Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

At home, Rehana told the children they should try to get some sleep, but nobody shifted from the drawing room. In the afternoon a truck stopped in the front of the bungalow, its engine grinding. On the silent street, every sound was exaggerated. A megaphone squealed to life.

‘Bengalis, take down your flags. Take down your flags. Take down your flags. Flag-bearing is illegal. You will be arrested. Take down your flags.’ The voice was thin and nasal. And then, as though an afterthought, it added, ‘Take down your flags, you bastard traitors.’

‘Maya — the flag!’

Maya ran to the roof in her bare feet.

A few minutes later she was lying on the floor with the flag wrapped around her shoulders. She raised her finger to the ceiling and counted mosquitoes. They could hear Juliet barking chaotically from Mrs Chowdhury’s driveway.

They sat. They waited for something to happen. Sohail paced the veranda, the garden, the roof. Maya fell asleep in the flag. Rehana checked the fridge and tried to work out how long the food would last. She counted the chickens. She measured the level of the rice. Three days, she said to herself. I can make it last three days. She went back and measured again. She stacked up the onions, the pumpkin, the marrows. Five days.

The truck came back. ‘Curfew will be lifted from 2 p.m. tomorrow afternoon for four hours. Curfew set for 6 p.m. Return to your homes at 6 p.m. Officers will shoot on sight. Repeat, shoot on sight. Curfew will be lifted from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.’

Juliet howled at the truck as it backed out of Road 5.

As soon as the curfew was lifted, Sohail and Maya left for the university. Rehana watched from the window as Lieutenant Sabeer emerged from the gate with Silvi and said a short farewell. Rehana stayed in the bungalow. She was wondering how many hours had passed since she’d slept, and whether she should be tired, when someone bolted through the door. It was Mrs Sengupta.

‘We just couldn’t turn them away.’

‘Who?’

‘You haven’t seen? Go to the veranda.’

Rehana peered over the boundary wall into Shona’s garden. Something was moving, rustling the grass. ‘What is it?’

‘People — refugees, Rehana.’

‘How many?’

‘Twenty, thirty, I’m not sure. They just started coming. Can they stay?’

‘Of course. Of course they can stay.’

‘I don’t know any of them. But we’re the only Hindus on the street.’

‘Are there children?’

‘A few. It’s mostly families, a few stray people. They’re not saying much.’

‘I’m going to bring over some food.’

Rehana took her chickens out of the fridge. Two she made into a spicy curry with tomatoes, the third into a korma for the children. There wasn’t any yoghurt; she used milk. She made cabbage and potato bhaji, fried the okra with onions, made a stew with the spinach and pumpkin. She worried for a moment about using up all the food, but she quickly brushed the thought away. Who knew what had happened to these people, what had led them here?

When she was finished, she took the trays of food to Shona, picking her way through the ragged blankets. There were children, just as she’d imagined, and women, and old men with wrinkled faces who looked at her and tried to smile in gratitude. But they didn’t speak, not even to each other. They sat in silence, sifting through their loose bundles, calculating the sum of what they had salvaged.

Looking at them, Rehana had the sudden urge to know more. She felt she was only beginning to make sense of the night, the bombings, Mrs Chowdhury’s hysteria. She wanted to know how these people had passed the night, how they had come to be there. A feeling of restlessness overcame her and she had to see it, whatever it was that was out there, what grief had caused these people to run from their homes and seek shelter on her doorstep.

‘University,’ she said simply.

‘Better not, apa,’ the rickshaw-wallah said.

‘University,’ she repeated, climbing in and pushing back the hood.

He shook his head and set off, turning on to Mirpur Road. There was very little traffic on the street. The few cars on the road had polite, murmuring engines. No one rang the horn. And when the rickshaw cut across Nilkhet, they let it pass with a wave.

Everything seems almost the same, Rehana thought. The New Market gate was shut, and the little shops around its entrance were boarded up, and the vendors selling jackfruit and amra were nowhere to be seen. Still, it could have been Friday afternoon, when everything closed down for the Jumma prayers; or it could have been another strike. They’d had so many strikes lately.

The rickshaw-wallah pedalled past the roundabout before entering the university compound, and here the air began to change: there was a low-lying fog clinging to the pavement — no, it was smoke, whispering through the streets, leaving an ashy, sour taste in the mouth. It got thicker as the rickshaw-wallah brought Rehana closer to the dormitories; he stopped, unravelled the gamcha from his head and tied it around his face. He motioned for Rehana to do the same with her sari. She held the sari to her nose and with one hand clung tightly to the rickshaw frame, because the road was uneven here; when she looked down she saw scraps of litter scattered over the street. She thought she saw a prayer cap and a pair of unbroken spectacles. People must have dropped their things as they ran. She wanted to pick up the spectacles and wave them around, see if anybody was looking for them, but the rickshaw had already driven past. Now there was a thin length of red ribbon on the road; she leaned over; she couldn’t be sure. It was glistening wet.

They continued and the rubble grew denser; Rehana became aware of the growing crowd on the street; the rickshaw-wallah strained to get them through the uneven road and the people that were laced around them. Now there were bricks and bits of plaster and layers of dust that had settled on the road and turned it grey-white.

They were in front of Curzon Hall. The wet ribbon had followed them all the way, and now it poured into a gutter, which was also red, and on the side of the gutter was a pair of hands, the fingers clasped together in prayer or begging, and next to the hands was a face. The mouth was tiny, only a pale pink smudge, like the introduction of a bruise.

It was a little girl. Her hair swallowed the top half of her face. Beneath the clumped-together strands Rehana could see an eye squeezed shut.

She wrenched herself away from it; she looked for only a minute, but it felt like so much longer, felt so close she thought she could smell the girl’s breath escaping from her nostrils and from those too-small lips.

‘Move on,’ she said to the rickshaw-wallah. She didn’t see anything after that. Later she would say she had seen it all: the corpses piled onto the pavement like cakes in a window; the rickshaw-pullers dead with their heels on rickshaw-pedals; the tank-sized holes in the dormitories, Rokeya Hall and Jagganath Hall and Mohsin Hall. But as they clattered through the compound her eyes had been closed, squeezed shut against the sight of her ruined city.

When Sohail and Maya returned, they were mute, their faces lined with ash. The story of the night unfolded slowly. First, Mujib had been arrested and flown to West Pakistan. The army had started its attack at the university, demolishing the dormitories and The Madhu Canteen. On their way to the old town, the tanks had bulldozed the slums that clung to each side of the Phulbaria rail track; they needed that rail line to get across the city, so they had swiped their guns through the cardboard and tin shacks, the flimsy homes held together with glue and cinema posters. And then they had gone into the Hindu neighbourhoods on jeeps because their tanks were too wide for the narrow lanes, and mounted on their jeeps they had fired through shutters and doorways and shirts and hearts.