Tahmima Anam - The Good Muslim

Instead, she found the kitchen packed with women. They wore long black burkhas and squatted over the grinding stone, the sink, the stove. Maya hovered at the entrance, wondering for a moment if she had strayed into the wrong house. She stood the tree up against a wall and set down her bag.

‘Hello?’

One of the women rose to greet her. Maya couldn’t make out her features beneath the loose black cloth. ‘As-Salaam Alaikum,’ she said.

‘Walaikum As-Salaam.’

The woman reached over and held Maya’s hand. ‘We mourn our sister,’ she said, then turned around and returned to her task, peeling cucumbers over a bowl of water. Maya stood and watched her for what felt like a long time. No one else spoke or addressed her. She picked up her things and left the kitchen. Where was Ammoo? The urge to see her became acute. Maya bent over the sink in the bathroom and splashed a few handfuls of water on her face. She retied her hair, practising the moment she would set eyes on her mother. When she emerged, someone was waiting for her in the corridor. ‘It’s time,’ she said, and led Maya to the living room.

The burkha-clad women were busy rearranging the room. They pushed the sofa against the wall, lifted up the dining table and leaned it on its side. A photograph of her father was turned upside down. The watercolour painting Sohail had done of Maya when she was seven, her ribbons red and yellow, was covered with a pillowcase. As the muezzin began the call to prayer, they sped up, spreading white cloths on the carpet, lighting incense and filling a long silver container with rosewater. Finally, they pinned a sheet across the room, dividing it in half.

Someone pushed Maya through the sheet and into the back of the room. ‘Please cover yourself,’ she said.

Maya grabbed the woman’s elbow. ‘Where is my mother, do you know?’

The woman shook her head.

‘Rehana Haque. This is her house.’

The woman pulled Maya close, her grip tight. ‘Doa koro, apa,’ she said. Pray, sister .

She could go out and look for her mother. Maybe she was at the Ladies’ Club, or visiting a friend. She might be at the graveyard, putting flowers on Abboo’s grave. But the room was too crowded now for Maya to leave. The women seemed to have multiplied, taking every inch of space on the carpet. They leaned against each other and held hands. Maya packed herself tightly against the wall. She heard the men shuffle in, shadow puppets on the sheet, their capped heads crowding the tableau. A man separated from the group and positioned himself in the centre of the room. He cleared his throat and began in a high, nasal voice: Alhamdulilla hi rabbil al-ameen. Praise be to God, cherisher and sustainer of all worlds. As he uttered this sentence, Maya saw her mother slip through the curtain. The breath stopped in her throat. She wanted to call out. She waved her arms. ‘Ma!’ she shout-whispered. Rehana looked this way and that. The Huzoor raised his voice. Ammoo fixed her gaze on Maya and stood still for a moment, her hands moving to her face. Maya felt a burning in her eyes and at the back of her throat. Another seven years passed. Then, a whisper of a smile. Ammoo stepped through the crowd, her arms outstretched, and before she knew it Maya was in the cloud of her, the coconuts in her hair, the ginger in her fingertips. ‘When did you come?’ she whispered. All the years between them, trapped in the amber of her voice.

‘Just now. What’s going on?’

‘Milaad for Silvi.’

Of course. Silvi would have been buried within hours of her death, but this was her Qul-khani, the prayer to mark the third day of her passing.

Seven months into her exile, Maya had written to her mother. I am not angry, she had begun . But I cannot come home.

For almost a year Ammoo had not replied. Those months had felt endless, as she rehearsed in her mind the furious words her mother might say, wondering if the silence would go on forever, willing her own letter back. But when it arrived, Ammoo’s letter was packed with news, updates about the house, the neighbours, the garden. She showed no anger, but she didn’t ask Maya to return. And that was how they corresponded, exchanging elaborate pleasantries, long passages about the weather, telling each other everything and nothing.

The Huzoor continued his sermon. Now the women were moving back and forth to the rhythm of his words. It occurred to Maya that when her father died there would have been a similar scene, men in white caps, the air scented with rosewater. She stole a glance at her mother. Ammoo was wiping tears with the back of her hand. She looked the same, exactly the same.

The Huzoor began to talk about Silvi. How pious she was, how good. How devoted to her faith. Sitting among these mourners, none of whom were crying because as Muslims they were instructed to mourn with modesty, Maya wondered how she could have kept away for so long — from this house, and this city, and this mother and this brother. Even though she had been the one to choose her exile, it was as though a thick skin had formed over it, and it appeared to her now as a mystery. On the other side of this curtain was her brother, newly widowed, and his son, Zaid. She thought of meeting him, of the beard that must be thick on his chin, and she remembered how much she had loved him, how fiercely she had needed him to be like her, how she had turned away when he had leaned towards God, taken it personally, as though he had done it to offend her.

When Ammoo closed her eyes and began to recite the final prayer, Maya looked closer at her. Maybe she looked a little older. Dark bruise shapes under her eyes, a line on her forehead. But it was only when her mother turned around after everyone had said Ameen, when she turned around with wet cheeks and smiled again, that Maya noticed one of her teeth missing at the back of her mouth. Then the years opened up and took shape — the shape of that molar, craggy and smooth, big and small, a chasm.

Maya had told Nazia about the mud, about the laugh. Nazia was indignant. ‘Those thugs,’ she said, fanning herself. ‘If this one turns out to be a boy I’m going to lock him up and only let him out for school.’

It had never been hotter. No one could remember a sari drying so fast on the washing line, the chillies thinning to husks in the field. The pond had begun to shrink back, and there was talk of a threat to the mangoes. ‘I know,’ Maya said. ‘Let’s go swimming. It’s hot enough to drive anyone mad.’

‘Really? We can do that?’

A beat. There were rules about pregnant women, about where they could bathe, but Maya brushed them aside; no one believed those things any more. She had been lecturing them for years now, about science and superstition and their rights. ‘Why not?’ she said to Nazia. She would remember it later, the moment of pause before she said yes, but on that day all she could think about was the water, its green coolness easing the lash of that summer.

They sat on the steps leading down to the pond, their feet submerged. Nazia lowered herself in and dipped her head under water. ‘Subhan Allah,’ she cried, ‘thanks be to God for such a thing!’

‘If my wife wants to cool her feet,’ Masud declared, ‘no one can stop her.’

The men of the village had appeared in front of his house, shaking their heads. A pregnant woman in the pond? It was too much.

They huddled around the cooking fire that night, Maya and Nazia, fanning the bits of wood until they flared high over the pot.

‘What a fuss,’ Nazia said. ‘I hear they’re having a meeting.’

‘Ignore them,’ Maya said. ‘Main thing is Masud is a good man. They’ll tire themselves out eventually.’ She didn’t tell her friend that she had heard the boys at her window again, that she had slept the night before with the windows shut, the heat-clotted air stopping her breath.