A Golden Age

by Tahmima Anam

  Good. She would find a way to make sure he didn’t go back.

  ‘We’ll join you,’ he said to the boy in the window; ‘we’re just coming.’

  ‘Hurry up–we’ll be at the TSC later.’

  ‘Why don’t you boys go ahead? I’ll drive,’ Mrs Sengupta said.

  ‘Na, Supriya, let the boys take us home,’ Rehana said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Sengupta insisted. ‘They’ll just have to come all the way back. Pull over, Sohail.’

  Rehana cursed the day Mr Sengupta had taught his wife to drive. She just wanted them all home. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s safe for us to go by ourselves?’

  ‘Of course it’s safe. We’ll be in the car, what could happen?’

  ‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said a little eagerly, ‘you’ll be OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rehana replied. It came out weakly, but he didn’t seem to need much convincing.

  They waited until the last of the procession passed. Sohail parked the car in front of Rokeya Hall and left the engine running. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry,’ Mrs Sengupta said. ‘I’ll get them home. You join your friends. Jao.’

  ‘OK. Ammoo–I’ll just find out what’s happening and come straight home.’

  Rehana fought off a wave of panic. ‘Be careful, beta.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Bye!’

  ‘Khoda Hafez.’

  Mrs Sengupta was already at the front of the car, waiting to take the wheel. She held out the door for Rehana with a flourish. ‘Don’t worry so much!’ she said.

  Suddenly a thin, lungi-clad boy bolted past. Mrs Sengupta’s sari slid from her shoulder, exposing her blouse and her bare stomach, and, as she bent to rearrange herself, she slipped and tumbled forward, her head knocking against the wheel before she could stretch out her arms to break the fall.

  Rehana rushed to her side and struggled to lift her up. ‘Are you hurt?’ She pulled Mrs Sengupta into the driver’s seat and slammed the doors. ‘Are you hurt?’ she repeated.

  ‘No, it’s nothing,’ Mrs Sengupta said, ‘just a little dirty.’

  ‘Here, take my handkerchief.’

  ‘Just an accident. Nothing to worry.’ She took the handkerchief and began to wipe the mud from her palms.

  ‘Supriya,’ Rehana said, ‘you’ve lost your teep.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mrs Sengupta touched her forehead and then looked into the folds of her sari. ‘I hadn’t realized.’ She rolled down her window and hurriedly brushed a few stray tears from her eyes. ‘Just a little startled,’ she said, laughing nervously. Then she adjusted her seat, checked her reflection in the mirror and cupped her palm over the gear.

  Rehana looked back to check on Maya. Her daughter was watching the retreating procession as it crossed the university intersection and headed towards Nilkhet.

  Waiting for them in front of the bungalow gate was Sharmeen, a tall young woman with broad shoulders and a tough, ageless face. She was a student at the art college, famous on campus for her political posters, and Maya’s best friend, or comrade, as she liked to be called.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Sharmeen said, as they tumbled out of the car. She was struggling with a giant roll of paper. Mrs Sengupta smoothed the back of her head. From across the road, Mrs Chowdhury’s cocker spaniels, Romeo and Juliet, began to bark.

  Maya hugged Sharmeen. ‘We were driving back from the cricket match. We got stuck in Paltan.’

  ‘I came to find you as soon as I heard. Help me with this?’

  ‘I don’t think you can get back,’ Maya said, catching one end of the roll.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Rehana said, unlatching the gate, ‘you can stay here.’ It was an unnecessary invitation; Sharmeen was always staying over. There was a mattress under Rehana’s bed that hardly ever gathered dust. Her toothbrush was in the cabinet behind the bathroom mirror.

  They’d been best friends since Maya’s first day at Vikarunnessa Noon School. The children had just arrived from Lahore, and Rehana decided it was time for them to learn Bengali. Not the fractured Bengali they picked up at the sweetshop and the playground but proper, school Bengali. So Maya was sent to Vikarunnessa, where the nuns were weathered and the girls wore hard braids and white knee socks. On that first day Maya stood up behind her desk and announced: ‘My name is Sheherezade Haque Maya. I was named after a famous storyteller. My father is dead. I am Lahore-returned. We have a big house called Shona.’ She was met with a vibrating silence as the girls shuffled and cocked their ears at her strained, accented Bengali. And then, chased by cries of ‘Bihari! Bihari!’, she fled into a far corner of the hockey field, her uniform skirt billowing around her legs, and that is where Sharmeen had found her, sitting inside her hula hoop, chewing on a piece of dried mango.

  ‘Can I have some?’

  ‘I already licked the whole thing.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Sharmeen pinched with two fingers the wet leather of mango and popped it into her mouth. ‘So. Your father’s dead? Mine too.’

  ‘How did yours go?’

  ‘Typhoid. Yours?’

  ‘Heart-attack.’

  And their friendship was sealed.

  Maya had always regarded Sharmeen with awe, as though she could never quite figure out why Sharmeen chose her when there were so many other stern young women in the movement. But Maya had underestimated Sharmeen’s need to be adored. She didn’t question, as Rehana often did, the fact that Sharmeen spent so many of her holidays at the bungalow in Dhanmondi instead of at home with her own family. It appeared the girl had nowhere else to go. Rehana accepted Sharmeen’s presence in the house, and, even though she wasn’t particularly fond of her, she liked to think of herself as the kind of person who took in strays.

  In the drawing room Sharmeen and Maya locked arms and surveyed the poster.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Maya said.

  ‘I think it needs more colour here,’ Sharmeen said, pointing with her brush to a blank area of the canvas. Her hands were amphibious, the fingers green and stuck together with paint.

  ‘Maybe–but it could signify, you know, the space of possibility–the future,’ Maya said.

  ‘You don’t think that’s too abstract?’

  ‘Probably.’ She shrugged her shoulders to indicate that people who didn’t understand the significance of the blank space didn’t deserve to know the meaning of the poster.

  Rehana retreated to her room; her head was throbbing, and she couldn’t get the sight of Mrs Sengupta’s fallen sari and her shocked mouth out of her head. And Sohail, drumming his fingers against that steering wheel. What was he doing now? Probably adding a voice of reason, she told herself. That was what he always did. He was so persuasive. If the students wanted to riot, he would tell them they shouldn’t tear down their own classrooms just to prove a point. He would slowly shift the language of the conversation, so that they were no longer shouting about revenge and saying things like who do they think they are.

  Rehana stroked her forehead in time to the rotating ceiling fan. I’ll just close my eyes for one minute, she thought. And then I’ll wake up and worry again.

  By the time she emerged from her room a few hours later it was dark outside, the hum of a gentle storm rustling the leaves in the garden. She followed the voices to the drawing room and found it crammed with Sohail’s friends.

  ‘Salaam-Alaikum, Auntie,’ they said in scattered chorus. No one was smoking, but the cigarette stink clung to the air. Maya and Sharmeen were bent over another sheet of paper. Aref was unpacking his guitar.

  ‘Ammoo,’ Sohail said, raising his voice over the throng, ‘Mujib has called a meeting on the 7th. You should come.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘Because history will be made.’

  ‘Yes, Auntie,’ Aref said, twisting a knob on his guitar. ‘You must be there–it’s going to be even bigger than the last one.’

  ‘You go,’ Rehana said a little nervously. ‘Tell me about it afterwards.’ She suddenly felt a
wkward, like she had stumbled into the Men Only room at the Gymkhana.

  ‘Ma, seriously,’ Maya interjected, ‘you can’t miss it–Mujib might declare independence.’

  ‘I don’t know–we’ll see, OK? Do you all need anything? Are you hungry?’

  ‘Don’t worry about us, Ammoo,’ Sohail said, waving to her. ‘We feed on the revolution.’

  As she turned back to the kitchen, Rehana wondered if she should attend the meeting. They were always telling her to come with them to their rallies and their get-togethers, but, not being young or part of the student movement, and not having attended the conferences of the Nationalist Party or the elections of the student unions, and not, like Sohail and Maya, having read the Communist Manifesto and sat for hours under the banyan tree debating the finer points of the resistance, she did not have the proper trappings of a nationalist. She did not have the youth or the appearance or the words. The correct words, though by now familiar to her, did not glide easily from her tongue: ‘comrade’, ‘proletariat’, ‘revolution’. They were hard, precise words and did not capture Rehana’s ambiguous feelings about the country she had adopted. She spoke, with fluency, the Urdu of the enemy. She was unable to pretend, as she saw so many others doing, that she could replace her mixed tongue with a pure Bengali one, so that the Muslim salutation, As-Salaam Alaikum was replaced by the neutral Adaab, or even Nomoshkar, the Hindu greeting. Rehana’s tongue was too confused for these changes. She could not give up her love of Urdu, its lyrical lilts, its double meanings, its furrowed beat.

  No, Rehana did not have the exactness to become a true revolutionary. But she had realized long ago that, while the children would remain fixed at the centre of her life, she would gradually fade out of theirs. In the meantime she wanted to hold on for as long as she could, especially now that their dreams had suddenly grown so spacious. She turned into the kitchen and wondered how she would feed all those hungry dreamers.

  ‘Ammoo, we have a present for you,’ Sohail said, after they’d all eaten. Rehana had decided on khichuri, which was quick and meant there was no need to cook the dal separately. And she’d made omelettes with chilli and fried onions. The whole lot had been devoured in seconds.

  ‘What?’ Rehana said.

  Sohail pulled out a large bag from underneath his chair. He unfolded the packet and held up a rectangular length of cloth. It was a rich, muddy green, the colour of the lowest leaves in the mangrove. Sewn into the middle was a circle, a little uneven, in red. Inside the circle was a yellow cut-out map of East Pakistan.

  ‘This is our flag, Ammoo.’ And he opened his arms to show her its full length. Aref took hold of one side, and they stretched it across the room. A few people clapped. ‘Joy Bangla!’ someone shouted. A flag without a country, Rehana thought, but didn’t say. Maya whooped, draped the flag around her shoulders and ran to find a bamboo pole so they could secure it to the rooftop.

  The days following the cricket match were full of strikes and processions, curfews disobeyed and slogans shouted from blaring megaphones. Sohail and Maya spent most of their days at the university, returning home late every night, talking excitedly about the change in the air. But Dhanmondi was quiet, and things mostly went on as normal. Occasionally Mrs Chowdhury would arrive at Rehana’s doorstep with a mountain of small brown packets containing the latest shopping for Silvi’s wedding. One sari after another was purchased, then the blouses and petticoats to match, and the lace trim to go around the sleeves of the blouses, and the matching clips for her hair. One day Mrs Chowdhury appeared with only her handbag, and on that day Rehana knew she’d been to the jeweller. She pulled out two red boxes covered in velvet and opened them with a snap, and Rehana had to ooh and aah at the locket and the pair of earrings that winked from inside.

  Despite her initial reluctance, Rehana found herself at the racecourse on the 7th of March. She arrived early but the field was already full. It was as though the whole country had turned up: people flooded the grounds and all Rehana could see for miles was a vast sea of shining black heads, glowing in the sunshine like a restless horizon of darkness.

  Sheikh Mujib was a tiny white figure in the distance. In the years since he’d become the leader of the movement, his short black coat, his reedy voice and the finger he always pointed at the sky had become familiar sights, but there was still a thrill at seeing him in the flesh. As he made his way on to the stage, the crowd bucked, and Rehana watched as he waved his arms to quiet and reassure his people. His. They belonged to him now; they were his charge, his children. They called him father. They loved him the way orphans dream of their lost parents: without promise, only hope. He cleared his throat and began to speak. Rehana could barely hear him amid the shouts of the crowd, the whistles and the cheers; the afternoon sun beating down on the cloud of flags that dotted the racecourse ground seemed to make his words bend and quiver in the heat. ‘Make every home a fortress,’ she could just hear him say.

  The scene appeared before Rehana like a glamorous black-and-white picture; there was the white of Mujib’s kurta-pyjama, the black of his short coat, the black–she knew, though she could not see–of his thick-framed glasses, the white of the tent pitched to cover the stage. By the end she found herself shouting Joy Bangla, Joy Bangla, Joy Bangla with the crowd, the rhythm of her words chiming with the hard thump of her chest, and she recognized, at once, the incendiary thrill of shouting. Maya looked over at her mother and flashed her a wide, encouraging smile. Rehana suddenly felt young, plunged into a world of limitless possibility.

  At thirty-eight, Rehana’s body had finally caught up with its history. People who did not know used to assume she was a student, or that she was unmarried, because she didn’t wear a wedding ring or a single piece of gold jewellery, but no longer. She had gained a little weight, and she enjoyed the occasional heaviness of her limbs, the stubborn, outward curve of her belly, the slight effort of movement, an awareness of breath and bone. Her new, comfortable shape came with new imperfections: the bowed line between nose and chin, the slight shadow above her lip, the thickening of her waist and ankles. All fortunate developments for Rehana, as they signified the battle-weary body of a woman who had passed years in the effort to raise her children.

  Maya leaned over and held her mother’s hand–not, as she sometimes did, for a reassuring squeeze but in solidarity, and suddenly Rehana felt sure it would all resolve itself: Sheikh Mujib would be Prime Minister, and the country would go on being her home, and the children would go on being her children. In no time at all the world would right itself, and they would go on living ordinary, unexceptional lives.

  25 March 1971

  Operation Searchlight

  They blamed it on a sudden, collective deafness. How else could they explain the military planes that had landed at the airport, the soldiers told they were saving the world? How else could they explain not knowing, not hearing? And later they would say they should have heard the birds leaping out of trees and flying eastwards, and the crickets fleeing, and the bats folding up, and the grass-green tiktikis hiding in crevices, under house slippers.

  But they didn’t, and this is how it happened:

  On the 25th Mrs Chowdhury invited them all to dinner in honour of Lieutenant Sabeer. All day there had been strange rumours floating around the city. Mujib was in talks about the election, and no one was saying whether the talking was coming to anything; at the end of Satmasjid Road, at the East Pakistan Rifles Compound, the place they have always called Peelkhana, there was speculation about a military attack; some university students had come out with bricks and broken chairs from the dormitories, trying to construct a makeshift barricade.

  It was a bad night for a party, but Mrs Chowdhury insisted. The couple hadn’t been formally engaged, she said, not with all the troubles; nothing elaborate, just a small ceremony, maybe a ring for Silvi. She roasted an entire lamb, which sat on the table with a tomato stuffed between its jaws. Rehana did not feel she could say no; Sohail agreed to come as well
–probably to test himself, Rehana thought. He avoided looking at Silvi and Sabeer and kept his eyes fixed on the lamb. Maya’s mood was especially black; she had been forced to leave Sharmeen at Rokeya Hall, where confetti was being thrown out of windows and a group of Bauls were singing at the bottom of the stairwell. She complained of the quiet in the neighbourhood, as though no one in Dhanmondi knew or cared they were on the verge of a revolution. She wanted to be on the streets, distributing leaflets and singing ‘We Shall Overcome’.

  The neighbours assembled around the table. Silvi was dressed in a heavy turquoise salwaar-kameez. Lieutenant Sabeer wore his uniform, as usual. Mr and Mrs Sengupta put Mithun to bed in Silvi’s bedroom and turned their attention to the aromas floating in from the kitchen.

  The party was quietly expectant. But no one heard anything, not even the sound of guava trees dropping their fruit, as they always do in March.

  ‘Well, then, let’s raise our glasses to Silvi and Sabeer, my beloved daughter, and my soon-to-be son-in-law. May God bless you both.’

  They raised their glasses of milk shorbot. Rehana sat beside Sohail and tried to catch his wrist to give it a squeeze. But his hands were on the table, and he said, ‘Here’s to our country. May it emerge from this trial and stand strong.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Mr Sengupta, leaning back and stroking his belly.

  ‘And to the proletariat! And to the revolution!’ Maya said, standing up and draining her glass in a hurry.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Mrs Chowdhury said, ‘now let’s eat.’

  While Mrs Chowdhury plunged her knife into the lamb’s glossy, rippled back, a slow procession of jeeps and tanks crawled through the city; it snaked out of the cantonment, crossed the railroad tracks into Bonani, where it split up, one line straying through Elephant Road, through Jinnah Avenue, and into the university compound. The other line made its way towards Peelkhana, green jeeps with green men waving the green Pakistan flag, a flapping sickle with its lavish, bent smile.