The Good Muslim (10 page)

He stopped. ‘He’s lonely, I know.’

Because you left him alone, only days after his mother died. ‘He’s a sweet child.’ She had said the wrong thing, revealed how little she knew the boy.

Sohail shook his head. ‘His education is continuing in the hands of Sister Khadija.’

Maya swallowed the lump of anger rising in her throat. ‘Do you remember what it was like, when Abboo died?’

He turned, smiled, his lips criss-crossed by the beard. ‘Of course I remember.’

‘How hard it was.’

‘Yes.’

She guessed that he was not unaware of suffering, but had decided he would no longer be in thrall to it. That he would embrace it. The death of his father, his wife. There was a grand design, and it left no room for self-pity. But she ploughed on. ‘He’s only six. His mother has just passed, he needs us, me and Ammoo. We’re his family.’

He said nothing, turning his face away and peering into the water. Perhaps he was about to tell her about all the ways he had reconstructed the word ‘family’, and that she was nothing more than a girl he once knew.

She looked towards the camp, where Zaid was no doubt waiting, swinging his arms and pacing through the alleys. She was about to renew her appeal, repeat the arguments, but Sohail reached out and clutched her arm, pulling her towards him. He peered straight into her, awakening all the parts of her that he had once known.

This was it. This was her moment. She had thought of it so often, it was a dream, a dream worn out from constant dreaming. He would see himself reflected through her eyes – see the absurdity of what he had become. He would see the ugliness of turning his family away, the cruelty of his own fathering. Cracks would appear in his belief, his faith would be shaken – not in the Almighty, she would not wish to take that away from him (or perhaps she did, but she was not willing to admit to it), but in whatever force had taken him from her and delivered up a stranger.

He would remember himself, awaken and resume the life she had imagined for him. And he would forgive her for wishing him different.

A man is not born once, she would say, a man can come into the world again.

The years disappeared.

She was ready to forget everything.

Brother, I will be yours again. I don’t care about the people upstairs, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve forgotten about our war, or our youth, no matter if this life is no longer your concern, that you have given up Ghalib and dear, dear Shakespeare, and no matter that I have ached in my bones because you appeared to forget me. If you want to put it aside, I say, yes, I accept, I forgive you, I ask you the same, let us return to it.

‘School is out of the question,’ he said.

Out of the question.
Out
. The burning sensation started in her gut and rose to her throat. She felt herself struggling to breathe. How foolish she had been to imagine she could come here and get her brother back; the dream was just that, a mirage. Her limbs were restless, angry. Yet she fought the urge to run from him. She had done enough running. Think of the boy, she said to herself. Forget your disappointment and think of the boy.

She swallowed her anger, ready to negotiate. ‘All right, then. Can I teach him a few things – sums, the alphabet? When he’s not busy upstairs, of course.’ For the moment, she would settle for this. One agreement at a time.

‘All right,’ Sohail said finally. ‘I will consider it.’ He bent to embrace her again, and she knew the meeting was over. She darted away, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear, clinging to her small scrap of victory. She would be Zaid’s tutor, and when Sohail saw how quickly he learned, she would persuade him to send the boy to school. She would mourn her little dream later, at night when the sight of him came back to her, his serious, closed face. But for now she told herself to be satisfied, and so she slipped into the crowd, eager to share the good news with her little charge.

Zaid came down for a few hours every day, at lunchtime. He ate undisturbed while Maya taught him the alphabet. Then, as a treat, she showed him a few card games. He cheated, hiding cards under the table or in the sleeve of his kurta. Sometimes her purse was lighter than it should have been, but she didn’t tell Ammoo. She didn’t mind. It was only a few coins, only Gin Rummy and 21. Sohail departed again, on a mission to Nepal, and she didn’t see him after that day by the river. She tried to call Rajshahi again but the line was constantly engaged. She wrote another letter to Nazia, pleading for a reply. She spent another day in the garden shed, looking for newspaper cuttings from the war, and she stumbled across a typed page dated September 1971. It was one of her old articles from the war – no one had agreed to publish it, she remembered, and she smiled now as she read the title: ‘The World Looks on as Bangladesh Bleeds: A Cry for Help’ by Miss Sheherezade Maya Haque.

1984
May

It took her awhile to find the shabby building in Old Dhaka. It was at the back of an alley that led down to the river, flanked by a leather factory. The stench of the tannery was overpowering. She held her nose and knocked. Aditi came to the door.

‘Ah, the doctor!’ she said. She was dressed as she had been at Saima’s party, in a pair of jeans and a short kurta, but she looked different. Her fingertips were stained with ink, and she wore a green bandana around her hair. ‘I’m so glad you decided to come. I won’t hug you, I’m filthy.’ She waved Maya inside.

‘It smells like death,’ Maya said.

Aditi laughed. ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it? We’re all used to it, don’t even notice any more.’

Inside was a windowless room, piled high to the ceiling with stacks of newsprint. There was a large table on one side, scattered with pens, books, empty cups of tea. A man sat with his back to them, huddled over a typewriter, his knees bouncing up and down.

‘Aditi, is that you? Bring me some tea, please, my nimble fingers are about to produce a miracle of a sentence.’

Aditi cleared her throat. ‘We have a guest, Shafaat, please behave.’

The man swung around. ‘I am so sorry, how rude. Hello, I’m Shafaat. Shafaat Rahman.’

‘Shafaat is the editor.’

‘Editor, reporter, manager, tea-boy.’

‘Well, not the tea-boy, it seems,’ Maya said.

‘Yes, you’ve spotted my weakness. What can I say, I like to give orders. But don’t worry, no one ever listens to me.’ He lit a cigarette and dangled it on the edge of his mouth. ‘The next issue comes out in a week. Here’s a mock-up.’ He handed her a leaflet printed on cheap paper. She began to flip through the articles. There was one about the Dictator’s wealth, another exposing corruption in the army. It ended with a tirade on the changes that were being made to the constitution.

‘You can print this?’

The man smiled through dark, tobacco-stained lips. ‘No, but we do.’

‘Won’t you get arrested?’

‘Arre, who’s afraid of a little time with uncle?’

As she turned the pages, the ink bled on to her fingers. She looked around, took in the typewriters, the empty glasses of tea, the floor littered with bits of paper, and for the first time since returning to the city she felt a ripple of belonging.

‘Aditi tells me you’ve been away.’

‘I lived in Rajshahi for a few years.’

‘Really? Do you have people there?’

‘No, my people are here.’ She could count all her people on the fingers of one hand.

‘So you went all the way to the middle of the country, for what?’

She looked at Aditi. ‘I was a “crusading” doctor.’

‘Aditi tells me you want to write.’

That’s what she had told Aditi, when she had called and asked if she could visit the newspaper office. But suddenly she wasn’t sure any more – it had been years since she’d picked up a pen. ‘Well, I thought – I did some writing during the war.’

‘You have something you want to say?’ Shafaat lit another cigarette, threw the match on the ground. A young boy in a tattered vest and lungi entered with a broomstick and pan and began to shift the dust to the corners of the room.

‘Something about village life, I guess.’

‘You mean all that bucolic I-love-the-countryside crap?’

‘No, nothing like that. About what’s really going on out there, sort of like a memoir. I was there for seven years, I saw a lot.’

‘All right, 500 words by next week. Let’s see what you come up with. But please, don’t write any sentimental drivel about the green valleys of Rajshahi, eh?’

She smiled. ‘All right.’

‘You sure your husband won’t mind?’

‘Does Aditi’s husband mind?’

Aditi looked up from her desk. ‘He’s too busy playing golf. I just ignore him.’

‘So, yours will?’

‘Stop harassing her, Shafaat, she’s not married.’

He raised his eyebrows. She imagined what he was thinking – poor girl, still without a husband. But he surprised her by giving her a thumbs-up. ‘I have a daughter, and I tell her, marriage only if she meets a prince. Otherwise men are bastards.’

‘My,’ she said, ‘I could sign you up right now – first male feminist of Bangladesh.’

‘Do it!’ he said, slamming his fist on to the table. ‘We’ll make an official announcement in the next issue.’

‘You’ll be a celebrity,’ Aditi said drily. ‘Now come with me, Maya, I’ll show you the rest of our humble establishment.’ They went down a corridor and into a smaller room. There was a desk at the back with a large rectangular box on top. ‘You’d better look out for Shafaat, he’s a flirt.’

‘He reminds me of my brother.’ There was something about the way he thumped his hand on that desk that brought back a flash of Sohail.

‘Really, I thought your brother had gone the religious way.’

‘He was different before.’ No one seemed to remember the old Sohail. They heard he had become a mawlana and forgot how he had been before. Only Maya had archived his image – hands wedged into his jeans, the cap he wore with a red star in the middle.

Aditi showed her the typesetting machine. She had to take every letter of every word and slot it neatly into a groove. The words were then dipped into the ink and pressed on to the paper. ‘Try it,’ Aditi said. Maya pulled out a few letters, arranged them on a tray. Dipped into black ink.
MynameisMayaHaque
.

‘You have to remember the spaces between the words, Doctor.’

*

The typewriter’s keys were tight. Probably angry with her for all the years it had spent under Ammoo’s bed. There was a time you couldn’t take it from her; she would bring it to the table and tap away while eating her dinner. And when she wasn’t banging on the keys, she was scribbling on anything she could find, an old newspaper, a piece of brown paper that the vegetables had been wrapped in. Now she struggled to find the words.
Chronicles of a Crusading Doctor
? That sounded pompous. There was nothing so lofty about what she had done. She began to write about the Dictator, the sight of him tossing flowers on the Martyrs’ Memorial. She tore the paper out of the typewriter. No one wanted to read about that. Five hundred words on the true story of the countryside. The true story. She remembered all the children she had brought into the world, all the mothers she hadn’t been able to save. She thought of Nazia – Nazia who had been punished because it was the hottest day of the year and she wanted to cool her feet. She started at the beginning.
I once knew a girl called Nazia
. What was she thinking – she couldn’t use real names. Nazia. Zania. Inaaz. Aizan.
I once knew a girl called Aizan.

1972
April

Sohail’s friends couldn’t understand his conversion, because they hadn’t really grasped what had come before. They had thought his life was full of happiness; they used words like jolly and cheerful to describe him. Happy-go-lucky. Happy and lucky, jolly and laughing, bell-bottomed. Rock and rolled. Before he found God. They remembered how good-looking he was, and that he showed his teeth when he smiled.

Had they known him better, they would have seen that the teeth, the smiling, the happy and the lucky had been taken by the war. By a girl whose captors had shaved her head so that she could not hang herself. Purdah, the preaching – all of this followed naturally, filling the hole left behind by his old mutinies.

And people misremember about the Book. They assume that Silvi gave him the Book and told him to read it, because by the end of the war Silvi had lost her husband and already found God, and she had defied everyone and been the first to cover her head, to turn her back on her country and face life after life.

But it was Rehana who had given Sohail the Book, a few months after he returned from the war. This was how it happened.

It is a Wednesday, Rehana’s shopping day, and she is walking along New Market, wondering how high the prices have risen since last week, wondering if she can afford a chicken, a half-leg of mutton, when she sees, across the road, someone familiar. Her own son. She catches the barest glimpse, but she is sure it’s him. He is getting down from a rickshaw, and she lifts her hand, is about to call out, but he looks beyond her, his face changing. He crosses the road, approaching her but not seeing her, and now he is both her son and not her son, as he walks directly past her. She turns to see what he sees: a man in another rickshaw. He approaches the man, says not a word, hauls him out of the rickshaw and punches him in the face. Three times, three punches. Then he turns and walks towards her, the muscles in his back rippling, telling her he knows this man, that this man has done terrible things, that he has seen these terrible things, and she knows now that these are the visions that have him pacing the hallway at night, the ones that leave his pillows wet and his mouth frozen stiffly, even as he tries to smile and act as if everything has gone back to normal.

And, not knowing what else to do, because he has asked her never to speak about it, she gives him the Holy Book. The book has helped her through so many difficult times, times she could not imagine surviving. But he shakes his head, because he has come to believe that the Book was part of the problem, before the war, before Bangladesh. Because people were attached to the Book, or their idea of the Book, more than to each other, or to their neighbours, or to their country. They had called themselves revolutionaries, and believed that faith was beneath them, a consolation for simpler, lower minds. Sohail turns his face from the Book and waves his mother away.