A Golden Age (20 page)

their resolve could know no bounds.

The Bengali resistance was weak and sporadic. General Zia relied on the youthful spirit of his soldiers, and they had small victories. A blown-up bridge here. An army-convoy ambush there. A captured railway station. They celebrated these victories with the broadcasters of the radio, who sent up cheers in the homes of their listeners, those city dwellers spending long, hot afternoons hugging their wireless radios.

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After the Major came to stay and Maya left for Calcutta, Rehana’s world grew smaller. She was encouraged not to leave the house too often; if she needed something, it would be brought to her. She should go to the market in Mrs Chowdhury’s car, but buy only enough food for herself. She should sometimes visit her neighbours; she should appear concerned; she should talk about the war but only vaguely. It was agreed that if anyone asked she should say that she had sent Maya and Sohail to stay with her sisters in Karachi.

Things were quiet at Shona. Joy appeared occasionally to take care of the Major, and the doctor was in and out, but otherwise there was very little activity next door. It was just the three of them: Rehana, and the two men in the other house. She spent the nights with the kerosene lamp on. Every sound incited a fierce hammering in her heart. She thought she heard footsteps, soft knocks on the door; she thought she felt someone tugging at her feet as she slept. The Major next door was no consolation; he made her feel exposed.

On days when her nerves threatened to overwhelm her, Rehana tried to think back to a less turbulent time, when nothing of significance happened, when the passing of seasons, the thrill of the Eid moon-sighting, the smell of mangoes ripen- ing on the trees, were the most spectacular events of the calen- dar. But their lives had never had any regularity – at least, not the sort Rehana was now sifting her memories for. There was always something, some uproar, in the city, or beyond, in Islamabad, where one punishing law after another was passed; and even further afield – the death of Che Guevara, whom Sohail had mourned as though he had lost a brother. Every hiccup of the political landscape made its way to their door and, when her son was old enough, came through the door and into the bungalow, into the boy’s drawn and serious face, the shadows he cast upon the corridors and over the dining table; and then into Maya, who was angrier and louder. No, there had never been any other time; their lives were populated by Lenin and Castro and Mujib and Anwar Sadaat; there was only this

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time, this life, this fraught and crowded era, to which they were bound without choice, without knowledge, only their passions, their loves, to lead and sustain them.

In this, as in all other things, Rehana veered between indul- gence and censure. There was a part of her that wanted to allow her children anything – any whimsy, any zeal, any excess. Another part of her wanted them to have nothing to do with it all, to keep them safe, at home; in either case, she treated Maya and Sohail as though they were there to collect on an old debt, an old promise that could never be fulfilled, not in this lifetime; a yawning, cyclic, inexhaustible need. Whether the need was theirs or hers, she could not say.

Discovering herself alone in the house for the first time in many years, Rehana found she had no desire to reassemble the sewing group. She didn’t want to laugh with her friends any more; she wanted to stir the melancholy in the empty house, the deep sadness that was also a kind of quiet, a tranquillity, that she was reluctant to surrender.

Rehana found she took something close to pleasure in repeat- ing the lonely rituals she had developed just after the children left for Lahore all those years ago. She scrubbed the house to a hos- pital shine; she shooed crows from her pickles; she took long, exaggerated baths under the bucket water; she dug up large sections of her garden and set about replanting the pumpkin, the marrow, the hibiscus, the jasmine.

The water would come on only between ten and twelve every day. Every morning she had to fill up the biryani pot and the three metal buckets and soak the clothes and the vegetables and gut the fish.

She went to the graveyard to tell Iqbal about the Major. When she got there, she felt like saying sorry, but she wasn’t sure what for. Well, it was obvious what for.

You would not have liked this.

A column of ants bisected Iqbal’s gravestone.

Forgive me; I haven’t come in almost a month. The flowers on your plot have cracked in the heat; that bodmash caretaker

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promised to water them, but of course he forgot, even though I gave him an extra five annas the last time I was here.

I am harbouring a person who I don’t know and who could get us all into very big trouble. No, you would not have liked it.

If you want to complain you should complain to your son, he brought that man and begged me to let him stay. Could I say no? No, I could not say no.

About a fortnight after the Major’s accident, Joy came to the door of the bungalow. He looked as though he’d been running: wet patches soaked through his shirt at his neck and his armpits. His cheeks glistened, and water, like tears, flowed from his forehead.

‘Auntie,’ he said softly, ‘can I come in?’ ‘Of course.’

He hesitated. ‘I’m not disturbing you?’

Rehana shook her head, surprised. Joy was not known for his politeness. He hovered at the edge of the sofa, bent his fingers and rubbed his knuckles together.

Rehana had just finished preparing lunch. ‘Are you hungry?’ He shook his head. She saw the beams of his shoulders press-

ing against his shirt, which was a red-and-blue check. The collars were long and pointed towards his shoes.

She knew that shirt. Where had he got it, she wanted to ask him. There must be a perfectly innocent explanation. They had the same shirt. Simple. But Joy kept sweating and saying nothing and she started to feel panicky. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Yes, I – I have to go.’ ‘Go where?’

His head dipped lower and closer to his hands; his face swam; still he didn’t move to mop his face. ‘I have to go to Agartala,’ he said. ‘Just for a few days. I’ll come back.’

‘Has something happened? Is it Sohail?’

‘Sohail?’ he said. ‘No, no, Auntie. He’s in Agartala; he’s fine; there was a telegram last night.’

‘You got a telegram? Why didn’t you tell me?’ She burned to ask him about the shirt, the telegram, why he had to go. ‘What’s

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happening, beta, why don’t you tell me? Here, have a glass of water.’ She forced a note of tenderness into her voice. ‘You sit here, and you tell me.’

‘My brother is dead.’ His voice was as flat as a vinyl record.

She didn’t want to believe it. ‘Aref?’ Then there was relief flooding guiltily through her. ‘Are you sure?’

‘There was an operation,’ he continued in the same voice. ‘And they were ambushed. He was shot in the chest; he died instantly.’

Rehana compared this boy to her son. There was something wrong with his face, the thick upper lip, now shimmering with sweat, the hard, angry eyes. There was no trace of childhood.

Joy rubbed the sleeve of the red-and-blue check over his fore- head, slicking his hair back until it stayed wet and stiff around the edges. ‘These things happen in war,’ he said. ‘You know what our sector commander told us? Did Sohail tell you? He said, “Nobody wants a live guerrilla.’’’

He said
a live
guerrilla. What did he mean? He swallowed the water she gave him.

‘We are all dead!’ he said, raising his voice. ‘Not just Aref, that’s what I’m trying to say.’ His wet face leaned close; she couldn’t stop the question any more. ‘Why are you wearing Sohail’s shirt?’

He looked down at himself. She saw his lips rustle. ‘We exchanged shirts. He wore Aref’s. I took his. Aref had mine.’

Rehana picked up her gloves and her shears. She felt like attack- ing something.

The garden was neither pretty nor particularly ordered. The rows were messy, the colours a little chaotic, and there was too much red and white, though this was not Rehana’s fault. The delta weather was punishing; it didn’t support the frailer colours of the palette, only the muscular ones, the shocking whites, the brutal reds, the fuchsias and the violets. And so Rehana couldn’t help overplanting the jasmine and the rojonigondha and the lilies. The dahlias and the chrysanthemums were mostly white

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too, and the carnations and the phlox were the crimson shade of a short, violent sunset. That was why she loved her yellow roses. Amid all the stark colours of the garden, they were the sweetest, tenderest plants.

She found a clutch of weeds growing against the eastern corner of the wall that divided the bungalow property from Shona. The weeds had spirited purple flowers, spiky and punc- tuated, as though they knew their time was borrowed. Rehana seized them with both hands and pulled. They didn’t budge. She planted a foot on the boundary wall, leaned back and used her weight. She strained and struggled, twisting the weed around her wrist, and finally it rushed out of the earth, trailing a long, knotted root.

Another boy dead. Rehana asked God again, as she did every day, to save Sohail. What made Him spare one and take another? She didn’t know. Bless Sohail in Agartala, and my Maya in Calcutta. Maya had rung once, a few days after she’d left. She didn’t say where she was calling from, or where she was staying. She said she was all right. Don’t worry, she said,
I’m happy
.

Rehana devised a strict schedule for the Major: the doctor came every other afternoon, checked the stitches and adjusted the medication. Rehana brought the Major his food on a tray and left him alone to eat. Then she gave him a half bar of soap and poured a glass of water over his right hand. After lunch, he took a nap. When he woke up, she brought him tea and gave him his evening pills. The Major, who could barely speak, chose to say nothing. He always nodded thank you. He didn’t smile, though, or wave to her when she said goodnight for the evening. He liked her cooking. His plate was always licked, except when she gave him fish. He would try to hide it under a pile of rice, or mix it up with the pieces of chewed-up pickle that climbed the side of his plate. What kind of Bengali doesn’t like fish? She added more pickles and replaced the fish with egg curry; maybe if she found a chicken at the market she would try to get it for him.

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She thought his first words to her might be ‘thank you’ or ‘I’m so grateful to you’ but instead he began with ‘It won’t be long now.’ She assumed he meant before he was well enough to leave Shona. He couldn’t mean before the war was over. In any case he was being optimistic, she thought. His leg still looked horribly twisted.

She had to lean forward to hear him, and hold her hair back so it wouldn’t fall on to his face. She made a note to herself to braid her hair. She caught his breath, which smelled of water- melons. She found herself wondering how a person’s breath might come to smell of watermelons. She told herself it must be because he didn’t smoke cigarettes.

The next day he said abruptly, ‘Why do you always wear white?’ which she thought was a rude observation, but then she surprised herself by answering, ‘So that you’ll be convinced I’m a nurse and not just a poor widow.’ At which he smiled, and Rehana was annoyed, in case she had accidentally begun some sort of banter with the man. But she needn’t have worried. He hardly said a word for a week after that, only smiled briefly when she brought him lunch and dinner.

Then one day he said, ‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ and Rehana replied, ‘It was a long time ago,’ and then she said, ‘Are you married?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I was.’ What kind of an answer was that? A look, a flash of something, passed across the Major’s face. It looked like anger. She wondered what it would be like to be close enough to the man to make him angry.

The next day he asked, ‘What happened to your husband?’ It occurred to her that it was none of his business, but somehow she felt the urge to answer.

‘He had a heart-attack.’ ‘Suddenly?’

‘Just like that.’

‘Why did you never marry again?’

Still none of his business, but once she started, it was difficult to stop without appearing rude. ‘I had children,’ Rehana said; ‘a reason not to marry again.’

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‘I thought that would be a good reason.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no. Children are the worst reason to marry again.’

‘You didn’t want someone to look after them?’

‘You don’t know how hard I had to fight just to keep them.’ She told him about the court case. ‘I had to get the children back. I needed money. A lot of money. I needed money to bribe the judge. Money for the plane ticket to Lahore. Mrs Chowdhury said, “Build a house at the back of the property.” This is what my husband had intended as well. So that is what I decided to do. But I needed –’