A Golden Age (18 page)

Rehana went to Mrs Sengupta’s kitchen for a glass of water. She was taking a giant gulp, sighing into the glass, when Sohail approached and hugged her tightly. She felt him crying into her shoulder.

‘Ammoo,’ he whispered, ‘it was my fault.’ ‘What happened?’

‘It was me. I was supposed to fix the timer on the explosive. But I got there and I just froze. I couldn’t move. The Major pushed me aside and did it himself, but it was too late; he got caught up in the blast. It should have been me; I messed it up.’

Rehana didn’t know what to say. She held his head, stroking it slowly.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know if I can do this – I’m no good – the firing, training – I shouldn’t have gone.’

‘It’s not your fault. Whatever it was, it can’t have been your fault.’

‘He saved my life,’ Sohail said. ‘I would’ve been dead without him.’

The doctor finished his work.

‘I’ve sutured the wounds, but I can’t promise there won’t be an infection. He needs medicine. And even then he might lose his leg.’

‘Can we take him away?’ Joy asked. ‘Maybe a few roads, but no further.’

‘There’s a field hospital in Agartala, near our camp.’ ‘Across the border? Absolutely not.’

‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said, ‘you have to let him stay here.’

Rehana was tired; there was blood everywhere; Mrs

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Sengupta’s carpet was ruined. She wanted to feel sorry for the man, but she couldn’t. He was so ugly, lying on the carpet, his mouth open horribly. But he had saved her son’s life.

But it was Maya who said, ‘No. He can’t stay here.’ She had been quiet ever since the boys arrived, hovering at the periphery of the scene. Now she was standing over the Major, pumping her fists.

‘Maya, please,’ Sohail said, ‘there’s no choice.’

‘Then you stay. You stay here and take care of him. Don’t make us do it.’

‘We can’t stay here. We’re wanted men.’ ‘This is all your fault.’

‘It is, it is my fault!’ Sohail’s eyes opened wide, red and fer- ocious. ‘Ma, you have to take him. Please say you’ll take him.’

Rehana was torn. ‘You’re sure there’s nowhere else he can go?’ ‘Ma,’ Maya gasped, ‘you want another man dying in your

house?’

Another man? Was she talking about her father?

‘This man cannot be moved,’ the doctor said. He looked at Maya, who was leaning against her mother and breathing heavily, as though she’d been running. Then he said, ‘I will stay. I will stay here and make sure he doesn’t die.’

Rehana breathed a sigh of relief. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked the doctor.

‘Rajesh.’

‘Maya. Maya, please look at me. Look at me. Dr Rajesh is going to stay here and take care of the Major. No one is going to die. OK? No one is dying. You wanted to do something, remem- ber? You wanted to do something? Here it is. We’ll take care of him. He saved your brother. Enough, enough. No crying.’ And she stroked her daughter’s hair.

Rehana opened her eyes and for a moment forgot where she was, only sensing the wrongness of the place, and then remembered,

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and woke with a start, moving the hair from her forehead, feeling for the frayed braid, untying, retying, out of habit. She was posi- tioned awkwardly on the sofa. Looking across the room, she saw the rubble from the night before – the stained bandages, the muddy footprints across the floor, the little bits of plaster and wood from the explosion – and accounted for the tiredness in her limbs.

The Major was installed in Mithun’s bedroom. When Rehana approached him, she saw the lace curtain was drawn, and in the early-morning light the pattern traced shadows across his face. There, on his forehead, a star-shaped flower; and there, across the thigh, a speckled row of hearts. He slept without a sound, immobile but for the lace shadow that stirred slightly with his every shallow breath.

In slumber, the Major was enormous. His arms and feet spilled out from the bed, his hands like spreading spider webs. The doctor had left just after dawn, declaring the Major stable and promising to return the next day with medicine and more bandages. The first night will be the worst, he had said. You must stay here.

And here she still was.

The night had made him no prettier. On his face, in a jagged, angry curve, was a scar. It travelled, meandering, from the outer edge of his left eyebrow to the corner of his upper lip. A bluish stain marked the other side of his face. The rest of him, except the bandaged leg, seemed strangely untouched, healthy in fact, the skin on the neck and arms taut and glowing in the pale morning sunlight.

Rehana looked at him and felt a surge of pride in his solid presence, as though he were a fallen angel, ugly and beaten, but maybe still a little blessed.

Suddenly she was hungry; she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. She had a craving for lychees, not the dry ones they imported from China but the local variety with the smooth, leathery skin. The lychees made her think of other indulgences; perhaps she should buy some meat, some better rice. She would

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go to New Market. She felt the urge to venture out, to leave the house and the sight of the night’s chaos.

It was a bright day with no clouds at all, the sort of day when the sky is holding its breath and everything is still and perfectly clear. The market was the same as it had been ever since the start of the war: every week another shop or two closed, the vegetables dusty and shrivelled, the fish small and dull-eyed. But Rehana was buoyed by the thought of haggling with the vendors or finding some small treasure, a fresh chicken or a late-season papaya.

Her cheer left her as soon as she entered the market. Dotted among the stalls and the ferry-wallahs were men in army uni- forms. They strolled through the market with rifles carelessly slung across their shoulders. She passed a sweetshop and saw a group of them sitting around a plastic table, laughing with their mouths so wide open she could see, even from a distance, the peaks of their teeth. One of them spat loudly into the gutter.

As she walked with her head down, trying not to catch anyone’s eye, Rehana was annoyed at her fear, especially in this place, which had seen her through a decade of struggle. Here was where the material for the children’s school uniforms had been bought, where she had calculated the week’s rations and planned her cooking. It was where Iqbal had bought her wedding sari – only twenty-two rupees, he’d confessed – where she had come to shop for Eid gifts, wedding presents, birthday clothes for the chil- dren. New Market was the very heart of the city for Rehana, its smells and winding alleys as familiar to her as her very own Dhanmondi. And now it was suddenly an alien place, the air heavy with menace. ‘Watch out for the butchers,’ Sohail had said; ‘they’re Urdu-speaking.’

‘Why? I’m Urdu-speaking. So what?’ ‘Those people are army collaborators.’

Sohail was referring to the Urdu-speaking Biharis, who were rumoured to be siding with the army. The division of the city into sympathizers and collaborators sat uncomfortably with Rehana,

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but he told her there had to be some way of knowing who to suspect and who to trust. They could no longer trust their instincts. Or even their friends.

Rehana followed a narrow passageway into the butchers’ quarter. The stalls were scattered haphazardly, cuts of meat hanging from each one like wet jewels. Rehana always took pleasure in buying meat; she would take her time examining the white pearl of bone, the rubied blood, the deep garnet sinews.

She found herself in front of her regular butcher.

‘What’s good today?’ she asked. She looked down at the ground, so he wouldn’t know it was her.

‘Nice chop meat, memsaab. Also mutton is good today.’

Rehana thought of the Major, his sewn-up cheek. ‘I need bones. For soup.’

‘You like soup? OK.’

It was so hot. Rehana saw the flies that hovered, then sank against the hanging meat, their buzzing amplified by the low ceiling of the market. She saw the butcher extending his arms and offering a piece he thought might impress her. It was the entire side of a small cow, a row of bones raised like curved teeth, the flesh sliced neatly so that its purple striations reflected the light. The smell of blood, metallic, laced with rot, assaulted Rehana. She shuddered and turned her face. The butcher recog- nized her instantly.

Rehana recalled why she had always bought her meat from this man. He was impeccably dressed; there was no blood any- where on his shirt or on his hands. He wore a spotless white kurta, and a cap, as though he was on his way to the mosque.

‘How are you, madam?’ he asked in Urdu, and saw her start. ‘Yes, well,’ she answered quietly, and then, without meaning

to, she said, ‘We’re having a war.’

‘I know.’ And when she stayed silent it was as though she was accusing him of something and he had to say, ‘I have nowhere else, madam.’ But the words were hollow, and Rehana realized how strange the language suddenly sounded: aggressive, insinu- ating. She saw that it was now the language of her enemy; hers

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and Sohail’s and the Major’s. She tried to feel something else, some tenderness for her poets, some sympathy for this man, only a meat-cutter after all.

‘You have this,’ he said, proffering the meat. And Rehana could see that he was afraid of her, and she was pleased, and then ashamed to be pleased. She quickly pulled out a five-rupee note and turned, waving away the flies that had suddenly collected around her head.

The Major was awake when she returned. Rehana could tell he was uncomfortable; he didn’t turn his head when she entered, just blinked a few times and tried to move his mouth. His eyes were two black pearls. She turned on the ceiling fan and wiped the sweat that had gathered on his forehead. He needed water. She went outside to look for Maya, and found her frowning over a book and writing in its margins with a tiny, illegible scrawl.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Reading
Che Guevara Speaks
,’ she said, exposing the spine. ‘I asked you to look after the Major.’

‘He’s asleep.’

‘No, he’s awake.’

‘Well, now you can take care of him.’ And she returned to her book.

‘You don’t like him?’

‘Why not?’ she mumbled, not looking up. ‘He’s fighting for us.’

Rehana looked more closely at her daughter and tried – how many times had she done this? – to see something that might have escaped her. There was none of the panic of the night before, nothing of the need.

It started to rain.

Sighing, Rehana took a glass of water to the Major, covering her head with a plastic sheet as she crossed the garden into the other house. As he drank, she noticed his lips were not as des- perate as the rest of him. He thanked her with a relieved breath,

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and she looked at him as though he could not see her, with a frank stare.

Joy arrived in the evening. He rubbed his hand across his chest and asked for a word. ‘I need to speak to you, Auntie,’ he said. ‘Thing is, the Pakistan Army think the Major is dead. They saw the building collapsing around him; there’s no chance he sur- vived.’ He looked around the room, avoiding her eyes. ‘We believe we can use this to our advantage.’

‘What will you do?’

‘He’ll stay here until he recovers, if that’s all right with you.’

She remembered the sight of the Major’s leg. It could be weeks, even months. ‘I thought it would be only a few days.’

‘We could move him,’ Joy said, ‘but now that he’s in hiding, it would be better if he stayed here.’

What had she got herself into? ‘How long?’ she asked. ‘Maybe a month. And he can give out his orders – through me.