The Good Muslim

1985 February

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya had only one thought.

Piya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is this?’ She pointed to something on the menu.

‘Oh, they’ve just misspelled cheeseburger. Have you had one before? It’s like a keema sandwich. They can be rather bland — I can ask them to put some chillies on it for you.’

‘All right, chillies. But no cheese.’

‘You don’t like cheese?’

‘It gives me wind.’

He laughed.

‘What?’

‘It’s like you missed the lesson at school on how to talk to boys.’

‘I’m a doctor,’ she said, irritated, ‘bodily functions don’t embarrass me. And what kind of education did you get? Mine certainly didn’t include any life lessons.’

‘I went to the same school as your brother. St Gregory’s. Those Jesuits told us everything we needed to know about girls.’

The waiter approached and took their orders. Joy was polite to the man, called him Bhai, said thank you after he’d jotted down the order. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Yes, lemonade.’

‘It’s very sour. Sure you want to take the risk?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Now,’ he said, placing his hands on the table, ‘what do you want to know?’

‘About your women.’

‘There was just the one.’

‘Really? I hear rumours.’

‘People always trying to set me up — you know, poor injured freedom fighter needs a wife.’

‘Perhaps you’ll succumb.’

‘Perhaps. You want to know about Cheryl. But maybe before you hear that story, I should tell you about all the shocking jobs I did while I was in New York. Just to get it over with — full disclosure. For a year I washed dishes. I drove a taxi, I told you that already. I cleaned hotel rooms for a while, then I moved on to cleaning houses. Rich people, Park Avenue, you wouldn’t believe. Offices too. I saw a lot of things in those offices, after dark and all that. But the last job I had was for an old man. He was dying. He had doctors, nurses, everything, but he needed someone to watch him at night. I slept in his room. That’s how I met Cheryl.’

‘She worked for him too?’

‘She was his daughter.’

Maya’s eyebrows went up.

‘Yes, that’s exactly what her family thought. Marrying the help. Big scandal. I needed a passport, she needed to rebel, that was it.’

‘Did you love her?’ Maya imagined a light-filled room, cigarette smoke deep in the furniture, and a tall, elegant woman in a man’s shirt, the collars wide about her neck.

He seemed to consider the question. ‘Maybe a little. It wasn’t just a business transaction. We had to live together, learn about each other. But in the end we couldn’t stay together.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the relationship was incomplete. I couldn’t tell her everything.’

The food arrived, a pair of meat patties between soggy layers of bread. Maya took a bite, the grease leaking on to her fingers. It was salty, and fiery from the chillies. She decided she liked it. ‘Very good, your American dish,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘So, you ended it.’

‘I came home.’

‘Poor girl. To be left behind.’ She thought of Cheryl, now without the solid bulk of Joy. How hollow her life must seem.

‘She couldn’t have been here with me.’

‘“Never the twain shall meet”?’

He shrugged, confused.

‘Kipling, you know? And Forster too.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Nothing. Just something I read in a book.’ She remembered now, he wasn’t the bookish type.

‘I’m not very well read.’ He crumpled the napkin in his hand and tossed it on to his plate. ‘Not like your brother.’

‘Don’t worry. He burned his books anyway.’

‘Burned?’

‘Hitler-style. In the garden.’

Joy clapped his hand over his mouth.

‘Yes, really.’ She had relived the incident so many times in her mind, she had forgotten how shocking it was.

They sat for a moment, picking at the remnants of their meal. Joy didn’t ask her why, or how, Sohail had burned his books, and she was happy not to have to describe it.

‘I suppose you’ve answered my question. I wanted to know why you left home, why you stayed away so long. Was it because of the books?’

She made a chopping motion with her hands. ‘Everything was finished in that moment.’

‘What year was it?’

‘’77. I waited five years longer than you did.’

‘True. You had higher hopes.’

‘The famine, and then Mujib dying, and then the army came in and it was like the war had never happened. But when Sohail did that — I mean, he wasn’t just my brother. People looked up to him. They worshipped him.’

‘They still do,’ he said.

He was right. ‘Yes, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’

‘So you ran away.’

‘I couldn’t bear it. You want to hear what I did, what my jobs were? I was training to be a surgeon, you know, before I left the city. Then one day, as I was travelling through some small town, I don’t even remember where it was exactly, I heard a woman screaming. She was squatting at the back of a tailoring shop, in labour. I helped her, and I felt — well, I hadn’t felt like that in a long time. Like I was finally good for something. After I finished the training, I started doing it full time. I opened a clinic, trained dayyis not to use rusty knives, to boil their instruments. I convinced the husbands to send their wives to hospital when complications came up.’

‘Did it make you think of having children?’

Maya shifted in her seat. ‘Not really, no. I mean, I suppose I would know what to — to expect, but I don’t think it’s for me. I was good at it, though.’ She flagged the waiter down and ordered two cups of tea.

‘Much better than cleaning an old man’s pissy sheets.’

‘There’s dignity in that. You were shepherding him out of this life, that’s a noble thing.’

‘Sohail probably thinks he’s doing the same thing. Helping people into the afterlife. And I guess he feels quite noble doing it.’

‘Did you know, I went upstairs and attended their taleems when Ammoo was sick?’

He tilted his head. ‘I’m surprised.’

‘It was — it felt like the only place in the world where I had hope she wouldn’t die.’

Joy reached across the table and brushed his knuckles against hers. She was still gripping the teacup, and he moved his hand and circled her wrist with his fingers. She felt the tears coming again. ‘Twice in one day,’ she said, dabbing at her face with her free hand. ‘You might think I cry all the time.’

‘No, I imagine you hardly ever cry at all.’

She looked at him closely then, and noticed that one of his eyes was slightly bigger than the other. And his smile was crooked. It was as though his mother had loved one side of his face better than the other. I would love your whole face, she thought. I would love your whole face, and your nine and a half fingers. She caught herself staring at his lips. The last few months, Ammoo’s illness, were making her forget herself. She swallowed her tea. ‘I must go,’ she said, rising abruptly from her seat. She insisted on paying for the meal. And when he offered to drive her home, she refused, rushing into a rickshaw and looking back only when the driver had pulled away, catching sight of his arm as it waved to her, and his eyebrows up, bemused.

*

Rehana was cured. There was no other way to put it. Dr Sattar said the chemotherapy had worked and she was in remission. She had drunk the Zamzam and the cancer had fled out of her, like birds from a tree when a shot is fired. Sohail was the shot. Rehana was cured. She walked around the garden, pulling weeds from the beds of sunflowers and dahlias. She reached between the plants, tearing them out with a flick of her wrist, and then she straightened, and stroked her belly, as if she missed it, whatever had been inside her.

Maya often caught herself staring at Ammoo, wondering what she had done to deserve this second chance. Episodes from their life together came back to her: leaving Ammoo in Dhaka while she and Sohail were taken to Lahore; leaving her again while they went off to war; and later, when she was angry at Sohail but ended up abandoning Ammoo. Leaving, always leaving. That is what she had done. She told herself to think of times she had returned to Ammoo, to this house, and recalled one day, just after the war, when she found Ammoo in the bedroom, sawing her bed in half.

It was the day after the army had surrendered, and Ammoo was holding a saw in one hand and balancing herself against the bed with the other. She had tucked the loose end of her sari around her waist, tied her hair up in a high knot and thrown all of her weight into the cutting.

Maya asked her mother what she was doing, but she ignored her, grunting and moving as though her life depended on it. The streets were filled with people celebrating and Maya was about to join them; she could already hear the radio blasting from a neighbour’s window and, in the distance, shouts, firecrackers. She stood and watched, ready to leave her mother to whatever crazy sense of destruction had overcome her, eager to join in the frenzy outside.

Rehana had cut through the foot end and was making her way through the baseboard. The wood was thinner here, which made her work slightly easier, but the position was awkward. Now she struggled to lift the entire frame upright, so she could cut along its length. Maya found herself helping her to lift it, lean it against the wall and hold it steady as she stood on a chair and bore down.

‘I’m doing this for you,’ she said as she approached the headboard. She descended from the chair.

‘What?’

She paused, wiped her forehead. ‘I need some water.’

‘You hold this,’ Maya said, showing her how to keep it steady, ‘I’ll bring you a glass.’

When she returned, Ammoo was standing where she’d left her, one hand on the upturned bed, the other on her hip. She gulped the water down.

The bed was ornately carved, made of heavy teak, and it had been in that room as long as Maya could remember, one of the few wedding presents her mother had received. An heirloom. But she appeared to take great pleasure in vandalising it.

It took them over an hour just to cut through the headboard; the wood was dense and resisted their efforts. They took turns with the saw. Tiny shavings stuck to their clothes, like field bugs.

When they were finished, the two ends of what used to be Rehana’s bed looked like the belly of a ship, pointing down towards the depths. Rehana said, ‘Sohail will be back soon, and you’ll have to share this room with me again. I thought you should have your own bed. At least.’

‘We need legs,’ Maya said.

There were a few offcuts of wood in the garden shed, which Maya retrieved. But they had no nails or glue of any kind, or sandpaper to smooth down the edges. Their sawing was reasonably straight but crude.

That night, they made their bed in the living room. It was cold, with just the carpet underneath them, the December chill sunk deep into the red cement floors.

‘He will be back, won’t he?’ Rehana asked, after they had switched off the lights and tucked the blankets under their feet.

‘He will,’ Maya said. He had to be. He had to be all right, and coming home; too much had been sacrificed for there to be any other ending. She had missed the celebrations, but she didn’t mind. Ammoo was preparing her for life after the war: new beds, a room for Sohail. Knowing this, she fell asleep with a quiet comfort in her bones.

They had slept on that sawed-in-half bed for the next few years, through Piya’s arrival and Sohail’s conversion, through his marrying and moving upstairs. While Maya was away, Ammoo had hired a carpenter and had the bed put back together, and it was whole now, with just a thin line on the headboard, visible if you looked closely, a long, meandering thunderbolt.

*

‘There’s something I’d like to contribute to the next issue. Under my own name.’

Shafaat was wedged into his chair. ‘Of course, my dear, what would you like to write?’

‘It’s about the war—’

‘Oh, would you be a darling and get me a cup of tea? I’m parched.’

Bastard. She decided not to argue, found her way to the tea station, boiled water, brewed, slammed the cup down beside his elbow. He did not raise his eyes.

‘Where’s Aditi?’ she asked.

‘At the printers. She’s going to try to get us a better rate, so we can print 800 copies next issue.’ He started to strike the typewriter.

‘As I was saying.’

He stopped, two index fingers in the air. ‘You want to write under your own name? I think our readers would prefer to hear S. M. Haque’s latest diatribe.’ He took a large gulp of tea. ‘Did you make my tea with condensed milk?’

‘Condensed milk and sugar. I thought you liked it sweet.’

‘I do. But I don’t like condensed milk. Please make it again. Milk and sugar.’ When he saw her face darken he said, ‘Come on, it’ll only take you a minute. A writer needs his tea.’

As he was sipping her second attempt and nodding in satisfaction, she said, ‘Jahanara Imam has called for a trial. For all the war criminals.’

He set the mug on his typewriter. ‘Hasn’t this been debated too many times already? We should have had a trial, I’m not denying that, but it’s too late now, my dear. Too late.’

‘It’s never too late to seek justice.’

‘Darling, it’s 1985. Don’t you see? We have bigger problems, Dictator isn’t going to hold a fair election, we have to get him out. Then worry about other things. Country needs to move forward, not backward.’

She found herself bargaining with him. ‘Just a short editorial,’ she said, but he was back at his typewriter, his fingers jabbing at the keys. She wondered if she should hang about, wait for him to finish, but she was angry now — he had made her feel old-fashioned, someone still clinging to her war-wounds. She gathered her things together and headed for the door, almost bumping into Aditi in the corridor. She was holding a blue-and-pink box of Alauddin sweets, her face flushed with triumph. ‘Celebration!’ she said, opening the box to reveal Kalo-Jaam, Chom Chom and a single, extra-large Laddu. ‘You’re not leaving now, are you? I can’t eat these all by myself. Can you believe it? I sweet-talked that printer into letting us do 800 for the price of five.’

Shafaat was still pounding away at the typewriter. ‘Come on, Maya,’ Aditi said, ‘Let’s keep these to ourselves. I’ll make some tea.’

Maya arranged the sweets on the table beside the Linotype. She liked the smell in here, the dry warmth created by the machine.

‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Aditi said, her cheeks pink with pleasure. She must have enjoyed the challenge of getting a deal from the printer. He would have been caught off guard by the sight of a woman in trousers, her hair braided tightly to the back of her head, as if she were zipped up. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, taking a bite out of the Laddu. ‘You peeved at Shafaat? What’s he done, asked you to make his tea, did he?’

Maya nodded. ‘He’s a pig.’

‘I want to write a piece about the Razakars, you know, how they should be tried.’

‘Really?’ A small piece of Laddu clung to Aditi’s lip.

‘Shafaat isn’t in favour.’

‘You know how he is, can’t see beyond his own two fingers.’ And she imitated him, stabbing into the air.

‘But he should care. And those people haven’t forgotten.’

‘Of course they haven’t forgotten. All those people who lost their loved ones.’

‘And the women.’

‘Women too.’

‘The raped women.’

‘You mean the Birangonas?’

‘Yes, the Birangonas. But calling them heroines erases what really happened to them. They didn’t charge into the battlefield and ask to be given medals. They were just the damage, the war trophies. They deserve for us to remember.’

‘What if they don’t want to remember?’

In her years of exile Maya had met many raped women. Some wanted abortions, or came to her to get stitched up, or simply to ask if there was a way for her to wash it out of them. Not one of them wanted anyone to find out. Not one of them wanted to file a police report, or tell her husband or her father. Perhaps it was wrong of her to want them to tell. But she could not get the image of Piya out of her mind. Piya squatting on the verandah, the words bubbling at her lips. She and Sohail had conspired against her that night. They had comforted her and told her it was over, that she was safe — but they had not made it possible for her to speak. It was an act of kindness that had led to the end of everything — Maya knew that now. And there was only one way to make it right.

Aditi popped the rest of the Laddu into her mouth. ‘Well, you know how it is. No one wants to stir all of that up.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Look,’ she said, wiping her hands on her jeans, ‘if it’s important to you, I’ll go in there and sugar him into it, okay? Don’t look so glum, yaar, you’ll get your piece. I’ll bring him this Kalo-Jaam and he won’t be able to resist.’

Maya followed Aditi with her eyes as she sailed into the other room, the box of sweets in her palm, and realised that this was what everything had been for. The sweets, pretending to commiserate with Maya, the article — all just another opportunity to plead and flirt with him and get her way. Maya didn’t want Shafaat to get sugared into anything. There was something sordid, she thought, about this office, the stale stink of cigarette smoke, the belching of the tanneries near by. She remembered back to the time when she and Sohail would talk about people like Aditi and Shafaat, how they had all the right ideas but lacked something, a sort of moral core. She remembered the conversations that took them deep into the night, until Sohail fell asleep with his hands in his pockets, his head falling back, and felt a stab of pain, of longing for him.

Maya often imagined the last day Sohail wore trousers. She wasn’t around to see it, but there must have been a final day, a day when he woke up in the morning, brushed his teeth, buttoned his shirt and pushed his feet through a pair of trousers. They may even have been his cherished jeans, handed down by a friend with a relative in America, procured through a mixture of pleading and bribing, like his Elvis LPs and his battered copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

All day her brother would have walked around with his legs piped through those trousers. He would have sat on rickshaws and brushed against tree trunks, and taken things in and out of his pockets. But at some point on that last day, he would have decided it would be a moulting, changing, skin-shedding sort of day. A day to abandon old fashions and adopt even older ones.

Had he predicted it? Had he known beforehand, and enjoyed those final moments, the stylish figure he cut across the university campus, the looks of admiration from his classmates, the sly glances of women?

Maya didn’t think so. The last day was probably as much a mystery to him as to everyone else. It would not have been premeditated. It would have come upon him suddenly, as a revelation: that he should dress in the style and manner of the faithful, that his outward appearance should match the changes that were occurring within, that it wouldn’t do to look like everyone else, to look as though he could attend parties and sit behind a desk and be called smart.

He would have decided on that day, and that day would have been the last. He would not have lingered over the trousers, or wanted a few final hours to enjoy them. As soon as he’d made up his mind, that would have been it.

And after:

A starched, white jellaba, the loose cotton pants underneath, pearl buttons on the collar. And, like a hand pressed in benediction, the cap that never left his head. That was what he wore every day after that last trousered day.

It wasn’t open for debate, Maya decided. If Shafaat didn’t let her write the article, she would send it to another paper. She would send it to the Observer. She went home and began to type.

My name is S. M. Haque, and I am here to tell you a few truths about our war. None of us is completely free of responsibility — not when we live in a country that is a living example of what we fought against — a Dictatorship, led by a man who cares nothing for this country, and a refusal to acknowledge the criminals who live among us. If we stand by and allow the crimes of the past to go unpunished, then we are complicit in those crimes. If the Dictator does not hold a trial for the war criminals, he too is a war criminal.

She signed it ‘Sheherezade Haque Maya’.

1985 February

The advance rent from the German tenant meant that there would be no money coming from the big house for six months. Maya’s savings had dried up. She decided to take up Dr Sattar’s offer of a position at the medical college hospital. He asked her to come in for an interview. The committee noted her high marks, her letters of distinction in the final examinations, but they were perplexed by her years in the countryside. Why had she given up surgery? She answered as best she could, making the years sound far more purposeful than they had been. She managed to impress them. She would be a junior doctor, subordinate to the other doctors in her class, but it was a start. She felt a lightness in her chest as she passed through the hospital on her way out. There would be a system here, charts and registers and written prescriptions. Students to boss around. She would not be held solely responsible if a patient died, or know the patient’s husband and her three other children, what they’d had to sell in order to afford the trip to hospital. Her world was contracting and expanding: she thought happily of colleagues, hospital politics, gossip in the corridors.

These were her thoughts as she returned to the bungalow that day. When she saw Joy’s car in the driveway, her stomach did a little dip.

The living room smelled of perfume. A small, middle-aged woman sat on the sofa and sipped tea from the good cups. Joy sat beside her, loading his plate with biscuits and shondesh. Ammoo was perched opposite, her hands clasped in her lap, smiling.

Because she felt she was interrupting something, Maya knocked on the doorframe.

‘Oh!’ said her mother, ‘come in, beta. Sit down. This is Mrs Bashir.’

Maya avoided looking at Joy and concentrated on the woman who was now standing up and reeling her into a tight embrace. ‘My dear girl,’ she said, ‘I am so happy to meet you. I knew your brother, but this is the first time I’m seeing you. Let me take a look. Oh, you are a beauty, those big eyes. Not so fair as your brother, but never mind, we don’t care about those things in our family.’

‘Hello,’ Maya said, leaning back as far as she could.

‘Do feet-salaam,’ her mother whispered.

‘Oh, no need for such formalities,’ Mrs Bashir said, releasing Maya. ‘Sit beside me, you must be tired. Joy told me you’re a very busy doctor. Very independent-minded,’ she said, waving her arms.

Joy crossed and uncrossed his legs. Maya tried to catch his eye, but he was looking the other way. ‘Maya,’ Ammoo said, her voice like warm milk, ‘why don’t you tell Mrs Bashir what you did today? Will you have another cup of tea, Mrs Bashir?’

‘I have to wash my hands,’ Maya said. ‘I’ve just come from the hospital. You wouldn’t want to catch TB, auntie.’

Mrs Bashir blinked, smiled through her surprise. ‘Please, beta, go right ahead.’

At the sink Maya caught a glimpse of herself. Her eyes were small and tired, and her braid had become ragged. She splashed water on herself and retied her hair.

Joy was waiting for her outside the bathroom. ‘TB?’

‘Well, there’s been an outbreak. I wanted to warn your mother.’

In the living room, more tea had been served. Maya sat as far from Mrs Bashir as she could and stared at the ceiling. Mrs Bashir looked expectantly around the room. Her eye caught the basket beside Maya’s chair.

‘Do you knit, Maya?’

‘No, not me.’ Had Joy told this woman nothing? ‘It’s Ammoo’s.’

‘I’m just a novice,’ Rehana said. ‘Something to do with my hands. I thought I’d start with a scarf.’

Mrs Bashir’s voice trembled when she said, ‘I used to knit too. For my husband.’

They had found their common ground. ‘Maya, why don’t you and Joy sit in the garden for a while while us mothers have a talk?’

Outside, Joy tried to take her hand. She shrugged him off.

‘You want to go for a drive?’

‘No, let’s walk. We need candles; the electricity’s been going off at night.’

They left through the kitchen door. As soon as they had crossed the road, Maya turned to Joy. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing.’ He searched his pockets and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘I told my mother I wanted to marry you, and she said the proper thing to do would be to pay a visit to your house. She insisted.’

He wanted to marry her. Marry her. She suppressed the tiny cheer that went up, unbidden. Marriage was a life sentence. ‘Do you do everything your mother says?’

‘No.’

Why hadn’t he said anything to her? ‘And did you think of consulting me first?’

‘Of course. But I thought it would be best if I appealed to auntie.’

‘That’s pathetic.’

‘Look,’ he said, inhaling sharply, ‘there’s no conspiracy here.’

‘It’s pathetic and you are just trying to make me feel guilty. You know how much she wants me to get married — you’re just using it against me. She’s dying, you know.’

‘I thought she was in remission.’

‘Well, it’s just a matter of time. Don’t you know I think about giving her some comfort — wedding, babies?’

‘I thought you didn’t want any babies.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is I have never given her anything.’ Would it be for herself, or for Ammoo? She might never know.

‘Well, then, all the more reason not to delay.’

‘You don’t care whether I love you, you just want to take advantage of my position?’ They were at the park now, where the road curved. She turned, marching towards the small cluster of shops on the corner.

‘Maya, please, I know you don’t mean that. Why do you always have to talk that way?’

‘Because I’m a hard-hearted woman, that’s why. You shouldn’t want — shouldn’t even dream of marrying me.’

‘I dream, I can’t help it.’

‘Well, I can’t help myself either. You can’t marry me. You can’t marry me and turn me into one of those women, with the jewellery and making perfectly round parathas and doing everything my mother-in-law says and only letting nice words out of my mouth.’

‘Think of all the nice words you have stored up. Since you’ve used up all the nasty ones.’

‘Don’t joke.’

He flicked away the cigarette and stopped in front of her. They had arrived at the shop, which was dimly lit by a hurricane lamp. The shopkeeper recognised her and waved. ‘I’m not joking. I want to marry you.’

‘You can’t. Go now, I have to buy the candles.’ She walked away from him and up to the shopkeeper’s counter, ordered the candles. She heard his footsteps retreating, and she lingered, buying oil, soap, eggs, chiding herself for listening out for him, for hoping he would come back, beg her again.

When she got home, he was leaning on the bonnet of his car.

‘Drive,’ she said, flinging herself into the passenger seat.

He was slow, almost casual, as he backed out of the driveway. She pressed her face against the window and the breath dragoned out of her, hot and fierce.

‘Where do you want to go?’ One hand on the steering wheel, the elbow poking out. It made the blood pound in her ears.

‘Just drive. I don’t care.’ Don’t cry, she told herself. It’ll be so stupid if you cry. ‘You could have asked me yourself, you know.’

‘I wanted to get your mother on my side first.’

‘She is on your side. Everyone is on your side.’

‘There isn’t a side.’

‘You just said.’

‘No sides.’

‘Do you even love me?’

He shifted into fourth. Relaxed on the clutch. Smooth as forest honey.

‘So you don’t even love me.’

‘You have something against marriage?’

She turned to face him. ‘How old am I?’

‘I don’t know, twenty-six?’

‘Thirty-bloody-two. You think I would be thirty-bloody-two without a husband if I didn’t have a problem with marriage?’

‘Here I was, thinking it was just a matter of the right man.’

‘There is no such thing.’

‘No such thing as the right man?’

‘They start out all right, but then, somewhere along the way, their egos turn to glass and you have to spend your whole life with your arms around them, making them feel better while your own life turns to shit.’ She banged her fist on the dashboard.

‘Is this about Shafaat?’

‘Shafaat — what? Oh, you’re jealous now. Exactly what I meant. Ego like an eggshell. And stop smiling, damn it, this isn’t funny.’

‘Stings like a bee,’ he said quietly, marshmallow-tender.

They were near Paltan now, and she leaned out of the car to see Paltan Maidan, the vast open field she knew so well. The car turned and she saw a brightly lit sign. She banged on the window. ‘Stop here — stop. Stop the car.’

He braked, jolted. ‘What?’

She wrenched open the door and flew out of the car. ‘What’s this?’ It was dark, and hard to see beyond the gate, but she caught sight of what looked like a Ferris wheel and, beyond, the plastic animals with human faces that told her this was a playground, a children’s playground. SHISHU PARK, the sign said.

Maya screamed. ‘Shishu Park!’ She pulled at the gates. ‘Did you know?’

She could see Joy getting out of his car and coming towards her. He must know why she was crying now, and pulling at the gates. ‘Who did this?’ she said. ‘Who did this?’

‘I don’t know.’ He stood a few feet away from her, smoking a cigarette. At first she thought of sitting there, right there in front of the gate, and waiting for someone to come and explain to her why Paltan Maidan had been turned into an amusement park. She dragged her hands across the bars. Joy finished his cigarette and came up behind her and put his arms around her. Then he led her to the car, opening the door for her before getting in and starting the engine. By the time they had turned around, she had wiped her face on the end of her sari.

‘It’s just a place,’ she said, ‘just an open field. They could have done anything with it, they could have left it there.’ She was imagining it now, the playground, a place that in the daytime would be littered with the newspaper cones of roasted peanuts, and tiny grains of puffed rice with mustard oil clinging to them, and the ribbons that fell from the braids of little girls as they ran from the bumper cars to the Ferris Wheel and screeched to their parents to hold their hands and the unwound shoelaces and the scraps of Mimi chocolate and pink glucose biscuit wrappers. A playground. Paltan Maidan, the most sacred site of the whole country, the place where Mujib had made all his speeches, and where the Pakistan Army had surrendered, and where he had returned after his nine months in exile and inaugurated the country, wiping tears from his eyes with a handkerchief, which he then waved at the crowd, thousands and thousands of them, as if to say, I come in peace, I am your father.

It was where, for a moment, they had won. Now their history would be papered over by peanuts and the smell of candy floss.

Joy stopped the car again, on a side road. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to her. A few feet away was a roadside biri stall. The man behind the stall was asleep, his ankles crossed, his arm flung over his eyes. She started to cry again. Everyone else was passing by this park every day; they were buying tickets and going inside and having a good time. No one else was angry.

Joy peeled her fingers from her face. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘it’s okay. The first time I saw it, I cried too.’ He leaned close. He smelled of lemons. She felt the lifting of her senses. She wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him towards her. Lips yielding. He was saying something but she couldn’t hear him. She pulled him closer — now her mouth was scraping his cheek. Smooth, with a hint of bristle. Rough-smooth. Lemonaftershave. She exhaled. She could hear him now, his lips at her ear.

‘Let me tell you something about love,’ he said. ‘They chopped off my finger with a cleaver, did you know that? I don’t know where they got it, a heavy big knife like that. Probably got it off some butcher. But you know what I was thinking when they did it? I was thinking that of all the people I knew, you would be the only one who wouldn’t mind. And when I got home and found my mother in a white sari, I knew you would understand that too, because you had a dead father all those years. I have loved you this whole time,’ he said. ‘All this time.’ He pulled away, serious now, his hands cupped over her shoulders.

‘Promise me’ Maya whispered.

‘Anything.’

‘That you won’t ask me to forget. Who we are.’

‘I promise.’

He made a fist around her hands. Thank you. He put it to his forehead. Thank you.

*

Maya felt someone shaking her roughly. ‘Apa, apa.’ A woman stood at the foot of the bed, waving her gloved arms around like a mime artist.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Rokeya’s sister. Forgive me for waking you like this, but she asked me to fetch you. She’s having terrible pain.’

‘Go on, I’ll meet you upstairs.’

‘Not upstairs. She’s at home with us. Hurry, rickshaw is waiting.’

Maya pulled on a crumpled salwaar-kameez, slipped her feet into a pair of chappals and ran through the back door, brushing past Sufia, who had taken to sleeping beside the stove as the nights grew colder.

In the rickshaw, she inspected Rokeya’s sister. ‘Have I seen you before? You didn’t join the upstairs jamaat?’ They set off towards the north side of the city, the rickshaw-wallah cycling swiftly through the empty streets, a biri at the edge of his lips.

‘I came once, but I didn’t want to stay. Khadija was angry because Rokeya didn’t bring in the rest of our family.’

The girl was covered from head to toe, with only a small piece of chiffon, like a dirty pane of glass, through which to see the world. The girl lifted the chiffon and revealed her face. In the darkness it shone, pale and perfect. ‘Khadija, whatever she calls herself — she’s a heartless woman.’

‘Don’t you like her sermons?’ She thought of the rapturous faces of the other girls, the way they fanned the air around Khadija with their gaping, devoted breaths.

‘She believes every word she says. That’s something. But I can’t follow someone like a mule.’

‘Then why are you dressed like that?’

‘Do you think I could have come to fetch you in the middle of the night otherwise?’

Maya considered this for a moment. A girl like this one, she might never have ventured out if it weren’t for the cover of her cloak. The practical reply impressed her. She squeezed the girl’s hand. ‘How long ago did the labour start?’

‘A few hours. She refused to go to the hospital. She was half starved when she came back to us; we thought she wasn’t going to make it.’

‘What happened?’

‘She won’t say. She was punished, I think, for something.’

Maya remembered seeing Rokeya twice, out in the sun, kneeling. Why hadn’t she said something? She had imagined Rokeya was doing it of her own free will and just shelved it among the other bizarre rituals of the upstairs. Now she felt guilty. ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea.’

‘Stop here,’ the girl said to the rickshaw-wallah. ‘We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.’ She had brought a torch, and they picked their way through the narrowing road, finally coming upon a small house with a curtain draped across the doorway. There was a front room and a back room and, somewhere beyond, a kitchen that was probably shared with the neighbours.

Rokeya’s father caught a glimpse of Maya and politely averted his eyes. ‘Subhan Allah,’ he said, his voice thick, ‘please, she’s waiting.’

Rokeya was swallowing her breaths. When she saw Maya, she squeezed her eyes shut and said, ‘I knew you would come.’

Maya washed her hands in a bowl of water and palpated Rokeya’s stomach. Then she told the girl to breathe while she performed an exam. Rokeya winced as Maya plunged her arm deep into her and measured her cervix. ‘Just relax now,’ she said, falling quickly into the soothing tones she reserved for women in labour. She probed with light fingers, reaching for the soft dome of the baby’s head. Instead, she felt the baby’s buttocks. Breech. They should have taken her to the hospital, but it was too late now, she was already too advanced. Maya had delivered breech babies before, but they were risky, the delivery slow. And where was Rokeya’s husband? There was no sign of him. Better not to ask, not now. ‘Listen to me, Rokeya. Open your eyes.’

Rokeya’s eyelids fluttered open.

‘Your baby is upside-down. Do you hear me? Nod if you understand. It’s too late to do anything, you’ll have to deliver. Don’t worry, I’ve seen it before. It’s going to be slow and it’s going to hurt. Understand?’ The baby’s backside was going to come out first, then the legs. She wouldn’t be able to assist; if she laid her hands on the baby, it might extend its arms and get stuck in the birth canal.

Rokeya nodded, squeezing her eyes shut again.

When the time came, Maya pulled her into a squatting position. ‘Next pain comes, you push, okay? Push as hard as you can.’

With each contraction, Rokeya put her head down and grunted. Soft, softer than Maya had ever heard a woman grunt. Maya whispered a stream of encouraging words, but the girl didn’t appear to be listening, just breathing roughly out of her nose and clenching her hands together into hard white fists.

Her sister came and went, boiling water for Rokeya, cradling her head. The contractions were coming faster now, but without any assistance the baby could descend only a few millimetres at a time. An hour passed. Another. Rokeya collapsed on to her back. ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I can’t any more.’

Maya peered between Rokeya’s legs. ‘It’s not long now, just a few more minutes. I can feel it coming.’

Rokeya shook her head. ‘Can’t,’ she whispered.

‘You have to. There’s no other way.’ Maya tried to pull her up again, but she fell back on the rolled-up mattress, shaking her head. Now the scream came as the baby bore down on her, a low, black bellow. ‘Come on now,’ Maya said, ‘the baby wants to come out, you can feel it, I know you can.’

Rokeya was too tired to move. Maya came up behind her and pushed her into a sitting position. Then she squatted behind her and held her by the armpits. She pushed her mouth close to the girl’s ear. ‘You know what? It’s a girl. I felt it during the exam. This is your little girl. You know how hard it is to be a little girl in this world? Don’t you want to let her know you love her, right now, before she’s even in the world? Tell her. Tell her now. Push with me.’ Maya gripped Rokeya hard while she pushed, and her strength seemed to return as she bore down. Maya saw the baby’s legs. With the next surge, the torso and shoulders emerged. Now that the arms were free, Maya tugged, gently, holding the neck in place. ‘Just one more,’ she said, but Rokeya was fully in control now, her body dictating every breath. The baby’s chin began to emerge, and the bridge of the nose, eyes covered in yellow and green, remnants of an already old world. Maya lifted her up, her arms and legs flopping to the sides while she rubbed the little chest, waiting for the cry, and then it came, high and grand and powerful. Before placing her in her mother’s arms, she whispered, as she had at all the other births, hello, little amphibian. Someone had to acknowledge the strangeness of this soul, and the distance it had traversed, millions and millions of years, in order to be here.

She had witnessed the birth of so many of these beings, held their hands as they left their sea-scapes and came ashore, but she had never allowed herself the thought that it might someday be hers, this spilling out of life. Now, in the quiet moment that followed, Maya allowed herself a small fantasy. Something of her own. She thought of Joy, and the child they might have, a strange little creature that would be hers this time, all hers.

Bundled into a katha, the baby was handed to the family while Maya attended to Rokeya. She held a needle to the kerosene flame and threaded it with string. ‘It’s going to hurt again,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Rokeya bit down on her lip. ‘I have to tell you something,’ she said, her fists curled around the mattress.

‘Now?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have to tell you now. It’s about the boy.’

About to make another stitch, Maya steadied herself. ‘Zaid?’

‘Did you know he ran away from the madrasa?’

Maya concentrated on her fingers, reaching, dipping, rising, closing the wound. ‘He’s run away?’

‘It was when your mother was in the hospital.’

He had lied. How stupid of her not to have known. ‘You saw him?’ she asked.

‘Only for a few minutes, then Sister Khadija found him. I asked him why he ran away. He said it was because at the madrasa the Huzoor made him lie down. What did he mean by that, Maya Apa? Because I have been thinking about it and thinking about it, and it can mean only one thing, really. Only one thing.’

Suddenly it seemed to Maya that Rokeya had breathed all the air out of the room. ‘You’re sure that’s what he said?’

‘I know the child lies. But I believed him.’

It can mean only one thing. It took every shred of Maya’s will to finish stitching Rokeya’s tear, give her instructions on how to look after the wound and slip quietly from the room, making her excuses to the family and jumping into the first rickshaw she could find, dawn tapping its feet on the horizon, the sky still black and studded with stars.

1977 November

Sohail was throwing away his books. Maya caught him boxing them into crates and alphabetising, sorting, dusting the spines. It was the loving way he did this, lining each crate with newspaper and placing the books gently inside, that made her angry. She saw the struggle that bent his hand over this title, that spine. The way he opened, read a page — lingered over Ibsen, perhaps considering Hedda, or Nora — then closed each volume with firmness, those women from another age, another world, forbidden to him now.

That’s when she confronted him, standing in the doorway of his bedroom, the books clustered at his feet like a dense school of fish. She knew the answer, had known all along, the change in his clothes, the dusting over of the guitar. Silvi, she said, I know it is Silvi.

‘She’s my wife; you can’t speak that way about her.’

‘So this is your idea?’

‘It was my choice.’ He was holding a volume of Rilke and shaking it at her.

Getting those books together hadn’t been easy. He had scoured New Market for each of the volumes, sitting on the chairs outside the booksellers, leaning into dusty, spiderwebbed corners for the books they pretended they didn’t have. Lawrence, Fitzgerald. The Scarlet Letter. He loved the outcast heroines, Lily Bart and Hester Prynne and Moll Flanders. The Rilke, she knew, he had stolen from the university library. The volume had attached itself to him and asked to be taken home, stuffed into the rucksack of a boy-soldier, battered in rain, in the water-filled air of the monsoon. It had been read in the pale orange of a kerosene lamp, in the yellow and gold of a candle, over meals of coarse bread and green banana curry. Orange and yellow and gold and green banana. This was what he was pointing at her now, the corner of the stolen volume, about to be closed into the dark of a crate, never to be touched again by the soldier, never lodged in the caress of his throat as he read its verses aloud, because his new love allowed him only one poet.

‘It has nothing to do with her.’

‘You suddenly have something against books?’

‘There has to be a limit, Maya.’

‘I agree. There has to be a limit. Isn’t that why you joined the fighting?’

‘It didn’t do any good, did it?’

‘I know it feels that way now, but it won’t always be like this.’

‘It doesn’t matter. There is another life after this one.’

He packed away the Rilke, pulled another volume from the shelf and tossed it into the box.

‘I want to talk about it,’ she said. ‘You never told me anything about the war.’

‘What could I tell you? We fought, we won. It didn’t make a difference in the end.’ He peeled off his cap and wrung it between his hands. His hair was cut close against his skin. He looked, as he never had during the war, like a soldier.

Any minute now she knew he could be gone to her. Gone for ever. What could she say to keep him back? Nothing, probably. Silvi’s hold on him was too strong, and she had the Almighty to back her up. A formidable foe. But there was one thing, one thing she had never told Sohail. Perhaps now was the time to tell him, something that might shock him into realising he wasn’t the only one who was suffering because of what he had done. ‘I want to talk about Piya,’ she said.

He swerved around to face her, and in a low, secretive voice said, ‘That’s finished, Maya.’

She knew he was trying to convince himself. She knew he thought of Piya every day. Every day he thought of her and wondered where she had gone. Just as Maya did.

She took the cap from his hands and made a space for them to sit down. He put his palms on the stacks of books and sat like a king, suddenly attentive. She couldn’t get out of it now. It occurred to her that if she told him, he might take all the books out of their crates and put them back on to the shelves. And exchange his loose cotton pyjamas for a pair of trousers and buy a reel-to-reel player so they could listen to Simon and Garfunkel.

She swallowed hard and began. ‘It was just after liberation, just after Piya came. I started working at the Women’s Rehabilitation Board. Ammoo too. We went to the office together, to volunteer. And they gave her the job of talking to the war widows, sorting out their pensions, their property. Negotiating with their husbands’ families.’ She took a deep breath, steadying herself for the next part. ‘And, Bhaiya, because I had medical experience, you know, from the camps, they assigned me to the wards. I performed abortions.’

She folded and unfolded and refolded Sohail’s prayer cap. ‘I didn’t tell you. You thought I was just helping the sick ones but we had a whole clinic at the back, where the women came to get rid of the babies. You remember what Sheikh Mujib said? That he didn’t want those bastard children in our country. But some of them — it was hard, you know, I didn’t think so much about it at the time — they wanted to get rid of them, but when it came time to do it they would cry. And then they would wake up and ask us to put the babies back. One day, Piya came to the clinic. She asked to see me — Ammoo didn’t know, she came straight to the ward. And she asked for a checkup. She was pregnant, Bhaiya, did you know?’

She couldn’t look at him. She said to herself, look at him when you tell him. But she couldn’t, she couldn’t look at him. She looked at the books instead. Her eye fell on Brideshead Revisited. To Waugh, she said, ‘She was early, you could hardly see. It must have happened towards the end of the war.

‘She wanted an abortion. Right now, she said. Do it right now. I was busy, I had ten other patients that morning, but I told her to wait, I said I would do it. Today, she said, it has to be today or I won’t be able to. I’ll tell him, she said. I didn’t understand what she meant, but I talked to the in-charge doctor and made the appointment. But by the time I came to her, she was nervous. I’m not sure, she said. She asked for you, she said please call Sohail Bhai. But you were in the cantonment that day, remember, you’d gone to quit the army. There were formalities, you were away all day. I thought she was scared, just scared like the others. I thought about bringing her home but I remembered what she said, that it had to be that day or she would lose her nerve. I knew what to do; I did it all the time, persuading the girls they were doing the right thing, for their families, for the country. If you have the operation you can go home, I said to her, your family will take you back. You are a Birangona, I told her, a war hero—’

The words came rushing back to Maya, the words she had been taught.

‘Defiled by the enemy. The child in your womb is a bastard child, a vial of poison. You must not allow it to come into this world. You must not give it the milk of your breast. What has been done can be undone. You must not live with it for the rest of your life. You must not mother this child. Do not think of it as your child, it is the seed of your enemy, I told her. Finally, she agreed.’

Sohail was sweating, thin lines of water bisecting his face. He didn’t move to wipe it away. Now he remembered the day he had found her in that prison, how he had carried her out of there, the short stubble of her hair rubbing coarsely against his collarbone. ‘Take me home,’ she said, ‘I want to go home, take me home.’

They were in a small bamboo grove, as far from the barracks as he could carry her. But the land was flat, and every time the building caught her eye she howled, so he propped her against a tree with her back to the prison. He sat in her line of vision, where the sun struck her face, casting a long, elegant shadow across her. ‘My village is east,’ she said.

They had brought her there in a jeep. ‘There was another girl, but she died.’

She told him the name of her village. Dhanikhola. Will you take me? The war is over, he told her. They would walk. At every village they were greeted with tired cheers and the small scraps of the harvest that were leftover from the war. Village after village, Pahara, Mormora, Lalkhet. Every mother wanted him to be her son, returning tired and whole with a woman in his arms.

She was eighteen. ‘My sister is the same age,’ he said.

‘You have a sister?’

‘Yes, Maya. She went to work at the refugee camps across the border.’

‘All by herself?’

‘She’s a very spirited girl.’

Piya had wide-apart eyes and a raw, aching quality to her voice. On the third day she waded into a village pond. He watched, worried she would stray too far. The sun struck the back of her, catching her hands as they moved across the water, propelling her forward. When she was neck-deep, she dipped her head under. Her sari floated to the top, flowering. And when she came up again, she was different, as though she had gone under and told all the bones of her to put themselves back in order. That was how she emerged: neat, organised. Wide apart eyes and a bruise in her voice. He asked if she would ever come to Dhaka, if she would visit. They were close now, only a few miles away.

They came to the edge of the village, and it was exactly as she had described it: a patch of trees casting a pale green tinge on neat houses of mud and straw. Round cakes of dung scalloped on to the outside walls, palm-printed by those who had collected it. A pond. Everything hushed, the fog hanging low and swallowing the cries of the koel, the ripple of water.

He wrote his address on a scrap of paper, knowing she couldn’t read, knowing every part of her would be examined, explored. She would toss it into the fire. She would never come.

He put his hand to his forehead and said goodbye. Formal. It was Piya who stepped close, who put her palm, scented with water, on his cheek. She who raised her face, kissed him lightly on the mouth, her lip rough and small, like the husk on a grain of rice.

She had learned a few words of English. See you again, she said, expanding the distance between them with her choppy, awkward syllables.

And she did come. She came and they spent their hours in the garden, talking about everything and nothing. The memory of war began to fade. Until that night — now he knows it was after Piya had gone to see Maya in the hospital, but at the time it was just another day. He had gone to the cantonment to surrender his gun. In the last few weeks of the fighting they had given him a uniform, with a green-and-red badge sewn on the sleeve. At the cantonment he saw the other boys in his regiment, Farouq and Shameek and Kona, all of them signing up to remain in the army. They told him it was no surprise that he was quitting; they had never taken him for a company man. Without a cause to fight for, he didn’t belong. He had listened to the official speech and been discharged, without dishonour, from the Bangladesh Army. And he had returned still dressed in his uniform. He could give it back later, they said.

It was late and the house was quiet, everyone asleep, or so he had thought until he caught a glimpse of Piya in the garden. He could barely see in the dark, but it was unmistakably her, the straightness of her back just as it was when she had emerged from the village pond.

‘Marry me,’ he said, whispering into the dark.

She turned around, her gaze drifting to the other side of the wall. ‘Who lives there?’ she asked, pointing to the two-storey house.

‘No one. We have to find new tenants.’

‘It belongs to you?’

‘Ammoo built it. We lived off the rent after my father died.’

‘It’s very big.’

‘Two storeys.’

‘Have you been inside?’

‘Yes. Do you want to go?’ He unlatched the small gate built into the wall.

She was sure-footed, even in the weak light of the half-moon, slipping through the gate and on to the lawn on the other side. She climbed the three short steps and waited for him in front of the large dark double-doors.

‘It’s locked,’ she said.

‘Yes, of course. I forgot. I’m sorry I don’t have the key.’

She cupped her hands against a window, peered inside.

‘Piya,’ he said, ‘there’s something I have to tell you.’

‘Me too.’

‘I want to get married.’ He tried to see her, but the light was too weak. ‘I want us to get married — what do you think?’

‘If that is what you wish,’ she replied, sitting on the top step.

‘Is that what you want?’

‘What will everyone say?’

‘Who cares?’

‘They’ll say I did it to get your things, this house.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You love me, don’t you?’

She didn’t say anything, only sat perfectly still, caught in the yellow tinge of moonlight. ‘If you want, I will be your wife. But I am not a good woman.’

‘What happened to you — it’s not your fault.’

‘I’m very tired,’ she said.

He sat down beside her. Laced his fingers through hers. ‘It’s all right, I’m tired too. I don’t care about anything, what anyone says. Do you understand? I’m tired too, I’m so tired. I want to lie with my head in your lap — forgive me — I want to kiss you again. I want to forget everything that happened before. I want our children to live in the country, free children in a free country. But you decide. Don’t choose me because you’re here, because you can’t go home. Choose me if you love me — do you understand? That’s what I believe. You have to love me.’

Her grip tightened, and then, abruptly, she let go and sprang up, light on the grass, like a girl who had grown up without shoes. She disappeared across the lawn.

Buoyant, he imagined it was a skip of joy, that flight across the lawn, but it was the lightning speed of departure, a farewell without ceremony.

By the morning she was gone. Her small bundle of clothes, her plastic comb, the stick of neem she used to clean her teeth. Her extra sari, drying that morning on the washing line.

He set out to look for her. He didn’t mean to, but he found himself travelling all the way back to her village, taking a bus to Mymensingh, a rickshaw the rest of the way. We never saw her again, an old woman said, spitting betel from the side of her mouth. The village was no longer beautiful, the houses ragged and dusty in the rising heat. He returned to the city and walked aimlessly from street to street, asking strangers if they had seen a young brown-eyed girl, walking alone. All the walking-alone girls had brown eyes. What was her father’s name? A girl had drowned herself in Dhanmondi Lake. It could have been her. He arrived too late at the morgue; someone had already claimed the body. She was on a bus bound for the border. Or she had boarded one of the planes taking the Pakistan Army back to Islamabad. There were women on that plane? Our women? Yes, there were women. They had been promised marriage. She could have gone with them.

‘Bhaiya,’ Maya said softly, ‘it was your child?’

He sprang up, knocking over an open crate. ‘You can ask me this, after everything?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘I didn’t touch her, you understand? I wouldn’t touch her. Not after what happened to her.’ He was shaking now, his arms hanging limp at his sides. ‘You gave her the operation, without asking any of us, me or Ammoo?’

‘But I didn’t do it, Bhaiya. I didn’t do it — she changed her mind.’

He started to cry. She could see his eyes welling up and he turned his face away from her.

‘You thought I was enjoying the days after liberation. But they were blood-soaked, Bhaiya, for everyone.’

He shook his hands at her, as if they were wet. ‘But I killed, Maya. I killed.’

Of course she misunderstood. ‘It’s all right, Bhaiya, it was the right thing to do. It was a just war, a right war. For us, for our freedom.’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t mean to. I was so angry.’

‘If they had let me fight, I would have shot them in the knees and let them die slowly.’

‘He was innocent.’

None of them were innocent. She told him that.

‘You want to talk about saving — Silvi saved me. You were too busy killing those children.’

So he had chosen. His wife, a future without books. The thought unleashed a fury in Maya, a tight, searing fury. ‘You put those books in crates, I’m going to take them out and lay them open for you. Every book you put away I will unpack and leave at your doorstep. I’ll read them aloud. Remember when Ammoo used to read the Qur’an to you? I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to keep bringing the books back until you can’t ignore them any more.’

His hand was dipped inside a crate. Slowly, he straightened. ‘I’ll have to find something else to do with them,’ he said softly.

He’ll give them away, she thought. He’ll give them all away. Damn it. She slipped out of the room then, without a word, stalked through the garden, loosening her braid and running her fingers roughly through the tangle of her hair. Do something, she told herself. Do something. Your brother is turning, turning. Soon you won’t recognise him. He had been her oldest friend, all the things a brother should be: protective, bullying, pushing her to be better. He knew all her frailties, knew she tended towards the hysterical, the dogmatic. That she was angry most of the time. He pushed her against herself. She needed him. It was selfish, but she needed him. No, it was not selfish. They all needed him. He was the lighthouse. The country needed him. Sheikh Mujib had said so himself. Oh, God, Mujib was dead. Sohail could not be gone too, it would be too much. The world would collapse. What could she do? Silvi was in command now, Silvi, whose thin lips and foreign eyes had turned a wounded man into a prophet.

She thought of all the things he liked to do. Before the war, before Piya and Silvi. Cricket on the shortwave. Mangoes and ice cream. Dante and Ibsen. Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. Her voice on the harmonium. Her voice. When was the last time he had heard her sing? She could sing to him. She could play the harmonium and open her voice. She had sometimes watched people’s eyes widen when she sounded her first note, and afterwards, even if they knew her, she would see that a new formality had opened up between them, because her voice would have altered her in their eyes. Such tenderness out of such a hard girl. Small woman, big voice.

Silvi could go to hell. She would sing. She pulled her harmonium out of its case. It had been a long time since she’d pushed open the bellows at the back of the instrument, since the war, probably.

She was at war now. War with Silvi. She had the books on her side, and the harmonium, and Tagore, and she would fight. Already she felt flush with victory, her hand in a fist, pacing the garden and punching the air. She couldn’t rely on her friends any more, not after Sohail had converted Kona on the spot. Weak souls! She would have to do it herself. Sohail was still in his bedroom, probably wondering what to do with his books. This would be the perfect time to strike. She dusted off the top of the harmonium. Laid out a jute pati in the garden. She would do it right there. Ammoo would come home to find her singing in the garden and she would agree that they had to use all the weapons in their arsenal to battle Silvi. They would fight fervour with fervour. The sun was beginning to go down for the night, the evening sounds taking over the daytime ones. Crickets, mosquitoes. She already had a few bites on her arm. She didn’t care. She lit a mosquito coil. All right, here we are. She started with one of Sohail’s favourites, ‘Ekla Chalo Re’. ‘Jodi tor daak shune keu na, tobe chalo re.’

She faltered with the harmonium a bit at first, her fingers getting tangled in the keys, but she soon caught up with herself, pumping the bellows with her left hand, pushing the keys down with her other. Tagore, just the man for the job.

The song ended. She heard the swish of a takoo lizard, its low staccato call. Should she have brought a lamp? Keep singing. A revolutionary song, ‘Amar protibader bhasha, amar protirodher agun.’ This one was getting her blood pumping. Her fingers moved and twisted and battered the keys. Sohail had loved this song. It would bring it all back for him. She kept an eye on his door, but it never stirred, not for the whole length of the song. A poem, then. She recited as much as she knew of Nazrul’s ‘Bidrohi’, keeping the tempo with three fingers on the harmonium. When she faltered on the second stanza, she imagined he would burst out of his room and finish the line for her. Still nothing. She switched to the tenderest Tagore song she knew, ‘Anondo Dhara’. Stream of Joy. She heard something. The creak of his door. A column of light, his shadow encased within it.

He was coming out. Her voice soared in anticipation. Something in his arms, it was too dark to make out. Just close your eyes and keep singing. ‘Anondo dhara bohichey bhuboney.’ Out he came, walking through the hallway and into the driveway. The shuffle of things. His books. Oh, he was moving them out. Don’t falter, just keep on going. He is only doing what he said he would do. Someone must be coming to collect the books. Whoever it was, she would stop them, convince them to leave the books in front of the house. Ha! What would he do then? Perhaps he just needs to hide them from Silvi — yes, that may be it. He’s protecting them. Never mind about the books. Keep singing. Bohichey bhuboney. In and out of his room, in and out; she could hear him occasionally grunting with the weight of the crates as he moved them to the driveway.

She was singing without thinking now, whatever song came to her. She started one without finishing another. Her body swayed with it, fingers and breath and tongue obeying. Eyes squeezed shut, believing that when she opened them, she would have sung them back to another time. A time when her brother wasn’t packing his books into crates. The singing was heating up the garden. This is how Tagore must have meant his songs to be done. Warming the spirit and the body. Words coming out with the roar and spit of a fire.

She opened her eyes.

The garden was orange black and Sohail stood in the middle of it, tossing books into a pile. Arm up, fling, watch the fire grow, fling. Was she still singing? She had stopped. Nothing but the sound of burning now, a low growl, and she wanted to move but she could not. The bucket was under the garden tap. She could attempt to fill it up, douse the fire. But its colour was speaking, its colour was saying, I am greater than you. My fire has silenced your fire.

It must be a dream. A great calm flowed through her. She took up the song again. While Ammoo dragged her into the house, while Ammoo filled the bucket and doused the flames, her voice remained tied to the verse. It was only when she heard Ammoo shout that she was roused, because Ammoo was saying it was all her fault, as she picked the floating scraps of paper out of her hair, as she rubbed her cheek, black with print that had turned back to ink. Only then did she realise what had happened.

Sohail had burned all the books.

‘You pushed him,’ Ammoo was shouting. ‘You pushed and you pushed.’ And Maya heard herself protest: ‘What could I do? I was only singing.’ But her mother, eyes as big as eggs now, said, ‘Did you listen to anything he said, up on that rooftop? Did you listen? No. You mocked him. You turned deaf and you mocked him.’

‘Because I knew where it was going.’

‘It didn’t have to. It did not. You led him here, calling him a mullah. Why? You couldn’t stand for him to be different.’

Et tu, mother.

Maya made the arrangements that very night, telephoning Sultana and packing her bags, her lungs full of the fire. In the morning, she disappeared. Two months later, the sermons on the roof were stopped. The little tin shack went up, and Sohail and Silvi built their world on top of the bungalow. Mrs Chowdhury died, silently and without a tear from her daughter. Zaid was born, brought into the world by a midwife whose face was covered by a piece of black netting. He opened his eyes to that, an empty space where the welcoming laugh should have been.

*

Maya took the bus to Tangail. Without unpacking her bag or greeting her friend, she began a shift at the clinic. The duty doctor was hassled, a spray of blood clinging to the collar of his shirt, as if he had bled there himself. ‘What are you doing here alone?’ he asked, rolling up his sleeves and bending over a sink, cracked, grey-rimmed.

‘I’m a friend of Sultana,’ she said. ‘From the medical college.’

He appeared too tired to ask any more questions. ‘There’s a cholera epidemic.’ The hallways were crowded; people threw down their gamchas and waited in the corridors. ‘You know what to do — ORT.’ He handed her a white jacket. She was dismissed.

She raced through one shift, then another, filled with a restless energy, and with the fear that if she sat down, if she thought about what she had done, she might be forced to run back to the bungalow. By the second night, she had found a stray stethoscope and wrapped it around her neck, and when she looked in the mirror she was glad to find a drawn face staring back at her, all signs of her heartache obscured by physical exhaustion.

When Sultana caught up with her the next morning, she was weaving through the ward, skirting between the patients on the floor, between the beds.

‘Time to stop,’ she said.

She blinked, taking a moment to recognise her. ‘I still have a few from last night.’

‘It’s been thirty-eight hours. Let’s go home.’

She blinked again, salt stinging her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said, turning her face away so her friend wouldn’t see her tears. ‘My things are in the other ward.’

She stayed until the cholera had done its worst. When it was time to go, Sultana’s husband said, ‘My friend Ranen has a clinic in Rangamati. They’re always shorthanded.’

After a fortnight in Khulna, and a week in Khagrachari, she found herself on the train to Rangamati. On the ferry she heard the sound of other languages, syllables with hard edges, and further still along her journey she saw women in long skirts and tunics, their faces small and squarish, babies tied to their backs with lengths of homespun, dark blue and yellow and red. They were called tribals, the Chakma and the Marma and the Santal, there before anyone else, before maps and Pakistan and the war. She saw a young girl and her mother eating with their fingers out of a leaf-wrapped parcel. They laughed with their jaws open and slapped one another on the cheek, gently, in admonishment, affection.

She finished her stint in Rangamati and took the train south again. When she stopped moving she found herself at the edge of the country, past the Chittagong port, and wandered on to an abandoned, tawny-sanded thread of a beach. Cox’s Bazaar. The water was cloudy but pleasantly warm, and as she dipped her ankles she found she could no longer taste the cinders, the tarry blackness that had got under her tongue and between her fingers. Now her tongue was clear, and as she squatted in the water, allowing her kameez to soak, she scrubbed between her toes, and the backs of her knees. At the guest-house, she continued to scrub at herself, this time with soap, splashing buckets of water over her head, attacking the dirt beneath her fingernails. She emerged red-faced, her hair wound into the thin striped towel that had come with the room.

She thought, for the first time since her departure, about her mother, and decided to send a telegram. After grappling with the words, she finally settled on I am fine. Please do not worry. It is better this way.

And that is how it happened. A few weeks here, a few weeks there. Rangamati, Bandorbon, Kushtia. She finally travelled back up, avoiding the city, weaving up the Jamuna, the Brahmaputra, and into Rajshahi, where she settled, where she had her dreams of orphanhood, and where she found herself eating purple berries under a jackfruit tree, waiting for the postman.

1985 February

Kakrail Mosque had none of the beauty of the mosques in the older parts of town. It was just a concrete structure, rectangular, with a minaret protruding upwards from its middle. Through the square-patterned grille, she could see men going about their business, kneeling down to pray, ducking under the taps to perform the Wazu, standing with their hands crossed in front of them, listening to a munajaat. So this was where Sohail spent all his time. Rising before dawn and making his way through the grey and sleeping city, to this place of fellow men.

She had woken Ammoo and told her she had to meet Sohail. Sohail, Ammoo said, sleep heavy in her mouth. You won’t find him. She had rushed out of the house, still wearing the grey cotton she’d had on since the night before, the birth fresh in her memory.

She entered through the gate and found a few men milling around outside the building. They looked at her, turned away, looked again. Stared, scratched behind their ears. She held back a smile. It’s all right, she wanted to say, I won’t bite you. Finally one approached her. ‘Women are not allowed,’ he said, clearing his throat.

‘I won’t stay long,’ she said, resisting the urge to stare him down. He couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen. Beard coming in spare and reluctant. His shoulders still narrow, frame still folded in on itself. He was about to say something to her, but an older man came up behind him and put an enormous hand on his shoulder.

‘Begum, I’m very sorry but we have no provisions for women. You must leave immediately.’ His voice was as big as his hand, deep and rough, as if scraped along the road.

‘I have business here,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for my brother.’

‘The Jumma prayer will begin soon. You must go.’

She was so tired. How hard could it be to find your own brother? ‘Sohail Haque — I’m looking for Sohail Haque.’

The man hesitated. His mouth opened and closed, a great, gaping hole surrounded by a pelt of beard. ‘He isn’t here.’

He was lying.

‘But this is where he comes, every day. Every day he is here.’

‘He is no longer with us.’ The man moved his arm, and she could tell he wanted to push her but he couldn’t, not in front of the others, standing around now and nudging each other, the crowd growing as people arrived for the Friday prayer.

‘No longer? Where is he?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, giving her a look of undisguised impatience. The muezzin began the call to prayer. A megaphone sprang to life. Allah-hu Akbar Allaaaah hu Akbar.

The crowd around them began to line up for the prayer. The man cupped her elbow in his palm and led her to the gate. ‘Please — I must find my brother.’ She raised her voice. ‘Sohail, Sohail!’ But they were already at the gate, and with great force he hurled her elbow out on to the street and slammed the gate closed. ‘What are you all looking at?’ she heard him roar. ‘Get back to your prayers, go!’

He must be somewhere inside. She rubbed her elbow, and the night came back to her, Rokeya straining with her breech birth. Her confession. She considered the possibility of Rokeya’s being overcome by the pain of labour — but, in her experience, women were often at their most lucid at the moment of delivery. No, it had to be true. As soon as she had said it Maya knew it was true. The truth of it stopped the air in her throat. Zaid had lied about coming home on a holiday. She remembered Khadija’s words. We sent him back.

She heard someone behind her and turned around to see the young man she had first addressed. He leaned through a crack in the gate. ‘Your brother is at a mosque in Kolabagan. Take Elephant Road to Ghost Road. It’s a small place, next to an empty plot of land. A new building.’

‘A new mosque? But why?’ She wanted to reach through the gap, but he was already gone.

*

She followed the directions, Elephant Road to Ghost Road. She asked for the new mosque, waving down passers-by on the road. They pointed, directing her to smaller and smaller lanes. The people of this neighbourhood were intent on their tasks, the women dipping into buckets and coming up with pieces of washing, and the men carrying heavy things with agility, drums of water and boxed-up parcels and bags of cement. Even the telephone wires seemed to dangle over the pavements with lightness and grace.

When she saw the gate she knew it must be the one. Painted green, with a small star and crescent etched in white. She could smell the freshly laid cement, taste the white dust it imposed on the air around it. There was no bell to ring. She banged on the gate. No reply. She banged again. She turned the corner, looking for another entrance. A man walked past with a stack of bricks piled on his head. ‘Is this the new mosque?’ she asked him.

The man could not nod but called out: ‘You have to wait,’ he said. ‘They don’t open the gate.’

More waiting. She found a small cut in the high wall that surrounded the building and wedged herself into it, shielding her eyes against the sun with her hand. The Ghost Road residents drifted past. She thought about finding a telephone and ringing Joy. What would she say? He would drive up in his Honda and try to rescue her. She did not want to be rescued. The sun battered her arm, the lower part of her leg that was out of the shade. She dozed, waking blearily to catch the curious glances of people walking by.

The afternoon opened up, then fell away again, the streets quietening and slowing down, the shops shuttered or lit up for the evening, fluorescent bulbs and kerosene lamps and tiny open fires.

Sohail’s building did not stir. She hadn’t seen anyone go in or out. There was no call of the muezzin, no shuffle of bodies preparing for the prayer. Ammoo would have started to worry. She realised she hadn’t eaten all day, a throb in her stomach. She thought again that she should have waited for him to come home. Then the gate swung open and he was in front of her, his hands crossed over his chest.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘A long time. Can I come inside? I’m very thirsty.’

‘Wait.’ He dipped back through the gate and emerged with a tin mug of water.

The water was lukewarm, metallic. She drank it down. ‘So, this is your new place? What is it?’

‘A meeting house.’

‘Can anyone join?’

‘If they wish to, yes.’ He sighed heavily, then surprised her by putting his hand on her shoulder. ‘Is something troubling you, Maya?’

She decided to tread lightly. ‘That day, at the hospital,’ she said, ‘what did you whisper to Ammoo?’

‘Surah Yasin.’ His voice was tender, heavy with love. ‘Waalqurani alhakeemi, Innaka lamina almursaleena. .’ It must have been this that roused Ammoo, the call of her firstborn. The miracle of his voice.

‘She’s much better, you know. She’s walking around and everything.’

A rickshaw pulled up in front of them. ‘Jaben?’ asked the driver, ringing the bell.

Maya was about to wave him away, but Sohail said, ‘Wait over there. Apa will need to get home soon.’

‘Sohail, please, let me come inside. I need to speak with you.’

He said nothing, just stood in front of the door as if he were guarding what was inside. She realised she would have to tell him right there, on the street. ‘It’s about Zaid.’ She checked his face to see if he knew, if he had any idea. ‘I heard he ran away. When Ammoo was in the hospital.’

Sohail sighed. His hand was heavy on her shoulder.

‘Did he tell you why he ran away?’

He shook his head. A weary, resigned shake. ‘The Huzoor said—’

‘It’s the Huzoor I want to talk to you about. There’s something going on, something not right — I saw Zaid, he didn’t look well. Ammoo was going into hospital that day, or I would have come to you.’ She was making excuses for herself. If only Zaid hadn’t arrived at that moment, if only she had taken him to the hospital with her. ‘The point is, you have to get him out of there,’ she said. ‘It’s not a safe place, not a place for children. That Huzoor is doing things, I don’t know exactly what, but the children have no defence against him. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

He turned away from her. Across the road, the rickshaw-wallah had curled up on the seat of his vehicle. The city sounds faded in and out, lorries labouring in the distance, the wheeze of carriages on the railway line. She reached for his hand, imagining the shock of it sinking slowly through him. When he turned around and spoke, his voice was cracked. ‘He lies, you know that. He lies all the time.’ A deep furrow between his eyes.

‘I know, but you can’t take the risk. Even if there’s a slight chance he’s telling the truth, you have to get him out of there. And I’m telling you, he didn’t look well. Rokeya said—’

‘You’ve seen Rokeya?’

‘I delivered her baby this morning.’

‘Sister Khadija was insulted by the way she left the jamaat.’ The evidence was getting shakier, less reliable.

‘The madrasa is not a good place, Bhaiya.’

‘You’re hardly objective.’ He was using both hands to smooth down his beard. The purple bruise on his forehead reflected the dying light. The devout believed that on the Day of Judgement, it would shine like a beacon, and she imagined it now, light pouring from his forehead, like a miner’s headlamp.

‘You’ll go tomorrow, then?’

He paused, pulling harder on his beard, taming the curl of it. ‘He is my son. I will ensure his safety.’

‘Promise me you’ll go tomorrow.’

‘I cannot promise you that.’

He could not mean what he appeared to be saying. He wouldn’t go, he wouldn’t rescue his son from whatever hellhole he had sent him to. ‘You want him to be just like you, is that it?’

Sohail took a step towards her, and he was close, very close, when he said, ‘I want, more than anything else, for him not to become like me. That is why I sent him away.’

It didn’t make any sense. She told him so. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ He kissed her gently, missing her forehead, his lips landing on her eyebrow. She held herself stiffly, wondering what to do now. All this time she had been waiting for something noble to come out of him. At the hospital, she had had an inkling of it. He had gone to Ammoo’s bedside, he had recited the words. At the time she had thought this might be enough. But he had not believed her. He would not rescue his son.

By the time she got home, Ammoo was already asleep. Maya packed a small bag. A toothbrush, a change of clothes. Then, thinking of Rokeya’s sister, she climbed up on to the roof and quietly pulled a long black chador and a nikab from the washing line. She wrote a note and left it on Ammoo’s bedside table. ‘I need to go back to Rajshahi for a few days. A few things to collect.’

Before slipping out into the morning, the sky pink and amber, she dialled Joy’s number. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said, sleep thick in his voice. ‘Changed your mind?’

‘No.’

‘Good. We can elope, you know. Kazi offices all over the country. Slip them a few bucks and they’ll do it on the spot.’

She told him she was going to Rajshahi for a few days. ‘Let me come with you.’

‘No. But I need a favour.’

‘Anything.’

‘I want you to find someone for me. Someone I lost in the war.’

The Following Day

There was always this: the Jamuna River, even in its diminished winter state, beating powerfully against its banks. Although she had raced here, Maya paused now for a moment before boarding the ferry, savouring the loam and brown silt of it. Little, in this country, inspired awe, but this river, thick and dangerous, was a wonder.

The ferry was crowded on this Saturday morning. Maya took her seat on the lower deck. A blaze of the siren, and the ferry picked up speed, tilting like a rocking chair as it hit the Jamuna current.

She knew little about the madrasa apart from the few clues she had been able to piece together. Sohail had told her he was taking the boy to Chandpur, and Zaid had said the madrasa was on its own island in the middle of the river. She had looked on a map, and found three different Chandpurs. Only one was near a river. At dawn, before she departed, she had gone upstairs and questioned Khadija, who had told her nothing. You no longer visit us, she said.

Maya had allowed herself to be duped. All those afternoons she had spent, drunk on the possibility that there might be some other hand in her mother’s illness, a divine hand she could manoeuvre with the help of Khadija and the jamaat. How could she have been so foolish? She should never have allowed Sohail to take Zaid to the madrasa. Ammoo’s illness had clouded her judgement. And when Zaid had come to her, she had swatted him away. What kind of mother would she make? She couldn’t even see the thing that was right before her eyes.

The cabin was packed now, and thick with heat. Being inside was making her thirsty. She stepped on to the deck and leaned her arms against the railing, tiny droplets of water landing on her face.

She found a cold-drinks stall. A boy with a lungi hitched up around his thighs squatted in front of a tub of ice and soft drinks. ‘Coke, please,’ she said. He looked about twelve, strong arms protruding from a vest that used to be white. He pulled a bottle out of the tub, wiped it with a cloth and opened it against the battered wooden table in front of him.

She gave him five taka. He caught her eye and smiled so broadly, so hopefully, that she found herself asking him why he wasn’t in school.

He shrugged, still smiling.

‘Where do you live?’

‘On this ferry. The driver is my uncle.’

A large family approached the stall and ordered their drinks. ‘Three Mirindas and seven 7 Ups!’ the father shouted, thrilled by his own joke ‘And hurry, na.’ The boy rushed through the order, fishing the bottles out of the icy water, throwing in new ones from the crates stacked up alongside. Maya lingered, watching him work. The man took his drinks, throwing his money at the boy, dodging the thin, pointy straws as they bobbed in the open bottles.

‘Do you live in Dhaka?’ he asked her.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m a doctor.’

He pushed out his lower lip and nodded, impressed. ‘Dakhtar.’

They were in the middle of the river now, the shores disappearing on either side. A muezzin announced the Asr prayer. The ferry slowed down, the engine coughing. Then it suddenly stopped, and everything was quiet; only the lapping of the water against the boat.

‘Sometimes the engine breaks,’ the boy said. They heard shouts coming from below, and the sound of running feet. There was no longer a breeze. Passengers crowded the walkways, squeezing themselves against the railing.

‘Come with me,’ the boy said. ‘I know a better place.’

‘Oh, it’s all right.’ Maya shook her head. ‘Really, it’s all right here. And you shouldn’t leave the stall; people will be wanting their drinks.’

He was already sliding the tub under the table and folding down the small cubicle. She followed him as he led her up a set of steps, then through the ferry and up a narrow ladder. He climbed up quickly, his bare feet curling around the metal rungs, then turned and held out his hand to Maya.

It was bright, the sun reflecting off the painted white roof, but it was also cooler, the wind open and rough. There was a tiny ledge on the eastern corner, and they perched there together. The muezzin called again. There were a few others; a man rolled out a small rectangle of cloth and began to pray, dipping his head to the west. Unbidden, the words of the prayer came to Maya’s lips. She remembered her mother patiently teaching her the verses, and how reluctantly she had submitted at the hospital. An hour passed. The boy took his leave. ‘I have to sell the drinks,’ he said.

‘What is your name?’ Maya asked.

‘Khoka.’

‘Goodbye, Khoka.’ She waved, then added, ‘God be with you.’

The ferry gasped to life, the siren blaring as they began to move. Soon they approached the other side, floating towards the embrace of land, the sun light, high-spirited, on the horizon.

As she was leaving the ferry, Maya found Khoka waiting for her, hugging a small bundle. ‘Dakhtar, where are you going? Let me come with you. I can help.’ She saw him clearly now, in the full brilliance of the afternoon. He had dark, luminous eyes. He would be handsome one day, if he were fed properly. If his shoulders weren’t burned and bowed from long hours on the dock. But she didn’t want to be burdened by anyone; he would ask questions and she would not be able to answer them. ‘No, it’s all right.’ She reached into her bag for a few notes.

He shook his head, refusing the money, suddenly shy.

As soon as she hit the ferry ghat, she was surrounded by porters, tea-wallahs, chotpoti-vendors, boatmen, and all manner of people wanting to buy, sell or rent things. Dusk was already falling, but she wouldn’t stop here; she wanted to start travelling north, towards Chandpur. Clutching her bag, she scanned the shore for an empty country boat. The boatmen saw her and called out.

‘Apa, you need to go somewhere, come with me!’

‘Upstream, downstream, anywhere you like, apa, come, come.’

She hesitated beside one boat, suddenly unsure of what to do. She had travelled alone so many times, but as she looked around now and saw that she was the only woman on the shore, she found herself wishing she had brought Joy. You’re going soft, Comrade Haque. Irritated by her sudden lack of confidence, she waved to one of the boatmen.

‘I need to travel upstream,’ she announced.

‘Yes, yes,’ the boatman nodded, ‘let me take your things.’

‘Tell me the price first.’

‘Don’t worry about the price, sister.’ He reached out again, grazing the strap of her bag.

She pulled back. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

The man skipped lightly off his boat and came to stand beside her. ‘Don’t worry, sister, price will be fair. And anyway’ — he fished something out of the corner of his mouth, chewed on it, then spat it out — ‘a woman should not travel alone.’

She turned away, thanking him for his assistance. The other boatmen watched. ‘Lady doesn’t know where she wants to go!’ the man called out after her. ‘Letting a poor man go hungry, chee chee. At least leave us something for our trouble.’

The ridiculousness of the demand made her turn back. ‘What trouble? You should pay me, harassing me like that.’

His face darkened. ‘You think you can talk any way you like?’ He grabbed her arm. ‘Because you have money and I’m just a boatman?’

Her anger swelled. ‘You think you can talk to me any way you like, just because I’m a woman?’ She twisted away and headed back in the direction of the ferry, the man continuing to call out to her. People stopped washing their boats and stared. She was a spectacle, running up and down the shoreline all by herself.

Khoka was carrying a crate of Coke bottles on his shoulder. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she called out, trying to stop her voice from trembling. ‘Find me a boatman, an honest one, who will take me upriver.’

‘It’s too late, Dakhtar, no one will take you now. They’re all leaving the ghat, see, it’s getting dark.’

She gathered herself together, unbearably hot now, even though the day was turning from yellow to grey, and she wondered if she were doing the right thing, feeling the urgency of it, the black panic of not knowing where Zaid was. This boy, this cold-drinks boy, was so poor he had to spend all day stuck between one shore and another, opening bottle after bottle and never going to school. But he had that open sky above him, he could walk away on his own legs, with his own will.

‘Please, you have to find me someone. I’ll pay, I’ve got money. But it has to be tonight.’

‘All right, I will try.’ He relieved her of her bag and led her further down the shoreline. The boatmen were packing up their things, cleaning out their engines and bailing water. He left her at a small shop. She bought a packet of Nabisco and a cup of tea. He returned a few minutes later, leading her to a simple country boat. A very old boatman greeted her. ‘Chacha will look after you,’ Khoka said, ‘won’t you, Chacha?’

Khoka reached out to steady her as she stepped on to the boat. ‘With your permission, Dakhtar, I would like to come with you.’

‘You think I can’t make it on my own? I’ve done it before, you know. I was in the war.’

‘You were in the war? My uncle too. He has a scar here’, he said, running a finger along his cheek, ‘from a bullet.’

He smiled again, as though there were no tragedy in the world he hadn’t heard of, and conquered. ‘All right,’ Maya said, ‘come along, then.’

They set off as the sun whispered towards the horizon, moving against the current, the people on the shore growing smaller, into bright yellow specks, like lit cigarettes in a dark room. Through the slats in the bamboo she could see the water rising against the boat. They passed the first hour in silence. The boatman hummed as he rowed. Then Khoka said, ‘Dakhtar, I shouldn’t ask. But you’re in trouble?’

Maya hesitated, wondering if he would understand any of it. ‘I’m looking for a boy. My nephew.’ As she started to speak the story poured out of her, about how she had returned, after her long absence, to the bungalow in Dhaka, her mother’s illness, the appearance of Zaid.

Khoka’s face moved with every episode of the story. She could tell he was thinking of himself, comparing his life and his miseries with those of the other boy. He was adding it up: the death of his parents, the long days he spent carrying the crates of drinks up and down the ghat. All the other hidden injuries. By the end, she had almost forgotten where she was as she described Rokeya’s disclosure, her meeting with Sohail. When she looked up, she saw Khoka’s eyes were shining. He leaned over the side of the boat, took a handful of water and splashed it on his face.

It would not have been appropriate for him to embrace her. But when he wiped his face roughly with his palms, it was as though he held her; as if he had said, you are right to be here, to be on this boat, to be travelling upriver in search of this boy. When you find him, you will also find me.

And this is how they passed their journey upstream, with the Jamuna pounding its banks, demanding its passage, breaking and swallowing pieces of the shore as it went, propelling them towards their destination, at its own pace, its own command.

She told Khoka what she knew of the madrasa.

‘You don’t know the name?’

‘No. I’m not familiar with these parts.’

‘You don’t know the village?’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘Then we will go to every madrasa in every village near Chandpur and we will find him.’

Zaid had said it was surrounded by water. She hadn’t understood before, but now she saw what he meant. The river was so vast, and so fierce, it created islands of its own. She had heard of these but she had never seen them. Khoka told her they were called chars, and he pointed them out to her now, shallow, floating cakes of land, rising just inches from the water, scattered with pale shoots of grass.

‘These islands come up every year, after the monsoon. They might stay, they might get eaten by the river in a few months. That one over there’ — he pointed to what looked like the shore — ‘is old, it’s been around for years. Your madrasa must be built on one of the older islands.’ He said something to the boatman. ‘Let’s stop here and ask.’

‘Too late,’ the boatman said. ‘We’ll stop now and try tomorrow.’

Maya checked her watch. Seven o’clock, but it was fully dark already, the river grey and black and suddenly quiet.

The boatman boiled rice on a makeshift stove beside the engine, and Khoka fried a few shrimps he had caught over the side of the boat. They ate in silence, Maya surprised by the delicious, salty crunch of the shrimp. After the meal, Khoka said, ‘The boatman wants to ask you a question, Dakhtar.’ He guided the old man towards her. Deep folds sectioned his face and made it kind. ‘My wife,’ the boatman said, ‘it’s her throat.’ He moved his hands up and down his own sagging neck. ‘It’s round, like this.’

‘You mean it’s swollen?’

‘Looks like she swallowed a pumpkin.’ His own lips were rimmed with orange from betel nut, his mouth black.

‘It’s called a goitre,’ Maya said. ‘She needs iodine. When you go to the shop to buy salt, tell them you want salt with iodine.’

‘Will it cost?’

‘Same as the other salt.’ It was the law now that all salt must contain iodine, but not every producer complied. In Rajshahi she had persuaded the salt-sellers to convert to iodine salt. There were no swollen throats in her village.

The boatman raised his right hand to his forehead, thanking her. Then he signalled for her to stretch out along the boat; he and Khoka would find a dry spot on the shore. She fell asleep quickly, hugging her arms tightly over herself and using the burkha as a blanket.

In the morning Khoka hailed a group of men heading towards the fields. Yes, they were told, there’s a madrasa here. They trudged between a few patches of paddy and came upon a blue school building made entirely of wavy sheets of tin. A handful of children loitered on a rough patch of grass outside the building. ‘This can’t be it,’ Maya said, turning away.

‘You don’t want to find the headmaster?’

‘Look,’ she said, pointing to the children. ‘Girls.’

They continued upriver, the boatman straining against the current. They stopped a few more times, turning up at makeshift schoolhouses and outbuildings on the grounds of mosques. The islands had an air of impermanence about them, the people appearing light and carefree as their saris and lungis ballooned out with the force of the river wind. Perhaps, Maya thought, as the sun dipped once more under its watery horizon, I will return here someday with a happier heart.

The next morning they stopped at a large island that rose several feet from the river. Maya and Khoka followed the path that began at the water’s edge, their toes sinking into the silt. After a few steps the ground grew higher and became dry, and then the going was comfortable, Khoka swinging her bag as he walked, the koel and the bulbul singing in chorus, singing them on.

Two more false starts and they were standing in front of a small blue door worked into a solid, windowless wall. Maya felt a hollow throb at the pit of her stomach. ‘This must be it.’ She pulled the burkha out of her bag and slipped it over her head. She tied the nikab over her head and face, surprised by the feeling of her own breath against her cheeks. ‘Wait by the boat,’ she told Khoka. ‘We may have to leave in a hurry.’

She circled the building like a thief. There was a high wall going all the way around the compound, and several smaller buildings around a central courtyard. A deep smell, of unwashed boys and rotting bananas, coated the building like a mist. Finally she gathered up the courage and knocked. A boy, older than Zaid, opened the door immediately. ‘Where is the Huzoor?’ she said. ‘Take me to him.’

He hesitated. ‘Big Huzoor or Small Huzoor?’

She didn’t know. ‘Doesn’t matter. Big, I suppose. Whoever’s in charge.’

The boy straightened, as if remembering something. ‘Women are not allowed,’ he said.

‘It’s all right, he’s expecting me.’ She reached out and patted the boy’s cap, but he stiffened, stepping back into the darkness.

‘No,’ he said, and made to close the door.

She grabbed his shoulders. ‘The Huzoor will see me,’ she said. ‘Take me inside.’

He pushed her and slammed the door. She banged with her fist, knowing he was waiting on the other side. ‘Open up!’

She circled the building again, looking for an entrance. It appeared deserted, no footsteps, no sounds of any kind. She went back to the door. Banged again. The inside of the nikab was black and searing. The breath roared out of her.

Nothing. She turned around, ran back to the river. The boat was unmoored, Khoka and the boatman waiting with the oars on their laps. ‘They won’t let me inside,’ she said.

‘How many?’ Khoka asked.

‘Just a boy. The classrooms must be at the back, but I couldn’t tell.’

‘Let me come with you,’ Khoka said. ‘I can try and find a way in.’ He waded to shore.

They tried the door again. The boy opened, and Khoka spoke. ‘We need to come inside,’ he said; ‘it’s very important.’

The boy pointed to Maya. ‘No women allowed.’

Khoka pushed the boy aside and stepped through the gap in the door. Maya was about to follow, but Khoka closed the door behind him. She heard a scuffle inside, footsteps, muffled, tense voices. Right now, she heard. Right now.

The door opened. Khoka was holding the boy by the elbow. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay here.’

‘What did you tell him?’ she whispered.

‘That you are the sister of Huzoor Haque and you have come on important business, and that, inshallah, if you are allowed inside, great blessings will fall upon the madrasa.’

‘Really?’

‘Actually forgive me, Dakhtar, I told the boy I would beat him till the blood ran out of his ears if he didn’t do as I said.’

The boy sniffed angrily, turned around and led her through a corridor and out into the open courtyard. He asked her to wait while he spoke to the Huzoor. ‘Tell him I’m Mrs Haque,’ she said. She waited, trying not to fidget in the heat. The boy emerged and led her into a small chamber. A very thin man with a neatly trimmed beard sat behind a desk with a pen in his hand. Glasses high on the bridge of his nose.

‘I’d like to speak with the Huzoor,’ she said. ‘Which one are you?’

‘I’m Choto Huzoor.’

‘Where’s the Big Huzoor?’

‘Travelling.’

Maya appraised the man. Rokeya’s sister was right about the burkha: from inside, she could stare freely without being noticed. She saw the man’s tapered, unworked fingers, the dark pools of his eyes, with their trace of surma. His jellaba was long, sweeping his ankles. She swallowed a fist of fear, remembering the man who had put the knife to her throat.

He set down his pen. ‘How can I be of service to you, sister?’ He smiled with narrow teeth.

Maya approached, put her hands on the table. ‘I want someone. A boy.’

The Huzoor looked down at his shoes, and suddenly she wasn’t afraid of him; he knew why she was there, knew it from the way she stood and pointed her face at him now, and his fingers trembled and the pen shook, like the line of an irregular heartbeat. She said, ‘I won’t stay long. I’ve come to collect Zaid Haque. You will give him to me and I will not trouble you further.’

She prepared herself for an argument, but he sat frozen at his desk, the pen hovering in mid-air. She noticed his fingernails were dyed red with henna. She repeated herself, raised her voice. She heard herself threatening him, telling him she would tell the Big Huzoor and he would inform his superiors. He would be disgraced. Then she would call the police and have the madrasa closed down. He would be arrested. Have you ever seen the inside of a prison, Huzoor? He stood up now and blocked the door, and she stepped up to him, placed her hands on his chest. ‘I know what you’ve done,’ she said. ‘I know and God knows and you’ll burn in dosok for it.’ There was a tremor in his voice as pointed to the back of the compound, mumbling something about a shack, a locked door. ‘I know what you’ve done,’ she said again, as he pulled a key from around his neck. ‘I know and God knows.’

She follows the outline of the building, turns around a bend and finds herself on a path leading through the bush. She sees the school building, a rectangular room with a tin roof. And, from within, a hum, many-voiced, like the sound of bees.

Just as the man said, there is a small square shack, the size of a chicken coop. There is no roof but the walls are high. She bangs on the door before attempting the lock. She is afraid to cry out, afraid she will be heard, afraid of what she will hear. The door replies. It is not a voice, only a soft rap, rap rap, not even from knuckles, more like the press of a hand. The lock is attached to a bolt on the door.

She uses the key.

The door swings open and he is inside, squatting over a pit dug into the ground. She holds out her arms and he leaps into them, and she thinks he is calling her name, Maya Maya Maya. Her heart sings along to it, but then the words come into focus, and she remembers she is still in her disguise, and that he has mistaken her for his mother. Ma, ma, ma.

She packs him into the boat. He clings to her. The Arabic alphabet, he says. Alif-ba-ta-sa. I know it. They make it to Gaibandha. On the boat, in darkness again, Maya pleads with Zaid to eat something. He refuses, gazing through the thin bamboo netting that arches over the boat, his eyes searching for the night sky. I know the Arabic alphabet, he repeats. Where is my mother? She isn’t here, Maya tells him, you know that. Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem, he begins, reciting the words he has been taught. Nauzubillah hira-shahitan-ir-Raheem. A small lizard has made its way on board, and scuttles back and forth among the curved roof slats. He settles for this, chasing it with his finger.

His grandmother is waiting at home, Maya tells him, she will be so happy to see him. His father too. At the mention of his father he says, I don’t want to go home. I know the Arabic alphabet. Alifbatasa. BismillahirRahmanirRaheem. There is a cut on his cheek. A bruise on the crease of his elbow.

She feels a sharp twist of guilt now, for the chappals she never bought him, for allowing him to be caught stealing, for not treating him more like he was hers, like something of her own. She expects to be angry too at his father, expects the rage to have thundered into her by now, but at this very moment she can only summon reproof for herself.

Khoka cannot take his eyes off the boy. He stares and stares, chasing Zaid’s hand as it picks up the lizard, pulls off its tail and flings it into the water.

As they approach the shore Zaid’s recitation gets louder and louder. I like oranges, he says. Bring me an orange. Bring me a bicycle. He starts reciting the call to prayer. AshahadullahMuhammadur RasoolAllah. He stands up and leans his weight this way and that. The boat tilts. The shore is crowded with boatmen and fishermen and people like them, people between one place and another. Closer now, and he begins to wail, banging his fists against Maya as she throws her arms around him. ‘You want to stay on the boat, Zaid, is that what you want? You want to stay the night here? All right, all right.’

They turn around again, moving away from the ferry dock, and the boatman moors them against the river bank.

Khoka and the boatman make their way to the shore, leaving her alone with Zaid. It’s getting chilly and she unzips her burkha and envelops the boy within it. He turns his back to her and she curls herself around him, her hands gently stroking his hair. His breathing slows.

‘We’ll go home,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be home.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Don’t worry, it won’t be like before.’

‘I tried to run away.’

‘I know, Rokeya told me.’

‘But Abboo sent me back.’

‘He won’t, once you tell him everything. He’ll never send you there again. Sleep now. Tomorrow we’ll be home.’

She is tired now, so tired. She thinks he is saying something to her, but she isn’t sure. I want a bicycle. I already told him. ‘Don’t worry,’ she mumbles. ‘I’ll talk to him. Nothing bad will happen to you now.’

Alifbatasa.

It is only a few moments of sleep, but she will remember them as the sweetest she has ever known, because the boy breathes beside her, the years unmarked ahead of him.

She is dreaming when she hears it, the small splash, little more than a hiccup in the water. But she knows, she knows it is him. She plunges in, the burkha billowing around her, the current pulling her away from the boat in an instant. She calls out to him, she opens her eyes underwater, tries to gaze through the darkness and the liquid silt of the Jamuna, falls deeper and deeper into the night of it, and, then, a pair of strong hands on her shoulders. She opens her eyes. Khoka. She struggles, pushing against him, but they are already on the boat now. How strong he is. How rough the current, how hungry.

She wakes to a slap on the head, and hands that grab her, pulling her arms apart. She discovers something about the police at that moment: that they divide the body so that one side cannot collude with the other. They raise her up, off her feet, and she screams WHEREISZAID, before her head hits the floor of the truck and all is black.

Cold and not a Speck of Light

Cold and not a speck of light. In the dark, she fumbles for her face. Nose, broken. Lips like burst fruit. She presses, examines, the pain spreading to her cheeks, her temples.

She tugs at the burkha. It’s a cruel joke, the way she has clung to this garment. The other prisoners are nearby but she can’t hear them. She was with them at first, crammed into a room where the women slept in shifts. But she started screaming and wouldn’t stop. The women surrounded her, making noises of comfort. Still she screamed.

ZAIDWHEREISZAID.

Finally a policeman came into the cell, threw her to the ground and pounded her into blackness. She opened her eyes to this: a coffin of a room, no longer anyone to shout at.

The slide of metal. A plate, a glass of water.

She drinks the water but when they come to collect the tray she throws it at them. Let her body taste hunger. Better if her head is light, her limbs heavy. Better not to remember the deep underwater sound.

They send her a woman. Soft voice. You haven’t eaten in three days.

Where is Zaid?

Are you on hunger strike? Tell us why you’re here.

Of course they know why she is there. Why else would they have brought her in? A pre-emptive strike by that slant-toothed Huzoor.

Where is Zaid?

How very stupid she has been. Wanted so badly for her brother to return to her that she had ignored her own oath. First. Do. No. Harm.

A small hand collides with her cheek. The lip opens up again. ‘Eat, bitch. I will not have your death on my hands.’

Days later, maybe a week, she cannot tell, she is packed into a van. Hands tied together with rope and the smell of the country in her nostrils, grass and paddy and drying cow dung all the way to the edge of town. A man writes her name into a ledger.

In Rajshahi, she was surrounded by children. She lost count of how many she had helped to bring into the world, but she kept a tally of the ones she buried, dead because of cholera, or snakebite, or the sudden rise of a nearby river, or because the tin of milk was too dear when the mother dried up, or for no reason at all. For no reason at all she had seen one hundred and thirty-seven to their graves.

She had loved every one of them, even if she had known them only long enough to pronounce their deaths, putting her ear to their little chests and telling their mothers it was over, there was nothing more to be done. But none had pounced on her heart with such ease, not a living or a dead one. A tongue-twisting, card-cheating, disappearing phantom of a child.

*

Dhaka Central Jail. A big square room, packed with women. Smells of piss and the air is cloudy with the breaths of too many. Like country, like jail. Everybody poor. Death a few feet away. Birth too. A woman in labour is dragged away, head lolling. Maya could have helped, but she does not. An old woman is combing her hair. It hurts, there are bruises on her head. Stop, she says. Water is sprinkled on her eyes. Food passed through salty, wrinkled fingers. She opens her eyes. The woman is a dark shadow, white irises painted into her face.

Scraps of her life come back to her. Swimming in the pond with Nazia. The smell of sesame trees. The books burning in the garden. Sohail’s voice. I killed, Maya. I killed. So that he won’t become like me. It wasn’t Piya, it was Silvi. It was the war. War made it too late. I killed. Now she knew what it was, the heaviness of death.

Someone calls her name. She is led to the bars at the front of the cell. Joy is crouching on the other side. She raises her eyes and sees that he is crying. She considers lightening the mood, saying something about how they are even now, both jailbirds, but the only thing she wants to say is ‘Where is he?’

Joy drops his head. ‘They haven’t found him yet.’

The light shifts. She can see the full length of him, his sturdy shoulders, his thick-soled shoes. She hasn’t been aware of being afraid, all this time, but now her fingers are reaching out and she is grasping and animal-shaking the bars.

‘I’m going to get you out,’ Joy said. ‘It will take a few weeks.’

She stops. Outside, she will have to face it. She is afraid to ask what Ammoo said when she heard. And Sohail. What had Sohail said? ‘I don’t want to come out. I want to stay here.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Maya. I have a good lawyer working for you.’

‘You don’t want to marry me any more, I know it. What will your mother say?’

‘She knows everything. I told her you just wanted to get the boy out of there. It wasn’t your fault.’

He wraps his fingers around hers. A question comes to her lips. ‘Were you angry, after your father died?’

‘Why?’

‘I just want to know.’

‘I was so angry I went to the street with my gun, ready to kill anyone who looked like a Bihari or a Pakistani. That’s why my mother sent me to America — because I could have murdered someone.’

She understood now, why he had left so abruptly. And how cruel she had been. Stings like a bee.

‘The lawyer is pushing for a quick trial. Do you need anything?’

‘No.’

‘I’m having them check your food. You have to eat.’ He is trying not to cry again, his face wound tight with it.

The lamplight follows him for a few steps, and then he is gone, swallowed into the maw of the prison.

The next time, he brings her mother. She is allowed into a room with a table and two chairs. Ammoo is wearing a dark blue sari, and her face leaps out in the darkness, pale, round. She is wearing glasses. Gently, she lowers herself on to a chair. Joy’s hand hovers over Maya’s head. ‘I’ll be outside.’

‘I’ve come to tell you something,’ Ammoo says.

Maya cannot meet her eye. She reaches up over her head, pulls the nikab over her face. I cannot bear for you to see me.

‘I know you have always blamed Silvi for what happened to your brother.’

Silvi. Silvi had reached from across the road and put her hands around Sohail’s neck.

‘Did you know about Haji Mudassar?’

Maya searches for her voice. She nods.

‘He’s the imam they worship in Kakrail. But back in ’72 he was at the mosque on Road 13.’

The mosque by the lake. The Eidgah, where the men of the neighbourhood gathered on Fridays.

‘Sohail started to go there soon after the war.’

Maya’s voice emerged thinly from inside the nikab. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Haji Mudassar was like a father to Sohail.’

‘He never said anything to me about him.’

Ammoo leans her elbows on the table. ‘You know, I have always wondered which of you two missed your father more.’

It was me. It was me.

‘At first I thought it was you. A girl needs a father, I know that better than anyone. And I always thought, if your father were alive, he would not have let you go off to war. Or to Rajshahi. We would have been together, all of us. But when he died Sohail was only eight, you know. He was only eight and he became the man around the house. I used to send him to get the ration card, to pay the bills at the electricity office. You don’t remember. I had to, you know, I had no one else. And after what happened in the war, Sohail found Haji Mudassar.’

‘After what happened?’

‘He was coming back,’ she says, ‘and there was a man on the road — it was more like an accident, really.’

Why is she the last to know?

‘He told me that you knew,’ Ammoo says. ‘That night, when he burned his books, he told you.’

No, he never said. He never told her anything. I killed, Maya. I killed.

‘Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this, Maya — the reason I’m telling you is because a thing like that can destroy a man. It can take away years, your whole life.’

It isn’t the same. Zaid was just a boy.

‘And another thing — about Silvi. You mustn’t blame her so much. Towards the end she was — I think she understood.’

Forgive Silvi? She had started all of it. There can be only One, she had said. And the world had narrowed. Her guilt did not make Maya more forgiving.

‘Have they found him yet?’ she whispers.

Ammoo winds her fingers through Maya’s. Her grip is strong. ‘No, they haven’t found him.’ Her hand tightens. ‘You didn’t believe Zaid, when he told you his mother played Ludo with him and promised him he could go to school. But it was true.’

She does not want her mother to go. She clings to her and they have to pull her arms away.

Ammoo told her everything. Now she knew. Sohail rescued Piya from the barracks. Unshackled her and took her to her village. Only then did he consider going home himself. He walked south, on the Jessore Road, refugees crowding on either side of him. The peace was only a few days old and already they were flooding back. All day he walked, resting on the side of the road like everyone else, his arms folded under his blue-and-red checked shirt — a treasure, it had belonged to his friend Aref. After dark one night, he saw a man on the road. He was unlike any of the others, well fed, wearing a thick wool jacket, a scarf wrapped tight around his neck, his chin. Why was he walking with such confidence — striding, even? Sohail wanted to see him up close. Was he an enemy officer, trying to blend in with the crowd? Was he the officer who had held Piya? It didn’t matter. They had, in their own ways, all held Piya in the storeroom at the back of their barracks.

Sohail approached the man, and the man looked at Sohail, and Sohail thought he heard him say something; it was difficult to hear, because the man’s mouth was obscured by the woollen scarf around his neck. He came closer, his hand folding around his rifle. Beta, the man said, beta. Beta. That was the word Ammoo had always used to address Sohail, a tender word, a word from her past. An Urdu word. And before he knew it, he had released his rifle and embraced the man, embraced him as if he were his long-dead father, and the instant after that he took out the knife he had tucked into his lungi, and when the man saw the knife he kneeled and wrapped his arms around Sohail’s knees and said Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem. The man begged for his life. He begged but Sohail could hear only the words of the Kalma as he took hold of the man’s neck and replied There is no God but God, and before he knew it they were speaking in chorus, killing and dying, dying and killing, his palm sure as it handled the knife, and in the glint of that knife he saw the eyes of the girl in the barracks, her head round and with a dusting of hair, and he was gripped by all the things he had seen and could now imagine, things that necessitated his hand across the man’s throat, as he recited God is Great, God is Great, God is Great.

Blood flowed from the man’s neck. Sohail picked up his scarf and unwrapped the man’s face, and as he looked down the realisation crashed into him with the force of a bullet. Beta. This man was not a soldier. He was not a soldier or a Bihari or any kind of enemy. He was just a very old man, salt-and-pepper hairs on his stubbly chin. And he had the face of a father, a kind, unremarkable, worried face. A nothing man. A man who had done nothing. Walking home from the war like everyone else.

Sohail’s life, in exchange for that death. Paying for it in flesh and blood. It must be there, ticking within him. It was why he had shunned Ammoo, because she had not taught him well enough. If she had given him the Book sooner, he might have known better. He might not have done it.

The next day Maya is visited by a stocky man in a tight-fitting suit. He introduces himself as her lawyer. ‘Now,’ he begins, ‘I’m afraid the situation is a little more complicated than we thought. The mullahs have ganged up against you.’

She was right. It was that Huzoor, acting meek and plunging the knife into her back.

‘Problem is, the Dictator has been trying to cosy up to them, so he’s taken against you. And you didn’t help your case, by making him look like a fool.’

The Dictator? She is confused. ‘I thought I was in jail for kidnapping my nephew, Zaid.’

‘I heard about that, madam, and I’m very sorry. But this is far more serious.’

What could be more serious?

‘They are trying to decide whether to bring a charge of slander or a charge of treason against you. As you can imagine, treason would be far worse. Luckily, the public is on your side — there is a protest march at Shaheed Minar tomorrow. For you and Shafaat.’

Shafaat? It comes to her now. She is in jail because she wrote that article, because she called the Dictator a war criminal. The lawyer tells her the whole story. Shafaat and Aditi have been arrested too. Were they angry, she wants to know. He laughs openly, because being arrested is exactly what Shafaat has always wanted. He’s a hero, she’s done him a favour.

She buries her face in her hands. They had not come for her because of Zaid. No one had cared about that little boy. She tastes it again, the dark purple water.

*

In the courthouse her hands were untied and she was instructed to take her place beside the lawyer. Joy was sitting in the front row in a crumpled kurta. For the last few weeks Maya had felt herself turning into a thing of little substance, her wrists becoming brittle, her cheeks hollow and grey. How ugly she must look. She caught his eye as he stared at her, unblinking.

The lawyer placed a helmet of curls on his head. The judge entered and they all stood up.

‘Your honour,’ the lawyer said in perfect, foreign-learned English, ‘I have come to plead for bail for Miss Sheherezade Haque.’

‘The charge is not bailable,’ the judge said, clearing his throat and making as if he were about to spit. Of course the charge was not bailable. It should not be.

‘Your honour, we dispute the charge of treason. Miss Haque — if it was, indeed, Miss Haque — was merely exercising the freedom granted to her by the constitution of Bangladesh.’

‘We are under martial law, sir, may I remind you?’

‘Yes, your honour, but I have taken the liberty of presuming you answer to a higher authority, sir. To our democratic constitution.’

The judge paused, turned to her. ‘And how would you plead, Miss Haque, if it were up to you? Treason, as you know, is a very serious charge.’

Maya found her voice. ‘I have committed no treason, your honour,’ she said. ‘I am guilty only of telling the truth.’

‘Taking away a citizen’s right to protest is a serious offence, your honour. The article, as you know, was written primarily as a plea to try the war criminals, not as a slight against the Dictator.’

The judge’s face narrowed. ‘What exactly are you asking of this court?’

The lawyer raised his arms. ‘Miss Haque’s brother was a freedom fighter. Her mother was a quiet, unsung hero of the revolution. She is following in her family’s footsteps. And I am merely trying to appeal to the ideal of justice to which your court is bound.’

The judge appeared to consider this. ‘You were a freedom fighter, Miss Haque?’

‘I was and I am, your honour.’

He peered down at her, as if to check the veracity of the statement. ‘Then we will let the court decide your fate. Bail is granted,’ he said gruffly. ‘Miss Haque, you are free to go.’

After the judge’s decision was announced, Maya glanced behind her, searching for Joy. At the back, she had to look twice, three times. There was Sohail, his eyes cast downward, so that she could see the top of his head, the thick turban that had replaced his prayer cap. He mouthed something to himself, then looked up, meeting her eye. She felt her legs buckling under her, the terrible weight of herself. ‘I have to go,’ she said to the lawyer, ‘please, hurry.’ And she made her way to Sohail, grabbing his hand and saying, ‘Zaid, did they find him?’

‘In the water, last Saturday.’ His eyes were dark and hooded. They had hidden it from her. They had buried him, whispered their prayers.

So this was what her life amounted to. A boy’s body washed up on the shores of the Jamuna. She wanted to throw herself at Sohail’s feet and beg for his mercy, but she didn’t deserve it. She waited for him to hit her. To open that lip again. Without meaning to, she spoke aloud. ‘I was trying to save him.’

‘He was not yours to save,’ he said simply.

He wasn’t hers. He had never been hers. To whom had he belonged, then? This robed father who lived behind a high wall, behind a string of verses? She felt the bitterness rising in her throat. ‘You put him in danger, Sohail — I tried to tell you.’

‘What did you think, Maya — that I wasn’t going to get him out of there?’

She faltered. ‘But I thought. I thought you said—’

‘I said I would ensure his safety.’

He would have gone himself. He would have gone, he would have saved his own son, he would have brought him back. Right now they would have been in the garden, sucking flowers from the ixora bush. ‘Then it was me — I’m responsible for his death.’

‘Only God can choose the hour of a man’s death,’ he said.

She didn’t believe him. She wasn’t willing to shed her responsibility, and she was about to tell him so, that he needed to account for it — they both did — but something moved in her, something told her to accept what he was offering, a way to make sense of it, a way to forgive her. And even though she didn’t want forgiveness — no, she did not want to be forgiven — she was relieved by its having been offered, by the germ of possibility that there was something beyond the two of them, beyond his heart and hers. God offers forgiveness, she remembered from the Book, for men who surrender to him, and women who surrender to him. For men who believe, and women who believe.

She dared to meet his eye. She wanted to ask if he could love her again, but she did not. Instead she said, ‘I believe you.’

He nodded. She wondered why he had come. To see her imprisioned, probably. To add his charge to the others. I hereby charge my sister, Maya, with the following crimes: not believing me when I turned to the Book, for mocking my allegiance to my faith, for attempting to lure me back to an old life, for abandoning me to whatever demons came to haunt me after our war, after we took our fingers out of the sky. For not loving me. For loving my son. For killing him.

After a long time, he said, ‘I’m leaving. After the forty days, I’m going to Saudia.’

‘For how long?’

‘A few months, maybe a year.’

So he had come to say goodbye. ‘And Ammoo?’

‘You’ll need to look after her.’

‘What about the women upstairs?’

‘Khadija is coming with me.’

She nodded, understanding. God was endless in his gifts.

She wanted to tell him that she knew about the man he had killed, she knew it was what had led him to this place, what he carried with him everywhere, a necklace of guilt around his neck, and that finally there was some sense to it all. But it was too late for that now, too late. There could be no sense between them. He would remain a hallucination to her, the ghost of a man she used to love. And she would remain a stranger to him. That he was willing to accept this without also punishing her was enough. ‘I’m so sorry, Bhaiya. I’m so very sorry.’ She bowed her head, waiting for the weight of his hand, for his blessing.

‘It is not for me to forgive you,’ he said. ‘It is not for me.’

She will return to that day. She will summon it at every crest and hinge of her life. What if. If only. Sohail had killed a man. He had taken his life and slaughtered him like an animal. Every day he hears the sound of that moment, feels the weight of the knife in his hand, the tear of flesh, the wetness of blood on his fingers. And she will do the same. She will see herself taking the ferry, banging her hands on the door of the madrasa, lifting the boy out of his cell and closing her arms around him and closing her eyes and she will tell herself not to sleep but sleep will come, and every time she opens her eyes it will be too late. What if. If only.

*

I am dreaming, dreaming. We are at the bungalow, Sohail and I. It is before the Book, before the war. Ammoo is peeling mangoes and we are waiting for the ice-cream man to ring his bicycle and shout igloo igloo igloo. We have just returned from the university and it is galloping through his veins now, the idea that there can be something greater than his own life. While I am dreaming Zaid wakes in the night, he doesn’t remember where he is, he only knows that he is about to be sent back to his father, who will return him to the madrasa, his boomerang life. The sand on the river bank is smooth; his toes curl around the silt. Alif, ba, ta, sa, he says to himself. I know the Alphabet. I am dreaming of ice cream and mangoes. I am dreaming of the three of us, the simple beauty of it because Ammoo was told she could never raise me and Sohail on her own, and here we are, with our appetites and politics and the roar of possibility glowing red in our cheeks, and where is he, my Zaid, he is sitting on the side of the Jamuna and dipping his toes into its heavy water. Warm. He is dreaming too, his hopes edge towards another life, on the other side of the river, laughter and bicycles and television all day. School. Love. Choc bars. The igloo man. The igloo man arrives on his refrigerator bicycle, and our tongues curl around this union, the mango warm from the tree, the afternoon trapped inside it, mingled with the taste of winter, sugary and cold. My brother is handsome, so handsome the girls slip notes to him in class, ink bleeding from the eager damp of their palms. He is serious and proud and he eats twice as many mangoes as Ammoo and me, but we don’t care, he has always been something of royalty in this house. The man about it. Zaid worries his loose tooth, reaches into his mouth, pulls. It is not ready; he drags it from its root; blood in his mouth. He spits.

She looks like his mother, but she is not his mother. She is taking him home. She promises he will not be sent back, that she will talk to his father. But what will she tell him? I already told him. At first he leans into the water, makes a dipper of his hands, rinses his mouth. The water is as bitter as the blood. The other side, the other side. Where teeth do not rot and there is no one to hold down his wrists. Ice cream and mangoes. Molasses. Tapping the date tree, drinking its sap. It isn’t far, that shore, he thinks. Half a mile, maybe. His father will always win. He will be sent back. He won’t go back. He won’t go. It isn’t far, that shore. I can hold my breath that long. He tips his body, minus one tooth, and the water folds over him. I can hold my breath that long.

Epilogue 1992

The day is perfect. Still a hint of winter in the trees, the light pale and glistening. The scaffolding is wrapped in red-and-green cloth, and in the middle of the stage is a square fenced-in area with a raised platform. The witness box.

Soon Suhrawardy Field will be thick with faces. One by one, they will line up on stage. One by one, they will begin to tell the story. Ali Ahmed, Shahjahan Sultan, Jahanara Imam. They will talk about the war, about the children and comrades they lost. About the things they have seen and the things they have done. They will utter the words they have uttered only to themselves all these years.

Maya’s daughter, Zubaida, five years old, will hold her hand as the speeches continue into the afternoon. Their palms will grow slippery, but they will cling to one another, their fingers interlaced. ‘Ammoo,’ she will whisper, ‘are they going to hang Ghulam Azam now?’

‘Not yet, beta. First he has to be tried.’

When Jahanara Imam gets up to tell her story, Maya will look for Ammoo in the crowd. She won’t see her — there will be too many people — but she knows her mother will be there. She has promised. The crowd will listen, softening the silence with nods and clapping, wanting to be told again and again how Jahanara sent her teenage son to the battlefield. Of her duty as a mother.

And then it is time.

A woman stands up. She walks to the stage, looking straight ahead, eyeing the horizon. Everything is quiet, only the trees rustling. A gift from the crowd, as if they were holding their breaths for her.

The years have made her regal. She is heavier, but still beautiful. A young man accompanies her to the stage, cupping her elbow.

With a nod to her, Maya begins. ‘Please state your name.’

‘Piya Islam.’

‘Tell us why you are here, Mrs Islam.’

She smiles. ‘It’s Miss.’

The crowd laughs, approving.

‘Miss Islam, tell us why you are here today.’

‘I was captured by the Pakistan Army on 26 July 1971. They came to raid my village; someone had told them we were hiding the guerrillas. My father was killed.’ She stops, clears her throat. The young man passes her a glass of water. She drinks.

‘I was put on a truck. Our neighbour’s daughter was with me; she was only fourteen. She cried and vomited in the truck.

‘We were chained to the wall. Someone had been there before us — we saw her name scratched into the wall. She had hanged herself, so they shaved our hair and took our saris.’

‘Can you tell us how many there were?’

‘Twenty, thirty. They took turns. After the other girl died, it was just me.’

‘And how long were you in captivity, Miss Islam?’

‘Until the war ended.’

‘Thank you, Miss Islam. Is there anything more you would like to tell us?’

‘Yes.’ She turned to the young man. ‘This is my son. His name is Sohail. I named him after the man who rescued me from that place. The man who saved my life.’

Piya steps down from the witness box. Maya reaches for her, and in front of all these people, the people who have come to bear witness and the ones who have come to tell their stories, they embrace. All that is good in her brother, and all that is good in her, is in this field, in this woman who has named her son after him, in the girl who is named after his son. Zaid. Zubaida. A name locked in a name. Every time her daughter laughs, with the delight, the miracle-joy of it, there is a fingerprint of pain, the memory of a little linguist, a card-shark and a thief. She misses him. Every day she misses him. Zaid and Sohail. She feels it here, under her ribs and right next to her beating heart. And here, at her temples, and every time she closes her eyes and sees the picture of who Sohail has become, knowing that they will never go to the cinema or sit up at the table with Ammoo or share a joke or a book (there can be only One, there can be only One), her heart will break. But she recognises the wound in his history, the irreparable wound, because she has one too. His wound is her wound. Knowing this, she finds she can no longer wish him different.