A Golden Age (32 page)

In the back room the radio squealed into focus.

‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, bearing a cup of tea and a pair of bis- cuits, ‘the BBC broadcast, then we’ll go.’

Rehana heard snatches of the radio programme, interrupted by comments from the people at the office.
This is the BBC World Service . . . a historic Indo-Soviet treaty . . . if Indira Gandhi intervenes, the war will surely be won for the people of Bangladesh...

A loud cheer went up in the room. Three telephones rang at once.

‘Joy Bangla! Joy Bangobandhu!’

The cheer was repeated several times, followed by scattered backslapping.

Rehana devoured the salty, cumin-studded biscuits and felt her knees turning to stone.

‘Beta,’ she said to Maya, ‘why don’t you just take me to – the flat?’

‘Ma, I’m so sorry – we’ll go now.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s not a flat, really.’

‘No matter. I just want to put my feet up.’ Rehana gathered her things and began to walk towards the front door.

‘No, Ammoo, this way.’ Maya led her to the back of the build- ing, where there were yet more serious-looking workers hunched over their desks. They squeezed through a small cluster of people who were still huddled over the radio. A young woman dressed like a man in a pair of grey trousers waved to them as they brushed past.

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes – Ammoo, this is Sultana.’

The girl–boy beamed at Rehana. She had shiny, black eyes. ‘We’ve heard all about you, Auntie. You need anything, you ask me.’

They passed through a narrow doorway and into a dim stair- well. ‘It’s just upstairs,’ Maya said, climbing the stairs two at a

212

time. Rehana followed Maya along the betel-stained corridor, stepping to avoid the crumpled bits of newspaper, the spit-globs, the smeared streaks of mud on the walls.

The stairwell opened on to a wide, flat roof. A low railing sur- rounded it, and beyond Rehana could see the other rooftops on Theatre Road. In the building next door a fat woman was pinning a yellow sari to a clothes line. ‘This way,’ Maya said. They crossed the roof. At the far end was a small shed topped with a sheet of tin. A set of narrow double doors was held together with a padlock.

Maya slipped a key into the lock. The doors swung open to reveal a tiny room with a sagging cot against one wall and a heavy wooden desk against the other. Between the cot and the desk was a sliver of window criss-crossed with crude metal bars. A tired gamcha hung from the bars, its chequered red-and-green pattern casting weak Christmas shadows on the concrete floor.

‘Ammoo, this was the best I could do.’ Rehana pushed aside her surprise.

‘I cleaned it!’ A tattered mop was angled against the wall. ‘It’s all right, jaan. It’s not for long.’

‘It’s a promotion! All this time I’ve been sleeping downstairs.’ ‘In the office?’

‘There’s no other place,’ Maya said, shrugging, ‘and anyway it’s been rather fun.’ Maya was unwrapping herself from her sari, and Rehana followed, her back to the window. She pulled her head through her nightgown and began to pick the pins out of her hair.

Maya was already sprawled out on the cot when she said, ‘Ammoo, I heard about Sabeer.’

She didn’t really want to talk about Sabeer, but she told Maya about Sohail, the flat in Nilkhet, how he’d begged her to help.

‘Mrs Chowdhury was hysterical.’ ‘And Silvi?’

‘Sohail thought . . . well, he wanted to do it for Silvi. He thought she might love him again if he – I – brought Sabeer back.’

213

‘And?’

‘Jani na. Sabeer was in very bad shape.’ ‘You persuaded them to let him go?’

‘I had to ask your Faiz Chacha.’ ‘How did you do it?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’ She realized she was telling the truth; that day was a blur, as though it had happened to someone else and she had just borrowed the memory.

‘You’re braver than you thought.’

‘Or perhaps I’m just foolish.’ Rehana rifled through her bag. She pulled out the blanket and held it to her face, breathing in the scent of the sun on her clothes line.

‘You look different,’ Maya said, ‘something . . . I don’t know.’ Rehana wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and wedged herself between the wall and her daughter. She looked up at the dimpled ceiling. Damp patches shaped like clouds

dotted the whitewash. ‘I was thinking the same about you.’

Maya flipped on to her back. ‘I needed to leave, Ammoo, I hope you can understand that. I felt so bad leaving you all alone . . .’

She hadn’t been all alone. She’d watched
Mughal-e-Azam
and fallen in love with a stranger and uttered words she’d kept hidden for more than a decade.

Maya was still speaking: ‘. . . and it’s been so busy here, I hardly have time to think.’ With a start she sat up and parted her hair in the middle, grabbing the left side and twisting it into a braid. The mattress pitched and wobbled. Rehana swal- lowed a groan. She had forgotten how restless the girl could be.

‘Was he – Sabeer – what did they do to him?’

Rehana didn’t move her eyes from the ceiling. She consid- ered which version of the truth Maya would not immediately reject.

‘We’ve been getting reports about the prisoners,’ Maya said. ‘I already know.’

‘Then I don’t need to tell you.’

214

‘I still want to know.’ She was working on the second braid now and climbing into her younger, schoolgirl face.

‘He was tortured.’

‘How? What did they do?’ ‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course you know.’ ‘I don’t really want—’

‘For God’s sake, Ammoo, I’m not a child!’

Rehana sighed, resigned. ‘All right.’ Keep your eyes on the clouds, she told herself. ‘They beat him, broke his ribs.

‘They made him stare at the sun for hours, days. ‘They burned cigarette holes on his back.

‘They hung him upside down.

‘They made him drink salt water until his lips cracked.

‘And they tore out his fingernails.’ The tears travelled across her cheeks and pooled in her ears. She closed her eyes and saw the blood pulsing through her eyelids. When she opened them, Maya was at the window, folding and unfolding the torn gamcha. Then she turned around and said in a hospital voice, ‘He’s lucky you came for him. They would have made him dig his own grave and buried him in it.’

Rehana turned and pressed her forehead to the wall. It was rough and spiked with dust.

‘Ma, you were so brave,’ Maya said, collapsing heavily on to the cot. ‘So brave.’ She stroked Rehana’s back. ‘Let’s sleep, now, OK?’ She turned and curled herself around her mother. Rehana felt her daughter’s restless warmth at her back. ‘Tomorrow we’ll visit the camp.’

She lay awake and thought about the Major, his blue-threaded arm, the weight of his breath.

It wasn’t like the love for children. It wasn’t like the love of home.

Or the accidental love of her husband.

It was a swallowing, hungry love. Already she wanted more. Not one day had passed and she wanted more. There was pain in it, but not a pain she knew. Not the pain of losing

215

fathermotherhusband. Not the grinding pain of waving goodbye from a foggy airport window.

‘Ammoo, utho, wake up!’ A lock of hair tickled Rehana’s cheek. She opened a clammy eye to find her daughter bent over the cot, a steaming mug of tea in one hand, a toothbrush in the other. She tried to remember where she was. ‘We have to hurry,’ Maya said, handing the toothbrush to Rehana and swallowing a gulp of tea. Yesterday’s softness was gone, replaced by a charmless efficiency.

‘What time is it?’ Rehana turned on to her back, wincing at the stiffness in her neck. ‘It’s still dark.’

‘Five thirty. We have to get ready and meet Sultana.’ She waved the mug in the direction of the door. ‘She’s waiting downstairs.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I told you, today is my day at the camp.’

Rehana’s stomach was hot and empty. ‘What about break- fast?’

‘There’s a canteen – the food’s not bad – just hurry up and we might have time for a little aloo paratha before we go.’

‘All right,’ Rehana said, heaving herself out of the bowl of the mattress, ‘I’ll just change and get ready. Go downstairs, I’m just coming.’

Half an hour later, after Rehana had dressed, brushed her teeth in a downstairs toilet that smelled of sweat and wolfed down a few potatoes rolled in a greasy paratha, she found herself wedged between Sultana and Maya in the front of a shabby truck. Sultana was behind the wheel, wearing the same grey trousers and an open-necked white kurta.
She’s driving a truck
, Rehana mouthed to Maya, who carried a box labelled oral rehydration therapy on her lap. Maya turned to Rehana and smiled inscrutably. ‘It’s a war, Ammoo,’ she whispered; ‘we can do whatever we want.’

216

They stopped in front of a battered coffee house. Mukul, smelling like eggs and toothpaste, stuck his head through the open window and shouted, ‘Nomoshkar! Good morning, Auntie.’ Then he jumped into the back of the trunk and settled among the medical boxes and tins of dried milk.

An hour later the sky was not even yellow and the heavy night- time dew still clung to the trees and the windscreen. Maya and Sultana picked up a song. Sultana said something about a Pakistani soldier and a jackfruit that made Maya hold her stomach and laugh. Rehana willed the journey to pass quickly.

‘Halfway!’ Maya called out cheerfully. And then it started to rain. Criss-crossing sheets made baby rattles on the windscreen. The road stretched ahead, vague and muddy.

Once they had crossed Howrah Bridge and left the perimeter of Calcutta, the landscape was barren and yellow with fields of drying hay. They passed a jute factory, with its smell of grass and dung, and a leather factory, spilling its fishy odour on to the road, and a cement factory, with black towers of smoke and a piercing, staccato clatter. Half an hour later Mukul rapped on the glass. ‘Almost there!’ he shouted, pointing ahead to a hand- written sign that read salt lake 2 kilometres. The wind flat- tened his hair and ears.

Sultana swung the steering wheel to the right, and they passed on to a narrow, rough track. In the distance Rehana saw an enormous tent, and beside it an expanse of makeshift shacks and hutments. The fields beyond were stacked with oversized cement pipes.

‘Is this it?’

‘Ji, Auntie,’ Sultana said, ‘this is it.’

As they approached the tent, Rehana saw a giant banner painted with a Red Cross sign.

‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, ‘this is it. Salt Lake Refugee Camp.’ ‘What’s that tent?’

‘It’s a hospital.’

Long wooden boards made a path from the car to the tent. The field that lay between was littered with the detritus of people

217

who had hastily abandoned their homes. Shoes, combs, frag- ments of clothing, broken cooking pots were sinking into the mud like swirls of confetti.

Maya and Sultana skipped over the boards, manoeuvring through the oily puddles and smudged footprints. Maya had pinned the red sari a little high, so that it just skimmed her ankles; she wore closed, sturdy shoes. No one had told Rehana what to expect. She hitched up her sari so that it wouldn’t trail in the mud, and with the other hand she covered her head with a copy of the
Calcutta Statesman
, because the sun had begun to force itself through the clouds, trapping the air in a hazy, thick heat. She kept her head down and concentrated on navigating the tilting, uneven boards.

Inside the Red Cross tent Maya and Sultana were greeted with cheers and handshakes. A tall man in a white coat came striding towards them. ‘Ah, my Tuesday angels,’ he bellowed.