Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age

Once they had crossed Howrah Bridge and left the perimeter of Calcutta, the landscape was barren and yellow with fields of drying hay. They passed a jute factory, with its smell of grass and dung, and a leather factory, spilling its fishy odour on to the road, and a cement factory, with black towers of smoke and a piercing, staccato clatter. Half an hour later Mukul rapped on the glass. ‘Almost there!’ he shouted, pointing ahead to a handwritten sign that read salt lake 2 kilometres. The wind flattened his hair and ears.

Sultana swung the steering wheel to the right, and they passed on to a narrow, rough track. In the distance Rehana saw an enormous tent, and beside it an expanse of makeshift shacks and hutments. The fields beyond were stacked with oversized cement pipes.

‘Is this it?’

‘Ji, Auntie,’ Sultana said, ‘this is it.’

As they approached the tent, Rehana saw a giant banner painted with a Red Cross sign.

‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, ‘this is it. Salt Lake Refugee Camp.’

‘What’s that tent?’

‘It’s a hospital.’

Long wooden boards made a path from the car to the tent. The field that lay between was littered with the detritus of people who had hastily abandoned their homes. Shoes, combs, fragments of clothing, broken cooking pots were sinking into the mud like swirls of confetti.

Maya and Sultana skipped over the boards, manoeuvring through the oily puddles and smudged footprints. Maya had pinned the red sari a little high, so that it just skimmed her ankles; she wore closed, sturdy shoes. No one had told Rehana what to expect. She hitched up her sari so that it wouldn’t trail in the mud, and with the other hand she covered her head with a copy of the Calcutta Statesman , because the sun had begun to force itself through the clouds, trapping the air in a hazy, thick heat. She kept her head down and concentrated on navigating the tilting, uneven boards.

Inside the Red Cross tent Maya and Sultana were greeted with cheers and handshakes. A tall man in a white coat came striding towards them. ‘Ah, my Tuesday angels,’ he bellowed.

‘Dr Rao, this is my mother,’ Maya said.

He had glittering olive eyes. ‘Welcome to Calcutta. Why don’t you join me later, when I do the rounds?’ He put a hand on Maya’s elbow.

‘Sure,’ Maya said, colouring, ‘we’ll just unpack the supplies.’

‘OK then, see you later,’ he said, sailing away on long, quick legs.

Sultana was already unpacking the supplies and giving instructions to the half-dozen volunteers who had gathered around her. Maya joined her in an assembly line, cracking the boxes open with a blade, pointing to the different shelves that made up the medicine stores. Rehana wedged herself into a corner and watched, shifting her weight from one foot to another. It was like being with her sisters again, disappearing while they went on with important, grown-up tasks.

‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, unwrapping a package of syringes, ‘do you want to have a look around?’

‘Yes, sure,’ Rehana replied, relieved.

‘Sultana, we’ll just be back.’

‘I’ll catch up with you later.’ And she raised a teasing eyebrow. ‘We can meet Dr Rao.’

When they stepped outside the tent, Rehana saw a ragged line of families snaking out to one side.

‘What are they waiting for?’

‘Vaccinations,’ Maya said. She checked her watch. ‘They do them every morning at ten.’ At the head of the queue, on a foldout table, a sandy-haired man in a coat plunged needles into spindly baby arms.

Maya was leading her to the field of shanties, where the beehives of discarded cement pipes were stacked three or four high.

‘This is where they bring the newcomers,’ Maya said, pointing to the pipes.

‘Where?’

‘Over there.’

There weren’t any buildings, only the pipes. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘ Inside the pipes, Ma, look.’

Rehana put her hand to her forehead and looked. The scene came into focus.

It was true. The pipes, each just wide enough for a grown man’s stretched arms, had people huddled inside them. Lungis hung across some for privacy. Saris lay drying on top. Inside, their backs bent against the curve of the pipes, men and women pitched against the sloping walls.

Maya and Rehana walked on, drawing closer to the pipes. The ground grew more sodden as they approached, and boards were laid down again. The stench of human waste suddenly assaulted Rehana, and she stopped in her tracks.

‘Maya,’ Rehana said, covering her mouth with her sari, ‘how long do you think we’ll be here?’

‘At the camp?’

‘No, in Calcutta.’

‘Why?’

‘I just want to know — how long before we go home?’

‘Dhaka isn’t safe any more. They’ve been raiding houses, and if even one person tells the authorities you’ve been harbouring freedom fighters, we could all end up in custody. Especially you. Sohail’s very worried.’

‘But I knew all of this when I decided to do it.’

‘Things have changed. The army is nervous; they’re cracking down.’

Rehana knew it was childish to indulge in feeling homesick, but she couldn’t help it. Everything had happened so quickly, she hadn’t even had time to consider what would happen next, after she arrived. She hadn’t bargained on feeling so lost . She shouldn’t have come.

‘Don’t worry, Ma. You’ll soon settle in.’

They marched on.

The pipes were no bigger at close range. Children dangled from their edges, while women hung back inside, their faces covered with the limp ends of their saris.

They found a boy, no more than six or seven, squatting beside his pipe. ‘You arrive today?’ Maya asked, crouching down herself and looking him up and down. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’

The boy was braiding two flat lengths of jute. When he looked up, Rehana saw the skin stretched over his face. On his neck, where his pulse should have been, was a pink millipede scar.

He kept his eyes on his hands and mumbled something incoherent.

‘Speak up, boy,’ Maya said roughly, taking his chin in her hands.

‘Ji, apa.’ He finished his braid and began another one.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Pabna,’ he whispered.

‘Where?’

‘Pabna,’ he said, even more softly, holding the first braid in his mouth.

‘Which village?’ Maya asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know the village?’

‘Dulal, tara tari koro.’ A woman with a fist on each hip crawled out of her pipe and looked Rehana up and down. ‘I need that basket.’ She had something — a chicken — tucked into the crook of her elbow. She twisted it around and held it by its wing.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked, looking at the boy and pointing to Maya. The chicken flapped its free wing against the woman’s leg.

Maya stood up. ‘My name is Maya. I work here.’ Maya didn’t introduce Rehana. ‘Is this your boy?’

‘No. He’s from my village.’

‘Where are his people?’

‘Dead,’ the woman said stiffly.

‘See that tent?’ Maya said, pointing, ‘go and register there. Him too. You can get food, medicine. Bujlen?’

The woman nodded. She passed the chicken to Dulal, who had tied his jute braids together into a loose net. Rehana wanted to ask her a few more questions, how old she was, how she had arrived at the camp, did she have parents, a husband, children of her own, but Maya was already moving on, waving her hands at an old man with a lungi hitched up around his knees.

Rehana rifled through her handbag and pulled out a few notes. ‘I can give you some taka—’

The woman gave Rehana a parched, blinkless stare. ‘I don’t need money,’ she said.