The Good Muslim Part 16

*I haven't seen you in weeks,' he said.

*I didn't call a I've been so busy with Ammoo.' She thought of the last time, with Zaid and the magic trick. Afterwards, the boy had refused to reveal what he had whispered in Joy's ear. She had hardly left the house since then; in fact, as she looked down at herself now, dressed in a loose cotton salwaar-kameez, she imagined he was already regretting his decision to come. She thought of very little aside from the care of her mother. She ferried her to and from the hospital; she oversaw the chemo therapy treatment; she took an advance from the German tenant to pay the medical bills. And with the little energy she had left, she went back and forth with herself about Zaid. At times she wondered if Sohail might have been right to send him away; after all, he was his father, and the child was not easy. Perhaps he needed the discipline, and it was school, in its own way a school was what the boy had always wanted. At other times she was filled with a cold rage; she lay awake at night and imagined herself screaming at Sohail. Mostly she just ached to see the boy; she would turn as if to tell him something, and then remember it could be weeks, or months, before she might meet him again. She tried to ask Khadija where he was, exactly, but no one upstairs was willing to tell her.

*Actually, I've got an appointment,' Joy said.

Was he flirting with her? *With who?'

*Not an appointment, really a I heard he was at home in the afternoons. After three o'clock.'

So that's why he'd come. She resisted the small pinch of disappointment. She remembered that night, in front of Shaheed Minar, when he had cried and taken off his shoes a it seemed such a long time ago. Whatever had seemed possible in that moment had vanished. He was different, the awkwardness gone. The years in America had fallen away, and the Bengali-ness had rea.s.serted itself a she could see it everywhere in him, in the way he held the key of his Toyota in his left hand, swirling the key ring around his finger, and in the slight shadow of stubble he permitted himself.

*Well, if he's given you an appointment, you'd better not be late.'

*Perhaps you could go up and announce my arrival,' he said. *I'm not sure what the protocol is.' She saw him wanting to ask how changed his friend really was, to ask whether he would be welcome in his jeans and short-sleeved shirt, head uncapped, mind still barricaded against religion.

Maya led the way. At the top of the stairs, seeing Rokeya perched again with her face to the sun, she motioned for Joy to stop. *Wait here.'

*Rokeya. It's me, Maya.' Rokeya's eyes were closed. Maya tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around and opened her eyes, swaying slowly back and forth, intoxicated. Maya crouched down and looked closely at her. Lines of sweat criss-crossed her face, and her lips were damp and loose. Underneath the burkha, she could see the rise of her belly. *Rokeya,' Maya said, *go inside. You'll get heatstroke.'

*I have to stay here.' She smiled thinly. *It's all right.' She turned away again, a flower to the sun.

*I've brought a guest. A man.'

Hurriedly Rokeya pulled the nikab over her head. *This way,' Maya said to Joy, resisting the urge to explain the sight of Rokeya kneeling in the sun, or the rest of the scene, the small piles of rubbish dotted along the ground, the windows papered over, the smell of cooking grease and the sharp odour of urine.

At the entrance to the outer chamber, Maya raised her voice and asked for the Huzoor.

*Who is it?' came the reply.

*His sister, Sheherezade Maya.' Her full name, so infrequently uttered, added to the strangeness of the occasion.

*Wait,' the voice inside said.

*Tell him his friend Joy is here.' What's was Joy's non-nickname name? Farshad? Farhan? *Farhan Bashir.'

They waited in the shadow of the doorway. Minutes pa.s.sed. For some reason neither spoke. Joy remained fixed in his place, standing with his back to the building and looking out over the road. Then, a shuffle of feet. The curtain parted and a few men left the room, glancing at Maya and quickly averting their eyes. They were soon pooled at the bottom of the stairs, waiting, she a.s.sumed, for the signal to return.

A man ushered them inside. The room was smaller than the women's chamber, but improved by windows on two sides and a fresh coat of whitewash. The floors were covered in a patchwork of mismatched carpets and thick white sheets.

Sohail was waiting for them. He stood as they approached, greeting Joy with a warm pressing of his hands and embracing him three times. *As-Salaam Alaik.u.m.' He sat down heavily in the centre of the room. *Bring the lemonade,' he said to the man who hovered close to his ear.

Sohail did not acknowledge Maya, and she wondered if she should leave, but curiosity kept her rooted to her seat. Joy nodded at something Sohail said. He must, Maya imagined, be resisting the urge to look around, his eye automatically searching for signs of the old Sohail. Not a bookcase or an LP could be seen a this he knew, this he had been told. But surely in the way he said his name, or curled his hand around Joy's shoulder as he greeted him, there would remain something of the man he had once been, and since shed, snaked off like a worn sc.r.a.p of hide.

*I am so glad you have returned. I have thought of you often.' He pa.s.sed Joy a small green gla.s.s.

*I have thought of you too.'

It was like the tender meeting of two old lovers. They were awkward around one another, each looking into his gla.s.s of lemonade. Joy turned the conversation to ordinary things. *I drove a taxi for the first five years, while I completed my degree. It wasn't bad,' he said. *I met a lot of interesting people. They told me everything, like I was a priest.'

*So you two have something in common,' Maya said, wishing they would stop staring so intently at everything but each other.

They ignored her. *Why did you come back?' Sohail asked, holding out his hand to refill Joy's gla.s.s.

*Everyone asks me that. Because it isn't so great.'

*Sometimes we believe something is important, but it turns out to be insignificant.' Sohail pulled the cap from his head, revealing a full head of hair in black and grey tones that matched his beard. He ran his fingers through it briefly, then returned the cap to its place, fitting and tightening it around his crown. *There were things I held on to, for a very long time. Too long.'

Maya wondered if he was about to talk about the war; she leaned forward to hear him. Then Joy said, *I didn't go to America for money. I went for other reasons.'

She saw Sohail debating whether to ask what his reasons were, then deciding not to. *Did you get married?' Sohail asked suddenly.

*Yes, how did you know?'

*A man should marry. You have children?'

*No.'

*You should have children.'

*I'm divorced.'

Sohail nodded. *Why don't you marry her?' he asked.

It took Maya a moment to realise what Sohail meant. She thought he might burst out laughing any moment, hold his stomach and apologise. But he didn't. Instead, he continued, *Why not? She's getting old now.'

*We don't love each other,' Maya said. *Don't you believe in love any more?'

Joy took a long sip of lemonade. *Actually, Sohail, you're right, I should get married. But this one won't even let me take her out for phuchka.'

*Well, there are others.'

*Yes,' Maya said, *the world is full of desperate women.' She was being unpleasant, she knew; she should have treated it casually, said something light and funny. Always too serious.

There was an awkward silence. Maya wanted to get up, but her legs were heavy, and she wanted to know what they would say to one another next, whether Joy would ask the question she knew he wanted to ask. What was Sohail doing here, in this shack on top of his mother's house, raising a son without love, in this beard, this costume, this posture of calm? Instead, he asked, *Do you think often about it?'

*About what?'

*About the war a those villages we saved, and the ones we didn't.'

Sohail didn't reply.

*And my brother, do you remember him?'

*I remember him every day,' Sohail said. *Your brother and your father both. And you. You saved my life, Joy. I will never forget that.'

Joy had been captured while her brother ran free.

*It wasn't me,' Joy said.

*G.o.d is great.'

That was not what Joy had meant. What he had meant was, it was just a matter of chance, that the soldiers had found him and not Sohail. They both fell silent, remembering that long November night. *Why did you do it, Sohail?' Joy asked finally. *What made you like this?'

Maya thought Sohail would have a quick and practised response, something about how his path was the natural one, that the question was not why he had become what he had become, but why Joy hadn't joined him. But instead he appeared hesitant, almost nervous, cupping the gla.s.s in his palm. He seemed to have no answer for Joy.

Joy turned his face away and caught Maya's eye. She had thought, until that moment, that he had been fooling around, that he might like to trap Sohail into saying something ridiculous, but now she realised he was angry, very angry, as though Sohail's being there, his having become who he was, had something to do with the death of his brother.

*These are mysteries that cannot be explained in brief. Why don't you come to the taleem? We can speak about it then.'

The man returned and spoke softly into Sohail's ear. *Khadijama asks if your guests will stay long.'

*Tell her they will be going soon, inshallah.'

It was time to leave; there appeared nothing left to say. Maya saw the disappointment in Joy's face. She knew that Joy must have thought often of Sohail, while he was in jail, and later, in New York, when he drove that taxi. She suspected that taxi-driver Joy had not elaborated on his gun-wielding, dogs-at-his-heels past; that he had taught himself the alien politeness of you have a good day now and where to, ma'am, learned to discuss the weather as though it were both a suitable topic for discussion and a way to avoid discussion altogether.

But in that foreign city, where he had been a cabbie, not a freedom fighter, where his most heroic act had been to run the occasional red light a and with the guilt of surviving the death of his brother, propping him up against a tree while the sh.e.l.ling approached, watching the blood escape from his body like water out of a mountain, long behind him a he must have thought of Sohail, thought about writing letters and making long-distance calls, turning their friendship into an ordinary one of traded news. But he hadn't been able to. And now this, this mystery. Joy wouldn't have known what to expect, though perhaps there was some part of him, some arrogance, which might have led him to believe he could catch a glimpse of it in action, cup it between his hands, because no one, after all, knew Sohail as he did, no one else had shaken the fleas out of his bread, or picked the lice out of his hair, or run with him through the smoke and thunder of bullets. No one else had gone to jail while he had run free.

Joy stood to take his leave. Sohail stood as well. They embraced. *You will always be a brother to me,' Sohail said, his eyes bright.

*And you to me,' Joy replied. The anger had left his face, replaced now with something else a a kind of longing, even envy. Perhaps there was a feeling at the back of Joy's throat, the feeling that this man slept easier than he did, that he didn't need to suck the marrow out of his memories or escape to a tall city to get away from them. Sohail didn't seem to mind, as he stroked the beard that protruded from his chin, that it was threaded with grey; and he didn't seem to mind about the shabbiness of his house, the stains on the carpets, the cement that scratched your feet as you removed your shoes to enter his room. He didn't seem to mind about anything at all. Not in this world.

*Khoda Hafez,' Joy said, his hands sandwiched again between Sohail's.

*Come again soon.' Sohail turned around, and Maya suspected that she and Joy were forgotten already, trumped by the tasks that lay ahead a prayer, sermon. The afterlife.

They descended the stairs in silence, and when they reached the bottom, Maya was reluctant to let Joy get into his car and drive away. She knew he was feeling something of what she was feeling, unsettled by the meeting with her brother, questions asked but not answered. She decided to ask one of her own. *Tell me about your time in jail,' she said. *I want to know what happened to you.'

Built with its back to the river, Dhaka city had little to recommend it. The roads were narrow and flooded easily, with no grand avenues or boulevards or vistas to make the heart ache and the poet draw out his pen. Still, after the war, it was awash with people who had nowhere to go, and with even more who had nothing to eat. The smell of burned thatch hung in the air in the villages, so they came to the city to escape it, and remained, as had so many before them, turning their backs on one violence to face the possibility of another. And yet they chose those streets, dusty and narrow as they were, over the river that closed around them every monsoon, and over a life spent staring up at the sky, hoping for rain this week, sun the next, their feet wet from the fields, and backs aching from bending over the paddy.

Joy had little affection for the city, but on the day he was released from jail he fell unexpectedly in love with it. That morning, the young subedar unlocked his cell, turned silently away and joined the retreating army. Joy turned to his cellmates, Raheem and Sultan and the old Abba.s.s, helping them to their feet. They hesitated, the other three, at the threshold, not believing they weren't being tricked into the firing squad or the leg room. But Joy had recognised the loud pa.s.sage of Indian fighter jets, had known they were on the brink of victory.

In his three months of captivity Joy had refused to speak. Not a word of a.s.sent, or protest, or denial, no shake of the head or movement of the hand. At the guerrilla camp in Sonamura they had been told something a he couldn't remember a about being captured, but, like the rest of their training, it was perfunctory, told casually as though it would never happen. The officers had taken this tone with all matters of disaster, parcelling out instructions with dry voices and short sentences, as though no one would ever get shot in the middle of an operation and need to be dragged by his collar and propped up against a tree so that his brother could watch him die, catch his final words in the spoonful of his ear, lock them in his heart until it was safe to tell their mother.

There were twenty-three of them, captured in November on a hot, rain-thirsty morning. And he watched as they were taken, one by one, into the room next door, the leg room. And encouraged to speak. And as soon as they spoke a said I am a mukti, yes, I fought against the army, yes, I betrayed the country, yes, yes, I am a traitor, yes, I believe in Bangladesh, yes, I was seduced by Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Mujib is a pig, I am a pig, yes, yes, yes a whatever was being done to them would stop. And the rest of them, bound together by their equal hatred of the p.i.s.s-pot in the corner of the cell, the foot beatings, the word *b.a.s.t.a.r.d' attached to the misp.r.o.nunciation of their name, eased into a quiet night, waking, the next morning, to the call to prayer followed by the snap of bullets.

That the soldiers liked to do their shooting at the hinge of day was another of their incomprehensible habits, like the taking of meat in the morning, which they did daily without fail.

Silence, and then the shot. This was all the schooling Joy needed. So when they took him out into the yard, he did not scream or curse or spit or rage. He pretended he couldn't make any sounds, and soon it became too difficult to utter words at night and forget them in the day, so he gave up speaking altogether. He learned the gestures of animals a the fingers in the mouth, hand in front of his face, the wave to indicate friendship. With his tongue trapped, his hands were freed a to hold the head of the boy who had run away to fight, the soldier with the torn shoulder, the one who feared the current above all other things and, later, his thing, to ease the pain. Beard growing, hands healing, tongue-tied, Joy pa.s.sed his three months in the belly of a cell, determined he would survive to see what came after.

The soldiers marked time by the sounds they routinely heard. The call to prayer. The splashing of water while performing the Wazu. The unrolling of prayer mats. The screams of the birds, arguing throughout their morning rituals. The prisoner dragged, heels collapsing, in front of the firing squad. His final plea for mercy.

But this prisoner made no sound. Not at the beating of his soles or the putting out of cigarettes on his back or the electrocution of his mouth. They rode him harder than all the others, charged with the suspicion, the hope, that his silence was loaded, that he might yield something special. He must know something, and he must have been trained to keep it, this secret. It was just a matter of cracking him. So they waited, taking him every day to the leg room, the upside-down room, the chair. He didn't cry, he didn't speak.

Finally, it was too much for his captors to bear. On a particularly slow day, they took their revenge. The new prisoners they were expecting had failed to arrive, and it was only the silent one and the old man who had dried up a long time ago, not worth the price of a bullet. The birds were winning. Singing, gurgling, cackling. Aftab, the youngest in the unit, fired a shot into the tamarind tree, sending the birds flapping, raising their voices, and now they moved to the windowsills of the barracks and picked at the remnants of food tossed carelessly through the bars, the dried-up bits of bread. The rest of them cursed him for shooting into the tree, typical Sindhi behaviour, they said, probably s.h.i.ts softer than the rest of us.

They dragged Joy out to the compound. Aftab nudged him with the back of his rifle. *Make the birds stop singing,' he said. *Bengali birds, they'll listen to you.'

Joy stood silent as the flap of birds continued around him, like sheets in the wind.

*Do it.' The slap of the rifle, the small rectangle of pain. *Now,' he said, *make those sisterf.u.c.king birds shut the f.u.c.king h.e.l.l up or I will shove a bullet up your a.s.s, I swear it.'

Joy raised himself to his knees and pointed at the tree. Nothing happened for a few moments: the birds continued to crowd the windowsill, picking and flirting and flapping. Then a small one separated from the others and sailed up, away from the compound, circling the perimeter of the building. The soldiers lifted their eyes to it as it turned and came towards them, landing quietly on Joy's outstretched finger. With his other hand, Joy stroked the bird as it moved up on to his arm, settling on the crook of his elbow. That was the last day he was whole; later they took his finger as payment, so the birds would have one less place to perch, one less reason to sing.

Freed in February, Joy fell in love with the city. Dhaka was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes, and its air was the first into which he spoke; it was the only place he wanted to be. He walked home, making his way out of the army cantonment and through the live streets, embraced by strangers who cried out at the sight of his scarred arms, his absent finger.

It wasn't until he got home that he learned the war had taken his father too. He walked into the house and saw his mother in a white sari and he knew. She sent him away, then, sent him as far from Dhaka as she possibly could, mortgaging their house and p.a.w.ning her wedding jewellery. And he had grasped at the chance and fled without looking back, without regret or sentiment.

He never thought about why he had been caught that night. Never minded it. On that November morning when it refused to rain, he had run free for six hours, scratched by close, thin-limbed trees, chased by the sound of dogs until his breath gave out a and in the few seconds it took them to catch up with him he had enough time to contemplate taking the gun to himself but not enough to balance the rifle against his head. So, as the day cracked open, hot and tired, and he walked back into the city with his arms and legs shackled, he thanked the soldiers for their speed, because he wasn't ready to die, not on that day, not in the very year he had watched the blood ribboning out of his brother.

Headmaster Headmaster Headmaster.

Headmaster Headmaster Headmaster Huzoor Huzoor Huzoor. Your whip is a snake. Why you bracelet my wrist? Why keno por que? I speak all the tongues but Arabic. You take revenge on my Arabic. Revenge on the palm of my hand. Zaid was an orphan adopted by the Prophet. I am an orphan. The Prophet was an orphan. Peace and blessings be upon the orphan that was the Prophet. When my mother died, the Kazi said, You are now an orphan. My father took me across the river and he told the Huzoor, he is in your hands now, and Allah's. The Huzoor takes my hand. He puts my hand on his heat. His whip is a snake. His snake is a whip. Hands on the heat. In the Huzoor's hand. In Allah's hands. Because my hands were wandering. Stealing. Coins and notes. Why you hold my hands behind my back? Keno why pourquoi? I always ask them to teach me three things. h.e.l.lo and Goodbye, peace on earth, and why. They don't like to teach why. I get it out of them. Why why why. Why did you put me in the Huzoor's hands? Why the Huzoor's hand? His hand on my hand. My hand in his hand. It is always like this for the new ones, one of the boys tells me. He is happy I am here, no more Huzoor for him. You are too pretty, he says. Foreign eyes. I am the Prophet's orphan. The Huzoor likes light eyes. The Huzoor's hand in my hand. All the boys laughing. The doors are always locked. The Huzoor carries the key around his neck. The toilet is outside, it is a hole dug into the ground. Deep. Flows into the river. I can hold my breath that long.

1984.

December.

*The treatment hasn't worked,' Dr Sattar said. He would have to take out a piece of her liver. Rehana laughed at this news, and they all knew immediately what she found so funny. Kolijar tukra, piece-of-my-liver, was a common form of endearment; she had applied it many times to her children. My sweet, my heart, piece-of-my-liver. In all those years, she had never thought that she had promised to give an actual piece of the organ away. She said, *Make sure you leave enough of it in there, Dr Sattar. I believe it's my only one.'

The surgery was scheduled immediately. That night, as she was helping her mother with her bag, packing toothbrush, comb, prayer mat, Maya had the feeling she should have come up with a list of things to say, words stored up in the event of this very occurrence. In the months since her mother had told her about the tumour, she should have been preparing herself. Instead, what had she done? Shaved her mother's hair, sorted through her medication, ferried her back and forth from the hospital, made short, abrupt phone calls to her friends to give them the news: yes, Ammoo is feeling better, yes, she's been eating. I gave her the food you sent, she liked it, yes, I agree, she needs to keep up her strength. Can you come around ten? She is better in the morning.

And she had nurtured a fragile alliance with the upstairs. She could think of her brother without that piercing anger, she could behold the serene, remote man he had become, and she could lie in her bed and listen to the chaotic footsteps above, and she could watch the clouds of men and women go up and down the stairs, and yes, she could even bear to witness the ragged condition of the boy, and tell herself it was all a casualty of the past.

She told herself she was growing up. There was her mother, and there was readjusting to the city, and the lack of politics, and maybe, just maybe, the beginning of a truce with Sohail. But that was all. Silently she folded Rehana's clothes, listening for the rustle of rain in the trees so that she would have something to remark on, so she could make some comment about the garden, how it would flood if they had another downpour. She started a few sentences in her head, but none of them sounded right. She remembered something Dr Sattar had said. *The disease hasn't won yet.' She clung to this.

Rehana was sitting up in bed, cross-legged, with her right hand on the Qur'an. *You need your rest, Ammoo, you know how the ward is.' It had finally begun to rain, soft sheets casting grey shadows into the room.

*It says here your lord has prescribed for himself mercy. Do you know what that means?'

*No.'

She closed the Book. *You never did pay any attention to your ustani.'