Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

‘Rehana.’ She was startled by the sound of her name. Her name was a stranger. ‘You were dreaming.’

‘No — it was all there — Sabeer—’

‘I know.’ I knew you would know!

The Major’s breath was in her hair. She felt the warmth of his belly against her back. She saw his hand, its tense vein, snaking across her waist and holding her down, as if she might float away without its weight.

The burned-rubber scent flooded her nose.

She pressed wet eyes against the pillow. She opened her mouth and swallowed the sob. She felt him knowing everything. This was his gift. Speaking little and knowing more.

His hand tightened, and she tilted backwards, feeling the hard weight of his chest. Brick and breath. The breath burned into her ear.

Her fist closed around the pillowcase.

‘Sleep,’ he said, ‘you can sleep.’

Miraculously, her eyes closed, and she felt her limbs relaxing, and, though her breath was still quick, she drifted into a hard, dreamless sleep.

The sky over Bengal is empty. No mountains interrupt it; no valleys, no hills, no dimples in the landscape. It is flat, like a swamp, or a river that has nowhere to go. The eye longs for some blister on the horizon, some marker of distance, but finds none. Occasionally there are clouds; often there is rain, but these are only colours: the laundry-white of the cumulus, the black mantle of the monsoon.

Beyond the city there are no beautiful buildings that might sink in the heat or wilt under generations of rain. The promise of the land is not in the cities — their sky-touching glamour, the tragedy of their ruin — but in the vast unfolding plains, this empty sky, this stretching horizon. Every year the land will turn to sea as it disappears under the spell of water, and then prevail again, as if by magic, and this refrain, this looping repetition, is the archive of its long, flood-turned history.

It was through this simple, spectacular landscape that Rehana’s train, the 2.55 from Agartala to Calcutta, clattered westwards, chasing the sun. Rehana was in an empty compartment, the open window whipping her hair until it haloed around her face. The long shadows of trees fell across her and moved away, light and dark, back and forth, like piano keys.

She’d had to get out of Dhaka. It’s not safe . Faiz knew about Maya. Joy and the Major thought she might have been followed. Perhaps the house was being watched. No choice. Make sure it looks as though you’ll be gone a long time. So she had locked up the two houses and draped sheets over the furniture — she had seen her father do the same, a long time ago, when they had lost Wellington Square. She wondered if it made her a refugee, this train, this distance, the sheets on the furniture.

She had to take a roundabout route, first travelling east and crossing the border into India, then catching the train to Calcutta. The train journeyed north, passing the remaining stretch of Bengal — the mustard fields, the rice fields, the chilli fields; then the land curved and dimpled as they went west and entered Assam. In the morning she woke to a rolling, jostled landscape painted in the sunwash of early light. The air was crisp and smelled of apples. Hill air.

This semicircular track, now called the Chicken Neck, had been laid by the British, a holiday route carrying memsahibs to their winter destinations: Silchar, Shilliguri, Shillong — hill stations with names like rustled leaves, where clothes did not flap, exhausted, in the humidity, where the air was dry, the lips chapped, the hats possible. It smelled of home.

The light was different here. Without the wet air to temper it, it fell directly from the sky in a brilliant, eye-aching shade, illuminating the hills below, falling on the green that covered everything and the licked, glistening dew.

Rehana turned the words around in her mouth. I’ll come for you .

She was not a refugee. The bungalow was waiting for her, a padlock on its front door. The kerosene lamps were full. The water pump was hungry. The windows were shut. The curtains were up. The beds were dressed. She had neighbours. Dirty plates. A leg of mutton in the ice-box.

She had taken Sabeer to Mrs Chowdhury’s. She had seen Silvi come out to the gate and look at her husband, her grey calf eyes dominating her face, and tiny lines appearing at the corners of her mouth, dragging it downwards.

She had left without saying goodbye.

She had done her duty. She hadn’t waited for them to realize what exactly she had brought back from Muslim Bazaar.

Rehana put her feet on the bench opposite and took out the stack of letters. They smelled of mothballs. She wondered where Silvi had kept them; perhaps folded between her clothes, between a matching salwaar and kameez, or among her jewellery, or her old schoolbooks. At the last moment, when she’d had to decide what to take and what to leave behind, Rehana could not bear to leave the letters. They were her only concession to nostalgia. The rest of her packing was purely pragmatic: three saris, three blouses, three petticoats, a nightgown, a plastic comb, a thin towel. A blanket. And a plate. Joy had told her to pack a plate.

After she had finished, the Major told her he was not going with her. He would go back to Agartala on his own. ‘It’s safer for you that way. Maya will meet you in Calcutta. Everything’s been arranged.’ She saw the slight tremble of his eyelids; battling feeling; winning.

Rehana unscrewed the cap and took a sip from her flask. How very close it is to illness. The loose, restless limbs. The feverish cheeks. The burning salt of the heart. The prickle of sweat. Love .

She remembered a line from Ghalib. Zindagi yun bhi guzar hi jaati . Life would have gone on; somehow it would have passed, unstirred, predictable, and without this, the weather in her kicked up.

As the train turned south towards Calcutta, the monsoon fields returned. Rehana gazed out on to the waterlogged landscape. The land was divided into rectangular plots of rice, framed by a raised mud bank the width of a footprint. Different stages of growth were segregated in the plots: there were the pale, tiny shoots the colour of limes, which would be pulled and replanted when they grew waist high; and then the established shoots, denser and slightly darker; and finally the milk-toned paddy, ready to be harvested. The plots were miniature islands, each in its own flooded pool; together they were a chequered palette of green and gold.

The weather changed, and suddenly the sky was the colour of washed slate. Slanted sheets of rain began to pour through Rehana’s open window. She stood up and struggled with the latch, until the window fell down with a clap upon its groove. And then there was only the sound of the train itself, the looping wheels on the track, the water falling onto the window like tapping fingers, and everything blue-black: the wood of the bench, the low-hanging clouds outside, the rattle of the window in its frame.

The train approached Shialdah Station, grunting to a halt. When the doors opened, Rehana tumbled out with her bag. It was like being thrown into a roiling human sea. People were everywhere, choked together in a dense blur. She pushed through and made her way to the end of the platform, tiptoeing to see over the mass of faces. How would Maya ever find her? She found a few inches of space in front of a bench and sat down on her bags. After a few minutes she began to distinguish the different categories of traveller. There were the just-arrived ones, wearing the same ragged, anxious expression as herself; and the recently arrived, still hanging around the station, waiting for something to happen, for someone to pick them up, or to tell them what to do now that they had made it to Calcutta; and those who had arrived weeks, months, ago, who realized that there was nowhere beyond the station, no other possible home, and so had remained there, lying down on the platform in jagged, uneven rows. Their blankets covered their faces; they had lost hope of being picked up and taken anywhere else. Whether it was day or night, time for sleep or not, they lay there, in masks of death, carving out their shroud-like places on the platform.