The Good Muslim

1984 February

It would not have been possible to go home if Silvi hadn’t died. Maya’s thoughts rested for a moment on this fact as she settled herself on the wooden bench in the third-class carriage, balancing on her lap the sum of all her worldly possessions: a small rucksack containing two saris, a kameez, a pair of trainers, a doctor’s case with a stetho and, for her mother, a young mango tree. The tree had been difficult to wrap; it was heavier than it looked and bulged awkwardly where the roots were packed in soil. ‘Tree won’t live,’ the farmer who sold it to her said. ‘Rajshahi tree, it belongs in Rajshahi.’

An old lady with a tiffin carrier slid into the space beside her. She stared for a moment at Maya, then clamped the tiffin carrier between her knees, pulled out a string of prayer beads and began to mutter the Kalma under her breath.

La Ilaha Illallah, Muhammad ur Rasul Allah.

Of course it would survive. There was an empty patch at the western edge of the garden, and if anyone could coax mangoes out of that tree it would be Ammoo. But seven long years had passed — she couldn’t even be sure the patch was still empty.

A group of young men entered the compartment. Immediately they began to laugh and smoke, passing around a box of matches and a packet of Star cigarettes. Maya resisted the urge to scold them and instead pressed her face to the horizontal bars on the open window, gazing at the litter-strewn tracks, the station platform where boys were selling peanuts and cold drinks, and beyond to the scattered patches of green where the groves of mango stood. She would miss it. The two-room house she had rented now stood empty, its rough concrete floor swept and washed. And the verandah where she had seen her patients, that too had been cleared, the examination table, the small stand on which she kept her equipment, the wooden chair on which she draped her white jacket at the end of the day, ballpoint clicked shut in its pocket.

It had started with a few handfuls of mud. She told herself the wind must have tossed a coconut or a piece of wood against the walls of her house. For three days she ignored the sound.

On the fourth night, the laugh. Unmistakable, escaping between the fingers of someone holding a palm over his mouth. A young man’s laugh, nervous and girlish.

She ran outside and peered into the darkness, but she couldn’t see anything. There is nothing darker than a moonless night in Rajshahi.

It had ended, months later, with the glint of a knife. She remembered it now: a gentle motion like the lick of a cat, the bright line of it; and the flash of white that caught her eye, the hem of a long robe floating just shy of a man’s ankles as he slipped out of the room and disappeared. Her hand went to her throat, to the scar that still stood there, black and angry, but he hadn’t cut her, only laid his knife on her: it was a way of saying that they had unfinished business, and that he could reappear at any moment to end the story.

Yes, she would miss it. Nazia and the house and the mangoes and the path around the pond. But the cat’s lick of that knife, and the scar on her neck, meant she might never return.

Just before the train pushed off, a couple with two small children occupied the bench opposite. The mother held one of the children on her lap, while the other, older, squeezed into the space between her parents. The mother smiled shyly; Maya guessed it was her first time on a train — nose pin gleaming, a pair of thin gold bangles on her wrists, her fortune.

Really, it was no tragedy her brother’s wife had died. The prospect of facing Silvi — sanctimonious, her face packed tightly into the burkha she hadn’t been seen without since the war — was largely what had kept Maya from her home. There was, of course, also her brother, Sohail. And Ammoo, who had abandoned her to her rage — her rage and the deep, driving smell of burning books, a scent that had never left her during the seven years she had gone missing. The train made its way through Rajshahi, and then into Natore, the landscape remaining flat and dry, the smells of the paddy mingling with the mustard plants that shone yellow, the burning cakes of dung.

The old woman opened her tiffin carrier, releasing the aroma of dal and fried cauliflower. The family opposite followed suit, unwrapping their bread and bhaji. Maya felt a tap of hunger; she had neglected to pack anything for the journey. The mother carefully tore her bread into tiny pieces and placed them in the baby’s mouth. She passed the rest of the food to her husband, avoiding his eye as he took the newspaper-wrapped package from her.

The older girl was refusing to eat, tugging at her mother’s elbow and shaking her head. Maya rooted around in her bag and emerged with two tamarind sweets. She offered one to the girl, who stood up, climbed into Maya’s lap and took the sweet from her outstretched hand. The mother protested, but Maya waved her away. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. The girl pulled her knees up against her chest and fell asleep. Maya must have slept too, because when she opened her eyes the girl was heavy in her arms and the train was just outside Bahadurabad Ghat. She felt a nudge on her shoulder. The old woman was pointing to her tiffin carrier, which held half a slice of bread and a smear of rice pudding.

‘Eat,’ she said, pinching Maya’s cheek; ‘you’re too skinny. Who’s going to marry you?’

At Bahadurabad, Maya boarded the ferry. It was afternoon now, and the sun danced on the wide expanse of river. She waved her ticket at the ferryman and pushed her way to the deck, where she was the only woman who chose to sit in the full glare of the sun. The Padma lapped at the ferry, gentle, hiding the force of its current. She munched on a packet of biscuits, trying to remember if this was the same boat that had brought her to Rajshahi. That one had a strange name. ‘Hey,’ she called out to a young boy in a uniform. ‘What’s the name of this boat?’

‘Padma.’

It must have been a different boat. That journey, running away from home, seemed a lifetime ago. She had turned to her old friend Sultana. They had volunteered together at the refugee camps during the war, Sultana shocking everyone by driving the supply truck herself. Maya always remembered what Sultana had told her that long summer before independence: that she dreamed of going home after the war, not to the city, but back to her father’s village. ‘I want to feel the earth pulling at my feet,’ she had said. After the book burning, when Maya had decided there was nothing to do but leave, she had telephoned, asking if she might come to stay. Sultana told Maya

she had recently married a boy she had known since childhood, a doctor. Together they worked at a clinic in Tangail; she could come; they could use her help.

She had stayed for three months, but Tangail was too close to Dhaka. Every day Maya stared at the buses shuttling towards the city, daring herself to climb aboard one and go home. And Sultana and her husband were newly married. Maya caught them kissing in the kitchen, their mouths open, his hands in her hair.

She left, wandered around the country on trains, ferries and rickshaws, finally arriving at the medical college hospital in Rajshahi town. She volunteered again, and then applied to finish her internship. After two years at the hospital, she was given permission to start a clinic of her own. It was Nazia who had given her the idea, Nazia who had come all the way to town on the back of a rickshaw-van, her baby stuck in the breech position. Impossible, Maya argued, for the women to travel all the way to the hospital to give birth. Too many babies were dying.

Somewhere along the way she had decided to become a lady doctor instead of a surgeon. She had seen how the women’s faces changed when she entered the chamber, relaxing their grip on the examining table. At the time she told herself it was a practical matter. Anyone could become a surgeon, but a doctor for women, a doctor who could deliver their babies and stitch their wounds afterwards and teach them about birth control — that is what they needed. She didn’t think of the debt she was repaying, that each of the babies she brought into the world might someday be counted against the babies that had died, by her hand, after the war.

They had never had a clinic in the village. Nazia spread the word, describing how Maya had saved her and her baby from certain death, how she had ordered the nurses about at the hospital, how expertly she had inserted the needle into her arm. That year, before the monsoon, Maya taught everyone in the village how to make oral-rehydration fluid: a handful of molasses, a pinch of salt, a jug of boiled water. And they passed that season without a single dead child. By the following year, when she succeeded in petitioning the district to build them a tube well, she believed she had won their hearts.

Nazia and Masud had another child. They named her Maya.

It was dark by the time the ferry reached the dock at Jaggannathganj. Maya checked her watch, wondering if it was too late to catch the last train. The tree was heavy in her arms, the branches pricking her shoulder. She decided to try; it would be difficult to find a hotel here, and they would ask her questions: why she was travelling alone, why she didn’t have a man with her, a husband, a father.

At the station she saw the old woman from the train, her tiffin carrier open. Maya went over and waved, strangely elated at the sight of her. The woman beckoned her closer.

‘Eat, eat,’ she said.

‘Grandmother,’ Maya said, ‘how is it your tiffin carrier is always full?’

The woman smiled, revealing a set of tiny, betel-stained teeth. Maya dipped a piece of bread into the curry she offered, suddenly famished.

Hours later, in the molten dark of night, the overnight train pulled into the station, and Maya helped the old woman on board. Five hours to Dhaka, she whispered to herself, reciting the names of the stations: Sirajganj, Mymensingh, Gafargaon. Only five more hours.

*

Maya thought she might be overcome at the sight of Dhaka. She imagined the waves of nostalgia that would coast over her, forcing her to remind herself of the necessity of the last seven years away. She imagined emerging into the cool February afternoon, clouds moving fast overhead, and remembering everything about her old life — all the days she had spent at the university, the rickshaw rides to Ramna Park, Modhumita Cinema and the Racecourse, regretting the spare years in the country. But, as she stepped out of Kamalapur Station, she saw that everything was loud and crude, as though someone had reached over and raised the volume. It smelled of people and garbage and soot. She saw how tall everything had grown — some buildings reached five or six storeys — and how her rickshaw-puller struggled to weave through the thicket of cars on Mirpur Road, horns blaring impatiently; and she saw signs of the Dictator everywhere, graffiti on the walls declaring him the ‘General of Our Hearts’ and the ‘Saviour of Bangladesh’, posters of him ten, twenty feet tall, with his high forehead, his thin, satisfied moustache.

An hour later Maya was standing in front of the house of her childhood, Number 25, clutching her rucksack and wondering what she would find within.

Her eyes adjusted to the new contours of the building. The decline was far worse than she had imagined. Here, grey streaks across its back, where the drainpipe had leaked; there, the slow sinking of its foundations, as if the house were being returned to the earth; and, above, the collection of shacks that made up the first floor, built by her brother out of a mixture of brick and tin and jute, making it appear as though an entire village had fallen from the sky and landed on the rooftop.

She had loved this house once. It was the only place where she could conjure up the memory of her father — his elbows on the dining table, his footsteps on the verandah. Sliding off his chappals and raising his feet on to the bed. The smell of his tweed suit on a humid day. And lodged into the bone of this house was every thought and hope and bewildered fantasy she had ever harboured about her life, about the war she had fought and won, about the woman and man she had imagined she and her brother would become; but after it was all over, the killing and the truce and the redrawing of the border, he had gone one way, and she another. And she had foreseen none of it.

There is no time to linger, she told herself. Pull up your socks and go inside.

Everything was quiet and shining. The wooden arms on the sofa gleamed. The tiny brass chandelier was polished, the lace runner on the table starched and fixed perfectly in its place. Cushions with pointy edges. It came back to her, the way her mother always kept the house, as though a guest might arrive at any moment and run her finger along the windowsill, checking for dust.

The house was modest: three rooms set out in a row, connected by a verandah that faced the garden. At the far end, a kitchen with its own small porch. This was where she headed now, sure she would find her mother bent over the stove or washing the breakfast plates.

Instead, she found the kitchen packed with women. They wore long black burkhas and squatted over the grinding stone, the sink, the stove. Maya hovered at the entrance, wondering for a moment if she had strayed into the wrong house. She stood the tree up against a wall and set down her bag.

‘Hello?’

One of the women rose to greet her. Maya couldn’t make out her features beneath the loose black cloth. ‘As-Salaam Alaikum,’ she said.

‘Walaikum As-Salaam.’

The woman reached over and held Maya’s hand. ‘We mourn our sister,’ she said, then turned around and returned to her task, peeling cucumbers over a bowl of water. Maya stood and watched her for what felt like a long time. No one else spoke or addressed her. She picked up her things and left the kitchen. Where was Ammoo? The urge to see her became acute. Maya bent over the sink in the bathroom and splashed a few handfuls of water on her face. She retied her hair, practising the moment she would set eyes on her mother. When she emerged, someone was waiting for her in the corridor. ‘It’s time,’ she said, and led Maya to the living room.

The burkha-clad women were busy rearranging the room. They pushed the sofa against the wall, lifted up the dining table and leaned it on its side. A photograph of her father was turned upside down. The watercolour painting Sohail had done of Maya when she was seven, her ribbons red and yellow, was covered with a pillowcase. As the muezzin began the call to prayer, they sped up, spreading white cloths on the carpet, lighting incense and filling a long silver container with rosewater. Finally, they pinned a sheet across the room, dividing it in half.

Someone pushed Maya through the sheet and into the back of the room. ‘Please cover yourself,’ she said.

Maya grabbed the woman’s elbow. ‘Where is my mother, do you know?’

The woman shook her head.

‘Rehana Haque. This is her house.’

The woman pulled Maya close, her grip tight. ‘Doa koro, apa,’ she said. Pray, sister.

She could go out and look for her mother. Maybe she was at the Ladies’ Club, or visiting a friend. She might be at the graveyard, putting flowers on Abboo’s grave. But the room was too crowded now for Maya to leave. The women seemed to have multiplied, taking every inch of space on the carpet. They leaned against each other and held hands. Maya packed herself tightly against the wall. She heard the men shuffle in, shadow puppets on the sheet, their capped heads crowding the tableau. A man separated from the group and positioned himself in the centre of the room. He cleared his throat and began in a high, nasal voice: Alhamdulilla hi rabbil al-ameen. Praise be to God, cherisher and sustainer of all worlds. As he uttered this sentence, Maya saw her mother slip through the curtain. The breath stopped in her throat. She wanted to call out. She waved her arms. ‘Ma!’ she shout-whispered. Rehana looked this way and that. The Huzoor raised his voice. Ammoo fixed her gaze on Maya and stood still for a moment, her hands moving to her face. Maya felt a burning in her eyes and at the back of her throat. Another seven years passed. Then, a whisper of a smile. Ammoo stepped through the crowd, her arms outstretched, and before she knew it Maya was in the cloud of her, the coconuts in her hair, the ginger in her fingertips. ‘When did you come?’ she whispered. All the years between them, trapped in the amber of her voice.

‘Just now. What’s going on?’

‘Milaad for Silvi.’

Of course. Silvi would have been buried within hours of her death, but this was her Qul-khani, the prayer to mark the third day of her passing.

Seven months into her exile, Maya had written to her mother. I am not angry, she had begun. But I cannot come home.

For almost a year Ammoo had not replied. Those months had felt endless, as she rehearsed in her mind the furious words her mother might say, wondering if the silence would go on forever, willing her own letter back. But when it arrived, Ammoo’s letter was packed with news, updates about the house, the neighbours, the garden. She showed no anger, but she didn’t ask Maya to return. And that was how they corresponded, exchanging elaborate pleasantries, long passages about the weather, telling each other everything and nothing.

The Huzoor continued his sermon. Now the women were moving back and forth to the rhythm of his words. It occurred to Maya that when her father died there would have been a similar scene, men in white caps, the air scented with rosewater. She stole a glance at her mother. Ammoo was wiping tears with the back of her hand. She looked the same, exactly the same.

The Huzoor began to talk about Silvi. How pious she was, how good. How devoted to her faith. Sitting among these mourners, none of whom were crying because as Muslims they were instructed to mourn with modesty, Maya wondered how she could have kept away for so long — from this house, and this city, and this mother and this brother. Even though she had been the one to choose her exile, it was as though a thick skin had formed over it, and it appeared to her now as a mystery. On the other side of this curtain was her brother, newly widowed, and his son, Zaid. She thought of meeting him, of the beard that must be thick on his chin, and she remembered how much she had loved him, how fiercely she had needed him to be like her, how she had turned away when he had leaned towards God, taken it personally, as though he had done it to offend her.

When Ammoo closed her eyes and began to recite the final prayer, Maya looked closer at her. Maybe she looked a little older. Dark bruise shapes under her eyes, a line on her forehead. But it was only when her mother turned around after everyone had said Ameen, when she turned around with wet cheeks and smiled again, that Maya noticed one of her teeth missing at the back of her mouth. Then the years opened up and took shape — the shape of that molar, craggy and smooth, big and small, a chasm.

Maya had told Nazia about the mud, about the laugh. Nazia was indignant. ‘Those thugs,’ she said, fanning herself. ‘If this one turns out to be a boy I’m going to lock him up and only let him out for school.’

It had never been hotter. No one could remember a sari drying so fast on the washing line, the chillies thinning to husks in the field. The pond had begun to shrink back, and there was talk of a threat to the mangoes. ‘I know,’ Maya said. ‘Let’s go swimming. It’s hot enough to drive anyone mad.’

‘Really? We can do that?’

A beat. There were rules about pregnant women, about where they could bathe, but Maya brushed them aside; no one believed those things any more. She had been lecturing them for years now, about science and superstition and their rights. ‘Why not?’ she said to Nazia. She would remember it later, the moment of pause before she said yes, but on that day all she could think about was the water, its green coolness easing the lash of that summer.

They sat on the steps leading down to the pond, their feet submerged. Nazia lowered herself in and dipped her head under water. ‘Subhan Allah,’ she cried, ‘thanks be to God for such a thing!’

‘If my wife wants to cool her feet,’ Masud declared, ‘no one can stop her.’

The men of the village had appeared in front of his house, shaking their heads. A pregnant woman in the pond? It was too much.

They huddled around the cooking fire that night, Maya and Nazia, fanning the bits of wood until they flared high over the pot.

‘What a fuss,’ Nazia said. ‘I hear they’re having a meeting.’

‘Ignore them,’ Maya said. ‘Main thing is Masud is a good man. They’ll tire themselves out eventually.’ She didn’t tell her friend that she had heard the boys at her window again, that she had slept the night before with the windows shut, the heat-clotted air stopping her breath.

After the Milaad the women passed around dishes of food and Ammoo began playing the hostess, encouraging everyone to eat. Someone offered Maya a plate but she refused, her tongue heavy in her mouth. She was suddenly overcome with weariness, and she considered slipping into Sohail’s old room and putting her head down for a few minutes. No one would notice. She closed her eyes. She heard people shuffle around her. Her head kept slipping sideways and when she opened her eyes the room was empty.

She found Ammoo in the kitchen.

‘Ma?’

‘Oh, you’re up. I didn’t want to wake you.’

Her lids were heavy. She took a few steps, faltered. Ammoo led her to the sofa. She wanted to talk to Ammoo, tell her about Nazia and the mud they threw at her window. And the lashes. She wanted to tell her about the lashes. But it was one thing for Ammoo to smile at her, to greet her tenderly, and another for the years to fall behind them. She collapsed on the sofa, struggling to keep her eyes open. ‘I have to tell you something.’

‘How did you come?’

‘The train, the ferry, the train.’

‘You must be tired. Lie down for a bit.’

She felt herself nodding off again. ‘I brought you a tree.’

‘I’ll wake you up; it’s only three now.’

She pulled her eyes open. There was a brown box against the wall. She hadn’t seen it before — the upstairs women had covered it with a tablecloth. ‘When did you get that?’ she asked, stumbling to her feet and examining it.

Ammoo’s face brightened. ‘A little gift to myself.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I saved and saved. Took me two years of leftover rent. There’s a German man living in the big house now, always pays the rent on time. You haven’t seen Magnum, P.I.?’

‘There’s no television in Rajshahi.’

Ammoo’s eyes widened in mock horror. ‘That’s very sad.’

They laughed. Ammoo sounded so cheerful she almost erased the loneliness of it, waiting with a plate on her lap for the BTV news at eight.

Maya lay her head on the cool pillow. Just for a moment, she thought, then I’ll give Ammoo the mango tree and explain everything. She slept. Through the shutters she glimpsed the tiger stripes of sunset, and later Ammoo came in to cover her with a blanket. She heard the muezzin marking the end of the day. A whisper in her ear: did she want something to eat? She curled her hand around her mother’s knee. No. Later, a cat slipped into the room and lay across her feet. She felt the quick heartbeat, the warmth radiating out of the little body.

She dreamed of Rajshahi.

In her dream it is the pineapple field that marks the end of everything. There is one day when she is as fierce and impenetrable as winter fog, walking around the village with the stetho wrapped proudly around her neck. No chains of gold; she is a doctor. Early that morning she saved a mother and a pair of twin boys, performing the emergency C-section herself, the cutting and stitching in perfect rhythm, her hands sinking deep into the shared womb. And, although she reminded the family they should have loved the babies just as well had they been girls, she enjoyed the tight embraces of the women, the relief; she munched on the triangle of wrapped betel leaf they offered her. Now she is striding through the village and on to the dirt path that leads to the road that leads into town. Her arms are swinging, January wind pinching at her face, and she is passing the pond, where she waves to the boy who lost a brother to snakebite last year (too late, that day), and she ducks under a pair of mango trees and decides to take a shortcut through the pineapple patch. A few steps in, and the sun is high, the field looks wider now than she had thought, but she is not the sort of person to turn around, so she lifts her sari above her ankles and treads delicately, avoiding the sharp thorns of the pineapple plants. She is tempted to peel back the leaves and check for a ripe joldugi, but she knows it is not the season. Still, the air is sweet and bee-heavy, and when she has reached the end of the field she lowers the hem of her sari and continues, humming a nursery rhyme she was taught by little Maya the night before. And then she sees the meeting. A dozen men in a circle. Masud stands in the middle. ‘It’s the doctor,’ he says; ‘she’s the cause of all the trouble.’

Maya woke up to darkness. She was dressed in one of Ammoo’s salwaar-kameezes, worn through at the elbows and smelling strongly of soap. By habit, she fingered the scab on her neck. A hard pellet, it refused to budge as she picked at its edges. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and went to find her mother. Ammoo was in bed, running a plastic comb through her hair.

‘I thought you might sleep all night.’

Maya ducked under the mosquito net and climbed in beside her. ‘I didn’t realise how tired I was.’

Rehana parted her hair down the middle, creating a perfectly straight seam, and began to braid one side. The ritual brought Maya back to all those mornings before school, getting up ten minutes before Sohail so that her hair could be oiled, plaited and ribboned. She thought of her brother now, holding her hand as they walked through the school gates.

‘Tell me about Sohail.’ In all the letters they had exchanged, Ammoo had said so little about him — only that he had moved upstairs, that his wife had delivered a son, that she saw hardly anything of them, so busy were they with their religion.

Ammoo picked up the comb again and began to tell her. They called themselves Tablighi Jamaat. The Congregation of Islam. Silvi had held meetings upstairs, preaching to the women about everything there was to know about being a Muslim. God, men, morality. Purdah and sex. The life of the Prophet. His wives, Ayesha and Khadija and Zaynab. The raising of children. How to be one of the faithful. And Sohail had his own group of followers at the mosque; many men had been led to the way of deen — the way of submission — under his direction. They brought their friends, their errant sons, and Sohail told them what to believe and how to live. He was considered a holy man.

‘They have twenty, thirty people living there. And almost a hundred during the day. I lost count.’ They had moved upstairs soon after Maya left. Started out with the brick room in front, then added the outside staircase so they could come and go without disturbing her. Then the tin rooms, the toilet, the kitchen.

‘How did she die?’

‘She had jaundice. They didn’t notice until it was too late.’

She thought of Silvi’s skin turning yellow, her eyes the colour of yolks. ‘And Bhaiya?’

‘For him, it is the afterlife that matters.’

‘Things will change now’, Maya said, ‘without Silvi.’

‘Maybe,’ Ammoo replied, sounding uncertain. ‘Come, let me comb your hair.’

Maya moved closer to her mother, but instead of sitting in front of her she put her head down on Ammoo’s lap. Ammoo smoothed her hand across her forehead. ‘I can hardly believe it,’ she said.

Maya’s eyes began to burn. The words rose up in her throat. Ammoo was running her fingers through her hair now, gently massaging her scalp.

‘What’s this?’ She peered down, brushing the hair from Maya’s neck.

‘It’s nothing, just a cut.’

‘On your throat?’

‘It’s a long story, Ammoo.’ She sat up, pulled the hair around her neck.

‘Tell me.’

The punishment was one hundred and one lashes. Masud came back from the meeting and spat the words at his wife. ‘One hundred and one,’ he said. ‘That’s what you deserve.’

Maya stood between Nazia and her husband. ‘For what?’

‘For lying about the child. He’s not mine.’

It’s not a curse, she had told them, it’s Down’s syndrome. The child will be different, he’ll have problems, but he’ll survive, I can show you how to care for him.

He looks like a Chink, Masud had said. Look at his flat nose — did you fuck a Chinese, wife, is that what you did?

He went to the meeting. He told the men. They said they had known something was wrong, known it since that day she and the doctor lady had gone swimming in the pond.

That Chink is not my baby. Lyingcheatingwhoreofawife.

The punishment was one hundred and one lashes.

One, shaped like a question mark, where the whip has curled around her calf.

Raise the sari!

Whore!

At the end, when Maya was the only one still watching, miscounting, thinking it was already one hundred and one when it was only one hundred, she approached her friend, and the whip caught her on its way up, nicked her, the bite of a hungry insect, making her swallow the word she was about to utter. Shesh. Finished. She had spoken too soon. Instead of a word, she was marked by the whip, her hand rushing to the place on her neck where it had touched her and returning with blood. And was that a smile in the man’s eye? The one who was only following orders, protecting the village, the name of the village.

She found Nazia in the hospital. ‘Please go,’ Nazia said. ‘I am tired.’ She was lying on her stomach, legs swaddled. Maya touched her foot, black and hard, and she flinched. ‘Leave me,’ Nazia pleaded.

She wanted to witness the skin closing over Nazia’s wound. She wanted to stay until the marks faded, until they were almost invisible — thin, worm-like tracks that would dance across her legs. She would stand up and they would begin to resist. They would go to the police, they would break up the meetings. But Nazia said no and her black foot said no and Maya realised she would have to leave the wound open, leave the village with her protests still urgent, still angry.

She was wondering where to go next when the telegram arrived. The Hill Tracts, maybe, or the north. She traced her finger around the map of Bangladesh, up the blue arteries, the Jamuna, the Meghna, reading aloud the names of the towns, Mymensingh, Pabna, Kushtia. She was sitting under the jackfruit tree outside her house, munching on a bowl of sour jaam, when the postman stopped and swung a leg over his bicycle. She offered him a piece of fruit, and he declined, looking at his feet. Then he said, ‘Daktar, someone in your family has died.’

It was the only thing she feared. She flung the bowl aside and grabbed the postman’s shoulders, feeling him shrink from the intimacy of the gesture, from the purple stain her fingers would leave on his shirt.

‘Is it my mother? Tell me quick.’ She closed her eyes, as if he was about to hit her.

‘I don’t know, I can’t read English.’

She snatched it from him and tore it open. Silvi. Silvi was dead.

That night, she dreamed of her mother wrapped in a white shroud, her nostrils stuffed with cotton. In the morning she began to pack her things. By dying, Silvi had declared a truce. It was time to go home.

No one came to say goodbye.

The house was changed, but it had survived. And she had made it, two train rides and a ferry across the country, and she was laying her head on her mother’s lap, and there was nothing to do now but remember all the times they had returned to this house, she and her brother, to find everything was the same and not the same, to find their mother waiting, waiting.

1972 February

The war ended and all the ugly and beautiful things were uglier and more beautiful. The Great Leader Mujib returned from exile and began printing the new currency and renaming all the buildings. Those who had sided with the enemy hid out, afraid of the back-from-war boys who had surrendered their guns but couldn’t stop thinking about revenge. The women wore marigolds in their hair and smelled of coconut oil, and the refugees drifting back from India clutched the cindered husks of their village homes and raised stakes on empty graves.

It was a winter of return, mothers waiting at home, preparing elaborate meals with the leftover war rations, straining their eyes to the road, jumping at the slightest sound. Inevitably, the moment of homecoming did not happen in the way they imagined, with the young boy returning to a fragrant house, rice on the table, everyone washed and smiling. No, it usually happened when she was at the market for a leg of mutton or looking for the lost pair of clothes pegs in the grass, and the boy would appear, dishevelled and with new depths in his eyes, new sorrows etched into him, and when she saw him it would be like birthing him all over again, checking he had all his fingers and toes, wondering if he would survive this new world. And the boy-soldier, quiet, his thoughts turning to ordinary pleasures, the feel of his mother’s cotton sari worn down to its threads, and the shape of her hand on his forehead, and the smell of her, like lemons, puncturing every other sensation.

But Sohail did not return. December ended, then January. Rehana and Maya told stories of his return, of the light and pleasant things they would do. Ice cream and spring chicken. Maybe they would take a trip to the tea gardens, or to Cox’s Bazaar. He had always wanted to see the brown tides of the Bay of Bengal.

When the moment arrived, Maya and Ammoo were at the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, where they had both signed up as volunteers. That day they returned to find him already home, sitting comfortably in the living room with a newspaper, as if he had been there all along.

He wore a red shirt and a dirty lungi. His face was obscured by the dark grey grizzle of a beard. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking back and forth at them both. ‘I meant to shave.’ They smiled at one another and then Maya embraced him and held on for as long as she could, surprised by the fragrance of earth in his hair.

That night they took the lamp and settled themselves in the garden. Rehana slipped a mosquito coil under Sohail’s chair, and the three of them pushed close to one another, huddling against the February chill.

‘What took you so long?’ she asked. ‘The other boys have been coming in for weeks now.’

Sohail didn’t explain. Smoke from the mosquito coil reached up and caressed them, pungent. He made a gesture with his left hand, which told them he was tired. Maya and Ammoo had been staring at him the whole evening; perhaps he was weary of being looked at.

They fell into silence. All the words seemed too small. The crickets raised their voices, the frogs. Maya thought about the other times they’d sat there. In winter they sometimes put their plates on their laps and ate breakfast and watched the fog curl back. Her father had wanted this garden, this porch that protruded into it. Two months before he died, he had planted a row of tomatoes, bending over the ground himself, sprinkling seeds, folding earth over the cleft. He died before they sprouted, and in the spring, when the plants released their buds of green, it was Ammoo who watered them, shooed away the crows. Years later, when the garden was shortened to make space for the big house, she rescued one or two tomato plants, migrating them to the smaller vegetable patch she had staked out in front of the bungalow, but they didn’t survive the move; their stalks crisped and turned to dust. Maya had found her among them once, holding the bones of the plant, disbelieving.

‘What will we do now, I wonder?’ Sohail asked.

‘Hasn’t she told you?’ Ammoo said. ‘Maya’s going to be a doctor. Look after me in my old age.’

Maya blushed, secretly proud of herself for choosing medicine. A noble way to serve the new country. ‘The university will open soon,’ she said.

‘Back to school for us.’ Sohail appeared unhappy at the prospect of returning to university, of answering yes sir, present sir, in the roll call. ‘What kind of doctor will you be?’ He pointed to himself. ‘Arms and legs? Eyes and ears? Heart?’ He laughed, as though she couldn’t possibly be trusted with anyone’s heart.

‘Surgery,’ she said.

He clapped his hands together. ‘Vah. Perfect, brilliant. Dr Sheherezade Haque Maya, sewer of wounds, extractor of tumours.’

‘How long does it take?’ Ammoo asked.

‘Stitcher of arteries.’

‘Six years.’

‘Maybe you’ll be married then.’

Maya bristled. ‘So? I can’t be a doctor if I’m married?’

‘I was just saying, a lot can change.’

‘Where will you be, Ammoo,’ Sohail said, ‘in six years?’

She turned her face upwards, to where the moon would be if there were a moon. Blanketed in darkness, they couldn’t see her expression when she said, ‘Only God knows. All this time I was just wanting your safe return, that’s all.’

‘Bhaiya?’ Maya asked Sohail.

‘Six years? No way. I don’t know.’

‘Married?’

‘Can’t say. It seems like a rather optimistic thing to do.’

‘You’ve always been an optimist.’

He sighed, sank back into his chair. ‘I’m not sure any more.’ They knew what he was thinking. Ever since they could remember, Sohail had been in love with the girl who lived in the house across the road. Her name was Silvi. When the war broke out, her mother had married her off to an army officer. The officer had been killed, and now Silvi was a widow; she was still next door, perhaps waiting for the day Sohail would return and knock on her door.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

‘She’s probably still in mourning,’ Ammoo said.

And they left it at that.

That night on the porch, with her brother back from war, Maya believed their waiting days were over. She watched her mother spread her prayer mat, face west and thank God for his return, imagining the future rolling out in front of them, as flat and endless and predictable as the Delta. How wrong she had been.

1984 February

Maya couldn’t sleep. She waited until the first breath of morning, pulled on her trainers, wrapped a shawl around her head and headed into the fog. In Rajshahi she had devised an early-morning route: around the pond, cutting across her neighbour’s sesame field, circumventing the mosque, past the road that led into town, and back again at her door before the end of the dawn prayer. Now she decided to make for Dhanmondi Lake via the back roads. Shrouded in mist, asleep, the city resembled the one she remembered, the whitewashed houses, laundry dancing on balconies, the wide, hushed streets.

She circled Dhanmondi Lake, noting that the trees had aged and the path around the lake had narrowed. A clutch of boats were tied together, with a sign that said TEN TAKA ONE HOUR. She stopped, leaned against a tree, her breath whistling in her throat. She’d been running hard, harder than she had realised. She squatted by the tree for a few moments. The dark lake was the colour of limes. She pushed off again, aware now of the sounds that began the day, people leaning out of their windows and clearing their throats into the grass, the tinkle of rickshaws, shops winding open their shutters. She ran across Mirpur Road, now studded with a trickle of cars. Then she turned a corner, and found herself in front of the graveyard where her father was buried.

She looked around. The caretaker was absent, the gate unlocked. She slipped inside. The graveyard looked smaller, with buildings crowded around on all sides. What would it be like, she wondered, to have your window opening on to those small rectangles of death, watching flowers placed and prayers said and people crying, telling your children every night there were no such things as ghosts. Maybe they didn’t care. The city was running out of space, she had read in the newspaper that arrived in Rajshahi a day late; it was growing fast and soon they would have to build further and further away. Perhaps this is why the Dictator had decreed that no more than five people could assemble together at once. Because the city was too crowded, it was important to spread out.

Visiting the graveyard was a family ritual. Her mother had kept her father’s plot tidy all these years, a hedge around its perimeter, the stone polished. Maya didn’t know what to do; she had never come on her own before. She remembered the speeches her mother had made in the presence of this grave, the questions she had asked, the apologies, the regrets. She squatted next to the gravestone and placed her palm on its surface. Hello, absent father.

When she returned to the bungalow, Maya found a group of women at the foot of the stairs. At first glance, they appeared to be the women from the night before, but when she approached she noticed their faces were uncovered, and they were speaking rapidly to one another in a foreign language. Maya asked in English if she could assist them. Without introducing themselves, they embraced her one by one and kissed her on both cheeks. In broken English, they explained that they were French missionaries. The Forashi Jamaat. Maya examined them closely. They wore soft leather shoes under their robes, light traces of varnish on their fingernails, and they had about them the air of tourists — hesitant, their fingers twisted around the handles of their suitcases and rucksacks. One of them was waving a tiny paper flag wrapped around a toothpick.

After a brief discussion, the women began to climb the narrow staircase one by one, ducking into the room at the top. Maya followed them up. Inside was a rectangular room that was crammed tight with people, the air spiced and heavy. A large woman at the front was speaking, her face exposed but circled in a black headscarf. She nodded at the new arrivals and continued her speech. ‘Our Sister Rehnuma’, she said, referring to Silvi by her Islamic name, ‘has recently passed away. May her soul rest in peace.’

‘Ameen,’ the women agreed.

‘But her work must continue. The Wednesday taleem will go on. And the jamaat missions from our sisters and brothers in foreign lands will also continue. Remember, this life is but a drop in the ocean of time; the hereafter is eternal, every moment is an age, infinite.’

Nods and murmurs of assent travelled through the room.

‘We welcome our sisters from France.’ Now the others turned to the French women and greeted them enthusiastically, touching their faces and fingering the material of their burkhas. The French women mingled, opening their bags and distributing gifts. A box of chocolates was passed around. The woman giving the speech began to circulate, embracing the visitors, speaking to them in a mixture of Bengali, Arabic and sign language. Then she sat down again and began to recite a passage in Arabic, gesturing with plump, graceful hands.

I should slip out before anyone notices, Maya thought. She left the scene reluctantly, her curiosity unquenched. On her way down the stairs she crashed into a boy carrying a bucket. Water splashed her sandals and doused the bottom of her salwaar. ‘Watch out, kid,’ she said, brushing past him.

‘Hello!’ he called out. ‘Howareyoumadam?’

‘Hello,’ she said, turning around.

The boy looked her up and down and laughed out loud, revealing a mouth of misshapen teeth. He had unusually light eyes, almost grey, and a fine, delicate nose. But everything else about him suggested poverty: his too-short pyjamas, and the way he treated his lips, rubbing them roughly with the back of his hand.

‘Why are you laughing?’ Maya asked.

He pointed to her clothes, her trainers. ‘You look funny.’

She was about to wave goodbye when it occurred to her that he might know where Sohail was. What had they called him? Huzoor.

‘Hey, you know where the Huzoor is?’

He shrugged. Then he opened his mouth and laughed again. ‘But you can’t see him. Pordah, don’t you know?’

‘Never mind about that. Is he here?’

The boy released the handle of his bucket. ‘No, he’s gone. Did you see the French ladies?’ he said.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Last month we had the Russian jamaat. I can talk in Russian.’

‘What can you say?’

He fired off a few foreign-sounding words.

‘What does it mean?’

‘Peace,’ he said, bending his knees and jumping high, ‘peace shanti peace. I know it in Spanish too.’ And he uttered another string of gibberish.

‘Do you have a book?’

He landed on his heels, rocked back and forth. ‘No books. Only my head,’ he said, pointing a finger at his temple.

‘I have to go now,’ Maya said.

‘Goodbye. Khoda Hafez. Au revoir!’ he called out. The French women must have been here before. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flattened samosa. ‘For you,’ he said.

‘No, you have it. I’m not hungry.’

He bit off one end of the triangle. ‘Okay, ta-ta-bye-bye.’

Ammoo was in the kitchen. The servant Rehana had hired a few years ago was standing over the sink, washing the pots from last night’s dinner.

‘Maya, this is Sufia.’ Taller than Maya by at least six inches, the woman came close, smiled and placed a large hand on her shoulder.

‘I know all about you,’ Sufia said. She looked her up and down. Maya saw her thinking, so this is the daughter who won’t come home. Looks like a peasant. Cheap salwaar-kameez, not even starched. Long hair, yes, but what skin, burned all dark by the sun. She kept smiling and patting her heavily.

‘I was running,’ Maya said. ‘I went to the graveyard.’

Ammoo nodded. Then she came close and put her hand on Maya’s cheek. ‘I am so happy.’

Maya was happy too. The warmth of it spread through her. She wanted to say it, to tell her mother she was home now, that she was staying put, but she couldn’t. It wouldn’t be true. When Ammoo took the samosas out of the frying pan, she remembered Nazia’s children, how they would save up their Eid money and buy samosas in town, sharing one, arguing over who had been given the bigger half.

‘Where is Sohail?’

‘He came to see me this morning,’ Ammoo said. ‘He asked me to tell you he sends his love.’

Love? Was that the word he had used? ‘Did he say when he’s coming back?’

‘Not for a few weeks.’

Sufia began to grind turmeric with a giant stone shaped like a rolling pin. She passed the stone back and forth over the turmeric bulb, smashing it into a rough paste, and then went over it again and again until it turned smooth, darkening to the colour of crushed marigolds. ‘Always coming and going,’ she said, scooping the turmeric on to a plate and starting the whole process again with a handful of garlic. ‘Coming and going.’

‘It’s like the United Nations up there. They weren’t even speaking Bangla.’

‘They come from all over the world,’ Ammoo said, pouring more oil into her pan.

‘Because of Sohail and Silvi?’

‘That’s what they do — they go from country to country, like missionaries.’

As a boy Sohail had attended a Jesuit school called St Gregory’s. Maya had visited him once on Games Day. The priests were dressed in long linen gowns with strings tied around their waists. An egg-and-spoon race. These were the images that came to mind when Ammoo said missionaries, not the cinnamon-scented women upstairs.

Ammoo lifted something out of the frying pan. ‘You want a samosa?’

The thought came rushing into Maya’s mind. Grey eyes. About the right age. ‘Was that Sohail’s son I just saw upstairs?’

‘If he was carrying a bucket, that’s the one,’ Sufia said, turning now to a pile of lavender-skinned onions.

‘But he looks. . Ammoo, did you see him?’

Ammoo put down her spatula and gathered the samosas on to a plate. ‘Yes, beta, I know. I was going to talk to you about it this morning.’

‘And?’

‘And’, Sufia interjected, ‘there’s nothing to be done. Boy runs around like a ruffian; that’s how they want it.’

‘Doesn’t he go to school?’

‘Sometimes they read the Book with him,’ Ammoo said.

‘And you just let them?’

Rehana passed the plate of samosas to Maya. Maya saw a great weariness in her mother’s gesture. She saw that, whatever was happening upstairs, Ammoo had decided to ignore it. She was no longer the protective, panicky mother she had once been. If Sohail wanted to burn his books, if he wanted to throw away his furniture and unscrew the light sockets and piss into a hole in the ground, so be it. Once she had given everything for her children. Now she was in retreat from them, passively accepting whatever it was they chose to do: turning to God, running away, refusing to send their children to school. There was nothing of the struggle left in her any more.

It was then Maya realised the years had been far, far longer for her mother.

‘He’s not my son,’ Ammoo said simply. ‘And he’s not yours. We do what we can, but you have to remember that.’

Maya remembered something else. The tree. She fetched it from Sohail’s room and presented it to her mother. ‘From Rajshahi,’ she said simply, knowing Ammoo would realise at once it was a prized mango tree, and that, if it survived the winter, it would yield the tart, complicated fruit that could be found nowhere else.

His name was Muhammad Zaid bin Haque. A long name for a small boy. The next day Maya kept her eye on the staircase, and as soon as she caught the shape of him she rushed outside and stood in his way. ‘Zaid, remember me?’

He shook his head, then, seeing her face fall, he said, ‘Ha ha, I fooled you!’

‘So you’re a joker and a linguist?’

‘What’s a linguist?’

‘Someone who knows a lot of languages. I know some languages too. How about I teach you a few things?’

He held up the bucket, empty. ‘I have to go,’ he said, running to the tap.

Later, he knocked on the door. ‘Do you want to play Ludo?’ he said, slipping off his sandals and stepping into her room.

‘Okay. You have a board?’

He unfolded a sheet of paper. On it, someone had attempted a crude reproduction of a Ludo board, the square boxes crisscrossing each other and filled in with a blue pencil.

Zaid produced a handful of stones. ‘White ones are yours,’ he said. ‘Black are mine.’

‘Where did you get this?’

‘My ammoo made it for me.’

‘Really?’ Maya said, wondering if he wanted to talk about his mother, dead less than a week now. ‘You played Ludo with her?’

He nodded vigorously. ‘Every day.’

He produced a single die. ‘You roll first,’ Maya said.

Six. ‘Chokka!’ he announced, moving his stone across the sheet.

‘Zaid,’ Maya said, rolling a three, ‘do you go to school?’

‘No,’ he said, blowing on the dice. ‘But I’m going.’

‘When?’

‘Next year. Ammoo promised.’

‘Do you know you have to wear a uniform to school?’

‘Pant-shirt?’

‘Yes, pant-shirt.’

He grinned. ‘I know.’

‘Your father might not allow it.’

He rolled a four. ‘I ate you!’

‘I think you skipped one.’

‘No, it was a four.’ He moved the stone back. ‘One-two-three-four. See?’

She was quite sure he had been five places behind. She let it go, losing to him quickly, and as soon as the game was over he folded the paper, tucked it under his arm, like a surveyor carrying his plans, and disappeared.

Zaid came and went. Maya sometimes found him squatting in the flowerbeds, picking insects out of the weeds. His Bangla was coarse, his consonants slurred. And his body was a mess. A rash that peppered his skin caused him to scratch and bleed. There was a line of small indentations on his forearm, dirt in every crease and ripple of him. He was six but looked about four, his wrists and ankles narrow, brittle. He wore identical, pale blue kurtas that were too small or too big, and a cap on his head, pushed back so that it circled his head like a crown.

*

Maya was reluctant to leave the house. In the morning she jogged around the lake, and sometimes, when Ammoo asked, she walked over to the shop at the top of the road and bought a few things. She had written three letters to Nazia, pleading with her to stay in touch, offering to send money if she needed anything. She had tried to ring once, at the post office in town, leaving a message, saying she would ring back three days later at exactly the same hour. Three days later the man at the post office said he had spread the word, but no one had come to receive her telephone call.

She rang again the following week. The man was polite. He didn’t know if Nazia had returned from the hospital. Maya remembered him: he was the one who had delivered her telegram.

‘Are you well?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, apa, but my daughter is ill.’

Why did this give her pleasure? Was it that the villagers would get sick, now that she was not there to look after them? ‘Will you tell her I rang?’ she said, skipping over the catch in her voice.

‘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 butter-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 — 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–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 passed 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 — 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 passed 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 — 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 passing 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 constitution and give them passports 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. ‘Hello, 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 Class 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 — 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.’

‘And you wore pant-shirt?’

He was holding something behind his back, and he produced it now, a package wrapped in brown paper. ‘For you,’ he said.

Maya tore it open. It was a brand-new Ludo board, with coloured pieces and a pair of dice. ‘For me?’ she asked. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘Mare-see,’ Zaid said. ‘That’s thank you in French.’

Maya repeated the word. ‘Thank you.’ She passed the board back to Zaid. ‘Why don’t you hold on to it, and when you want to play you can bring it downstairs?’

‘Now we can play with Dadu,’ he said, smiling, and slipped out of the doorway, the Ludo board balanced on his head, returning the light to the shed. Maya continued her reconnaissance, sifting through old newspapers, cans of paint, a bag of leftover cement, until she found what she was looking for: a stolen cinema projector, still packed in its case, the hinges crimson with rust.

*

On Friday, Joy came to collect Maya for the party. He knocked on the door, smiling and smelling of soap. Ammoo greeted him warmly as he bent down to touch her feet, interrupting Dallas to inquire after his mother. His car smelled of leather and aftershave. He rolled down the window and stuck his elbow out, his other hand light on the steering wheel. ‘So why did you move to the village anyway?’ he said, as they made their way across town to Gulshan.

Maya shifted in her seat. She had decided to wear a simple cotton sari, and now, with the warm air whipping around Joy’s car, her pleats already creased, she began to regret it. She should have listened to her mother and dressed up a little, maybe worn a silk or a chiffon. ‘Things were changing too quickly,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand it any more.’ It sounded so harsh when she put it that way.

‘And you gave up your training, everything?’

‘I was a year away from finishing. I completed the internship at Rajshahi Medical. Then I just became a simple country doctor. But that’s what people need out there, someone to help them deliver babies.’ She felt the urge to tell him more, to explain about the abortions she had done after the war, and that she hadn’t realised until later, much later, that she had racked up a debt she was still struggling to repay. How could he know — he was just a soldier, he had killed as a matter of principle, but the war babies, the children of rape, had been left to junior doctors, the volunteers in ragged tents on the outskirts of town.

They were on Road 27 now, passing Abahani Field. Maya remembered playing cricket with Sohail on that field, running between the wickets in her salwaar-kameez.

‘Seven years, you’ve been in Rajshahi?’

‘I went to Tangail first, but it wasn’t far enough.’ They sped through a wide road with a fountain at one end, an abstract sculpture at the other. She wanted to change the subject. ‘So, what’s new in Dhaka?’

‘I haven’t been here that long myself. Looks different, doesn’t it?’

‘Hmm.’

‘They changed the road numbers — you must already know that.’

She did. Dhanmondi had been renumbered. No one knew whether to refer to their street by the old number or the new. Old 13, they said, new 6A. It was like a half-swallowed pill, stuck in the throat. Perhaps they were hoping the old places would not be what they had once been to people, the streets where they had marched and the streets to which they had taken to cast their votes. Road 27 was no longer the artery through which the army had driven its tanks. And Road 32 was no longer where Mujib had been killed, falling upside down on the staircase of his house, his pipe clattering to the chequered ground, the flower of blood pooling and colouring his hair. No, you could no longer say, it happened at Bottrish Nombor; you would have to say it was Road 26A, a new road on which no man had been killed, no man and his wife, sons, daughters-in-law, brother, nephew, bodyguards, drivers, gatekeepers. And 26A was not the kind of number you could assign to those deaths, attached, as it was, to an English letter. Yes, she knew they had changed the numbers.

They spent the rest of the journey in silence, Maya’s eyes following the road as they passed the old airport, the cantonment, Mohakhali with its new office buildings and factories. Finally they turned into Gulshan, where the plots of land were twice as large and the cars were thick on the streets, where even the Dictator had a light touch.

Chottu’s cheeks were shiny and pink. ‘Yalla, I’m seeing a ghost!’ He clapped an arm around Joy. ‘Where did you find her?’

‘Shaheed Minar,’ Joy said. ‘We were lighting candles.’

Chottu erupted into a growling, used-car laugh. ‘Always looking for trouble, dost. Come, Maya, come inside. Saima will crucify me if I keep you to myself.’ He led them through the house, through the garden, which had been decorated with fairy lights, and into a large yellow marquee.

A woman in a blue chiffon sari handed Chottu a drink. ‘People, this is Maya, my old muktijuddo friend.’ He gestured to the crowd with his glass. A few people turned around and waved. ‘What will you have, Maya? Coke? A little veeno?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Whisky? Paul will get you anything you like.’ A man appeared beside Chottu. He wore a suit and a pair of white gloves.

‘Juice?’ Maya said.

Chottu shook his head, disappointed, and motioned to Joy. Joy looked at Maya, cleared his throat. ‘Juice for me too, thanks.’

‘Bastard,’ Chottu said. ‘Making me look bad.’

‘Pineapple, Mango, Tomato, Tang,’ the waiter said. Maya heard a screech and turned around to find Saima careening towards her, a fat toddler in her arms.

‘I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you right now, you’re back in town, you didn’t call me? Ei, Joy, you didn’t tell me you were bringing her, thought you’d make it a surprise, you bad boy, OHMYGOD, I don’t believe it.’ She passed the child to the waiter and cupped Maya’s face in her hands. ‘Let me see you properly. Alhamdulillah, you haven’t aged a day, you cruel, cruel woman. Look at me, I’m a shrivelled old hag next to you.’

Maya shook her head and returned the compliment, taking in the shiny sari Saima was wearing, and the carefully orchestrated strands of hair that fringed her face. People were staring now. Saima took Maya’s hand and began to introduce her to the other guests. The Blue Chiffon woman was called Lovely. Her husband, Pintu, was a tiny, sweating man in a white T-shirt. ‘This is Khaled and Minny, they live opposite, and Khaled’s brother, Sobhan, and his wife, Dora. Dora bakes the most delicious cakes, chocolate, vanilla, lemon — the lemon is divine.’ Dora threaded her arm through her husband’s and gave Maya a watery smile. Maya wondered what had happened to their old friends, the slightly shabbier-looking ones with whom they had gone to school and run away to war. Pot calling the kettle, she told herself; you haven’t kept up the old ties either. Saima’s hand was soft and damp as she led Maya from guest to guest. She smiled and smiled, smearing a bit of lipstick on her front tooth. ‘I want to hear everything,’ she said, ‘and I mean ev-ree-thing. Let me check on the food first, I’ll be back. They’ll make a mess of it if I don’t supervise.’

Maya perched on the edge of a tightly upholstered chair. Saima’s Alhamdulillah was bothering her; once upon a time they would have laughed at people referring to God between every other sentence. But now everyone had caught it; just this morning she had been to the vegetable man, and after she had paid him and taken her leave, he had said Allah Hafez. ‘What’s wrong with the old greeting?’ she had replied sharply. ‘Khoda Hafez not religious enough for you?’ And the man had scraped the feeling out of his face and returned her money. ‘Please buy your vegetables somewhere else,’ he said quietly.

The memory of it brought a flash of heat to Maya’s cheeks. Now she would have to walk all the way to Mirpur Road if she wanted something. She looked around the room. Lovely caught her eye and waved. Maya waved back. Where was Joy? Her sari was now more than a little crinkled, and it puffed unattractively around her hips. Maybe she could find the bathroom and smooth herself out a little. She stepped back into the house and into a wide hallway lined with paintings. Little lights built into the ceiling shone on each one. She found herself in front of an oil painting of a rural landscape: bright yellow stalks of rice, and farmers, their ankles deep in the earth, their muscles bulging and round, working the fields. The painting looked nothing like the people she had lived among these past years; out there, the men who walked the paddy were more lean than round, the flesh carved out of them by work and hunger.

She spotted a woman in a pair of jeans and a brightly coloured kurta staring at another of Chottu’s paintings. ‘Hello,’ she said, attempting to sound friendly.

The woman looked her up and down, taking in Maya’s plain sari, her hands knitting nervously together. ‘I take it you’re not enjoying the jollity.’

‘Jolly doesn’t really suit me.’

‘Nor me. My husband insisted we come.’

‘I’m an old friend of Saima. Maya Haque.’

‘I’m Aditi. Oh, yes, they told me about you. The crusading doctor.’

Maya smiled, enjoying that. ‘Is this how it is, everyone jolly?’

‘Mostly. You’ve been away?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You can’t blame them, really. There’s fun to be had. Who wants to remember the old days?’

They drifted back to the party together.

The music had come on, and a few people began to dance, tilting their hips this way and that, drinks rocking in their hands. They jostled one another, fingertips lightly touching. Maya found Joy and Chottu in a corner of the garden, talking about a business venture. ‘So, what do you think, dosto, you want to come in with us?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Chottu leaned close, tapped Joy on the chest. ‘All kinds of nonsense people making money in this country, no reason we can’t join the bonanza. Eh, Maya, you don’t agree?’

‘Yes, why not.’ She caught a glimpse of Joy, who was looking over at her. She remembered now that his father had owned the jute mills in Khulna. ‘Make money all you want. But you won’t fix anything.’

‘We leave that to the doctors. And the politicians.’

‘Leave it to others and let the country go to hell?’

‘Ah, Maya,’ Chottu said, shaking his head, ‘you’re always taking things too seriously. We’re all getting old, na, let’s enjoy ourselves before we die, that’s what I say.’ He raised his glass, empty except for a few ice cubes. Maya shot Joy a look of horror, waiting for him to roll his eyes back at her, collude, but he just stared impassively ahead. One of Saima’s friends — Molly or Dolly or something — nudged Maya’s arm. ‘Hello!’ she said.

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

‘So you’re a friend of Saima?’

‘Yes, school friend.’

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

‘You’re not married?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t want to get married?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What happened to him?’

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

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

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

Saima smiled, her face broad and tight.

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

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

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

‘Yes, it was delicious.’

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

‘Me too,’ Maya said.

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

‘Other dinosaurs, stuck in the past?’

‘Journalists.’

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Some notes missing from my bag.’

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

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

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

‘Well, maybe she has something against me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Please, Ma, it’s no big thing.’

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

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

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

‘Did you hit him?’

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

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

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

‘The crow?’ Rehana asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked unsure, his eyes pinched together.

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

‘As big as me?’

‘Bigger.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Crows don’t read letters.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘See, your dadu agrees.’

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

‘How about the alphabet?’

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

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

‘Of course, beta.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You don’t understand. You think Zaid does what he wants, but he is watched like a hawk. Every minute, from upstairs.’

‘If Sohail finds out, I’ll say it was all my idea.’

‘He’ll take it out on the boy.’

Maya waved her away. ‘I’m telling you, I won’t take no from him, I won’t.’ She was determined to find a way to do it.

At the end of March, just as the cool evenings were replaced by dust-coated heat, she caught him wrist-deep in her handbag. An expression of surprise came over him, but he just stood there and stared at his own hand, as though it might tell him what to say.

She ran over to him and snatched the bag away. Now he was on his knees, his hair was brushing her feet as he uttered the words, sniffling as he did so. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.’

She crouched down and raised him by the armpits, until they were eye to eye.

‘I am not a thief,’ he said, shaking his head.

She believed him. ‘Then don’t steal from me as though you were.’ A fresh wave of tears overcame him as she set him down on the sofa. ‘Do you need money?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. Then, ‘Yes.’

She tried to give him some money, but he couldn’t take it from her, his body trembling. ‘Please don’t tell Abboo,’ he said, ‘please please please.’

She thought of what his father might say. About lying, and cheating at games, and stealing money from his aunt. She wanted to tell him these things, lessons that one taught a small child about the difference between right and wrong. But where would he be, this kid, without pretending he could speak French? God sees everything, his father would tell him, but that wouldn’t bring back his mother.

After that day, whenever she noticed a few notes missing from her bag, she assumed Zaid had taken the money. She didn’t care; in fact, she took a sort of pride in it. She imagined him with a piece of fruit or a boiled egg in his hands, then filling his stomach, having an ounce of pleasure because of her, because she had looked the other way.

1972 March

The change in Sohail began as soon as he returned from the war. Maya and Ammoo remarked on how thin he’d become, trying to scale the distance between them by talking about his appearance. It didn’t take them long to see that he had fallen into himself — become a man of few and exact words, fastidious. Bathing twice, sometimes three times a day. Ironing his shirts, one in particular, a red-and-blue check, which he wore in the morning, removed in time for lunch and wore again at dusk. Those first weeks Maya waited every evening for him to tell her about the war, hoping he would begin his story as soon as Ammoo had said goodnight and taken the lamp away, telling them both not to stay up too late.

‘So. .’ she began one night, turning to him.

He reached into his shirt pocket. ‘Do you mind?’ he said, waving a packet of cigarettes.

‘No, of course not. Since when do you ask my permission?’

‘I don’t know. Won’t you tell me I’m picking up bad habits?’

‘Revolutionaries are exempt from all social conventions. Haven’t you heard?’

‘I’ve dodged so many bullets that now I’m immune?’

‘Exactly. No one can touch you.’

‘Good,’ he said, inhaling sharply. ‘I’ve had enough of following orders.’

Once again, she hoped he might unravel himself now, tell her the whole thing from start to finish, war to peace, so that, by the end of it, it would be as if she’d been there, the distance between them traversed, forgotten. It wasn’t as if her own return had been uncomplicated. There were things she wanted to tell him too, and the telling would mean that it was over, that there was somewhere to lodge those nine months, somewhere comfortable and remote.

Instead, he smoked so intently she could hear the tip of his cigarette as it burned towards him.

‘I’m tired,’ he said, though he made no move to get up.

‘Was it a long journey?’ she asked, realising she didn’t even know how far he’d travelled to get home.

‘Yes.’

‘You walked?’

‘Mostly.’

He crushed the cigarette under his heel, then picked up the butt and tossed it away. They watched it disappear into the black of the garden.

‘I’m tired,’ he said again, and she understood, in that moment, that he had no intention of telling her anything, that he was going to keep it all to himself and parse it out over the years, and in the meantime it would lie between them, silent and angry.

And then Piya arrived, and everything changed.

By the time Maya found her in front of the gate she had been standing there all morning, afraid to ring the bell. Maya was about to leave for her afternoon shift at the Rehabilitation Centre; she was dressed smartly in a churidaar and kurta. She had even allowed herself a tiny smear of lipstick.

‘Are you looking for someone?’ she asked, taking in the girl’s worn sandals, the limp, old sari she had wound tightly around her head. The woman said nothing, just handed Maya a note. In Sohail’s handwriting was their address, and the words ‘Inshallah, we shall meet again.’

Sohail was smoking a cigarette in the garden. He flicked it aside when he saw her.

‘Someone is looking for you.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. Some girl. She won’t tell me anything.’

He rushed to the gate. ‘Piya?’

The woman appeared to straighten at the sight of him, and a moment later they were hugging and she was wiping her face with the end of her sari. ‘They threw me out,’ she cried. ‘I have no place with them.’

‘You did the right thing,’ he said.

Maya stood there awkwardly, her hand on the latch, guilty for the stab of jealousy she felt at the sight of their embrace. Then the woman shifted, and the covering fell from her head. Maya inhaled sharply. Her hair was short, obviously shorn just a few weeks ago. Sohail led Piya inside, casting only the briefest glance at Maya, a look that seemed to say, please don’t ask me; for once, please don’t ask.

When Maya returned from the Rehabilitation Centre in the evening, Piya was sitting in the living room. Rehana was patting her on the back. ‘Piya is going to stay with us.’

Piya nodded at Maya, who nodded back. No one said anything about why she was there. They guessed that Sohail had met this woman during the war, that she was in trouble and that her family had sent her away — and there was only one kind of trouble, Maya knew, that would have led to her appearance on their doorstep.

Maya saw women like Piya every day at the Rehabilitation Centre; they had been pouring into the city for weeks. Some had been raped in their villages, in front of their husbands and fathers, others kidnapped and held in the army barracks for the duration of the war. Maya was tasked with telling these women that their lives would soon return to normal, that they would go home and their families would embrace them as heroes of the war. She said this to their faces every day knowing it was a lie, and they listened silently, staring into their laps and willing it to be true.

Some recognised the lie for what it was. The new government had allowed a few of the enemy soldiers to return home to Pakistan, as a gesture of generosity in the face of victory, and a number of the women decided to go with them. Maya was woken one morning by a phone call from the Centre. They’re at the airport, they’re trying to leave.

The airport was a mess, people trying to get in or out of the new country, pushing themselves to the head of any queue that formed as soon as a desk was manned. But dressed as brides, the women were unmistakable, nose pins strobing in the sunlight, bangles weighing down their wrists, making each motion heavy and musical. Some wore flowers in their hair, and one or two had even gone to the trouble of painting henna on their hands.

Nearby, the soldiers were being unshackled, one by one. They clustered around each other and whispered casually among themselves. Occasionally, one of them smiled.

A volunteer from the centre, dressed plainly and with her hair loose, appealed to the departing women.

‘It’s not right,’ she said; ‘you haven’t even told your families.’

One stepped forward. ‘They said they don’t want us. Where are we supposed to go? What do we eat?’

‘The Women’s Rehabilitation Board will make provisions for you.’

‘What provisions? Will you give us our families? Will you take us into your homes?’

‘We will rehabilitate you. Back into society. Didn’t you hear what Sheikh Mujib said? He said you were heroines, war heroines.’

Another woman spoke up. ‘We don’t want to be heroines. We are ashamed. We want to leave our shame behind, start again.’

Maya joined in. ‘Please don’t abandon us now.’

The soldiers filed on to the aeroplane. How tall they were, how straight they stood.

The brides picked up their tiffin carriers, their small cloth bags. They lifted their saris so they could make their way up the stairs and into the aeroplane. And then it swallowed them; the hatch was closed, the engine roused, leaving the volunteers on the black and blue tarmac.

It was time, they were told, to forgive. Forgive and forget. Absolve and misremember. Erase and move on. The country had to become a country. Just as it had needed them, once, to send their brothers into the fighting, to melt their pots and surrender their jewellery, so it now needed them to forget.

It was the least they could do.

The prisoners of war were released, put back into their uniforms and sent home to Pakistan. No sorrys were exchanged. Anointed by the hand of forgiveness, they would grow old without shame.

Maya knew exactly what had happened to Piya. No explanation was necessary.

Piya slept all day, oblivious as they worked around her, ate their meals, tied and untied the mosquito nets, swept the floor by her feet. Maya sometimes woke in the middle of the night and found her gone, but she was only in the garden, or out on the verandah, squatting and staring into the distance. She did not attempt to take Maya into her confidence, and Maya did not try to appeal to her. If she needed something, she addressed herself to Rehana — Maya saw them whispering to each other in the kitchen a few times. Piya began to help Ammoo in the kitchen, grinding spices with the rough-edged stone, rolling the rootis for breakfast. Other than that, she was a half-presence, a person both with and without them. Maya sometimes forgot she was there — she was busy too, feeling her way around the strangeness of peace, of having her brother at home again, of being encouraged, now that it was all over, to make a display of enjoying the country.

Two weeks after Piya arrived, Maya saw her in the garden with Sohail. It was early evening, the shutter of darkness about to close. She watched them from the verandah. If they had looked up they would have seen her, but both pairs of eyes were lowered, staring at the same thing in front of them. Piya rubbed her hands across her arms, and Sohail offered her his shawl, wrapping it loosely around her shoulders. Their hair was of a similar length, and from a distance they seemed like brothers, two men sharing men’s secrets. The light began to fade; Piya looked up and saw Maya staring and nudged Sohail. They waved.

She walked over gingerly, knowing she had interrupted something.

‘Come,’ Sohail said, ‘sit.’

She squatted down on the jute mat next to them. They edged over to make space for her but the pati was too small, and Piya ended up on the grass. ‘Let me get another one,’ Sohail said, quick to his feet.

They were alone. Piya plucked at the grass while Maya looked uncomfortably up and down the garden, wondering if they should talk about Sohail, or the war, or why Piya was here. Finally Piya said, ‘You’re very good, letting me stay.’ She pulled out a blade of grass, twisted it between her hands.

‘Where were you,’ Maya asked, ‘before?’

Piya concentrated on the long blade of grass, tying knots across its length. ‘In an army camp,’ she said. ‘He found me there, in the barracks.’

‘Where is your family?’

‘Not far. In Trishal. You think I should go home?’

She hadn’t meant it that way. ‘No, of course, you can stay here.’ She wanted to tell Piya how glad she was that she had come, that she had brought a flash of life back to her brother. She made an awkward attempt at friendliness. ‘Stay as long as you like.’

Sohail returned with the pati; they stood up, rearranged themselves.

Piya didn’t sit down. ‘I’m just coming,’ she said, and darted into the kitchen.

‘She’s better,’ Sohail said. ‘Doesn’t she look better, already?’

‘Yes, she does.’ Maya wanted to ask him if he was better, but there seemed no reason to ask him this. For once he looked relaxed, his white cotton kurta gleaming in the fading light. He appeared in perfect health, in perfect cheer, rather than like a man who had yet to shake off the war, a man who had brought home a strange woman. An ordinary man. She decided to treat him as one.

‘When I found her, she looked as though she might slip away, at any moment.’

Before Maya could reply, Piya stepped back into the garden, holding a kerosene lamp in one hand, and a large bowl in another. ‘Jhal muri,’ she announced, placing the spicy puffed rice in front of them. As she scooped a handful into her mouth, Maya noticed a bracelet-shaped scar on Piya’s wrist. She looked closer at Piya’s arms: the other wrist was similarly marked. Piya set down the kerosene lamp, and suddenly Maya was filled with wonder that she should be here, among them, bearing the scars of her captivity, making snacks and sitting with them in the garden. What other wounds still marked her?

It was getting darker. They could barely see one another now; there was just a faint, oval-shaped pool of light cast by the kerosene lamp.

Piya and Sohail hatched a plan. Piya had never been to the cinema, and Sohail was trying to explain it to her. People on a wide, flat surface. Not real people — well, real, but not present. Acting — she knew acting, she had seen the jatra when it came to her village.

‘When it reopens,’ Sohail said, ‘we’ll take you. Won’t we, Maya?’

She nodded. ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘Joy brought a film projector to our house during the war?’

‘From where?’

‘I don’t know. An abandoned theatre, I think.’

‘What is a projector?’

‘It’s the machine that shows the film.’

‘You have the machine?’

‘Do you want to see it?’ Joy had brought the projector for Ammoo. Now it was lying somewhere in the garden shed. ‘I think it’s still here.’

Sohail hesitated. She could tell he was thinking about whether it would cause him pain, or happiness, to see an object brought to this house by his friend.

‘Yes,’ said Piya, ‘I do, I want to see.’ She stood up and clapped her hands together.

‘All right,’ Sohail said, ‘let’s see it.’

The shed was a crude little building beside the lemon tree. Maya went inside first, holding the lamp high. They stepped over a few trunks and boxes, off-cuts of wood, a half-open bag of cement that had hardened over the years.

The projector was exactly where she had left it, wedged into a corner of the room, covered in dried banana leaves. ‘There it is.’

She remembered now, carrying it from the big house and tenderly placing the leaves on top, as though she were burying it.

Sohail heaved the box on to his shoulder and Maya helped him manoeuvre it into the house. They decided to set the box down in the corridor and examine it without turning on the lights. Maya held the lamp as Sohail unfastened the hinges.

All the pieces were there — the two round cases, one on top of the other, the protruding lens, the smaller pieces, the clips that held the film in place, the metal fasteners that opened and closed over the reel.

Piya reached forward, passing her hand delicately over the metal plates. Sohail pulled the projector out of the case and stood it upright on its sturdy metal legs.

‘This is where the film goes in, I suppose,’ he said, pointing. ‘It goes up here, and through this part, and the light catches it and makes it big, very big. The film itself is only the width of two fingers. It’s the light that makes it bigger.’

‘How big?’ Piya asked.

‘Bigger than a person,’ Sohail said.

Piya fixed her eyes on him.

‘Sometimes when they show just the face, you can see everything, you can see inside them,’ he continued.

‘You can see inside?’

Maya thought the girl might weep from the wonder of it.

‘Shall we see if it works?’ she said. ‘I think there are a few films in there.’

Piya lifted her hands from the machine and turned to face her. Her tiny eyes disappeared behind a pool of tears. ‘Yes, oh, yes.’

‘No,’ Sohail said, his voice suddenly distant. ‘We can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, surprised by this change of heart.

‘It doesn’t belong to us, we have to give it back.’

‘But it’s here now.’ Maya couldn’t understand it. One minute he was gaping at the machine, the next he was acting as though the whole thing was done without his consent.

Sohail moved to replace the projector. ‘Let’s not do something we’ll regret.’

‘I won’t regret it,’ Maya said. ‘And neither will Piya. Will you, Piya?’

Piya had sensed the shift in Sohail too. She shuffled away from the projector and leaned against the verandah wall, squatting in the village way, with her elbows on her knees. ‘I don’t know.’

Maya pursued her and crouched down beside her. ‘Haven’t you ever done anything you might regret later?’

‘Maya, please, don’t be childish.’ Sohail was packing up the projector, tucking it back into its felt grooves. ‘Look, here’s the stamp. Modhumita Cinema. How many times have you and I gone to that cinema? And who knows how Joy got the thing here anyway.’

‘What are you saying, that your friend is a thief?’

‘I’m saying a lot of things happened during the war, but now it’s not wartime any more, and we have to behave like citizens, rather than rebels.’

‘I don’t think Piya cares about that,’ she said. ‘I think we should let her see a film. Isn’t that why we fought this war anyway, so we could be free?’

‘That’s a completely bogus argument, you know that. Freedom comes with responsibilities, with limits.’ He snapped the lid shut, as though there could be no further debate.

‘I have done something,’ Piya whispered from the darkness. The lamp was burning low, and didn’t reach her any more. Sohail lifted the projector box into his arms and was about to stand up. He paused.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Something very bad.’

Sohail squatted down in front of Piya. He came very close to her, but he was careful not to touch her. She was shrinking from him anyway, pressing her back into the wall. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Forget it. You should try to forget it.’

She grew silent, but they could hear her breathing, as though the words were struggling to get out of her and she was struggling to keep them in. Maya didn’t want Piya to forget what had happened to her, she wanted her to remember. She wanted her to remember and she wanted to know. But she did not press Piya. Everyone else was determined to forget, to move on and leave behind whatever dirty things had happened in the past; it would be cruel to deny Piya this, a chance to begin again.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sohail said. ‘Whatever it was, it wasn’t your fault.’

‘He’s right,’ Maya said. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

Certainly they had only meant to comfort her. But Piya was different after that night. Something had rippled within her, demanded to get out, and they had silenced it.

A few weeks later, she was gone.

1984 April

The queue snaked out of the tent, wrapped around the corner and doubled back on itself. In some places people had taken to crouching on the ground, holding their hands up against the fierce heat, quieting their babies. They shared stories and bits of food while they waited. Maya heard the call of the muezzin, and saw great swathes of pilgrims making their way to the prayer ground. But the people in the queue did not budge: they were here for the free medicine.

They had all the usual ailments — dysentery, dehydration, broken legs that hadn’t healed properly, wounds that should have been stitched up but never made it to hospital. Jaundice, malaria, typhoid. It had taken her the better part of that morning to organise the clinic. The other doctors — young interns and trainees who had probably never left their city hospitals — were relieved to be told what to do. She barked out orders, telling them to run down the line and divide the patients into groups. Put the young children first. Check for infectious diseases. Separate queues for men and women. By noon she was seeing a patient every seven minutes, and a pregnant girl with gest ational diabetes had hugged her and cried. She felt the murmur of a thrill. She was right to have come.

Her brother was here, somewhere among the worshippers. Zaid had given her the idea. ‘Abboo will be at the Ijtema,’ he said. The upstairs had emptied out, no more footsteps on the ceiling or groups of jamaatis pooling in front of the gate.

‘Maybe you can meet him,’ Zaid said. Someone had shaved his head that morning, there were two neat crimson scars at the nape of his neck. She considered the idea. Perhaps it was time to face Sohail.

The Ijtema provided free medical clinics to all pilgrims. It was easy to offer her services, set up a curtained area for women. And here she was. Millions of people. Somehow it was easier to meet him in this context, his foreignness multiplied, but made plainer, by the replication of people like him, clusters of men in beards and white robes. Since her return he had been away, travelling from one jamaat to another, and she had been relieved to accustom herself to the house, the city, without the prospect of seeing him. But now she was ready.

Though he was a relative newcomer to the Tabligui movement, Sohail was already known for his bayaan, his sermons. Maya could bet none of the people who listened to him now had any idea where he learned to speak like that. If they had asked her, she could have told them about the time when at sixteen he beat the debating champion in college, the very handsome Iftekar Khan. Speak for or against: does the arms race decrease the possibility of another world war?

Sohail had studied Iftekar Khan and decided he was, in fact, a very fragile man. Twice the All-Pakistan Debating Champion, he had risen too high; he was full of the fear of disappointing his fans. So Sohail paused, longer than was necessary, before beginning his two-minute opening. And he spoke very slowly. By then Iftekar was already jamming his finger between his neck and his shirt collar, trying to create a bit of space for his swelling throat, his itch to fill the silence. And Sohail continued to draw out his words, so that, after he had won, the college newspaper dubbed him the Tortoise that Beat the Khan. It was on that day that he learned his trick of manipulating the moment, of deciding the beat and tempo of a conversation, and it was that day that led him to become president of his university hall, and the object of much speculation among the girls, and eventually a protester on the streets, shouting through a megaphone against the army. It was the day that led him, finally, to the war.

But none of these pilgrims would know that. They probably believed it was a gift from God.

Zaid was flitting in and out of the medical tent, translating the day. ‘There’s an American tent,’ he said, gasping. ‘They gave me this.’ It was a red-and-green-striped sweet in the shape of a walking stick.

‘You can eat it after lunch.’ It would be a very late lunch; already the afternoon prayer was under way. Along the banks of the Turag River, thousands upon thousands of men bent their heads and faced west. They pointed themselves towards Mecca, but they were also bowing to the afternoon sun, which cast sharp beams into their eyes as they raised their hands. Together they stood, turned their heads from side to side. They folded their hands, kneeled and performed the Sejda, putting their foreheads to the ground. It was at this moment, Maya thought, recalling something her mother had told her, that the heart rose higher than the head.

Zaid led her to a tent and found them a small square of carpet. A woman walked past, willowy in her chador, and handed them a bowl of spicy chickpeas. ‘As-Salaam Alaikum,’ she said, pinching Zaid’s cheek and wandering away.

Maya unwrapped their lunch, a box of chicken and rice. ‘I saw Abboo,’ Zaid said.

The chicken dried up in her mouth. ‘Where?’

‘Over there.’ He pointed in the direction of the praying men on the river bank.

Here was her chance. At the prospect of seeing him again, she allowed herself a sliver of hope. A reunion. She would approach him, ask about Zaid. Toe in the water. See if there was somewhere they could meet, she and her brother. She had travelled to his home turf, he might like that. She looked at the boy, allowing herself, for a moment, to wonder what it would be like to take charge of him. School, first of all. He would go to school. She would have to teach him not to wander off in the middle of a sentence, and how to sit behind a desk all day. He would have to wear a uniform and carry his tiffin to the playground.

They finished their chicken and rice, washed their hands by the side of the tent. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s go and find your father.’

They pushed through the stream of pilgrims and made their way to the river, passing row after row of tents, each one housing tribes of men, their lungis hanging on strings to divide the space between them. They would eat, sleep and pray here for a whole week. The larger tents were set up with speakers and microphones and makeshift stages where famous orators from India, imams from Jerusalem or Shanghai or Mozambique, would stand and spread the word. Maya had heard on the news that it was the biggest gathering of Muslims after the pilgrimage to Mecca. Even the Dictator would be attending the final recitation, to seek blessings from the spiritual leaders of the jamaat.

The prayer ended; men shuffled away, putting their shoes back on and wiping the sun from their eyes. Zaid was holding her hand and dragging her forward. They pushed against the tide of men leaving the prayer ground, inching slowly towards the lip of the river. Large boats packed with pilgrims were floating on the river, waiting for a space to drop anchor. Impatient, some jumped into the water and waded, their capped heads bobbing as they swam. Zaid wriggled his way through the crowd, tugging on Maya’s arm, and finally they came to a stretch of sand.

‘There,’ Zaid said, pointing. A clutch of men stood talking. Sohail was smiling, gesturing with his hands. He embraced each person in turn, and then the group dispersed. Zaid hesitated for a moment, looking up at her as if she were about to tell him what to do, and then he released her hand and scurried away, disappearing into the crowd.

Sohail was standing with his back to her, gazing into the water, his hands folded behind him. She watched him quietly for a moment. She had practised this meeting countless times. His back was broad, his hips. The white that draped his body ended above his ankles, which were black, his thick heels in a pair of cheap rubber sandals.

He turned. They regarded one another for a moment, and then he held out his arms to her, and she dived straight into them until she was wrapped in his pillowy chest, his fragrance of rosewater and attar.

He kissed her forehead. ‘As-Salaam Alaikum,’ he said. She clung to him, and slowly, gently, he shifted away.

‘Walaikum As-Salaam,’ she heard herself reply. ‘How are you?’

‘I am well, by the grace of Allah.’

Maya shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The things she wanted to say, dense, historical words, sat at the bottom of her. ‘I’m so sorry, about Silvi.’

There was a time when she would know, from the way he glanced at her, or the shape of his lips when he spoke, exactly what he was thinking. But he had learned to disappear within himself, and his face told her nothing. ‘It was her time.’

She wanted to touch him. He was fragile and he was remote. She watched the Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat. She steadied herself. ‘You know I’ve come back,’ she began.

‘Yes, I know.’

He knew. He hadn’t come down to see her; she hadn’t gone up to see him. Brother and sister, once inseparable. Tell me, she thought, tell me you’ve missed me, that you wished for my return. That you want to make up. He stepped closer to the water, and she followed. ‘I–I’d like your permission to enrol Zaid in school. There’s a new one on Road 4, I went to see the headmistress and she agreed to take him at the start of the next term.’ She was so nervous. Every word was a struggle.

He stopped. ‘He’s lonely, I know.’

Because you left him alone, only days after his mother died. ‘He’s a sweet child.’ She had said the wrong thing, revealed how little she knew the boy.

Sohail shook his head. ‘His education is continuing in the hands of Sister Khadija.’

Maya swallowed the lump of anger rising in her throat. ‘Do you remember what it was like, when Abboo died?’

He turned, smiled, his lips criss-crossed by the beard. ‘Of course I remember.’

‘How hard it was.’

‘Yes.’

She guessed that he was not unaware of suffering, but had decided he would no longer be in thrall to it. That he would embrace it. The death of his father, his wife. There was a grand design, and it left no room for self-pity. But she ploughed on. ‘He’s only six. His mother has just passed, he needs us, me and Ammoo. We’re his family.’

He said nothing, turning his face away and peering into the water. Perhaps he was about to tell her about all the ways he had reconstructed the word ‘family’, and that she was nothing more than a girl he once knew.

She looked towards the camp, where Zaid was no doubt waiting, swinging his arms and pacing through the alleys. She was about to renew her appeal, repeat the arguments, but Sohail reached out and clutched her arm, pulling her towards him. He peered straight into her, awakening all the parts of her that he had once known.

This was it. This was her moment. She had thought of it so often, it was a dream, a dream worn out from constant dreaming. He would see himself reflected through her eyes — see the absurdity of what he had become. He would see the ugliness of turning his family away, the cruelty of his own fathering. Cracks would appear in his belief, his faith would be shaken — not in the Almighty, she would not wish to take that away from him (or perhaps she did, but she was not willing to admit to it), but in whatever force had taken him from her and delivered up a stranger.

He would remember himself, awaken and resume the life she had imagined for him. And he would forgive her for wishing him different.

A man is not born once, she would say, a man can come into the world again.

The years disappeared.

She was ready to forget everything.

Brother, I will be yours again. I don’t care about the people upstairs, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve forgotten about our war, or our youth, no matter if this life is no longer your concern, that you have given up Ghalib and dear, dear Shakespeare, and no matter that I have ached in my bones because you appeared to forget me. If you want to put it aside, I say, yes, I accept, I forgive you, I ask you the same, let us return to it.

‘School is out of the question,’ he said.

Out of the question. Out. The burning sensation started in her gut and rose to her throat. She felt herself struggling to breathe. How foolish she had been to imagine she could come here and get her brother back; the dream was just that, a mirage. Her limbs were restless, angry. Yet she fought the urge to run from him. She had done enough running. Think of the boy, she said to herself. Forget your disappointment and think of the boy.

She swallowed her anger, ready to negotiate. ‘All right, then. Can I teach him a few things — sums, the alphabet? When he’s not busy upstairs, of course.’ For the moment, she would settle for this. One agreement at a time.

‘All right,’ Sohail said finally. ‘I will consider it.’ He bent to embrace her again, and she knew the meeting was over. She darted away, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear, clinging to her small scrap of victory. She would be Zaid’s tutor, and when Sohail saw how quickly he learned, she would persuade him to send the boy to school. She would mourn her little dream later, at night when the sight of him came back to her, his serious, closed face. But for now she told herself to be satisfied, and so she slipped into the crowd, eager to share the good news with her little charge.

Zaid came down for a few hours every day, at lunchtime. He ate undisturbed while Maya taught him the alphabet. Then, as a treat, she showed him a few card games. He cheated, hiding cards under the table or in the sleeve of his kurta. Sometimes her purse was lighter than it should have been, but she didn’t tell Ammoo. She didn’t mind. It was only a few coins, only Gin Rummy and 21. Sohail departed again, on a mission to Nepal, and she didn’t see him after that day by the river. She tried to call Rajshahi again but the line was constantly engaged. She wrote another letter to Nazia, pleading for a reply. She spent another day in the garden shed, looking for newspaper cuttings from the war, and she stumbled across a typed page dated September 1971. It was one of her old articles from the war — no one had agreed to publish it, she remembered, and she smiled now as she read the title: ‘The World Looks on as Bangladesh Bleeds: A Cry for Help’ by Miss Sheherezade Maya Haque.

1984 May

It took her awhile to find the shabby building in Old Dhaka. It was at the back of an alley that led down to the river, flanked by a leather factory. The stench of the tannery was overpowering. She held her nose and knocked. Aditi came to the door.

‘Ah, the doctor!’ she said. She was dressed as she had been at Saima’s party, in a pair of jeans and a short kurta, but she looked different. Her fingertips were stained with ink, and she wore a green bandana around her hair. ‘I’m so glad you decided to come. I won’t hug you, I’m filthy.’ She waved Maya inside.

‘It smells like death,’ Maya said.

Aditi laughed. ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it? We’re all used to it, don’t even notice any more.’

Inside was a windowless room, piled high to the ceiling with stacks of newsprint. There was a large table on one side, scattered with pens, books, empty cups of tea. A man sat with his back to them, huddled over a typewriter, his knees bouncing up and down.

‘Aditi, is that you? Bring me some tea, please, my nimble fingers are about to produce a miracle of a sentence.’

Aditi cleared her throat. ‘We have a guest, Shafaat, please behave.’

The man swung around. ‘I am so sorry, how rude. Hello, I’m Shafaat. Shafaat Rahman.’

‘Shafaat is the editor.’

‘Editor, reporter, manager, tea-boy.’

‘Well, not the tea-boy, it seems,’ Maya said.

‘Yes, you’ve spotted my weakness. What can I say, I like to give orders. But don’t worry, no one ever listens to me.’ He lit a cigarette and dangled it on the edge of his mouth. ‘The next issue comes out in a week. Here’s a mock-up.’ He handed her a leaflet printed on cheap paper. She began to flip through the articles. There was one about the Dictator’s wealth, another exposing corruption in the army. It ended with a tirade on the changes that were being made to the constitution.

‘You can print this?’

The man smiled through dark, tobacco-stained lips. ‘No, but we do.’

‘Won’t you get arrested?’

‘Arre, who’s afraid of a little time with uncle?’

As she turned the pages, the ink bled on to her fingers. She looked around, took in the typewriters, the empty glasses of tea, the floor littered with bits of paper, and for the first time since returning to the city she felt a ripple of belonging.

‘Aditi tells me you’ve been away.’

‘I lived in Rajshahi for a few years.’

‘Really? Do you have people there?’

‘No, my people are here.’ She could count all her people on the fingers of one hand.

‘So you went all the way to the middle of the country, for what?’

She looked at Aditi. ‘I was a “crusading” doctor.’

‘Aditi tells me you want to write.’

That’s what she had told Aditi, when she had called and asked if she could visit the newspaper office. But suddenly she wasn’t sure any more — it had been years since she’d picked up a pen. ‘Well, I thought — I did some writing during the war.’

‘You have something you want to say?’ Shafaat lit another cigarette, threw the match on the ground. A young boy in a tattered vest and lungi entered with a broomstick and pan and began to shift the dust to the corners of the room.

‘Something about village life, I guess.’

‘You mean all that bucolic I-love-the-countryside crap?’

‘No, nothing like that. About what’s really going on out there, sort of like a memoir. I was there for seven years, I saw a lot.’

‘All right, 500 words by next week. Let’s see what you come up with. But please, don’t write any sentimental drivel about the green valleys of Rajshahi, eh?’

She smiled. ‘All right.’

‘You sure your husband won’t mind?’

‘Does Aditi’s husband mind?’

Aditi looked up from her desk. ‘He’s too busy playing golf. I just ignore him.’

‘So, yours will?’

‘Stop harassing her, Shafaat, she’s not married.’

He raised his eyebrows. She imagined what he was thinking — poor girl, still without a husband. But he surprised her by giving her a thumbs-up. ‘I have a daughter, and I tell her, marriage only if she meets a prince. Otherwise men are bastards.’

‘My,’ she said, ‘I could sign you up right now — first male feminist of Bangladesh.’

‘Do it!’ he said, slamming his fist on to the table. ‘We’ll make an official announcement in the next issue.’

‘You’ll be a celebrity,’ Aditi said drily. ‘Now come with me, Maya, I’ll show you the rest of our humble establishment.’ They went down a corridor and into a smaller room. There was a desk at the back with a large rectangular box on top. ‘You’d better look out for Shafaat, he’s a flirt.’

‘He reminds me of my brother.’ There was something about the way he thumped his hand on that desk that brought back a flash of Sohail.

‘Really, I thought your brother had gone the religious way.’

‘He was different before.’ No one seemed to remember the old Sohail. They heard he had become a mawlana and forgot how he had been before. Only Maya had archived his image — hands wedged into his jeans, the cap he wore with a red star in the middle.

Aditi showed her the typesetting machine. She had to take every letter of every word and slot it neatly into a groove. The words were then dipped into the ink and pressed on to the paper. ‘Try it,’ Aditi said. Maya pulled out a few letters, arranged them on a tray. Dipped into black ink. MynameisMayaHaque.

‘You have to remember the spaces between the words, Doctor.’

*

The typewriter’s keys were tight. Probably angry with her for all the years it had spent under Ammoo’s bed. There was a time you couldn’t take it from her; she would bring it to the table and tap away while eating her dinner. And when she wasn’t banging on the keys, she was scribbling on anything she could find, an old newspaper, a piece of brown paper that the vegetables had been wrapped in. Now she struggled to find the words. Chronicles of a Crusading Doctor? That sounded pompous. There was nothing so lofty about what she had done. She began to write about the Dictator, the sight of him tossing flowers on the Martyrs’ Memorial. She tore the paper out of the typewriter. No one wanted to read about that. Five hundred words on the true story of the countryside. The true story. She remembered all the children she had brought into the world, all the mothers she hadn’t been able to save. She thought of Nazia — Nazia who had been punished because it was the hottest day of the year and she wanted to cool her feet. She started at the beginning. I once knew a girl called Nazia. What was she thinking — she couldn’t use real names. Nazia. Zania. Inaaz. Aizan. I once knew a girl called Aizan.

1972 April

Sohail’s friends couldn’t understand his conversion, because they hadn’t really grasped what had come before. They had thought his life was full of happiness; they used words like jolly and cheerful to describe him. Happy-go-lucky. Happy and lucky, jolly and laughing, bell-bottomed. Rock and rolled. Before he found God. They remembered how good-looking he was, and that he showed his teeth when he smiled.

Had they known him better, they would have seen that the teeth, the smiling, the happy and the lucky had been taken by the war. By a girl whose captors had shaved her head so that she could not hang herself. Purdah, the preaching — all of this followed naturally, filling the hole left behind by his old mutinies.

And people misremember about the Book. They assume that Silvi gave him the Book and told him to read it, because by the end of the war Silvi had lost her husband and already found God, and she had defied everyone and been the first to cover her head, to turn her back on her country and face life after life.

But it was Rehana who had given Sohail the Book, a few months after he returned from the war. This was how it happened.

It is a Wednesday, Rehana’s shopping day, and she is walking along New Market, wondering how high the prices have risen since last week, wondering if she can afford a chicken, a half-leg of mutton, when she sees, across the road, someone familiar. Her own son. She catches the barest glimpse, but she is sure it’s him. He is getting down from a rickshaw, and she lifts her hand, is about to call out, but he looks beyond her, his face changing. He crosses the road, approaching her but not seeing her, and now he is both her son and not her son, as he walks directly past her. She turns to see what he sees: a man in another rickshaw. He approaches the man, says not a word, hauls him out of the rickshaw and punches him in the face. Three times, three punches. Then he turns and walks towards her, the muscles in his back rippling, telling her he knows this man, that this man has done terrible things, that he has seen these terrible things, and she knows now that these are the visions that have him pacing the hallway at night, the ones that leave his pillows wet and his mouth frozen stiffly, even as he tries to smile and act as if everything has gone back to normal.

And, not knowing what else to do, because he has asked her never to speak about it, she gives him the Holy Book. The book has helped her through so many difficult times, times she could not imagine surviving. But he shakes his head, because he has come to believe that the Book was part of the problem, before the war, before Bangladesh. Because people were attached to the Book, or their idea of the Book, more than to each other, or to their neighbours, or to their country. They had called themselves revolutionaries, and believed that faith was beneath them, a consolation for simpler, lower minds. Sohail turns his face from the Book and waves his mother away.

This wounds her, because she too has her memories, of her son, a boy who would not dismiss his mother, who would not punch a stranger in the street. That her son has seen, and committed, acts of violence, is not surprising to her — but she cannot account for the lingering of his passions so long after the end of the battle.

Sohail rejects the Book. He lets it gather dust on his desk, and then he shelves it away high, where its spine is not in his sight.

She decides to read to him. You don’t have to listen, she says, just sit with me.

This was how it began. It hurt her to remember this, because everything that happened afterwards could be traced to Sohail’s first steps towards God, beginning with the Book that she gave him, that gathered dust on his bookshelf, that she prised from between Neruda and Ghalib, that she read aloud while he ate his breakfast, that he was unable to resist, that he began to memorise, then understand, then love, that finally fell into his hands as he learned to read, that wove itself into his heart — that led to revelation and his conversion, the alchemy of which none of his loved ones could trace to a single moment, a single gesture.

1984 June

Several months after Chottu and Saima’s party, Joy telephoned with another invitation. ‘The party wasn’t really your cup of tea, was it?’

‘Was it yours?’ She was glad to hear his voice. ‘Why haven’t you rung?’

He laughed. ‘I was waiting for the right opportunity and it has just come up.’

‘Oh? What’s that? Not another evening of whisky and dancing?’

‘Maya-bee, your heart is as hard as sugar. No, this is something totally different — I thought you might like to see the other side.’

‘The other side of what?’

‘People who care about the same things you do.’

‘No, thanks. I already did. You remember Aditi — I met her at the party? She took me to her newspaper office. The editor is giving me a column.’

‘Shafaat?’

‘You know him?’

‘Everyone knows him.’

She didn’t like the way he said everyone. She was about to tell him so when he said, ‘I’m talking about real revolutionaries. Look, you won’t regret it — I’ll pick you up at three.’ Before she could reply, he hung up. Real revolutionaries. He knew she wouldn’t be able to resist that, even if it was only a joke. Everyone knew there weren’t any real revolutionaries left, not in Dhaka, not in the world. It was 1984 after all.

They drove to Kolabagan. The woman who answered the door introduced herself as Mohona. ‘Come with me,’ she said, leading them down an unlit corridor that smelled of old books and damp. The corridor opened into a drawing room with large windows on one side. Money plants climbed up the grilles and fingered the ceiling. There were a handful of people there already, seated in a loose circle. It was a long time since Maya had been to a meeting, but the scene was familiar: the women in plain cotton saris, the sparse jute furniture, the smell of paper and incense. She drifted away from Joy and sat down beside a man in a uniform.

‘Hello, I’m Sheherezade,’ she said, using her formal name.

‘Lieutenant Sarkar,’ he replied, nodding. ‘You have been to the meeting before?’

‘No, my first time.’

‘Jahanara Imam is coming today.’

Maya’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’ Jahanara Imam had written a book about losing her son in the war. Everyone had read it; they called her Shaheed Janani, Mother of Martyrs. Joy was right about bringing her here. Maybe she could even write about it for the newspaper. She settled into her seat and pulled out her notebook. Soon the room filled up; when the chairs ran out, people leaned against the wall or crouched on the floor. ‘That’s her,’ the army man said, pointing to an elderly woman who had just taken her seat.

The meeting was called to order by Mohona. She welcomed everyone, including, with a nod to Maya, people who were joining them for the first time. Joy found a seat in the row behind her, tapped her on the shoulder. ‘What did I say?’

Jahanara Imam rose. Tiny, in a white cotton sari, she looked insubstantial, like a froth of smoke. Her voice, however, was firm, her words direct. ‘It has been thirteen years,’ she began, ‘but I know that, like me, you have not forgotten. It has been thirteen years and our war is not over. Perhaps we gained our freedom, perhaps you can hold your head high and say you have a country, your country. But what sort of country allows the men who betrayed it, the men who committed murder, to run free, to live as the neighbours of the women they have widowed, the young girls they have raped?’

She told the story of Ghulam Azam, whose thugs had collaborated with the Pakistan Army, led them to guerrilla hideouts, helped them burn villages. Not only was he acquitted of any wrongdoing, but he was being considered for Bangladeshi citizenship.

Maya had always prided herself on remembering exactly who she had been before the war broke out. She remembered her politics, the promises she had made to herself about the country. She remembered the sight of dead men with their hands tied behind their backs, their faces lapped with blood, and she remembered every day she had worked in the camps, scooping bullets out of men with nothing but a spoon and a hunter’s knife.

She remembered everything she had done and who she had been and who she had vowed to remain. But now, listening to this woman, she felt herself pulled and folded back into another body, one that hadn’t been lonely all these months and years, one that hadn’t left home and trodden carelessly around the past decade, one that could shore up the memories of that time and get angry when the moment came for anger.

She clapped along with the others, between Jahanara Imam’s sentences. The room was growing hot now, bright sunlight filtering through the thicket of money plants. Someone turned up the ceiling fan, and the women readjusted themselves as the folds of their saris flapped open. Maya held down the pages of her notebook.

When Jahanara Imam was finished, Mohona stood up again. ‘How many of you have lost a loved one to the war?’

Hands went up. Maya’s too.

‘Madam,’ said a man in a grey suit, ‘I lost my father and mother. They went to the university and shot the professors.’ From the back of the room, another voice added, ‘My relatives lived in Old Dhaka. They killed my uncle, my grandfather.’

More people spoke up, announcing the date of their loss, the circumstances. Caught in the crossfire. Shot by the army on a raid in their village. Tortured to death at the cantonment.

The confessions made Maya grip the underside of her seat. Would they each have to get up and confess who they had lost, exactly what they had done, in the war? She found herself shivering under the whirr of the fan. A woman was talking about documenting all the atrocities of the war. ‘We should make a list,’ she was saying, ‘and identify all the killers.’

Maya found herself raising her hand. Mohona pointed to her. ‘I think — I believe — that the first thing we must do is admit our own faults, our own sins. So much happened during the war — we were not just victims.’

The room suddenly grew quiet.

Lieutenant Sarkar turned to her and said gently, ‘You are speaking to a room full of wounded souls, my dear.’

She could hear people breathing quietly, waiting for the awkward moment to pass. Finally Mohona stood up. ‘We all have our private grief. But we are here to talk about the collabor ators. Let us focus on the task at hand. If we document the atrocities in a systematic manner, Ghulam Azam will surely be denied permission to stay in Bangladesh.’

The voices rose again, and Maya was left with a sharp pain under her ribs. She thought of her own casualties of war, the reason she had raised her hand. But there were also the things that she had done, which returned to her now, the memories clear and sharp. She turned to Joy. ‘I have to go,’ she whispered.

‘Wait — it’s almost finished. Another ten minutes.’

She couldn’t wait. She stood up, stepping over Lieutenant Sarkar’s knees. At the end of the row she overturned someone’s teacup, and the clattering made the room quiet again. ‘Excuse me,’ she mumbled, and fled. She emerged into the fading afternoon, a busy road with a succession of trucks lumbering by. In the distance was a jumble of tin shacks, and when she grew near she saw that it stretched far beyond the horizon, row after row of frail-looking structures, pasted together with bits of paper, cinema posters and calendars and newspaper and jute and cow dung. She found an overturned crate and sat down to face it.

‘I’m not getting it right.’ It was Joy. He crouched beside her.

‘You’re not my tour guide.’

‘But you’re back after so long, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression.’

‘I could show you a few things too, you know.’

‘Like what?’

‘Look over there. You want to know the most painful thing about living in that slum? If you’re a woman?’

‘What?’

‘Drinking water.’

‘Why, because the water is dirty?’

‘That too, but it’s not just that. See, if you are a woman and you live in that slum, you wake up in the middle of the night while it’s still dark, and you make your way to the edge of the shanties, and you lift up your sari and squat over the open drain. And then you tiptoe back into bed with your husband, and for the rest of the day, you wait, you wait and wait until it gets dark, your stomach feels like it’s full of needles, your insides are burning, but you can’t do anything, no, you can’t, you have to wait until it gets dark and everyone else has gone to sleep so you can have your one solitary piss of the day.’

His head was bowed, and she saw his hand moving towards her hand and she moved her hand away, because she didn’t want him to think that his gesture was a way of resolving this, the cruelty of the country, the collaborators that ran free and never went to jail for murder and rape — because there were things that could not be erased with the squeeze of a hand, memories and sins and conditions of humanity.

She turned to him. ‘I’m not made to sit in meetings.’

‘You shouldn’t. You argue too much.’

She laughed. ‘That’s true.’ She leaned against him. ‘Find me a rickshaw.’

‘Let me take you — make use of my skills as a taxi-driver.’

*

She had just taught Zaid the numbers in English, one through ten, and he was repeating them aloud, his voice high and proud, when the phone rang. Maya looked at her watch — four o’clock, must be for the girl upstairs, though she was nowhere in sight. She picked up. ‘Hello?’

The line was sandy. ‘Hello?’ It was a woman. ‘Maya?’

Nazia. ‘Nazia?’ Her heart flew to her throat.

‘Maya Apa,’ she said, addressing her formally. ‘Are you well?’

‘Yes, I am well.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She is well also. And how are your children?’

Maya heard the sound of Nazia clearing her throat. ‘I got your letter — your letters. Both of them.’

She tried to remember what she had written. The long, meandering explanations, the apologies. ‘There was much to say.’

Nazia blew into the receiver. ‘I’m sorry you had to go, like that.’

‘It was my fault. I should never have let you swim in the pond.’

A pause. ‘I’m going home today, doctor says.’

All this time she had been at the hospital. ‘The children will be so glad to see you.’

‘I have to go now.’

‘All right,’ Maya said. For some reason she wanted to add, God Bless You, but before she could say anything the line went dead. She pressed several times on the receiver, but there was only the sandy sound, not even a dial tone.

*

‘Zaid, what do you know about your grandfather?’

‘He died.’

‘That’s right. Did you know he had your chin?’

She was making it up. ‘Really?’

She placed her thumb in the dent of his chin. ‘Yes, it was yours exactly.’

They took a rickshaw to the graveyard. He was wearing his sandals today, and a clean kurta that smelled of industrial soap. He could almost sound out the words on the gravestone: MUHAMMAD IQBAL HAQUE.

‘Did you know’, Maya said, ‘I was the same age as you when my father died?’

‘Did you cry?’

‘No, I didn’t cry. I didn’t know how sad I should be.’

‘Me too.’

She knew. She had watched him talking about his mother, putting all his optimism in his recollections of her — the Ludo board, the promises about going to school. ‘She was very beautiful, your ammoo,’ Maya said. ‘She had grey eyes, like yours.’

He circled the grave, tapping his hand on the gravestone as he passed.

‘Do you want to say something to your mother, Zaid?’

‘This isn’t her.’

‘Yes, but she can hear you. What do you want to say to her?’

He stopped, crouched. ‘Ammoo,’ he said, ‘I would like a cycle.’ Then he cupped his hands, as he had been taught, and recited the Kalma.

That night, in her sleep, she stretched her feet to the edge of the bed and found herself in contact with something warm. Sitting upright, she reached with her fingers. A sleeping form, breathing in and out. She must be dreaming. She switched on the light. The boy, his hand fanned over his face, did not stir.

She draped the blanket over him and he shifted, pulling it up over his head. In the garden, the trees were licked by moonlight.

Later, as the room coloured, she pulled him into the mosquito net and curled around him, feeling his shoulders loosening, his feet drifting towards her.

*

On the last day of June, when the searing heat of spring was about to move aside for the monsoon, Rehana persuaded Maya out of the house and stood her in front of the newest, grandest building in the city.

‘I hate it,’ she said, shielding her eyes. ‘It’s hideous.’

‘Come on, beta, don’t be so harsh.’

‘Hideous. She swivelled her head around, trying to take in the whole building, making sure she didn’t miss any of it. ‘Is that water?’

‘Yes, it’s built on a pool of water, like a shapla flower floating in the river.’

‘Why is it so big?’

‘Doesn’t matter, it’s our parliament now. That very nice American chap built it.’

‘Well, I don’t like it,’ she said, moving forward nonetheless, climbing the wide steps that led up to the building. ‘Where’s the entrance?’

‘I don’t know. We’re not supposed to go inside; just admire it from here.’

They turned their backs to the building and took in the view of the grounds. The lawn stretched out on either side, reaching Sher-e Bangla Nagar to the east, Mirpur Road to the west. It was impressive, there was no denying that. Already the trees ringing the compound looked ancient. Dotted around the gardens, she saw couples holding hands, trying to catch the shade of a tree. On a patch of grass near the main road, a phuchka-vendor had set up his cart. He waved, beckoning. ‘Hungry, Ma?’ Maya said.

They settled into the crude wooden chairs and ordered two plates. The sun was starting its rapid descent, sending horizontal ribbons of light across the wide carpet of green that led up to the building. Suddenly she wanted to be somewhere else; her eye ached for the groves of Rajshahi, for her little brick house. She wondered if Nazia would call her again, imagined the trouble it would be for her to pay the postman, get him to dial the number. ‘That little village was like home,’ she said suddenly, her eye lingering on the building, resisting its grey curves, the way it floated, solid yet delicate, on its American-made lake.

‘It will be hard to leave behind,’ her mother said. I can still go back, Maya thought. I can pack up again and march out the door and become a country doctor again.

The phuchkas arrived, a dozen shells, each filled with its chickpea and potato mixture. Maya poured in the tamarind water and popped one into her mouth. Immediately her eyes began to water. ‘Mmm,’ she said, smiling.

‘Ay,’ Rehana said, ‘he’s put too much chilli.’ She waved at the phuchka-man.

‘No, Ammoo, leave it, they’re perfect,’ Maya said, wiping her streaming eyes. ‘Seriously. Perfect.’ Her mother passed her a handkerchief. ‘I’d forgotten how yummy they were.’ A steady procession of cars drove past the wide avenue in front of the parliament compound. In between bites of phuchka, Maya heard car horns, and the tinkle of rickshaw-bells as they turned corners or changed lanes, and, every few minutes, the Dhanmondi — Gazipur bus, tilted to one side as the passengers hung, Tarzan-like, to the railings.

Now, with the pastry about to collapse in her mouth, and sunlight beaming sideways, pink and orange, against her mother’s cheek, she suddenly remembered all the times she had been loved. It was like that with her mother — memory upon memory stacked together like the feathers in a wild bird, there to keep her warm, or when she needed to, fly. She was the wings of her, the very wings.

‘The road is so busy,’ Maya said, sipping the tea they had been brought by the phuchka-man.

Her mother nodded. ‘Everything is speeding up. Only thirteen years since independence and you can’t recognise anything.’

Thirteen. Her broken wishbone of a country was thirteen years old. Didn’t sound like very long, but in that time the nation had rolled and unrolled tanks from its streets. It had had leaders elected and ordained. It had murdered two presidents. In its infancy, it had started cannibalising itself, killing the tribals in the south, drowning villages for dams, razing the ancient trees of Modhupur Forest. A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.

The phuchkas were finished, the tea cooling in their cups. Maya didn’t want the day to end. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘let’s go to New Market. I want to buy you a sari.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve missed seven of your birthdays, and seven Eid days — fourteen, if you count both Eids.’ A sari, she realised as she said it, would never add up to that many missed days. But she liked the thought of returning to their favourite shops in New Market, haggling with the sari-vendors who would order cold drinks and model their wares on the hips of their young sons.

‘Okay,’ Rehana said, ‘let’s go.’

The rickshaw-puller turned on Mirpur Road, crossed its length, past Gawsia and Chandni Chawk. Just as he was about to make the turn into the market, a crowd emerged from Fuller Road, a wall of people marching towards them, holding up a large painted banner.

‘It’s the Chattro League,’ Maya said, recognising their logo from her university days. The marchers advanced slowly, filling the area in front of the New Market gate. Their megaphones blared. She saw herself multiplied. ‘What do they want?’

Their voices were drowned out by the chanting. Something about the vice-chancellor being sacked. And the Dictator’s corruption.

A canvas-covered truck arrived, and uniformed men spilled out of the open flap at the back. The marchers took a step back, still holding the banner in an uneven line. A man behind the megaphone said, ‘We are here in peace. We want to be heard.’

The uniformed men held up their shields and their lathis.

‘Chattro League demands—’

As they charged, the policemen looked like angry housewives. They smashed their rolling pins on the backs of the front line. The banner collapsed, falling to the ground and getting tangled in the legs of the protesters. The marchers scattered, but the police chased them down, beating hard on their backs, until they crumpled, one by one, and were dragged by their armpits into the waiting truck.

Maya saw a boy with his hands around his head, blood leaking from between his fingers. The rickshaw-wallah tried to turn around, but there were too many cars behind them, and the police vans were blocking the road ahead. ‘Forgive me but you’ll have to walk,’ he said, refusing to take his fare. ‘Hurry, if you don’t go now you’ll get stuck here for hours.’

They followed the footpath and headed west, away from New Market. Behind them, clouds of teargas billowed upwards. Maya grabbed her mother’s elbow. ‘Quickly, Ammoo.’ They broke into a jog, turned off Mirpur Road and began to cross the bridge. They turned a corner and the side streets were suddenly quiet, no sign of the police. Maya turned around and hugged Ammoo, out of breath. Tears clogged her throat.

‘You used to look like that,’ Rehana said, reading her thoughts.

She laughed, wiping her eyes. ‘Like what? Youthful and carefree?’

‘Like you were only alive to be on the streets.’

They returned to the bungalow. At six o’clock Maya switched on the news. The newsreader, her sari pinned tightly to her shoulder, began narrating the day’s events. The Dictator had announced he would build a strong Bangladesh. The finance minister announced they would not trade with India on unfavourable terms. There was no mention of the protests, the arrests or the beatings.

‘What a bullshit newsreader. All that lipstick and she can’t tell the truth. I don’t know why you keep this stupid television here.’ Maya slammed her palm against the dial.

‘Leave that on,’ Ammoo said. She was ironing a sari, leaning heavily on the crumpled border.

‘I can’t believe you’re falling for this propaganda.’

Rehana stood the iron upright and straightened her back. ‘Who do you think talked to me all day long? Before you came back? Nobody. Sometimes I used to ask Sufia to sing a village song while she was dusting, just so I knew there was someone else here. I bought the TV because otherwise it’s so quiet I can hear the rats trying to get into the house. So don’t you tell me to switch it off. I’ll have it if I want to.’ And she, in turn, slammed a palm on the dial, making the images jump on to the screen, then disappear. She fiddled with the antenna. ‘Damn,’ she said, while the picture flickered in and out. Finally she found the signal and, with the iron still plugged into its socket, leaned against the sofa and listened to the weather report.

‘I don’t want to go back,’ Maya said. And there it was. Easy as one sentence. Maya felt herself warming with relief. She wouldn’t stop sending letters to Rajshahi, and maybe, once the seasons turned and the memory of that day receded, she would go back for a visit. Check up on the postman’s daughter, hand out a few packets of antibiotics. But she would stop imagining it was possible to return; she would stay here, begin some kind of life with what was left. She would not forget Nazia; Nazia’s story, her daring to swim in the pond and the lashes with which she paid for such bravery, would be chronicled. It would be there in black and white; people would read it and they would know that their freedom was as thin as the skin around Nazia’s ankles. But she would stay here, with her mother, the Dictator at their doorstep, the little boy under her wing.

There were tears in Ammoo’s eyes. ‘It’s your house,’ she said. ‘Stay as long as you like.’ They embraced again, and then the news programme ended, and it was time for Dallas. Maya promised to watch if Ammoo would fill her in on the plot. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but it’s going to take a while, it’s very complicated.’

As Ammoo put up her feet on the coffee table, Maya noticed a slight swelling around her midriff. ‘What’s this?’ she said, patting her mother’s stomach.

‘It’s nothing,’ Rehana said, batting Maya’s hand away.

‘Let me see.’

‘Leave it alone, beta. I’m just getting fat.’ And she bent towards the television again, turning up the volume.

That night, Maya lay awake and thought of Sohail. When she was six and Sohail eight, they were sent away to live with their aunt and uncle in Lahore. Their father had died not long before, and everyone thought it would be better if they went away for a while to give their mother a chance to recover, build a new life for herself. There was talk of another marriage, more children. They would only be in the way.

Ammoo did not agree. There was a judge, and a court case, which she lost.

They lived in Lahore for two years with their father’s brother, Faiz, and his wife, Parveen. An enormous house. She and Sohail had an ayah who slept on the verandah outside their room. If they needed something, they were told to ring the bell beside the light switch.

On some nights Parveen would slip into Maya’s bed and put her hand gently on her forehead, believing she was asleep. Maya would hear her sigh deeply, her breath medicinal and light, and she would drift off to the sound of Parveen’s gentle snoring.

Her memories of those two years were full of Sohail. Sohail holding her hand on the aeroplane. Sohail bending down and retying her shoelaces. Sohail’s handkerchief against her lashes. Sohail instructing her to stay silent at school until she knew enough Urdu. Sohail breaking her rootis into small pieces and stacking them up, just the way she liked.

He was father and mother and bhaiya to her. Her closest human. Her only friend.

When they returned to Dhaka, a very large two-storey building stood where half of the garden had once been. Ammoo took them on a tour, their shoes clattering against the bare cement floors. From the upstairs verandah, which wrapped around the building like a vine, you could see the flat roof of their shabby little bungalow, rainwater gathering in mossy pools, whitewash greying.

They couldn’t live in it. Ammoo was going to rent it out and buy them things with the money. It was her two-storeyed bit of insurance, that house. She whispered a prayer every time she stepped into it; she dusted and redusted the banisters; she stretched her hand up, touching the frame of the front door. And she made them call it Shona, as though it were built of solid gold.