The Good Muslim (5 page)

‘Okay. You have a board?’

He unfolded a sheet of paper. On it, someone had attempted a crude reproduction of a Ludo board, the square boxes crisscrossing each other and filled in with a blue pencil.

Zaid produced a handful of stones. ‘White ones are yours,’ he said. ‘Black are mine.’

‘Where did you get this?’

‘My ammoo made it for me.’

‘Really?’ Maya said, wondering if he wanted to talk about his mother, dead less than a week now. ‘You played Ludo with her?’

He nodded vigorously. ‘Every day.’

He produced a single die. ‘You roll first,’ Maya said.

Six. ‘Chokka!’ he announced, moving his stone across the sheet.

‘Zaid,’ Maya said, rolling a three, ‘do you go to school?’

‘No,’ he said, blowing on the dice. ‘But I’m going.’

‘When?’

‘Next year. Ammoo promised.’

‘Do you know you have to wear a uniform to school?’

‘Pant-shirt?’

‘Yes, pant-shirt.’

He grinned. ‘I know.’

‘Your father might not allow it.’

He rolled a four. ‘I ate you!’

‘I think you skipped one.’

‘No, it was a four.’ He moved the stone back. ‘One-two-three-four. See?’

She was quite sure he had been five places behind. She let it go, losing to him quickly, and as soon as the game was over he folded the paper, tucked it under his arm, like a surveyor carrying his plans, and disappeared.

Zaid came and went. Maya sometimes found him squatting in the flowerbeds, picking insects out of the weeds. His Bangla was coarse, his consonants slurred. And his body was a mess. A rash that peppered his skin caused him to scratch and bleed. There was a line of small indentations on his forearm, dirt in every crease and ripple of him. He was six but looked about four, his wrists and ankles narrow, brittle. He wore identical, pale blue kurtas that were too small or too big, and a cap on his head, pushed back so that it circled his head like a crown.

*

Maya was reluctant to leave the house. In the morning she jogged around the lake, and sometimes, when Ammoo asked, she walked over to the shop at the top of the road and bought a few things. She had written three letters to Nazia, pleading with her to stay in touch, offering to send money if she needed anything. She had tried to ring once, at the post office in town, leaving a message, saying she would ring back three days later at exactly the same hour. Three days later the man at the post office said he had spread the word, but no one had come to receive her telephone call.

She rang again the following week. The man was polite. He didn’t know if Nazia had returned from the hospital. Maya remembered him: he was the one who had delivered her telegram.

‘Are you well?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, apa, but my daughter is ill.’

Why did this give her pleasure? Was it that the villagers would get sick, now that she was not there to look after them? ‘Will you tell her I rang?’ she said, skipping over the catch in her voice.

‘I will tell her, apa.’

‘Thank you.’

‘The joldugi will be sweet this year, apa.’

She would miss the pineapples, he was saying, and perhaps they would miss her.

*

‘Zaid, I’m going to the vegetable man. Do you want to come?’

‘Wait,’ he said, holding up his hand. He bounded up the stairs, returning a few minutes later with a crumpled piece of paper.

Maya took it from him. ‘Let me see that.’

A shopping list from upstairs.

Okra, it said. Potatoes. One gourd.

They set off down the road. ‘Where are your shoes?’

He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’ Skipping lightly over the hot road. She steered him towards the shade. Turning a corner, they came upon a large building with open windows.

Two twos are four, three twos are six, four twos are eight.

Zaid, holding the shopping note, stood frozen.

The name on the gate said
AHSANULLAH MEMORIAL BOYS’ SCHOOL
.

‘You’ve seen it before?’ she said, turning to ask him, but he had disappeared. A moment later he was the other side of the gate, peering into the window. He pulled the cap from his head.

‘Someone will see you,’ she called out as he worked his way around the building. ‘Come back.’

He ducked out of sight. She waited five, ten minutes. She heard a whistle and followed it, turned a corner and found him waiting for her. He had scaled the high wall at the back of the school building and dropped into the street; his kurta was streaked with orange-brown dust. He pulled the cap from under his arm, planted it back on his head. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ll be late.’

The vegetable man measured out the okra and potatoes, then fetched the gourd. He didn’t request any money; the upstairs people paid on account. ‘Ask the Huzoor to pray for me,’ he said.

1984
March

On Independence Day, Maya switched on the television and saw the Dictator laying wreaths at Shaheed Minar, the Martyrs’ Memorial. He had a small dark head and wide shoulders fringed by military decorations. Last month he had tried to change the name of the country to the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh. And before that, he had bought a pair of matching Rolls-Royces, one for himself, another for his mistress.

Now, on the anniversary of the day the Pakistan Army ran its tanks over Dhaka, he was making a speech about the war. Eager to befriend the old enemy, he said nothing about the killings. He praised the importance of regional unity. All Muslims are Brothers, he repeated. She couldn’t bear to listen. She switched off the television and found her mother in the kitchen, frying parathas. Sufia was lifting up discs of dough and patting them tenderly between butter-lined hands.

At dusk, Maya walked from Elephant Road to Shaheed Minar in her bare feet. She stepped on newspapers and plastic bags, feeling the rough grit of sand moving pleasantly between her toes, the warmth of the tarmac slowing her down until she was barely moving, tiptoeing her way forward. A light breeze caught her under the chin, and she held the straps of her shoes between her fingers and nodded, smiling, to the small groups of people on the road beside her.

All through the movement, they had walked barefoot from Elephant Road to Shaheed Minar in red-and-white saris, greeting one another with the national salutation, Joy Bangla.
Victory to Bengal
.

There were only a handful of people on the road today, making their slow way through the traffic. Horns blared impatiently behind them. On the corner of Zia Sarani, Maya sidestepped a broken bottle and considered putting on her sandals. The thought irritated her. They should have closed the roads and cleaned the pavements, and there should have been a bigger crowd, thousands of people carrying children on their backs, grasping at the retreating feeling of having once, many years ago, done something of significance.

She caught the eye of a long-haired man in a woollen shawl. The man shook his head, as though he knew what she was thinking, telling her not to mind so much.

She wouldn’t be consoled. She cradled her anger, tightening her hands around the clutch of flowers she had plucked from the garden. Why hadn’t Ammoo come, and Sohail? Why, when they had lived every moment of that time together, was she here alone, between the dark blue sky and a street full of rubbish?

The memorial was illuminated by candles. The wide steps led up to three narrow concrete structures, each rising up, then bending forward, as if to provide shelter for the visitors. An enormous paper sun, painted red, was suspended from behind. The wind picked up, bending the tiny candle flames, pushing the willow tree until its leaves shook and fell forward.

Shaheed Minar was the first thing the Pakistan Army destroyed in the war. It was also the first thing to be rebuilt, taller and wider, but Maya wished they had left it broken, because now, shiny and freshly painted, it bore no signs of the struggle.

She sat down on the top step, the flowers in her lap, and watched while people made their offerings. Kneeling in front of the pillars, heads bowed. No one spoke. She saw a man weeping quietly in a corner of the arch. He brought his hand to his cheek, wiping roughly. Then he turned and looked directly at her. He stood for a moment, leaning his head forward as if to make her out in the dying light. She rose, the flowers dropping from her lap. He was beside her in an instant.

‘Maya.’

‘Joy – is that you?’

He picked up the flowers and held them out to her, and she was jolted by the memory of him, now almost a decade old. Joy. Younger brother of Sohail’s best friend. He had spent most of the war at the bungalow, an errand boy for the guerrillas, ferrying supplies back and forth from the border. He had lost a brother, a father and a piece of his right hand to the war. And he had given her a nickname once; she tried to remember it now.

They looked at each other for a long time. He was taller than she remembered. He moved towards her and, without knowing it, she took a step back. ‘I thought you were in America,’ she said, recalling the last time they had met, when he told her he was moving to New York. She had taken it personally, his abandoning the country so soon after its birth.

‘I was.’

‘But now you’re here.’

‘I’m back. Almost a year now. And you? The grapevine told me you were somewhere in the north.’

‘I’m back too.’ She didn’t know how else to explain the long way she had come.

‘And how is Sohail?’ His face was dark in the half-light of the candles, red in the shadow of the red sun behind Shaheed Minar, but she could see his broad forehead, the angle of his jaw.

‘His wife died,’ Maya said.

‘Yes, I heard. I – I thought of calling him, but—’

‘He doesn’t have a phone.’ They began to walk towards the university. Maya resisted the urge to make Joy recall what her brother had been like, in the battlefield, at war, as a student revolutionary, to share the tragedy of his transformation. ‘Tell me about New York. How tall are the buildings, really?’

‘Taller than in the films.’

‘Taller than that? You must have felt very small.’

‘It isn’t the buildings that make you feel small.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I was a taxi-driver,’ he said. He looked at her and she gave him a small smile, as if to say it was all right his driving a taxi, there was no shame in it. ‘And I got married.’

‘Married!’ She stopped in her tracks. ‘Unforgiveable. You get married and you don’t tell anyone?’

They had reached the giant banyan tree in front of the Art College, under which they had passed so many afternoons before the war. He pressed a palm against it and leaned back. ‘It wasn’t that kind of marriage.’

‘What, then?’ She thought about it for a moment, the answer came to her, and before she knew it she had blurted out, ‘Pregnant?’

He laughed. ‘Maya-bee. Stings like a bee. Like Muhammad Ali.’

That was the nickname. Maya-bee.

He went on. ‘I married her so I could stay in the country. My student visa ran out and I didn’t want to come back.’

‘So attached to foreign,’ she said.

‘I know how you feel about it – you made it very clear the last time we saw each other.’ He pulled a box out of his pocket and held it up to her.

‘A cigarette from New York? I can’t refuse.’

He put two cigarettes in his mouth, lit both and passed one to her.

‘I saw that in a movie once,’ she said.

‘Me too.’

‘I thought you didn’t like the cinema.’ She was reminding him of the soldier he had been, the one who was worried about appearing soft.

‘I’m not the same man any more.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

He changed the subject. ‘But they tell me
you
haven’t changed a bit. Still the same fighting spirit.’

She blushed, suddenly shy. She told him about Rajshahi, about becoming a village doctor, omitting the cause of her sudden departure. And she pictured him crying, the way he had lifted his hand to his face. She wanted to say something to him about his brother. Aref had been Sohail’s best friend at university, the two inseparable once Sohail discovered that Aref’s father, like Ammoo, was Urdu-speaking, that they both had relatives in Pakistan. It had set them apart from the others, having to square their politics with their family history.

She was still holding her shoes. When she bent down to slip them on she saw that he too was barefoot, his trousers rolled up. ‘Where are your shoes?’

‘I left them at home.’

‘In New York?’

They both laughed. He hailed a rickshaw, holding out his hand to help her to her seat, and just as she was about to wave goodbye he slipped in beside her. ‘I’d like to see Sohail,’ he said.

She wondered how much he knew – and if she should tell him about the upstairs, and all the visitors, and the sight of their clothes, hanging thick and black on the washing line, and how years ago they had thrown away all their light bulbs, their darkness now interrupted only occasionally by the tiny yellow presence of oil lamps.

‘Now’s not a good time,’ she said. ‘He’s out of town.’

He lowered himself out of the rickshaw. ‘Another day,’ he said, nodding his head to her as if he were wearing a cap. Then he said: ‘There’s a party next Friday at Chottu and Saima’s. Why don’t you come?’

She had heard of Chottu and Saima’s wealth, their big house in Gulshan. She was a little curious. And, she thought, she wouldn’t mind knowing when she would see Joy again. ‘Maybe. I’ll phone you, okay?’

On her way home, Maya recalled the last time she had seen Joy. Sheikh Mujib had been released from jail in Pakistan and was arriving in Dhaka that morning. People were lining up along the streets all the way from the airport to Road 32 in Dhanmondi, where he lived. Maya met Chottu and Saima on Mirpur Road. Chottu had painted a green-and-red flag on his cheek. She told him he looked like a clown. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘Joy Bangla!’ By then the crowds were streaming in from all sides, pouring out of houses, shops, abandoning their cars, jumping out of rickshaws. Children were pulled up on shoulders. When she looked back, the road had disappeared behind her, replaced by a swell of bodies. Finally they came to the street where Mujib would be passing and staked out a place on the footpath. The singing grew louder. ‘He’s coming,’ Chottu said, standing on his toes. ‘I can see him.’