Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

She had married a man she had not expected to love; loved a man she had not expected to lose; lived a life of moderation, a life of few surprises. She had asked her father to find her a husband with little ambition. Someone whose fortunes had nowhere to go.

It was getting dark; the gravestone shadows lapped at their feet.

‘Ammoo, I’m hungry,’ Maya said.

Rehana had thought to bring a packet of glucose biscuits. ‘Here,’ she said, peeling away the pink wrapper.

Sohail stood statue-still and stared into his father’s grave. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

‘Just a few minutes.’ She hadn’t finished explaining it to Iqbal. ‘Why don’t you see if you can get those kites up?’

The children drifted to an empty field at the edge of the graveyard, unwinding the spools of thread attached to their kites.

Rehana began again.

Dear Husband,

I have given up the only thing you left me. When the judge asked me if I knew for certain whether I would be able to care for them, I could not bring myself to say yes. I was mute, and in my silence he saw my hesitation. That is why he gave them away. It was me; my fault. No other’s. I don’t blame your brother for wanting them. Who would not want them? They are the spitting image of you.

After the verdict, in that hot room with the dust-furred ceiling fans, the black shine of velvet benches, the tattered grey wig of the judge, she had fallen to her knees. She had not been able to convince anyone that even though she was poor, and friendless in this town and the only thing left to her was a wild, untamed plot of land so recently reclaimed from the paddy she had to burn the insects that marched on to her small bungalow porch every morning when she woke to pray, she could still be a mother to her children. She had not explained to the children where exactly their father had gone, and she had let them stay home from school, and she had taken them to watch Cleopatra , but she could still be their mother; she would find a way to overcome her grief, her poverty, her youth; she would find a way to love them all alone. But no one had believed her, and in a few weeks they would travel across the continent, and she didn’t know when she would ever see them again.

Faiz and Parveen took the children to Lahore a few days later on Pakistan International Airlines Flight 010. Rehana watched them leave from an airport window made foggy by hair oil and goodbye fingerprints. She waved a small wave, wondering when the world would stop ending. Maya and Sohail, their kites tucked under their arms, fastened their seatbelts and sailed gracefully into the sky, crossing the flooded delta below.

The next day Parveen called to say they had arrived safely, but Rehana could hear very little aside from the crackle of the long-distance line, and the cultivated, genteel laugh that conveyed both confidence and an awkward regret.

In the days that followed, people came to see her: Iqbal’s business acquaintances; old men claiming to be friends of her father; distant relatives with wagging, so-sorry tongues; her gin-rummy friends from the Dhaka Gymkhana Club; even the lawyer. Grief tourists, Rehana thought, and pretended not to hear them scratching at the door.

All but Mrs Chowdhury, who came dragging a sad, tearful daughter. She held Rehana in the rolling fat of her arms and scolded her daughter for sulking.

‘Silvi, it’s not the end of the world. They’ll be back.’ And then she turned to Rehana. ‘At least you had a few good years. My bastard husband left me when I couldn’t give him a son. Took one look at this one, and I never saw him again.’

Rehana sat immobile, staring into the garden. Mrs Chowdhury finally said, ‘We should let the poor girl rest.’

Silvi idled behind the kitchen door. ‘Nine years old!’ Mrs Chowdhury cried out. ‘Too old to sulk, too young to be heart-broken. What, you think no boy will ever ask to marry you again?’

‘Let her stay,’ Rehana said; ‘we can eat together.’ She tried to imagine what she might feed the child. She hadn’t been shopping. There was just a weak, watery dal and some bitter gourd.

‘You said we would see Roman Holiday .’

‘Next time, Silvi, OK?’

‘If they ever come back. OK.’

She left. Rehana didn’t see her to the door.

Rehana watched the days go by. She began letters to Sohail and Maya:

The mangoes will be perfect this year. It has been hot and raining at all the right times. I can already smell the tree.

She threw that one away. She also threw away the one that began:

My dearest children, how I miss you.

She wrote cheerful, newsy letters. The children should not be confused. They should know these important facts:

She was going to get them back soon.

The world was still a generally friendly place.

Silvi had not forgotten them.

The neighbourhood was exactly as it had always been.

Her memories of the children were scrambled and vague. The more she clutched at them, the more distant they became. She tried to stick to facts: Maya’s favourite colour is blue, Sohail’s is red. Sohail has a small scar on his chin, just below the ridge. She had teased him and said, ‘This is a scar only your wife will see, because she will stand just beneath you and look up,’ and he had said, very seriously, ‘What if she is a very tall girl?’

Her son had a sense of humour. No, he was completely unfunny. He barely ever smiled. Which was it?

She took comfort in telling them apart. She remembered which was the loud, demanding child, which the quiet, watchful one. The one who sang to birds to see if they would sing back. The one whose fingernails she had to check, because she liked the taste of mud. The one who caught chills, whether the day was cold or fiercely hot. The one who sucked red juice from the tiny flowers of the ixora bush. The one who spoke; the one who wouldn’t; the one who loved Clark Gable; the one who loved Dilip Kumar, and stray dogs, and crows that landed on the gate with sharp, clicking talons, and milk-rice, and Baby ice-cream.

And she couldn’t get off her mind all the times Iqbal had fretted over them, making them wear sweaters when it wasn’t even cold, having the doctor visit every month to put his ear to their little chests, holding hands on busy roads and empty roads— just in case, just in case, just in case. And then there was that train journey that they almost didn’t take.

It was Maya’s fourth birthday, and Iqbal’s new Vauxhall had just arrived from England. It was on a special consignment of fifty cars brought to Dhaka from the Vauxhall factory in Wandsworth, London, in 1957. Iqbal had seen an advertisement that told him about the smart new car with the restyled radiator and the winding handles. There was a photograph. He fell in love with the car: the smooth curves, the side-view mirrors that jutted out of the frame. He imagined driving it into their garage, a big ribbon tied around the top, the horn blaring. But when it arrived, he was too nervous to drive the car and decided to leave it in the hands of a driver he hired for the purpose, an ex-employee of the British Consul-General who had driven His Excellency’s Rolls-Royce and was an expert behind the wheel. His name was Kamal. It was Kamal who was driving the Vauxhall the day Maya waved to her father from the window of the Tejgaon — Phulbaria rail carriage.

As a special birthday treat for Maya, they had decided to take a train ride between a new station on the fringes of the city and Phulbaria Central; tracks had just been opened, and it was now a short trip from the brightly painted station built by a hopeful government to the crumbling colonial building that housed the old carriages of the Raj. It was to be their very first train ride.