The Good Muslim (24 page)

She made a chopping motion with her hands. ‘Everything was finished in that moment.’

‘What year was it?’

‘’77. I waited five years longer than you did.’

‘True. You had higher hopes.’

‘The famine, and then Mujib dying, and then the army came in and it was like the war had never happened. But when Sohail did that – I mean, he wasn’t just my brother. People looked up to him. They worshipped him.’

‘They still do,’ he said.

He was right. ‘Yes, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’

‘So you ran away.’

‘I couldn’t bear it. You want to hear what
I
did, what my jobs were? I was training to be a surgeon, you know, before I left the city. Then one day, as I was travelling through some small town, I don’t even remember where it was exactly, I heard a woman screaming. She was squatting at the back of a tailoring shop, in labour. I helped her, and I felt – well, I hadn’t felt like that in a long time. Like I was finally good for something. After I finished the training, I started doing it full time. I opened a clinic, trained dayyis not to use rusty knives, to boil their instruments. I convinced the husbands to send their wives to hospital when complications came up.’

‘Did it make you think of having children?’

Maya shifted in her seat. ‘Not really, no. I mean, I suppose I would know what to – to expect, but I don’t think it’s for me. I was good at it, though.’ She flagged the waiter down and ordered two cups of tea.

‘Much better than cleaning an old man’s pissy sheets.’

‘There’s dignity in that. You were shepherding him out of this life, that’s a noble thing.’

‘Sohail probably thinks he’s doing the same thing. Helping people into the afterlife. And I guess he feels quite noble doing it.’

‘Did you know, I went upstairs and attended their taleems when Ammoo was sick?’

He tilted his head. ‘I’m surprised.’

‘It was – it felt like the only place in the world where I had hope she wouldn’t die.’

Joy reached across the table and brushed his knuckles against hers. She was still gripping the teacup, and he moved his hand and circled her wrist with his fingers. She felt the tears coming again. ‘Twice in one day,’ she said, dabbing at her face with her free hand. ‘You might think I cry all the time.’

‘No, I imagine you hardly ever cry at all.’

She looked at him closely then, and noticed that one of his eyes was slightly bigger than the other. And his smile was crooked. It was as though his mother had loved one side of his face better than the other. I would love your whole face, she thought. I would love your whole face, and your nine and a half fingers. She caught herself staring at his lips. The last few months, Ammoo’s illness, were making her forget herself. She swallowed her tea. ‘I must go,’ she said, rising abruptly from her seat. She insisted on paying for the meal. And when he offered to drive her home, she refused, rushing into a rickshaw and looking back only when the driver had pulled away, catching sight of his arm as it waved to her, and his eyebrows up, bemused.

*

Rehana was cured. There was no other way to put it. Dr Sattar said the chemotherapy had worked and she was in remission. She had drunk the Zamzam and the cancer had fled out of her, like birds from a tree when a shot is fired. Sohail was the shot. Rehana was cured. She walked around the garden, pulling weeds from the beds of sunflowers and dahlias. She reached between the plants, tearing them out with a flick of her wrist, and then she straightened, and stroked her belly, as if she missed it, whatever had been inside her.

Maya often caught herself staring at Ammoo, wondering what she had done to deserve this second chance. Episodes from their life together came back to her: leaving Ammoo in Dhaka while she and Sohail were taken to Lahore; leaving her again while they went off to war; and later, when she was angry at Sohail but ended up abandoning Ammoo. Leaving, always leaving. That is what she had done. She told herself to think of times she had returned to Ammoo, to this house, and recalled one day, just after the war, when she found Ammoo in the bedroom, sawing her bed in half.

It was the day after the army had surrendered, and Ammoo was holding a saw in one hand and balancing herself against the bed with the other. She had tucked the loose end of her sari around her waist, tied her hair up in a high knot and thrown all of her weight into the cutting.

Maya asked her mother what she was doing, but she ignored her, grunting and moving as though her life depended on it. The streets were filled with people celebrating and Maya was about to join them; she could already hear the radio blasting from a neighbour’s window and, in the distance, shouts, firecrackers. She stood and watched, ready to leave her mother to whatever crazy sense of destruction had overcome her, eager to join in the frenzy outside.

Rehana had cut through the foot end and was making her way through the baseboard. The wood was thinner here, which made her work slightly easier, but the position was awkward. Now she struggled to lift the entire frame upright, so she could cut along its length. Maya found herself helping her to lift it, lean it against the wall and hold it steady as she stood on a chair and bore down.

‘I’m doing this for you,’ she said as she approached the headboard. She descended from the chair.

‘What?’

She paused, wiped her forehead. ‘I need some water.’

‘You hold this,’ Maya said, showing her how to keep it steady, ‘I’ll bring you a glass.’

When she returned, Ammoo was standing where she’d left her, one hand on the upturned bed, the other on her hip. She gulped the water down.

The bed was ornately carved, made of heavy teak, and it had been in that room as long as Maya could remember, one of the few wedding presents her mother had received. An heirloom. But she appeared to take great pleasure in vandalising it.

It took them over an hour just to cut through the headboard; the wood was dense and resisted their efforts. They took turns with the saw. Tiny shavings stuck to their clothes, like field bugs.

When they were finished, the two ends of what used to be Rehana’s bed looked like the belly of a ship, pointing down towards the depths. Rehana said, ‘Sohail will be back soon, and you’ll have to share this room with me again. I thought you should have your own bed. At least.’

‘We need legs,’ Maya said.

There were a few offcuts of wood in the garden shed, which Maya retrieved. But they had no nails or glue of any kind, or sandpaper to smooth down the edges. Their sawing was reasonably straight but crude.

That night, they made their bed in the living room. It was cold, with just the carpet underneath them, the December chill sunk deep into the red cement floors.

‘He will be back, won’t he?’ Rehana asked, after they had switched off the lights and tucked the blankets under their feet.

‘He will,’ Maya said. He had to be. He had to be all right, and coming home; too much had been sacrificed for there to be any other ending. She had missed the celebrations, but she didn’t mind. Ammoo was preparing her for life after the war: new beds, a room for Sohail. Knowing this, she fell asleep with a quiet comfort in her bones.

They had slept on that sawed-in-half bed for the next few years, through Piya’s arrival and Sohail’s conversion, through his marrying and moving upstairs. While Maya was away, Ammoo had hired a carpenter and had the bed put back together, and it was whole now, with just a thin line on the headboard, visible if you looked closely, a long, meandering thunderbolt.

*

‘There’s something I’d like to contribute to the next issue. Under my own name.’

Shafaat was wedged into his chair. ‘Of course, my dear, what would you like to write?’

‘It’s about the war—’

‘Oh, would you be a darling and get me a cup of tea? I’m parched.’

Bastard. She decided not to argue, found her way to the tea station, boiled water, brewed, slammed the cup down beside his elbow. He did not raise his eyes.

‘Where’s Aditi?’ she asked.

‘At the printers. She’s going to try to get us a better rate, so we can print 800 copies next issue.’ He started to strike the typewriter.

‘As I was saying.’

He stopped, two index fingers in the air. ‘You want to write under your own name? I think our readers would prefer to hear S. M. Haque’s latest diatribe.’ He took a large gulp of tea. ‘Did you make my tea with condensed milk?’

‘Condensed milk and sugar. I thought you liked it sweet.’

‘I do. But I don’t like condensed milk. Please make it again. Milk and sugar.’ When he saw her face darken he said, ‘Come on, it’ll only take you a minute. A writer needs his tea.’

As he was sipping her second attempt and nodding in satisfaction, she said, ‘Jahanara Imam has called for a trial. For all the war criminals.’

He set the mug on his typewriter. ‘Hasn’t this been debated too many times already? We should have had a trial, I’m not denying that, but it’s too late now, my dear. Too late.’

‘It’s never too late to seek justice.’

‘Darling, it’s 1985. Don’t you see? We have bigger problems, Dictator isn’t going to hold a fair election, we have to get him out. Then worry about other things. Country needs to move forward, not backward.’

She found herself bargaining with him. ‘Just a short editorial,’ she said, but he was back at his typewriter, his fingers jabbing at the keys. She wondered if she should hang about, wait for him to finish, but she was angry now – he had made her feel old-fashioned, someone still clinging to her war-wounds. She gathered her things together and headed for the door, almost bumping into Aditi in the corridor. She was holding a blue-and-pink box of Alauddin sweets, her face flushed with triumph. ‘Celebration!’ she said, opening the box to reveal Kalo-Jaam, Chom Chom and a single, extra-large Laddu. ‘You’re not leaving now, are you? I can’t eat these all by myself. Can you believe it? I sweet-talked that printer into letting us do 800 for the price of five.’

Shafaat was still pounding away at the typewriter. ‘Come on, Maya,’ Aditi said, ‘Let’s keep these to ourselves. I’ll make some tea.’

Maya arranged the sweets on the table beside the Linotype. She liked the smell in here, the dry warmth created by the machine.

‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Aditi said, her cheeks pink with pleasure. She must have enjoyed the challenge of getting a deal from the printer. He would have been caught off guard by the sight of a woman in trousers, her hair braided tightly to the back of her head, as if she were zipped up. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, taking a bite out of the Laddu. ‘You peeved at Shafaat? What’s he done, asked you to make his tea, did he?’

Maya nodded. ‘He’s a pig.’

‘I want to write a piece about the Razakars, you know, how they should be tried.’

‘Really?’ A small piece of Laddu clung to Aditi’s lip.

‘Shafaat isn’t in favour.’

‘You know how he is, can’t see beyond his own two fingers.’ And she imitated him, stabbing into the air.

‘But he should care. And those people haven’t forgotten.’

‘Of course they haven’t forgotten. All those people who lost their loved ones.’

‘And the women.’

‘Women too.’

‘The raped women.’

‘You mean the Birangonas?’

‘Yes, the Birangonas. But calling them heroines erases what really happened to them. They didn’t charge into the battlefield and ask to be given medals. They were just the damage, the war trophies. They deserve for us to remember.’

‘What if they don’t want to remember?’

In her years of exile Maya had met many raped women. Some wanted abortions, or came to her to get stitched up, or simply to ask if there was a way for her to wash it out of them. Not one of them wanted anyone to find out. Not one of them wanted to file a police report, or tell her husband or her father. Perhaps it was wrong of her to want them to tell. But she could not get the image of Piya out of her mind. Piya squatting on the verandah, the words bubbling at her lips. She and Sohail had conspired against her that night. They had comforted her and told her it was over, that she was safe – but they had not made it possible for her to speak. It was an act of kindness that had led to the end of everything – Maya knew that now. And there was only one way to make it right.

Aditi popped the rest of the Laddu into her mouth. ‘Well, you know how it is. No one wants to stir all of that up.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Look,’ she said, wiping her hands on her jeans, ‘if it’s important to you, I’ll go in there and sugar him into it, okay? Don’t look so glum, yaar, you’ll get your piece. I’ll bring him this Kalo-Jaam and he won’t be able to resist.’

Maya followed Aditi with her eyes as she sailed into the other room, the box of sweets in her palm, and realised that this was what everything had been for. The sweets, pretending to commiserate with Maya, the article – all just another opportunity to plead and flirt with him and get her way. Maya didn’t want Shafaat to get sugared into anything. There was something sordid, she thought, about this office, the stale stink of cigarette smoke, the belching of the tanneries near by. She remembered back to the time when she and Sohail would talk about people like Aditi and Shafaat, how they had all the right ideas but lacked something, a sort of moral core. She remembered the conversations that took them deep into the night, until Sohail fell asleep with his hands in his pockets, his head falling back, and felt a stab of pain, of longing for him.

Maya often imagined the last day Sohail wore trousers. She wasn’t around to see it, but there must have been a final day, a day when he woke up in the morning, brushed his teeth, buttoned his shirt and pushed his feet through a pair of trousers. They may even have been his cherished jeans, handed down by a friend with a relative in America, procured through a mixture of pleading and bribing, like his Elvis LPs and his battered copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

All day her brother would have walked around with his legs piped through those trousers. He would have sat on rickshaws and brushed against tree trunks, and taken things in and out of his pockets. But at some point on that last day, he would have decided it would be a moulting, changing, skin-shedding sort of day. A day to abandon old fashions and adopt even older ones.