The Good Muslim (27 page)

She couldn’t look at him. She said to herself, look at him when you tell him. But she couldn’t, she couldn’t look at him. She looked at the books instead. Her eye fell on
Brideshead Revisited
. To Waugh, she said, ‘She was early, you could hardly see. It must have happened towards the end of the war.

‘She wanted an abortion. Right now, she said. Do it right now. I was busy, I had ten other patients that morning, but I told her to wait, I said I would do it. Today, she said, it has to be today or I won’t be able to.
I’ll tell him
, she said. I didn’t understand what she meant, but I talked to the in-charge doctor and made the appointment. But by the time I came to her, she was nervous. I’m not sure, she said. She asked for you, she said please call Sohail Bhai. But you were in the cantonment that day, remember, you’d gone to quit the army. There were formalities, you were away all day. I thought she was scared, just scared like the others. I thought about bringing her home but I remembered what she said, that it had to be that day or she would lose her nerve. I knew what to do; I did it all the time, persuading the girls they were doing the right thing, for their families, for the country. If you have the operation you can go home, I said to her, your family will take you back. You are a Birangona, I told her, a war hero—’

The words came rushing back to Maya, the words she had been taught.

‘Defiled by the enemy. The child in your womb is a bastard child, a vial of poison. You must not allow it to come into this world. You must not give it the milk of your breast. What has been done can be undone. You must not live with it for the rest of your life. You must not mother this child. Do not think of it as your child, it is the seed of your enemy, I told her. Finally, she agreed.’

Sohail was sweating, thin lines of water bisecting his face. He didn’t move to wipe it away. Now he remembered the day he had found her in that prison, how he had carried her out of there, the short stubble of her hair rubbing coarsely against his collarbone. ‘Take me home,’ she said, ‘I want to go home, take me home.’

They were in a small bamboo grove, as far from the barracks as he could carry her. But the land was flat, and every time the building caught her eye she howled, so he propped her against a tree with her back to the prison. He sat in her line of vision, where the sun struck her face, casting a long, elegant shadow across her. ‘My village is east,’ she said.

They had brought her there in a jeep. ‘There was another girl, but she died.’

She told him the name of her village. Dhanikhola. Will you take me? The war is over, he told her. They would walk. At every village they were greeted with tired cheers and the small scraps of the harvest that were leftover from the war. Village after village, Pahara, Mormora, Lalkhet. Every mother wanted him to be her son, returning tired and whole with a woman in his arms.

She was eighteen. ‘My sister is the same age,’ he said.

‘You have a sister?’

‘Yes, Maya. She went to work at the refugee camps across the border.’

‘All by herself?’

‘She’s a very spirited girl.’

Piya had wide-apart eyes and a raw, aching quality to her voice. On the third day she waded into a village pond. He watched, worried she would stray too far. The sun struck the back of her, catching her hands as they moved across the water, propelling her forward. When she was neck-deep, she dipped her head under. Her sari floated to the top, flowering. And when she came up again, she was different, as though she had gone under and told all the bones of her to put themselves back in order. That was how she emerged: neat, organised. Wide apart eyes and a bruise in her voice. He asked if she would ever come to Dhaka, if she would visit. They were close now, only a few miles away.

They came to the edge of the village, and it was exactly as she had described it: a patch of trees casting a pale green tinge on neat houses of mud and straw. Round cakes of dung scalloped on to the outside walls, palm-printed by those who had collected it. A pond. Everything hushed, the fog hanging low and swallowing the cries of the koel, the ripple of water.

He wrote his address on a scrap of paper, knowing she couldn’t read, knowing every part of her would be examined, explored. She would toss it into the fire. She would never come.

He put his hand to his forehead and said goodbye. Formal. It was Piya who stepped close, who put her palm, scented with water, on his cheek. She who raised her face, kissed him lightly on the mouth, her lip rough and small, like the husk on a grain of rice.

She had learned a few words of English. See you again, she said, expanding the distance between them with her choppy, awkward syllables.

And she did come. She came and they spent their hours in the garden, talking about everything and nothing. The memory of war began to fade. Until that night – now he knows it was after Piya had gone to see Maya in the hospital, but at the time it was just another day. He had gone to the cantonment to surrender his gun. In the last few weeks of the fighting they had given him a uniform, with a green-and-red badge sewn on the sleeve. At the cantonment he saw the other boys in his regiment, Farouq and Shameek and Kona, all of them signing up to remain in the army. They told him it was no surprise that he was quitting; they had never taken him for a company man. Without a cause to fight for, he didn’t belong. He had listened to the official speech and been discharged, without dishonour, from the Bangladesh Army. And he had returned still dressed in his uniform. He could give it back later, they said.

It was late and the house was quiet, everyone asleep, or so he had thought until he caught a glimpse of Piya in the garden. He could barely see in the dark, but it was unmistakably her, the straightness of her back just as it was when she had emerged from the village pond.

‘Marry me,’ he said, whispering into the dark.

She turned around, her gaze drifting to the other side of the wall. ‘Who lives there?’ she asked, pointing to the two-storey house.

‘No one. We have to find new tenants.’

‘It belongs to you?’

‘Ammoo built it. We lived off the rent after my father died.’

‘It’s very big.’

‘Two storeys.’

‘Have you been inside?’

‘Yes. Do you want to go?’ He unlatched the small gate built into the wall.

She was sure-footed, even in the weak light of the half-moon, slipping through the gate and on to the lawn on the other side. She climbed the three short steps and waited for him in front of the large dark double-doors.

‘It’s locked,’ she said.

‘Yes, of course. I forgot. I’m sorry I don’t have the key.’

She cupped her hands against a window, peered inside.

‘Piya,’ he said, ‘there’s something I have to tell you.’

‘Me too.’

‘I want to get married.’ He tried to see her, but the light was too weak. ‘I want us to get married – what do you think?’

‘If that is what you wish,’ she replied, sitting on the top step.

‘Is that what you want?’

‘What will everyone say?’

‘Who cares?’

‘They’ll say I did it to get your things, this house.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You love me, don’t you?’

She didn’t say anything, only sat perfectly still, caught in the yellow tinge of moonlight. ‘If you want, I will be your wife. But I am not a good woman.’

‘What happened to you – it’s not your fault.’

‘I’m very tired,’ she said.

He sat down beside her. Laced his fingers through hers. ‘It’s all right, I’m tired too. I don’t care about anything, what anyone says. Do you understand? I’m tired too, I’m so tired. I want to lie with my head in your lap – forgive me – I want to kiss you again. I want to forget everything that happened before. I want our children to live in the country, free children in a free country. But you decide. Don’t choose me because you’re here, because you can’t go home. Choose me if you love me – do you understand? That’s what I believe. You have to love me.’

Her grip tightened, and then, abruptly, she let go and sprang up, light on the grass, like a girl who had grown up without shoes. She disappeared across the lawn.

Buoyant, he imagined it was a skip of joy, that flight across the lawn, but it was the lightning speed of departure, a farewell without ceremony.

By the morning she was gone. Her small bundle of clothes, her plastic comb, the stick of neem she used to clean her teeth. Her extra sari, drying that morning on the washing line.

He set out to look for her. He didn’t mean to, but he found himself travelling all the way back to her village, taking a bus to Mymensingh, a rickshaw the rest of the way. We never saw her again, an old woman said, spitting betel from the side of her mouth. The village was no longer beautiful, the houses ragged and dusty in the rising heat. He returned to the city and walked aimlessly from street to street, asking strangers if they had seen a young brown-eyed girl, walking alone. All the walking-alone girls had brown eyes. What was her father’s name? A girl had drowned herself in Dhanmondi Lake. It could have been her. He arrived too late at the morgue; someone had already claimed the body. She was on a bus bound for the border. Or she had boarded one of the planes taking the Pakistan Army back to Islamabad. There were women on that plane? Our women? Yes, there were women. They had been promised marriage. She could have gone with them.

‘Bhaiya,’ Maya said softly, ‘it was your child?’

He sprang up, knocking over an open crate. ‘You can ask me this, after everything?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘I didn’t touch her, you understand? I wouldn’t touch her. Not after what happened to her.’ He was shaking now, his arms hanging limp at his sides. ‘You gave her the operation, without asking any of us, me or Ammoo?’

‘But I didn’t do it, Bhaiya. I didn’t do it – she changed her mind.’

He started to cry. She could see his eyes welling up and he turned his face away from her.

‘You thought I was enjoying the days after liberation. But they were blood-soaked, Bhaiya, for everyone.’

He shook his hands at her, as if they were wet. ‘But I killed, Maya. I killed.’

Of course she misunderstood. ‘It’s all right, Bhaiya, it was the right thing to do. It was a just war, a right war. For us, for our freedom.’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t mean to. I was so angry.’

‘If they had let me fight, I would have shot them in the knees and let them die slowly.’

‘He was innocent.’

None of them were innocent. She told him that.

‘You want to talk about saving – Silvi saved me. You were too busy killing those children.’

So he had chosen. His wife, a future without books. The thought unleashed a fury in Maya, a tight, searing fury. ‘You put those books in crates, I’m going to take them out and lay them open for you. Every book you put away I will unpack and leave at your doorstep. I’ll read them aloud. Remember when Ammoo used to read the Qur’an to you? I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to keep bringing the books back until you can’t ignore them any more.’

His hand was dipped inside a crate. Slowly, he straightened. ‘I’ll have to find something else to do with them,’ he said softly.

He’ll give them away, she thought. He’ll give them all away. Damn it. She slipped out of the room then, without a word, stalked through the garden, loosening her braid and running her fingers roughly through the tangle of her hair. Do something, she told herself. Do something. Your brother is turning, turning. Soon you won’t recognise him. He had been her oldest friend, all the things a brother should be: protective, bullying, pushing her to be better. He knew all her frailties, knew she tended towards the hysterical, the dogmatic. That she was angry most of the time. He pushed her against herself. She needed him. It was selfish, but she needed him. No, it was not selfish. They all needed him. He was the lighthouse. The country needed him. Sheikh Mujib had said so himself. Oh, God, Mujib was dead. Sohail could not be gone too, it would be too much. The world would collapse. What could she do? Silvi was in command now, Silvi, whose thin lips and foreign eyes had turned a wounded man into a prophet.

She thought of all the things he liked to do. Before the war, before Piya and Silvi. Cricket on the shortwave. Mangoes and ice cream. Dante and Ibsen. Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. Her voice on the harmonium. Her voice. When was the last time he had heard her sing? She could sing to him. She could play the harmonium and open her voice. She had sometimes watched people’s eyes widen when she sounded her first note, and afterwards, even if they knew her, she would see that a new formality had opened up between them, because her voice would have altered her in their eyes. Such tenderness out of such a hard girl. Small woman, big voice.

Silvi could go to hell. She would sing. She pulled her harmonium out of its case. It had been a long time since she’d pushed open the bellows at the back of the instrument, since the war, probably.

She was at war now. War with Silvi. She had the books on her side, and the harmonium, and Tagore, and she would fight. Already she felt flush with victory, her hand in a fist, pacing the garden and punching the air. She couldn’t rely on her friends any more, not after Sohail had converted Kona on the spot. Weak souls! She would have to do it herself. Sohail was still in his bedroom, probably wondering what to do with his books. This would be the perfect time to strike. She dusted off the top of the harmonium. Laid out a jute pati in the garden. She would do it right there. Ammoo would come home to find her singing in the garden and she would agree that they had to use all the weapons in their arsenal to battle Silvi. They would fight fervour with fervour. The sun was beginning to go down for the night, the evening sounds taking over the daytime ones. Crickets, mosquitoes. She already had a few bites on her arm. She didn’t care. She lit a mosquito coil. All right, here we are. She started with one of Sohail’s favourites, ‘Ekla Chalo Re’. ‘Jodi tor daak shune keu na, tobe chalo re.’

She faltered with the harmonium a bit at first, her fingers getting tangled in the keys, but she soon caught up with herself, pumping the bellows with her left hand, pushing the keys down with her other. Tagore, just the man for the job.