passengers breathing the dead skin of the people in other cars, the dust flying off the tar and swirling in the air. And it came back to him, a dim memory of himself as a lanky teenager studying hard so he could one day come to America.

They had both changed, from their shabby looks, cheap clothes, and timid eyes when they had first landed in this country, to fit into the society they had come into, like water filling a glass. They had navigated getting their first haircuts, buying their first clothes at the mall, their first car, and their second, until they could comfortably negotiate the highways, the malls, and the restaurants, and the countless TV channels. What did Monirul watch, lying on his couch? The Rachel Maddow Show, the Trevor Noah Show, Saturday Night Live, all the morning news shows and evening TV shows, and the football game. From reading The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal he had familiarized himself with all the political opinions, all the personalities, and all the movies. Why was it that when they had learned all the ropes, and settled in, when they had got comfortable in their massive house with four bedrooms and two living rooms, their home had fallen apart?

During the crisis of his marriage, when a tense atmosphere prevailed in his house, Monirul had gone to see a therapist, hoping that the therapist would have a solution. He launched into a stammering account of the past ten months of his marriage, cataloguing all of Sheila’s ridiculous accusations and demands, ending plaintively, “Tell me, am I to blame?”

The psychologist was a young woman with a back that was too long to be real. Her face was burnt coal, the color of Monirul’s mother’s skin, and her eyes were large and milky, like his sons’ eyes. Her front two teeth were larger than all the others, and her hair fell in oily thickets across her face, like Sheila’s used to do, when she had long hair.

“No, you are not to blame at all,” the therapist said in a calm voice. “It seems like this is a situation in which, unfortunately whatever you do, you cannot save the relationship. I don’t think your wife can change.” She tapped her heel on the sky-blue carpet. Water propelled by electricity glided over stones on a contraption placed on her table, making a soothing sound.

Monirul’s eyes were red, and his hair was falling. He sighed deeply with relief that she agreed with him that it was all Sheila’s fault, that Sheila was being unreasonable, and her mother was encouraging her. He leaned back against the cool, grey surface of the therapist’s fabric sofa. If they could agree on this, that Sheila was to blame, if he could convince Sheila, even now, then all would be saved in the final act.

“I think, though, what I am about to say, might give you some peace. The problems that you faced in your marriage had less to do with interpersonal conflict and more to do with the larger problems seething in this society. Do you see what I mean?” The therapist lifted her chin and stared into his eyes.

Monirul shook his head. “No!” But he wanted to know, if she had the answer to save his marriage!

“I mean, all the things you mention, all the things your wife is complaining about, they fit, if one were to think of big things–”

Monirul nodded, “yes, yes,” waiting for her to go on.

“They are symptoms of the alienation caused by suburbs and subdivisions, the alienation of workers working in big corporations–”

The young woman went on talking brightly, muttering words that made no sense to him. He gave his head a shake, to let the words enter and make sense. 

“What do you mean?” he asked desperately.

“You live in a subdivision. Subdivisions are created by corporations for their workers. They are poison to community and human relationships.”

Monirul joined his eyebrows.

“Don’t you see? It’s the elephant in the room!” she cried passionately. “Many immigrants have described what you feel, that as they assimilated, they lost everything they were. They became like, like clowns.”

The therapist went on speaking in this vein, giving a shake at the end of every sentence. Her radiant hair scattered about her face. “When new immigrants come to this country to work for corporations, they are remade as the white middle class. This has happened to each new wave of immigrants who have arrived in America. Immigrants inherit the values of white America, rejecting the working class and other people of color who built this country and who are part of the violent creation of this country! Indigenous people displaced again and again, black Americans who were brought here as chattel for cotton plantation, Mexicans and Hawaiians displaced from land that had belonged to them! Chinese and Japanese and Filipino laborers who built this country under brutal conditions, giving their blood. Did you know that so much of America was Mexican land before laws made these into majority white states? The middle class, of which you are now a part, have no culture and no values except mass culture. Because they are somebody else’s men, the corporation’s men. That is why your lives feel hollow, and you feel depressed! You can read about this in Lawrence Hogue’s book. Here, let me write down the name of the book for you!” The young woman extended a smooth arm and pulled out a pink post-it note from a drawer.

“Think of the circus in the 1920s!” She was shouting now. She appeared a little mad in the dim blue light. “Movies, TV, motor vehicles, fast food. Novelty, modernity, money, prosperity, everyone out for a good time! But there is no good time to be had, is there, not without trying to forget the violence, a loss of memory!”

He did not know those words she uttered, being an IT guy, or what any of it had to do with the problem of his marriage. She was too young, too inexperienced, he thought, regretting coming to her.

“Is the session at an end?” he said, standing up. “I have to return to the office.”

He had left rapidly and never returned. After returning home, he Googled her and read the reviews, which were brutal, two out of five stars, calling her “Marxist, Leftist, and Socialist.” If only he had researched her earlier, he would not have wasted two hundred dollars on the crazy therapist. At any rate, perhaps it was not such a waste, because one thing she said stuck to him. Something she said had reminded him that the suit he wore to his office every day felt too tight under the arms and the shoes pinched his feet. Once he had looked in the mirror and thought that he looked ridiculous in the tight buttoned suit, his feet ensconced in their big black shoes, splayed outward, clownish! She had kept coming back to circus metaphors, and it was the circus, of course, that terrible outing of that night, that had resulted in his divorce.

~

Long after they had dissolved their marriage (the one thing they could fix in their lives), there was one scene that neither Monirul nor Sheila could wipe from their memory. The night of the circus, they had been standing in line. Even in line, there had been entertainment, something to keep the long, weary crowd distracted from their misery before the show began. Two tottering clowns came around, wide waists bound in pin-striped, heavy suits, with stuck-on pink noses and painted, smiling mouths, juggling balls, squirting plastic toys, bursting horns in their ears. These clowns were trying hard, laughing in thin voices, spitting, and hissing. One of them came up close to Sheila and Monirul, the stench of his breath spewing on their mouths, laughing with yellow teeth, swatting his squirting flower at their necks like a fly when they were all so irritated, hot and heavy, wiping the grime off their cheeks and foreheads.

“What’s it like working at a circus?” Robby asked the man, jumping up.

His younger brother Sunny joined in. The two brothers took turns slinging questions. Sheila’s mother tried to catch them with her claws and still them.

“Is it scary? Do you have to work all day? Every day? Do people get hurt in a show?”

“Do you treat the animals well?”

“Yeah, are the animals happy?”

The clown ignored the boys’ questions, intent on his tricks. “You hot? This will mist your neck, Sir. See?”

Try as Monirul might to get the clown away from his family, the clown refused to move. When they tried to move away (“Ei, move away, that water he is squirting is dirty!” Sheila’s mother cried to the kids in Bengali), the clown turned his head with a click and stared into their dark eyes with a sad look, taking them in from dull eyes, his head lolling like a bauble on a spring. Up close, Monirul could see his cheeks, beneath the thick coat of makeup, lined, pockmarked, and haggard, a familiar face. Monirul and Sheila stared at the figure blocking their way, standing outside the promised gates of the circus and the greatest show on earth that awaited within. Refusing to look at each other, they gazed instead into the depths of the clown’s eyes, penetrating their aqueous humor, the lenses behind, the vitreous humor, and the electric cells of the retina, to the very back, where everything was dark.