The Good Muslim (14 page)

That’s not what she had meant. She felt desperation spreading through her. ‘Please, no.’

He put his hand on her shoulder, as though she would have trouble understanding otherwise. ‘The boy misses his mother, I know that. I should give him more time, but . . .’

She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. ‘Your duties?’

He looked wounded, his gaze pointing beyond her, to the small patches of sunshine now visible through the clouds. ‘A boy needs to find his way in the world.’

She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she wanted to agree with him, to tell him it was all right, that he was doing his best. It couldn’t be easy, raising a son. He was laying down the law, she could see that, but he made it appear as if he had no choice, as though there were something natural about the rule he was imposing. She struggled with herself, knowing that if she pushed too hard he might abandon her entirely, that perhaps he was giving her this chance simply because his wife was not here to admonish him, dead before she could pour that last drop of venom into his ear and make him deaf to her for ever. Maya tried to be grateful for this.

‘Go in and see Ammoo – she’s expecting you.’ And she turned around and made her way down the stairs and towards the operating theatre, drying her hair with the end of her sari, the rain still heavy on her cheek.

1972
May

Sohail finds, in the spring after he has returned from the war, that his hands will not stop shaking. He holds his hands to his chest. He wraps them around the teapot. He stands on the threshold of his mother’s room. Ma, he wants to say, my hands will not stop shaking. Will you say a prayer and blow on them? Will you twine your fingers through mine and bind them to yours? But he stops. He isn’t a child any more; he’s a man, a soldier back from the war. He asks himself if he can be right again, if he can be good. After Piya, after the killing.

This is how the war made its way into their house. Sohail, spilling water from his glass, flicking dal over the side of his plate. A vanishing woman. A shake of the hand. A silence between siblings.

He had killed an innocent man. The man was not an enemy, not a soldier. Just someone who had let the wrong word come out of his mouth. There is only one way to be good now. The Book has told him he is good, that it is in his nature to be good. The words have been reclaimed and he swells up with love for the Book. Weeks after Piya has disappeared – leaving only the faint trace of her scent, which he tries to pick up in the kitchen where she had squatted, or the rectangle on the floor where she had spread her sleeping mat – he finds himself climbing the ladder up to the roof and sitting cross-legged under the open sun. It is May, a windless, rainless month, heat tearing through the sky. He sits and reads the words. His mother has given him the Book and he reads the words, refusing to see his friends or celebrate the victory. Dimly, he hears them: time to go back to the university; stop worrying your mother, na, and be happy, yaar, war is over. Time to sell-e-brate.

Most of all he is afraid to talk. Maya is always regarding him hungrily, eager for small scraps of detail. Yesterday he told her about the food at the guerrilla camp, how it had danced on his tongue though it was only a few spoonfuls of rice and dal. Freedom food. She devoured the story, begged him for more. How greedy she is. He wants her to be quiet so she can hear the roar in his head, thinking that if she could hear that roar, the roar of uncertainty and the roar of death, she might understand. But she refuses to be quiet for long enough. She searches his face and then she launches into her latest story, telling him who has returned from the war, who has lost a son, a brother. Worse things have happened to other people.

I have committed murder
. If he were to tell his sister about the war, this is what he would have to tell her. She wants stories of heroism. She wants him to tell her that he planted bombs under country bridges and that he got away just before the flame hit the powder, and that the felled bridge cut off the army, and the people of north Tangail or Kushtia or Bogra were saved.

But he has no story of this kind. She grows angrier and angrier at his silence, and even after his mother has given in to the mornings on the roof, Maya continues to follow him with her eyes, reproach him with a stony silence. Silence for silence. When he asks her about her work at the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, she snaps, what, you don’t think women are victims of the war too?

He thinks of all the people who have died – the enemy combatants, and the people he didn’t save, and his friend Aref, and all the boys who went to war and were killed. Every day he thinks of them. How very selfish of her to want a piece of that.

Ammoo is not greedy, but she has been worried about him, climbs halfway up the ladder and calls out, it’s very hot, Sohail, won’t you come down and have something to drink?

On the roof he has assembled a number of things. There is a comb that used to belong to Piya, a shirt that belonged to his friend Aref, killed last summer by the army. And a photograph of his father, taken in front of the Vauxhall. Not handsome – his father had not been handsome – but looking confidently ahead, living the life that was intended for him. And Ammoo’s Book.

There has come to you from God a light and a Book most lucid.

With it, God guides him who conforms to his good pleasure to the paths of tranquillity;

He shall lead them from the fields of darkness to the light, by his leave,

And he shall guide them to a straight path.

The book believes he is good. He begins to read.

He comes to Maya one day and tries to tell her. He says it is the greatest thing that has ever happened to him. He has found something, something that explains everything. Does she want to know what it is? Isn’t she curious? He is pale and the skin is stretched tight over his face, and she sees that death hovers inside him, the death to which he had come so close in the war, he and death in a tight corridor. Now it is like a bruise that won’t heal, and he is pressing his face close to hers, and she sees that whatever it is that he is telling her about is what stops the bruise from spreading from his cheek to his bones and from his bones to his blood. It is a dam, like the one they are building in Rangamati that will hold its water like a giant cupped hand and power the fields; it holds him together, it lights him up.

At that moment Maya makes a decision, one that she will come to regret many times in the years that follow. She sees in his bright, water-lined eyes that he is telling the truth. She sees that he fell into the abyss and that this Book is what brought him to the surface and allowed him to breathe. She sees too, in herself, the need for such a rescue, such a buoy, such a truth. But because it has suddenly become clear to her that religion, its open fragrance and cloudless stretches of infinity, may in fact be what he is claiming it is, an essential human need, hers as much as his, and because she feels the twinge of his yearning, turning like a leaf in her heart, she decides, at that moment, that it cannot be. She will not become one of those people who buckle under the force of a great event and allow it to change the metre of who they are.

And neither will Sohail. She will not let him. She believes – oh, how foolish she is, how arrogant – she believes she has a say. She believes she can do something to prevent it. She believes her will is greater than the leaf in her heart and the leaf in her brother’s heart.

He approaches her. ‘I’ve been praying.’

‘For what?’ She is reading the
Observer
.

‘Not for anything. Just praying.’

‘Please, Bhaiya,’ she says, ‘don’t start talking religious mumbo-jumbo, we won’t recognise you any more.’ She turns her attention away, folding her newspaper to the classified ads.

‘But that is what prayer is. It is the abandonment of all other thoughts, all other pursuits.’

She looks at him then, and he sees her searching for the joke.

‘I’m serious,’ he says, answering the question she is too stunned to ask. He pauses, levelling his thoughts before replying. Outside, a man is shouting on the street and banging on what sounds like a cooking pot. ‘Allah, Allah, Allah. Give to the poor, give to the poor.’

‘It doesn’t matter what brings us to God; it only matters that it does.’

‘Are you quoting from some mullah now?’

‘No, Maya, I am telling the truth.’

‘So this has nothing to do with Piya, with the war. Did something else happen? Did you do something?’

She is close, too close. ‘I told you, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Of course it matters. How can you accept the cure without considering the disease?’

‘Is it your opinion that I am ill?’

The beggar’s voice grows louder. ‘God forgives you,’ he cries. ‘God forgives you.’

The window behind Maya is illuminated with the gold tones of morning. The light spills across her back, and, overflowing, falls into his eyes. He can see little of her face, only the orb of her hair.

‘I’ve been reading about it,’ she says; ‘it’s called shell shock.’

A splinter of anger enters his voice when he replies. ‘You’re not listening to me. I’m not ill. Maybe, yes, after the war, it is always difficult.’

‘So it has just come out of that, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘But even if one thing has led to another, I can only be grateful.’

Now it is her turn to be angry. ‘You remember, don’t you, what they did to us in the name of God?’

‘Just because it was usurped for evil ends doesn’t make it a bad thing. That is the mistake I made.’

‘Mistake? You think it was all a mistake?’

He shifts his gaze away from her, unsure how to reply. It’s not that he wishes there hadn’t been a war, or that he hadn’t joined the fighting. But his life wasn’t for that, it was for something else. How can he explain this to her? That there was a reason for his living while so many others had died. He longs for her to know, to know something of what it was like, longs for her to have a heart as heavy as his, a heart that needs to wrap itself around a certainty, a path.

Maya is gulping down her tea, and making to leave the table. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she says, ‘after everything, you do this.’

Rehana comes upon them at this very moment, carrying a bowl of semolina halwa she has reheated on the stove. She sees Sohail pointing to the window behind Maya.

‘There’s someone there,’ he says.

They look. The man is bare-chested and unadorned except for his long and elaborately knotted hair, which hangs down past his shoulders. He taps on the window. ‘God forgives you,’ he says. ‘God is merciful.’

They all stare at each other for a moment, and then Maya says, ‘What does your book tell you to do about this man, Bhaiya?’

Sohail fishes in his pockets and pulls out a folded note. The man cups his hands as the window is opened and the note slips through.

‘That’s it? That’s all you’re doing? Don’t you want to know how that man came to be here?’

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

‘I’m not the one pretending to be holy.’

Sohail’s fist comes down on the table. ‘There’s nothing holy about me – nothing. Only I have the humility to admit it. There is something greater.’

‘But look what your greater being has brought us. War, and a beggar tapping at our window.’

‘Maya,’ Rehana says, raising her voice, ‘that’s enough.’

The man raises his hand to his forehead, then turns away, slipping through the opening in the gate. Sohail darts out of the room. They hear his door slamming shut.

Maya turns to her mother. ‘He’s going to turn your house into a mosque, didn’t you hear?’

‘Why, child, why do you have to be so intolerant?’ She puts her face close to her daughter’s and whispers, tender, ‘He’s going to pray, he’s going to go to the mosque on Fridays. Don’t be so frightened of it. It’s only religion.’

Rehana was right – at first. Sohail was almost back to his old self, smiling at meals, whistling under his breath. He started to attend classes at the university, though he didn’t linger on campus or go to any of the student-union meetings. He was occasionally seen with his friends, playing cricket at Abahani Field, and in that second summer after the war, when the constitution was written and the cyclone ebbing away, Rehana told Maya it was only a slight change in Sohail, that the mother had been right about her son. He didn’t even grow a beard.

There were ripples of darker things. They heard that the Hussain boy, a few years younger than Sohail, had drowned himself. And the neighbour’s son Shahabuddin had beaten his pregnant wife because he believed she was carrying a demon child.

But most of the boys and girls were as serious and obedient as they had ever been. They attended their classes; they married and bore children and warmed milk for their parents every evening. They put their memories away as best as they could, and they wiped the traces of blood from their hands and from the hems of their saris. And Rehana rested easy, sure that her son wouldn’t take his interest too far. After all, she was the one who had given him the Book.

1984
August

Cancer. Every time Dr Sattar said the word his voice dipped, until he started calling it ‘the disease’ and then, occasionally, ‘the C’. The operation was only the beginning. Rehana would need chemotherapy, powerful poisons that would kill the cancer. But they might kill her too. It was an uncertain science, the treatment often worse than the disease. Maya listened and the words went straight to her blood. She had never taken seriously the possibility that she might someday have to live without her mother. Death was something that had already happened to her; her father had died before she even knew that death was longer than sleep; later, death happened to the people she treated; she held her hand up against it every day, against dysentery and malaria and snakebites. Death had even skirted past Nazia, leaving scars on her legs but allowing her to live. She had never imagined, never seriously, that death would take something from her again.