Tahmima Anam - The Good Muslim

But he has no story of this kind. She grows angrier and angrier at his silence, and even after his mother has given in to the mornings on the roof, Maya continues to follow him with her eyes, reproach him with a stony silence. Silence for silence. When he asks her about her work at the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, she snaps, what, you don’t think women are victims of the war too?

He thinks of all the people who have died — the enemy combatants, and the people he didn’t save, and his friend Aref, and all the boys who went to war and were killed. Every day he thinks of them. How very selfish of her to want a piece of that.

Ammoo is not greedy, but she has been worried about him, climbs halfway up the ladder and calls out, it’s very hot, Sohail, won’t you come down and have something to drink?

On the roof he has assembled a number of things. There is a comb that used to belong to Piya, a shirt that belonged to his friend Aref, killed last summer by the army. And a photograph of his father, taken in front of the Vauxhall. Not handsome — his father had not been handsome — but looking confidently ahead, living the life that was intended for him. And Ammoo’s Book.

There has come to you from God a light and a Book most lucid.

With it, God guides him who conforms to his good pleasure to the paths of tranquillity;

He shall lead them from the fields of darkness to the light, by his leave,

And he shall guide them to a straight path.

The book believes he is good. He begins to read.

He comes to Maya one day and tries to tell her. He says it is the greatest thing that has ever happened to him. He has found something, something that explains everything. Does she want to know what it is? Isn’t she curious? He is pale and the skin is stretched tight over his face, and she sees that death hovers inside him, the death to which he had come so close in the war, he and death in a tight corridor. Now it is like a bruise that won’t heal, and he is pressing his face close to hers, and she sees that whatever it is that he is telling her about is what stops the bruise from spreading from his cheek to his bones and from his bones to his blood. It is a dam, like the one they are building in Rangamati that will hold its water like a giant cupped hand and power the fields; it holds him together, it lights him up.

At that moment Maya makes a decision, one that she will come to regret many times in the years that follow. She sees in his bright, water-lined eyes that he is telling the truth. She sees that he fell into the abyss and that this Book is what brought him to the surface and allowed him to breathe. She sees too, in herself, the need for such a rescue, such a buoy, such a truth. But because it has suddenly become clear to her that religion, its open fragrance and cloudless stretches of infinity, may in fact be what he is claiming it is, an essential human need, hers as much as his, and because she feels the twinge of his yearning, turning like a leaf in her heart, she decides, at that moment, that it cannot be. She will not become one of those people who buckle under the force of a great event and allow it to change the metre of who they are.

And neither will Sohail. She will not let him. She believes — oh, how foolish she is, how arrogant — she believes she has a say. She believes she can do something to prevent it. She believes her will is greater than the leaf in her heart and the leaf in her brother’s heart.

He approaches her. ‘I’ve been praying.’

‘For what?’ She is reading the Observer .

‘Not for anything. Just praying.’

‘Please, Bhaiya,’ she says, ‘don’t start talking religious mumbo-jumbo, we won’t recognise you any more.’ She turns her attention away, folding her newspaper to the classified ads.

‘But that is what prayer is. It is the abandonment of all other thoughts, all other pursuits.’

She looks at him then, and he sees her searching for the joke.

‘I’m serious,’ he says, answering the question she is too stunned to ask. He pauses, levelling his thoughts before replying. Outside, a man is shouting on the street and banging on what sounds like a cooking pot. ‘Allah, Allah, Allah. Give to the poor, give to the poor.’

‘It doesn’t matter what brings us to God; it only matters that it does.’

‘Are you quoting from some mullah now?’

‘No, Maya, I am telling the truth.’

‘So this has nothing to do with Piya, with the war. Did something else happen? Did you do something?’

She is close, too close. ‘I told you, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Of course it matters. How can you accept the cure without considering the disease?’

‘Is it your opinion that I am ill?’

The beggar’s voice grows louder. ‘God forgives you,’ he cries. ‘God forgives you.’

The window behind Maya is illuminated with the gold tones of morning. The light spills across her back, and, overflowing, falls into his eyes. He can see little of her face, only the orb of her hair.

‘I’ve been reading about it,’ she says; ‘it’s called shell shock.’

A splinter of anger enters his voice when he replies. ‘You’re not listening to me. I’m not ill. Maybe, yes, after the war, it is always difficult.’

‘So it has just come out of that, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘But even if one thing has led to another, I can only be grateful.’

Now it is her turn to be angry. ‘You remember, don’t you, what they did to us in the name of God?’

‘Just because it was usurped for evil ends doesn’t make it a bad thing. That is the mistake I made.’

‘Mistake? You think it was all a mistake?’

He shifts his gaze away from her, unsure how to reply. It’s not that he wishes there hadn’t been a war, or that he hadn’t joined the fighting. But his life wasn’t for that, it was for something else. How can he explain this to her? That there was a reason for his living while so many others had died. He longs for her to know, to know something of what it was like, longs for her to have a heart as heavy as his, a heart that needs to wrap itself around a certainty, a path.

Maya is gulping down her tea, and making to leave the table. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she says, ‘after everything, you do this.’

Rehana comes upon them at this very moment, carrying a bowl of semolina halwa she has reheated on the stove. She sees Sohail pointing to the window behind Maya.

‘There’s someone there,’ he says.

They look. The man is bare-chested and unadorned except for his long and elaborately knotted hair, which hangs down past his shoulders. He taps on the window. ‘God forgives you,’ he says. ‘God is merciful.’

They all stare at each other for a moment, and then Maya says, ‘What does your book tell you to do about this man, Bhaiya?’

Sohail fishes in his pockets and pulls out a folded note. The man cups his hands as the window is opened and the note slips through.

‘That’s it? That’s all you’re doing? Don’t you want to know how that man came to be here?’

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

‘I’m not the one pretending to be holy.’

Sohail’s fist comes down on the table. ‘There’s nothing holy about me — nothing. Only I have the humility to admit it. There is something greater.’

‘But look what your greater being has brought us. War, and a beggar tapping at our window.’

‘Maya,’ Rehana says, raising her voice, ‘that’s enough.’

The man raises his hand to his forehead, then turns away, slipping through the opening in the gate. Sohail darts out of the room. They hear his door slamming shut.

Maya turns to her mother. ‘He’s going to turn your house into a mosque, didn’t you hear?’