A Golden Age (6 page)

‘Sounded quite heated to me,’ Mrs Rahman said.

‘Well, you know, he’s young and full of ideas.’ Rehana felt a bit defensive. It was always difficult for the rest of them to under- stand: Mrs Akram’s children were still in school, Mrs Rahman’s three children had all married sensibly, and Silvi hardly strayed out of her mother’s grasp. Her own children seemed a little out of control by comparison. ‘It’s just in the air – all this talk about delaying the assembly – the students are getting nervous, they’re worried the elections won’t be honoured.’

‘He sounds quite involved to me,’ Mrs Rahman insisted. ‘And your Maya is in the Chattra League, no?’

Mrs Chowdhury decided to come to Rehana’s rescue. ‘What she’s saying is – why doesn’t the boy waste his time chasing girls instead!’

The kitchen suddenly grew quiet.

Rehana turned around and caught Mrs Chowdhury’s eye. ‘What?’ she said. ‘What?’

No one replied. Rehana realized they were making a space for her to say something. She opened her mouth and tried, but she couldn’t think of the right sequence of words.

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Mrs Rahman broke the silence. ‘Are you the last to know?’ she said.

‘Know what?’

Rehana thought she might still be able to stop the conversa- tion there, but something kept her swirling the plates with her back to the room. Let them have it out.

‘Sohail is in love with your daughter,’ she heard Mrs Rahman say. ‘Ohhhh,’ Mrs Chowdhury laughed, ‘that. Don’t be silly – that

was just a childish thing.’

Rehana kept moving the sponge in circles. No one said any- thing; Rehana thought she could hear them all holding their breath, waiting for her to speak, but she was mesmerized by her plate and her sponge and the little orange flecks of rice that floated like petals in the dishwater.

‘Well,’ Mrs Chowdhury said finally, noisily heaving herself upright. ‘I didn’t know. The girl never told me.’

‘You had no idea?’ Mrs Rahman said. ‘Of course I had no idea!’

Just then they heard heavy, running footsteps approaching the kitchen.

‘Ammoo!’

It was Maya.

‘Ammoo,’ she said, panting and red-faced from the effort, ‘Bhaiya’s just sitting in the garden with his head in his hands.’

Lemonade, he needs lemonade. Rehana handed her daughter a clean glass. ‘Here. Get some shorbot from the fridge.’

Maya must have sensed there was something going on in the kitchen because for once she just set off obediently, her chappals clacking behind her as she ran.

‘Rehana,’ Mrs Chowdhury said, ‘you must believe me. I really didn’t know.’

Rehana turned back to the washbasin and picked up another plate.

‘She didn’t say anything,’ Mrs Chowdhury repeated, ‘and he’s so young – just a student – surely it’s foolish to think—’

‘So you did know,’ Mrs Akram said.

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‘No, I didn’t.’ Rehana felt Mrs Chowdhury approach her. ‘Rehana agrees with me, don’t you, my dear – that it would be a bad idea? I’m sure she discouraged her son as well.’

Rehana swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘Yes, of course you’re right.’ What could she do now? Just save her son from any further humiliation.

‘See – she agrees,’ Mrs Chowdhury announced.

Mrs Rahman shook her head. She began spooning the leftover biryani out of the giant metal pot it had been cooked in. The kitchen swelled with its perfume, and quickly the room shrank and the air was tight, filled with the remains of the afternoon heat, the buzzing of the bulb, Mrs Chowdhury’s loud sighing.

‘I don’t know what the fuss is about. There’s no way – no way

– they couldn’t be serious.’

Rehana finished rinsing her plate and began working on another. She thought that it must be the cleanest plate in the world. Mrs Akram picked it up and wiped it with the end of her sari.

‘He’s too busy with his politics – he’ll never make a good husband. Anyway, he’s younger than her.’

Rehana couldn’t bear the conversation any longer. ‘Please, Mrs Chowdhury – don’t worry. It was just a misunderstanding.’ ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Chowdhury said, satisfied. ‘Nobody forced Silvi.’ Then she turned abruptly on her heel. ‘I’m tired.

Goodnight, everyone. Khoda Hafez.’ She bustled away, knocking a row of empty pickle jars as she rounded the corner.

Mrs Rahman was elbow-deep in the biryani pot. ‘Rehana,’ she began, ‘I’m so sorry—’

‘Let’s not speak of it.’

Mrs Rahman and Mrs Akram looked at each other as though this was exactly what they’d expected her to say.

‘You don’t speak of it. But I can say it’s a shame.’

‘Please.’ Rehana chewed the inside of her lip. She gripped her plate; the soap slipped between her fingers. ‘I’ll take care of the rest – the children will help – it’s getting late, I shouldn’t keep you.’ She brushed her cheek with the back of her wrist, where it itched.

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‘Let’s go,’ Mrs Akram said. ‘Come on.’ She peeled Mrs Rahman’s arm out of the biryani dish.

‘Goodnight, Rehana,’ they said softly.

‘Goodnight, friends,’ she whispered back. She wasn’t sure if they’d heard her.

Later, after the children had fallen asleep, Rehana climbed under her mosquito net and pulled the katha up to her chin.

She lingered over the Silvi episode, wondering if there was something she could have done. Sohail had avoided her all evening and gone to bed without his tea. She thought she saw a small accusation in the set of his mouth as he said goodnight.

He’ll never make a good husband, she heard Mrs Chowdhury say. Too much politics.

The comment had stung because it was probably true. Lately the children had little time for anything but the struggle. It had started when Sohail entered the university. Ever since ’48, the Pakistani authorities had ruled the eastern wing of the country like a colony. First they tried to force everyone to speak Urdu instead of Bengali. They took the jute money from Bengal and spent it on factories in Karachi and Islamabad. One general after another made promises they had no intention of keeping. The Dhaka University students had been involved in the protests from the very beginning, so it was no surprise Sohail had got caught up, and Maya too. Even Rehana could see the logic: what sense did it make to have a country in two halves, poised on either side of India like a pair of horns?

But in 1970, when the cyclone hit, it was as though everything came into focus. Rehana remembered the day Sohail and Maya had returned from the rescue operation: the red in their eyes as they told her how they had waited for the food trucks to come and watched as the water rose and the bodies washed up on the shore; how they had realized, with mounting panic, that the food wouldn’t come because it had never been sent.

The next day Maya had joined the student Communist Party. She donated all of her clothes to the cyclone victims and began

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wearing only white saris. Rehana hated to see the white saris on her daughter, but Maya didn’t notice. She swallowed, like sugar, every idea passed to her by the party elders.
Uprising
.
Revolution.
She bandied the words about as though she had dis- covered a lost, ancient language.

As for Sohail, he would have made a powerful student leader. But he had refused to join any of the student movements, claiming he couldn’t be swayed by one faction or another. He was unmoved by the differences between the various Communist parties: the parties that sided with Peking, the ones that sided with Moscow, the Mao-lovers, the Mao-haters, the Marxist–Leninists, the Stalinists, the Bolshevists. It might have been a problem, but Sohail collected friends and offended no one. He was popular and well loved by everyone. Mullahs and bad-boys. Communists and bullies and goodfornothings. Arts faculty, science faculty. Physicists, engineers, painters, anthro- pologists. Girls and boys. Girls, especially. His fellow students might have interpreted Sohail’s absence from their meetings as a sign of disloyalty, but no one who knew him doubted his com- mitment to the cause. Sohail loved Bengal. He may have inher- ited his mother’s love of Urdu poetry, but it was nothing to the love he had for all things Bengali: the swimming mud of the delta; the translucent, bony river fish; the shocking green palette of the paddy and the open, aching blue of the sky over flat land. People said his popularity had something to do with his being handsome, but Rehana was convinced it had more to do with the sound of his voice and the manner in which he spoke, a gentle, whispering baritone. And he always held his hands behind his back in a posture of deference, fixing his gaze on whomever he was addressing, the effect disarming and magical and the reason women followed him from Curzon Hall to Madhu’s Canteen every afternoon when he went to meet his friends under the giant banyan tree where every major student movement in Dhaka had

ever been born.

But Sohail loved Silvi. He had loved her when they had watched
Cleopatra
in the summer after his father died, and he

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loved her when he came back from Lahore and they saw Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
; he loved her at school, where her roll number was 33 and her uniform slate and blue, and he loved her when her breasts began pushing against the V of her school uniform dupatta; he loved her still when he discovered poetry and when she wrote him letters sealed with India ink lip prints; he loved her at the university when they rode home together in rickshaws, their knees knocking together over potholes; and he loved her when she started to read the Koran, and he loved her when she agreed to marry according to her mother’s wishes; and he even loved her after that, when she closed the shutters of her bedroom and refused to come to the window when he rapped, gently, with the rubber end of his pencil.

Yes, it was probably true. He was still a student, and too young. And he would recover from this first heartache, as men so easily do. Still, Rehana thought, the party could hardly be called a success. It was supposed to be a celebration of the children’s return, that ten-year-old day when she brought them back.

As she lay in the dark, the story of their return began to play itself out like an old film reel, rusty and clicking but with the images still intact, still potent. This was the end of the ritual: a recounting of the past, an attempt at a reckoning.

First, Rehana had sold Iqbal’s precious Vauxhall. Mrs Akram had convinced her husband to buy it. ‘Sell us the car,’ she said to Rehana, ‘it’s almost new – I’ve seen my husband eyeing it. I could convince him to give you a thousand.’ At first Rehana refused, but after paying the lawyer she had exactly 250 rupees left. She said yes. ‘Tell your husband to take it away when I’m at the bazaar tomorrow morning,’ she told Mrs Akram; ‘I don’t want to see it go.’ And when she returned that afternoon it was gone, leaving only a dark oily stain in the middle of the driveway and four bare patches where the wheels had been.

The Vauxhall brought her a thousand rupees. Still not enough money to bring the children back, raise them, keep them in ribbons and socks and uniforms. Not nearly enough. She

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pawned the rest of her jewels: the sun-shaped locket and match- ing earrings, the ruby ring, a few gold chains. She counted the total: 2,652. Still not enough. She sold the carved teak mirror frame above her dressing table, an antique from the house in Wellington Square, sent on a cart to Dhaka after her wedding, with a note from her father:
I’m sorry, this is all I could save
. The mirror always reminded her of her father’s last days in the Calcutta mansion, knocking around the empty rooms, his foot- steps spelling defeat, as one truckload after another disappeared down the alley, bound for the coffers of the people to whom he owed money, or gold, or acres.

Then Mrs Chowdhury had her idea.

Rehana hired an architect. It was May, two months after the court case. Make the house as big as possible, was Rehana’s only request. Make it grand. The workers arrived in July and began to dig the foundations, their backs like black pearls in the dense midsummer heat. They poured cement into the hole. Metal girders to support the structure. Wooden scaffolding for the walls. But by August the money was gone.

She went to the bank for a loan. She tried Habib Bank first, then United and National banks. She had no guarantor. She could mortgage the land, they said. She wouldn’t mortgage the land. Then a round-faced man with an oily forehead said
yes
and took her to his office at the back of a building, where he slipped his hand under her elbow like a question mark, to which she too almost said
yes
, until he came close and she smelled his curry breath and saw the cigarette tracks on his teeth. She leaped out of the room, still gripping the instrument she had brought along to sign the papers, a green metal fountain pen with a letter opener at the top.