The Good Muslim (23 page)

Sohail lifted a plastic container of water, poured a small measure into a glass. Water from the Well of Zamzam. He lifted his mother’s head and raised the glass to her mouth, tipping it slowly through the slight part in her lips. The drops that spilled on to her chin he did not wipe away. The men continued to recite. Dr Sattar brushed his eyes with a handkerchief.

During the war, the Pakistani soldiers would ask a boy, any boy on the street, to unwrap his lungi. Prove it, they would say. Prove you are one of us. The boy would fumble with the knot of his lungi and hold it open for the soldier to peer inside. It might be night. It’s too dark to see, the soldier would say. Take it out and show us. Show us your cut, you dirty Bengali.

Maya had taught herself away from faith. She had unlearned the surahs her mother had recited aloud, forgotten the soft feather of air across her forehead when Ammoo whispered a prayer and blew the blessing out of her mouth. She had erased from her memory all knowledge of the sacred, returned her body to a time before it had been taught to kneel, to prostrate itself.

In her seven years of roaming the countryside, she had witnessed an altogether different form of the faith. The mosques were few and far between; the city, proclaiming itself newly pious, was even further away. In villages the people worshipped saints and the Prophet in equal measure. They worshipped by prayer, yes, and like everyone else they fasted during the month of Ramzaan and kept a section of land aside, if they had it, to sell someday and embark on the trip to Mecca. But in the forest they prayed to Bon-Bibi, the goddess of the trees, and they invited Bauls to their villages – thin, reedy-voiced men who sang the songs of Lalon, turning the words of the Qur’an into song, a tryst between lovers, casting the divine as the beloved, the poet as His supplicant.

Occasionally she had stood at the edge of a concert, mesmerised by the voice of the Baul. But she could not bring herself to step inside, because of the boys on the roadside, and all the things she had witnessed, committed in the name of God.

The men filed silently out of the room. Only Sohail remained, stroking his mother’s forehead, whispering to her. Maya sat beside him and he reached out to her with his free hand. The room began to grow dark, the light finally changing to blue-black, and in the breeze was a hint of cold. Winter is here, she thought. Clementines will scent the city. Ammoo has planted a few vegetables this year: shim beans, cauliflower, tomatoes. Her cooking was always best in winter, suited to the bounty of the colder months. In the morning she would boil cauliflower and peas, and they would eat them just like that, with a few slices of boiled egg crumbled on top. Sohail, she remembered, would sometimes douse his plate with ketchup. Her grip on his hand tightened, and he returned her grasp, and they played this game, an old one, a Morse code of squeezes, until she was too cold to sit up and climbed into the bed with Ammoo, curling around her, resting her face against the outline of her shoulder, careful not to touch.

Maya slept, dreamed. In her dream her mother was very thirsty. Water, she said. Water. Then Sohail said it. Water. She’s asking for water.

Maya opened her eyes to see him pouring the Zamzam into Ammoo’s mouth. Her mouth was open. She swallowed. Maybe he would spoil the moment now by declaring it a miracle, but he just stood up and kissed his mother gently on her forehead. Then he collected his cap from the table and walked away without looking back, as though this was the only way the day could have ended.

She didn’t remember to look for Zaid until it had all passed. Searched under the desk and in the garden shed and behind the curtain of cobwebs at the foot of the stairs. He was gone. She asked Khadija if she knew where he was. ‘At the madrasa,’ she replied. ‘The Huzoor sent him back.’

Book Three

God wrongs no one,
Not even by the weight of an atom

1985
February

In winter, the rivers retreated. They sucked themselves back from the floodplain, and what was water became land once more.

The bungalow sank back into its habits. Downstairs, Rehana prepared the garden for winter and took up knitting; Sufia emptied the kitchen of all its contents and scrubbed each surface until it mirrored her hard hands and the sharp line of her jaw. And Maya returned to her columns, attacking the Dictator, the clergy, the Jamaat Party, Ghulam Azam, Nizami. Shafaat told her the letters had multiplied.
Who is S. M. Haque
, they asked. At the medical college, Dr Sattar told Maya that the students had organised a bet to guess which of their professors it might be. But he had a feeling he knew who it was. As she was leading her mother out of his office after her last check-up (I can’t see any signs of the disease, my dear. Your brother seems to have frightened it away), he said, with a tender wink,
Be careful, won’t you
? And he offered her a job, if she wanted one.
No point in wasting all that training.

Upstairs, too, life continued as before. Maya stopped attending the taleem. Khadija did not call down to her, and she did not go up. She thought of ten of those visits, of Khadija’s warm lap, the enveloping sound of the recitation. She knew she had been seduced, knew she had betrayed something in herself by accepting the solace it had given her. She carried a small wedge of guilt, for her own falsity, the fraud of it. As for Sohail’s act, his words into Ammoo’s ear, tipping the zamzam into her mouth – she had no way of cataloguing this, of putting a name to his act. The name that came to her – miracle – was not one she could believe.

Joy persuaded Maya to attend another meeting. Jahanara Imam was going to bring up something important, something Maya would regret not having heard. Ali Rahman, the tall actor who had played Hamlet in all the Bailey Road productions, opened the meeting with a recitation from Gitanjali. Beside her, Joy was a solid presence, his hands placed carefully on his knees. She noticed the bigness of him, the great pads of his fingers, the abundant eyebrows. Everything was verdant within this man, ample, alive. She suddenly had the urge to listen to the speeches with her arm woven through his.

After the poetry they all sang. ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’
.
Jahanara Imam pulled herself to the stage and they stood and cheered. She spoke again about the war criminals. This time, Maya listened. Mujib and Zia had failed to punish the killers, and now the Dictator would never push for a trial. The collaborators will continue to live among us, she said, if we don’t do something. She had made a decision.

If the state wouldn’t give them justice, they would find it for themselves. They would hold a people’s tribunal in which the killers and collaborators would be tried and sentenced. It took a moment for people to realise what she meant. A cheer went up in the room. Clapping. The people will pronounce their verdict on Ghulam Azam, and Nizami, and the Razakars who raped our country in ’71. They would hold a trial for the killers – a citizens’ trial. Not just for the boys who died in the battlefield, but for the women who were raped.

‘Right now, across the country, thousands of women live with the memory of their shame. The men who shamed them roam free in the villages. No one reminds them of the sin they have committed. For those women, this trial. For them, justice must be done. If the courts of this nation will not bear witness to their grief,
we
will bear witness.
We
will bring them justice. It is our duty, our most solemn duty as citizens, as survivors.’

Maya had only one thought.

Piya.

Jahanara Imam finished her speech. A discussion began about the details. Who would stand trial? What would the witnesses say? Would there be real victims, real testimony? How would they convince people to take the stand?

She remembered what Piya said about her ordeal. I have done something. Something I regret. Something very bad.
I
have done. How could she have allowed Piya to put it that way? The memory of it came back to Maya, pointed and sharp. She forced herself to remember the moment at the clinic, the desperate look in her eye as she asked her to
finish
it.
Take away the bad thing
. Maya shook her head, trying to evict the memory, and before she knew it her shoulders began to shake and her cheeks to burn with the heat of tears, and she remembered her mother in the hospital, believing she would die, and Piya, who had turned to her for help, whom she had failed.

The meeting broke up, people rising from their seats and circling Jahanara Imam. Maya sat frozen, water falling hard and quick out of her nose. She tried to wipe her face with the back of her hand. ‘Let’s go,’ Joy said. ‘I’ll take you home.’

She didn’t want to go home. He packed her into the car and they sped out of the neighbourhood. Maya rubbed roughly at her face with the end of her sari until her cheeks were raw. Joy turned on Elephant Road and parked in front of a two-storey building. ‘Will you stop with me, have a cup of tea?’

There was a café on the first floor, large panes of glass revealing a view of the shoe shops on Elephant Road. They sat opposite one another in a green leather booth. For a long time neither said anything. Joy allowed her to gaze out of the window for a few minutes, to smooth her hands over her face until she was sure the tears had stopped. Then he fixed her with a light, teasing stare.

‘So, now that I’ve got you,’ he said, ‘perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity about something.’

‘Nothing doing,’ she replied, matching his tone. She fixed her eyes on the menu, relieved to be there, the waves of feeling slowly abating. ‘I’m not telling you anything.’ Below them, the cars and rickshaws wrestled silently on Elephant Road. ‘Not until you tell me about your American wife.’

‘Okay, fine. But let’s make a deal. I answer all of your questions – all, and then you have to answer one of mine. Just one. Okay?’

‘What is this?’ She pointed to something on the menu.

‘Oh, they’ve just misspelled cheeseburger. Have you had one before? It’s like a keema sandwich. They can be rather bland – I can ask them to put some chillies on it for you.’

‘All right, chillies. But no cheese.’

‘You don’t like cheese?’

‘It gives me wind.’

He laughed.

‘What?’

‘It’s like you missed the lesson at school on how to talk to boys.’

‘I’m a doctor,’ she said, irritated, ‘bodily functions don’t embarrass me. And what kind of education did you get? Mine certainly didn’t include any life lessons.’

‘I went to the same school as your brother. St Gregory’s. Those Jesuits told us everything we needed to know about girls.’

The waiter approached and took their orders. Joy was polite to the man, called him Bhai, said thank you after he’d jotted down the order. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Yes, lemonade.’

‘It’s very sour. Sure you want to take the risk?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Now,’ he said, placing his hands on the table, ‘what do you want to know?’

‘About your women.’

‘There was just the one.’

‘Really? I hear rumours.’

‘People always trying to set me up – you know, poor injured freedom fighter needs a wife.’

‘Perhaps you’ll succumb.’

‘Perhaps. You want to know about Cheryl. But maybe before you hear that story, I should tell you about all the shocking jobs I did while I was in New York. Just to get it over with – full disclosure. For a year I washed dishes. I drove a taxi, I told you that already. I cleaned hotel rooms for a while, then I moved on to cleaning houses. Rich people, Park Avenue, you wouldn’t believe. Offices too. I saw a lot of things in those offices, after dark and all that. But the last job I had was for an old man. He was dying. He had doctors, nurses, everything, but he needed someone to watch him at night. I slept in his room. That’s how I met Cheryl.’

‘She worked for him too?’

‘She was his daughter.’

Maya’s eyebrows went up.

‘Yes, that’s exactly what her family thought. Marrying the help. Big scandal. I needed a passport, she needed to rebel, that was it.’

‘Did you love her?’ Maya imagined a light-filled room, cigarette smoke deep in the furniture, and a tall, elegant woman in a man’s shirt, the collars wide about her neck.

He seemed to consider the question. ‘Maybe a little. It wasn’t just a business transaction. We had to live together, learn about each other. But in the end we couldn’t stay together.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the relationship was incomplete. I couldn’t tell her everything.’

The food arrived, a pair of meat patties between soggy layers of bread. Maya took a bite, the grease leaking on to her fingers. It was salty, and fiery from the chillies. She decided she liked it. ‘Very good, your American dish,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘So, you ended it.’

‘I came home.’

‘Poor girl. To be left behind.’ She thought of Cheryl, now without the solid bulk of Joy. How hollow her life must seem.

‘She couldn’t have been here with me.’

‘“Never the twain shall meet”?’

He shrugged, confused.

‘Kipling, you know? And Forster too.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Nothing. Just something I read in a book.’ She remembered now, he wasn’t the bookish type.

‘I’m not very well read.’ He crumpled the napkin in his hand and tossed it on to his plate. ‘Not like your brother.’

‘Don’t worry. He burned his books anyway.’

‘Burned?’

‘Hitler-style. In the garden.’

Joy clapped his hand over his mouth.

‘Yes, really.’ She had relived the incident so many times in her mind, she had forgotten how shocking it was.

They sat for a moment, picking at the remnants of their meal. Joy didn’t ask her why, or how, Sohail had burned his books, and she was happy not to have to describe it.

‘I suppose you’ve answered my question. I wanted to know why you left home, why you stayed away so long. Was it because of the books?’