A Golden Age (33 page)

‘Dr Rao, this is my mother,’ Maya said.

He had glittering olive eyes. ‘Welcome to Calcutta. Why don’t you join me later, when I do the rounds?’ He put a hand on Maya’s elbow.

‘Sure,’ Maya said, colouring, ‘we’ll just unpack the supplies.’ ‘OK then, see you later,’ he said, sailing away on long, quick legs.

Sultana was already unpacking the supplies and giving instructions to the half-dozen volunteers who had gathered around her. Maya joined her in an assembly line, cracking the boxes open with a blade, pointing to the different shelves that made up the medicine stores. Rehana wedged herself into a corner and watched, shifting her weight from one foot to another. It was like being with her sisters again, disappearing while they went on with important, grown-up tasks.

‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, unwrapping a package of syringes, ‘do you want to have a look around?’

‘Yes, sure,’ Rehana replied, relieved. ‘Sultana, we’ll just be back.’

‘I’ll catch up with you later.’ And she raised a teasing eyebrow. ‘We can meet Dr Rao.’

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When they stepped outside the tent, Rehana saw a ragged line of families snaking out to one side.

‘What are they waiting for?’

‘Vaccinations,’ Maya said. She checked her watch. ‘They do them every morning at ten.’ At the head of the queue, on a fold- out table, a sandy-haired man in a coat plunged needles into spindly baby arms.

Maya was leading her to the field of shanties, where the bee- hives of discarded cement pipes were stacked three or four high.

‘This is where they bring the newcomers,’ Maya said, pointing to the pipes.

‘Where?’ ‘Over there.’

There weren’t any buildings, only the pipes. ‘I can’t see any- thing.’

‘
Inside
the pipes, Ma, look.’

Rehana put her hand to her forehead and looked. The scene came into focus.

It was true. The pipes, each just wide enough for a grown man’s stretched arms, had people huddled inside them. Lungis hung across some for privacy. Saris lay drying on top. Inside, their backs bent against the curve of the pipes, men and women pitched against the sloping walls.

Maya and Rehana walked on, drawing closer to the pipes. The ground grew more sodden as they approached, and boards were laid down again. The stench of human waste suddenly assaulted Rehana, and she stopped in her tracks.

‘Maya,’ Rehana said, covering her mouth with her sari, ‘how long do you think we’ll be here?’

‘At the camp?’ ‘No, in Calcutta.’ ‘Why?’

‘I just want to know – how long before we go home?’

‘Dhaka isn’t safe any more. They’ve been raiding houses, and if even one person tells the authorities you’ve been harbouring

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freedom fighters, we could all end up in custody. Especially you. Sohail’s very worried.’

‘But I knew all of this when I decided to do it.’

‘Things have changed. The army is nervous; they’re cracking down.’

Rehana knew it was childish to indulge in feeling homesick, but she couldn’t help it. Everything had happened so quickly, she hadn’t even had time to consider what would happen next, after she arrived. She hadn’t bargained on feeling so
lost
. She shouldn’t have come.

‘Don’t worry, Ma. You’ll soon settle in.’ They marched on.

The pipes were no bigger at close range. Children dangled from their edges, while women hung back inside, their faces covered with the limp ends of their saris.

They found a boy, no more than six or seven, squatting beside his pipe. ‘You arrive today?’ Maya asked, crouching down herself and looking him up and down. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’

The boy was braiding two flat lengths of jute. When he looked up, Rehana saw the skin stretched over his face. On his neck, where his pulse should have been, was a pink millipede scar.

He kept his eyes on his hands and mumbled something inco- herent.

‘Speak up, boy,’ Maya said roughly, taking his chin in her hands.

‘Ji, apa.’ He finished his braid and began another one. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Pabna,’ he whispered. ‘Where?’

‘Pabna,’ he said, even more softly, holding the first braid in his mouth.

‘Which village?’ Maya asked. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know the village?’

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‘Dulal, tara tari koro.’ A woman with a fist on each hip crawled out of her pipe and looked Rehana up and down. ‘I need that basket.’ She had something – a chicken – tucked into the crook of her elbow. She twisted it around and held it by its wing. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked, looking at the boy and pointing to Maya. The chicken flapped its free wing against the woman’s leg.

Maya stood up. ‘My name is Maya. I work here.’ Maya didn’t introduce Rehana. ‘Is this your boy?’

‘No. He’s from my village.’ ‘Where are his people?’ ‘Dead,’ the woman said stiffly.

‘See that tent?’ Maya said, pointing, ‘go and register there.

Him too. You can get food, medicine. Bujlen?’

The woman nodded. She passed the chicken to Dulal, who had tied his jute braids together into a loose net. Rehana wanted to ask her a few more questions, how old she was, how she had arrived at the camp, did she have parents, a husband, children of her own, but Maya was already moving on, waving her hands at an old man with a lungi hitched up around his knees.

Rehana rifled through her handbag and pulled out a few notes. ‘I can give you some taka—’

The woman gave Rehana a parched, blinkless stare. ‘I don’t need money,’ she said.

Rehana reached out a hand to touch the woman’s arm, but she shifted slightly and her fingers grazed the sari instead. She ran to catch up with Maya.

They went deeper into the camp. It was getting unbearably hot and the stench was even worse there; the stacks of cement pipes had given way to shacks and makeshift shelters built out of plastic and scraps of wood. The lucky ones had a few pieces of tin sheeting to keep off the rain. Rehana pulled her sari around her ankles, and with the other hand she tried to swat away a family of flies that were following her. Everywhere she looked she saw the haunted faces of the refugees. They held out their hands, and she thought they might grab her, drag her into the muck. She had an image of them forcing her into one of their

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pipes, making her weave those jute strings all day. You’re one of us, they would say, you’re one of us. She imagined Maya leaving her there, going back in the truck with Sultana and Mukul, laughing all the way to Theatre Road.

‘Maya,’ Rehana said finally, ‘I can’t go on.’

‘It’s just a bit further,’ Maya said, pointing ahead. ‘There’s someone I want to see on that side.’

‘Really,’ Rehana said, feeling her stomach twist, ‘you go ahead, I’ll stay here and wait for you.’

‘Where will you wait?’

Rehana glanced around. There was no place to sit. ‘I’ll go back to the tent.’

‘Will you be able to find it?’

‘Yes – just go ahead.’ Rehana couldn’t wait to get rid of her; she could stop pretending to be interested and run back to the tent. She thought about the truck. Maybe she could go back to the truck with a cold glass of water and listen to the radio. Or sit beside those volunteers and their medicine boxes. Anything, any- thing but this stink.

She picked her way to the tent. Slipping quietly through the flaps, she found herself in the hospital ward. All the beds were pushed up against each other, so that it looked like an unbroken stretch of bodies. She walked through the aisle, stepping over people. It was the women who made the breath catch in her throat. It was the way they squatted next to the children, holding up empty breasts to their mouths, their hair matted with the road.

‘Mrs Haque?’ A man approached: it was the doctor, coming towards her with a quizzical wave. A pair of white rubber gloves were stretched across his hands. Rehana saw dark spots on the fingertips, and, as he drew nearer, a smattering of red above the pocket of his white coat. ‘Chachi? What are you doing here?’

She wanted to hug him. ‘I – I came to look around a little.’ ‘Well, this is it. We have a small operating theatre at the back,

and a dispensary. Shall I take you around?’ ‘No – it’s all right. I just – I wanted to see.’

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‘There are so many,’ Dr Rao said, fixing his gaze on her. ‘From all over the country. They’ve left everything, walked for days, only to arrive at this place.’

Rehana couldn’t keep her eyes from the red smudges on his gloves.

‘There’s a register – I can show it to you.’

They turned a corner and entered another room. There were more crowds, echoes of wailing children. A grating mechanical hum shrouded all of the other sounds.

‘What is that noise?’

‘Generator,’ the doctor replied. ‘We get power for the OT, and a few hours of light in the evening.’

‘Do you stay here?’

‘Yes,’ he sighed, smiling. ‘There’s another small tent in a far corner of the field.’

‘Where are you from?’ ‘Kashmir.’

‘You came to Calcutta to study?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I came for this.’

‘Ammoo,’ Maya said that night, ‘Dr Rao suggested that you might want to help at the camp.’

I knew
. I knew she wanted to leave me there. ‘Me? What can I do?’

‘They really need help. You could do what you did at Shona – just talk to the refugees.’

Rehana did not want to talk to the refugees. Why was it always her? Rescue this one, save that one. ‘If I’m in the way I should just go back to Dhaka.’

‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, ‘you know you can’t do that.’ ‘I should never have come.’

‘It’s very serious, they could have arrested you.’

The thought of spending months there, in the shed, or worse, at the camp, was suddenly unbearable. ‘So what? I deserve to be arrested.’

‘Stop talking nonsense.’

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‘I don’t want to go back to that camp.’

‘Fine. Stay here.’ Maya turned her back and folded her hands under her cheek. Just like her father slept, Rehana thought. As though she were praying.

The stifling heat in the shed woke Rehana. The bed was empty; Maya’s clothes were strewn across the floor. Rehana started picking up the clothes and folding them. There was a smell coming from Maya’s kameez. It needed a wash. The rest of her clothes were no better: the hems of all her saris and petticoats were streaked with mud.

Rehana stepped out of the shed to see if there was a tap. She circled the perimeter of the roof, holding a hand against the sun. She followed a copper pipe, and in a far corner she found what she was looking for, fastened to the wall. Below it was a hole where the water would run off.

There wasn’t any laundry soap. She took out the cream- coloured bar of soap she had brought to wash her face. She turned the tap, and a weak trickle made its way out. The water was warm and comfortable; she soon felt herself relax as she kneaded Maya’s salwaar-kameez in a familiar double beat: clap- clap, clap-clap, clap-clap.

She hung the clothes over the railing, pleased with the sight of them sizzling under the sun. The fat woman from the other day was on the next-door roof again, pinning up the same yellow sari. She waved. Rehana waved back.

Downstairs, Maya was attacking the typewriter with a pen in her mouth. The pen had leaked a little; on one corner of her lip was a growing patch of indigo.

‘Ma, where’ve you been?’

‘Just tidying a little upstairs.’ Rehana pointed to her mouth. ‘You have a little—’

Maya had already turned back to her typewriter. ‘Isn’t it hot up there?’ she said distractedly.

‘I’ll go out and see if I can get us a few things,’ Rehana said. ‘We need soap, and maybe a few snacks.’

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‘All right,’ Maya said, her eyes on her punching fingers. ‘You go ahead.’

On her way out, Rehana passed Mukul pasting a flyer on to the wall. He wore a blue cap that was pulled down to hide his eyes.

‘Auntie, hello,’ he said, raising his chin so he could see her. ‘You going out in this heat?’

‘Just down the road for a few things.’ ‘It’s burning up!’

‘I’ll only be gone a few minutes.’

‘Here, why don’t you take my cap?’ he said, peeling it off his head. His hair was plastered wetly to his forehead. She saw the ring of sweat around the rim.

‘No, really.’ ‘Please, I insist.’