Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

‘I’m always worried about you!’

Rehana was surprised to hear the words, but realized they must be true, and here it was, the thing she had been looking for, a small window into her daughter’s locked heart. It was not that she was diffident but burdened. Burdened by the beloved, the disappeared. By her own widowed mother. Rehana embraced Maya, who was still so thin and brittle, but instead of telling her to be careful she found herself saying, ‘Write some good stories.’

Throughout June, Tikka Khan’s soldiers made their way across the summer plains of Bangladesh. They looted homes and burned roofs. They raped. They murdered. They lined up the men and shot them into ponds. They practised old and new forms of torture. They were explorers, pioneers of cruelty, every day outdoing their own brutality, every day feeling closer to divinity, because they were told they were saving Pakistan, and Islam, maybe even the Almighty himself, from the depravity of the Bengalis; in this feverish, this godly journey, their resolve could know no bounds.

The Bengali resistance was weak and sporadic. General Zia relied on the youthful spirit of his soldiers, and they had small victories. A blown-up bridge here. An army-convoy ambush there. A captured railway station. They celebrated these victories with the broadcasters of the radio, who sent up cheers in the homes of their listeners, those city dwellers spending long, hot afternoons hugging their wireless radios.

After the Major came to stay and Maya left for Calcutta, Rehana’s world grew smaller. She was encouraged not to leave the house too often; if she needed something, it would be brought to her. She should go to the market in Mrs Chowdhury’s car, but buy only enough food for herself. She should sometimes visit her neighbours; she should appear concerned; she should talk about the war but only vaguely. It was agreed that if anyone asked she should say that she had sent Maya and Sohail to stay with her sisters in Karachi.

Things were quiet at Shona. Joy appeared occasionally to take care of the Major, and the doctor was in and out, but otherwise there was very little activity next door. It was just the three of them: Rehana, and the two men in the other house. She spent the nights with the kerosene lamp on. Every sound incited a fierce hammering in her heart. She thought she heard footsteps, soft knocks on the door; she thought she felt someone tugging at her feet as she slept. The Major next door was no consolation; he made her feel exposed.

On days when her nerves threatened to overwhelm her, Rehana tried to think back to a less turbulent time, when nothing of significance happened, when the passing of seasons, the thrill of the Eid moon-sighting, the smell of mangoes ripening on the trees, were the most spectacular events of the calendar. But their lives had never had any regularity — at least, not the sort Rehana was now sifting her memories for. There was always something, some uproar, in the city, or beyond, in Islamabad, where one punishing law after another was passed; and even further afield — the death of Che Guevara, whom Sohail had mourned as though he had lost a brother. Every hiccup of the political landscape made its way to their door and, when her son was old enough, came through the door and into the bungalow, into the boy’s drawn and serious face, the shadows he cast upon the corridors and over the dining table; and then into Maya, who was angrier and louder. No, there had never been any other time; their lives were populated by Lenin and Castro and Mujib and Anwar Sadaat; there was only this time, this life, this fraught and crowded era, to which they were bound without choice, without knowledge, only their passions, their loves, to lead and sustain them.

In this, as in all other things, Rehana veered between indulgence and censure. There was a part of her that wanted to allow her children anything — any whimsy, any zeal, any excess. Another part of her wanted them to have nothing to do with it all, to keep them safe, at home; in either case, she treated Maya and Sohail as though they were there to collect on an old debt, an old promise that could never be fulfilled, not in this lifetime; a yawning, cyclic, inexhaustible need. Whether the need was theirs or hers, she could not say.

Discovering herself alone in the house for the first time in many years, Rehana found she had no desire to reassemble the sewing group. She didn’t want to laugh with her friends any more; she wanted to stir the melancholy in the empty house, the deep sadness that was also a kind of quiet, a tranquillity, that she was reluctant to surrender.

Rehana found she took something close to pleasure in repeating the lonely rituals she had developed just after the children left for Lahore all those years ago. She scrubbed the house to a hospital shine; she shooed crows from her pickles; she took long, exaggerated baths under the bucket water; she dug up large sections of her garden and set about replanting the pumpkin, the marrow, the hibiscus, the jasmine.

The water would come on only between ten and twelve every day. Every morning she had to fill up the biryani pot and the three metal buckets and soak the clothes and the vegetables and gut the fish.

She went to the graveyard to tell Iqbal about the Major. When she got there, she felt like saying sorry, but she wasn’t sure what for. Well, it was obvious what for.

You would not have liked this.

A column of ants bisected Iqbal’s gravestone.

Forgive me; I haven’t come in almost a month. The flowers on your plot have cracked in the heat; that bodmash caretaker promised to water them, but of course he forgot, even though I gave him an extra five annas the last time I was here.

I am harbouring a person who I don’t know and who could get us all into very big trouble. No, you would not have liked it.

If you want to complain you should complain to your son, he brought that man and begged me to let him stay. Could I say no? No, I could not say no.

About a fortnight after the Major’s accident, Joy came to the door of the bungalow. He looked as though he’d been running: wet patches soaked through his shirt at his neck and his armpits. His cheeks glistened, and water, like tears, flowed from his forehead.

‘Auntie,’ he said softly, ‘can I come in?’

‘Of course.’

He hesitated. ‘I’m not disturbing you?’

Rehana shook her head, surprised. Joy was not known for his politeness. He hovered at the edge of the sofa, bent his fingers and rubbed his knuckles together.

Rehana had just finished preparing lunch. ‘Are you hungry?’

He shook his head. She saw the beams of his shoulders pressing against his shirt, which was a red-and-blue check. The collars were long and pointed towards his shoes.

She knew that shirt. Where had he got it, she wanted to ask him. There must be a perfectly innocent explanation. They had the same shirt. Simple. But Joy kept sweating and saying nothing and she started to feel panicky. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Yes, I–I have to go.’

‘Go where?’

His head dipped lower and closer to his hands; his face swam; still he didn’t move to mop his face. ‘I have to go to Agartala,’ he said. ‘Just for a few days. I’ll come back.’

‘Has something happened? Is it Sohail?’

‘Sohail?’ he said. ‘No, no, Auntie. He’s in Agartala; he’s fine; there was a telegram last night.’

‘You got a telegram? Why didn’t you tell me?’ She burned to ask him about the shirt, the telegram, why he had to go. ‘What’s happening, beta, why don’t you tell me? Here, have a glass of water.’ She forced a note of tenderness into her voice. ‘You sit here, and you tell me.’