The Good Muslim (31 page)

Khoka and the boatman make their way to the shore, leaving her alone with Zaid. It’s getting chilly and she unzips her burkha and envelops the boy within it. He turns his back to her and she curls herself around him, her hands gently stroking his hair. His breathing slows.

‘We’ll go home,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be home.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Don’t worry, it won’t be like before.’

‘I tried to run away.’

‘I know, Rokeya told me.’

‘But Abboo sent me back.’

‘He won’t, once you tell him everything. He’ll never send you there again. Sleep now. Tomorrow we’ll be home.’

She is tired now, so tired. She thinks he is saying something to her, but she isn’t sure.
I want a bicycle. I already told him
. ‘Don’t worry,’ she mumbles. ‘I’ll talk to him. Nothing bad will happen to you now.’

Alifbatasa
.

It is only a few moments of sleep, but she will remember them as the sweetest she has ever known, because the boy breathes beside her, the years unmarked ahead of him.

She is dreaming when she hears it, the small splash, little more than a hiccup in the water. But she knows, she knows it is him. She plunges in, the burkha billowing around her, the current pulling her away from the boat in an instant. She calls out to him, she opens her eyes underwater, tries to gaze through the darkness and the liquid silt of the Jamuna, falls deeper and deeper into the night of it, and, then, a pair of strong hands on her shoulders. She opens her eyes. Khoka. She struggles, pushing against him, but they are already on the boat now. How strong he is. How rough the current, how hungry.

She wakes to a slap on the head, and hands that grab her, pulling her arms apart. She discovers something about the police at that moment: that they divide the body so that one side cannot collude with the other. They raise her up, off her feet, and she screams WHEREISZAID, before her head hits the floor of the truck and all is black.

Cold and not a Speck of Light

Cold and not a speck of light. In the dark, she fumbles for her face. Nose, broken. Lips like burst fruit. She presses, examines, the pain spreading to her cheeks, her temples.

She tugs at the burkha. It’s a cruel joke, the way she has clung to this garment. The other prisoners are nearby but she can’t hear them. She was with them at first, crammed into a room where the women slept in shifts. But she started screaming and wouldn’t stop. The women surrounded her, making noises of comfort. Still she screamed.

ZAIDWHEREISZAID.

Finally a policeman came into the cell, threw her to the ground and pounded her into blackness. She opened her eyes to this: a coffin of a room, no longer anyone to shout at.

The slide of metal. A plate, a glass of water.

She drinks the water but when they come to collect the tray she throws it at them. Let her body taste hunger. Better if her head is light, her limbs heavy. Better not to remember the deep underwater sound.

They send her a woman. Soft voice. You haven’t eaten in three days.

Where is Zaid?

Are you on hunger strike? Tell us why you’re here.

Of course they know why she is there. Why else would they have brought her in? A pre-emptive strike by that slant-toothed Huzoor.

Where is Zaid?

How very stupid she has been. Wanted so badly for her brother to return to her that she had ignored her own oath. First. Do. No. Harm.

A small hand collides with her cheek. The lip opens up again. ‘Eat, bitch. I will not have your death on my hands.’

Days later, maybe a week, she cannot tell, she is packed into a van. Hands tied together with rope and the smell of the country in her nostrils, grass and paddy and drying cow dung all the way to the edge of town. A man writes her name into a ledger.

In Rajshahi, she was surrounded by children. She lost count of how many she had helped to bring into the world, but she kept a tally of the ones she buried, dead because of cholera, or snakebite, or the sudden rise of a nearby river, or because the tin of milk was too dear when the mother dried up, or for no reason at all. For no reason at all she had seen one hundred and thirty-seven to their graves.

She had loved every one of them, even if she had known them only long enough to pronounce their deaths, putting her ear to their little chests and telling their mothers it was over, there was nothing more to be done. But none had pounced on her heart with such ease, not a living or a dead one. A tongue-twisting, card-cheating, disappearing phantom of a child.

*

Dhaka Central Jail. A big square room, packed with women. Smells of piss and the air is cloudy with the breaths of too many. Like country, like jail. Everybody poor. Death a few feet away. Birth too. A woman in labour is dragged away, head lolling. Maya could have helped, but she does not. An old woman is combing her hair. It hurts, there are bruises on her head. Stop, she says. Water is sprinkled on her eyes. Food passed through salty, wrinkled fingers. She opens her eyes. The woman is a dark shadow, white irises painted into her face.

Scraps of her life come back to her. Swimming in the pond with Nazia. The smell of sesame trees. The books burning in the garden. Sohail’s voice.
I killed, Maya. I killed.
So that he won’t become like me. It wasn’t Piya, it was Silvi. It was the war. War made it too late.
I killed.
Now she knew what it was, the heaviness of death.

Someone calls her name. She is led to the bars at the front of the cell. Joy is crouching on the other side. She raises her eyes and sees that he is crying. She considers lightening the mood, saying something about how they are even now, both jailbirds, but the only thing she wants to say is ‘Where is he?’

Joy drops his head. ‘They haven’t found him yet.’

The light shifts. She can see the full length of him, his sturdy shoulders, his thick-soled shoes. She hasn’t been aware of being afraid, all this time, but now her fingers are reaching out and she is grasping and animal-shaking the bars.

‘I’m going to get you out,’ Joy said. ‘It will take a few weeks.’

She stops. Outside, she will have to face it. She is afraid to ask what Ammoo said when she heard. And Sohail. What had Sohail said? ‘I don’t want to come out. I want to stay here.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Maya. I have a good lawyer working for you.’

‘You don’t want to marry me any more, I know it. What will your mother say?’

‘She knows everything. I told her you just wanted to get the boy out of there. It wasn’t your fault.’

He wraps his fingers around hers. A question comes to her lips. ‘Were you angry, after your father died?’

‘Why?’

‘I just want to know.’

‘I was so angry I went to the street with my gun, ready to kill anyone who looked like a Bihari or a Pakistani. That’s why my mother sent me to America – because I could have murdered someone.’

She understood now, why he had left so abruptly. And how cruel she had been. Stings like a bee.

‘The lawyer is pushing for a quick trial. Do you need anything?’

‘No.’

‘I’m having them check your food. You have to eat.’ He is trying not to cry again, his face wound tight with it.

The lamplight follows him for a few steps, and then he is gone, swallowed into the maw of the prison.

The next time, he brings her mother. She is allowed into a room with a table and two chairs. Ammoo is wearing a dark blue sari, and her face leaps out in the darkness, pale, round. She is wearing glasses. Gently, she lowers herself on to a chair. Joy’s hand hovers over Maya’s head. ‘I’ll be outside.’

‘I’ve come to tell you something,’ Ammoo says.

Maya cannot meet her eye. She reaches up over her head, pulls the nikab over her face. I cannot bear for you to see me.

‘I know you have always blamed Silvi for what happened to your brother.’

Silvi. Silvi had reached from across the road and put her hands around Sohail’s neck.

‘Did you know about Haji Mudassar?’

Maya searches for her voice. She nods.

‘He’s the imam they worship in Kakrail. But back in ’72 he was at the mosque on Road 13.’

The mosque by the lake. The Eidgah, where the men of the neighbourhood gathered on Fridays.

‘Sohail started to go there soon after the war.’

Maya’s voice emerged thinly from inside the nikab. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Haji Mudassar was like a father to Sohail.’

‘He never said anything to me about him.’

Ammoo leans her elbows on the table. ‘You know, I have always wondered which of you two missed your father more.’

It was me. It was me.

‘At first I thought it was you. A girl needs a father, I know that better than anyone. And I always thought, if your father were alive, he would not have let you go off to war. Or to Rajshahi. We would have been together, all of us. But when he died Sohail was only eight, you know. He was only eight and he became the man around the house. I used to send him to get the ration card, to pay the bills at the electricity office. You don’t remember. I had to, you know, I had no one else. And after what happened in the war, Sohail found Haji Mudassar.’

‘After what happened?’

‘He was coming back,’ she says, ‘and there was a man on the road – it was more like an accident, really.’

Why is she the last to know?

‘He told me that you knew,’ Ammoo says. ‘That night, when he burned his books, he told you.’

No, he never said. He never told her anything.
I killed, Maya. I killed
.

‘Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this, Maya – the reason I’m telling you is because a thing like that can destroy a man. It can take away years, your whole life.’

It isn’t the same. Zaid was just a boy.

‘And another thing – about Silvi. You mustn’t blame her so much. Towards the end she was – I think she understood.’

Forgive Silvi? She had started all of it.
There can be only One
, she had said. And the world had narrowed. Her guilt did not make Maya more forgiving.

‘Have they found him yet?’ she whispers.

Ammoo winds her fingers through Maya’s. Her grip is strong. ‘No, they haven’t found him.’ Her hand tightens. ‘You didn’t believe Zaid, when he told you his mother played Ludo with him and promised him he could go to school. But it was true.’

She does not want her mother to go. She clings to her and they have to pull her arms away.

Ammoo told her everything. Now she knew. Sohail rescued Piya from the barracks. Unshackled her and took her to her village. Only then did he consider going home himself. He walked south, on the Jessore Road, refugees crowding on either side of him. The peace was only a few days old and already they were flooding back. All day he walked, resting on the side of the road like everyone else, his arms folded under his blue-and-red checked shirt – a treasure, it had belonged to his friend Aref. After dark one night, he saw a man on the road. He was unlike any of the others, well fed, wearing a thick wool jacket, a scarf wrapped tight around his neck, his chin. Why was he walking with such confidence – striding, even? Sohail wanted to see him up close. Was he an enemy officer, trying to blend in with the crowd? Was he the officer who had held Piya? It didn’t matter. They had, in their own ways, all held Piya in the storeroom at the back of their barracks.

Sohail approached the man, and the man looked at Sohail, and Sohail thought he heard him say something; it was difficult to hear, because the man’s mouth was obscured by the woollen scarf around his neck. He came closer, his hand folding around his rifle.
Beta
, the man said,
beta
. Beta. That was the word Ammoo had always used to address Sohail, a tender word, a word from her past. An Urdu word. And before he knew it, he had released his rifle and embraced the man, embraced him as if he were his long-dead father, and the instant after that he took out the knife he had tucked into his lungi, and when the man saw the knife he kneeled and wrapped his arms around Sohail’s knees and said
Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem
. The man begged for his life. He begged but Sohail could hear only the words of the Kalma as he took hold of the man’s neck and replied
There is no God but God
, and before he knew it they were speaking in chorus, killing and dying, dying and killing, his palm sure as it handled the knife, and in the glint of that knife he saw the eyes of the girl in the barracks, her head round and with a dusting of hair, and he was gripped by all the things he had seen and could now imagine, things that necessitated his hand across the man’s throat, as he recited
God is Great, God is Great, God is Great
.

Blood flowed from the man’s neck. Sohail picked up his scarf and unwrapped the man’s face, and as he looked down the realisation crashed into him with the force of a bullet.
Beta
. This man was not a soldier. He was not a soldier or a Bihari or any kind of enemy. He was just a very old man, salt-and-pepper hairs on his stubbly chin. And he had the face of a father, a kind, unremarkable, worried face. A nothing man. A man who had done nothing. Walking home from the war like everyone else.

Sohail’s life, in exchange for that death. Paying for it in flesh and blood. It must be there, ticking within him. It was why he had shunned Ammoo, because she had not taught him well enough. If she had given him the Book sooner, he might have known better. He might not have done it.

The next day Maya is visited by a stocky man in a tight-fitting suit. He introduces himself as her lawyer. ‘Now,’ he begins, ‘I’m afraid the situation is a little more complicated than we thought. The mullahs have ganged up against you.’

She was right. It was that Huzoor, acting meek and plunging the knife into her back.

‘Problem is, the Dictator has been trying to cosy up to them, so he’s taken against you. And you didn’t help your case, by making him look like a fool.’

The Dictator? She is confused. ‘I thought I was in jail for kidnapping my nephew, Zaid.’

‘I heard about that, madam, and I’m very sorry. But this is far more serious.’