The Good Muslim

1984 July

‘It’s a good thing you’re staying,’ Ammoo said; ‘you’ll be here for the surgery.’

Maya was only half listening, her hands twisted into a mound of warm dough. Ammoo was teaching her to make parathas, the trick of which, she said, was that the water should be boiling hot when mixed with the flour. She thought her mother was telling her she would be here for so-and-so’s wedding, or daughter’s naming ceremony. Then she heard it. ‘Surgery?’

‘You were right. I went to see the doctor. I have a tumour.’ She patted her stomach. ‘In my uterus. They have to take it out.’

Maya could see it now, protruding lightly from her middle. And she hadn’t been the one to diagnose it. Her hands moved in the dough, but Ammoo shook her head. ‘Parathas first, then you can doctor me.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘Not long.’

Maya began to knead, hard and furious, reaching into the elastic warmth of flour, water. ‘Enough, Maya,’ Ammoo said; ‘now divide it. Put some flour on your hands, like this.’ She pulled off a section, rolled it between her palms, fingers extended like a dancer’s, and passed her a perfect sphere.

‘More flour,’ she said, and handed Maya the rolling pin.

‘You didn’t tell me.’ She rolled, pressed, turned the disc, rolled again.

Rehana wiped the flour from her hands. ‘I was going to tell you, I just didn’t want you to worry unnecessarily.’

‘Why would you do that, why would you keep this a secret?’

She came up behind Maya, guiding her hands on the rolling pin. ‘You’re making it square,’ she said. ‘I told you, I didn’t mean to. And they said it isn’t anything serious.’

The dreams Maya had had in Rajshahi, the blade of premonition when the postman delivered the telegram, were coming true. She shrugged off the sensation that it had somehow been ordained, and that Ammoo would die now, just as she had dreamed, wrapped in a shroud of white and sent into the ground with prayers and fistfuls of mud. The air thickened in her chest. Stop, she told herself. You’re a doctor, focus on what you can do. Tumours in the uterus were the best kind of tumour; they lay in the womb like a seed, and they grew within it, but the uterus could easily be disposed of. Ammoo didn’t need it any more. That is what they would do. They would perform a hysterectomy, and the whole thing would be over. Finished.

She immediately called her old professor Dr Sattar, scratching at a loose bit of plaster on the wall as she waited for the medical college switchboard to connect her. He was the best surgeon at the hospital; people waited months for his steady hands to cut into them. He came on the line, irritated, and she introduced herself formally, reminding him of the year she had enrolled at the medical college (‘Sir, it was just after the war, sir. .’). There was no softening, no note of recognition, but he asked for details of Ammoo’s tumour, its location and size. Maya read from the report Ammoo had given her. And then he agreed to see her, to do an X-ray and decide the next course of action. Yes, he said, a hysterectomy was probably called for. He didn’t say anything about the risks, or the complications, or about her chances; he just treated it like any other thing, something to put in his diary. Call my secretary, he said, make an appointment. That’s what she liked about surgeons, they didn’t stand on ceremony.

*

The day before the surgery, Rehana’s friend Mrs Rahman appeared with a plate of shemai, her five-year-old grandson trailing behind her.

‘I’ve got Surjo for a week,’ she said, clamping her hand around the wrist of the wriggling boy. ‘Neleema and her husband have gone to Shillong.’ She smiled broadly. The boy was sullen and immediately wanted to tear the heads off the lilies.

‘Don’t touch that,’ Maya said, wondering what her mother would say if she returned from the hospital to find a shorn flowerbed.

Rehana appeared a few moments later wearing a sari that Maya had always liked, a moss-green cotton with a pink paisley border. She had joked once that she wanted Ammoo to bequeath the sari to her, and she remembered this now as she positioned her mother in a garden chair, with a cushion at her back.

‘It’s nothing,’ Rehana said to her friend. The boy came charging towards them, complaining he had been bitten by a fire ant. ‘Poor dear,’ Mrs Rahman said, kissing the spot on his arm where a tiny red welt had appeared. He wandered off, wielding a stick against the insects, and Rehana continued, ‘There’s nothing to worry about, please don’t make a fuss.’

Mrs Rahman nodded. ‘It’s up to Him. What’s written on your forehead is already written.’

Maya hated, more than anything, the forehead explanation of life. She was about to say something but she remembered how just that morning, when a neighbour had sent a piece of paper that she claimed would shrink the tumour because the Saint of Eight Ropes had blown on it, her mother had pleaded with her to keep her opinions to herself.

‘How are Neleema and her husband?’ Rehana asked.

‘Yes, they are well. She’s expecting.’

‘Oh, Alhamdulillah.’

Mrs Rahman paused, guilty at having imparted this piece of good news.

Maya had left Zaid in the kitchen, gnawing on a chicken leg. She found him still eating, the yellow gravy stuck to his palms and the corners of his mouth. ‘Always hungry, poor child,’ Sufia whispered.

‘Berry, berry good,’ he said, tilting his head from side to side, crunching on a piece of chicken bone.

‘Come with me,’ Maya said, pulling him to the outside tap. She scrubbed his hands with soap as he looked on. ‘When was the last time you ate?’ she said. She’d been neglecting him. Between the doctor’s visits and the cold feeling that Ammoo’s illness was her fault, she had hardly seen him. She moved up to his wrists, scrubbing now with a small washcloth, digging at the dirt that had ploughed into the creases of his hand. She rolled up his sleeve and stopped, looking at the small round scars that disappeared into his kurta. She had seen them somewhere before. Worms? She patted his stomach, taut from having just eaten, then drew him close. When he wrapped his arms around her, she caught the smell of sick.

‘Did you vomit today?’

‘No.’

She wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth. ‘Bring down your clothes,’ she said. ‘Sufia will wash them.’

He nodded.

‘And what about ABC, do you remember any of it? A for?’

The blood rushed to his cheeks. ‘Apple,’ he said, unrolling his sleeves and shaking out his legs. ‘I have to go.’

‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to Dadu? She’s going to the hospital.’

His eyes widened. ‘Is she going to be dead?’

‘No, she’s not. But she’ll be gone for a few days, so come and say goodbye.’

In the garden, Sufia was serving tea to Mrs Rahman. Surjo was darting out from behind the mango tree, balling his hands together and pointing at his grandmother. ‘Dishoom Dishoom!’

Mrs Rahman feigned mortal injury.

Zaid’s palm grew damp in Maya’s. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Mrs Rahman’s grandson. Do you want to play with him?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t worry, he’s much smaller than you.’

‘I don’t want to.’ He made to turn around, but Mrs Rahman had already spotted him. ‘Is that Sohail’s boy?’

‘Yes,’ Rehana replied, quickly scanning Zaid. At least his clothes weren’t torn.

‘Come here,’ Mrs Rahman called, and when she saw him hesitating, holding Maya’s hand in front of his face, she said, ‘I’ll give you a Mimi — come here.’

Zaid stopped for a moment, then inched closer, releasing Maya’s hand.

‘Come here.’ Rehana had given her friend a few sketchy details about Sohail, but Mrs Rahman couldn’t stop the shock from passing briefly across her face. Zaid was holding out his hand now, and Mrs Rahman was stroking his capped head. She fumbled in her bag for the promised Mimi chocolate.

‘That’s mine!’ The grandson crawled, commando-style, towards them.

‘Hold on, darling boy, I think there’s enough for both of you.’ She brandished the small bar of chocolate with the photograph of an orange on its wrapper, breaking it in two and offering half to each.

‘It’s mine.’ Surjo stood up and grabbed both halves, stuffing one aggressively into his mouth.

‘Be a good boy now,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to share? No? I’ll buy you another one on the way home. I’ll buy you two. Now give the chocolate to the little boy. There’s a jaanoo. Yes, what a little angel you are.’

Surjo passed the half-bar of chocolate to Zaid, smearing it against his palm. Zaid gazed at it for a moment as it softened against his hand. Then he turned around, holding the chocolate as far from his body as he could, and walked slowly, one foot in front of the other.

‘Khoda Hafez,’ Rehana called out. ‘I shall see you again very soon.’ Zaid turned his head towards her and nodded once, then continued his slow tread until he reached the edge of the lawn, where he stopped, raised his hand to his mouth and lapped delicately at the treasure on his palm.

*

The copy of Rise Bangladesh! came through the gate and landed on the porch. Shafaat had published her article on the third page, next to a long essay about the military — industrial complex, and opposite an advertisement celebrating the anniversary of the socialist revolution in Bulgaria. ‘Confessions of a Country Doctor’, by S. M. Haque. She had thought of choosing a more glamorous penname, but nothing had sprung to mind. Already the time before Ammoo’s illness seemed a long way away. She had started with Nazia’s story; now she wondered where to go next. Being here in Dhaka, living in the bungalow, had breached levees she had carefully constructed of what she remembered about the past, about her brother, the war. She remembered the meeting with Jahanara Imam, the way she had stormed out. And why. And the projector in the garden shed. I once knew a girl called Piya.

*

Zaid had given her lice. In the hospital, Rehana parted Maya’s hair into sections, seaming each one with kerosene, mining her scalp for the white lice eggs.

‘Ammoo, stop now, I can get Sufia to do it later. You need to get ready for the surgery.’

Sufia was sobbing heavily in the corner. ‘What will I do if you die?’ she wailed in Rehana’s direction. ‘Who will look after me?’

Behind her back, Maya could feel her mother sighing. ‘I won’t be dead for a long time. You’ll be dead before me, I’m sure.’ Having oiled and thoroughly picked through Maya’s hair, she began to run a thin-toothed comb through it.

‘This one’, Sufia said, pointing at Maya, ‘doesn’t even like me. She’d have me on the street in half a second.’

‘She only looks mean,’ Rehana said, combing Maya’s hair into a towel. ‘Inside she’s as soft as rice pudding. Maya, you have an infestation. Look.’

Maya turned around and saw a smattering of little black insects nestled on the towel. Ammoo began squeezing each one between her thumbnails.

‘Disgusting,’ Maya said. ‘I can’t believe they grew so fast.’

‘It’s because you didn’t take care of it straight away.’

‘That kid. I’m going to thrash him.’

Rehana reached over, pulled Maya’s face into her hands. ‘Don’t ever say that,’ she said, ‘don’t say it. Ever.’

‘I’m sorry, Ma, I just — sometimes I just don’t know what to do with him.’ That morning she had made him promise to practise his lessons, but he had insisted she take him to the graveyard, so he could ask his mother again about the bicycle. And he had irritated her on the way back, demanding to go to school, a proper school. But don’t you like Maya-school? she teased, and he shook his head. It’s no good, he said. No good.

‘She hasn’t said a word to me since she arrived,’ Sufia said, blowing her nose.

Rehana had finished combing and braiding Maya’s hair. ‘It’s a routine operation,’ Maya said, standing up and straightening her kameez. ‘She’ll be fine.’

‘Maya, I don’t think she knows what a routine operation is.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Maya said. She stepped out of the room and paced the corridor until she found what she was looking for: a medical student. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘may I borrow that?’ And she pulled the stethoscope from around his neck before he could protest. ‘I’ll give it back,’ she said, returning to Ammoo’s bedside. ‘Sufia, come over here.’

Sufia approached tentatively. Maya put the chestpiece of the stethoscope on Ammoo and let Sufia listen. ‘You hear this? It’s her heart.’

Sufia’s eyes widened. ‘Strong.’

‘Strong as an ox,’ Rehana said; ‘they can’t kill me.’

‘The surgery will take two, three hours at the most,’ Maya said, repeating the sentences she’d been telling herself over and over again. ‘Dr Sattar is one of the best surgeons in the country.’

Rehana put her hand, IV-threaded, on her hand. ‘Say Aytul Kursi with me.’

Maya turned away from her, facing the doorway of the cubicle; the thin curtains parted to reveal the scene in the corridor, the nurses walking purposefully, holding metal kidney dishes, bags of blood and saline. She was suddenly afraid for her mother, and the feeling she’d had under the jackfruit tree in Rajshahi came flooding back to her — all the things that could go wrong, and the nagging sense that it was all her fault, that the tumour had somehow grown out of her mother’s loneliness. She wanted to ask Ammoo to cancel the surgery, postpone it to another day, perhaps till winter, when it was cooler and the electricity was less likely to go out; or perhaps until there was a better doctor, a younger man who had just returned from foreign with new techniques, advanced anaesthesiology. And Sufia was right: if her mother died, she could never be the one to replace her — the bougainvillea would die and the fruit would fall from the guava tree, unpicked. And Ammoo was the only person left in the world who still loved her.

All Ammoo wanted was a prayer. Surely she could give her that. She tried to unlock the words, but they were buried deep, and knotted among all the other things. The disappointments, the heartache, the state of the country and the Dictator who said Allah between every other word — all latched on to those words, that Book. Don’t worry, she wanted to tell her mother, we don’t need Aytul Kursi. We have science. But she couldn’t help but remember that every death she had ever witnessed — on the battlefield, at the field hospital, in the wards — had been accompanied by the sound of prayer, the same words embroidering every parting of flesh and spirit.

Dr Sattar pulled the curtain aside and stepped in. A clutch of medical students followed, crowding into the space. ‘Is my patient ready?’ He picked up the chart at the foot of the bed.

Rehana waved at him, as if from a great distance. ‘Dakhtar, you needn’t have come yourself.’

Dr Sattar surprised Maya by smiling. ‘Nonsense. We take good care of our own, don’t we, Dr Haque?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied.

He ordered the students to check Rehana’s blood pressure and adjust her IV. They shuffled nervously around him. ‘Your brother is waiting outside,’ one of them said.

‘Brother?’ Maya and Rehana spoke in unison. For a moment Maya thought it might be a distant cousin of her mother’s, here from Karachi after receiving the telegram she had sent their relatives about the surgery. Then she knew it must be Sohail.

‘Ma,’ she said, ‘I’ll just be back. The nurse will be here if you need anything.’

Sohail was leaning against the balcony railing, his eyes on the mosaic tiling below. The sky was darkening overhead, purple and grey, the air quiet, everything hovering in that moment before the afternoon rain.

‘How is Ammoo?’ he asked.

‘She’s fine. You should go in and see her.’ Our mother might die and we might be orphans and I might be your last remaining kin. Was he thinking the same thing?

‘The surgeon—’

‘He’s very experienced, don’t worry. She’ll be all right.’ Or she won’t. Was he persuaded by the tone she tried to bring to her voice, the doctor’s certainty?

He nodded. ‘Inshallah.’

‘And you, are you well?’ She looked him up and down, her eye lingering on the bruise that blossomed on his forehead, pearly and blue-black, from his daily submission to the prayer mat.

‘I am well, by the Grace of Allah.’ It started to rain, that slanted, sideways rain that reminded Maya of childhood, the smell of wet cement, the two of them rushing to close the windows before the mattresses were soaked. Sohail did not retreat from the edge of the railing, Maya too remained beside him, and now they were both being pelted with rain. His beard took on the sheen of water. He straightened, fixed his gaze on her. Was it tenderness she saw? She struggled to keep her eyes open against the torrent. It would be too much, she wanted him to say, too much to lose our mother now. But instead he said, ‘Zaid tells me you’re teaching him the English letters.’

‘Yes. Soon he’ll be reading Middlemarch.’

He laughed. She laughed. The rain stopped as suddenly as it began. She wanted to hug him, and she did, and he returned her embrace, squeezing his arms around her. Rain mixed with tears, salty and warm.

‘Nothing bad will happen, Bhaiya,’ she said.

‘Sister Khadija told me you taught Zaid to play cards.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he’s a shark.’

‘Sister Khadija is dismayed. Gambling is not allowed.’

Maya stepped back, the shock of his words dipping slowly, painfully into her. ‘But it’s just a game. Ammoo plays too.’

‘You know the difference between Halal and Haram. If you don’t, then perhaps Sister Khadija should take over Zaid’s education.’

That’s not what she had meant. She felt desperation spreading through her. ‘Please, no.’

He put his hand on her shoulder, as though she would have trouble understanding otherwise. ‘The boy misses his mother, I know that. I should give him more time, but. .’

She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. ‘Your duties?’

He looked wounded, his gaze pointing beyond her, to the small patches of sunshine now visible through the clouds. ‘A boy needs to find his way in the world.’

She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she wanted to agree with him, to tell him it was all right, that he was doing his best. It couldn’t be easy, raising a son. He was laying down the law, she could see that, but he made it appear as if he had no choice, as though there were something natural about the rule he was imposing. She struggled with herself, knowing that if she pushed too hard he might abandon her entirely, that perhaps he was giving her this chance simply because his wife was not here to admonish him, dead before she could pour that last drop of venom into his ear and make him deaf to her for ever. Maya tried to be grateful for this.

‘Go in and see Ammoo — she’s expecting you.’ And she turned around and made her way down the stairs and towards the operating theatre, drying her hair with the end of her sari, the rain still heavy on her cheek.

1972 May

Sohail finds, in the spring after he has returned from the war, that his hands will not stop shaking. He holds his hands to his chest. He wraps them around the teapot. He stands on the threshold of his mother’s room. Ma, he wants to say, my hands will not stop shaking. Will you say a prayer and blow on them? Will you twine your fingers through mine and bind them to yours? But he stops. He isn’t a child any more; he’s a man, a soldier back from the war. He asks himself if he can be right again, if he can be good. After Piya, after the killing.

This is how the war made its way into their house. Sohail, spilling water from his glass, flicking dal over the side of his plate. A vanishing woman. A shake of the hand. A silence between siblings.

He had killed an innocent man. The man was not an enemy, not a soldier. Just someone who had let the wrong word come out of his mouth. There is only one way to be good now. The Book has told him he is good, that it is in his nature to be good. The words have been reclaimed and he swells up with love for the Book. Weeks after Piya has disappeared — leaving only the faint trace of her scent, which he tries to pick up in the kitchen where she had squatted, or the rectangle on the floor where she had spread her sleeping mat — he finds himself climbing the ladder up to the roof and sitting cross-legged under the open sun. It is May, a windless, rainless month, heat tearing through the sky. He sits and reads the words. His mother has given him the Book and he reads the words, refusing to see his friends or celebrate the victory. Dimly, he hears them: time to go back to the university; stop worrying your mother, na, and be happy, yaar, war is over. Time to sell-e-brate.

Most of all he is afraid to talk. Maya is always regarding him hungrily, eager for small scraps of detail. Yesterday he told her about the food at the guerrilla camp, how it had danced on his tongue though it was only a few spoonfuls of rice and dal. Freedom food. She devoured the story, begged him for more. How greedy she is. He wants her to be quiet so she can hear the roar in his head, thinking that if she could hear that roar, the roar of uncertainty and the roar of death, she might understand. But she refuses to be quiet for long enough. She searches his face and then she launches into her latest story, telling him who has returned from the war, who has lost a son, a brother. Worse things have happened to other people.

I have committed murder. If he were to tell his sister about the war, this is what he would have to tell her. She wants stories of heroism. She wants him to tell her that he planted bombs under country bridges and that he got away just before the flame hit the powder, and that the felled bridge cut off the army, and the people of north Tangail or Kushtia or Bogra were saved.

But he has no story of this kind. She grows angrier and angrier at his silence, and even after his mother has given in to the mornings on the roof, Maya continues to follow him with her eyes, reproach him with a stony silence. Silence for silence. When he asks her about her work at the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, she snaps, what, you don’t think women are victims of the war too?

He thinks of all the people who have died — the enemy combatants, and the people he didn’t save, and his friend Aref, and all the boys who went to war and were killed. Every day he thinks of them. How very selfish of her to want a piece of that.

Ammoo is not greedy, but she has been worried about him, climbs halfway up the ladder and calls out, it’s very hot, Sohail, won’t you come down and have something to drink?

On the roof he has assembled a number of things. There is a comb that used to belong to Piya, a shirt that belonged to his friend Aref, killed last summer by the army. And a photograph of his father, taken in front of the Vauxhall. Not handsome — his father had not been handsome — but looking confidently ahead, living the life that was intended for him. And Ammoo’s Book.

There has come to you from God a light and a Book most lucid.

With it, God guides him who conforms to his good pleasure to the paths of tranquillity;

He shall lead them from the fields of darkness to the light, by his leave,

And he shall guide them to a straight path.

The book believes he is good. He begins to read.

He comes to Maya one day and tries to tell her. He says it is the greatest thing that has ever happened to him. He has found something, something that explains everything. Does she want to know what it is? Isn’t she curious? He is pale and the skin is stretched tight over his face, and she sees that death hovers inside him, the death to which he had come so close in the war, he and death in a tight corridor. Now it is like a bruise that won’t heal, and he is pressing his face close to hers, and she sees that whatever it is that he is telling her about is what stops the bruise from spreading from his cheek to his bones and from his bones to his blood. It is a dam, like the one they are building in Rangamati that will hold its water like a giant cupped hand and power the fields; it holds him together, it lights him up.

At that moment Maya makes a decision, one that she will come to regret many times in the years that follow. She sees in his bright, water-lined eyes that he is telling the truth. She sees that he fell into the abyss and that this Book is what brought him to the surface and allowed him to breathe. She sees too, in herself, the need for such a rescue, such a buoy, such a truth. But because it has suddenly become clear to her that religion, its open fragrance and cloudless stretches of infinity, may in fact be what he is claiming it is, an essential human need, hers as much as his, and because she feels the twinge of his yearning, turning like a leaf in her heart, she decides, at that moment, that it cannot be. She will not become one of those people who buckle under the force of a great event and allow it to change the metre of who they are.

And neither will Sohail. She will not let him. She believes — oh, how foolish she is, how arrogant — she believes she has a say. She believes she can do something to prevent it. She believes her will is greater than the leaf in her heart and the leaf in her brother’s heart.

He approaches her. ‘I’ve been praying.’

‘For what?’ She is reading the Observer.

‘Not for anything. Just praying.’

‘Please, Bhaiya,’ she says, ‘don’t start talking religious mumbo-jumbo, we won’t recognise you any more.’ She turns her attention away, folding her newspaper to the classified ads.

‘But that is what prayer is. It is the abandonment of all other thoughts, all other pursuits.’

She looks at him then, and he sees her searching for the joke.

‘I’m serious,’ he says, answering the question she is too stunned to ask. He pauses, levelling his thoughts before replying. Outside, a man is shouting on the street and banging on what sounds like a cooking pot. ‘Allah, Allah, Allah. Give to the poor, give to the poor.’

‘It doesn’t matter what brings us to God; it only matters that it does.’

‘Are you quoting from some mullah now?’

‘No, Maya, I am telling the truth.’

‘So this has nothing to do with Piya, with the war. Did something else happen? Did you do something?’

She is close, too close. ‘I told you, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Of course it matters. How can you accept the cure without considering the disease?’

‘Is it your opinion that I am ill?’

The beggar’s voice grows louder. ‘God forgives you,’ he cries. ‘God forgives you.’

The window behind Maya is illuminated with the gold tones of morning. The light spills across her back, and, overflowing, falls into his eyes. He can see little of her face, only the orb of her hair.

‘I’ve been reading about it,’ she says; ‘it’s called shell shock.’

A splinter of anger enters his voice when he replies. ‘You’re not listening to me. I’m not ill. Maybe, yes, after the war, it is always difficult.’

‘So it has just come out of that, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘But even if one thing has led to another, I can only be grateful.’

Now it is her turn to be angry. ‘You remember, don’t you, what they did to us in the name of God?’

‘Just because it was usurped for evil ends doesn’t make it a bad thing. That is the mistake I made.’

‘Mistake? You think it was all a mistake?’

He shifts his gaze away from her, unsure how to reply. It’s not that he wishes there hadn’t been a war, or that he hadn’t joined the fighting. But his life wasn’t for that, it was for something else. How can he explain this to her? That there was a reason for his living while so many others had died. He longs for her to know, to know something of what it was like, longs for her to have a heart as heavy as his, a heart that needs to wrap itself around a certainty, a path.

Maya is gulping down her tea, and making to leave the table. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she says, ‘after everything, you do this.’

Rehana comes upon them at this very moment, carrying a bowl of semolina halwa she has reheated on the stove. She sees Sohail pointing to the window behind Maya.

‘There’s someone there,’ he says.

They look. The man is bare-chested and unadorned except for his long and elaborately knotted hair, which hangs down past his shoulders. He taps on the window. ‘God forgives you,’ he says. ‘God is merciful.’

They all stare at each other for a moment, and then Maya says, ‘What does your book tell you to do about this man, Bhaiya?’

Sohail fishes in his pockets and pulls out a folded note. The man cups his hands as the window is opened and the note slips through.

‘That’s it? That’s all you’re doing? Don’t you want to know how that man came to be here?’

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

‘I’m not the one pretending to be holy.’

Sohail’s fist comes down on the table. ‘There’s nothing holy about me — nothing. Only I have the humility to admit it. There is something greater.’

‘But look what your greater being has brought us. War, and a beggar tapping at our window.’

‘Maya,’ Rehana says, raising her voice, ‘that’s enough.’

The man raises his hand to his forehead, then turns away, slipping through the opening in the gate. Sohail darts out of the room. They hear his door slamming shut.

Maya turns to her mother. ‘He’s going to turn your house into a mosque, didn’t you hear?’

‘Why, child, why do you have to be so intolerant?’ She puts her face close to her daughter’s and whispers, tender, ‘He’s going to pray, he’s going to go to the mosque on Fridays. Don’t be so frightened of it. It’s only religion.’

Rehana was right — at first. Sohail was almost back to his old self, smiling at meals, whistling under his breath. He started to attend classes at the university, though he didn’t linger on campus or go to any of the student-union meetings. He was occasionally seen with his friends, playing cricket at Abahani Field, and in that second summer after the war, when the constitution was written and the cyclone ebbing away, Rehana told Maya it was only a slight change in Sohail, that the mother had been right about her son. He didn’t even grow a beard.

There were ripples of darker things. They heard that the Hussain boy, a few years younger than Sohail, had drowned himself. And the neighbour’s son Shahabuddin had beaten his pregnant wife because he believed she was carrying a demon child.

But most of the boys and girls were as serious and obedient as they had ever been. They attended their classes; they married and bore children and warmed milk for their parents every evening. They put their memories away as best as they could, and they wiped the traces of blood from their hands and from the hems of their saris. And Rehana rested easy, sure that her son wouldn’t take his interest too far. After all, she was the one who had given him the Book.

1984 August

Cancer. Every time Dr Sattar said the word his voice dipped, until he started calling it ‘the disease’ and then, occasionally, ‘the C’. The operation was only the beginning. Rehana would need chemotherapy, powerful poisons that would kill the cancer. But they might kill her too. It was an uncertain science, the treatment often worse than the disease. Maya listened and the words went straight to her blood. She had never taken seriously the possibility that she might someday have to live without her mother. Death was something that had already happened to her; her father had died before she even knew that death was longer than sleep; later, death happened to the people she treated; she held her hand up against it every day, against dysentery and malaria and snakebites. Death had even skirted past Nazia, leaving scars on her legs but allowing her to live. She had never imagined, never seriously, that death would take something from her again.

That year the rain was everywhere. The gutters overflowed in Dhaka, and the rivers burst their banks, the Padma, the Jamuna, swallowing houses and farm animals and drowning the young rice. Maya brought Ammoo back from the hospital and paced the verandah. At night she cried into the crook of her arm. She found Sufia in her bedroom once, holding up the kerosene lamp and nodding, nodding.

The telephone girl brought Maya a message. Sister Khadija was going to hold a special Milaad for Ammoo. The upstairs women would recite, between them, the entire Qur’an and direct their blessings to Ammoo’s recovery. Would she like to come? The picture in her mind was serene, the smell of bodies mingling with the cinder waft of attar. She found herself saying yes.

The women were casually laid out, in clumps of three or four. Their heads were covered, but their hands and feet, normally gloved and socked, were visible, and busy: they carried plates of food into the room, distributed cushions, stepped purposefully around each other. Khadija embraced her warmly.

‘Sister,’ she said. ‘Please, sit down, sit here.’ The floor was cleared, a fresh cloth placed under her feet. Maya looked around and saw many faces turned towards her. ‘This is the Huzoor’s sister, Maya.’

A chorus of salaams travelled through the room. ‘Everyone knows who you are. Huzoor has spoken of you.’

A young woman approached, raven-haired, and smiled dazzlingly at Maya. The telephone girl. ‘Maya, this is Rokeya.’ Rokeya salaamed. ‘You’re a doctor?’ she said.

‘Yes, I trained in surgery.’

‘Under Sattar sir?’

‘Yes, he was my supervisor. You know him?’

‘I trained at Dhaka Medical.’

‘Really — what batch?’

‘’83.’

So she had finished her training only last year. What a waste, Maya thought; now she was waiting for her husband, probably some wrinkled old thing, to call every afternoon, laying out blankets for me and calling my brother Huzoor.

‘Let me make you a cup of tea,’ Rokeya offered, adjusting her scarf. ‘How do you take it?’

She darted away and Khadija motioned again for Maya to sit down. Then she turned to the other women and said, ‘Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem, it is time.’

Each of them pulled out a tasbi and began to recite the Kalma under her breath. The beads of stone and wood passed through their palms as they pulled the tasbi across with their thumbs. Empty bowls were passed around, and in the four corners of the room were small piles of dried beans. As soon as someone finished a cycle on her tasbi, she put a chickpea into the bowl in front of her.

Khadija sat down heavily and opened her Qur’an. She began to recite.

*

On the second day Rokeya told her that Sohail was going to make a rare appearance at the taleem. A personal sermon. Would she like to come?

When she arrived, it was already quiet, and the women were rearranging themselves around her, turning to the back of the room. They worked silently, clearing plates and lifting sheets from the floor, shaking them out, pointing, you sit there, let Sister Zayna have a cushion.

It was just like the funeral. A curtain was pulled across the room, dividing it in half. The women fitted themselves into what had become the back of the room. On the other side, footsteps, lowered voices, the sound of men filing in. Men, clearing their throats. On the women’s side, the scarves were pulled tighter, as though the very sound of their brothers on the other side warranted an extra dose of vigilance.

From beyond the partition, her own brother began to speak.

‘My brothers and sisters, Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem. I speak of the prophet Abraham, may peace and blessings be upon him. The story of Abraham is an old and sacred one. Our prophet and brother Abraham, peace be upon him, was a man of letters. He translated the ancient texts into Hebrew; he was fluent in the language of the Greeks and the Assyrians. In his great learning, he yearned also to know the secrets of human feeling, the joys and pleasures — not of the flesh, but of the heart and the mind. Thus, when he picked up his son Isaac, he felt the swell of love rise in his breast like the pull of the moon. He recorded it in himself; it was a matter of learning. And when the myths of the ancients caused Abraham to cry, with pity or fury at their folly, this too he recorded as a piece of sacred knowledge, for the ability to empathise is a purely human trait, given to us by the Almighty.

‘All along, Abraham was a seeker of knowledge. But his knowledge was woven to the will of God. When his followers began to worship idols of clay, he told God and God struck them down. His quest for knowledge was second only to his deference to the will of God. So when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham could not rebuff God. Abraham was God’s servant, and it was not in his nature or his will to say no; but he was motivated by more than his duty. He sought to know, in himself, the true nature of his faith, and whether this faith, which had become so beloved to him, could withstand the pull of his devotion to his son. He leaned over his son, the knife heavy in his hands. And God gave him a ram instead of Isaac.

‘We come to know God by giving our will to him. By accepting that He knows better than we do, and that surrender is the only path to true faith. The very best of our humanness is in our ability to recognise the truth of the Almighty, the truth that is beyond us.’

She heard the pointed tone of his voice. He was telling her something. He was telling her that she had not learned to be humble; that she had put her will before that of God’s. And was she being punished, was that it?

Maya was reminded of a story she had heard during the war. A man had been shot with a machine gun, three bullets entering his back. The field doctors had operated (no anaesthetic, only a rag between his teeth) and removed two bullets, missing the third entry wound. A fragment of the bullet had entered his bloodstream and circulated within him, travelling through arteries like a tourist, until it had finally lodged in his heart, killing him instantly.

Medically, she knew the story could not be true. But she allowed herself to imagine it was this way with her and Sohail. They had been injured, perhaps by the death of their father, or by the thin whisper of poverty that hung on their backs throughout their childhood. In Maya, the pointed black thing travelled freely, now touching her liver, now her limbs, now her stomach. She would awake to it, and unleash some of its poison on whoever happened to be nearest. Ammoo had received the worst of it; Sohail too.

But Sohail’s shrapnel had lodged in his flesh, percolating through him ever so slowly, until, like the rest of them, he was dying on his feet, only faster, and the knowledge of this speed, that earthy scent of the grave, was what had made him, from that early age, a creature half-spirit, half-man. It was why he commanded an audience whenever he spoke, on the march or in the pulpit, why those in his orbit scrambled for a closer look, a touch. He had been born for prophesy, already, from those early moments, the master of himself. But what he was saying to her now was that the source of his power was not in command but in surrender. She too should now accept her smallness, her human limitations. And if she did not, the consequences would be unhappy.

Afterwards, the men cleared out, the curtain was drawn open, and the women began to make their preparations for the evening meal. Sohail’s sermon nagged at Maya. She left the meeting room and found Khadija squatting over a small gas burner in the kitchen.

‘Were you pleased by the bayaan?’ she asked. Even without the cadence of recitation, Khadija’s speech was formal.

Maya didn’t know how to reply. Pleased was not how she would have put it.

‘The boy,’ she began, ‘my nephew.’

‘You are referring to Huzoor’s son?’

‘Yes, Zaid. I’ve been teaching him a few things, lessons, but with Ammoo’s illness, I don’t have as much time. I would like to enrol him in school.’

Khadija appeared to consider this for a moment. She stirred a handful of chillies into the pot of dal.

‘He’s troubled,’ Maya continued.

‘You are right,’ she said, taking her by surprise. ‘I will not deny it. Your brother agrees.’

‘So you know.’

‘We were discussing it yesterday, with Haji Mudasser.’

Maya knew who Haji Mudasser was. The people upstairs consulted him on every matter, no matter how small. They lowered their heads in front of him and took his blessing on their heads. They did everything he said.

‘Haji Mudasser has told us that it is our duty to ensure the boy’s proper upbringing. We understand that we have failed at this.’

Khadija stretched out her hand, thick and solid, and wrapped her fingers around Maya’s wrist. ‘We have resolved to do better. Amra neyot korechi.’ They had made a promise, under the watchful eyes of the Almighty.

Khadija appeared unwilling to say more. Maya allowed herself a thin thread of hope.

‘Will you join us? The Maghreb Azaan will begin in a few minutes.’

‘I have to get back. Ammoo needs me.’

‘We pray for her every day. The Huzoor is a devoted son.’

‘Thank you,’ Maya said, suddenly moved by this statement.

‘Have faith, Sister Maya,’ Khadija said. ‘The boy will be looked after, and your mother will soon recover.’ Khadija continued to grasp her hand. Maya had a flash, a presentiment, that Khadija would be her sister, the fellow spirit she had always searched for. Khadija put her hand on Maya’s forehead, which she took as a sign that it was time for her to leave.

Maya walked back downstairs, her forehead hot from the imprint of Khadija’s hand. Surprised at how reluctant she had been to leave her.

On the third day, Maya went upstairs without an invitation. She had just spooned a bit of broth into her mother, checked her stitches and watched as she fell asleep. The women were sitting in long rows along the wall, heads bent over plates. Rokeya passed along the rows, ladling rice. ‘Maya Apa,’ she said, ‘please, eat with us.’ Khadija nodded to her, smiling. Maya liked their lack of surprise at seeing her. A new jamaat had arrived from South Africa. Black and white women fingered tasbis and joined in the prayers. When the recitation began, her eyes filled with tears.

She found herself leaning into Khadija’s arms. ‘Ammoo, will she be all right?’

Khadija caressed the top of her head with a light, tender touch. ‘Of course, God willing, she will remain with us.’ She braced herself, worried Khadija was about to feed her some story about the importance of accepting death as God’s will. But Khadija remained silent, moving her hand now to Maya’s forehead, where she kept it like a poultice, until Maya closed her eyes and began to believe her.

1973 March

After Piya disappeared and Sohail was spending more and more time on the roof with his book, he was invited to meet Sheikh Mujib. The Father of the Nation was now the prime minister, and he wanted to see the faces of the boys who had delivered the country. Maya was thrilled. She had an idea that the sight of the great man, fatherly and expectant, would give Sohail a reason to snap back into his old life. When the invitation arrived, it included all of them — Sohail, Rehana and Maya.

On the morning of their appointment Sohail turned up at breakfast wearing a kurta-pyjama and a Mujib coat, sleeveless and with a high collar. It was a hot day, too hot for a coat, but he couldn’t be persuaded to take it off, not even while they ate. He fanned himself with a copy of the Bangladesh Observer. Then he drank three glasses of milk. Maya had spent the entire morning trying to decide what to wear. She practised greeting Bangabandhu in front of the bathroom mirror, putting on her widest, most grateful smile.

Rehana was nervous too. She looked radiant, if a bit severe, in a white cotton sari and a pair of thin silver bangles. She served them burnt toast, which Sohail devoured without even scraping off the charred bits. Then she disappeared into the bedroom and locked the door. Maya knocked a few times — they were going to be late — then went around the back and through the kitchen. She found Ammoo using her dressing table as a writing surface, scribbling something with her head bent so close to the paper it was as if she were chasing the words with her eyes.

She ignored her when Maya announced the time. Maya leaned over and caught a snatch of writing.

Respected sir

Most gracious sir

Dear Father

Bangabandhu, I know you are a man of compassion

‘I’m getting ready,’ Ammoo said, putting her things into a small leather handbag.

‘What’s that you’re writing?’

‘He’s a great man,’ she said, opening a drawer and retrieving a tube of lipstick.

‘Then what’s this?’

‘Nothing.’ She twisted open the lipstick and touched the tip with her finger. ‘I’m very honoured to be meeting him.’

Maya couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her mother wearing lipstick. Ammoo appeared unsure of what to do with it, how to apply it now that she had daubed her finger. Her hand hovered above her face for a moment, then landed on her top lip. She stabbed at this lip for several moments, then scrutinised herself in the mirror.

‘Are you ill?’ Maya asked, wondering if, after all, she didn’t look a bit pale.

Ammoo turned to examine her, as if noticing her for the first time. ‘You need to comb your hair,’ she said.

‘Fine,’ she said, grabbing her brush from the dressing table. ‘You are the one who kept telling Sohail he should meet Bangabandhu.’

Ammoo was facing the mirror again, wiping away at her lipstick with a handkerchief. ‘You never told me what you were doing for the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre,’ she began.

‘As in?’ Maya knew what she was getting at; she was going to ask her about the operations. She didn’t want to talk about it; she didn’t even want to think about it. How had Ammoo known? The clinics were not at the centre itself, and, though they had not been explicitly ordered to keep their activities a secret, none of the doctors or nurses ever spoke about it.

‘You remember Piya?’

Maya nodded. Of course she remembered Piya. ‘She was pregnant.’

‘Yes, I knew.’

‘You knew?’ Ammoo paused for a moment, taking this in. ‘She wanted — she wanted to get rid of it. She was afraid of the operation, she wasn’t sure. She held my arm like this—’

Ammoo turned to Maya and gripped her elbow, her fingers hot, her lips smudged and red. ‘And she said, please, I don’t want to. And you know, a few days later, she was gone. She disappeared. Why do you think she left?’

‘Maybe she changed her mind.’

Ammoo tightened her grip on Maya’s arm, and they looked at each other. Maya didn’t want to tell her what had happened the night before Piya left. ‘Maybe it was better’, she said, ‘for everyone.’

‘Don’t you see?’ Ammoo’s voice was cracked, her eyes swimming. ‘They forced her. And she’s not the only one. Some of the girls don’t want to. But they’re ashamed, they’re told they’re carrying the seed of those soldiers.’

Bangabandhu had promised to take care of the women; he had even given them a name — Birangona, heroines — and asked their husbands and fathers to welcome them home, as they would their sons. But the children, he had said he didn’t want the children of war. Maya told herself this every day, every day while she put the mask over their faces and told them to count backwards from 100. ‘Isn’t it better, Ma, to erase all traces of what happened to them? That way they can start to forget.’

‘But their children, Maya, their children.’ Rehana passed the back of her hand over her eyes and turned away from her. Thick-throated, she said, ‘You’re not a mother, you won’t understand.’ She crumpled the letter and tossed it aside. ‘Let’s go, we’re going to be late.’

Maya was worried Ammoo would say something to Bangabandhu, about the war babies, but she needn’t have worried; Ammoo was quiet and polite and repeated what an honour it was to meet him. Only she could tell that Ammoo was trying to convince herself, that the thing did not sit right with her, and that, even as she allowed him to hold her hands between his, she resisted him, doubted his sincerity.

Maya offered no such resistance. Bangabandhu was the closest thing to a deity she had ever known, and to have him standing before her, touching her head as she bent down to take the dust of his feet, was almost too much. She thought she might vomit, and gulped down the bottle of Fanta brought in on a trolley by the servant.

He was surrounded by his family — she glimpsed his daughter, Hasina, and Sheikh Moni, his nephew. Mrs Mujib was there too, and although the room was empty when they first entered, it was soon crowded with people, touching Bangabandhu’s feet and crying with the sheer joy of it.

He lit his pipe and gave it a few short, shallow breaths.

Sohail sat transfixed, mirroring what Maya imagined was her own fascination.

‘You are responsible for the power-plant blast?’

‘Ji, sir,’ Sohail said, nodding.

‘Very audacious of you, my son.’

‘Risk was great, sir, but we were determined.’ Sohail’s head was bent, but she saw the curve of his mouth. He was smiling. She hadn’t seen him smile like that in months.

‘Shahbash,’ Bangabandhu said. ‘Come here, let’s take a photo. Come, come.’

Sohail had brought his Leica, but a photographer was already stationed, and they arranged themselves on either side of Bangabandhu. Maya put on the face she thought would be most appropriate for the photograph: a serious, determined young citizen, grateful to be in the presence of this man.

As they gathered around him for the photo, Bangabandhu turned to her and said, ‘And you, my dear, how did you pass those nine months?’

Maya looked at Ammoo, and she nodded. ‘I worked. I was in Theatre Road, sir. It was my honour to serve the government in exile.’

‘Theatre Road! Your mother let you go to Calcutta? Well, you are a brave girl.’

‘It was wonderful, sir, so many of us, working together.’

He regarded her quietly, gnawing on his pipe. ‘I would have liked to see that, ma. I would have liked that very much.’

Maya wondered if Bangabandhu had felt as she had — left out, stuck somewhere safe and unremarkable — when the fighting broke out and she couldn’t enlist in the army. He had been in prison the whole time. He hadn’t seen a day of fighting or listened to a single broadcast. She hoped he knew that he was there without being there, because they had gone to sleep every night with his name on their lips and woken every morning to his portrait, cut out of newspapers, on their walls, his voice on the radio. It didn’t matter to anyone that he had been in jail and not on the front lines of the battle. Though perhaps it mattered to him.

She wanted to tell him all of this, but a group of new visitors came to the door, and Bangabandhu’s attention was diverted. By now she really needed the toilet, but she told herself she should concentrate on this moment, because she was going to always remember it, and she tried to fix Bangabandhu’s face in her mind so she would be able to recall what he was wearing, and the weight of his hand on her head.

She looked across the room and saw Sohail sitting very straight with his knees in his hands. He rose to get up, but Bangabandhu was telling Ammoo about the other women like herself who had harboured freedom fighters in their homes, and asking if she had known any of them. Maya heard him asking what had happened to her husband, and when Ammoo told him, she saw Bangabandhu hold her two hands between his two hands again and tell her he was very sorry, and that she was very brave to raise her children without a father.

Finally, they gathered around the doorway.

‘There’s a lot of work to be done, my children,’ Bangabandhu said. ‘I hope I can trust you.’

‘Ji, sir.’ Sohail bent to touch his feet again, but Bangabandhu held him by the shoulders and lifted him up until they were eye to eye, then he embraced Sohail, three times, as though they were father and son. He walked them the entire way to the gate, and afterwards all they could talk about was how warm, how genial and how like any other person he had been.

Even Ammoo could not help but praise him, remarking on how, no matter how many people were in his presence, he fixed his eyes on you as if he were telling you a deep secret, as if you were conspiring with him on something, something lasting and great.

1984 September

Maya was astonished by the number of people who came through the door. Mrs Rahman arrived first, fluffed up Rehana’s pillows and stuffed the fridge with chicken stew. She was followed by a group of women from the Ladies’ Club, all promising to postpone their annual Rummy tournament until Rehana returned. The fish-hawker came, and the butcher she had known for over twenty years, bearing an enormous mutton bone and promising the soup would cure whatever had made her ill. Flowers arrived from the principal of Maya’s junior school, and from the Dhanmondi Society. Sufia’s sister and her husband came, dressed in formal clothes and bearing a prayer written by their local pir on a tiny piece of paper. Even the German tenant came, clutching a spray of roses. He stayed only a minute, but long enough for Maya to appraise him and find him sorely disappointing. Bald, so tall he had to duck to get through the door and covered in a fine coating of orange hair, he smiled his way through the visit, then passed Rehana an envelope labelled SEPTEMBER 1984 RENT.

After another morning with Khadija and the upstairs women, Maya found Joy sitting at Ammoo’s bedside, telling her a story about his new business venture with Chottu. She was laughing, holding her stomach in her hands.

‘Ma, be careful, your stitches have barely healed.’ She shot Joy an irritated look.

Joy continued to entertain Rehana. He looked breezy, as though he had just stepped out of the bath, with his neat sandalled feet, his closely cropped hair. Slowly, he finished his story, leaning close to Ammoo’s ear. Then he took his leave, assuring her she would be out of bed in no time, ready to fry her famous parathas.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Maya said politely, leading him to the living room. She wanted to say something about the last time they’d met, the awkward goodbye.

‘Your mother said you’ve been visiting the upstairs.’

‘Sohail came to the hospital. He sat with her, I think she really liked that. So I wanted to thank him.’

‘How did you find it?’

‘It’s another world.’

‘You say that as if it’s not so bad.’

‘It’s different. Totally unlike anything else.’ She tried to turn it into words, the feeling of being among those women. Joy’s foot had touched something under the sofa, and now he was reaching underneath, disturbing the dust.

‘I think I know what this is,’ he said.

Maya knew too. And he pulled it out, a piece of wreckage. A relic.

‘Still has all its strings,’ he said. Maya found a wet rag in the kitchen, and they rubbed it down together, watching as the colour of the wood emerged, honey-toned.

‘Does it play?’ she asked.

‘Probably needs to be tuned. I can try, I’m not very good. It was always my brother.’

‘Mine too,’ she said.

It isn’t fair, she felt him thinking, at least her brother is still alive. What he would give to have his brother back. She imagined him wanting his brother under any circumstances, so long as he were here, even if he shunned his old life and behaved like a stranger. A world of difference, she imagined him thinking, between the living and the dead; not so different, she countered in her mind. There’s a reason for phrases such as you’re dead to me, which she had used against Sohail more than once.

Joy began to fiddle with the guitar strings, turning knobs on the long neck of the instrument. ‘I think I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Try it now.’

She ran her thumb down the strings. ‘Sounds nice,’ she said.

‘Like old times.’

‘What was that song you used to sing, that Spanish song?’

‘We never sang a song in Spanish.’

‘You did, something with a very long name.’

‘Oh!’ He slapped his knee. ‘You mean “Guantanamera”.’

‘I always loved that song.’

‘Sohail used to sing it. He said it was a revolutionary song, but when I was in New York I had a Mexican friend who told me the words. It’s just like every other song.’

‘Oh?’

‘About some poor chap who wants to fall in love.’

‘You have something against love?’

He leaned back and crossed his legs. ‘I’m only a minor opponent. Not like you.’

She plucked at the strings. ‘You know nothing, my friend. I’m just like any other girl.’ She believed it herself, at that moment. That she was as tender as all the others, as hopeful. He began to strum the guitar.

‘Let me show you the chords,’ Joy said. He took hold of her fingers and placed them on the strings. ‘You have to press harder than that.’

Zaid came into the room. ‘Here’s my little tongue-twister,’ Maya said. ‘Zaid, come and say hello to uncle Joy.’

Joy extended his hand, and when Zaid stepped forward to shake it, he moved it quickly to his forehead. ‘As-Salaam Alaikum. Tricked you!’

Zaid collapsed into giggles.

‘This one knows every language on the planet. Don’t you, Zaid? Tell Uncle Joy something in Spanish.’

Zaid rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Oh-kay,’ he said, enunciating very slowly. ‘Akee yeygo la paz.’

‘That’s very good,’ Joy said. ‘Even I know what that means.’

‘Did he really say something?’ Maya whispered. ‘I always think he’s pulling my leg.’

Joy picked up the deck of cards on the table and began to shuffle. ‘Let me show you something,’ he said.

‘We can’t play cards,’ Maya interjected; ‘he’s not allowed.’

Joy cast a sideways glance at her. ‘It’s not a game,’ he said, ‘it’s magic.’ Nervous, she let him play his trick. Then Zaid climbed into Joy’s lap and whispered something in his ear, and then he danced out of the room, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta.

*

Rehana held her hair in her hands.

‘Oh, Ma.’ Maya took it from her, the tuft like a tiny furred animal. The place where it had been shone like a fragment of metal at the bottom of the sea.

She was in the bath when it happened. There was more, she said, in the towel.

‘Ma,’ Maya said, ‘let’s shave it.’

‘No, not yet.’ Her voice was small and tired. ‘Please, no.’ She lay her head back on the pillow, turned her face away so Maya could no longer see her crying. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, blowing her nose, ‘we discussed this with the doctor.’

Maya was still holding her fallen tuft of hair. ‘Throw it,’ she said. ‘Burn it.’

She tossed it to the floor. Sufia picked it up and disappeared into the kitchen.

Rokeya was on a patch of concrete, sitting with her face to the sun. ‘Get out of the glare,’ Maya said, ‘you’ll get burned.’ It must have been one of the hottest days of the year. Rokeya salaamed, her voice thready, and Maya saw that her lips were dry, hair feathering out from under her scarf.

‘How is your mother?’ she asked.

‘She is managing,’ Maya said.

Rokeya nodded, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes. She placed both hands on her stomach in a gesture Maya recognised immediately.

‘Are you pregnant?’ Maya asked, bending to get a closer look at her.

Rokeya smiled weakly. ‘How did you know?’

Khadija parted the curtain and stepped outside. She cast a light glance at Rokeya and handed her a glass of water. ‘Go inside now,’ she said. Rokeya grabbed the water and swallowed it quickly, holding the glass with both hands and gulping hard.

‘We must do another taleem for your mother,’ Khadija said. She turned to Rokeya again. ‘Tell the sisters to make the arrangements.’

Inside, the air had stopped in its tracks. With the curtains drawn tightly, and the windows shut, it was unbearably hot. Only Khadija looked comfortable, the shine of sweat on her forehead giving her a polished glaze as she took her place at the front of the room. She opened the Book and began to read quietly to herself. The other women, who had been whispering and fanning themselves, straightened and hushed one another. Rokeya motioned for Maya to sit beside her.

The sun was at its full thrust now, as Maya stared down at her hands, sweating steadily. Here, in this room, was the only place she could believe, really believe, that her mother would live. Everywhere else the possibility of her absence had taken over: every meal Maya ate that wasn’t cooked by her, the rooms in which she read and bathed and dressed, the garden, which she had diligently watered but could not save from its yellowish cast.

That was why, day after day, she found herself sitting at Khadija’s feet. She did not read from the Qur’an or join in the prayers. She just sat cross-legged with her hands in her lap and her legs slowly falling asleep, for as long as it took for the panic to pass.

When most of her hair had gone, Rehana finally asked Maya to shear off the rest. She propped herself up on the bed, sharp shoulders blading out of her nightdress, the skin on her neck grey and tired. Sufia stood crying quietly as Maya draped her mother with a towel.

She had known this day would come; she had rehearsed it. She would remain calm, her hand steady on the instrument. She began with the scissors. Ammoo had lost her hair in patches: in some places it was gone completely; in others it was thick and clung strongly to her scalp. She cut these sections close, lingering at the weight of them, long ribboning strands, before dropping them on the floor. Sufia followed her movements with a broom. Rehana herself was dry-eyed, holding a newspaper in front of her as if it were any other morning and she were waiting for her eggs. She had obviously rehearsed it too.

Maya replaced the scissors with a blade, dipping it into a bowl of warm soapy water, and lightly, delicately, painting across her mother’s head. Now Ammoo was emerging under her hand, shiny, perfectly round. The whole planet of her.

‘I used to watch my father’, Rehana said, holding the newspaper high, ‘being shaved by his barber. He always looked so relaxed.’

‘How does it feel?’

‘Nice. A bit ticklish.’

Soon there was very little soap left. Maya rubbed her mother’s head with a thin towel. ‘I have something for you,’ she said. She went to her room and came back with a bandana she had acquired a few days before at a roadside stall. It was red and white, and fitted neatly around her mother’s forehead.

‘You look like a gypsy,’ she said. ‘Or a pirate.’

‘Give me an eye patch and I’ll rob you blind.’ They laughed.

In the evening, Mrs Rahman and Mrs Akram came to play cards with Rehana. Maya agreed to make up their fourth so they could play poker. No one mentioned Rehana’s hair, except to remark that perhaps red was her lucky colour, because she won twice, with a pair of aces and a straight flush.

*

When Ramzaan, the fasting month, began, Rehana insisted that Maya do all the shopping in preparation for Eid. ‘It’s the first year I haven’t been able to keep the fast,’ Rehana said, her head light on the pillow. ‘So the least you can do is wear something nice for Eid.’

Ammoo had given strict instructions. How many yards of cloth to buy for her own salwaar-kameez. Blouse, petticoat and sari for Sufia. Gifts for Mrs Rahman and Mrs Akram. Something for Sohail. Now Maya was standing in front of a fabric counter with Zaid, trying to find cloth for Sufia’s blouse.

The shopkeepers, young men with wispy moustaches, hurried back and forth from the counters to the fabrics behind them. The bolts of cloth, arranged along the wall like books on a shelf, contained every shade of colour imaginable. They began the process of finding matching fabric for the blouse by holding up the sari Maya had bought to the palette of colours that most resembled it. Then they moved along this palette, light to dark, until she nodded somewhere along the spectrum. Maya chose a navy-blue piece for Sufia.

It was time to make their way to the tailoring section of the market. Zaid pulled hard on her wrist, jumping over the cracks that rivered through the cement.

‘Do you remember what we learned yesterday,’ she asked him, ‘the numbers? Let’s see if you can count the steps from here to the tailor’s shop.’

His eyes were everywhere, taking in the brightly painted hoardings, the women in their shopping clothes, the dogs biting at fleas, the cinema posters, the sharp smell of tamarind pickle. It was a pleasant day, a brief hint of the winter to come, the breeze tickling at their knees, fingertips. Maya couldn’t help but think back to all the Eid celebrations they’d had at the bungalow. The crackle of new clothes, pressed and starched by Ammoo until they smelled of wet rice. Waiting for Sohail to return from the mosque, and breakfast, and then on a rickshaw, visiting the homes of all the people they knew, their lives suddenly full, and finally, as the afternoon peaked, stopping at the graveyard, marking another year of their threesomeness and praying at Abboo’s grave, telling him again how much he was missed.

‘Ek,’ Zaid began hesitantly, ‘dui.’ The cap on his head bobbed up and down. ‘Teen.’ One. Two. Three.

‘Here,’ Maya said, gripped by a sudden tenderness for the boy, ‘hold these.’ She gave him the shopping bags and lifted him into her arms. He was light, a whisper of a child.

‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘Choose something.’

‘For me?’

‘Anything you like. Anything in all of New Market.’

He flashed her a smile, his crooked teeth beautifully white, cleaned, she knew with charcoal and the branch of a cypress tree, because toothbrushes were banned upstairs. He tried to decide what he wanted, looking down at himself, taking in his filthy kurta-pyjama, the crescent-shaped dirt under his fingernails. She thought he might ask for the bicycle he had spoken of at the graveyard, but he surprised her by leaning close and whispering in her ear: ‘Sandal.’

‘Really, you just want sandals? I said you could have anything in all of New Market and you want a pair of sandals?’

He nodded solemnly.

‘Okay, then we have to turn around.’ She set him down and they made their way back through the market until they reached Bata. A thin salesman in a blue shirt spotted Maya before she entered the shop.

‘Heel for you, madam? Coat-shoe?’

‘We’re here for the boy,’ Maya said, leading Zaid inside. Into his ear she whispered, ‘What colour do you want?’

‘Blue,’ he whispered back.

‘We’d like a pair of blue sandals.’

The salesman brought out a pair of blue chappals not unlike the ones Zaid was already wearing, which were worn down to the nub and already a little too small.

Maya slipped the new sandals on his feet. ‘Walk from here to there,’ she said; ‘let’s see if they fit.’

He took a few narrow steps, placing each foot on the shop floor with a careful touch. He shuffled back towards her. His lips were red and his eyes were brimming with tears. She cupped his shoulders. ‘It’s all right. Go on, see if they fit.’ Then she turned him around and pushed him gently away.

‘Can’t you find him something better, a sandal-shoe maybe?’

Zaid charged the length of the shop, then hopped back towards her, whistling.

‘Don’t run,’ the salesman said, putting his finger to his lips. Turning to Maya, he said, ‘How much do you want to spend?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘just show me another style.’

‘How very kind of you,’ he said, shuffling through the shoe-boxes, ‘bringing your servant boy to the market.’

‘He’s not—’

Zaid was holding the shoes in his hands now, threading them through his fingers and clapping them together, seal-like. She looked at him and she looked at the salesman. He was holding out another crude pair of rubber sandals.

‘Let’s go,’ Maya said, pulling the shoes from Zaid’s hands and returning them to the salesman. ‘Give us back the old sandals.’

‘I’ve thrown them away.’

‘Get them back.’

Zaid began to cry. ‘Sush,’ she said, impatient, and suddenly angry at him for being so shabbily dressed. She saw the way he breathed through his mouth, and the caked mucus in the corners of his eyes. He did look like a servant boy, his collars rimmed with grey, short scabs dotting his forearms.

The salesman returned, holding the old shoes by the very tips of his fingers. She grabbed them and nudged Zaid out of the shop. By now the boy had dropped into a hard silence, refusing to hold her hand, walking a few paces behind. She tried to tell him the salesman thought you were a servant boy, the bastard, but he refused to listen, keeping his back to her and swatting her hand away when she tried to touch him. She finished her errand at the tailor’s, haggling unnecessarily about the price of stitching, demanding the clothes be ready in three days even though Eid was still weeks away, and then they left, ignoring each other in the rickshaw. When they reached the bungalow Maya tried again to address him, but Zaid bounded up the stairs two at a time, refusing to look back at her when she called out goodbye.

‘Did you get everything?’ Ammoo asked. Her voice was down to a whisper, chalk in the dust.

‘I did.’

‘I need the toilet. Call Sufia.’

‘She’s washing the pots. I’ll take you.’

Ammoo didn’t have the strength to protest. Maya slid an arm under her shoulders, and with a soft grunt Ammoo sat upright. She held up her hand. ‘Wait,’ she said. She caught her breath. Swung her legs over the side of the bed. Waved to Maya to hold out her arm so she could stand up. Together they shuffled to the hallway.

‘Keep the door unlocked,’ Maya said. She heard the water running, and then a slap against the wall and the sound of retching. ‘Are you all right, Ma? Let me come in.’

She didn’t hear anything. ‘Ma? Let me come in, Ma, please.’ Still nothing. She pushed the door open and found Ammoo lying beside the toilet, her arm over her face. Maya tried to lift her up. Her cheek and chin were coated in vomit. Maya poured a mugful of water over her, and then another. Ammoo lay very still, opening her eyes against the cool splash of water. The sounds of the garden came through the small bathroom window. Maya peeled away Ammoo’s sari and placed it in the washing bucket. Ammoo lifted her head. They inched their way back to the bed. Ammoo mouthed something and Maya came close, trying to understand.

‘Everything,’ she said softly, ‘did you get everything?’

‘Don’t worry, Ma,’ Maya replied. ‘Eid will be just like it always is.’

Shafaat rang, excited. ‘We’ve been getting letters about your column,’ he said. ‘People like it.’

She didn’t care if people liked it. Did they understand it? ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘your message is certainly getting across. We had a letter from the Khatib of Rajshahi Mosque. An upstanding fellow, apparently.’

‘Is it threatening?’ She didn’t care for herself, only for the people of the village, for Nazia.

He told her not to worry. Static through the receiver as he blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth. All right, then. She would keep on writing.

Travelling through the rugged south of the country, I found myself among the Hill tribes, the Garo and the Chakma. Ask yourself, citizen, have you ever met a tribal? Ever sat next to one at school? Ever known anyone who knows anyone who has a tribal for a friend? I thought not.

They know the medicine of the forest. Plants that you soak and paste over a wound. They chew the leaf and smear it over your cut. There is a treasure, they say, in every inch of this land.

In exchange, we raze their villages and let the army rape their women. We take their forests and smoke them out of their villages. This is no kind of freedom.

*

Ammoo grew weaker every day. The change was hardly perceptible, but occasionally Maya would notice something, the angle of her cheekbones, the sleek profile she had acquired. She tried to monitor other things — her eating, her bowel movements, the vomiting from chemotherapy. But Ammoo remained scrupulously private, refusing to talk openly about her disease, always preferring Sufia’s help to hers. She was so careful to obscure the details of the cancer that Maya began to wonder if she should be there at all.

But she couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Her time away had dissolved, like sugar in water, leaving no imprint. She rarely thought of Nazia and whether she might call again. The season of mangoes had come and gone in Rajshahi, and she might have spent a few moments remembering the currents of scent that blew into the village and made everyone’s mouth water, but she didn’t. She thought only of Ammoo, only of banishing the premonition. She was a regular visitor upstairs, sitting on the fringes of their strange world, transfixed by its rituals, the air of calm and certainty that surrounded them. She once asked Rokeya what she thought of President Zia’s death, and Rokeya looked at her blankly as though unaware of which Zia she meant. Was there a Zia in the Qur’an, she saw her wondering. A Zia in their extended family? But instead of experiencing the familiar surge of anger, instead of repeating her usual lines — about citizens who do not deserve the freedom they had fought so hard to gain, about how they deserve their dirty politicians, and about how it was people like her who had brought all of this upon the country — Maya found herself relieved. She was tired of letting everything break her heart, the politicians and crooks and the women whose babies died because they didn’t make it to the hospital on time. This was a world in which it didn’t matter that two of their presidents had been assassinated, and that they were now fully in the throes of irony, with their very own Dictator, their own injustices, their own dirty little war down south. There was just this room, this hot room with its stink of men and its stink of women, and the feeling that she was pulling the end of a rope with all her weight, pulling her mother back as she careened towards death.

Zaid forgave Maya for the incident in the market, and came and went as usual. As before, she fed him and tried to teach him things. Halal things, no card games, no television. She was working on addition and subtraction. His frenzied energy was the only bright thing in the bungalow. He tiptoed into Rehana’s room and sat at her feet, radiating a sort of brisk optimism, no matter that she was sinking into the mattress, that she was as frail as a bird in its nest, a trembling, bruise-breasted robin.

1973 July

Even after Sohail declared his love for the Holy Book, after he started making trips to the mosque and wearing a cap on his head, Maya still thought she could persuade her brother to change his mind. She had known him all her life, and all her life he had been the opposite of a religious man. He had laughed and joked about it, and he had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty. He had seen it with his own eyes, the boys butchered because they were Hindu, the university teachers shot and piled into graves because they weren’t considered Islamic enough. For all these reasons Maya believed Sohail’s conversion was fragile, like the dew that settled between the grasses at the start of the day, gone by the time the afternoon sun vanished into dusk.

She decided to throw him a birthday party. All the old friends would come — Chottu, Saima, Iqbal, the boys from his regiment, their friends from university. The ones who had heard Sohail’s speeches at the student union, the ones who had voted him president of his hall and heard his name ringing in their throats when they joined up.

When the day arrived, she ignored Ammoo’s advice and said little to Sohail about the party, informing him only that it would take place in the afternoon, and that he would be expected to be there. It was his birthday, after all. She worked hard, setting up the Carrom board on the verandah and squeezing lemons by the dozen and frying lentils for a vast pot of khichuri.

The day was bright and hot, not a hint of a monsoon spoiler. Chottu and Saima arrived first, carrying their newborn baby in a katha they had stitched in the colours of the Bangladesh flag. ‘Have you decided on a name?’ she asked, knowing that Chottu’s mother was superstitious, and that she had forbidden them to name the child before her three-month naming ceremony.

‘No,’ Saima said, ‘the dragon still hasn’t given us permission.’

Chottu said, ‘I keep telling this kid how lucky she is to be born in a free country, but all she does is fart and eat, eat and fart.’

Some of the boys in Sohail’s regiment sauntered in, dressed in their army uniforms. Kona, the one whose shoulders filled his uniform most handsomely, gave her a brief salute. ‘Hello, little sister,’ he said. ‘Not so little any more, I see.’

The garden began to fill up. She passed around the lemonade while people scattered to the shady parts of the garden, leaning against the guava tree, lingering on the porch. A large group of Maya’s fellow medical students arrived. Then a trio of women who had always taken a particular interest in Sohail. At university they had been known as the fast girls, sleeveless blouses and lips always curled into perfect, teeth-hiding, air-hostess smiles. It was all coming together, laughter and lemonade and pretty girls — the only thing missing was Sohail. She checked her watch: three o’clock and he still wasn’t there. She felt a flutter of panic; maybe he wouldn’t turn up at all. He was probably at the mosque, repelled by the whole thing, and then what would she do, what would she tell all these people as they munched on peanuts and traded stories about her brother?

She greeted the medical students, pulling chairs together so they could sit in a circle. At that moment she caught sight of Ammoo in a starched white sari, passing out little bowls of puffed rice, smiling and greeting everyone by name. The boys stood up straight and put their hands to their foreheads or bent down to touch her feet. Around her the talk grew more animated, the atmosphere more relaxed, and although there were occasional chants of ‘where is the birthday boy?’ no one seemed to mind Sohail’s absence.

Maya decided to go ahead and serve lunch. She sliced cucumbers for the salad and heated up the khichuri, piling it on to large platters and corralling everyone into the living room. Then, just as she was about to serve the egg curry, she saw him coming in from the far side of the garden. He stood back for a moment, until someone caught his eye and he waved. He wore a white kurta and a cap; she was right, he had been to the mosque. She gave the egg curry an irritated stir, then she heaved the pot out of the kitchen and into the dining room. The fast girls circled Sohail. One of them, the tallest, touched his arm lightly and giggled with the sound of a spoon against a glass.

Maya made her way around the garden, calling everyone to the table. In Ammoo’s room she found Saima lying on the bed with the shutters closed, feeding the baby. She offered to look after the baby so Saima could eat.

‘You’re a jaan,’ she sighed. ‘I’m starving! And that rascal has gone off to refill his glass. Wait, let me change her nappy.’

‘Refill? Where?’ Maya hadn’t seen Chottu in the kitchen.

‘In Murad’s car.’ She giggled. ‘He’s brought a half-bottle of whisky.’

‘Oh,’ she said, imagining Ammoo’s stony anger if she found out.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Saima said, pulling up the baby’s legs and slipping the cloth nappy underneath, shushing her as she squealed in protest.

As long as no one found out. ‘No, I suppose not. Just tell them to be careful. Ammoo won’t like it. And Sohail.’

‘We’ll definitely keep it from auntie. But I’ve seen Sohail with a drink before — who knows, he might be in Murad’s car himself.’ She folded the nappy, holding a giant safety pin between her teeth.

Maya couldn’t believe her eyes. ‘Honestly, Saima, I don’t know how you do it, all this baby-handling. Already you’re an expert.’ Maya was relieved it wasn’t her, but still she felt a twinge of jealousy at the thought that her friend was already good at something, while she was floundering, still not sure how she was going to get used to a life without war.

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Can’t be as hard as medical college.’

She was about to ask Saima if she might want to return to the university herself, but she was suddenly given the infant, swaddled into its flag-blanket. ‘He’s different, you know,’ Maya said instead, steering the conversation back to Sohail, her hand warm under the baby’s head.

‘They’ve all changed,’ Saima replied. ‘No one is the same any more.’

She struggled to explain it. ‘He’s been going to the mosque. Says he’s found something.’

‘Don’t worry, it’ll pass.’

‘That’s what Ammoo said. But you know how he is, takes everything so seriously.’

Saima stood up, waved her hand as if she were swatting a mosquito. ‘We won’t let him go too far. I’m going to eat now — you’ll be okay with the monster?’

The child was asleep again, puffy-eyed, working her fists against some imaginary foe. Maya carried her into the living room, where Ammoo was passing out plates. ‘Not too much, auntie,’ she overheard, ‘have to keep our figures!’

Sohail was beside Chottu, holding an empty plate in his hand. Maya saw him, forbidding in his white kurta, tall and lean and spotless. She was suddenly acutely aware of how angry he must be. Tightening her arms around the baby, she gathered the courage to approach him. When he saw her, Chottu thumped Sohail’s back. ‘This guy is full of goodness. He’s been telling me some awesome things. Awesome.’

‘Come,’ she said, ‘eat something.’ Sohail looked at her with an expression she could not decipher. His eyes were dark and locked on her. ‘Bhaiya, please.’ But he shook his head, put down the empty plate and made his way to a clutch of guests waving from the doorway. ‘Sorry to eat and run,’ she heard one of them say. ‘Khoda Hafez,’ she heard Sohail reply. ‘When you are settled, we will talk again.’ She had the impression he had talked to everyone at the party, that they were leaving with little buds of ideas that Sohail had planted, and that, throughout the rest of the day, they would worry these ideas, itch away at them until they were changed, and everything would be slightly altered. This is what Sohail’s talking would have done, what his talking had always done.

‘Here’s my little queen,’ Chottu said, poking his finger into the baby’s mouth.

‘Are your hands washed?’ Maya asked, catching the caramel scent of whisky on his breath.

‘Give her here.’ He pulled the bundle from her hands. ‘How’s my little stink-bomb?’ Maya scanned the room for Sohail, but he had gone outside to open the gate for the departing guests. As people were putting their plates away, it began to rain. The fast girls hurried away, ducking under the gauzy ends of their saris. The medical students and the army men crowded into the living room, leaning against the wall or squeezing on to the sofa.

‘Let’s have a song, shall we?’ Kona said. ‘Sohail, mia, you on the guitar.’

Sohail shook his head. He appeared agitated now, removing the cap from his head and folding it into his pocket.

Kona began to sing.

Bangladesh, my first and last,

Bangladesh, my life and death

Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Bangladesh!

Everyone joined in except Sohail, whose eyes shifted from the tapping of Kona’s feet to the wide sheets of rain that splashed against the windows. Maya wasn’t the only one who noticed; after the song, there was a long, solid silence. The baby began to cry.

‘Sohail,’ Saima said, putting the baby on her shoulder, ‘I hear you’re becoming a mowlana.’

‘Saima,’ Maya said, ‘not now.’

‘It’s all right, we can all see for ourselves. Nothing to be ashamed of. Why don’t you tell us about it?’

Maya didn’t want Sohail to tell anyone about it. She just wanted it to go away. The medical students stood up to leave. ‘Oh, please don’t run off,’ she called after them weakly. But they waved goodbye, promising to see her in the dissection room. ‘We have to take out Hitler’s kidney,’ they said, referring to their cadaver. One of the boys, a rather malnourished-looking one with hair over his ears, paid her particular attention as he said goodbye, holding her gaze for a moment too long and chewing his bottom lip. She ignored him, but when the gate had closed behind them, she heard the others sniggering, and a few dull thumps as they jostled one another.

Now there was only Chottu and Saima and Kona and the boys from Sohail’s regiment. Saima’s question was circling the room.

Suddenly Sohail stood up, smoothing his kurta and resettling the cap on his head. ‘It’s true,’ he said, his voice the perfect shade of rough-smooth. ‘I have been going to the mosque.’

‘Watch out,’ Chottu said, ‘they steal shoes at the mosque.’

‘And stand at the back, yaar, otherwise the other men will get turned on by your backside. All that squatting and leaning.’ They started to laugh. Chottu got down on the floor, demonstrating the dangers of leaning too far forward in prostration. ‘Trouser can come down any time!’

The room erupted. This was exactly what she had wanted, but she realised, too late, what was happening. There was no way Sohail was going to join in, no way he was going to start laughing at himself.

Kona continued to strum the guitar, humming lightly. Sohail did not sit down. He stared straight into the room and said, ‘It is not a bad thing, to find one’s God.’

‘Alhamdulillah!’ Chottu said, raising his fist into the air.

Kona put down his guitar and spoke up. ‘You remember, Sohail, you told us religion would make us blind — in training you would tell everyone not to recite the Kalma before an operation.’

‘That’s right,’ Sohail said, ‘you remember well. And did you listen to me?’

‘No.’

‘Because you knew I was wrong.’

‘Well,’ he said, smiling, ‘we just didn’t want to get our heads blown off, eh boys?’

Ammoo entered with the cake. It was white and square and decorated with blue flowers. Many Happy Returns, Bhaiya.

‘Dosto,’ Chottu said, ‘we didn’t know it was a birthday party.’

Ammoo lit the candles. ‘Come, beta,’ she said, her hand on Sohail’s cheek, ‘cut the cake.’

They sang. Sohail sliced into the cake and fed a small piece to Ammoo. Usually he would do the same for Maya, but she leaned out of sight, her back against the wall. She saw him putting a piece of cake into his own mouth, and she knew, at that moment, that it would be the last time she would see him this way, pretending to be something of the man she remembered, allowing lipsticked women to dance their fingers on his arm, smelling the whisky on his friends’ breath and watching them all shifting uncomfortably as he talked about the mosque; maybe now he would change his clothes and start to grow a beard, and maybe he would make the trip to Mecca and go into purdah. The future was suddenly clear: he was going somewhere, somewhere remote and out of reach, somewhere that had nothing to do with her, and that even if he didn’t disappear altogether, she would, from now on, be left behind.

Later, when they had dried the plates and scraped the khichuri out of the bottom of the pot, Maya turned to Ammoo. ‘I shouldn’t have done it.’

Ammoo nodded, and without a word continued to divide the leftovers into smaller containers, her elbows working hard, lifting, scooping.

‘Did you see him? The way he looked at everyone, like he was from another world.’

She was waiting for Ammoo to tell her it wasn’t something to get so agitated about, just a phase, it would pass. But, instead, she said, ‘It’s more serious than we thought.’

‘He told you?’

‘He wants to use the roof. To talk.’

‘Talk?’

‘Talk about religion. He’s not a mowlana, he says. We shouldn’t call him that. He says he just wants to go up there and talk about God.’

‘To who?’

‘To anyone who’ll listen. His friend Kona has already signed up.’

Ammoo put her hand up to her hair and retied her bun, twisting firmly from the wrist. Outside, the rain had stopped, leaving the air heavy with its imprint, and with the occasional sound of leaves dropping their last traces of water.

‘There isn’t anything we can do, is there?’

Ammoo bent over to pick up the empty pot and take it to the outside tap. She sounded very tired when she said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Well,’ Maya said, ‘let’s eat this leftover cake, then.’ And she squatted on a piri beside her mother and passed her a plate with the last corner of the birthday cake, the flourish now gone from the edges, the frosting matted and smudged.

He recited words from the Torah, the Gita, the Bible. He praised the prophets of old, Ram and Odysseus, Jesus and Arjun, the Buddha and Guru Nanak. They were all messengers of God, in their way. Separate in time, diverse in their teaching, yet equal in their desire for human betterment. He spoke to those, like Kona, who had never thought seriously about their faith; he read to them from the Qur’an, and he told them stories about the place where their faith was born, in the high desert of Arabia, where the warring tribes of the Quraysh came together in the shadow of the Ka’bah.

Other religions had their saints, their icons. They had their churches, their gospels, their commandments, their strife, their exiles, their miracles. We, he said, have our Prophet, and our Book. The Book was the miracle. It was so simple. That was the power of the message. It turned them into brothers and guardians of one another. It promised equality. It promised freedom. It was perfect.

The Book spoke to his every sorrow, to every bruise of his life. It spoke to the knife passing across the throat of an innocent man; it spoke to the day his father died, hand on his arrested heart; and it spoke to the machine-gun sound that echoed in his chest, night after night, and to the hollow where Piya had been. And every idea he had ever had about the world, it spoke to those too. That every man was equal before God — how foolish of him to believe that Marx had invented this concept, when it was ancient, even deeper than ancient, embedded in the very germ of every being; that is what God had intended, what God had created. He wept from the beauty of it.

1984 October

She had forgotten about the trip to New Market when Sohail came through the door a few weeks later. His face was red, the air coming hard out of his mouth. He held a small paper bag in his hands.

‘How is Ammoo?’ he asked, sitting down heavily.

‘She has cancer, how do you think?’ She hadn’t meant to sound so sharp, but he hadn’t been to see Ammoo since that day at the hospital. Ammoo asked after him constantly, and Maya had to tell her he was off somewhere on important jamaat business, that he had sent his love and blessings. There were messages from upstairs, informing them that the Qur’an had been read three times from start to finish in Rehana’s name. Khadija had sent food, sometimes in excessive amounts, which they’d had to throw away because there was no one to eat it.

‘I’ve been praying,’ Sohail said.

‘I know. I heard.’ She remembered his sermon, the way he had admonished her.

He rubbed his face with both hands. Then he held out the paper bag. Inside were the Bata sandals, blue and brand new. She felt a cold flood of panic. Sohail tented his fingers and said, ‘I would like to know how these sandals came to be in my son’s possession.’ Maya noticed a ring on his left thumb, a silver ring with a cheap green stone. She stared at it as she tried to decide how to explain it to him — the market, the salesman, the insult.

‘They were a gift from me. His old sandals were torn.’

‘They were not torn. I have seen them myself.’

‘You’re right, they weren’t torn. But they were too small.’

‘You know I regard humility and truthfulness above all things.’

‘He wanted—’

‘Of course he wanted. He’s a child.’

‘Exactly. He’s a kid — you don’t treat him like one.’

Sohail looked at her directly, sword-like. Damn it, he always knew when she was lying. ‘Did you give him the sandals?’

‘No.’

‘Then where did he get them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Look, we went to New Market, and I wanted to buy him sandals, but the shopkeeper thought he was a servant.’ Sohail said nothing, just continued to stare at her. ‘Did you hear me? A servant.’

‘Why do you care about such things?’

He seemed genuinely perplexed. Why had she cared? ‘Because he was humiliated, that’s why. Your son was humiliated. It’s the same thing that happens when he walks the streets in torn clothes, or stares at the children coming out of the playground when the school bell rings.’

‘If you didn’t buy the sandals, then who did?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he bought them with his pocket money.’

‘You know very well we don’t give him pocket money.’

No toys. No pocket money. No sandals. A rattle in his chest. Dirty scabs on his arms.

‘I have to do something,’ he said, rising heavily from the sofa.

Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe Sohail would realise what he was doing to his son. ‘Yes, do something. Please.’

Sohail hesitated. Then he drew a sharp, deep breath and said, ‘I’m sending him to madrasa.’

‘What?’

‘In Chandpur.’

She felt her voice narrowing, trembling. ‘Where the hell is Chandpur?’

‘On the other side of the Jamuna. I thought you knew every corner of this country.’ He couldn’t resist it, the gibe.

‘But that’s days away.’

‘I hear the Huzoor is a good man.’

‘You hear? You don’t know him?’

‘He comes highly recommended. I need to spend more time at the mosque; I can’t watch over Zaid. He — he needs guidance. Even you can see that.’

‘Let him stay with us, Ammoo and me. He’s lost his mother.’

‘I am grateful for the efforts you’ve made, Maya, but I think we both know the situation is getting out of hand. Can you promise me he won’t steal any more? And he makes up stories all the time; the boy lives in his own dream-world. It’s not right.’

She couldn’t promise him the boy wouldn’t steal. She couldn’t promise him anything — she didn’t even know where Zaid was half the time, or why he returned with bruises on his arms or why he smelled of vomit.

‘Ammoo needs you,’ Sohail continued; ‘your duty lies with her.’

‘Zaid needs us too. Please, Bhaiya.’ The air closed around her throat. ‘I’m sorry about the chappals, I should have asked you first. But madrasa is too much, Bhaiya, even for you.’

His voice hardened, as if he’d just piped a line of metal through it. ‘He’s my son. The decision is made. He leaves after Zohr on Wednesday.’

There was nothing left to say; his voice left no space for argument. ‘And Ammoo?’

‘Give Ammoo my salaam.’

He would even shun his own mother. ‘You don’t want to see her?’

‘Tell her we are praying for her recovery, inshallah.’

And then he was gone.

Of course, the boy would never agree to it. He would refuse, and she would have another argument with Sohail. This time, she would be prepared; Ammoo would help. But the next day Maya found Zaid dancing on the rooftop, plucking leaves from the lemon tree that brushed the first-floor windows, sprinkling them over his head. He bounded down the stairs, yah yah yah, wearing a brand new lungi, the starch of it making him look wider than he really was, a half-sleeved kurta and a cap on his head. A small trunk was in his arms.

‘I’ve come to show you my new things.’ He laid the trunk on the ground and gently, reverently, hinged it open. Fingernails clipped. Excited hands revealing the treasures within. A comb. A stick of neem for his teeth. A crisp-paged Qur’an. Two new lungis. And the chappals, wrapped in newspaper. His father had gone back to the shop and paid for them. ‘It has a lock,’ he said, showing her the key attached to a string around his neck.

There was nothing more for her to do. She wanted to give him something for his trunk. What could she give him? Photographs were banned. No books other than the Qur’an. Toys out of the question.

In the end she packed up a few balls of sweet puffed rice. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘some snacks for your trip.’

He placed them delicately in the trunk, careful not to disturb the other objects.

‘You’ll be all right?’

He smiled, still caught up in the joy of it. School. Other children. The women upstairs no longer worrying he was getting too old to be around them. His father’s heavy hand on the back of his head.

‘How will you get there?’

‘Abboo. He says we’ll take a train, and the ferry. And a bus, and a rickshaw.’

She closed her eyes and imagined his journey. Holding his father’s hand — had he ever known it before, the grip of his father’s hand? Heaven. And the ferry, the syrupy tea, the river wind wrapped tightly around him, the sky open and vast and giving a boy a small piece of the world. And here her imagination reached its limits.

The building’s sagging mud walls and patchy green moss. The courtyard strewn with chicken bones, a dirty drain clogged with spit. He swallows the lump of disappointment, his heart lifting, for a moment, at the chorus of sound drifting into the courtyard. His father quickly releases his hand and suddenly the Huzoor appears, unsmiling, taking the key from around his neck, examining his trunk, tossing aside the sweet moori. He nods to his father, yes, he will be instructed in the way of deen, he will not be tempted by the modern life, and all the while he is watching the pale green lizards as they scurry and fuck and lose their tails, and the cane that lies upon the Huzoor’s low table, and his knees are starting to ache as his father’s speech continues, so he is relieved when he is asked to stand up, and when he is given a blanket and a plate he dreams of what he will be fed. And as he crosses the courtyard, he wonders if he will meet the other students now, and then a door opens and there is another key, and his father’s voice says As-Salaam Alaikum, the Huzoor’s face retreats and the door swings shut.

He is alone with the blanket and the plate, the grey light from a slit between the thatch and the wall, the scratch of rats, and as the lock is turned he hurls himself at the door and opens his voice to the footsteps fading with every moment, until there is nothing but his own voice, begging to be released, and his fist on the wall, and each cry echoing into the next: Abboo, Abboo, Abboo. At this moment he is more afraid of what is in the room, the aloneness and the rats and the line of light against the wall, than of what is beyond. He is wrong.

1974 January

Whatever else had led Sohail to delivering sermons on his rooftop — Piya, the war, the disappointing ordinariness of freedom — Maya had always believed it was Silvi, his oldest and first love, who had finally brought about the end of his old self.

Silvi had continued to live across the road. After her husband’s death, she had started covering her head, and now, on the rare occasions when she left the house, she was seen in a black chador that masked everything but her eyes. Her mother, Mrs Chowdhury, once a great friend of Rehana, was rumoured to have become an obsessive hand-washer, spending hours in the bathroom scrubbing at her fingers until they peeled and bled. More and more rooms of the grand two-storey house were closed off, until Mrs Chowdhury lived in one bedroom, and Silvi in another.

The other neighbours had written them off, but Maya was convinced Silvi was just biding her time. She knew that whatever direction her brother might be taking, it would be Silvi who pressed him further along the journey; after all, Silvi had come to her own conclusions about the Almighty. Maya knew Silvi was watching from across the road. And she knew, though he never told her, that Sohail secretly longed for Piya, and that he had decided that this longing must be erased, must be conquered, so that he could fulfil his duty — the reason why, he believed, he had survived the war.

It was true. For months Silvi had kept her vigil, as the people gathered to hear Sohail speak. She saw the men and women sitting in columns, side by side. She couldn’t hear his words, but from her rooftop she saw his rooftop, and the bodies that swayed with the cadence of his voice.

And while Silvi watched Sohail, Maya watched Silvi. She saw the parting of Silvi’s curtains whenever Sohail appeared. She saw the black outline of her, hanging up her washing on the rooftop so she could peer across at Sohail and his followers. One day, after the sermon had ended and the Azaan been recited, Maya saw Silvi open her gate and cross the road. Silvi caught the eye of a young woman on her way out. Come here, she said, motioning with her hand. The woman looked very little like a religious supplicant — she wore a plain salwaar-kameez and didn’t even cover her head. Maya stood behind her own gate and listened to the exchange.

‘What goes on in that house?’ Silvi asked.

The woman smiled. ‘He is a very wise man,’ she said. ‘A wise and humble man.’ And she gazed directly into Silvi’s eye, and Maya knew that Silvi was being told everything she needed to know, because Silvi must remember the hypnotic quality of Sohail’s voice, and the way he made people want to believe everything he said, and the deep conviction he brought to every word, and the rising colour in his cheek, and the way he raised his hand, gently, as if he were about to caress you, and the stillness of the rest of him, all his energy, his power, channelled into his voice, its current swift, and long, and steady.

What exactly was he preaching, Silvi wanted to know.

‘It cannot be explained,’ the woman said, looking more and more as if she were in love, ‘it cannot be explained.’

And the woman left Silvi at the bungalow gate, treading confidently away, taking with her a piece of that river voice, that little piece of astonishment. Maya was about to confront her, to warn her away, to tell her that she had already broken Sohail’s heart once, and that she no longer had a claim to him. But before Maya could act, Silvi climbed up the ladder, surprisingly nimble in her cloak. Maya never knew what happened on that roof, what words were exchanged by Silvi and her brother. She tried to imagine it and she could conjure up only this: that Silvi approached Sohail, still kneeling from the prayer, and said, ‘You remember the slave Bilal. He was punished by Ummayah for becoming a Muslim. He was forced to lie outside in the heat with a stone on his chest. And what did he shout to the sun, beating mercilessly on him?’

‘One,’ Sohail replied, ‘One.’

That is how she dealt the final blow. ‘One,’ she said. ‘There can be only One.’

Sohail and Silvi were married in March of the following year. Maya attended out of pity for her mother, who was pretending it was all for the best. Ammoo suggested to Sohail that, because her first marriage had been hastily conducted, Silvi might want to enjoy being a bride this time around. She might like to have her hair done, or hire a girl to decorate her hands and feet. But Sohail said Silvi didn’t want any of it. Quietly, they said. No ceremony.

So Rehana printed a few cards and sent them with boxes of sweets to everyone she knew. Orange-studded Laddus and curd-dusted Pranharas, the sweet named for heartache.

Mrs Rehana Haque is delighted to announce

the marriage of her son

Muhammad Sohail Haque

to

Rehnuma Chowdhury (Silvi)

daughter of late Mr Kamran Chowdhury

and Mrs Aziza Chowdhury

May God bless the Happy Couple

This was how they came to cross the road on a Friday morning in March, carrying a set of clothes for Silvi and a small pair of gold earrings. It was all the jewellery Rehana could afford. Maya had good intentions as she was getting ready, telling herself there was nothing to be done, that she should try to make amends before it was too late, but halfway across the road, between the bungalow and the crumbling mansion, she was seized with a sudden hatred for Silvi. How grim this whole operation was, Sohail retreating to the woman who had once spurned him, who was taking him back only because his fears had suddenly aligned with her own.

Silvi changed into the clothes they had brought, the earrings obscured by the tight headscarf she wrapped across her forehead. Sohail sat alone in Mrs Chowdhury’s drawing room while the rest of them crowded into Silvi’s bedroom. Silvi sat hunched under her sari, her face invisible. When the contract was pushed in front of her, she signed it quickly and with a sure hand.

It still surprised Maya how small their world had remained. There were no swarms of relations, no uncles and grandparents. It had always been this way: they had spent Eid with Ammoo and her friends from the Ladies’ Club; their birthdays were celebrated thinly, with a few neighbours dropping in. And yet Maya could never remember feeling alone, anxious that they were marooned on their own little island while everyone else was sheltered by their extended circle of relations. It must have been difficult for Ammoo, responsible for constructing a family out of just the three of them. Perhaps this is why she and Sohail, and eventually Ammoo, had attached themselves so much to the war effort. Suddenly it did not matter that they had grown up without a father, that their relations were a thousand miles away and had abandoned them, because all the fighters, and their mothers and sisters, were kin, their very own people, as though they shared features, histories, bloodlines. But all of this was before Silvi and Sohail made their own family, with followers and supplicants. They wouldn’t need a war after that, or even their own blood.

After the ceremony, Mrs Chowdhury served tea and luchialoo, puffed bread and sour potato curry. Ammoo suggested Maya sing a song to entertain them, but Silvi shook her head and whispered no. Maya noted the way her mother obeyed her. They ate their luchi-aloo in silence.

At the end of the meal Mrs Chowdhury’s servant appeared with a red suitcase, which he handed to Sohail. Then the four of them, Rehana, Sohail, Silvi and Maya, crossed the road and returned to the bungalow. Mrs Chowdhury did not even see them to the gate, maybe because Silvi herself did not seem sorry to be leaving home, or her mother.

After loving the girl from across the road, after witnessing her marriage to another man, after waiting, patiently and without malice, for him to die, and after conquering his own desire for the girl he had found in the barracks, Sohail had finally got his bride. Nothing could separate them now. Despite the joyless, quiet ceremony, Maya knew Sohail was revelling in this small bit of satisfaction.

And what of the rooftop? The sermons continued, but they were no longer about the many faces of God. There was only one. One message. One Book. The world narrowed. Curtains between men and women. Lines drawn in the sand. And Silvi, coated in black, reigned in her brother’s heart.

1984 October

By morning, the cell has achieved its purpose. There are no more shouts in his throat. No words remain. He clutches his plate and he is no longer lonely, or broken-hearted by the memory of his father’s footsteps, or determined to trace his way back home. He is only hungry. He can think only about what will fill that plate.

He is led to the courtyard, where he blinks at the light and the delicate, feathery aroma of the morning.

The others are already seated, fingers dipped into their breakfast. A circle of eyes follows him as he sits down and places his plate in front of him. They laugh, a moment before a hard, tight-fingered palm strikes the back of his head. The voice says, ‘Wazu, prayer, then you eat, bodmaish.’

He locates the square of cement on to which he is meant to squat, and the tiny tap that protrudes from the side of the building. Most of the boys have returned to their meal, but some watch while he removes his cap and circles one hand over another, prods the insides of his nostrils and ears. He prays.

Finally, he is allowed to eat. The rice is cold and overcooked, but he swallows it in great gulping mouthfuls. As he takes his final bite, a boy throws a spray of rocks at him.

He has missed the dawn lesson. After breakfast he is led into a room with long rows of low, wooden tables. When he sits cross-legged on the mud floor, the table reaches his chest and on it he can place his Qur’an. A man sits at the front of the room with a square desk of his own. His Qur’an is raised by a triangular shelf that holds the book open. In his hand is a length of cane that catches the light and casts snake-like shadows across the room.

He pretends to read, his fingers on the Book, his body moving back and forth, as if at sea and battered by the tide, but now his mind meanders back to his father, the cell, the ferry ride, and as the anger heats up within him he is suddenly very tired, his eyes dragging downwards. To stay awake he concentrates on the wiry shape of the cane, the thought of it striking his legs. He wonders if he can sneak into the Huzoor’s room and retrieve his puffed-rice snacks. He misses Maya. He looks around the room to see if anyone is trying to catch his eye, but no eyes reach out to his; they are all on the same ship, all battered by the same tide.

Later, he tries to sleep, after counting the different noises in the room, the rats, the hum-snoring, the rustle of mosquito nets as they are tucked into sleeping mats. His father has neglected to give him a mosquito net. The Huzoor has instructed the other boys to stretch their nets over his mat, but they have refused. He counts the number of times a mosquito lands near his ear, its buzzing louder than anything he has heard all day. Even the roar let out by the Huzoor when he discovered the boy didn’t know the Arabic alphabet. What comes after alif, ba, ta, sa? What comes after the walking-stick letter? He doesn’t know. The Huzoor strikes him three times across the palm. One, two, three. The mosquito is louder than the strike, beating its wings together, hectic, stereophonic.

He falls asleep in the company of wings.

1984 November

Joy was leaning against his car. She had heard the horn, gone outside to see who it was and found him smiling, his hands in his pockets.

‘I haven’t seen you in weeks,’ he said.

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

‘Actually, I’ve got an appointment,’ Joy said.

Was he flirting with her? ‘With who?’

‘Not an appointment, really — I heard he was at home in the afternoons. After three o’clock.’

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

‘Well, if he’s given you an appointment, you’d better not be late.’

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve brought a guest. A man.’

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

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

‘Who is it?’ came the reply.

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

‘Wait,’ the voice inside said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am so glad you have returned. I have thought of you often.’ He passed Joy a small green glass.

‘I have thought of you too.’

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

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

They ignored her. ‘Why did you come back?’ Sohail asked, holding out his hand to refill Joy’s glass.

‘Everyone asks me that. Because it isn’t so great.’

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

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

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

‘Yes, how did you know?’

‘A man should marry. You have children?’

‘No.’

‘You should have children.’

‘I’m divorced.’

Sohail nodded. ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ he asked.

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

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

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

‘Well, there are others.’

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

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

‘About what?’

‘About the war — those villages we saved, and the ones we didn’t.’

Sohail didn’t reply.

‘And my brother, do you remember him?’

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

Joy had been captured while her brother ran free.

‘It wasn’t me,’ Joy said.

‘God is great.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tell her they will be going soon, inshallah.’

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

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

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

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

‘Khoda Hafez,’ Joy said, his hands sandwiched again between Sohail’s.

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

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

*

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

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

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

There were twenty-three of them, captured in November on a hot, rain-thirsty morning. And he watched as they were taken, one by one, into the room next door, the leg room. And encouraged to speak. And as soon as they spoke — said I am a mukti, yes, I fought against the army, yes, I betrayed the country, yes, yes, I am a traitor, yes, I believe in Bangladesh, yes, I was seduced by Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Mujib is a pig, I am a pig, yes, yes, yes — whatever was being done to them would stop. And the rest of them, bound together by their equal hatred of the piss-pot in the corner of the cell, the foot beatings, the word ‘bastard’ attached to the mispronunciation of their name, eased into a quiet night, waking, the next morning, to the call to prayer followed by the snap of bullets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do it.’ The slap of the rifle, the small rectangle of pain. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘make those sisterfucking birds shut the fucking hell up or I will shove a bullet up your ass, I swear it.’

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

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

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

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

Headmaster Headmaster Headmaster

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

1984 December

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

She closed the Book. ‘You never did pay any attention to your ustani.’

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

Rehana’s eyes widened. ‘I don’t believe you.’

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

‘No, I don’t remember.’

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

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

‘She ran out of the house so fast!’

‘When will my little girl grow up, hmm? Give me some grandchildren?’

‘I’d have to get married first, you know.’

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

‘What did you think?’

‘That I wished I hadn’t seen it. I had to marry him anyway.’

‘Would it be so bad, if I never married?’

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

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

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

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

Rehana smiled. ‘I am taking comfort from the love of my child.’

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

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

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

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

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

There is no God but He, the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal.

La ta’khudhuhu sinatun wa la nawm.

No slumber can seize Him, nor sleep.

‘I would like you to pray, Maya. Just once a day, at Maghreb.’

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

‘To who?’

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

‘God is greater than your belief,’ Rehana said. ‘I’m asking you because you might need something, if I am gone.’

‘Ma, please, don’t say that.’

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

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

‘I’m tired now, jaan. Let’s go to sleep.’

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

And she thought about what Ammoo was asking for, a prayer once a day, at dusk, that holy hour. She thought about giving in, and wished somehow she had done it long ago, surrendered to the practicality of religion. If she chose it now, it would be a hollow bargain, shallow and insubstantial. No God she could respect would enter into such a pact, knowing the believer knocking at the door wanted nothing more than a genie, a single

wish, and that even if this wish were to be accompanied by a deeper longing, there was no saying if she would ever keep her promises.

*

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

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

‘The bus,’ he said.

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

He nodded, eyes rimmed with water. ‘It’s a holiday,’ he mumbled.

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

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

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

‘It’s a holiday,’ he repeated. ‘Huzoor let us go home.’

Because she had to, she believed him.

‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How long has it been?’

‘A few hours. Not long.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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