The Good Muslim Part 3

*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 b.u.t.ter-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 a 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 a 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 pa.s.sed 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 a 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 pa.s.sed 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 a 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 pa.s.sing 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.'

A roar travelled up the road. Mujib was standing in the open top of a very ordinary cab, one of those trucks that are used to carry bricks or crates of fruit. Tajuddin stood on one side, Sheikh Moni on the other. The cab was strewn with flowers. As it went by, Mujib was looking the other way, and she could see only the back of him, his coat, his white kurta. The convoy must have been moving rather slowly, but to Maya it sailed past, and she fell into its wake, swimming into the crowd. She locked arms with Saima and they inched ahead. By now they could see the backs of all those men who had finally returned from war, the people who would make their victory into a country, who would write the const.i.tution and give them pa.s.sports and anthems.

Maya felt someone tugging at her sari; she tried to speed up and pressed into the person in front. Saima's arm slipped out of hers as she pushed ahead. Then there was a tap on her shoulder. She turned around, irritated, and saw a man reaching through the crowd, a laugh in his eyes. She stopped. He stopped. They stood still and looked at each other, people flowing around and between them, like stones in a river. She reached for his hand, the one nearest to her, but he offered her the other, and it turned into a handshake. *h.e.l.lo, Joy,' she said stupidly.

*Maya-bee.' Stings like a bee, he used to say. It was impossible to stay in this position, against the tide, so she turned around and continued to walk. She felt him following. Occasionally they were jostled, and she could feel him crashing lightly into her. She began to hum a revolutionary song, and she heard him pick up the tune. Moved, she reached again for his hand.

Then she found it, the gap where his finger should have been. Hand swaddled by a thick bandage. Slowly, she moved the tip of her finger over what was now the tip of his finger, the bandage stretched tight and smooth. She turned around again, releasing his hand, and stared into his face. *Where is your finger?' she asked.

*Army took it.'

She reached for it again, the crowd impatient at her back, and brought the interrupted finger to her lips. *Goodbye, finger,' she said.

*Goodbye, Maya,' Joy replied, *I'm going away.'

*Misunderstanding,' she said, We'll have to give your finger a proper burial.'

*I'm going to America.'

Impossible. She jerked herself away. *Now, you're going now?'

*Day-after-tomorrow.'

It came back to her, the crudeness of his character. How he had bullied and cursed his way through the war. Looted a cinema hall for the projector, still rotting in her mother's garden shed. She clung to this evidence of his criminality. *Goodbye, then,' she said. *Good luck.' And she reached out to shake his hand,' the uncut one, as if to say, go on, you broken thing, I have no need of you.

Now, Maya counted Joy's losses and stacked them up against her own. He had lost his brother in the fighting, and then, after being captured by the army, he had come home to find his father gone. She was comforted by the nearness of this man, this man who had survived far worse than she.

There was a pile of boxes in the tin-topped garden shed, sheeted with dust and cobwebs. Rifling through it, Maya found her school report from Cla.s.s VI. Mediocre marks, and a note from the teacher complaining that she talked too much and frequently interrupted the lesson.

A short shadow in the open doorway: Zaid.

*Well, there you are. I called for you yesterday a where were you?'

*At school.'

*Really, you went to school? What did they teach you?'

*French.'

*French? What a very nice school. Are you sure it wasn't one of the women upstairs?'

*No,' he shook his head; *it was a proper school.'