A Golden Age

April: Radio Free Bangladesh

The city slowly adjusted to occupied life. It adjusted to the stiff-backed soldiers who manned the streets, their uniforms starched, their pale faces grimacing. It adjusted to the tanks sitting fatly in the middle of roads, and to checkpoints where soldiers leaned into car windows and barked orders at drivers who held up their hands and shook their heads, protesting their innocence. And it adjusted to the silence, because there were no more speeches, or marches, or processions, just an eerie, still quietness, interrupted twice a day by the wail of the curfew siren; but otherwise all was ghostly, only the rustle of trees and the sizzle of the April sun to draw the line between day and night.

Wild rumours circulated in the quiet. The army had dug a mass grave to hide the bodies. There was a warehouse, somewhere on the outskirts of town, where they tortured the prisoners. The animals in Mirpur Zoo, even the Bengal tiger, had all died of fright. But no one seemed to know anything for sure. The newspapers announced, ‘Yahya saves Pakistan!’ and Dhaka, so long at the centre of the struggle, was now a besieged and vacant city that kept its knowledge close and hidden.

Those people who had never really been citizens of the city erased their faint tracks and returned to their villages. The butchers, the tailors, the milkmen, the rickshaw-pullers, the boys who painted cinema actresses on the back flaps of rickshaws and the even younger boys who made tea in rusting kettles on pavements — all left silently, snaking out of the city with bundles on their shoulders, children cradled against their backs.

As she witnessed the emptying of the city, Rehana counted her blessings.

The children were safe.

Mrs Chowdhury and Silvi.

The gin-rummy ladies. Mrs Akram had spent that night with the shutters closed and her hands over her ears. Later her husband would say she’d been hysterical, screaming about Kayamat, the end of the world. They’d had to tie her to the bedposts and press their hands over her mouth. She remembered none of it. When she came to see Rehana, two days after the curfew was lifted, she tried to hide the weals on her wrists by wearing wide, mirror-studded bangles. But she was alive.

Romeo was dead. Mrs Chowdhury had him buried under the tallest coconut tree in her garden.

Mrs Rahman had almost not been so lucky. She had accepted an invitation to dine with an old schoolfriend. The schoolfriend’s husband owned a tailoring shop in the old town, and they lived above it, on Nawabpur Road. At the last minute Mrs Rahman had pleaded a headache, dreading the choked roads she would have to pass through to get there, remembering the dreary furniture, the bony curry she’d been fed the last time. She felt guilty but consoled herself by resolving to send her friend a gift the very next day. A sari perhaps, or a pair of earrings.

Nawabpur Road was in the army’s way as they passed through the old town on their way to Shakaripotti, the Hindu neighbourhood. Perhaps they had taken a wrong turn; perhaps they’d held their maps upside down; or maybe it was taking too long to get there and they were impatient, the blood leaping in their skins. They swiped with their machine-guns, back and forth, and one of their bullets found the house on Nawabpur Road. Mrs Rahman’s schoolfriend escaped with a grazed cheek, but her husband, crouching under the dining table, did not.

Rehana’s children were safe. That was the most important thing. She could not help feeling grateful to Mrs Chowdhury for holding Silvi’s engagement party that night, keeping her children close to home, when they could so easily have been in one of the university halls.

Sohail and Maya accounted for their friends. Joy and Aref had been among the students who had heard rumours of an attack on the city. They had broken into their dormitory cafeteria and stolen all the chairs, which they’d stacked at the mouth of Nilkhet Road. They set fire to glass bottles and hurled them into the streets. But when the tanks climbed over the barricades and splintered the chairs, they fled, weaving through the buildings and hiding in Curzon Hall. The bullets missed them.

But Sharmeen. Sharmeen could not be found.

At first Maya was vaguely irritated she’d missed everything. All her friends had stories of that night, and, while she kept saying, ‘Good thing I wasn’t on campus,’ there was a slight regret at having been sidelined. She wanted some mark, some sign, that the thing had happened to her. A bruise on the cheek. A tear in her blouse. She waited for Sharmeen to show up at the gate, to give her a little of the moment.

But on the third day there was still no sign of her.

‘It’s all right,’ Rehana soothed, not knowing what to say; ‘there must be some explanation.’ Everything she knew about Sharmeen prevented her from fearing for the girl. She was too big, too stormy, to simply vanish. Maya must have thought the same thing, because she refused to worry.

On the fourth day the Senguptas decided to leave. Rehana found them at Shona with their belongings strewn across the drawing-room floor, dotting Mrs Sengupta’s pink rose-petal carpet.

‘We have to go,’ Mrs Sengupta began. It was obvious she had been the one to urge her husband to leave; she was nervous, drawing her achol over her shoulder and smoothing her pleats.

Rehana didn’t say anything, only nodded.

‘It’s not safe for Hindus in the city,’ Mr Sengupta explained. ‘As you know.’ The refugees had stayed a couple of days, making their home on the lawn, keeping vigil at night with hurricane lamps and lengths of wood they had saved from their doorframes. Then they too had left, for villages in the interior, or across the border to India. They had thanked Rehana for her kindness, gathered up their things and latched the gate behind them.

‘Are you going to India?’ Rehana asked.

Mr Sengupta made a show of being surprised. ‘Why? No, why would we go to India? We are going to our village in Pabna. We haven’t been to stay in a long while. Mithun should see his ancestral home, meet his cousins.’ Mr Sengupta parted the net curtains on the window behind him and looked out at his son chasing a crow in the garden.

‘Of course,’ Rehana said, ‘you know what is best. But there are disturbing reports. Burning villages. Targeting Hindus.’

‘That’s just a rumour. The city is dangerous, but they won’t go that far inland,’ he said. ‘It takes two days just to reach the town — mud roads, nothing paved. Why would they bother?’ And he made a sound somewhere between a short laugh and a snort.

‘The people in your village,’ Rehana said, pressing him a little, ‘can you trust them?’

‘My village people? Of course! My family has been in that village for generations. Mrs Haque, would you have all Hindus flee to India?’

Rehana could see she had offended him. There was now a clear note of challenge, a probe, to see which side of things she was on. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. Mrs Sengupta was nervously fiddling with the hem of her sari. Looking at her, Rehana was reminded of herself at a younger, more confident age, when she’d had the luxury of retreating when she wanted to, allowing someone else to make decisions, declare the lines of argument.

Mrs Sengupta leaned over to Rehana and took her hand. ‘We feel terribly about leaving you alone. Will you be all right?’

‘Of course,’ Rehana said, though it had just occurred to her that she would not have any money until the Senguptas returned. In the way Mrs Sengupta was looking at her, Rehana could tell this was the reason for the apology. Her friend took out an envelope and held it between her palms. ‘Oh, no, Supriya, you mustn’t do that.’

‘It’s the only way we could even consider leaving.’ She turned to her husband. He appeared to have recovered and nodded vigorously. ‘It’s not much. But we couldn’t leave you empty-handed.’

‘I won’t hear of it,’ Rehana insisted, wondering how long she would have to pretend she didn’t really need the money. She murmured a few more words of protest but took it in the end, warning the couple that if they stayed away too long she might find new tenants. The idea of anyone moving to Dhaka at a time like this made everyone laugh.

‘I’m sorry we’ve left such a mess,’ Mrs Sengupta said, waving her arm around the room.

‘Don’t worry, Maya and I will take care of the rest.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. Just take what you need. You’ll be back soon, I know it.’

‘Mithun!’ Mr Sengupta called out into the garden. ‘Say goodbye to your auntie!’

Despite her best efforts to appear casual, Rehana felt a sting in her eyes as she embraced Mrs Sengupta. ‘God be with you,’ she said, squeezing her friend’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

By the middle of April they began to realize that the attack on Dhaka was only the beginning. The army was making its way across the country, subduing one district after another, leaving behind a trail of burning villages. And there were stories of boys running away from home to join the resistance, slipping away in the middle of the night with their shoes in their pockets, crossing the border to find Major Zia, who had made the announcement on the radio.

One day Joy and Aref came to the bungalow in a truck. It was filled with crates of different sizes, which they began unloading and stacking up against the gate.

‘What’s this?’ Rehana asked.

‘Auntie, we need your help,’ Joy said. ‘We need to store some things in your house.’

Sohail came out of his room. ‘Where did you get them?’

‘What’s going on?’ Rehana asked. They were all behaving as though it was perfectly ordinary. As if people arrived with trucks full of mysterious things every day.

‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said, ‘we’ve heard reports of refugee camps across the border. They need medicine.’

‘Where did you get these?’

Sohail waited for Joy to reply. Aref was counting the remaining boxes in the truck. ‘PG Hospital.’ He put his hands on his waist. There was a pause while the boys waited for Rehana to ask how they had convinced the doctors at PG hospital to give them a truckful of medicine.

She decided not to ask. If she asked, they would have to tell her they had stolen it. ‘Good idea,’ she said finally, ‘bring it all inside. Do you boys want to stay for lunch?’

Aref beamed at Rehana from above. ‘We knew you’d understand,’ he said, blowing her a kiss.

The next day they came again. They carried eight crates of powdered milk, three boxes of cotton wool, four drums of rice, sixteen cases of dal. Buckets. Shovels. Rehana put the food in the passage between her bedroom and the kitchen. Now they had to walk sideways to get to the kitchen. The dining chairs were stacked on top of the table, the medicines stored underneath. They started taking meals with plates on their laps.

Maya was soothed by the crowded house. She put her cheeks against the boxes of cotton wool, ran her finger along the tops of the medicine cases.

It had been almost two weeks, and Sharmeen was still missing. No one knew where the girl was, but she was making her presence felt at the bungalow, as they each silently imagined what might have happened to her. Still Maya refused to talk about it. She drifted through the house like a cloud of dust. Rehana tried to bring it up, but every time she approached Maya it felt like a trespass.

‘Where is her mother?’ Rehana asked finally.

‘She’s in Mymensingh.’

‘Maybe Sharmeen went to see her?’

‘I already contacted her family. She’s not there.’

‘Does she have brothers?’

‘Not really.’

Sharmeen’s mother, Rehana remembered, had remarried. There were other children. And a stepfather. That is why Sharmeen lived in the dormitory, and why she was always at the bungalow for Eid. And why her clothes were mixed up with Maya’s in the cupboard. And her toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet. She had a stake in their house. Rehana knew all of this, but, as the picture of Sharmeen’s life came into focus, she felt guilty for sometimes resenting her presence at the bungalow. She could have been warmer towards her. She might not have saved the girl, but she could have loved her.

She still didn’t know what to do with Maya. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘No.’

Rehana did not know what else to say. If Maya would not discuss Sharmeen, Rehana could not console her. She could not find a way into her daughter’s grief, drawn so tightly around her.

Rehana often wondered if she could help loving one child better. She had a blunt, tired love for her daughter. It was full of effort. Sohail was her first-born, and so tender, and Maya was so hard, all sympathy worked out of her by the throaty chants of the street march, the pitch of the slogan. Too many strong words had come out of her mouth. The ideas were like an affliction; they had taken her over so completely she had even changed physically: suddenly the angles of her face had moved, sharpened, so that she was no longer young, or even pretty. And she wore only widow’s white, which always felt to Rehana like an insult.

She had only two remnants of a gentler self: the thick braid that snaked down her back like a swollen, black river, and her singing voice. Both had escaped being sacrificed. She often threatened her mother with photographs of women with short hair, the bob that stared out of magazine covers, the boy-cut some of her friends had dared to ask for at the parlour. But somehow, despite the threats, she had never lopped off the hair that so definitively identified her as Rehana’s daughter, in its shine and its straightness, in its dark blue hue, its thickness and weight. Rehana had even caught Maya caring for her hair, combing or massaging it with coconut oil, though if she herself ever offered to help she was met with a withering stare and a short ‘nothing doing’.

And when she sang, Maya could not stop the tenderness from covering her features like a fine winter mist. There was nothing harsh in her voice — in fact, it was even a little girlish, defying the learning that had so hardened her spoken words. She opened her mouth, and from her lips, her throat, the immature heart, came sweet, rapturous song. She had learned her mother’s ghazals, but her politics had turned her to the banned songs of Tagore, and these suited her better. For they did not demand the plaintive, mournful tenor of forsaken love but rather, a more innocent form of sentiment, which Tagore, uncomplicated lover of God, of earth, of beauty, had delivered in such abundance.

Her hands on the harmonium were delicate, square-tipped, her bitten-down nails paying homage to the seriousness of the task; her brows were knitted together in service of the song, and in the end it was only to the music that she was bound. In singing she was, if only briefly, a supplicant, as though in the presence of a divinity that even she, devout non-believer, had to somehow acknowledge.

Rehana thought of it as her biggest failure. That her daughter had not found a way into her heart.

On the day Joy and Aref appeared without the truck, they had another boy with them, a Hindu boy named Partho whose family had fled the city.

‘Don’t let them in,’ Sohail said to Rehana, but they had already climbed over the gate. Aref was shifting from one foot to another and adjusting his round-rimmed glasses with the tip of his finger. There was a black bag between Partho and Joy.

She couldn’t imagine why Sohail would shun his friends.

Joy cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, ‘Sohail! Dost! Aye na! Come out!’

When Sohail didn’t reply, Rehana stepped through the veranda and asked them what they wanted. They looked rough, as though they hadn’t bathed or changed clothes. Joy’s hair curled like a comma above his head, and Aref’s hung limp between his ears. Partho was staring past Rehana and into the windows of the bungalow to see if Sohail would emerge.

‘As-Salaam Alaikum, Auntie,’ Aref said. ‘Sohail achhe?’

These were his friends. Surely he wouldn’t mind if she invited them in. ‘Do you want to come in?’

Joy and Aref looked at the black bag. ‘No,’ Joy replied, ‘we’ll stay here.’

Aref was fidgeting with a matchbox. He held a packet of cigarettes out to Partho, who shook his head. He lit one. ‘Is he there?’ he said.

Rehana considered lying but decided not to. ‘I think he’s upset.’ She was annoyed at not knowing the cause of this sudden change of heart. One minute he was glued to his friends, the next he didn’t want to see them.

‘We just want to talk. Can he come to the window?’

‘I don’t know, I’ll see.’ She went back through the house and found Sohail pacing the drawing room with the loose drawstring of his pyjamas flapping between his knees. ‘Tell them to go away,’ he said, tugging at the string.

‘They’ve come all the way—’

‘I don’t care.’

Rehana paused for a moment, exasperated. ‘OK, I give up. I’m going to Shona. You decide what to do with your friends.’

Rehana and Maya were at Shona, packing up the last of Mrs Sengupta’s things, when Sohail entered. He hung in the doorway of the dining room, watching Rehana wrap Mrs Sengupta’s plates in sheets of newspaper. The newspaper was mostly blank, giant banner advertisements for Tibet Soap and Brylcreem framing empty spaces.

Maya was helping Rehana put the wrapped plates into a crate, but as soon as she saw Sohail she abandoned the crate and put up her hands.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Aref and Joy came to see if we were all right. We’re waiting to see how things will evolve.’

‘Waiting for what?’

‘The foreign journalists at the InterContinental Hotel saw everything. Can you believe those bastards? They didn’t even try to cover their tracks. It’ll be all over the international news.’

‘Your friends. What did they want?’

‘We need support from the UN.’

‘Don’t change the subject,’ Maya needled. ‘You’re planning something.’

‘Nothing — what would we be planning?’

‘They had something — a package — Ammoo told me. Were they asking you to hide something?’ She pressed him. Rehana knew he hated lying.

He looked straight at Maya, as though daring her to ask again.

‘You’re going, aren’t you?’

Going? Where would he be going? Wait, Rehana wanted to say. I thought you were arguing about something small. Something insignificant. Not about going. If only they’d told me it was something to do with going, I would have stood at the door myself and refused to let them in.

Sohail pushed the hair from his eyes. Rehana fought the wave of panic crawling through her arms.

‘Just tell me, bhaiya, please, I just want to know,’ Maya said. She pointed her face to the box of plates, as though to say, You owe me.

‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said the next day, ‘there’s something I have to tell you.’ The full moon was hammocked over Dhaka; it shone through the windows of the bungalow, revealing the dark, speckled shadow on Sohail’s chin, on his fist tightening and loosening.

‘Don’t tell me.’

He looked very sorry. ‘I have to go.’

‘Go? Where? Where will you go?’

‘We heard there’s a resistance across the border. All the Bengali regiments have mutinied. Didn’t you hear Zia?’

‘This is a thing between soldiers. What does it have to do with you?’

‘They need volunteers. Aref and Joy and Partho are going too.’

‘I thought you were a pacifist.’ She clung to the word. Pacifist. Someone who does not rush off to join a war. Someone who stays behind and doesn’t break his mother’s heart.

‘I really struggled, Ammoo, but I realized I don’t have a choice.’

‘Of course you have a choice. You always have a choice.’ Rehana held her head in her hands and tried not to sound desperate. ‘What if something happens to you?’ She choked a little at the words. He had missed a button on his shirt. It was his favourite, a red-and-blue check, and as she leaned over to tuck the stray button through its loop he put his hand on her head, as though he were giving her his blessing. ‘I thought you hated war,’ Rehana said weakly.

‘This isn’t war. It’s genocide.’

‘Is it Silvi?’

‘No, of course not.’ He paused, seemed to hold his breath, then said, ‘I can’t sit back and do nothing, Ma. Everyone is fighting. Even people who weren’t sure, people who wanted to stay with Pakistan.’

‘How will you go?’

‘Aref’s cousin Raju has a car. He’ll drive us to the border.’

He didn’t say when. Maybe if she delayed him it wouldn’t happen at all. She wanted so much for it to depend on her. ‘I can’t decide now. Can I decide later? Can I decide tomorrow? We’ll go to the graveyard.’

‘It won’t be for a few days,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to sleep now.’

Rehana nodded. And then she had a sudden thought: what if he left in the middle of the night, like the other boys, without telling her? It might be better. No. No, it wouldn’t be better. ‘Don’t go without telling me.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Promise.’

‘I promise.’

‘Promise on my life.’

‘I promise on your life, Ammoo.’

The next day Rehana and Sohail took a rickshaw to the graveyard. Rehana was silent all the way, though in her head there was a shout. Don’t go, the shout said. Please, don’t go.

They passed a group of schoolboys on the street. Rehana wondered if their thoughts, like Sohail’s, were full of war. If they turned the idea over in their mouths like sugar-candy. If they were waiting for the right moment to tell their mothers and disappear.

The graveyard was pristine, a crisp open sky above it.

Here is your son, she said to Iqbal. Surely you would not have wanted this. Your son wants to fight for his country. He says he has no choice. I want to, but cannot be angry with him. So I leave it to you.

The quiet rumbled in her ears; the brief rustle of the drying graveyard grasses, the tinkle of a passing rickshaw, the burning tip of the caretaker’s biri as he lit it through the open glass of his kerosene lamp. The sounds roared; they screeched; they pierced. Please don’t go.

‘Don’t go,’ she finally said aloud. ‘There must be another way you can help.’

Sohail looked at her as though to say, Let’s not do this in front of Abboo. But Rehana was strengthened by Iqbal’s presence. Of the two of them, he would have been the one to protest. He would have forbidden it — yes, forbidden. I forbid you to go, he would have said. I forbid it! She should try to utter that word; it had such an unyielding quality.

But of course she could forbid nothing. She was seized with a sudden, gripping exhaustion. ‘I just keep hoping you’ll change your mind.’

He was still wearing the red-and-blue check; the collar pointed to his shoes. She saw him arguing with himself, calculating the most noble thing to do. The thing that would require the most sacrifice. Weighing his guilt against his desire to go. He must be picturing her alone in the house, with only Maya as her silent companion. And then himself in an army uniform. Which would be worse? He would choose that.

Rehana realized that she too would have made the same calculation. She would have moved through the world in that same way, trying find the thing that denied her most. She suddenly saw how much like her he was in this. The knowledge was an open window.

Sohail was still battling. His hand was hovering over the pocket of his shirt. Iqbal’s gravestone gleamed like the side of a ship.

‘It’s all right, baba,’ was all she could think to say. ‘Say goodbye to your father.’

Sohail cupped his hands and raised them to his face.

I cannot stop him. Perhaps if you were here, you would have done it. But I cannot. It is too great a thing.

In the afternoon Rehana watched as he packed his bags. Her fingers itched to help him so she tried to focus on something else. The books on his shelf. The posters hanging on the wall. Mao Tse-Tung. Che Guevara. Karl Marx. He wouldn’t tell her when he was leaving, or how he was planning to get out of the city.

‘It’s better if you don’t know,’ he said.

She unearthed an irritated, argumentative version of herself. ‘Why? Why is it better if I don’t know?’

‘Because that way if anyone asks, you can say you don’t know.’

She was tired. She wanted to be stubborn. It reassured her to dictate the terms of his leaving. ‘No. I have to be here when you go. Tell Aref and Joy to pick you up. There’s no need for secrecy,’ she said; ‘just tell them to come here. I want to know the moment you step out of that door, the moment you cross that gate. I want to say Aytul Kursi and Surah Yahseen.’

‘All right,’ he sighed. He was folding his shirts.

All this time Maya was standing under the doorframe, her feet on the raised threshold.

‘I have something for you,’ she said. It was a package wrapped in delicate red paper. It looked soft.

‘What is it?’ Rehana asked.

‘Open it later,’ Maya said.

Rehana wanted a brother. Someone to give going-away presents to. Someone to love without worry.

Rehana went to see Mrs Chowdhury. She thought she might tell her the news: about Sohail, and the boys leaving their stolen supplies in her corridors, and Sharmeen disappearing. She imagined Mrs Chowdhury holding her hands and telling her it would all be put right, like she used to.

Mrs Chowdhury was sitting on her veranda, facing the coconut trees in her garden. When Rehana leaned over to kiss her cheek, she found henna paste smeared into Mrs Chowdhury’s hair.

‘Any news of the Senguptas?’ Her breath was eggy.

‘Nothing. I thought they might write. Where is Silvi?’ She hadn’t seen Silvi since that night.

‘In her room. Praying, probably. All she does these days.’ Mrs Chowdhury waved away the plate of sliced papaya the cook had brought her. ‘What’s this? Bring me the samosas!’

‘No fried things, khalamma. Silvi apa’s orders.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll eat samosas if I want to. Go!’ And she snapped her fingers, which were heavy with generations of gold rings.

Rehana smiled indulgently at Mrs Chowdhury and realized that, in some quarters of the city, life was going on as before. Women were arguing for samosas. People were taking briefcases to work and frowning over their typewriters.

Mrs Chowdhury misunderstood Rehana’s silence. ‘Don’t worry, darling. The Senguptas will soon return.’

‘Times are bad, Mrs Chowdhury.’

‘Nonsense. Things will soon return to normal. It will all be done in no time.’

The words, when they came, did not comfort Rehana. She wondered if Mrs Chowdhury had been out of the house since the massacre, if she’d seen the death-coated city. Her dog had died, that appeared to be the extent of it. Rehana felt waves of hot and cold pummel her; she gripped the seat and swayed.

‘Oh, my dear, you’re about to faint!’ Mrs Chowdhury clapped again. ‘Ei, get over here, you goodfornothings, bring some ice water. Hurry!’

Rehana closed her eyes and waited; the ice water was put to her lips; she drank, pressed her back against the sofa. I’ll just lie here for a few minutes, she told herself. Just a few minutes.

‘Tomorrow,’ Sohail whispered. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow.’

Even though she had left him alone to pack his bag, she could not help unzipping it to see what he’d taken. She counted a few shirts. A lungi. She felt the plastic of his toothbrush. It was like combing her hands through his hair. Satisfied, she left for the kitchen.

She had prepared a feast. It had kept her calm throughout the day. So much to do.

There was shrimp malai curry.

Polao.

Chitol fish, which she’d had to debone and shape into balls. Chicken roast. Shami kabab. Dal, extra thick.

This is my duty, she said to herself. Sending my son to war with a full stomach.

They ate.

Maya, whose clothes suddenly hung over her frame in limp, deflated folds, nudged her rice with a spoon. Rehana realized how much she had neglected her daughter. The food turned grainy and sour in her mouth. Sohail was the only one eating, smacking his fingers together and smiling into his plate.

They said nothing of what was about to happen.

After the sweets and the halwa, Sohail rubbed his hands together and prepared to go.

‘They’re going to meet me in Sadarghat.’

‘Should I get you a rickshaw?’

‘Na.’

Just let me go, she heard him say. He turned to Maya, who had set her mouth into a thin line. He gripped her shoulders. She looked brittle between his hands. When he pulled her towards himself, she crumpled.

‘Get the bastards,’ she whispered. Then she turned and left them.

The light flickered.

‘I hate to let you go,’ Rehana said. She saw him looking at the creases on her forehead, the ones she had named 1959 and 1960. And she saw the scar under his chin, the one he had named Silvi.

‘Go,’ she said finally. ‘God goes with you.’

And then he was gone, his room tidied, the sheets tucked neatly into the mattress, his books lined up straight on the shelf, a small gap where Ghazals of Mirza Ghalib and Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas had sat beside each other, their frayed, loved, monsoon-waved pages pressed into line. She smiled at the choice. He had already memorized the poems and worn out the spines, but he would surely recite the verses to his soldier friends, who, despite being fierce and gun-wielding, would listen in rapt attention.

After Sohail left, Rehana resolved to confront her daughter. But Maya was evanescent; somehow even when she was sitting right in front of her it was as if she wasn’t there. She behaved as though no one had told her that once the war began there would be nothing for her to do but wait. No one had told her that she would only be allowed to imagine it from a distance. No one had told her how lonely, how hot, how tiresome, the days would be. And no one had told her that her friend would be the first to go.

She began spending all her time at the university, leaving as soon as the morning curfew was lifted, ignoring the breakfast Rehana offered, bolting through the door with only a few rushed words, and every evening returning just before the siren, looking exhausted and tense. When Rehana asked her what she did all day she said she had work to do.

In truth, it was a relief when she left the house every morning. Even the trees seemed to relax. Rehana tried not to let her imagination run loose around the empty house. She spent the days in stunned efficiency, counting and recounting the supplies, listening to the radio and discovering the violence that had been wrought upon the country. The deaths. The arrests. The children with no parents. The mothers with empty laps. The ones who simply vanished, leaving behind a comb or a pair of shoes.

Mrs Akram and Mrs Rahman came to visit. ‘Mrs Chowdhury said you’ve been upset,’ Mrs Rahman began.

Sohail had instructed her not to say anything about his departure. ‘It’s been very difficult. Everyone’s gone — the Senguptas — and you remember that girl, Sharmeen, Maya’s friend? We can’t find her anywhere.’

‘We should all go,’ Mrs Akram said. ‘It’s not safe for our children.’

‘Why should we go?’ Mrs Rahman said. ‘We don’t have to run away like criminals. This is our city. Let them march around and pretend they’ve taken over — I’m not leaving. I passed by those soldiers on my way here — they’re just little boys, younger than my own children. They expect me to be afraid!’

There was something comical about Mrs Rahman’s bravado, but Rehana didn’t feel like smiling.

‘Will you go, Rehana?’ Mrs Akram asked. ‘Don’t you have sisters in Pakistan?’

‘Pakistan?’ Mrs Rahman said. ‘Why on earth should she go to Pakistan? You know what they would do to us over there?’

‘No,’ Rehana said slowly, as though she had given the matter some thought, ‘I don’t think so. The children would never hear of it.’

‘I tell you, we should all stay here and take a stand.’

‘What sort of a stand, exactly?’ Mrs Akram asked.

‘We should do something. I’m not giving up so easily.’

‘Don’t be foolish. You’re just a housewife. What on earth could you possibly do?’

‘You wait and see. I’m not just good for gin-rummy, I’ll have you know.’

A few days later Rehana decided she’d had enough of Maya’s secrecy, so she decided to confront her. She wanted to know what the girl was doing all day at the university. Rehana borrowed Mrs Chowdhury’s car and ordered the driver to take her to the university campus. She didn’t know where to look — in the bombed-out hostels, or the canteen, or the Teacher — Student Centre — but she was sure she would find her, and she couldn’t stop thinking Maya must be doing something wrong. She was upset. She could be in trouble. Rehana would find out and put an end to it, whatever it was. Yes, she was worrying. Maybe for no reason. But better to make sure.

Rehana had only really been inside the university once, when Sohail had invited her to try the famous phuchkas at the canteen. He had bet her the university phuchkas were better than the ones at Horolika Snacks in Dhanmondi. Rehana said that wasn’t possible. She and Iqbal had tried all the phuchkas in Dhaka and no one could beat Horolika Snacks. Sohail said that was over a decade ago and things had changed. Rehana didn’t like to be reminded that things had changed and her husband was dead, but she was carried along by her son’s enthusiasm and agreed to see for herself. They bought a dozen phuchkas at Horolika Snacks and balanced the boxes on their knees as they took a rickshaw to the university campus.

At the canteen Sohail ordered a dozen more. He put the tiny cups of fried dough in a row in front of Rehana. Then he poured a little tamarind water into each one, licking his lips and clapping his hands together and saying, ‘Horolika versus Dhaka University! Which will it be?’ Some of the students stopped talking and looked over. The owner of the canteen stood up over his counter and cheered for himself. Then Sohail told Rehana that, in the interest of fairness, she should close her eyes and taste first one, then the other.

In the end she chose the canteen phuchkas. Things really had changed. And now the canteen, along with most of the other low buildings on the university campus, had been burned down on the night of the massacre.

Rehana didn’t have to search for her daughter. She saw her as soon as the car entered the university gates. There was a line of girls, and Maya was in the front row, raising her knees higher than all the others and shouting louder than all the others. So this was what she’d been doing. She didn’t look timid, or embarrassed that the gun she was holding was just a wooden stick. ‘Hut-two-three-four! Hut! Hut! Hut!’ she shouted.

Rehana told the driver to stop the car. She watched as the girls marched past. Some of them paused and peered through the window at Rehana. One smiled shyly; another waved. Maya, who kept her eyes straight ahead, didn’t notice her mother. The girls stopped a few feet away from the car and moved their hands over the wooden sticks, pretending to load, aim, fire, reload. They wore starched white saris with thin blue borders. They looked like washerwomen. They looked serious. None was as serious as Maya.

Rehana sat in the car and watched her daughter, waiting for the training, or whatever it was, to end. Once it was over she opened the car door and waved in Maya’s direction. Maya was talking to a boy and didn’t notice, but the boy, who was blowing smoke rings into the air, saw Rehana wave and whispered something to Maya. He pointed. Maya stalked over, her face coming together in a frown.

‘Are you spying on me?’ she said. The exercise had made her aggressive. Her braid was coming undone, and the stray hairs clung wetly to her forehead.

‘No, I just — you’ve been away so much. It’s dangerous, I just wanted to see where you were.’

‘Well, now you know.’ She brushed the hair from her face. ‘I’m trying to contribute.’

‘By doing this? Running around with wooden guns?’

As was her habit, Maya mounted an attack. ‘Why did you bring us back here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘From Lahore? Why did you bother to bring us back? You have no feeling for this place.’

What did she mean? ‘This is my home. Your father’s home.’

‘Then why won’t you let me do something?’

‘I just want to protect you. Everything I’ve done I’ve done for you and your brother. Now please, get in the car, the curfew’s about to ring.’

‘I’m not coming.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not coming. You go home, I’ll stay here.’

‘You come with me right now. You get in the car.’ Rehana felt the futility of it, but she insisted, grabbing Maya’s elbow and pulling her towards the car. She was surprised at her own strength. Maya tried to wrench her arm away, and Rehana gripped harder. ‘Don’t make a scene,’ she said coldly.

They said nothing to one another in the car. When they got home, Maya turned on her mother and began with a shout: ‘You are not so good at this either. You couldn’t keep my brother back, and you can’t keep me!’

Keep me. The words were poisoned arrows.

‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘You’ve been crazy — ever since — ever since Abboo died, you have this thing about keeping us at home. You’re mad! You want to lock us up!’

Rehana tried to change the subject. ‘I’m so sorry about Sharmeen, I know you’re upset.’

‘Don’t speak about her. You could never understand.’

‘Of course I understand.’

‘I mean you could never understand what it’s like for me and Sohail.’

‘Leave your brother out of it.’

‘Sohail,’ she said, ‘where is he now? Probably dead, killed by one of your Pak soldiers!’

It happened so quickly. She hadn’t meant to hit so hard, and it was only when she saw the red flowering on Maya’s cheek that she realized what she’d done.

Maya put her hand to her face, looking surprised, and then almost relieved. Then she said, ‘You should have left us in Pakistan.’

Rehana wanted to say sorry for the slap. She wanted to shake her until Maya took it back. But she stayed quiet, only glaring at her daughter and hoping Maya would not see the weak tremble in her jaw.

Maya stopped speaking. There were no more pleasantries, no more ‘good mornings’ and ‘I’m not hungrys’. With Sohail and the Senguptas gone, and Mrs Chowdhury and Silvi locked up in their house, Rehana felt a kinship with the deserted city. Maya took her plate and ate silently in Sohail’s room. The light would stay on deep into the night, and Rehana began to know her daughter only through the line of pale yellow that crept in below the door, and through the small sounds she made: the click of the ceiling-fan switch, the swish of the bedcover as she peeled it back, the faint whistle of a turning page. It went on this way for two weeks, as April, with its dense, stifling heat, spooled out before them.

Then one day Maya suddenly announced: ‘The soldiers need blankets. We’re collecting old saris.’

‘You’re sewing kathas?’

‘Yes. We need material. Things you’d throw away.’

Before she even realized it, Rehana had an idea that led her to an old steel almirah she hadn’t opened in years. She found the heavy key tucked behind the lowest shelf in the kitchen where she kept the emergency supplies of rice and dal. A life of variable fortunes had taught her never to finish anything. She always kept behind a tiny bit — a finger of ginger, a stick of cinnamon, a handful of rice — in case the next time she went to buy these things they somehow eluded her, through poverty or the unreliability of the country’s fortunes.

The key, despite years of disuse, slid smoothly into the lock. As she turned it and twisted the handle to release the bolt, Rehana recognized the old sound of scraping metal, and she steadied herself for the smell of mothballs and silk. The doors rasped in protest as she swung them open and surveyed the contents of the almirah. Here were the saris Iqbal had given her in the eight years of their marriage. After his death, she had washed, ironed and hung them up in the order in which they had been presented to her.

She remembered each occasion, the sari arriving in the red-and-white cardboard box of the sari shop, still smelling of the attar of the market and the ash of young cigarette-smoking boys who were enlisted to bring down the starched saris from high shelves and drape them delicately around their youthful hips. They would sway in imitation of women, dangling the achol from outstretched arms to show off the elaborate embroidery, the swimming colours.

It had not been difficult to arrange the saris; as the years had gone by, Iqbal’s prosperity, and his gratitude for his wife, had meant more and more daring purchases. Simple cottons became diaphanous chiffons, prints were given up in favour of embroidery, the threads of each sari always heavier than the last, the patterns more refined, the silk more serious, until, just a few weeks before his death, Iqbal had presented Rehana with the jewel of the collection, a blue Benarsi silk.

Rehana regarded the saris and tried to recall the feeling they had given her, of being at once enveloped and set free, the tight revolutions of material around her hips and legs limiting movement, the empty space between blouse and petticoat permitting unexpected sensations — the thrill of a breeze that has strayed low, through an open window, the knowledge of heat in strange places, the back, the exposed belly. It was the bringing together of night and day, the sari: as it concealed the skin, it also released it, so that one body, one woman, would know something of the complications of her sex.

The saris stared at Rehana like pictures in a photo album, evocative, a little accusing. She hadn’t worn a single one in years. She was not sorry to lose them, just sorry she would never again have occasion to wear them. She piled the saris loosely into her arms, rushed into the drawing room and presented them to her daughter.

‘Here. Blankets for your freedom fighters. I’ll help you sew.’

Maya stared at her mother. ‘I asked you for cottons,’ she said quietly. ‘What’s the point of all this expensive material? The blankets will itch.’

‘Put them inside. It will be winter before you know it, and the silk will keep everyone warm.’

The sight of the saris stirred something in Maya.

‘Please don’t give them away,’ she said softly.

‘Why not? You never wear anything but white.’ Rehana was aware of a punishing note in her voice. Why, despite her best intentions, did the words to her daughter always sound so sharp?

Maya’s face closed up. ‘It’s foolish to give these away. They’re of no use; you should put them back.’

Rehana called Mrs Rahman and Mrs Akram to the bungalow. ‘Follow me,’ she said, leading them up the stairs to the roof. She had laid out a jute pati and a few cushions. The saris were stacked up in a basket. Beside the basket was Rehana’s sewing box. The box contained a row of needles and a bundle of black spools. There were small pattern cutouts and a collection of thimbles. A tomato-shaped pin-cushion.

‘What’s all this?’ Mrs Rahman said, sliding off her chappals and flopping on to the pati. ‘You want to open a tailoring shop?’

‘Don’t you know? We’re at war, and my daughter says I have to do something. To prove I belong here. So I’m doing something.’ Rehana felt a tear crawling out of her eye; she tilted her head, sent it back. ‘I’m doing something. Making blankets for the refugees.’ She felt her lip curling back on to her teeth.

‘What’s going on — where’s Sohail?’ Mrs Akram asked.

She was desperate to tell them. ‘He isn’t here — I sent him to Karachi.’

‘Really? I thought—’

‘Don’t you know what they’re doing to all the university boys? They’re making them disappear. What would you have me do, just sit back and let them take him?’

‘Rehana,’ Mrs Rahman said, pointing to the silks, ‘you don’t have to use these. We can find some old cottons.’

Rehana dug in her heels. ‘Why not? Everyone has to make sacrifices, why not me? It’s my country too.’

‘Of course it’s your country—’ Mrs Akram began.

‘My daughter doesn’t think so.’

‘She said that? She couldn’t have meant it; you know how children are.’

‘I slapped her.’

‘Oh, Rehana.’ Mrs Akram put a hand on Rehana’s arm.

‘I couldn’t help it, I just did it. She’s out of control.’

‘Rehana, you must have patience,’ Mrs Rahman said.

‘Patience? I have nothing but patience for the children. Running around all over town, revolution this, democracy that — nothing but patience!’

‘For Sohail, yes, but—’

‘What are you saying?’

The two women exchanged cautious looks. ‘We know she hasn’t exactly been easy,’ Mrs Rahman said. ‘But you’ve always been — a little more unforgiving of Maya.’

‘Unforgiving? Me? I’m only one person — I have to do everything — is it possible, humanly possible?’ But she knew they were right. The knowledge burned inside her, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. You’re right. I’ve been unfair. ‘You want to help me,’ she said instead. ‘Sew.’

On the last day of April, it rained. Rehana watched the cotton clouds shout to a hungry, cracked earth. She imagined it raining on the human exodus on the Jessore Road and the Mymensingh Road and on the widows and the swollen bellies, trying to wash away the tears, falling in skyfuls over the slowly departing. And falling on her Sohail and his friends as they picked through the spring prairie grasses, through the low paddy, the bleached stacks of wheat, as they searched for the war with only their wettoothed smiles, their poems, their death-defying youth.