Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

The procession was heading towards them. Sohail looked over his shoulder and tried to back up, but they were stuck in front of a line of cars. The chants rose, the words slowly becoming audible.

Maya tried to identify the people in the crowd. ‘Who is it? Chattra League?’

‘I can’t tell,’ Sohail said; ‘should we get out?’

Rehana shook her head. ‘We’re safer in the car. Let’s stay inside.’ Mrs Sengupta nodded in agreement. Maya kept shifting between her seat and the rear window, pressing her face against the glass. Rehana knew it was no use telling her to stop; she was just grateful the girl didn’t break open the door.

Within minutes they were swallowed. As they snaked past, people knocked against the hood of the car. They pounded the boot. Bared their teeth and pressed their faces against the glass. ‘Joy Bangla!’ they shouted. ‘Death to Pakistan! Death to dictatorship!’ Their breaths made clouds on the glass.

Someone recognized Sohail. He rapped with his knuckles. ‘Dost!’

Maya slapped the window. ‘Jhinu!’

The boy made binoculars with his hands and peered inside. ‘What are you doing in the car?’ he shouted.

Sohail opened his window and the boy stuck his fingers through the gap. ‘I’m just taking my mother and my sister home,’ Sohail said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘You haven’t heard? Assembly postponed indefinitely.’

‘What?’

‘Sala. Bastard Bhutto’s convinced Yahya there can’t be a Bengali running Pakistan.’

‘What?’ Maya said. ‘Election cancelled?’

Joy and Aref started firing questions at Jhinu, asking what he thought Mujib was going to do. They all kept saying we knew, we knew this was going to happen. It was only a few moments, a few sentences, but Rehana had the feeling they were deciding something important. She kept telling herself she was still in charge, that nothing would be done without her consent. She pitched forward on the seat.

‘Sohail, beta, the crowd is thinning, perhaps we should go?’

Sohail was rapping the steering wheel with his fingers, whispering something to Joy. He turned around. ‘OK, Ammoo, let’s go.’

Good. She would find a way to make sure he didn’t go back.

‘We’ll join you,’ he said to the boy in the window; ‘we’re just coming.’

‘Hurry up — we’ll be at the TSC later.’

‘Why don’t you boys go ahead? I’ll drive,’ Mrs Sengupta said.

‘Na, Supriya, let the boys take us home,’ Rehana said.

‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Sengupta insisted. ‘They’ll just have to come all the way back. Pull over, Sohail.’

Rehana cursed the day Mr Sengupta had taught his wife to drive. She just wanted them all home. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s safe for us to go by ourselves?’

‘Of course it’s safe. We’ll be in the car, what could happen?’

‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said a little eagerly, ‘you’ll be OK?’

‘Yes,’ Rehana replied. It came out weakly, but he didn’t seem to need much convincing.

They waited until the last of the procession passed. Sohail parked the car in front of Rokeya Hall and left the engine running. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, don’t worry,’ Mrs Sengupta said. ‘I’ll get them home. You join your friends. Jao.’

‘OK. Ammoo — I’ll just find out what’s happening and come straight home.’

Rehana fought off a wave of panic. ‘Be careful, beta.’

‘Don’t worry. Bye!’

‘Khoda Hafez.’

Mrs Sengupta was already at the front of the car, waiting to take the wheel. She held out the door for Rehana with a flourish. ‘Don’t worry so much!’ she said.

Suddenly a thin, lungi-clad boy bolted past. Mrs Sengupta’s sari slid from her shoulder, exposing her blouse and her bare stomach, and, as she bent to rearrange herself, she slipped and tumbled forward, her head knocking against the wheel before she could stretch out her arms to break the fall.

Rehana rushed to her side and struggled to lift her up. ‘Are you hurt?’ She pulled Mrs Sengupta into the driver’s seat and slammed the doors. ‘Are you hurt?’ she repeated.

‘No, it’s nothing,’ Mrs Sengupta said, ‘just a little dirty.’

‘Here, take my handkerchief.’

‘Just an accident. Nothing to worry.’ She took the handkerchief and began to wipe the mud from her palms.

‘Supriya,’ Rehana said, ‘you’ve lost your teep.’

‘Oh.’ Mrs Sengupta touched her forehead and then looked into the folds of her sari. ‘I hadn’t realized.’ She rolled down her window and hurriedly brushed a few stray tears from her eyes. ‘Just a little startled,’ she said, laughing nervously. Then she adjusted her seat, checked her reflection in the mirror and cupped her palm over the gear.

Rehana looked back to check on Maya. Her daughter was watching the retreating procession as it crossed the university intersection and headed towards Nilkhet.

Waiting for them in front of the bungalow gate was Sharmeen, a tall young woman with broad shoulders and a tough, ageless face. She was a student at the art college, famous on campus for her political posters, and Maya’s best friend, or comrade , as she liked to be called.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Sharmeen said, as they tumbled out of the car. She was struggling with a giant roll of paper. Mrs Sengupta smoothed the back of her head. From across the road, Mrs Chowdhury’s cocker spaniels, Romeo and Juliet, began to bark.

Maya hugged Sharmeen. ‘We were driving back from the cricket match. We got stuck in Paltan.’

‘I came to find you as soon as I heard. Help me with this?’

‘I don’t think you can get back,’ Maya said, catching one end of the roll.

‘Don’t worry,’ Rehana said, unlatching the gate, ‘you can stay here.’ It was an unnecessary invitation; Sharmeen was always staying over. There was a mattress under Rehana’s bed that hardly ever gathered dust. Her toothbrush was in the cabinet behind the bathroom mirror.

They’d been best friends since Maya’s first day at Vikarunnessa Noon School. The children had just arrived from Lahore, and Rehana decided it was time for them to learn Bengali. Not the fractured Bengali they picked up at the sweetshop and the playground but proper, school Bengali. So Maya was sent to Vikarunnessa, where the nuns were weathered and the girls wore hard braids and white knee socks. On that first day Maya stood up behind her desk and announced: ‘My name is Sheherezade Haque Maya. I was named after a famous storyteller. My father is dead. I am Lahore-returned. We have a big house called Shona.’ She was met with a vibrating silence as the girls shuffled and cocked their ears at her strained, accented Bengali. And then, chased by cries of ‘Bihari! Bihari!’, she fled into a far corner of the hockey field, her uniform skirt billowing around her legs, and that is where Sharmeen had found her, sitting inside her hula hoop, chewing on a piece of dried mango.

‘Can I have some?’

‘I already licked the whole thing.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Sharmeen pinched with two fingers the wet leather of mango and popped it into her mouth. ‘So. Your father’s dead? Mine too.’

‘How did yours go?’

‘Typhoid. Yours?’

‘Heart-attack.’

And their friendship was sealed.

Maya had always regarded Sharmeen with awe, as though she could never quite figure out why Sharmeen chose her when there were so many other stern young women in the movement. But Maya had underestimated Sharmeen’s need to be adored. She didn’t question, as Rehana often did, the fact that Sharmeen spent so many of her holidays at the bungalow in Dhanmondi instead of at home with her own family. It appeared the girl had nowhere else to go. Rehana accepted Sharmeen’s presence in the house, and, even though she wasn’t particularly fond of her, she liked to think of herself as the kind of person who took in strays.