A Golden Age

by Tahmima Anam

  God, she said, the tears flowing freely from her eyes, take my want.

  The room spun around. Mrs Sengupta’s parents stared down at her from the wall. She closed her eyes and dreamed of a man kneading her shoulder with a rough, callused hand. His hand travelled to her neck, pressing the tendons, pressing until she almost choked; and then the hand was on her shoulder again, and then travelling down the length of her arm, slipping through the hollow between her elbow and her waist.

  ‘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.

  August, September, October

  Salt Lake

  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.

  ‘Mrs Haque?’ A young man with a friendly gap between his teeth called out to Rehana. He shuffled towards her on squat legs. ‘You’re Mrs Haque?’

  Rehana wasn’t sure whether to answer. She managed a hesitant ‘Yes?’

  ‘Remarkable resemblance! Even in this crowd I recognized you.’ He grinned, incongruous in this mess of lost bodies.

  ‘You are…?’

  ‘Mukul, Auntie, I’m here to collect you. Maya-di couldn’t come; she’s very sorry, she sent me. I’ll take you straight to the office–she’s waiting.’

  Rehana was too tired to question the boy further; and here he was, wrestling the bag out of her hands, pushing cheerfully through the crowd, leading her outside, where the heat pulsed through the open mouth of the station entrance.

  Mukul’s car was a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Someone had thought of painting the bumper to match. Through the opening of doors and lifting of bags, he began a monologue that lasted until he’d pulled down the brake and jerked the car into motion. ‘Please, sit comfortably at the back–front seat is full of rubbish–well, not rubbish exactly, pamphlets–I was supposed to deliver them before I came to collect you but the roads were chock-a-block and I didn’t want to be late!’

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ Rehana said.

  ‘It’s an honour, Auntie. I’ve heard all about you from Maya,’ he said, catching Rehana’s eye in the rear-view.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Rehana muttered, trying to shield her eyes from the afternoon glare.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he answered. ‘Why not? You are an example to all of us. A hero!’ The car sped past a flooded pavement and splashed a huddle of schoolboys.

  ‘Your first time in Calcutta?’ Mukul asked, swivelling around to face her.

  ‘Um, no actually, I used to live here.’

  ‘Really?’ Mukul asked. ‘Where? Which neighbourhood?’

  Rehana was too taken aback to give him a fake address. ‘Wellington Square.’

  ‘Wellington Square? My goodness, your people must be rich.’

  The Volkswagen hiccuped down the narrow city roads. Rehana kept the window rolled up, but even through the glass she could make out the mud-and-rotten-vegetable smell of Calcutta. She heard the clatter of the tongas, the shuffle of roasting peanuts. She fixed her eyes on her lap and resisted the temptation to look at her old home.

  I have not returned to Calcutta, she told herself, I have not returned to Calcutta.

  By the time her marriage to Iqbal had been arranged, she was desperate to leave. One by one her sisters had been married and shipped to Karachi. The house in Wellington Square was long gone, and they had rented a flat above a dusty bookshop on College Street. Every morning her father would go down into the bookstore and announce the names of the titles he used to own. ‘Great Expectations!’ he would shout. ‘Akbar-nama. Tales of the Alhambra.’

  Mukul’s car shuddered to a halt in front of a two-storey house. A rectangular patch of garden was laid out in front like a welcome mat. The sign above the gate read number 8, theatre road.

  ‘Auntie,’ Mukul said, ‘please go ahead. I’ll park the car and bring your jeeneesh-potro.’

  ‘It’s all right–just a small bag–I’ll bring it in myself.’ Rehana climbed gratefully out of the car.

  The office door was open, and she could hear the clatter of typewriters inside, and the screech of a radio being tuned. She stepped over the threshold and entered a high-ceilinged room that smelled of cobwebs and newsprint. A bright strip of tube-lights gave the room its official, fluorescent-wash feeling.

  ‘Ma!’ Maya ploughed into Rehana’s chest, knocking the breath out of her. Then she grabbed her by the shoulders, pushed her away and scanned her face with a giant smile. ‘Ammoo!’ Then she was pulling her close again, and Rehana thought she heard a sniffle as Maya buried her face in Rehana’s sari. ‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t come to the station–the Soviets signed the treaty, can you believe it? How are you, Ma, I’ve missed you’–she waved her arms around–‘everyone, amar Ma!’ A few people looked up from their desks and salaamed and nomoshkared Rehana. ‘You’ll meet everyone later. Was it all right, the train?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it was.’ Rehana took a moment to note the change in her daughter. She had exchanged her white sari for a brilliant red cotton. Her lips were chapped and bitten, and her hair was a mess, overgrown and forced into a braid that ended in a thin, weak tangle, but there was a rough health about her. On one of her fingers she wore a ring made of a cheap brown metal. Everything about her was different. Her eyes were bright, and Rehana could feel their warmth as they summed each other up. ‘I was worried,’ Maya was saying.

  ‘No, it was nothing, just a little tiring.’

  ‘Well, I’ve arranged the place–you want to go, sleep a little?’ Maya pulled the bag from Rehana’s arm.

  Rehana felt her way around the new mood between them. ‘I’m a little hungry–and maybe a bath–if that’s all right–you’re not busy?’

  ‘No, Ma, today I’m all yours.’ She flung her arm around Rehana’s shoulders and laughed easily. ‘Where d’you want to go? Victoria Park? Wellington Square? Oooh, College Street?’

  ‘First let’s—’

  ‘Yes, sorry–home–yes, first home. Just a few minutes, Ammoo. Here, you sit behind the desk, I’ll just finish this paragraph.’

  Rehana was so tired her arms were starting to grow cold.

  ‘Let me bring you some tea first.’ Maya ran off.

  Rehana took the opportunity to examine the office more closely. There wasn’t much to see. Stacks of paper columned up the desks and covered every inch of spare floorspace. Young men in spectacles frowned over typewriters. A few posters were strung on the wall. Above a doorway leading to a back room was a framed photograph of Mujib in his black coat. Already the picture looked out of date.

  Rehana pressed her head against the worn leather seat, hypnotized by the clack-clack-clack of the typewriters.

  In the back room the radio squealed into focus.

  ‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, bearing a cup of tea and a pair of biscuits, ‘the BBC broadcast, then we’ll go.’

  Rehana heard snatches of the radio programme, interrupted by comments from the people at the office. This is the BBC World Service…a historic Indo-Soviet treaty…if Indira Gandhi intervenes, the war will surely be won for the people of Bangladesh…

  A loud cheer went up in the room. Three telephones rang at once.

  ‘Joy Bangla! Joy Bangobandhu!’

  The cheer was repeated several times, followed by scattered backslapping.

  Rehana devoured the salty, cumin-studded biscuits and felt her knees turning to stone.

  ‘Beta,’ she said to Maya, ‘why don’t you just take me to–the flat?’

  ‘Ma, I’m so sorry–we’ll go now.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s not a flat, really.’

  ‘No matter. I just want to put my feet up.’ Rehana gathered her things and began to walk towards the front door.

  ‘No, Ammoo, this way.’ Maya led her to the back of the building, where there were yet more serious-looking workers hunched over their desks. They squeezed through a small cluster of people who were still huddled over the radio. A young woman dressed like a man in a pair of grey trousers waved to them as they brushed past.

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Yes–Ammoo, this is Sultana.’

  The girl–boy beamed at Rehana. She had shiny, black eyes. ‘We’ve heard all about you, Auntie. You need anything, you ask me.’

  They passed through a narrow doorway and into a dim stairwell. ‘It’s just upstairs,’ Maya said, climbing the stairs two at a time. Rehana followed Maya along
the betel-stained corridor, stepping to avoid the crumpled bits of newspaper, the spit-globs, the smeared streaks of mud on the walls.

  The stairwell opened on to a wide, flat roof. A low railing surrounded it, and beyond Rehana could see the other rooftops on Theatre Road. In the building next door a fat woman was pinning a yellow sari to a clothes line. ‘This way,’ Maya said. They crossed the roof. At the far end was a small shed topped with a sheet of tin. A set of narrow double doors was held together with a padlock.

  Maya slipped a key into the lock. The doors swung open to reveal a tiny room with a sagging cot against one wall and a heavy wooden desk against the other. Between the cot and the desk was a sliver of window criss-crossed with crude metal bars. A tired gamcha hung from the bars, its chequered red-and-green pattern casting weak Christmas shadows on the concrete floor.

  ‘Ammoo, this was the best I could do.’

  Rehana pushed aside her surprise.

  ‘I cleaned it!’ A tattered mop was angled against the wall.

  ‘It’s all right, jaan. It’s not for long.’

  ‘It’s a promotion! All this time I’ve been sleeping downstairs.’

  ‘In the office?’

  ‘There’s no other place,’ Maya said, shrugging, ‘and anyway it’s been rather fun.’ Maya was unwrapping herself from her sari, and Rehana followed, her back to the window. She pulled her head through her nightgown and began to pick the pins out of her hair.

  Maya was already sprawled out on the cot when she said, ‘Ammoo, I heard about Sabeer.’

  She didn’t really want to talk about Sabeer, but she told Maya about Sohail, the flat in Nilkhet, how he’d begged her to help.

  ‘Mrs Chowdhury was hysterical.’

  ‘And Silvi?’

  ‘Sohail thought…well, he wanted to do it for Silvi. He thought she might love him again if he–I–brought Sabeer back.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Jani na. Sabeer was in very bad shape.’