The Good Muslim (28 page)

The song ended. She heard the swish of a takoo lizard, its low staccato call. Should she have brought a lamp? Keep singing. A revolutionary song, ‘Amar protibader bhasha, amar protirodher agun.’ This one was getting her blood pumping. Her fingers moved and twisted and battered the keys. Sohail had loved this song. It would bring it all back for him. She kept an eye on his door, but it never stirred, not for the whole length of the song. A poem, then. She recited as much as she knew of Nazrul’s ‘Bidrohi’, keeping the tempo with three fingers on the harmonium. When she faltered on the second stanza, she imagined he would burst out of his room and finish the line for her. Still nothing. She switched to the tenderest Tagore song she knew, ‘Anondo Dhara’.
Stream of Joy.
She heard something. The creak of his door. A column of light, his shadow encased within it.

He was coming out. Her voice soared in anticipation. Something in his arms, it was too dark to make out. Just close your eyes and keep singing. ‘Anondo dhara bohichey bhuboney.’ Out he came, walking through the hallway and into the driveway. The shuffle of things. His books. Oh, he was moving them out. Don’t falter, just keep on going. He is only doing what he said he would do. Someone must be coming to collect the books. Whoever it was, she would stop them, convince them to leave the books in front of the house. Ha! What would he do then? Perhaps he just needs to hide them from Silvi – yes, that may be it. He’s protecting them. Never mind about the books. Keep singing. Bohichey bhuboney. In and out of his room, in and out; she could hear him occasionally grunting with the weight of the crates as he moved them to the driveway.

She was singing without thinking now, whatever song came to her. She started one without finishing another. Her body swayed with it, fingers and breath and tongue obeying. Eyes squeezed shut, believing that when she opened them, she would have sung them back to another time. A time when her brother wasn’t packing his books into crates. The singing was heating up the garden. This is how Tagore must have meant his songs to be done. Warming the spirit and the body. Words coming out with the roar and spit of a fire.

She opened her eyes.

The garden was orange black and Sohail stood in the middle of it, tossing books into a pile. Arm up, fling, watch the fire grow, fling. Was she still singing? She had stopped. Nothing but the sound of burning now, a low growl, and she wanted to move but she could not. The bucket was under the garden tap. She could attempt to fill it up, douse the fire. But its colour was speaking, its colour was saying, I am greater than you. My fire has silenced your fire.

It must be a dream. A great calm flowed through her. She took up the song again. While Ammoo dragged her into the house, while Ammoo filled the bucket and doused the flames, her voice remained tied to the verse. It was only when she heard Ammoo shout that she was roused, because Ammoo was saying it was all her fault, as she picked the floating scraps of paper out of her hair, as she rubbed her cheek, black with print that had turned back to ink. Only then did she realise what had happened.

Sohail had burned all the books.

‘You pushed him,’ Ammoo was shouting. ‘You pushed and you pushed.’ And Maya heard herself protest: ‘What could I do? I was only singing.’ But her mother, eyes as big as eggs now, said, ‘Did you listen to anything he said, up on that rooftop? Did you listen? No. You mocked him. You turned deaf and you mocked him.’

‘Because I knew where it was going.’

‘It didn’t have to. It did not. You led him here, calling him a mullah. Why? You couldn’t stand for him to be different.’

Et tu, mother.

Maya made the arrangements that very night, telephoning Sultana and packing her bags, her lungs full of the fire. In the morning, she disappeared. Two months later, the sermons on the roof were stopped. The little tin shack went up, and Sohail and Silvi built their world on top of the bungalow. Mrs Chowdhury died, silently and without a tear from her daughter. Zaid was born, brought into the world by a midwife whose face was covered by a piece of black netting. He opened his eyes to that, an empty space where the welcoming laugh should have been.

*

Maya took the bus to Tangail. Without unpacking her bag or greeting her friend, she began a shift at the clinic. The duty doctor was hassled, a spray of blood clinging to the collar of his shirt, as if he had bled there himself. ‘What are you doing here alone?’ he asked, rolling up his sleeves and bending over a sink, cracked, grey-rimmed.

‘I’m a friend of Sultana,’ she said. ‘From the medical college.’

He appeared too tired to ask any more questions. ‘There’s a cholera epidemic.’ The hallways were crowded; people threw down their gamchas and waited in the corridors. ‘You know what to do – ORT.’ He handed her a white jacket. She was dismissed.

She raced through one shift, then another, filled with a restless energy, and with the fear that if she sat down, if she thought about what she had done, she might be forced to run back to the bungalow. By the second night, she had found a stray stethoscope and wrapped it around her neck, and when she looked in the mirror she was glad to find a drawn face staring back at her, all signs of her heartache obscured by physical exhaustion.

When Sultana caught up with her the next morning, she was weaving through the ward, skirting between the patients on the floor, between the beds.

‘Time to stop,’ she said.

She blinked, taking a moment to recognise her. ‘I still have a few from last night.’

‘It’s been thirty-eight hours. Let’s go home.’

She blinked again, salt stinging her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said, turning her face away so her friend wouldn’t see her tears. ‘My things are in the other ward.’

She stayed until the cholera had done its worst. When it was time to go, Sultana’s husband said, ‘My friend Ranen has a clinic in Rangamati. They’re always shorthanded.’

After a fortnight in Khulna, and a week in Khagrachari, she found herself on the train to Rangamati. On the ferry she heard the sound of other languages, syllables with hard edges, and further still along her journey she saw women in long skirts and tunics, their faces small and squarish, babies tied to their backs with lengths of homespun, dark blue and yellow and red. They were called tribals, the Chakma and the Marma and the Santal, there before anyone else, before maps and Pakistan and the war. She saw a young girl and her mother eating with their fingers out of a leaf-wrapped parcel. They laughed with their jaws open and slapped one another on the cheek, gently, in admonishment, affection.

She finished her stint in Rangamati and took the train south again. When she stopped moving she found herself at the edge of the country, past the Chittagong port, and wandered on to an abandoned, tawny-sanded thread of a beach. Cox’s Bazaar. The water was cloudy but pleasantly warm, and as she dipped her ankles she found she could no longer taste the cinders, the tarry blackness that had got under her tongue and between her fingers. Now her tongue was clear, and as she squatted in the water, allowing her kameez to soak, she scrubbed between her toes, and the backs of her knees. At the guest-house, she continued to scrub at herself, this time with soap, splashing buckets of water over her head, attacking the dirt beneath her fingernails. She emerged red-faced, her hair wound into the thin striped towel that had come with the room.

She thought, for the first time since her departure, about her mother, and decided to send a telegram. After grappling with the words, she finally settled on
I am fine. Please do not worr
y.
It is better this way.

And that is how it happened. A few weeks here, a few weeks there. Rangamati, Bandorbon, Kushtia. She finally travelled back up, avoiding the city, weaving up the Jamuna, the Brahmaputra, and into Rajshahi, where she settled, where she had her dreams of orphanhood, and where she found herself eating purple berries under a jackfruit tree, waiting for the postman.

1985
February

Kakrail Mosque had none of the beauty of the mosques in the older parts of town. It was just a concrete structure, rectangular, with a minaret protruding upwards from its middle. Through the square-patterned grille, she could see men going about their business, kneeling down to pray, ducking under the taps to perform the Wazu, standing with their hands crossed in front of them, listening to a munajaat. So this was where Sohail spent all his time. Rising before dawn and making his way through the grey and sleeping city, to this place of fellow men.

She had woken Ammoo and told her she had to meet Sohail. Sohail, Ammoo said, sleep heavy in her mouth. You won’t find him. She had rushed out of the house, still wearing the grey cotton she’d had on since the night before, the birth fresh in her memory.

She entered through the gate and found a few men milling around outside the building. They looked at her, turned away, looked again. Stared, scratched behind their ears. She held back a smile. It’s all right, she wanted to say, I won’t bite you. Finally one approached her. ‘Women are not allowed,’ he said, clearing his throat.

‘I won’t stay long,’ she said, resisting the urge to stare him down. He couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. Beard coming in spare and reluctant. His shoulders still narrow, frame still folded in on itself. He was about to say something to her, but an older man came up behind him and put an enormous hand on his shoulder.

‘Begum, I’m very sorry but we have no provisions for women. You must leave immediately.’ His voice was as big as his hand, deep and rough, as if scraped along the road.

‘I have business here,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for my brother.’

‘The Jumma prayer will begin soon. You must go.’

She was so tired. How hard could it be to find your own brother? ‘Sohail Haque – I’m looking for Sohail Haque.’

The man hesitated. His mouth opened and closed, a great, gaping hole surrounded by a pelt of beard. ‘He isn’t here.’

He was lying.

‘But this is where he comes, every day. Every day he is here.’

‘He is no longer with us.’ The man moved his arm, and she could tell he wanted to push her but he couldn’t, not in front of the others, standing around now and nudging each other, the crowd growing as people arrived for the Friday prayer.

‘No longer? Where is he?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, giving her a look of undisguised impatience. The muezzin began the call to prayer. A megaphone sprang to life. Allah-hu Akbar Allaaaah hu Akbar.

The crowd around them began to line up for the prayer. The man cupped her elbow in his palm and led her to the gate. ‘Please – I must find my brother.’ She raised her voice. ‘Sohail, Sohail!’ But they were already at the gate, and with great force he hurled her elbow out on to the street and slammed the gate closed. ‘What are you all looking at?’ she heard him roar. ‘Get back to your prayers, go!’

He must be somewhere inside. She rubbed her elbow, and the night came back to her, Rokeya straining with her breech birth. Her confession. She considered the possibility of Rokeya’s being overcome by the pain of labour – but, in her experience, women were often at their most lucid at the moment of delivery. No, it had to be true. As soon as she had said it Maya knew it was true. The truth of it stopped the air in her throat. Zaid had lied about coming home on a holiday. She remembered Khadija’s words.
We sent him back
.

She heard someone behind her and turned around to see the young man she had first addressed. He leaned through a crack in the gate. ‘Your brother is at a mosque in Kolabagan. Take Elephant Road to Ghost Road. It’s a small place, next to an empty plot of land. A new building.’

‘A new mosque? But why?’ She wanted to reach through the gap, but he was already gone.

*

She followed the directions, Elephant Road to Ghost Road. She asked for the new mosque, waving down passers-by on the road. They pointed, directing her to smaller and smaller lanes. The people of this neighbourhood were intent on their tasks, the women dipping into buckets and coming up with pieces of washing, and the men carrying heavy things with agility, drums of water and boxed-up parcels and bags of cement. Even the telephone wires seemed to dangle over the pavements with lightness and grace.

When she saw the gate she knew it must be the one. Painted green, with a small star and crescent etched in white. She could smell the freshly laid cement, taste the white dust it imposed on the air around it. There was no bell to ring. She banged on the gate. No reply. She banged again. She turned the corner, looking for another entrance. A man walked past with a stack of bricks piled on his head. ‘Is this the new mosque?’ she asked him.

The man could not nod but called out: ‘You have to wait,’ he said. ‘They don’t open the gate.’

More waiting. She found a small cut in the high wall that surrounded the building and wedged herself into it, shielding her eyes against the sun with her hand. The Ghost Road residents drifted past. She thought about finding a telephone and ringing Joy. What would she say? He would drive up in his Honda and try to rescue her. She did not want to be rescued. The sun battered her arm, the lower part of her leg that was out of the shade. She dozed, waking blearily to catch the curious glances of people walking by.

The afternoon opened up, then fell away again, the streets quietening and slowing down, the shops shuttered or lit up for the evening, fluorescent bulbs and kerosene lamps and tiny open fires.

Sohail’s building did not stir. She hadn’t seen anyone go in or out. There was no call of the muezzin, no shuffle of bodies preparing for the prayer. Ammoo would have started to worry. She realised she hadn’t eaten all day, a throb in her stomach. She thought again that she should have waited for him to come home. Then the gate swung open and he was in front of her, his hands crossed over his chest.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘A long time. Can I come inside? I’m very thirsty.’

‘Wait.’ He dipped back through the gate and emerged with a tin mug of water.