When you tried to trick God in that way, bad things could happen. Even though he was younger, it was Emdad her grandmother had loved the best: that was why she’d kept him with her. The elder one, Khokon, had been Mukti Bahini during the war, while the younger, Emdad, had stayed in the village so that her grandmother wouldn’t worry too much. Nanu had had five daughters and two sons, but both of Amina’s uncles had died before she was born. Her first memory was of climbing up the stone steps from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s, watching a funny pattern of light and dark splotches turn into a frog hiding in the ragged shade of a coconut palm. Two years later, her parents had left the village to find work in Dhaka, but she had stayed with her grandmother and her Parveen Auntie until she was five years old. She had been born there, back when the house was still a hut, with a thatched roof and a glazed-mud floor. After she understood its purpose, Amina liked the cornfield, which reminded her of her grandmother’s village. When Amina asked about the field, George explained that there were power lines that couldn’t be moved, and so no one could build a house there. ![]() She’d had to remind herself of the clean and modern Rochester airport, and of the Pittsford Wegmans-a grocery store that was the first thing she described to her mother once she got her on the phone. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived-had made her wonder, just for a moment, if she had been tricked (as everyone had predicted she would be) and ended up in a sort of American village. ![]() The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul-de-sac, and beyond the cul-de-sac was a field of corn. Theirs was the second-to-last house on the road.
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