The Good Muslim (11 page)

This wounds her, because she too has her memories, of her son, a boy who would not dismiss his mother, who would not punch a stranger in the street. That her son has seen, and committed, acts of violence, is not surprising to her – but she cannot account for the lingering of his passions so long after the end of the battle.

Sohail rejects the Book. He lets it gather dust on his desk, and then he shelves it away high, where its spine is not in his sight.

She decides to read to him. You don’t have to listen, she says, just sit with me.

This was how it began. It hurt her to remember this, because everything that happened afterwards could be traced to Sohail’s first steps towards God, beginning with the Book that she gave him, that gathered dust on his bookshelf, that she prised from between Neruda and Ghalib, that she read aloud while he ate his breakfast, that he was unable to resist, that he began to memorise, then understand, then love, that finally fell into his hands as he learned to read, that wove itself into his heart – that led to revelation and his conversion, the alchemy of which none of his loved ones could trace to a single moment, a single gesture.

1984
June

Several months after Chottu and Saima’s party, Joy telephoned with another invitation. ‘The party wasn’t really your cup of tea, was it?’

‘Was it yours?’ She was glad to hear his voice. ‘Why haven’t you rung?’

He laughed. ‘I was waiting for the right opportunity and it has just come up.’

‘Oh? What’s that? Not another evening of whisky and dancing?’

‘Maya-bee, your heart is as hard as sugar. No, this is something totally different – I thought you might like to see the other side.’

‘The other side of what?’

‘People who care about the same things you do.’

‘No, thanks. I already did. You remember Aditi – I met her at the party? She took me to her newspaper office. The editor is giving me a column.’

‘Shafaat?’

‘You know him?’

‘Everyone knows him.’

She didn’t like the way he said
everyone
. She was about to tell him so when he said, ‘I’m talking about real revolutionaries. Look, you won’t regret it – I’ll pick you up at three.’ Before she could reply, he hung up. Real revolutionaries. He knew she wouldn’t be able to resist that, even if it was only a joke. Everyone knew there weren’t any real revolutionaries left, not in Dhaka, not in the world. It was 1984 after all.

They drove to Kolabagan. The woman who answered the door introduced herself as Mohona. ‘Come with me,’ she said, leading them down an unlit corridor that smelled of old books and damp. The corridor opened into a drawing room with large windows on one side. Money plants climbed up the grilles and fingered the ceiling. There were a handful of people there already, seated in a loose circle. It was a long time since Maya had been to a meeting, but the scene was familiar: the women in plain cotton saris, the sparse jute furniture, the smell of paper and incense. She drifted away from Joy and sat down beside a man in a uniform.

‘Hello, I’m Sheherezade,’ she said, using her formal name.

‘Lieutenant Sarkar,’ he replied, nodding. ‘You have been to the meeting before?’

‘No, my first time.’

‘Jahanara Imam is coming today.’

Maya’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’ Jahanara Imam had written a book about losing her son in the war. Everyone had read it; they called her Shaheed Janani,
Mother of Martyrs
. Joy was right about bringing her here. Maybe she could even write about it for the newspaper. She settled into her seat and pulled out her notebook. Soon the room filled up; when the chairs ran out, people leaned against the wall or crouched on the floor. ‘That’s her,’ the army man said, pointing to an elderly woman who had just taken her seat.

The meeting was called to order by Mohona. She welcomed everyone, including, with a nod to Maya, people who were joining them for the first time. Joy found a seat in the row behind her, tapped her on the shoulder. ‘What did I say?’

Jahanara Imam rose. Tiny, in a white cotton sari, she looked insubstantial, like a froth of smoke. Her voice, however, was firm, her words direct. ‘It has been thirteen years,’ she began, ‘but I know that, like me, you have not forgotten. It has been thirteen years and our war is not over. Perhaps we gained our freedom, perhaps you can hold your head high and say you have a country, your country. But what sort of country allows the men who betrayed it, the men who committed murder, to run free, to live as the neighbours of the women they have widowed, the young girls they have raped?’

She told the story of Ghulam Azam, whose thugs had collaborated with the Pakistan Army, led them to guerrilla hideouts, helped them burn villages. Not only was he acquitted of any wrongdoing, but he was being considered for Bangladeshi citizenship.

Maya had always prided herself on remembering exactly who she had been before the war broke out. She remembered her politics, the promises she had made to herself about the country. She remembered the sight of dead men with their hands tied behind their backs, their faces lapped with blood, and she remembered every day she had worked in the camps, scooping bullets out of men with nothing but a spoon and a hunter’s knife.

She remembered everything she had done and who she had been and who she had vowed to remain. But now, listening to this woman, she felt herself pulled and folded back into another body, one that hadn’t been lonely all these months and years, one that hadn’t left home and trodden carelessly around the past decade, one that could shore up the memories of that time and get angry when the moment came for anger.

She clapped along with the others, between Jahanara Imam’s sentences. The room was growing hot now, bright sunlight filtering through the thicket of money plants. Someone turned up the ceiling fan, and the women readjusted themselves as the folds of their saris flapped open. Maya held down the pages of her notebook.

When Jahanara Imam was finished, Mohona stood up again. ‘How many of you have lost a loved one to the war?’

Hands went up. Maya’s too.

‘Madam,’ said a man in a grey suit, ‘I lost my father and mother. They went to the university and shot the professors.’ From the back of the room, another voice added, ‘My relatives lived in Old Dhaka. They killed my uncle, my grandfather.’

More people spoke up, announcing the date of their loss, the circumstances. Caught in the crossfire. Shot by the army on a raid in their village. Tortured to death at the cantonment.

The confessions made Maya grip the underside of her seat. Would they each have to get up and confess who they had lost, exactly what they had done, in the war? She found herself shivering under the whirr of the fan. A woman was talking about documenting all the atrocities of the war. ‘We should make a list,’ she was saying, ‘and identify all the killers.’

Maya found herself raising her hand. Mohona pointed to her. ‘I think – I believe – that the first thing we must do is admit our own faults, our own sins. So much happened during the war – we were not just victims.’

The room suddenly grew quiet.

Lieutenant Sarkar turned to her and said gently, ‘You are speaking to a room full of wounded souls, my dear.’

She could hear people breathing quietly, waiting for the awkward moment to pass. Finally Mohona stood up. ‘We all have our private grief. But we are here to talk about the collabor ators. Let us focus on the task at hand. If we document the atrocities in a systematic manner, Ghulam Azam will surely be denied permission to stay in Bangladesh.’

The voices rose again, and Maya was left with a sharp pain under her ribs. She thought of her own casualties of war, the reason she had raised her hand. But there were also the things that she had done, which returned to her now, the memories clear and sharp. She turned to Joy. ‘I have to go,’ she whispered.

‘Wait – it’s almost finished. Another ten minutes.’

She couldn’t wait. She stood up, stepping over Lieutenant Sarkar’s knees. At the end of the row she overturned someone’s teacup, and the clattering made the room quiet again. ‘Excuse me,’ she mumbled, and fled. She emerged into the fading afternoon, a busy road with a succession of trucks lumbering by. In the distance was a jumble of tin shacks, and when she grew near she saw that it stretched far beyond the horizon, row after row of frail-looking structures, pasted together with bits of paper, cinema posters and calendars and newspaper and jute and cow dung. She found an overturned crate and sat down to face it.

‘I’m not getting it right.’ It was Joy. He crouched beside her.

‘You’re not my tour guide.’

‘But you’re back after so long, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression.’

‘I could show you a few things too, you know.’

‘Like what?’

‘Look over there. You want to know the most painful thing about living in that slum? If you’re a woman?’

‘What?’

‘Drinking water.’

‘Why, because the water is dirty?’

‘That too, but it’s not just that. See, if you are a woman and you live in that slum, you wake up in the middle of the night while it’s still dark, and you make your way to the edge of the shanties, and you lift up your sari and squat over the open drain. And then you tiptoe back into bed with your husband, and for the rest of the day, you wait, you wait and wait until it gets dark, your stomach feels like it’s full of needles, your insides are burning, but you can’t do anything, no, you can’t, you have to wait until it gets dark and everyone else has gone to sleep so you can have your one solitary piss of the day.’

His head was bowed, and she saw his hand moving towards her hand and she moved her hand away, because she didn’t want him to think that his gesture was a way of resolving this, the cruelty of the country, the collaborators that ran free and never went to jail for murder and rape – because there were things that could not be erased with the squeeze of a hand, memories and sins and conditions of humanity.

She turned to him. ‘I’m not made to sit in meetings.’

‘You shouldn’t. You argue too much.’

She laughed. ‘That’s true.’ She leaned against him. ‘Find me a rickshaw.’

‘Let me take you – make use of my skills as a taxi-driver.’

*

She had just taught Zaid the numbers in English, one through ten, and he was repeating them aloud, his voice high and proud, when the phone rang. Maya looked at her watch – four o’clock, must be for the girl upstairs, though she was nowhere in sight. She picked up. ‘Hello?’

The line was sandy. ‘Hello?’ It was a woman. ‘Maya?’

Nazia. ‘Nazia?’ Her heart flew to her throat.

‘Maya Apa,’ she said, addressing her formally. ‘Are you well?’

‘Yes, I am well.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She is well also. And how are your children?’

Maya heard the sound of Nazia clearing her throat. ‘I got your letter – your letters. Both of them.’

She tried to remember what she had written. The long, meandering explanations, the apologies. ‘There was much to say.’

Nazia blew into the receiver. ‘I’m sorry you had to go, like that.’

‘It was my fault. I should never have let you swim in the pond.’

A pause. ‘I’m going home today, doctor says.’

All this time she had been at the hospital. ‘The children will be so glad to see you.’

‘I have to go now.’

‘All right,’ Maya said. For some reason she wanted to add, God Bless You, but before she could say anything the line went dead. She pressed several times on the receiver, but there was only the sandy sound, not even a dial tone.

*

‘Zaid, what do you know about your grandfather?’

‘He died.’

‘That’s right. Did you know he had your chin?’

She was making it up. ‘Really?’

She placed her thumb in the dent of his chin. ‘Yes, it was yours exactly.’

They took a rickshaw to the graveyard. He was wearing his sandals today, and a clean kurta that smelled of industrial soap. He could almost sound out the words on the gravestone:
MUHAMMAD IQBAL HAQUE
.

‘Did you know’, Maya said, ‘I was the same age as you when my father died?’

‘Did you cry?’

‘No, I didn’t cry. I didn’t know how sad I should be.’

‘Me too.’

She knew. She had watched him talking about his mother, putting all his optimism in his recollections of her – the Ludo board, the promises about going to school. ‘She was very beautiful, your ammoo,’ Maya said. ‘She had grey eyes, like yours.’

He circled the grave, tapping his hand on the gravestone as he passed.

‘Do you want to say something to your mother, Zaid?’

‘This isn’t her.’

‘Yes, but she can hear you. What do you want to say to her?’

He stopped, crouched. ‘Ammoo,’ he said, ‘I would like a cycle.’ Then he cupped his hands, as he had been taught, and recited the Kalma.

That night, in her sleep, she stretched her feet to the edge of the bed and found herself in contact with something warm. Sitting upright, she reached with her fingers. A sleeping form, breathing in and out. She must be dreaming. She switched on the light. The boy, his hand fanned over his face, did not stir.

She draped the blanket over him and he shifted, pulling it up over his head. In the garden, the trees were licked by moonlight.

Later, as the room coloured, she pulled him into the mosquito net and curled around him, feeling his shoulders loosening, his feet drifting towards her.

*

On the last day of June, when the searing heat of spring was about to move aside for the monsoon, Rehana persuaded Maya out of the house and stood her in front of the newest, grandest building in the city.

‘I hate it,’ she said, shielding her eyes. ‘It’s hideous.’

‘Come on, beta, don’t be so harsh.’

‘Hideous. She swivelled her head around, trying to take in the whole building, making sure she didn’t miss any of it. ‘Is that water?’

‘Yes, it’s built on a pool of water, like a shapla flower floating in the river.’

‘Why is it so big?’

‘Doesn’t matter, it’s our parliament now. That very nice American chap built it.’