The Good Muslim (7 page)

The woman, packed tightly into a sleeveless blouse, resembled a stack of bicycle tyres. ‘Hello,’ Maya said, trying not to stare at the dough of her neck.

‘So you’re a friend of Saima?’

‘Yes, school friend.’

The woman stared intently into Maya’s face. Maya stared back.

‘You’re not married?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t want to get married?’

‘I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it.’

The woman’s eyes bored into Maya. ‘Come with me,’ she said, taking Maya’s arm. ‘Meet my brother. Saadiq. He’s a chartered accountant.’

Maya pulled away. ‘Oh, no, thank you.’

The woman held fast. ‘He’s very, very eligible. All the girls like him. But I want someone plain and simple, not too – you know what I mean? The girls these days. Come, come, what can it hurt?’

Saima approached and put her arm around Maya’s shoulders. ‘So you’ve met my friend. She’s one of a kind, you know. Not only is she a doctor, but she sings – sweeter than a nightingale, she does. In fact, Maya, won’t you sing something for us, just a little something?’

The fat woman beamed. Maya shook her head. ‘I’m out of practice,’ she said.

Saima caught her eye. ‘Please don’t mind, I’m going to steal my friend away.’ She laughed and led Maya towards the food. ‘Don’t worry about her, she’s harmless.’ A long table had been laid out across the back wall of the garden. Men in white jackets were serving freshly rolled rootis and kebabs. At the other end of the table, biryani, mutton curry, fish cutlets and salad completed the meal.

There had been a day, not long after the war, when Maya was in a rickshaw passing through one of the new roads in Dhanmondi. The lake was calm, the day cloudless, the sun biting hard. In ’72 the houses in the neighbourhood were sparse; big lawns and open spaces separated each plot of land. The rickshaw was about to turn into Road 13, when Maya saw a woman crouching on a front lawn. She watched as the woman grabbed a fistful of grass and stuffed it quickly into her mouth, her eyes darting here and there. Although by then Maya had witnessed all manner of misery, all through the war and the summer after, when the rice died in the fields and people flooded the city with salt crusted around their mouths, it was that woman, caught under the glare of high summer, her sari falling about her like the sheltering wings of a long-extinct creature, who had always remained with her, and she had never been able to shake the feeling that they were all never more than a few steps from crouching on their lawns to be suckled by the very earth itself.

‘You should come and visit Rajshahi,’ she said to Saima; ‘you can see more of the country.’

She sighed. ‘Oh, I would love to. What a life you must have over there. My life is hectic, too hectic. There’s so much to do here. The house isn’t finished yet – upstairs still needs to be painted. And the toilets are a mess. The mistris, you have to watch them so closely.’

Maya nodded, distracted by how Saima pushed the food around her plate but didn’t seem to eat anything. ‘I can’t even find good help any more, the children can’t stand the bua, but at least she isn’t a thief, like the last one. But enough about me. Tell me, what is it like, coming home after all this time?’

‘It passed so quickly,’ Maya said. ‘Sohail’s wife died, you know.’

‘No, I didn’t know. Innalillah. We haven’t seen him in a long time. You both seemed to disappear together.’

Maya didn’t like the comparison. ‘He’s living upstairs, he has a son.’

‘What happened to him?’

She searched for the right words, but she couldn’t find them. She never knew how to tell the story of Sohail’s conversion, how he had morphed from an ordinary man into a Holy one. She wished she could be more honest with this woman who had been her friend. Long ago she could have told Saima that all this disgusted her – the painting of peasants, the weight of the food on her table, the way Blue Chiffon rested her hand on Chottu’s arm. But not any more.

Joy approached them, wiping his hands on a cloth napkin. ‘Delicious dinner, Saima. You’re as talented as you are beautiful.’

‘Flirting with my wife?’ Chottu said, slapping Joy hard on his back. ‘Someone should, I don’t have time for flirting-shirting – too busy making enough money to keep the woman in saris and earrings.’

Saima smiled, her face broad and tight.

‘Better be careful,’ Joy said. ‘Your wife is beautiful and your stomach is getting bigger by the day.’

‘Wife will come and go, my friend, but my tongue serves no woman.’

Over dessert – fruit trifle, made of tinned pineapples and peaches – the woman called Aditi approached Maya again. ‘Eaten?’

‘Yes, it was delicious.’

‘Saima always cooks enough to feed an army.’ Aditi lowered her voice. ‘To be honest I prefer dal-bhaat to this biryani stuff any day.’

‘Me too,’ Maya said.

‘Perhaps you’d like to meet other dal-bhaat people.’

‘Other dinosaurs, stuck in the past?’

‘Journalists.’

Maya was sceptical. ‘You mean the people telling us the Dictator is a great leader?’

‘We’re not all the same.’ She wrote an address on a piece of paper. ‘Come in for a visit.’

She folded the note into her palm – something to set against Saima’s biryani, her Alhamdulillah.

‘Call me,’ Saima said, hugging her tightly. ‘What am I saying, you’re playing hard to get. I’ll call you. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll have lunch. Oh, and tell your mother I send my love. Tomorrow, okay? Don’t forget.’

Maya hoped Joy wouldn’t speak on the ride home. Her sari had collapsed, and she had given up on it, putting her foot on the seat and allowing the pleats to unfold on her lap. The night was making her queasy. She thought about how excited Saima had been to see her – and how eager those villagers in Rajshahi had been to get rid of her. She was hovering in limbo. She felt too old and too young. Ugly. Ugly spinster in an ugly sari. Even so, it would be easy to slip back in. They would all forget about this awkward encounter and there would be afternoons with Chottu and Saima, swinging her legs over an armchair. She might persuade them to talk about the past, but mostly they would talk about each other and the people they knew, gossiping and complaining about the heat. A part of her wanted to do it, but she knew she wouldn’t. Was Joy thinking this, driving her home in silence? She didn’t care. He hadn’t exactly jumped to her defence. It was a mistake, this party – a mistake to think she could come home and everything would be as it was before.

*

Maya tried to forget about the party. She occupied herself with observing the comings and goings of the upstairs. The plump woman was called Khadija and she was the daughter of a wealthy farmer in Sylhet. She took over Silvi’s sermons; twice a day the crowds of women arrived and packed themselves into the upstairs rooms. There were rumours of groups from as far away as Italy and Cuba.

The bungalow telephone rang at four every afternoon, and a young woman from upstairs sat waiting for it. She came a few minutes early and hovered in the doorway, removing her shoes and nervously curling her socked toes.

By the time the phone rang she was ready to spring, but she would wait for someone to come out of the kitchen and answer, and when Maya or Rehana extended the receiver, she grabbed it with both hands. Then she squatted on the floor and whispered. The conversation lasted only a few minutes before she hung up and scampered back upstairs.

Maya collected these titbits. A girl who whispered into the telephone, a boy who carried water in a bucket.

They prepared the empty patch at the western edge of the garden. It was the perfect location, catching the south-facing wind, sheltered from the sun by the coconut tree that towered over it. Ammoo leaned over the hole Maya had dug and unwrapped the jute sackcloth, running her fingers along the delicate roots of the young tree. She whispered a prayer and, softly, blew the air out of her mouth and over the tree. Long may you bear fruit, she said. Maya helped her close the earth over its wound, and together they poured a few cupfuls of water on the mound.

‘Ma,’ Maya said, ‘I think Sufia is stealing from me.’

Ammoo’s head swivelled around. ‘Where did you get that idea?’

‘Some notes missing from my bag.’

Ammoo put a finger over her mouth. ‘Quiet,’ she said. ‘She could come out of the kitchen and hear you.’

‘If she’s a thief I shouldn’t have to whisper about it.’

‘She’s been with me for six years, she’s never taken a pie.’

‘Well, maybe she has something against me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Why don’t you check again? Maybe you miscounted.’

Ammoo seemed so sure. ‘I suppose. Maybe.’

Maya discovered one of her old medical journals in the shed, an issue of the
Lancet
from 1960 – she remembered coming upon it at a second-hand bookstall in Nilkhet just after the war. ‘Common Causes of Eye Injury in the Young’, she read. Suddenly she heard a scuffle, and her mother saying ‘This is not the first time, beta’ in a low, serious voice. Maya closed the journal and tiptoed towards the kitchen. A heavy crash. Maya found Ammoo standing over Zaid, her hand in the air.

Ammoo turned around and saw her. ‘Maya, please go.’ Zaid was holding a plate in his hand; around his feet were the remnants of another. He refused to meet Maya’s eye, his head down. ‘Maya, I said please go, I will handle this.’

Maya slipped out, blinking into the sunshine. Later, Ammoo paced the verandah in a pair of rubber slippers, her footsteps mimicking the sound of slapping.

‘It was him,’ Ammoo said. ‘He took the money.’ She handed Maya a few notes. ‘Here, take this.’ Ammoo’s hand was shaking. Tiny pearls of sweat along her hairline.

‘Please, Ma, it’s no big thing.’

‘He steals, he lies. I don’t know what to do.’

Maya remembered the Ludo board, suspiciously new. ‘His mother has just died, he’s trying to cope.’

Ammoo shook her head. ‘It’s not that.’

‘Did you hit him?’

Ammoo shook her head. ‘He has a temper. A few months ago he set the curtains on fire. I thought the whole house would burn down.’

The next week Rehana was rolling out rootis. Maya and Zaid squatted on a couple of low stools, waiting for her to fry the bread and pass it around. A crow shuffled sideways on the high wall outside the kitchen window.

‘Why doesn’t it have shoes?’ Zaid said.

‘The crow?’ Rehana asked.

‘Because it has claws,’ Maya said. ‘And anyway, birds don’t need shoes, they have wings.’ You’d like pair of wings, wouldn’t you, she thought. Then she said, ‘Do you know your alphabet?’

‘Alif, ba, ta, sa,’ he mumbled, chewing intently on his rooti.

‘Not Arabic, Bangla. Do you know ko kho?’

He tore off another piece of bread. ‘No,’ he said.

‘All these languages and you don’t know your own alphabet. I’ll teach you.’

‘I have to go.’ He darted from the kitchen, skipping over the rui fish that was laid out on the floor, gutted and glass-eyed.

Zaid filled his water bucket, and Maya helped him to heave it up the stairs. At the top she saw that the washing was out today, three sets of black burkhas and a white jellaba hanging between them like a flag of surrender. Rehana had told her the upstairs women dried their underthings at night and took them away before the Fajr prayer at daybreak. Fine for these hot spring nights, but probably not very effective in winter. A roomful of cold arses – the thought made her laugh out loud.

‘Come tomorrow,’ she said; ‘we’ll do ko kho.’

He looked unsure, his eyes pinched together.

The next day, when he was still unwilling to repeat the names of the letters, she said, ‘You know, I used to live in a village, and I know a lot of boys who still haven’t learned ko kho.’

‘As big as me?’

‘Bigger.’

He was constantly moving, scratching his ear, ramming his finger into one nostril, then another, smashing his palm into a line of red ants crossing the garden. ‘I want to go to school,’ he said.

‘Try again,’ she said, exasperated. ‘Ko.’

He ignored her, pressing his thumb down, assassinating one ant at a time.

She tried another tack. ‘You know that crow you saw yesterday?’

‘Hmm.’ Thumb, smash, thumb, smash. ‘The one without shoes?’ He found one filing across his arm, and crushed it between his fingers.

‘The one without shoes. Don’t you want to know how to spell “crow”? You could write him a letter, ask him about his shoes.’

‘Crows don’t read letters.’

She fell back on the grass, defeated. ‘Okay, you’re right.’

‘I want to go to school,’ he repeated.

His bucket was full. She let him carry it up the stairs on his own this time, pretending not to count the very long minutes it took him to negotiate the stairs, or the large splashes that fell overboard on the way, interrupting the dust of the driveway below.

They played Ludo almost every afternoon. ‘I can tell you’re cheating,’ Maya said one day, holding up the red Ludo piece. ‘Ammoo, did you see what he did there?’

‘Yes,’ Rehana said. ‘Beta, you moved an extra square.’

‘See, your dadu agrees.’

‘Fine,’ he said, folding his arms over his chest, ‘put it back, then.’

‘How about the alphabet?’

He shook his head. ‘I have to go.’ He lifted up the board, letting the Ludo pieces scatter to the floor.

‘Ma,’ Maya said after he had gone, gathering up the round discs, ‘there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’

‘Of course, beta.’

‘I’ve been thinking about Zaid. You know, that day we walked to the vegetable man together and he was acting so strangely. And the stealing. There’s only one thing I can think of, and I think, if we can do it, it will really work. I want to enrol him in school.’

Ammoo nodded, as if she expected this. ‘It’s true, he talks about school.’

‘I made an appointment with the headmistress at the school down the road. She said she would give him an exam, and if he passed, he could start next January.’

Ammoo folded up the Ludo board and passed it to Maya. ‘I’ve had this conversation with your brother many times, Maya.’

‘But he’s never here; he won’t know the difference.’