Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

He’d given up trying to say anything, and now he was just laughing, heh heh heh — a silly, ridiculous laugh. Rehana felt a tickle at the back of her throat. She coughed it away. It came back. She took refuge in scolding him. ‘You think this is funny?’

‘No, no. Of course it’s not funny.’ And he snorted. ‘Excuse me!’

‘Chih! I tell you this dark, terrible thing, and all you can do is laugh.’ She turned away indignantly, grateful that it was too dark for him to make out the expression on her own face. It could have been a smile, or it could have been a grimace. And the tickle in her throat could have been a chuckle or it could have been tears. It was mixed up: sad; funny; unfunny. She didn’t care. And she left him there, with the projector humming in the dark afterglow of the cinema, his head tilted back gratefully, laughing as though she had just given him a prize.

It was still only July, not yet August, the month of contradiction. In August, mornings were unbearably liquid, the air dense, tempers threadbare; wives and paratha-makers and jilapifryers laboured over breakfasts, and children woke from damp sheets and wiped their faces in limp, furry towels. And then, at some mysterious hour between noon and dusk, the sky would hold its breath and the tempers worsen, as the air stopped around people’s throats, not a stir, everything still as buildings, and there was a hush, interrupted only by the whine of the city dwellers, lunching, probably, or just tossing and turning on mattresses, debating whether it was hotter to stay still or to move; women with sinking make-up fanned their faces, men with bulging chests fanned their necks. But, after the stillness, after the gathering of clouds and the darkness, there was the exultant, joyous rain, sweet water that jetted violently, and scratchy, electric thunder, and exclamations of lightning. Altogether, a parade of weather, a feast for the hot, the tired; and every day there was one small boy, or a very old man, or even a dog, who would look up at the sky and wait for the first fat drop with his tongue outstretched, his face full of hope, all knowledge of the morning entirely forgotten.

But this was not August; it was July, a timid, confused month that cowered under the threat of what was to come. It was only the warm-up.

It was on such an in-between day that a wail could be heard coming from Number 12, a woman calling hysterically for water, ice water for her head. When Rehana arrived at her bedside, she exclaimed, ‘My poor daughter! My poor daughter!’ In the garden, a dog named Juliet howled at the afternoon.

The war had finally found Mrs Chowdhury.

She was beached on the four-poster with a wet compress on her forehead. The ceiling fan was on at full speed, slicing violently through the air. Silvi was fanning her mother’s face with a jute hand-fan. Between the ceiling fan and the hand-fan, Mrs Chowdhury’s face was flattened, the hair plastered to her forehead.

‘Faster, faster! I’m so hot!’ Mrs Chowdhury said. ‘Silvi, get my thermometer. I’m burning up!’

Impassively Silvi passed the hand-fan to Rehana and went to fetch the thermometer. Someone had stitched a red border around the rim of the fan, so that it looked like a seashell dipped in red paint.

‘One minute hot, one minute cold,’ Mrs Chowdhury cried. Rehana worked the fan back and forth over her, watching the loose tendrils of hair float from side to side. Mrs Chowdhury’s bedroom was crowded with family antiques. There was the mammoth four-poster that required a stepladder to mount, a dressing table with a heavy oval mirror and a wall of solid teak wardrobes, each with an open-mouthed keyhole the size of a baby’s fist. Tucked into Mrs Chowdhury’s sari was a gold chabir gocha that held the keys to the wardrobe and to the other important locks in the house: the sugar and oil store, the front gate, the back gate, the drawing room (which stayed locked and sheet-draped for special occasions), the ice-box room and, most importantly, the jewellery safe, set into the wall of Mrs Chowdhury’s heaviest steel almirah.

The rest of Mrs Chowdhury’s house was a museum of better times. Room after room contained haphazardly assembled family heirlooms. Some were so crowded that it was difficult to navigate among the furniture, the tarnished silver candlesticks, the clashing statues of Venus de Milo and Nataraj; others were mostly empty, a grandfather clock ticking erratically in one, a solitary birdcage in another, swaying in the breeze of an open window, its creaking echoing against damp, blistered walls. An air of accident permeated Mrs Chowdhury’s house, an expectation that something would come along and stir the sad, dormant air. Only a few knew the reason for this arrangement, and Rehana was one of them: Mrs Chowdhury was still waiting for her long-lost husband to come home.

Silvi returned with the thermometer and inserted it into her mother’s open mouth. She turned to Rehana and whispered, ‘Sabeer has been captured.’ Her voice was flat and unconcerned.

Mrs Chowdhury tried to speak through clamped lips. ‘Just wait one minute,’ Silvi told her. And then, ‘Ammoo, there’s no fever.’

‘Rehana,’ Mrs Chowdhury said. ‘This is my poor daughter’s fate. I knew she shouldn’t have married that man.’

‘What happened?’

‘His regiment were fighting the Pak Army in Mymensingh,’ Silvi began.

‘Why we had to get involved in this business,’ her mother interjected. ‘It was you, Silvi, you just had to marry him — because he was an officer. You were so impressed. Fan harder, Rehana, I’m burning up. But I never trust military men, never. You never know what kind of trouble they’re going to drag you into. What did you say my temperature was, girl? 98? That can’t be. Check it again. No, not that way. You have to wash it first. Go, go and wash it and bring it back.’

Silvi turned to go, and that is when Rehana noticed her head was covered in a dupatta. At first she thought Silvi might be getting ready for the Zohr prayer, but she checked the clock above Mrs Chowdhury’s bed and saw that it was only noon, still an hour before the Azaan.

‘It’s God’s will,’ Silvi said, coming back. She put the thermometer into its leather sleeve.

‘Nothing to do with God,’ Mrs Chowdhury said. ‘You see what’s happened to her, Rehana? Covering her head? She’s in pordah all of a sudden; spends all her time reading the Holy Book. Foolishness, that’s what it is. Sabeer should have fled, left the country, like Sohail. Your children have some sense . What possessed him to join that silly army? Your husband is a fool, girl, a fool and a dead man.’

‘Perhaps they’ll free him,’ Rehana tried to say, but Mrs Chowdhury wasn’t listening.

‘I’ve even lost my appetite,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I’m so hot.’

Rehana began smoothing Mrs Chowdhury’s forehead with the wet compress.

‘Please, apa, don’t make yourself sick.’

‘We don’t know where he is, what’s happened. We wouldn’t even have known he’s captured, but one of his soldier friends sent a letter to Silvi. Show her the letter, Silvi.’

Silvi nodded but didn’t move to get the letter. She was massaging her mother’s foot, moving her thumb in circles along the heel.

On the antique canopy bed, Mrs Chowdhury’s bulk rose like freshly pressed dough.

‘There’s nothing to be done, Rehana, I don’t even know why I called you. Nothing! And I thought he would be the one protecting us.’ Mrs Chowdhury closed her eyes and waved Rehana away. She sighed deeply and turned over on to her side; in a few minutes she was snoring lightly. Silvi glanced at Rehana and whispered, ‘Thank you for coming, khala-moni.’