The Good Muslim (26 page)

‘Promise me’ Maya whispered.

‘Anything.’

‘That you won’t ask me to forget. Who we are.’

‘I promise.’

He made a fist around her hands. Thank you. He put it to his forehead. Thank you.

*

Maya felt someone shaking her roughly. ‘Apa, apa.’ A woman stood at the foot of the bed, waving her gloved arms around like a mime artist.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Rokeya’s sister. Forgive me for waking you like this, but she asked me to fetch you. She’s having terrible pain.’

‘Go on, I’ll meet you upstairs.’

‘Not upstairs. She’s at home with us. Hurry, rickshaw is waiting.’

Maya pulled on a crumpled salwaar-kameez, slipped her feet into a pair of chappals and ran through the back door, brushing past Sufia, who had taken to sleeping beside the stove as the nights grew colder.

In the rickshaw, she inspected Rokeya’s sister. ‘Have I seen you before? You didn’t join the upstairs jamaat?’ They set off towards the north side of the city, the rickshaw-wallah cycling swiftly through the empty streets, a biri at the edge of his lips.

‘I came once, but I didn’t want to stay. Khadija was angry because Rokeya didn’t bring in the rest of our family.’

The girl was covered from head to toe, with only a small piece of chiffon, like a dirty pane of glass, through which to see the world. The girl lifted the chiffon and revealed her face. In the darkness it shone, pale and perfect. ‘Khadija, whatever she calls herself – she’s a heartless woman.’

‘Don’t you like her sermons?’ She thought of the rapturous faces of the other girls, the way they fanned the air around Khadija with their gaping, devoted breaths.

‘She believes every word she says. That’s something. But I can’t follow someone like a mule.’

‘Then why are you dressed like that?’

‘Do you think I could have come to fetch you in the middle of the night otherwise?’

Maya considered this for a moment. A girl like this one, she might never have ventured out if it weren’t for the cover of her cloak. The practical reply impressed her. She squeezed the girl’s hand. ‘How long ago did the labour start?’

‘A few hours. She refused to go to the hospital. She was half starved when she came back to us; we thought she wasn’t going to make it.’

‘What happened?’

‘She won’t say. She was punished, I think, for something.’

Maya remembered seeing Rokeya twice, out in the sun, kneeling. Why hadn’t she said something? She had imagined Rokeya was doing it of her own free will and just shelved it among the other bizarre rituals of the upstairs. Now she felt guilty. ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea.’

‘Stop here,’ the girl said to the rickshaw-wallah. ‘We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.’ She had brought a torch, and they picked their way through the narrowing road, finally coming upon a small house with a curtain draped across the doorway. There was a front room and a back room and, somewhere beyond, a kitchen that was probably shared with the neighbours.

Rokeya’s father caught a glimpse of Maya and politely averted his eyes. ‘Subhan Allah,’ he said, his voice thick, ‘please, she’s waiting.’

Rokeya was swallowing her breaths. When she saw Maya, she squeezed her eyes shut and said, ‘I knew you would come.’

Maya washed her hands in a bowl of water and palpated Rokeya’s stomach. Then she told the girl to breathe while she performed an exam. Rokeya winced as Maya plunged her arm deep into her and measured her cervix. ‘Just relax now,’ she said, falling quickly into the soothing tones she reserved for women in labour. She probed with light fingers, reaching for the soft dome of the baby’s head. Instead, she felt the baby’s buttocks. Breech. They should have taken her to the hospital, but it was too late now, she was already too advanced. Maya had delivered breech babies before, but they were risky, the delivery slow. And where was Rokeya’s husband? There was no sign of him. Better not to ask, not now. ‘Listen to me, Rokeya. Open your eyes.’

Rokeya’s eyelids fluttered open.

‘Your baby is upside-down. Do you hear me? Nod if you understand. It’s too late to do anything, you’ll have to deliver. Don’t worry, I’ve seen it before. It’s going to be slow and it’s going to hurt. Understand?’ The baby’s backside was going to come out first, then the legs. She wouldn’t be able to assist; if she laid her hands on the baby, it might extend its arms and get stuck in the birth canal.

Rokeya nodded, squeezing her eyes shut again.

When the time came, Maya pulled her into a squatting position. ‘Next pain comes, you push, okay? Push as hard as you can.’

With each contraction, Rokeya put her head down and grunted. Soft, softer than Maya had ever heard a woman grunt. Maya whispered a stream of encouraging words, but the girl didn’t appear to be listening, just breathing roughly out of her nose and clenching her hands together into hard white fists.

Her sister came and went, boiling water for Rokeya, cradling her head. The contractions were coming faster now, but without any assistance the baby could descend only a few millimetres at a time. An hour passed. Another. Rokeya collapsed on to her back. ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I can’t any more.’

Maya peered between Rokeya’s legs. ‘It’s not long now, just a few more minutes. I can feel it coming.’

Rokeya shook her head. ‘Can’t,’ she whispered.

‘You have to. There’s no other way.’ Maya tried to pull her up again, but she fell back on the rolled-up mattress, shaking her head. Now the scream came as the baby bore down on her, a low, black bellow. ‘Come on now,’ Maya said, ‘the baby wants to come out, you can feel it, I know you can.’

Rokeya was too tired to move. Maya came up behind her and pushed her into a sitting position. Then she squatted behind her and held her by the armpits. She pushed her mouth close to the girl’s ear. ‘You know what? It’s a girl. I felt it during the exam. This is your little girl. You know how hard it is to be a little girl in this world? Don’t you want to let her know you love her, right now, before she’s even in the world? Tell her. Tell her now. Push with me.’ Maya gripped Rokeya hard while she pushed, and her strength seemed to return as she bore down. Maya saw the baby’s legs. With the next surge, the torso and shoulders emerged. Now that the arms were free, Maya tugged, gently, holding the neck in place. ‘Just one more,’ she said, but Rokeya was fully in control now, her body dictating every breath. The baby’s chin began to emerge, and the bridge of the nose, eyes covered in yellow and green, remnants of an already old world. Maya lifted her up, her arms and legs flopping to the sides while she rubbed the little chest, waiting for the cry, and then it came, high and grand and powerful. Before placing her in her mother’s arms, she whispered, as she had at all the other births,
hello, little amphibian
. Someone had to acknowledge the strangeness of this soul, and the distance it had traversed, millions and millions of years, in order to be here.

She had witnessed the birth of so many of these beings, held their hands as they left their sea-scapes and came ashore, but she had never allowed herself the thought that it might someday be hers, this spilling out of life. Now, in the quiet moment that followed, Maya allowed herself a small fantasy. Something of her own. She thought of Joy, and the child they might have, a strange little creature that would be hers this time, all hers.

Bundled into a katha, the baby was handed to the family while Maya attended to Rokeya. She held a needle to the kerosene flame and threaded it with string. ‘It’s going to hurt again,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Rokeya bit down on her lip. ‘I have to tell you something,’ she said, her fists curled around the mattress.

‘Now?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have to tell you now. It’s about the boy.’

About to make another stitch, Maya steadied herself. ‘Zaid?’

‘Did you know he ran away from the madrasa?’

Maya concentrated on her fingers, reaching, dipping, rising, closing the wound. ‘He’s run away?’

‘It was when your mother was in the hospital.’

He had lied. How stupid of her not to have known. ‘You saw him?’ she asked.

‘Only for a few minutes, then Sister Khadija found him. I asked him why he ran away. He said it was because at the madrasa the Huzoor made him lie down. What did he mean by that, Maya Apa? Because I have been thinking about it and thinking about it, and it can mean only one thing, really. Only one thing.’

Suddenly it seemed to Maya that Rokeya had breathed all the air out of the room. ‘You’re sure that’s what he said?’

‘I know the child lies. But I believed him.’

It can mean only one thing
. It took every shred of Maya’s will to finish stitching Rokeya’s tear, give her instructions on how to look after the wound and slip quietly from the room, making her excuses to the family and jumping into the first rickshaw she could find, dawn tapping its feet on the horizon, the sky still black and studded with stars.

1977
November

Sohail was throwing away his books. Maya caught him boxing them into crates and alphabetising, sorting, dusting the spines. It was the loving way he did this, lining each crate with newspaper and placing the books gently inside, that made her angry. She saw the struggle that bent his hand over this title, that spine. The way he opened, read a page – lingered over Ibsen, perhaps considering Hedda, or Nora – then closed each volume with firmness, those women from another age, another world, forbidden to him now.

That’s when she confronted him, standing in the doorway of his bedroom, the books clustered at his feet like a dense school of fish. She knew the answer, had known all along, the change in his clothes, the dusting over of the guitar. Silvi, she said, I know it is Silvi.

‘She’s my wife; you can’t speak that way about her.’

‘So this is your idea?’

‘It was my choice.’ He was holding a volume of Rilke and shaking it at her.

Getting those books together hadn’t been easy. He had scoured New Market for each of the volumes, sitting on the chairs outside the booksellers, leaning into dusty, spiderwebbed corners for the books they pretended they didn’t have. Lawrence, Fitzgerald.
The Scarlet Letter
. He loved the outcast heroines, Lily Bart and Hester Prynne and Moll Flanders. The Rilke, she knew, he had stolen from the university library. The volume had attached itself to him and asked to be taken home, stuffed into the rucksack of a boy-soldier, battered in rain, in the water-filled air of the monsoon. It had been read in the pale orange of a kerosene lamp, in the yellow and gold of a candle, over meals of coarse bread and green banana curry. Orange and yellow and gold and green banana. This was what he was pointing at her now, the corner of the stolen volume, about to be closed into the dark of a crate, never to be touched again by the soldier, never lodged in the caress of his throat as he read its verses aloud, because his new love allowed him only one poet.

‘It has nothing to do with her.’

‘You suddenly have something against books?’

‘There has to be a limit, Maya.’

‘I agree. There has to be a limit. Isn’t that why you joined the fighting?’

‘It didn’t do any good, did it?’

‘I know it feels that way now, but it won’t always be like this.’

‘It doesn’t matter. There is another life after this one.’

He packed away the Rilke, pulled another volume from the shelf and tossed it into the box.

‘I want to talk about it,’ she said. ‘You never told me anything about the war.’

‘What could I tell you? We fought, we won. It didn’t make a difference in the end.’ He peeled off his cap and wrung it between his hands. His hair was cut close against his skin. He looked, as he never had during the war, like a soldier.

Any minute now she knew he could be gone to her. Gone for ever. What could she say to keep him back? Nothing, probably. Silvi’s hold on him was too strong, and she had the Almighty to back her up. A formidable foe. But there was one thing, one thing she had never told Sohail. Perhaps now was the time to tell him, something that might shock him into realising he wasn’t the only one who was suffering because of what he had done. ‘I want to talk about Piya,’ she said.

He swerved around to face her, and in a low, secretive voice said, ‘That’s finished, Maya.’

She knew he was trying to convince himself. She knew he thought of Piya every day. Every day he thought of her and wondered where she had gone. Just as Maya did.

She took the cap from his hands and made a space for them to sit down. He put his palms on the stacks of books and sat like a king, suddenly attentive. She couldn’t get out of it now. It occurred to her that if she told him, he might take all the books out of their crates and put them back on to the shelves. And exchange his loose cotton pyjamas for a pair of trousers and buy a reel-to-reel player so they could listen to Simon and Garfunkel.

She swallowed hard and began. ‘It was just after liberation, just after Piya came. I started working at the Women’s Rehabilitation Board. Ammoo too. We went to the office together, to volunteer. And they gave her the job of talking to the war widows, sorting out their pensions, their property. Negotiating with their husbands’ families.’ She took a deep breath, steadying herself for the next part. ‘And, Bhaiya, because I had medical experience, you know, from the camps, they assigned me to the wards. I performed abortions.’

She folded and unfolded and refolded Sohail’s prayer cap. ‘I didn’t tell you. You thought I was just helping the sick ones but we had a whole clinic at the back, where the women came to get rid of the babies. You remember what Sheikh Mujib said? That he didn’t want those bastard children in our country. But some of them – it was hard, you know, I didn’t think so much about it at the time – they wanted to get rid of them, but when it came time to do it they would cry. And then they would wake up and ask us to put the babies back. One day, Piya came to the clinic. She asked to see me – Ammoo didn’t know, she came straight to the ward. And she asked for a checkup. She was pregnant, Bhaiya, did you know?’