Tahmima Anam - The Good Muslim

On some nights Parveen would slip into Maya’s bed and put her hand gently on her forehead, believing she was asleep. Maya would hear her sigh deeply, her breath medicinal and light, and she would drift off to the sound of Parveen’s gentle snoring.

Her memories of those two years were full of Sohail. Sohail holding her hand on the aeroplane. Sohail bending down and retying her shoelaces. Sohail’s handkerchief against her lashes. Sohail instructing her to stay silent at school until she knew enough Urdu. Sohail breaking her rootis into small pieces and stacking them up, just the way she liked.

He was father and mother and bhaiya to her. Her closest human. Her only friend.

When they returned to Dhaka, a very large two-storey building stood where half of the garden had once been. Ammoo took them on a tour, their shoes clattering against the bare cement floors. From the upstairs verandah, which wrapped around the building like a vine, you could see the flat roof of their shabby little bungalow, rainwater gathering in mossy pools, whitewash greying.

They couldn’t live in it. Ammoo was going to rent it out and buy them things with the money. It was her two-storeyed bit of insurance, that house. She whispered a prayer every time she stepped into it; she dusted and redusted the banisters; she stretched her hand up, touching the frame of the front door. And she made them call it Shona, as though it were built of solid gold.

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

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

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

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

‘How long have you known?’

‘Not long.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, Alhamdulillah.’

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

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

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

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