The Good Muslim Part 17

Maya flopped down on the bed beside her mother. *She never explained anything to me. And she told me to shave between my legs.'

Rehana's eyes widened. *I don't believe you.'

*I'm not joking. She said it was cleaner that way. But you remember, Ammoo, she was always scratching herself there?'

*No, I don't remember.'

*I swear, I thought there was a man hiding under that burkha. Or a hive of mosquitoes.'

*Chi!' Rehana slapped Maya gently on the cheek, but she was laughing now, shaking her head. *You're still that little girl who pretended to be ill every time the teacher came. You told her you had your period, remember, when you were only eight.'

*She ran out of the house so fast!'

*When will my little girl grow up, hmm? Give me some grandchildren?'

*I'd have to get married first, you know.'

She placed her hand on the cover of her Qur'an, her fingers tracing the gold lettering. *I hardly knew your father when we married. After it was arranged there was a photograph going around the house, but I didn't have the courage to ask for it. Marzia brought it to me one night, and we examined it by candlelight.'

*What did you think?'

*That I wished I hadn't seen it. I had to marry him anyway.'

*Would it be so bad, if I never married?'

*No, it wouldn't be so bad. Look at me, I've spent most of my life without a husband.'

*Men can be so horrible.' She was thinking about n.a.z.ia now, the baby that came out with narrow eyes and a foreign cast, and Saima and Chottu, and all the cruelties that might be inflicted on her if she agreed to be someone's wife.

*That's true,' Rehana said, stretching her legs slowly and leaning back on her pillow. *But to whom will you utter your sorrows, my little girl?'

*I don't know.' Maya found her mother's foot under the blanket and began to knead it. *I'll do what you did.'

Rehana smiled. *I am taking comfort from the love of my child.'

Maya felt it stirring then, the need, deeply buried, for love. The chemo had made Rehana's circulation sluggish; her feet were cold, and Maya heard her sigh as she scrubbed the arch with the palm of her hand. Outside, the rain softened the other sounds of the evening. The crickets and the lizards chirped, the high notes of their calls swallowed by the fall of water. Only the leaves increased their volume, making themselves heard as they clapped against the raindrops.

She had told herself many times that marriage could not be for her. Or children. She saw them coming into the world every day, selfish and lonely and powerful; she watched as they devoured those around them, and then witnessed the slow sapping of their strength as the world showed itself to be far poorer than it had once promised to be.

Rehana closed her eyes, suddenly appearing very tired. *Say Aytul Kursi with me,' she said.

*All right.' Despite telling herself it was for the sake of her mother, the same thing she told herself of the visits upstairs, Maya felt relief flooding through her as she recited the prayer. The words stumbled out of her at first, then came to her smoothly, like the memories of childhood, her favourite foods, the marigolds on the lawn.

Allahu la ilaha illa Huwa, Al-Haiyul-Qaiyum.

There is no G.o.d but He, the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal.

La ta'khudhuhu sinatun wa la nawm.

No slumber can seize Him, nor sleep.

*I would like you to pray, Maya. Just once a day, at Maghreb.'

Maya shook her head. *You know I can't do that, Ma, it wouldn't be fair.'

*To who?'

*To all the believers.' She was crying now, the tears landing hot and soft on her cheek.

*G.o.d is greater than your belief,' Rehana said. *I'm asking you because you might need something, if I am gone.'

*Ma, please, don't say that.'

*You act so independent. You left home, you made your own life. You're a strong girl. But who will take care of you when I am not here? I wish you had something of your own. Your father would have wanted that.'

Something of her own. What could she have? A marriage, a family, a G.o.d? She had prepared herself for none of these. And then she realised Ammoo had been enc.u.mbered by her daughter's loneliness all this time. She has had to bear me all alone. All my burdens. Perhaps, Maya thought, she should tell her mother that it was all right for her to die now, that she would find a way to make up for the s.p.a.ce that would be left behind. But she couldn't do it, she wasn't ready. *Let's pray some more, Ammoo, if that will make you feel better.'

*I'm tired now, jaan. Let's go to sleep.'

Maya kept vigil beside Ammoo, listening for her breath, her hands ready to shake her if she faltered, if she showed any signs of giving in to her forehead, her fate, or her sense that she had completed what she had come to do.

And she thought about what Ammoo was asking for, a prayer once a day, at dusk, that holy hour. She thought about giving in, and wished somehow she had done it long ago, surrendered to the practicality of religion. If she chose it now, it would be a hollow bargain, shallow and insubstantial. No G.o.d she could respect would enter into such a pact, knowing the believer knocking at the door wanted nothing more than a genie, a single wish, and that even if this wish were to be accompanied by a deeper longing, there was no saying if she would ever keep her promises.

In the morning Maya found Zaid curled up under the small wooden desk. She peered underneath and saw his knees, wedged tight against his chest.

He opened his eyes. Held out his hands and she pulled him out from under the desk. *How did you come?' she asked.

*The bus,' he said.

*All by yourself?' He couldn't have chosen a worse time. She had to help Ammoo pack her things for the hospital. He stank of sweat and G.o.d knew what else, and his head was shaved so close she could see the pale veins of his neck as they climbed, creeper-like, over the dome of his head. She had waited all these weeks for him, and here he was, dirty and bald and breaking her heart.

He nodded, eyes rimmed with water. *It's a holiday,' he mumbled.

*Are you hungry?' she said, sounding rougher than she meant. She had known her mother's treatment wasn't working; she knew what it meant, the spread to the liver. Zaid was crying now, his hands pressed tightly to his face.

She grabbed him, and squeezed the breath out of his lungs. *I've been waiting for you,' she said. *Did you know that?'

She brought him a piece of toast and a fried egg, which he ate slowly, his mouth trembling as he chewed. Ammoo was awake, calling out to remind her to pack the prayer mat into her bag. She turned to Zaid. *I have to take Dadu to the hospital.'

*It's a holiday,' he repeated. *Huzoor let us go home.'

Because she had to, she believed him.

*I'll be back as soon as I can.'

He handed her the empty plate and crawled across the room, tucking himself under the desk again. *I'll stay here. I'm just going to stay here.'

She told herself he would be all right. She would come back from the hospital and fetch him and they would go to the park and Ammoo would recover and they would all play Ludo together and he would cheat, like he always did.

Maya counted the hours of her mother's sleep. Twenty-two. Thirty-seven. Forty. On the third day, Dr Sattar asked Maya to call her brother. And anyone else who might want to see her. She made the telephone calls, and they came, people she remembered from her childhood, neighbours and friends. They brought their children, who tugged at the bedsheets and complained about the hospital smell. They said innalillah, as though she were already dead. Maya called the bungalow, begged for Sohail. Ammoo is going, she said into the telephone, do something.

*I've done all I can,' Dr Sattar had said; *now we just wait.'

Rehana breathed, but she hadn't regained consciousness. Her kidneys were failing. Her fingertips had begun to turn blue.

They had put her in a private cubicle, away from the ward and the other patients. Maya greeted the guests, repeated the lines about cancer, her uterus, the liver resection. She was polite; she didn't protest when Mrs Rahman brought a piece of thread from the Saint of Eight Ropes and tied it around Rehana's wrist.

On the fourth day, Dr Sattar pleaded with Maya to go home. Just for a few hours. Freshen up. Change her clothes. When she refused, he offered to let her rest in the doctors' lounge. He held her elbow and led her down the stairs and across the courtyard. She knew the way, through the green corridors, the patients lining up outside, holding ragged bits of paper and files with worn, blackened edges.

*I'll send someone to fetch you. Sleep now.' Dr Sattar shut the door behind him, and Maya focused her eyes on a line of light under the door. Yellow and gold, it glowed steadily, lying about the other side, where her mother lay, blue-fingertipped, dying out of herself. She told the line of light she would stare at it until its colour changed, until it turned from gold to blue, day to night, but her eyes must have closed, because when she opened them the light was there again, steady, unflinching, casting its narrow length into the room, and she thought, then, of her father, of the short line of his life, and of all the boys who had bled into the dust, and of her brother, and his child, and she suddenly remembered Zaid, wondered whether he was still hiding under the desk a how could she have left him there? a and then she worried whether she would ever have a boy of her own, because she might never be able to love anyone enough, love them enough to swallow their loneliness and make it her own.

The line of light shone steadily. Day remained day. Then it lengthened, acquired shadows. She held up her hand to shield her eyes. A nurse in the doorway.

*How long has it been?'

*A few hours. Not long.'

She returned to a roomful of strangers, a ring of men in long white coats. Were they ready to write it up? Fifty-two-year-old woman with stage four metastatic uterine cancer. Hysterectomy. Liver resection. Through the crowd, she saw her mother's feet sticking out from under the sheet, her neat, organised toes, a dark spot under her ankle bone.

Dr Sattar separated from the others. *Come, Maya, join us.' The circle opened to let her in. Did they want her medical opinion? Now they raised their arms, palms to the sky. She understood all at once, that gesture. Not doctors after all. I put my palms up to you, and ask. O Allah, I beg. I entreat you. Her arms went up. She turned around and saw her brother at the end of the bed, where her mother's feet lay open and lonely, whispering words she didn't recognise. The men in white repeated after him, raised their voices in chorus. Ameen. She knew it was wrong, standing in a circle, facing this way and that, appealing to G.o.d. It wasn't done like this. This world, he had told her, was only temporary. Ammoo would reap her heavenly reward. It was selfish to keep her here. He was doing it for Maya, because she had begged him not to let her mother die. He had come, he had brought these men, and they had stood in a circle, not in a line facing Mecca. They knew the words. They had decided to use them.

She caught his eye, and she moved to embrace him, but his face told her to keep apart, that their keeping apart was part of the spell, so she stepped back and concentrated on believing that this was the cure.

Sohail lifted a plastic container of water, poured a small measure into a gla.s.s. Water from the Well of Zamzam. He lifted his mother's head and raised the gla.s.s to her mouth, tipping it slowly through the slight part in her lips. The drops that spilled on to her chin he did not wipe away. The men continued to recite. Dr Sattar brushed his eyes with a handkerchief.

During the war, the Pakistani soldiers would ask a boy, any boy on the street, to unwrap his lungi. Prove it, they would say. Prove you are one of us. The boy would fumble with the knot of his lungi and hold it open for the soldier to peer inside. It might be night. It's too dark to see, the soldier would say. Take it out and show us. Show us your cut, you dirty Bengali.

Maya had taught herself away from faith. She had unlearned the surahs her mother had recited aloud, forgotten the soft feather of air across her forehead when Ammoo whispered a prayer and blew the blessing out of her mouth. She had erased from her memory all knowledge of the sacred, returned her body to a time before it had been taught to kneel, to prostrate itself.

In her seven years of roaming the countryside, she had witnessed an altogether different form of the faith. The mosques were few and far between; the city, proclaiming itself newly pious, was even further away. In villages the people worshipped saints and the Prophet in equal measure. They worshipped by prayer, yes, and like everyone else they fasted during the month of Ramzaan and kept a section of land aside, if they had it, to sell someday and embark on the trip to Mecca. But in the forest they prayed to Bon-Bibi, the G.o.ddess of the trees, and they invited Bauls to their villages a thin, reedy-voiced men who sang the songs of Lalon, turning the words of the Qur'an into song, a tryst between lovers, casting the divine as the beloved, the poet as His supplicant.

Occasionally she had stood at the edge of a concert, mesmerised by the voice of the Baul. But she could not bring herself to step inside, because of the boys on the roadside, and all the things she had witnessed, committed in the name of G.o.d.

The men filed silently out of the room. Only Sohail remained, stroking his mother's forehead, whispering to her. Maya sat beside him and he reached out to her with his free hand. The room began to grow dark, the light finally changing to blue-black, and in the breeze was a hint of cold. Winter is here, she thought. Clementines will scent the city. Ammoo has planted a few vegetables this year: shim beans, cauliflower, tomatoes. Her cooking was always best in winter, suited to the bounty of the colder months. In the morning she would boil cauliflower and peas, and they would eat them just like that, with a few slices of boiled egg crumbled on top. Sohail, she remembered, would sometimes douse his plate with ketchup. Her grip on his hand tightened, and he returned her grasp, and they played this game, an old one, a Morse code of squeezes, until she was too cold to sit up and climbed into the bed with Ammoo, curling around her, resting her face against the outline of her shoulder, careful not to touch.

Maya slept, dreamed. In her dream her mother was very thirsty. Water, she said. Water. Then Sohail said it. Water. She's asking for water.

Maya opened her eyes to see him pouring the Zamzam into Ammoo's mouth. Her mouth was open. She swallowed. Maybe he would spoil the moment now by declaring it a miracle, but he just stood up and kissed his mother gently on her forehead. Then he collected his cap from the table and walked away without looking back, as though this was the only way the day could have ended.

She didn't remember to look for Zaid until it had all pa.s.sed. Searched under the desk and in the garden shed and behind the curtain of cobwebs at the foot of the stairs. He was gone. She asked Khadija if she knew where he was. *At the madrasa,' she replied. *The Huzoor sent him back.'

Book Three.

G.o.d wrongs no one, Not even by the weight of an atom.

1985.

February.

In winter, the rivers retreated. They sucked themselves back from the floodplain, and what was water became land once more.

The bungalow sank back into its habits. Downstairs, Rehana prepared the garden for winter and took up knitting; Sufia emptied the kitchen of all its contents and scrubbed each surface until it mirrored her hard hands and the sharp line of her jaw. And Maya returned to her columns, attacking the Dictator, the clergy, the Jamaat Party, Ghulam Azam, Nizami. Shafaat told her the letters had multiplied. Who is S. M. Haque, they asked. At the medical college, Dr Sattar told Maya that the students had organised a bet to guess which of their professors it might be. But he had a feeling he knew who it was. As she was leading her mother out of his office after her last check-up (I can't see any signs of the disease, my dear. Your brother seems to have frightened it away), he said, with a tender wink, Be careful, won't you? And he offered her a job, if she wanted one. No point in wasting all that training.

Upstairs, too, life continued as before. Maya stopped attending the taleem. Khadija did not call down to her, and she did not go up. She thought of ten of those visits, of Khadija's warm lap, the enveloping sound of the recitation. She knew she had been seduced, knew she had betrayed something in herself by accepting the solace it had given her. She carried a small wedge of guilt, for her own falsity, the fraud of it. As for Sohail's act, his words into Ammoo's ear, tipping the zamzam into her mouth a she had no way of cataloguing this, of putting a name to his act. The name that came to her a miracle a was not one she could believe.

Joy persuaded Maya to attend another meeting. Jahanara Imam was going to bring up something important, something Maya would regret not having heard. Ali Rahman, the tall actor who had played Hamlet in all the Bailey Road productions, opened the meeting with a recitation from Gitanjali. Beside her, Joy was a solid presence, his hands placed carefully on his knees. She noticed the bigness of him, the great pads of his fingers, the abundant eyebrows. Everything was verdant within this man, ample, alive. She suddenly had the urge to listen to the speeches with her arm woven through his.

After the poetry they all sang. *Amar Sonar Bangla'. Jahanara Imam pulled herself to the stage and they stood and cheered. She spoke again about the war criminals. This time, Maya listened. Mujib and Zia had failed to punish the killers, and now the Dictator would never push for a trial. The collaborators will continue to live among us, she said, if we don't do something. She had made a decision.

If the state wouldn't give them justice, they would find it for themselves. They would hold a people's tribunal in which the killers and collaborators would be tried and sentenced. It took a moment for people to realise what she meant. A cheer went up in the room. Clapping. The people will p.r.o.nounce their verdict on Ghulam Azam, and Nizami, and the Razakars who raped our country in '71. They would hold a trial for the killers a a citizens' trial. Not just for the boys who died in the battlefield, but for the women who were raped.

*Right now, across the country, thousands of women live with the memory of their shame. The men who shamed them roam free in the villages. No one reminds them of the sin they have committed. For those women, this trial. For them, justice must be done. If the courts of this nation will not bear witness to their grief, we will bear witness. We will bring them justice. It is our duty, our most solemn duty as citizens, as survivors.'

Maya had only one thought.

Piya.

Jahanara Imam finished her speech. A discussion began about the details. Who would stand trial? What would the witnesses say? Would there be real victims, real testimony? How would they convince people to take the stand?

She remembered what Piya said about her ordeal. I have done something. Something I regret. Something very bad. I have done. How could she have allowed Piya to put it that way? The memory of it came back to Maya, pointed and sharp. She forced herself to remember the moment at the clinic, the desperate look in her eye as she asked her to finish it. Take away the bad thing. Maya shook her head, trying to evict the memory, and before she knew it her shoulders began to shake and her cheeks to burn with the heat of tears, and she remembered her mother in the hospital, believing she would die, and Piya, who had turned to her for help, whom she had failed.

The meeting broke up, people rising from their seats and circling Jahanara Imam. Maya sat frozen, water falling hard and quick out of her nose. She tried to wipe her face with the back of her hand. *Let's go,' Joy said. *I'll take you home.'

She didn't want to go home. He packed her into the car and they sped out of the neighbourhood. Maya rubbed roughly at her face with the end of her sari until her cheeks were raw. Joy turned on Elephant Road and parked in front of a two-storey building. *Will you stop with me, have a cup of tea?'

There was a cafe on the first floor, large panes of gla.s.s revealing a view of the shoe shops on Elephant Road. They sat opposite one another in a green leather booth. For a long time neither said anything. Joy allowed her to gaze out of the window for a few minutes, to smooth her hands over her face until she was sure the tears had stopped. Then he fixed her with a light, teasing stare.

*So, now that I've got you,' he said, *perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity about something.'

*Nothing doing,' she replied, matching his tone. She fixed her eyes on the menu, relieved to be there, the waves of feeling slowly abating. *I'm not telling you anything.' Below them, the cars and rickshaws wrestled silently on Elephant Road. *Not until you tell me about your American wife.'

*Okay, fine. But let's make a deal. I answer all of your questions a all, and then you have to answer one of mine. Just one. Okay?'