The Good Muslim (3 page)

She found Ammoo in the kitchen.

‘Ma?’

‘Oh, you’re up. I didn’t want to wake you.’

Her lids were heavy. She took a few steps, faltered. Ammoo led her to the sofa. She wanted to talk to Ammoo, tell her about Nazia and the mud they threw at her window. And the lashes. She wanted to tell her about the lashes. But it was one thing for Ammoo to smile at her, to greet her tenderly, and another for the years to fall behind them. She collapsed on the sofa, struggling to keep her eyes open. ‘I have to tell you something.’

‘How did you come?’

‘The train, the ferry, the train.’

‘You must be tired. Lie down for a bit.’

She felt herself nodding off again. ‘I brought you a tree.’

‘I’ll wake you up; it’s only three now.’

She pulled her eyes open. There was a brown box against the wall. She hadn’t seen it before – the upstairs women had covered it with a tablecloth. ‘When did you get that?’ she asked, stumbling to her feet and examining it.

Ammoo’s face brightened. ‘A little gift to myself.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I saved and saved. Took me two years of leftover rent. There’s a German man living in the big house now, always pays the rent on time. You haven’t seen
Magnum, P.I.
?’

‘There’s no television in Rajshahi.’

Ammoo’s eyes widened in mock horror. ‘That’s very sad.’

They laughed. Ammoo sounded so cheerful she almost erased the loneliness of it, waiting with a plate on her lap for the BTV news at eight.

Maya lay her head on the cool pillow. Just for a moment, she thought, then I’ll give Ammoo the mango tree and explain everything. She slept. Through the shutters she glimpsed the tiger stripes of sunset, and later Ammoo came in to cover her with a blanket. She heard the muezzin marking the end of the day. A whisper in her ear: did she want something to eat? She curled her hand around her mother’s knee. No. Later, a cat slipped into the room and lay across her feet. She felt the quick heartbeat, the warmth radiating out of the little body.

She dreamed of Rajshahi.

In her dream it is the pineapple field that marks the end of everything. There is one day when she is as fierce and impenetrable as winter fog, walking around the village with the stetho wrapped proudly around her neck. No chains of gold; she is a doctor. Early that morning she saved a mother and a pair of twin boys, performing the emergency C-section herself, the cutting and stitching in perfect rhythm, her hands sinking deep into the shared womb. And, although she reminded the family they should have loved the babies just as well had they been girls, she enjoyed the tight embraces of the women, the relief; she munched on the triangle of wrapped betel leaf they offered her. Now she is striding through the village and on to the dirt path that leads to the road that leads into town. Her arms are swinging, January wind pinching at her face, and she is passing the pond, where she waves to the boy who lost a brother to snakebite last year (too late, that day), and she ducks under a pair of mango trees and decides to take a shortcut through the pineapple patch. A few steps in, and the sun is high, the field looks wider now than she had thought, but she is not the sort of person to turn around, so she lifts her sari above her ankles and treads delicately, avoiding the sharp thorns of the pineapple plants. She is tempted to peel back the leaves and check for a ripe joldugi, but she knows it is not the season. Still, the air is sweet and bee-heavy, and when she has reached the end of the field she lowers the hem of her sari and continues, humming a nursery rhyme she was taught by little Maya the night before. And then she sees the meeting. A dozen men in a circle. Masud stands in the middle. ‘It’s the doctor,’ he says; ‘she’s the cause of all the trouble.’

Maya woke up to darkness. She was dressed in one of Ammoo’s salwaar-kameezes, worn through at the elbows and smelling strongly of soap. By habit, she fingered the scab on her neck. A hard pellet, it refused to budge as she picked at its edges. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and went to find her mother. Ammoo was in bed, running a plastic comb through her hair.

‘I thought you might sleep all night.’

Maya ducked under the mosquito net and climbed in beside her. ‘I didn’t realise how tired I was.’

Rehana parted her hair down the middle, creating a perfectly straight seam, and began to braid one side. The ritual brought Maya back to all those mornings before school, getting up ten minutes before Sohail so that her hair could be oiled, plaited and ribboned. She thought of her brother now, holding her hand as they walked through the school gates.

‘Tell me about Sohail.’ In all the letters they had exchanged, Ammoo had said so little about him – only that he had moved upstairs, that his wife had delivered a son, that she saw hardly anything of them, so busy were they with their religion.

Ammoo picked up the comb again and began to tell her. They called themselves Tablighi Jamaat.
The Congregation of Islam
. Silvi had held meetings upstairs, preaching to the women about everything there was to know about being a Muslim. God, men, morality. Purdah and sex. The life of the Prophet. His wives, Ayesha and Khadija and Zaynab. The raising of children. How to be one of the faithful. And Sohail had his own group of followers at the mosque; many men had been led to the way of deen – the way of submission – under his direction. They brought their friends, their errant sons, and Sohail told them what to believe and how to live. He was considered a holy man.

‘They have twenty, thirty people living there. And almost a hundred during the day. I lost count.’ They had moved upstairs soon after Maya left. Started out with the brick room in front, then added the outside staircase so they could come and go without disturbing her. Then the tin rooms, the toilet, the kitchen.

‘How did she die?’

‘She had jaundice. They didn’t notice until it was too late.’

She thought of Silvi’s skin turning yellow, her eyes the colour of yolks. ‘And Bhaiya?’

‘For him, it is the afterlife that matters.’

‘Things will change now’, Maya said, ‘without Silvi.’

‘Maybe,’ Ammoo replied, sounding uncertain. ‘Come, let me comb your hair.’

Maya moved closer to her mother, but instead of sitting in front of her she put her head down on Ammoo’s lap. Ammoo smoothed her hand across her forehead. ‘I can hardly believe it,’ she said.

Maya’s eyes began to burn. The words rose up in her throat. Ammoo was running her fingers through her hair now, gently massaging her scalp.

‘What’s this?’ She peered down, brushing the hair from Maya’s neck.

‘It’s nothing, just a cut.’

‘On your throat?’

‘It’s a long story, Ammoo.’ She sat up, pulled the hair around her neck.

‘Tell me.’

The punishment was one hundred and one lashes. Masud came back from the meeting and spat the words at his wife. ‘One hundred and one,’ he said. ‘That’s what you deserve.’

Maya stood between Nazia and her husband. ‘For what?’

‘For lying about the child. He’s not mine.’

It’s not a curse, she had told them, it’s Down’s syndrome. The child will be different, he’ll have problems, but he’ll survive, I can show you how to care for him.

He looks like a Chink, Masud had said. Look at his flat nose – did you fuck a Chinese, wife, is that what you did?

He went to the meeting. He told the men. They said they had known something was wrong, known it since that day she and the doctor lady had gone swimming in the pond.

That Chink is not my baby. Lyingcheatingwhoreofawife.

The punishment was one hundred and one lashes.

One, shaped like a question mark, where the whip has curled around her calf.

Raise the sari!

Whore!

At the end, when Maya was the only one still watching, miscounting, thinking it was already one hundred and one when it was only one hundred, she approached her friend, and the whip caught her on its way up, nicked her, the bite of a hungry insect, making her swallow the word she was about to utter. Shesh.
Finished
. She had spoken too soon. Instead of a word, she was marked by the whip, her hand rushing to the place on her neck where it had touched her and returning with blood. And was that a smile in the man’s eye? The one who was only following orders, protecting the village, the name of the village.

She found Nazia in the hospital. ‘Please go,’ Nazia said. ‘I am tired.’ She was lying on her stomach, legs swaddled. Maya touched her foot, black and hard, and she flinched. ‘Leave me,’ Nazia pleaded.

She wanted to witness the skin closing over Nazia’s wound. She wanted to stay until the marks faded, until they were almost invisible – thin, worm-like tracks that would dance across her legs. She would stand up and they would begin to resist. They would go to the police, they would break up the meetings. But Nazia said no and her black foot said no and Maya realised she would have to leave the wound open, leave the village with her protests still urgent, still angry.

She was wondering where to go next when the telegram arrived. The Hill Tracts, maybe, or the north. She traced her finger around the map of Bangladesh, up the blue arteries, the Jamuna, the Meghna, reading aloud the names of the towns, Mymensingh, Pabna, Kushtia. She was sitting under the jackfruit tree outside her house, munching on a bowl of sour jaam, when the postman stopped and swung a leg over his bicycle. She offered him a piece of fruit, and he declined, looking at his feet. Then he said, ‘Daktar, someone in your family has died.’

It was the only thing she feared. She flung the bowl aside and grabbed the postman’s shoulders, feeling him shrink from the intimacy of the gesture, from the purple stain her fingers would leave on his shirt.

‘Is it my mother? Tell me quick.’ She closed her eyes, as if he was about to hit her.

‘I don’t know, I can’t read English.’

She snatched it from him and tore it open. Silvi. Silvi was dead.

That night, she dreamed of her mother wrapped in a white shroud, her nostrils stuffed with cotton. In the morning she began to pack her things. By dying, Silvi had declared a truce. It was time to go home.

No one came to say goodbye.

The house was changed, but it had survived. And she had made it, two train rides and a ferry across the country, and she was laying her head on her mother’s lap, and there was nothing to do now but remember all the times they had returned to this house, she and her brother, to find everything was the same and not the same, to find their mother waiting, waiting.

1972
February

The war ended and all the ugly and beautiful things were uglier and more beautiful. The Great Leader Mujib returned from exile and began printing the new currency and renaming all the buildings. Those who had sided with the enemy hid out, afraid of the back-from-war boys who had surrendered their guns but couldn’t stop thinking about revenge. The women wore marigolds in their hair and smelled of coconut oil, and the refugees drifting back from India clutched the cindered husks of their village homes and raised stakes on empty graves.

It was a winter of return, mothers waiting at home, preparing elaborate meals with the leftover war rations, straining their eyes to the road, jumping at the slightest sound. Inevitably, the moment of homecoming did not happen in the way they imagined, with the young boy returning to a fragrant house, rice on the table, everyone washed and smiling. No, it usually happened when she was at the market for a leg of mutton or looking for the lost pair of clothes pegs in the grass, and the boy would appear, dishevelled and with new depths in his eyes, new sorrows etched into him, and when she saw him it would be like birthing him all over again, checking he had all his fingers and toes, wondering if he would survive this new world. And the boy-soldier, quiet, his thoughts turning to ordinary pleasures, the feel of his mother’s cotton sari worn down to its threads, and the shape of her hand on his forehead, and the smell of her, like lemons, puncturing every other sensation.

But Sohail did not return. December ended, then January. Rehana and Maya told stories of his return, of the light and pleasant things they would do. Ice cream and spring chicken. Maybe they would take a trip to the tea gardens, or to Cox’s Bazaar. He had always wanted to see the brown tides of the Bay of Bengal.

When the moment arrived, Maya and Ammoo were at the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, where they had both signed up as volunteers. That day they returned to find him already home, sitting comfortably in the living room with a newspaper, as if he had been there all along.

He wore a red shirt and a dirty lungi. His face was obscured by the dark grey grizzle of a beard. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking back and forth at them both. ‘I meant to shave.’ They smiled at one another and then Maya embraced him and held on for as long as she could, surprised by the fragrance of earth in his hair.

That night they took the lamp and settled themselves in the garden. Rehana slipped a mosquito coil under Sohail’s chair, and the three of them pushed close to one another, huddling against the February chill.

‘What took you so long?’ she asked. ‘The other boys have been coming in for weeks now.’

Sohail didn’t explain. Smoke from the mosquito coil reached up and caressed them, pungent. He made a gesture with his left hand, which told them he was tired. Maya and Ammoo had been staring at him the whole evening; perhaps he was weary of being looked at.

They fell into silence. All the words seemed too small. The crickets raised their voices, the frogs. Maya thought about the other times they’d sat there. In winter they sometimes put their plates on their laps and ate breakfast and watched the fog curl back. Her father had wanted this garden, this porch that protruded into it. Two months before he died, he had planted a row of tomatoes, bending over the ground himself, sprinkling seeds, folding earth over the cleft. He died before they sprouted, and in the spring, when the plants released their buds of green, it was Ammoo who watered them, shooed away the crows. Years later, when the garden was shortened to make space for the big house, she rescued one or two tomato plants, migrating them to the smaller vegetable patch she had staked out in front of the bungalow, but they didn’t survive the move; their stalks crisped and turned to dust. Maya had found her among them once, holding the bones of the plant, disbelieving.