A Golden Age Read online

  ‘Auntie,’ he said softly, ‘can I come in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He hesitated. ‘I’m not disturbing you?’

  Rehana shook her head, surprised. Joy was not known for his politeness. He hovered at the edge of the sofa, bent his fingers and rubbed his knuckles together.

  Rehana had just finished preparing lunch. ‘Are you hungry?’

  He shook his head. She saw the beams of his shoulders pressing against his shirt, which was a red-and-blue check. The collars were long and pointed towards his shoes.

  She knew that shirt. Where had he got it, she wanted to ask him. There must be a perfectly innocent explanation. They had the same shirt. Simple. But Joy kept sweating and saying nothing and she started to feel panicky. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Yes, I–I have to go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  His head dipped lower and closer to his hands; his face swam; still he didn’t move to mop his face. ‘I have to go to Agartala,’ he said. ‘Just for a few days. I’ll come back.’

  ‘Has something happened? Is it Sohail?’

  ‘Sohail?’ he said. ‘No, no, Auntie. He’s in Agartala; he’s fine; there was a telegram last night.’

  ‘You got a telegram? Why didn’t you tell me?’ She burned to ask him about the shirt, the telegram, why he had to go. ‘What’s happening, beta, why don’t you tell me? Here, have a glass of water.’ She forced a note of tenderness into her voice. ‘You sit here, and you tell me.’

  ‘My brother is dead.’ His voice was as flat as a vinyl record.

  She didn’t want to believe it. ‘Aref?’ Then there was relief flooding guiltily through her. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘There was an operation,’ he continued in the same voice. ‘And they were ambushed. He was shot in the chest; he died instantly.’

  Rehana compared this boy to her son. There was something wrong with his face, the thick upper lip, now shimmering with sweat, the hard, angry eyes. There was no trace of childhood.

  Joy rubbed the sleeve of the red-and-blue check over his forehead, slicking his hair back until it stayed wet and stiff around the edges. ‘These things happen in war,’ he said. ‘You know what our sector commander told us? Did Sohail tell you? He said, “Nobody wants a live guerrilla.’’’

  He said a live guerrilla. What did he mean? He swallowed the water she gave him.

  ‘We are all dead!’ he said, raising his voice. ‘Not just Aref, that’s what I’m trying to say.’ His wet face leaned close; she couldn’t stop the question any more. ‘Why are you wearing Sohail’s shirt?’

  He looked down at himself. She saw his lips rustle. ‘We exchanged shirts. He wore Aref’s. I took his. Aref had mine.’

  Rehana picked up her gloves and her shears. She felt like attacking something.

  The garden was neither pretty nor particularly ordered. The rows were messy, the colours a little chaotic, and there was too much red and white, though this was not Rehana’s fault. The delta weather was punishing; it didn’t support the frailer colours of the palette, only the muscular ones, the shocking whites, the brutal reds, the fuchsias and the violets. And so Rehana couldn’t help overplanting the jasmine and the rojonigondha and the lilies. The dahlias and the chrysanthemums were mostly white too, and the carnations and the phlox were the crimson shade of a short, violent sunset. That was why she loved her yellow roses. Amid all the stark colours of the garden, they were the sweetest, tenderest plants.

  She found a clutch of weeds growing against the eastern corner of the wall that divided the bungalow property from Shona. The weeds had spirited purple flowers, spiky and punctuated, as though they knew their time was borrowed. Rehana seized them with both hands and pulled. They didn’t budge. She planted a foot on the boundary wall, leaned back and used her weight. She strained and struggled, twisting the weed around her wrist, and finally it rushed out of the earth, trailing a long, knotted root.

  Another boy dead. Rehana asked God again, as she did every day, to save Sohail. What made Him spare one and take another? She didn’t know. Bless Sohail in Agartala, and my Maya in Calcutta. Maya had rung once, a few days after she’d left. She didn’t say where she was calling from, or where she was staying. She said she was all right. Don’t worry, she said, I’m happy.

  Rehana devised a strict schedule for the Major: the doctor came every other afternoon, checked the stitches and adjusted the medication. Rehana brought the Major his food on a tray and left him alone to eat. Then she gave him a half bar of soap and poured a glass of water over his right hand. After lunch, he took a nap. When he woke up, she brought him tea and gave him his evening pills. The Major, who could barely speak, chose to say nothing. He always nodded thank you. He didn’t smile, though, or wave to her when she said goodnight for the evening. He liked her cooking. His plate was always licked, except when she gave him fish. He would try to hide it under a pile of rice, or mix it up with the pieces of chewed-up pickle that climbed the side of his plate. What kind of Bengali doesn’t like fish? She added more pickles and replaced the fish with egg curry; maybe if she found a chicken at the market she would try to get it for him.

  She thought his first words to her might be ‘thank you’ or ‘I’m so grateful to you’ but instead he began with ‘It won’t be long now.’ She assumed he meant before he was well enough to leave Shona. He couldn’t mean before the war was over. In any case he was being optimistic, she thought. His leg still looked horribly twisted.

  She had to lean forward to hear him, and hold her hair back so it wouldn’t fall on to his face. She made a note to herself to braid her hair. She caught his breath, which smelled of watermelons. She found herself wondering how a person’s breath might come to smell of watermelons. She told herself it must be because he didn’t smoke cigarettes.

  The next day he said abruptly, ‘Why do you always wear white?’ which she thought was a rude observation, but then she surprised herself by answering, ‘So that you’ll be convinced I’m a nurse and not just a poor widow.’ At which he smiled, and Rehana was annoyed, in case she had accidentally begun some sort of banter with the man. But she needn’t have worried. He hardly said a word for a week after that, only smiled briefly when she brought him lunch and dinner.

  Then one day he said, ‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ and Rehana replied, ‘It was a long time ago,’ and then she said, ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I was.’ What kind of an answer was that? A look, a flash of something, passed across the Major’s face. It looked like anger. She wondered what it would be like to be close enough to the man to make him angry.

  The next day he asked, ‘What happened to your husband?’ It occurred to her that it was none of his business, but somehow she felt the urge to answer.

  ‘He had a heart-attack.’

  ‘Suddenly?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Why did you never marry again?’

  Still none of his business, but once she started, it was difficult to stop without appearing rude. ‘I had children,’ Rehana said; ‘a reason not to marry again.’

  ‘I thought that would be a good reason.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no. Children are the worst reason to marry again.’

  ‘You didn’t want someone to look after them?’

  ‘You don’t know how hard I had to fight just to keep them.’ She told him about the court case. ‘I had to get the children back. I needed money. A lot of money. I needed money to bribe the judge. Money for the plane ticket to Lahore. Mrs Chowdhury said, “Build a house at the back of the property.” This is what my husband had intended as well. So that is what I decided to do. But I needed–’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Yes, I needed money. I didn’t have any. My father had passed away. My sisters were in Karachi. They said they wanted to come, but they couldn’t. Things hadn’t gone well for them, they were always struggling. I was the one who was always sending them things.’ She remembered the stri
ped aerograms with the bank drafts.

  The Major looked around Mrs Sengupta’s bedroom–took in the thick walls, the immaculate white plaster, the heavy double doors leading out on to the wide veranda. With his eyes he asked, How did you do it?

  Rehana considered telling the Major about stealing the money. She told herself the thought was practical; after all, she had to tell someone, she couldn’t keep it locked inside her for ever. A thing like that will eventually corrupt and destroy a person. And this man would be as good as any; better, in fact, because after he left she would probably never see him again. He might even die. Tobah as-tak farullah. She said Aytul Kursi in case he died. She said it again, sorry for having thought of his death.

  She thought of telling him as her first selfish act in a very long time. Something just for herself. An act that would help no one, do nothing, feed no hunger, raise no children. She practised in front of the mirror inside the door of her steel almirah. She imagined the secret disappearing from her days. She lingered over it in her dreams, knowing it would soon be gone. She wondered if she would miss it.

  But every day she put off telling him. She went to see him and talked about other things. He listened patiently, nodding, though not frequently enough to suggest he was bored. He always looked at her mouth, not her eyes. She liked that. She didn’t like being stared at in the eyes.

  Whenever she intended to ask him a question, she would find herself talking instead. For instance, one day she found herself saying, ‘After my husband died I lost my tongue.’

  The Major tilted his head. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I had no one to tell my sorrows to.’

  And he nodded.

  It appeared the conversation was over. To end it with a flourish Rehana felt it was appropriate to say, ‘Iqbal was my saviour.’

  ‘Women always say that.’ He held his lips tight around his teeth, so the words struggled to get out.

  Now she had to explain. ‘No, it’s true. We had to leave Calcutta. We–my father–had to sell everything. My sisters had moved to Karachi, but I didn’t want to go. I would have married anyone.’

  ‘You’re not angry he died?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes. He left me so suddenly.’ She considered telling him about her trips to the graveyard: the negotiations, the pleas, the stubborn, embarrassing belief he might come back, that things might return to the way they had once been. But it was too soon, or perhaps too late, for such revelations. And anyway this man did not seem the type to indulge in such acts of sentiment.

  ‘My wife died,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We weren’t really married. She was Hindu. But we loved each other. Does that count?’

  ‘Yes, of course it counts,’ Rehana said, thinking of Silvi’s wedding.

  ‘My father was a very religious man.’

  ‘Mine wasn’t.’

  ‘No?’

  An old image of her father flashed before her: handsome, polished, his legs crossed confidently in front of him. ‘I didn’t really know him. I was too young. But I remember the things he liked. Pipe tobacco. Thackeray. William Makepeace Thackeray–he used to make me say that. He played the piano–we had an enormous piano. It was always the shiniest thing in the house. Someone came to tune it every time the seasons changed.’

  ‘You had a piano-tuner?’

  ‘A piano-tuner. A table-setter. A horseman. Three poets.’ She recited the list from memory, like multiplication tables. ‘Eight cooks, two butlers, twelve cars.’ She hadn’t seen any of it. By the time she was old enough to know the difference, they were already poor.

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘She died when the money ended. 1936. I was three.’

  Rehana had found a chicken at New Market. From the look on the Major’s face, she might have given him a trunk full of gold. He sucked on his fingers and licked the rim of the plate. When he was finished, he belched very quietly into his hand. And then he asked her about Iqbal again, and she found herself telling him about the trip he had made to London in ’57, when he’d ordered the Vauxhall.

  ‘These are the things my husband brought me from London: a black wool coat from Harrods, a gold Rolex ladies’ watch, a round box of Quality Street chocolates. I kept the coat in a box with mothballs. I divided the chocolates in half. Maya ate hers in one day, and spent the next day holding her stomach and moaning. On the third day she begged Sohail for his share. He gave them up–he could never resist her–though he kept one aside, the round caramel–do you know the one? Purple foil wrap?

  The Major didn’t reveal whether he recognized it.

  ‘He kept it for so long the ants got to it. But I don’t think he liked the chocolates. As for the gold Rolex, well, eventually I pawned it. But it was very beautiful, a beautiful gift. And that is the story of my husband’s trip to London in 1957.’ Rehana piled up the dinner plates and moved to carry them away.

  ‘Weren’t there any suitors? After your husband died?’ Maybe he thought he was changing the subject, but really he was coming closer to the truth about Shona. She fixed her gaze on his torn lip. She reached her hand out, as if to touch it, but the hand went to the bed, smoothing the sheet, tucking it into the mattress. Time to change it, she thought.

  The next day there were three sharp raps at the door. Rehana rushed to the drawing room, her heart racing, because these days it could be anything, Sohail, news of Sohail, a letter from Maya, a telegram saying they were both dead, or captured, or hurt somewhere. Or it could be the army, or a spy, or someone pretending to be a spy, or someone pretending not to be a spy. It could be anyone.

  The woman was carrying a silver tray. There was a bowl on the tray, a blue porcelain bowl with a white napkin on top. The napkin had golden tulips embroidered along its edge. Something hot and fragrant was inside: Rehana caught a whiff of raisins as the woman, standing in the doorway, said hello.

  ‘I’m Joy’s mother’, she said a little apologetically. ‘Joy and Aref.’ She had a plump, dimpled face.

  ‘Mrs Bashir, yes, of course. Please come in.’ Was she coming to ask about Aref? Rehana seated her on the sofa. She tried not to stare. No matter how hard you look, she told herself, you won’t be able to know if she’s telling the truth.

  ‘May I offer you some tea?’

  ‘No, please, I just came for this.’ She pointed to the silver tray, which she had balanced on her lap. The raisin smell wafted through the room. Mrs Bashir paused a little, then placed her palms on the tulip napkin. She had big hands and ragged fingernails.

  ‘Can you please give this to Joy?’ The words came out quickly, as though the woman was afraid her courage would suddenly leave her.

  Did she know Aref was dead? If she did not know, did this mean she was telling the truth, or did it mean she was lying? ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Just morag polao.’

  ‘I don’t know where your son is.’ Your son is dead. The other son, who is wearing my son’s shirt, has gone to bury him.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course you don’t know.’ She paused, then said, ‘Perhaps Sohail can bring it to him.’ Mrs Bashir looked at the doorway, and Rehana could see the anxiety, the cautious curiosity and a little jealousy, perhaps, towards another woman, another war-mother who might know something she didn’t.

  ‘Sohail is in Karachi,’ Rehana said carefully, ‘with his aunts.’ Sohail is wearing Aref’s shirt Aref is wearing Joy’s shirt Joy is wearing Sohail’s shirt.

  ‘Perhaps you know someone who might pass this on. It’s his favourite.’

  ‘I know no one,’ Rehana said, as though she had spoken the words a thousand times before.

  ‘Please, Mrs Haque, you are a mother also!’

  You are a mother. How many times had she repeated this very phrase to herself? I’m a mother. Above all things, a mother. Not a widow, certainly not a wife. Not a thief. A mother. But now she was something else–a mother, yes, but not just of children. Mother of a different s
ort. This mother knew what it was to long for her children. But she also understood the dangers of such longing.

  ‘I’m sorry. I know you miss your boys.’

  ‘Have you seen them? How are they? How is Joy, and my Aref?’

  She doesn’t know her son is dead. Rehana started at the thought of Aref lying in a grave somewhere, restless and unmourned. She wanted to touch the woman’s rough hand. But it could so easily be a trick. Maybe it wasn’t her son. She had to pretend she didn’t know anything about it. To test herself, Rehana looked straight into Mrs Bashir’s eyes and said, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen them since the war began.’ And, as she said it, she thought of the blessing she had blown on Joy’s forehead that morning when he had left for Agartala, and the needy look in his eyes as she had whispered the words, and the tender way in which he had thanked her and touched her feet. ‘Mrs Bashir, please take your morag polao home.’

  Rehana stood up in what she imagined was a guiltless manner and opened the front door.

  ‘You take it,’ Mrs Bashir said, thrusting the silver tray towards Rehana. ‘Please, you have it. Think that I made it for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bashir, please go.’

  ‘I know he’s here, I know it. You’re a liar,’ she said softly. Her kajol-streaked tears fell sloppily on to her cheeks. She stepped towards the door, and for a moment Rehana thought she might fling the hot rice at her, but she didn’t. She smoothed the tulip napkin and walked away, leaving Rehana in the doorway reciting the morag polao recipe to herself, wondering if she had enough chicken to prepare the dish when Joy returned.

  The visit from Joy’s mother was unsettling. Just after she finished the Magrib prayer, Rehana went to see the Major. She felt strangely exposed without a tray of food in front of her, a bedsheet to change or even a vial of medicine from Dr Rajesh. ‘Joy’s mother was here,’ she said. ‘I sent her away.’