A Golden Age (12 page)

By the middle of April they began to realize that the attack on Dhaka was only the beginning. The army was making its way

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across the country, subduing one district after another, leaving behind a trail of burning villages. And there were stories of boys running away from home to join the resistance, slipping away in the middle of the night with their shoes in their pockets, cross- ing the border to find Major Zia, who had made the announce- ment on the radio.

One day Joy and Aref came to the bungalow in a truck. It was filled with crates of different sizes, which they began unloading and stacking up against the gate.

‘What’s this?’ Rehana asked.

‘Auntie, we need your help,’ Joy said. ‘We need to store some things in your house.’

Sohail came out of his room. ‘Where did you get them?’ ‘What’s going on?’ Rehana asked. They were all behaving as

though it was perfectly ordinary. As if people arrived with trucks full of mysterious things every day.

‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said, ‘we’ve heard reports of refugee camps across the border. They need medicine.’

‘Where did you get these?’

Sohail waited for Joy to reply. Aref was counting the remain- ing boxes in the truck. ‘PG Hospital.’ He put his hands on his waist. There was a pause while the boys waited for Rehana to ask how they had convinced the doctors at PG hospital to give them a truckful of medicine.

She decided not to ask. If she asked, they would have to tell her they had stolen it. ‘Good idea,’ she said finally, ‘bring it all inside. Do you boys want to stay for lunch?’

Aref beamed at Rehana from above. ‘We knew you’d under- stand,’ he said, blowing her a kiss.

The next day they came again. They carried eight crates of powdered milk, three boxes of cotton wool, four drums of rice, sixteen cases of dal. Buckets. Shovels. Rehana put the food in the passage between her bedroom and the kitchen. Now they had to walk sideways to get to the kitchen. The dining chairs were stacked on top of the table, the medicines stored underneath. They started taking meals with plates on their laps.

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Maya was soothed by the crowded house. She put her cheeks against the boxes of cotton wool, ran her finger along the tops of the medicine cases.

It had been almost two weeks, and Sharmeen was still missing. No one knew where the girl was, but she was making her pres- ence felt at the bungalow, as they each silently imagined what might have happened to her. Still Maya refused to talk about it. She drifted through the house like a cloud of dust. Rehana tried to bring it up, but every time she approached Maya it felt like a trespass.

‘Where is her mother?’ Rehana asked finally. ‘She’s in Mymensingh.’

‘Maybe Sharmeen went to see her?’

‘I already contacted her family. She’s not there.’ ‘Does she have brothers?’

‘Not really.’

Sharmeen’s mother, Rehana remembered, had remarried. There were other children. And a stepfather. That is why Sharmeen lived in the dormitory, and why she was always at the bungalow for Eid. And why her clothes were mixed up with Maya’s in the cupboard. And her toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet. She had a stake in their house. Rehana knew all of this, but, as the picture of Sharmeen’s life came into focus, she felt guilty for sometimes resenting her presence at the bungalow. She could have been warmer towards her. She might not have saved the girl, but she could have loved her.

She still didn’t know what to do with Maya. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘No.’

Rehana did not know what else to say. If Maya would not discuss Sharmeen, Rehana could not console her. She could not find a way into her daughter’s grief, drawn so tightly around her. Rehana often wondered if she could help loving one child better. She had a blunt, tired love for her daughter. It was full of effort. Sohail was her first-born, and so tender, and Maya was so hard, all sympathy worked out of her by the throaty chants of the street march, the pitch of the slogan. Too many strong words had

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come out of her mouth. The ideas were like an affliction; they had taken her over so completely she had even changed physically: suddenly the angles of her face had moved, sharpened, so that she was no longer young, or even pretty. And she wore only widow’s white, which always felt to Rehana like an insult.

She had only two remnants of a gentler self: the thick braid that snaked down her back like a swollen, black river, and her singing voice. Both had escaped being sacrificed. She often threatened her mother with photographs of women with short hair, the bob that stared out of magazine covers, the boy-cut some of her friends had dared to ask for at the parlour. But somehow, despite the threats, she had never lopped off the hair that so definitively identified her as Rehana’s daughter, in its shine and its straightness, in its dark blue hue, its thickness and weight. Rehana had even caught Maya caring for her hair, combing or massaging it with coconut oil, though if she herself ever offered to help she was met with a withering stare and a short ‘nothing doing’.

And when she sang, Maya could not stop the tenderness from covering her features like a fine winter mist. There was nothing harsh in her voice – in fact, it was even a little girlish, defying the learning that had so hardened her spoken words. She opened her mouth, and from her lips, her throat, the immature heart, came sweet, rapturous song. She had learned her mother’s ghazals, but her politics had turned her to the banned songs of Tagore, and these suited her better. For they did not demand the plaintive, mournful tenor of forsaken love but rather, a more innocent form of sentiment, which Tagore, uncomplicated lover of God, of earth, of beauty, had delivered in such abundance.

Her hands on the harmonium were delicate, square-tipped, her bitten-down nails paying homage to the seriousness of the task; her brows were knitted together in service of the song, and in the end it was only to the music that she was bound. In singing she was, if only briefly, a supplicant, as though in the presence of a divinity that even she, devout non-believer, had to somehow acknowledge.

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Rehana thought of it as her biggest failure. That her daughter had not found a way into her heart.

On the day Joy and Aref appeared without the truck, they had another boy with them, a Hindu boy named Partho whose family had fled the city.

‘Don’t let them in,’ Sohail said to Rehana, but they had already climbed over the gate. Aref was shifting from one foot to another and adjusting his round-rimmed glasses with the tip of his finger. There was a black bag between Partho and Joy.

She couldn’t imagine why Sohail would shun his friends.

Joy cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, ‘Sohail!

Dost! Aye na! Come out!’

When Sohail didn’t reply, Rehana stepped through the veranda and asked them what they wanted. They looked rough, as though they hadn’t bathed or changed clothes. Joy’s hair curled like a comma above his head, and Aref’s hung limp between his ears. Partho was staring past Rehana and into the windows of the bungalow to see if Sohail would emerge.

‘As-Salaam Alaikum, Auntie,’ Aref said. ‘Sohail achhe?’

These were his friends. Surely he wouldn’t mind if she invited them in. ‘Do you want to come in?’

Joy and Aref looked at the black bag. ‘No,’ Joy replied, ‘we’ll stay here.’

Aref was fidgeting with a matchbox. He held a packet of cig- arettes out to Partho, who shook his head. He lit one. ‘Is he there?’ he said.

Rehana considered lying but decided not to. ‘I think he’s upset.’ She was annoyed at not knowing the cause of this sudden change of heart. One minute he was glued to his friends, the next he didn’t want to see them.

‘We just want to talk. Can he come to the window?’

‘I don’t know, I’ll see.’ She went back through the house and found Sohail pacing the drawing room with the loose drawstring of his pyjamas flapping between his knees. ‘Tell them to go away,’ he said, tugging at the string.

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‘They’ve come all the way—’ ‘I don’t care.’

Rehana paused for a moment, exasperated. ‘OK, I give up. I’m going to Shona. You decide what to do with your friends.’

Rehana and Maya were at Shona, packing up the last of Mrs Sengupta’s things, when Sohail entered. He hung in the doorway of the dining room, watching Rehana wrap Mrs Sengupta’s plates in sheets of newspaper. The newspaper was mostly blank, giant banner advertisements for Tibet Soap and Brylcreem framing empty spaces.

Maya was helping Rehana put the wrapped plates into a crate, but as soon as she saw Sohail she abandoned the crate and put up her hands.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Aref and Joy came to see if we were all right. We’re waiting to see how things will evolve.’

‘Waiting for what?’

‘The foreign journalists at the InterContinental Hotel saw everything. Can you believe those bastards? They didn’t even try to cover their tracks. It’ll be all over the international news.’

‘Your friends. What did they want?’ ‘We need support from the UN.’

‘Don’t change the subject,’ Maya needled. ‘You’re planning something.’

‘Nothing – what would we be planning?’

‘They had something – a package – Ammoo told me. Were they asking you to hide something?’ She pressed him. Rehana knew he hated lying.

He looked straight at Maya, as though daring her to ask again. ‘You’re going, aren’t you?’

Going?
Where would he be going? Wait, Rehana wanted to say. I thought you were arguing about something small. Something insignificant. Not about going. If only they’d told me it was something to do with going, I would have stood at the door myself and refused to let them in.

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Sohail pushed the hair from his eyes. Rehana fought the wave of panic crawling through her arms.

‘Just tell me, bhaiya, please, I just want to know,’ Maya said. She pointed her face to the box of plates, as though to say,
You owe me
.

‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said the next day, ‘there’s something I have to tell you.’ The full moon was hammocked over Dhaka; it shone through the windows of the bungalow, revealing the dark, speckled shadow on Sohail’s chin, on his fist tightening and loosening.

‘Don’t tell me.’

He looked very sorry. ‘I have to go.’ ‘Go? Where? Where will you go?’

‘We heard there’s a resistance across the border. All the Bengali regiments have mutinied. Didn’t you hear Zia?’

‘This is a thing between soldiers. What does it have to do with you?’

‘They need volunteers. Aref and Joy and Partho are going too.’

‘I thought you were a pacifist.’ She clung to the word. Pacifist. Someone who does not rush off to join a war. Someone who stays behind and doesn’t break his mother’s heart.

‘I really struggled, Ammoo, but I realized I don’t have a choice.’ ‘Of course you have a choice. You always have a choice.’ Rehana held her head in her hands and tried not to sound des- perate. ‘What if something happens to you?’ She choked a little at the words. He had missed a button on his shirt. It was his favourite, a red-and-blue check, and as she leaned over to tuck the stray button through its loop he put his hand on her head, as though he were giving her his blessing. ‘I thought you hated war,’

Rehana said weakly.

‘This isn’t war. It’s genocide.’ ‘Is it Silvi?’

‘No, of course not.’ He paused, seemed to hold his breath, then said, ‘I can’t sit back and do nothing, Ma. Everyone is

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fighting. Even people who weren’t sure, people who wanted to stay with Pakistan.’

‘How will you go?’

‘Aref’s cousin Raju has a car. He’ll drive us to the border.’

He didn’t say when. Maybe if she delayed him it wouldn’t happen at all. She wanted so much for it to depend on her. ‘I can’t decide now. Can I decide later? Can I decide tomorrow? We’ll go to the graveyard.’

‘It won’t be for a few days,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to sleep now.’

Rehana nodded. And then she had a sudden thought: what if he left in the middle of the night, like the other boys, without telling her? It might be better. No. No, it wouldn’t be better. ‘Don’t go without telling me.’

‘I won’t.’ ‘Promise.’ ‘I promise.’

‘Promise on my life.’

‘I promise on your life, Ammoo.’

The next day Rehana and Sohail took a rickshaw to the grave- yard. Rehana was silent all the way, though in her head there was a shout. Don’t go, the shout said. Please, don’t go.

They passed a group of schoolboys on the street. Rehana won- dered if their thoughts, like Sohail’s, were full of war. If they turned the idea over in their mouths like sugar-candy. If they were waiting for the right moment to tell their mothers and disappear.