Tahmima Anam - The Good Muslim

*

Dhaka Central Jail. A big square room, packed with women. Smells of piss and the air is cloudy with the breaths of too many. Like country, like jail. Everybody poor. Death a few feet away. Birth too. A woman in labour is dragged away, head lolling. Maya could have helped, but she does not. An old woman is combing her hair. It hurts, there are bruises on her head. Stop, she says. Water is sprinkled on her eyes. Food passed through salty, wrinkled fingers. She opens her eyes. The woman is a dark shadow, white irises painted into her face.

Scraps of her life come back to her. Swimming in the pond with Nazia. The smell of sesame trees. The books burning in the garden. Sohail’s voice. I killed, Maya. I killed. So that he won’t become like me. It wasn’t Piya, it was Silvi. It was the war. War made it too late. I killed. Now she knew what it was, the heaviness of death.

Someone calls her name. She is led to the bars at the front of the cell. Joy is crouching on the other side. She raises her eyes and sees that he is crying. She considers lightening the mood, saying something about how they are even now, both jailbirds, but the only thing she wants to say is ‘Where is he?’

Joy drops his head. ‘They haven’t found him yet.’

The light shifts. She can see the full length of him, his sturdy shoulders, his thick-soled shoes. She hasn’t been aware of being afraid, all this time, but now her fingers are reaching out and she is grasping and animal-shaking the bars.

‘I’m going to get you out,’ Joy said. ‘It will take a few weeks.’

She stops. Outside, she will have to face it. She is afraid to ask what Ammoo said when she heard. And Sohail. What had Sohail said? ‘I don’t want to come out. I want to stay here.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Maya. I have a good lawyer working for you.’

‘You don’t want to marry me any more, I know it. What will your mother say?’

‘She knows everything. I told her you just wanted to get the boy out of there. It wasn’t your fault.’

He wraps his fingers around hers. A question comes to her lips. ‘Were you angry, after your father died?’

‘Why?’

‘I just want to know.’

‘I was so angry I went to the street with my gun, ready to kill anyone who looked like a Bihari or a Pakistani. That’s why my mother sent me to America — because I could have murdered someone.’

She understood now, why he had left so abruptly. And how cruel she had been. Stings like a bee.

‘The lawyer is pushing for a quick trial. Do you need anything?’

‘No.’

‘I’m having them check your food. You have to eat.’ He is trying not to cry again, his face wound tight with it.

The lamplight follows him for a few steps, and then he is gone, swallowed into the maw of the prison.

The next time, he brings her mother. She is allowed into a room with a table and two chairs. Ammoo is wearing a dark blue sari, and her face leaps out in the darkness, pale, round. She is wearing glasses. Gently, she lowers herself on to a chair. Joy’s hand hovers over Maya’s head. ‘I’ll be outside.’

‘I’ve come to tell you something,’ Ammoo says.

Maya cannot meet her eye. She reaches up over her head, pulls the nikab over her face. I cannot bear for you to see me.

‘I know you have always blamed Silvi for what happened to your brother.’

Silvi. Silvi had reached from across the road and put her hands around Sohail’s neck.

‘Did you know about Haji Mudassar?’

Maya searches for her voice. She nods.

‘He’s the imam they worship in Kakrail. But back in ’72 he was at the mosque on Road 13.’

The mosque by the lake. The Eidgah, where the men of the neighbourhood gathered on Fridays.

‘Sohail started to go there soon after the war.’

Maya’s voice emerged thinly from inside the nikab. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Haji Mudassar was like a father to Sohail.’

‘He never said anything to me about him.’

Ammoo leans her elbows on the table. ‘You know, I have always wondered which of you two missed your father more.’

It was me. It was me.

‘At first I thought it was you. A girl needs a father, I know that better than anyone. And I always thought, if your father were alive, he would not have let you go off to war. Or to Rajshahi. We would have been together, all of us. But when he died Sohail was only eight, you know. He was only eight and he became the man around the house. I used to send him to get the ration card, to pay the bills at the electricity office. You don’t remember. I had to, you know, I had no one else. And after what happened in the war, Sohail found Haji Mudassar.’

‘After what happened?’

‘He was coming back,’ she says, ‘and there was a man on the road — it was more like an accident, really.’

Why is she the last to know?

‘He told me that you knew,’ Ammoo says. ‘That night, when he burned his books, he told you.’

No, he never said. He never told her anything. I killed, Maya. I killed .

‘Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this, Maya — the reason I’m telling you is because a thing like that can destroy a man. It can take away years, your whole life.’

It isn’t the same. Zaid was just a boy.

‘And another thing — about Silvi. You mustn’t blame her so much. Towards the end she was — I think she understood.’

Forgive Silvi? She had started all of it. There can be only One , she had said. And the world had narrowed. Her guilt did not make Maya more forgiving.

‘Have they found him yet?’ she whispers.

Ammoo winds her fingers through Maya’s. Her grip is strong. ‘No, they haven’t found him.’ Her hand tightens. ‘You didn’t believe Zaid, when he told you his mother played Ludo with him and promised him he could go to school. But it was true.’

She does not want her mother to go. She clings to her and they have to pull her arms away.

Ammoo told her everything. Now she knew. Sohail rescued Piya from the barracks. Unshackled her and took her to her village. Only then did he consider going home himself. He walked south, on the Jessore Road, refugees crowding on either side of him. The peace was only a few days old and already they were flooding back. All day he walked, resting on the side of the road like everyone else, his arms folded under his blue-and-red checked shirt — a treasure, it had belonged to his friend Aref. After dark one night, he saw a man on the road. He was unlike any of the others, well fed, wearing a thick wool jacket, a scarf wrapped tight around his neck, his chin. Why was he walking with such confidence — striding, even? Sohail wanted to see him up close. Was he an enemy officer, trying to blend in with the crowd? Was he the officer who had held Piya? It didn’t matter. They had, in their own ways, all held Piya in the storeroom at the back of their barracks.

Sohail approached the man, and the man looked at Sohail, and Sohail thought he heard him say something; it was difficult to hear, because the man’s mouth was obscured by the woollen scarf around his neck. He came closer, his hand folding around his rifle. Beta , the man said, beta . Beta. That was the word Ammoo had always used to address Sohail, a tender word, a word from her past. An Urdu word. And before he knew it, he had released his rifle and embraced the man, embraced him as if he were his long-dead father, and the instant after that he took out the knife he had tucked into his lungi, and when the man saw the knife he kneeled and wrapped his arms around Sohail’s knees and said Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem . The man begged for his life. He begged but Sohail could hear only the words of the Kalma as he took hold of the man’s neck and replied There is no God but God , and before he knew it they were speaking in chorus, killing and dying, dying and killing, his palm sure as it handled the knife, and in the glint of that knife he saw the eyes of the girl in the barracks, her head round and with a dusting of hair, and he was gripped by all the things he had seen and could now imagine, things that necessitated his hand across the man’s throat, as he recited God is Great, God is Great, God is Great .