A Golden Age Read online

  ‘You have this,’ he said, proffering the meat. And Rehana could see that he was afraid of her, and she was pleased, and then ashamed to be pleased. She quickly pulled out a five-rupee note and turned, waving away the flies that had suddenly collected around her head.

  The Major was awake when she returned. Rehana could tell he was uncomfortable; he didn’t turn his head when she entered, just blinked a few times and tried to move his mouth. His eyes were two black pearls. She turned on the ceiling fan and wiped the sweat that had gathered on his forehead. He needed water. She went outside to look for Maya, and found her frowning over a book and writing in its margins with a tiny, illegible scrawl.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Reading Che Guevara Speaks,’ she said, exposing the spine.

  ‘I asked you to look after the Major.’

  ‘He’s asleep.’

  ‘No, he’s awake.’

  ‘Well, now you can take care of him.’ And she returned to her book.

  ‘You don’t like him?’

  ‘Why not?’ she mumbled, not looking up. ‘He’s fighting for us.’

  Rehana looked more closely at her daughter and tried–how many times had she done this?–to see something that might have escaped her. There was none of the panic of the night before, nothing of the need.

  It started to rain.

  Sighing, Rehana took a glass of water to the Major, covering her head with a plastic sheet as she crossed the garden into the other house. As he drank, she noticed his lips were not as desperate as the rest of him. He thanked her with a relieved breath, and she looked at him as though he could not see her, with a frank stare.

  Joy arrived in the evening. He rubbed his hand across his chest and asked for a word. ‘I need to speak to you, Auntie,’ he said. ‘Thing is, the Pakistan Army think the Major is dead. They saw the building collapsing around him; there’s no chance he survived.’ He looked around the room, avoiding her eyes. ‘We believe we can use this to our advantage.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘He’ll stay here until he recovers, if that’s all right with you.’

  She remembered the sight of the Major’s leg. It could be weeks, even months. ‘I thought it would be only a few days.’

  ‘We could move him,’ Joy said, ‘but now that he’s in hiding, it would be better if he stayed here.’

  What had she got herself into? ‘How long?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe a month. And he can give out his orders–through me. I’ll go back and forth.’

  ‘What about Sohail?’

  Joy rubbed his chest again. His fingernails were rimmed with black. ‘That’s the thing, see, it’s dangerous now for him to come here so often. So we’ll have to find him another place.’

  ‘He can’t stay here with you?’

  ‘It puts everyone in danger. You, the Major, Maya. Anyway he’ll mostly be in Agartala.’

  Rehana threw up her hands. ‘Do as you will, beta.’

  As it turned out, it wasn’t long before Rehana saw Sohail again. Just after lunch a few days later she received a telegram and spent the rest of the day with her head on the arm of the sofa, waiting for him. She knew he would come; he wouldn’t make her do this alone. All afternoon she heard the clatter of Maya’s typewriter; her strokes were getting faster, more confident.

  By evening he was at the door. He stared emptily at Rehana and squeezed her hand. He was wearing a white kurta, like the butcher, except he had a green hat with a red metal star glued to the front.

  When Maya came into the drawing room, she saw her brother staring into the garden.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’

  He approached her and pulled her into his arms. Then he said, ‘Sharmeen is in Dhaka.’

  ‘What? How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’ A beat, and then: ‘She’s at the cantonment, Maya. The hospital.’

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  Nobody moved.

  ‘Why are you sitting there? Let’s go!’ she started. ‘She must be sick. How did she end up there? But you can tell me everything later.’ And she flashed her teeth–a bluish tinge, like the sight of clouds. If she noticed her brother’s bent head, she ignored it, smoothing the middle part in her hair and changing her sandals for outside shoes.

  ‘Go go cholo cholo,’ she said, in the mixed Bengali–English she used when she was nervous, or in a hurry.

  ‘She’s dead,’ Sohail said finally. His beard, now dense like a solid black mantle, reflected the thickness of his eyebrows, the paleness of his skin.

  Maya ran out into the garden and started speaking to them through the window.

  ‘Why would she be in the hospital if she were dead?’ She had to shout to make herself heard.

  ‘She’s been there, Maya. She’s been there all along.’

  ‘What? And you knew?’

  ‘Yes. But there was no point in telling you. There wasn’t anything we could do.’

  ‘Why? Why didn’t you tell me? I would have got her out of there myself.’ Then, as though it had just occurred to her, she realized the truth was uglier than she had imagined. Rehana, seeing her daughter through the open window, knew that for ever afterwards Maya would remember where her brother had told her the news, there in the shade of the mango tree, the air expectant, just after rain, the sky dark as though it were night, could only be night, but wasn’t, and the pale glow of the jasmine and the bougainvillea, abundant, perfumed; the Major asleep, or dead, in a far corner of Shona.

  And then he told her everything.

  ‘She died in the hospital.’ He would have gone outside to comfort her, but she gripped the window bars and held him with a terrible look.

  ‘She was pregnant.’

  ‘Pregnant?’

  Maya turned her face away and kicked the foot of the tree. ‘She hated men. She hated them! She hated sex, did you know that? She never had sex. Everyone else did, but not her.’ Rehana wanted to flinch, or to tell Maya to shut up, but she stopped herself and just stared, letting a tear trickle slowly from her eye.

  ‘I want to know their names.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The ones who raped her. I want to know.’

  ‘They’re soldiers, Maya. Tikka Khan’s soldiers.’

  ‘Tikka Khan,’ Maya shouted, as though she were making an announcement, ‘the Butcher of Bengal!’ And then she kicked at the tree again, reached up and hugged a ropy branch, looking as though she might swing from it, but then just stood there with her arms raised and her face pressed against the bark.

  That night Rehana dreamed of Iqbal. She dreamed he was knocking at the door. In life, he had never knocked.

  He would come home every evening at exactly six o’clock. Rehana, her eyes on the wall clock, would be ready with his evening refresher: a tumbler of whisky, at first with water, then soda and eventually, as the years passed, with two cubes of ice.

  Even though she had been waiting for him all day and she knew he would not be late, she would sit quietly with her back to the door and her hands folded on her lap instead of staring out of the window or unfastening the latch or even waiting on the veranda so he could see her as soon as he stepped through the gate. She would close her eyes and smell the jasmine crawling over the vine, and the green lemons in the tree, ripening and swelling with each passing hour.

  She sat and waited, waited even as he pulled at the gate and it swung open in front of him; she waited still as his footsteps drew nearer, and then–she knew exactly when–just as he was about to pull his hand out of his pocket and curl his fingers around to knock, she would sweep across the room, pull down the latch and throw the doors open in one liquid movement.

  Every evening it was the same, and every evening a new, breathless thing.

  When she woke she was angry. He owed her, she wanted to tell him; he owed her for staying behind and taking care of the mess; for getting to the end, which was never the end; for finishing it or, at least, for standing up to the
struggle.

  She moved through the house, her cheeks hot with memory. Maya’s bed was empty. Rehana had spent the evening with her, feeding her jao bhaat and running her hands over her forehead. She went to check on the Major occasionally, but otherwise the two houses were quiet, with only the swift rustle of leaves and a stretch of brief, sudden showers. Sohail said he would keep things quiet around Shona for a few days, until they decided what to do with Maya. It wasn’t safe to have her at home any more; now that she knew about Sharmeen, there was no telling what she might do. And then they’d fallen asleep, Rehana more deeply than she had intended, and now here was Maya’s bed, empty.

  She searched the house stealthily, listening at the bathroom door, scanning the kitchen sink, the dining table. She peered out into the garden and saw a faint light coming from Shona. The light drew her in; she staggered across the garden in the darkness and hovered outside the window, where she could make out faint shadows cast by a flickering kerosene lamp.

  It was Maya. She was in the Major’s room.

  She was circling him. Abruptly she sat down at the edge of the bed and turned up the sheet to reveal the black soles of his feet. Rehana watched silently; she couldn’t bring herself to interrupt. Maya ducked under the bed and plunged her hand into a bucket of water, emerging with a wet cloth and wringing it gently, the water falling back with the sound of bare feet on a cool cement floor. She pressed the cloth against the Major’s soles, first left, then right, then both together. Rehana thought she heard the Major sigh, though he kept perfectly still, and then, suddenly and awkwardly, Maya bent her head and hovered over the Major’s feet, and Rehana saw that she was weeping, her tears falling on to the Major’s rolled-up military trousers.

  And when she looked up, Maya saw her mother watching from the window and fled, leaving the bucket where it was, the dark water rippling and gleaming, a luminous, blinking eye.

  Rehana’s first thought was that she should be sent away. She was guilty for thinking it; she wanted to believe her daughter should stay close, with her. Or she should go with her, wherever it was. But she couldn’t leave Sohail, wouldn’t leave Shona, the Major, Joy. It was not a choice; even though the whole thing sometimes felt like an accident, she was caught up; she couldn’t leave now. But Maya had to go. Rehana considered, then rejected, the idea of sending her to Karachi to stay with her aunts; it would incense her, and anyway Rehana had no idea how her sisters had taken the news of the war. They hadn’t written to her since the war had begun, and, while she wanted to blame it on the post, she knew they were secretly berating her, and in their hearts calling her gaddar. Traitor.

  In the end Maya made it easy. She came to her mother the next afternoon, her eyes scratched and red.

  ‘I’m going to Calcutta. I’ve arranged it with bhaiya.’

  Rehana didn’t know what to say; all the things she had been storing up for Maya–the soft words, the sorrys, her regret at knowing she had not been able to love her as she should–crowded for her attention.

  Maya misunderstood Rehana’s silence. ‘Please don’t be angry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be angry.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m not angry, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you alone.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ She smiled at her daughter. ‘You don’t worry about me.’

  ‘I loved her so much!’ Maya said, trying to keep from crying. Her chin shook, and she kept swallowing and pressing her lips together. ‘I have to do something. It’s so unfair.’

  Rehana nodded.

  Maya looked into the distance and didn’t say anything for a long time. ‘They need people to write the press statements,’ she said finally, the anguish gone from her voice. ‘Sohail knows someone at the headquarters. Maybe I can even go into the liberated areas.’

  ‘You be careful. I’ll be worried about you. I’m always worried about you.’

  ‘I’m always worried about you!’

  Rehana was surprised to hear the words, but realized they must be true, and here it was, the thing she had been looking for, a small window into her daughter’s locked heart. It was not that she was diffident but burdened. Burdened by the beloved, the disappeared. By her own widowed mother. Rehana embraced Maya, who was still so thin and brittle, but instead of telling her to be careful she found herself saying, ‘Write some good stories.’

  June

  I loves you, Porgy

  Throughout June, Tikka Khan’s soldiers made their way across the summer plains of Bangladesh. They looted homes and burned roofs. They raped. They murdered. They lined up the men and shot them into ponds. They practised old and new forms of torture. They were explorers, pioneers of cruelty, every day outdoing their own brutality, every day feeling closer to divinity, because they were told they were saving Pakistan, and Islam, maybe even the Almighty himself, from the depravity of the Bengalis; in this feverish, this godly journey, their resolve could know no bounds.

  The Bengali resistance was weak and sporadic. General Zia relied on the youthful spirit of his soldiers, and they had small victories. A blown-up bridge here. An army-convoy ambush there. A captured railway station. They celebrated these victories with the broadcasters of the radio, who sent up cheers in the homes of their listeners, those city dwellers spending long, hot afternoons hugging their wireless radios.

  After the Major came to stay and Maya left for Calcutta, Rehana’s world grew smaller. She was encouraged not to leave the house too often; if she needed something, it would be brought to her. She should go to the market in Mrs Chowdhury’s car, but buy only enough food for herself. She should sometimes visit her neighbours; she should appear concerned; she should talk about the war but only vaguely. It was agreed that if anyone asked she should say that she had sent Maya and Sohail to stay with her sisters in Karachi.

  Things were quiet at Shona. Joy appeared occasionally to take care of the Major, and the doctor was in and out, but otherwise there was very little activity next door. It was just the three of them: Rehana, and the two men in the other house. She spent the nights with the kerosene lamp on. Every sound incited a fierce hammering in her heart. She thought she heard footsteps, soft knocks on the door; she thought she felt someone tugging at her feet as she slept. The Major next door was no consolation; he made her feel exposed.

  On days when her nerves threatened to overwhelm her, Rehana tried to think back to a less turbulent time, when nothing of significance happened, when the passing of seasons, the thrill of the Eid moon-sighting, the smell of mangoes ripening on the trees, were the most spectacular events of the calendar. But their lives had never had any regularity–at least, not the sort Rehana was now sifting her memories for. There was always something, some uproar, in the city, or beyond, in Islamabad, where one punishing law after another was passed; and even further afield–the death of Che Guevara, whom Sohail had mourned as though he had lost a brother. Every hiccup of the political landscape made its way to their door and, when her son was old enough, came through the door and into the bungalow, into the boy’s drawn and serious face, the shadows he cast upon the corridors and over the dining table; and then into Maya, who was angrier and louder. No, there had never been any other time; their lives were populated by Lenin and Castro and Mujib and Anwar Sadaat; there was only this time, this life, this fraught and crowded era, to which they were bound without choice, without knowledge, only their passions, their loves, to lead and sustain them.

  In this, as in all other things, Rehana veered between indulgence and censure. There was a part of her that wanted to allow her children anything–any whimsy, any zeal, any excess. Another part of her wanted them to have nothing to do with it all, to keep them safe, at home; in either case, she treated Maya and Sohail as though they were there to collect on an old debt, an old promise that could never be fulfilled, not in this lifetime; a yawning, cyclic, inexhaustible need. Whether the need was theirs or hers, she could not say.

  Discovering herself alone in the house for the fi
rst time in many years, Rehana found she had no desire to reassemble the sewing group. She didn’t want to laugh with her friends any more; she wanted to stir the melancholy in the empty house, the deep sadness that was also a kind of quiet, a tranquillity, that she was reluctant to surrender.

  Rehana found she took something close to pleasure in repeating the lonely rituals she had developed just after the children left for Lahore all those years ago. She scrubbed the house to a hospital shine; she shooed crows from her pickles; she took long, exaggerated baths under the bucket water; she dug up large sections of her garden and set about replanting the pumpkin, the marrow, the hibiscus, the jasmine.

  The water would come on only between ten and twelve every day. Every morning she had to fill up the biryani pot and the three metal buckets and soak the clothes and the vegetables and gut the fish.

  She went to the graveyard to tell Iqbal about the Major. When she got there, she felt like saying sorry, but she wasn’t sure what for. Well, it was obvious what for.

  You would not have liked this.

  A column of ants bisected Iqbal’s gravestone.

  Forgive me; I haven’t come in almost a month. The flowers on your plot have cracked in the heat; that bodmash caretaker promised to water them, but of course he forgot, even though I gave him an extra five annas the last time I was here.

  I am harbouring a person who I don’t know and who could get us all into very big trouble. No, you would not have liked it.

  If you want to complain you should complain to your son, he brought that man and begged me to let him stay. Could I say no? No, I could not say no.

  About a fortnight after the Major’s accident, Joy came to the door of the bungalow. He looked as though he’d been running: wet patches soaked through his shirt at his neck and his armpits. His cheeks glistened, and water, like tears, flowed from his forehead.