Hunger
Neela’s friend Jessica invited her to her baby shower. “My mom is throwing a lunch party for me. She always has a nice spread. The food is to die for!”
Jessica and Neela were graduate school friends. Chemistry. Rice. Their kids were the same age. Three. Neela was excited. This was her first baby shower, her first American party. She considered Jessica her close friend.
Neela arrived at Jessica’s mom’s house with an empty stomach, dressed in a long prairie skirt and lacy blouse purchased at Target. She adored Target. It was Jessica who had told Neela about Target’s low-cost designer line. Most of Neela’s wardrobe still consisted of defective clothes she had bought at the surplus garments market Bongobazar in Dhaka, where discarded export items were sold off locally, loose shirts with running threads, blue jeans that had to be cut and hemmed.
“You made it,” Jessica greeted her softly at the door, taking her hand and leading her inside to a sunlit living room with windows and pale walls.
“Call me Nan,” Jessica’s mom greeted Neela, rising from a sofa.
Nan had a broad forehead, wide shoulders, and big teeth, revealing pink gums when she smiled. She was tall and reedy, like Jessica, a head taller than Neela. Neela felt especially small since coming to America. Jessica had joked that she could try shopping at the juvenile section at Target. Jessica’s mom had invited some of her own friends, matronly women with necklaces at their ribbed throats and button earrings, who wore skirts and dresses like Neela.
Neela sat down next to a round-faced woman with pink lips and soft, brown curls. She sat upright in a sleeveless, floral dress, her pale legs ensconced in glossy pumps, holding her purse on top of her lap.
“Hi! I’m Neela!” Neela smiled widely, bobbing her chin.
“Hello. Joan.”
“It’s nice to see you also wearing a skirt! I thought I had overdressed.” Neela cried with a sigh of relief. “Jessica and her mom are both dressed simply in blouses and blue jeans!”
The woman laughed like a hyena, as if Neela had said something very funny. “I always dress nicely. When you’ve lost your looks, dressing nicely is all you have, to cover up the wrinkles and fat.” She spoke in a sweet, soft drawl that sharpened at the ends of sentences.
“What are you saying? You’re beautiful, Joan,” Jessica’s mom Nan scolded the woman.
“Yes, you’re one hot chick,” Jessica piped.
The living room was long and elegant, with minimal furniture, two beige leather couches with buttons and a long white shelf holding copies of Life and People magazines, and vinyl records in colorful sleeves that Jessica said were from her childhood. Neela peeked around nervously, holding her fingers in each other. A row of low-hung windows of clear glass looked out on bright grass lined with tulips, irises, and lilies in large clay pots. At Nan’s invitation, the party stepped outside. Neela had been the only one to pull off her shoes at the door, a custom she followed in her country. The soles of her bare feet touched the soft carpet of Zoysia grass, which poked between her toes.
“Zoy-c-a?”
“Zoy-sha, or Zoy-z-a,” Nana corrected her.
Neela tried to pronounce the name several times. She was excited. She wanted to tuck it away in her memory to tell her husband later.
“Zoy-si-a?”
Nan’s eyes narrowed to a bright dot in the sun, and Neela stopped asking. It wasn’t as if they had a house with a yard to fill with grass.
For a long, luxurious moment, the party of elegant women stood under the satsuma trees heavy with fruit, their arms at their backs, their dresses and skirts swinging in the breeze, the scent of citrus in their nostrils. It occurred to Neela that she was the only friend Jessica had invited! Two of the women were her mother’s friends, one an old neighbor, and two were aunts. Neela felt pleased and nervous at this honor. But she had been embarrassed to see the gift bags lined up in a corner on the floor, she realized that she had not brought a present.
“I’ll buy you something later,” she whispered to Jessica, drawing Jessica’s attention away from the aunt she was having a conversation with.
“No worries!” Jessica assured her in a hissed whisper, thumping Neela on the back.
“Am I the only friend you invited?”
“Well, Bee, my schoolfriend. She’s running a little late.”
“Oh, Jessica! I’m so honored–”
Nan called them all inside. The women sat down again on the beige leather sofas and talked lazily. Jessica and Nan served everyone drinks, wines and cocktails.
“And you?”
“Water!” Neela barked.
“Sure.” Jessica smiled from far away, standing at mouth of the dining room.
All the other women were older, with greying hair, the soft beginnings of wrinkles, eyebags, and sunspots. Neela was having a good time. She admired the older women, their wide conversation, and the relaxed way they were spending the afternoon, rolling the ice in their drinks, rotating the glasses in their hands.
Jessica appeared in front of her and pressed Neela’s hand, whispering, “Are you hungry? They food at my mom’s parties is good.”
At one point, Nan left the room, returned, and announced that the food was ready. She stood with her hands on the hips of her jeans, waiting for the party to follow her. They sat down at a long table in a dining room flooded with sunlight. Each place was marked with a name card. The table had already been laid with little bowls of salad placed on frilly lace circles. She had been seated next to the matronly woman Joan. Her floral dress was dotted with red buttons and bows. Little button earrings peeped below her reddish-brown curls. Neela agreed with Nan and Jessica; Joan must have been strikingly beautiful in her youth. Joan praised the salad in detail, remarking on the colors and scents. Jessica’s mom, Nan, mentioned that the cilantro and the thyme were from her garden. Her guests became very animated. They swore that they could taste the different herbs. Everyone kept commenting on the ingredients, isolating the taste of the rosemary, the cilantro, and the thyme on their palettes as they chewed. The women complimented the flower arrangement on the table, purple irises bundled with pink and white lilies from Jessica’s mom’s garden. Neela made sounds to agree with the others. She basked in the luxurious, slow lunch, enamored by the lofty conversation, on politics, community gardens, and yoga, and the careful attention paid to every detail.
“Okay?” Jessica asked across the table.
Neela nodded. Her black her fell in front of her eye and she wiped it back. It was rare for her to be free of a nagging child. Neela and her husband Zubair, who was a postdoc at Rice, toiled so hard that they could barely feel their bones, let alone find each other. Often, one or the other would fall asleep reading on the couch, with the lights on.
The shrimp cocktail was served in tall glasses. Neela wolfed down what appeared to be pink shrimp stuck together in a creamy sauce. It was the most perfect appetizer she had ever tasted with her tongue.
She murmured softly, along with everyone else, “So good.”
A few minutes later, she was shocked to find that the shrimp cocktail had been the entrée, the whole meal. Her stomach gurgled. She pressed her midriff with her palm to stop the sound.
The women rose to collect their coffee, served from a carafe. Jessica’s childhood friend Bee had arrived, red-haired and plump, carrying roses. Joan complimented the pink roses Bee had brought, which Jesssica’s mom had cut and stood up in a cut-glass rectangular vase on the side table, next to the coffee carafe and cups. When they returned to the table, Jessica’s mom told the story of each cup picked up by each guest. The cup Neela picked, tall and flared bone china with pink blossoms painted on the surface, had belonged to Jessia’s grandmother.
“I hope I don’t break it,” Neela croaked, stirring the milk and sugar nervously.
“It’s fine! It’s a frumpy cup. Break it if you like before I inherit it!” Jessica smiled at her across the expanse of the long table, baring her teeth all the way to her pink gums.
Bee was sitting beside her, their shoulders touching, their frizzy hair blending together. Neela realized that the empty place next to Jessica had been reserved for her. But that was okay. They saw each other every day. They had been seated far away from each other so that they could mingle with other people. Joan was saying that she had been an activist all her life, fought for this cause, that cause, but now she was tired.
“Let the young people do the work now, I say,” she said.
Neela listened reverently as Joan recounted several colorful stories. “Wow, that’s amazing,” Neela said, holding Jessica’s grandmother’s teacup by its delicate stem, which she expected to snap at any moment between her fat fingers. “I wish I could be like you.” She looked at Joan admiringly.
Joan leaned forward. A lock of fiery red hair fell over her forehead. “If you don’t mind my asking, I’ve been meaning to ask all evening. You almost don’t have an accent. It’s not noticeable. I’ve been wondering–where are you from?”
“Bangladesh?” Neela answered with a question, as if she were apologizing, trying to bridge the small gap between Joan and herself.
“Your English is very good. I would never have guessed.” Joan gave a satisfied shake of her head and turned to talk to the woman on her other side.
Neela sat with a grin weighing down her cheeks. She swung her head to take in all the seated women, who appeared both sharp and distant. Joan went on talking to her neighbor on her other side, with her broad back turned to Neela, exuding the faint notes of jasmine, as if she were satisfied with all she wanted to know from Neela. Neela rose and walked to the coffee table. She put down her cup carefully, still carrying a smile on her cheeks. Her naughty three-year-old son sometimes said that when he felt bad in daycare, when the other kids teased him or his teacher scolded him, he floated up to the air and hung suspended above everyone at a great height, from where he could see everyone, even himself. Neela got annoyed with him when he said things like that. But now, she felt herself floating in the air above the company, staring down at them all, including the shell of her own self, swiveling big, frightened, big eyes, smoothing her untidy black hair in place. With that question from Joan, she had been placed, taken out of the company and set apart.
Later, when Neela was leaving, Jessica stood at the front door.
“Sure you’ll be okay?” Jessica asked, bending her long neck.
“Yeah! Sorry I’m leaving early. I have to go to another party at night.”
Jessica turned her head and made a joke to her childhood friend Bee about Neela, about how Neela drove on the highway like an old woman, with her shoulders hunched, at forty miles per hour, her head barely above the steering wheel. Jessica had an open smile, that Neela had always admired, reaching up to her gums and all the way to her eyes and forehead, but now Neela felt that Jessica’s eyes were opaque. Neela stepped down to the driveway and hurried to her car. She had never traveled so far from the city, to the suburb of Spring, in the used car she and her husband had bought. She had just got her license two months ago after failing the test three times.
The party at night was at a crumbling apartment complex, in the opposite direction from Jessica’s mom’s house on I-45. It was a Bangladeshi party at the home of one of the young Bangladeshi families with whom Neela and her husband Zubair wanted to build a community for their son Jewel and for themselves. They went to these parties in search of the food that made them nostalgic for home and, also, the conversation that reminded them of back home, the different breeds of mangoes, all the fruits, sweet and sour, and even simply the sounds of their language.
It was the couple’s baby’s one-year-old birthday party. When they entered the apartment, it seemed that a hundred families had been invited! People kept flowing into the tight space, filling all the sofas and the extra folding chairs in the living room. The women and children sat in the bedroom, on top of the bed, on plastic chairs lined along the walls, and on the polyester loop carpet. Neela found Polly Bhabi in the kitchen, a sweaty silk sari wrapped around her bulky trunk and tied at the waist, sweat falling off her dark forehead as she scooped rice and meat from pots into Aluminum trays to reheat. She had been cooking all week, she said.
“Bhabi, where is the birthday baby?”
“I don’t know. See if he is with his father,” Polly Bhabi cried in a feverish voice. Her eyes were red, and her brown cheeks and forehead glistened.
Neela left Polly Bhabi to her work. She didn’t know any of the women sitting in the bedroom. Jewel pulled off his sandals and started jumping on top of the mattress. Neela tried to catch him and stop him, reaching for him with her outstretched arms, but he kept running away from her to the middle of the mattress, laughing.
A middle-aged woman Neela did not know, somebody’s mother with thinning hair, dressed in a sweating grey sari, shrieked at Jewel. “Why is the child’s hair in that state? Uh? It’s dry like jute!” The woman cried with disapproval, raising her eyebrows in alarm while wiping her cheeks with her heavy sari’s edge. The air inside the room was hot and oppressive.
Neela said, “Swimming every day, all summer.”
“You have to care for his hair,” the middle-aged woman shrieked, annoyed. “Ei, Ei, boy, you have to take care of your hair. Why is it red? Ha? Say?” She turned to Neela. “Put oil in his hair and shampoo it well.”
Neela frowned and turned her back to the woman. She didn’t speak to the woman anymore. She didn’t speak to anyone else either. All the faces were unfamiliar to her. Women kept entering the room with children in tow. The temperature rose. There must have been fifty women in that ten foot-by-twelve-foot room. The women complained about the heat, but they refused to take off the party clothes of their children, who nagged them to do so. Jewel kept jumping on the bed. Neela reached the middle of the bed and grabbed Jewel with her claws. She held onto him as he struggled against her belly until the food was served. She was dressed in a new silk sari that she had not worn yet, but no one noticed. No one complimented her on her blue sari or the gold hoops at her ears.
After the men had taken their food, the women poured out of the bedroom with their children, headed toward the kitchen island. Neela stood impatiently in line, pressed behind overdressed women fanning their saris. She tried to smile at the other women, to make eye contact, but everyone was too busy, pushing to get at the food. Greasy trays were parked on top of the island, arrayed buffet style, spilling oily beef bhuna, polao that already had the stale odor of weeks-old cardamom, pasty vegetables, fish fried in turmeric, a prawn curry, and sweet chicken korma for the children. Mountains of food. Because the men had reached the food first, the trays were in disarray. The island was covered with grains of rice, splatter, and even pieces of meat and cauliflower that had rocketed out of the containers. Polly Bhabi was lifting a heavy pot of meat, pouring out the contents into one of the trays, spraying a girl nearby with oil and curry.
“Ow!” the little girl cried.
The girl’s mother held her angrily by the shoulders, but no one else paid her attention. Polly Bhabi poured a handful of dense green chillis into a Styrofoam bowl. She said she had grown them carefully in a pot on her kitchen windowsill from seeds she had smuggled from Bangladesh. They had successfully taken root. Their color promised that they would have some heat. Neela picked one up to eat with her rice. She filled her springy plastic plate with enough food for Jewel and herself and hurried back to the bedroom, where she had left him.
Jewel was back on the bed. She pulled him down to the carpet beside her and started to feed him with her fingers. Around them, people chomped on their food, not speaking, and tried to shovel rice into their children’s mouths as they played with toys or devices they had brought from home.
“Bhabi, where do you live?” Neela asked one nice-looking woman with a dusky face, dressed in a pretty, blue sari similar to hers. She wondered if they had bought their saris from the same shop.
The woman appeared not to hear. She called loudly to her girls to come eat before the food got cold. The girls, with cute brown faces and pigtails, dressed in thick party dresses, ran to her, received a bite eat from her gathered fingers, and ran back to the wall where their IPads were charging. And how elegant had been the women at Jessica’s mother’s house, engaged in polite conversation? There was no comparison between them and the women in this room, overdressed in heated clothes and clanking jewelry, who were collapsing from their denigrated condition, their saris falling off their shoulders, wiping their nose and screaming to their children to come and eat.
An infant dressed in a white satin party dress with a white ribbon tied on her scalp began to cry. The mother lay the heavily dressed infant on the carpet–its satin dress and head gear fanned around its body–and began to tear off its diaper. The air in the room filled with the aroma of the plastic diaper and the contents of the diaper, which mingled with the smell of hot spices and starch.
“I don’t want to eat! Bad smell!” Jewel shouted. Freeing himself from Neela’s hold, he climbed on top of the bed again and began to jump with his bowed brown legs, bouncing between the eating people, who cried out in alarm.
In the chaos, hurrying after Jewel, Neela dropped her plate on the carpet. She glared furiously at the mother, who was folding the diaper and inserting it in a plastic bag, looking around to see where to discard it, eyeing an open waste basket with greedy eyes. She looked young and pretty, with a diamond stud in her small nose and pale arms and neck. Who knew she would be capable of such abomination.
“Have to put oil in his hair!” the middle-aged woman resumed, catching Neela’s eyes. She was biting her food with her mouth open, revealing a white tongue caked with food. “Nothing tastes good to me! Something wrong with my tongue!” she wailed.
Neela reached out her forearms laden with sky-blue glass bangles, matched so carefully with her blue sari, which nobody had remarked on, and caught her son by pinching his wrists.
Jewel cried out. “You hurt me!”
“We have to go!” Neela shouted.
Jewel whimpered, rubbing his hand. At that moment, he looked so small to her, so dark and compact, the way he must appear to his classmates and teacher at his daycare center, in the center of all the peach and beige cheeked boys and girls.
“Take care of his hair!” The middle-aged woman wailed behind Neela’s fleeing back.
As she left the bedroom, Neela realized the woman was the only person at the party who had tried to strike a conversation with her. She found her husband in the living room, squashed between two men on the dirty-looking sofa covered by a cloth.
“We have to go! Jewel is being naughty,” she complained through pressed lips, still holding onto the naughty boy’s wrist. Beside her, Jewel cried inconsolably, shedding tears from shut eyes.
Her husband jumped up from the sofa and got rid of his unfinished food hurriedly before she could shout at him also. Here, among the other Bangladeshi men, he looked tall, although he was dwarfed by all his colleagues at the university.
Together, they looked for the people who had invited them, but they were nowhere to be found. They exited in a fluster, picking out their shoes from the pile of discarded heels, dress shoes, and tennis shoes heaped like a mountain inside the front door, while Jewel cried, pulling at their arms. “I don’t want to go! I didn’t eat. I’m hungry. Is there any dessert? Mishti? What about the cake?”
Finally, they stepped into their shoes and emerged into the inky night. All the sounds stopped at once. Now they were alone again, only the three of them. While they had been inside the apartment, the stench of food had been overwhelming, attacking Neela’s nostrils and suffocating her lungs, making the vomit rise to Neela’s throat, but when they shut the door behind them on the excess of food and human bodies, Neela’s stomach gave a kick. She was still hungry.
Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13 Books, Fall 2023) and the short-story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, Press 53, Allium, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, Arkansas Review, Valley Voices, Bridge Eight, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship. She was a staff writer for the Daily Star newspaper and senior editor of Feminist Economics. She is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston.