Tahmima Anam - The Good Muslim

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

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

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

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

‘Jolly doesn’t really suit me.’

‘Nor me. My husband insisted we come.’

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

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

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

‘Mostly. You’ve been away?’

‘Something like that.’

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

They drifted back to the party together.

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

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So you’re a friend of Saima?’

‘Yes, school friend.’

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

‘You’re not married?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t want to get married?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What happened to him?’

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