Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

In the drawing room Sharmeen and Maya locked arms and surveyed the poster.

‘It’s perfect,’ Maya said.

‘I think it needs more colour here,’ Sharmeen said, pointing with her brush to a blank area of the canvas. Her hands were amphibious, the fingers green and stuck together with paint.

‘Maybe — but it could signify, you know, the space of possibility — the future,’ Maya said.

‘You don’t think that’s too abstract?’

‘Probably.’ She shrugged her shoulders to indicate that people who didn’t understand the significance of the blank space didn’t deserve to know the meaning of the poster.

Rehana retreated to her room; her head was throbbing, and she couldn’t get the sight of Mrs Sengupta’s fallen sari and her shocked mouth out of her head. And Sohail, drumming his fingers against that steering wheel. What was he doing now? Probably adding a voice of reason, she told herself. That was what he always did. He was so persuasive. If the students wanted to riot, he would tell them they shouldn’t tear down their own classrooms just to prove a point. He would slowly shift the language of the conversation, so that they were no longer shouting about revenge and saying things like who do they think they are .

Rehana stroked her forehead in time to the rotating ceiling fan. I’ll just close my eyes for one minute, she thought. And then I’ll wake up and worry again.

By the time she emerged from her room a few hours later it was dark outside, the hum of a gentle storm rustling the leaves in the garden. She followed the voices to the drawing room and found it crammed with Sohail’s friends.

‘Salaam-Alaikum, Auntie,’ they said in scattered chorus. No one was smoking, but the cigarette stink clung to the air. Maya and Sharmeen were bent over another sheet of paper. Aref was unpacking his guitar.

‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said, raising his voice over the throng, ‘Mujib has called a meeting on the 7th. You should come.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Because history will be made.’

‘Yes, Auntie,’ Aref said, twisting a knob on his guitar. ‘You must be there — it’s going to be even bigger than the last one.’

‘You go,’ Rehana said a little nervously. ‘Tell me about it afterwards.’ She suddenly felt awkward, like she had stumbled into the Men Only room at the Gymkhana.

‘Ma, seriously,’ Maya interjected, ‘you can’t miss it — Mujib might declare independence.’

‘I don’t know — we’ll see, OK? Do you all need anything? Are you hungry?’

‘Don’t worry about us, Ammoo,’ Sohail said, waving to her. ‘We feed on the revolution.’

As she turned back to the kitchen, Rehana wondered if she should attend the meeting. They were always telling her to come with them to their rallies and their get-togethers, but, not being young or part of the student movement, and not having attended the conferences of the Nationalist Party or the elections of the student unions, and not, like Sohail and Maya, having read the Communist Manifesto and sat for hours under the banyan tree debating the finer points of the resistance, she did not have the proper trappings of a nationalist. She did not have the youth or the appearance or the words. The correct words, though by now familiar to her, did not glide easily from her tongue: ‘comrade’, ‘proletariat’, ‘revolution’. They were hard, precise words and did not capture Rehana’s ambiguous feelings about the country she had adopted. She spoke, with fluency, the Urdu of the enemy. She was unable to pretend, as she saw so many others doing, that she could replace her mixed tongue with a pure Bengali one, so that the Muslim salutation, As-Salaam Alaikum was replaced by the neutral Adaab , or even Nomoshkar , the Hindu greeting. Rehana’s tongue was too confused for these changes. She could not give up her love of Urdu, its lyrical lilts, its double meanings, its furrowed beat.

No, Rehana did not have the exactness to become a true revolutionary. But she had realized long ago that, while the children would remain fixed at the centre of her life, she would gradually fade out of theirs. In the meantime she wanted to hold on for as long as she could, especially now that their dreams had suddenly grown so spacious. She turned into the kitchen and wondered how she would feed all those hungry dreamers.

‘Ammoo, we have a present for you,’ Sohail said, after they’d all eaten. Rehana had decided on khichuri, which was quick and meant there was no need to cook the dal separately. And she’d made omelettes with chilli and fried onions. The whole lot had been devoured in seconds.

‘What?’ Rehana said.

Sohail pulled out a large bag from underneath his chair. He unfolded the packet and held up a rectangular length of cloth. It was a rich, muddy green, the colour of the lowest leaves in the mangrove. Sewn into the middle was a circle, a little uneven, in red. Inside the circle was a yellow cut-out map of East Pakistan.

‘This is our flag, Ammoo.’ And he opened his arms to show her its full length. Aref took hold of one side, and they stretched it across the room. A few people clapped. ‘Joy Bangla!’ someone shouted. A flag without a country, Rehana thought, but didn’t say. Maya whooped, draped the flag around her shoulders and ran to find a bamboo pole so they could secure it to the rooftop.

The days following the cricket match were full of strikes and processions, curfews disobeyed and slogans shouted from blaring megaphones. Sohail and Maya spent most of their days at the university, returning home late every night, talking excitedly about the change in the air. But Dhanmondi was quiet, and things mostly went on as normal. Occasionally Mrs Chowdhury would arrive at Rehana’s doorstep with a mountain of small brown packets containing the latest shopping for Silvi’s wedding. One sari after another was purchased, then the blouses and petticoats to match, and the lace trim to go around the sleeves of the blouses, and the matching clips for her hair. One day Mrs Chowdhury appeared with only her handbag, and on that day Rehana knew she’d been to the jeweller. She pulled out two red boxes covered in velvet and opened them with a snap, and Rehana had to ooh and aah at the locket and the pair of earrings that winked from inside.

Despite her initial reluctance, Rehana found herself at the racecourse on the 7th of March. She arrived early but the field was already full. It was as though the whole country had turned up: people flooded the grounds and all Rehana could see for miles was a vast sea of shining black heads, glowing in the sunshine like a restless horizon of darkness.

Sheikh Mujib was a tiny white figure in the distance. In the years since he’d become the leader of the movement, his short black coat, his reedy voice and the finger he always pointed at the sky had become familiar sights, but there was still a thrill at seeing him in the flesh. As he made his way on to the stage, the crowd bucked, and Rehana watched as he waved his arms to quiet and reassure his people. His . They belonged to him now; they were his charge, his children. They called him father. They loved him the way orphans dream of their lost parents: without promise, only hope. He cleared his throat and began to speak. Rehana could barely hear him amid the shouts of the crowd, the whistles and the cheers; the afternoon sun beating down on the cloud of flags that dotted the racecourse ground seemed to make his words bend and quiver in the heat. ‘Make every home a fortress,’ she could just hear him say.

The scene appeared before Rehana like a glamorous black-and-white picture; there was the white of Mujib’s kurta-pyjama, the black of his short coat, the black — she knew, though she could not see — of his thick-framed glasses, the white of the tent pitched to cover the stage. By the end she found herself shouting Joy Bangla, Joy Bangla, Joy Bangla with the crowd, the rhythm of her words chiming with the hard thump of her chest, and she recognized, at once, the incendiary thrill of shouting. Maya looked over at her mother and flashed her a wide, encouraging smile. Rehana suddenly felt young, plunged into a world of limitless possibility.