A Golden Age

by Tahmima Anam

  Home made her think of Mrs Sengupta. Where would Supriya go, when this was all over? Rehana decided to approach her, to tell her the truth. That she didn’t understand how a mother could abandon her son to save her own life, but that it was not, in the end, her place to understand. That was between her and her maker. She was only her friend.

  At the ward Rehana waited for her daily appointment with Dr Rao. The trembling in her fingers spread to her arms, a cold travelling shiver.

  The doctor approached, making his hurried, long-legged strides. He was right on time, as usual.

  ‘Did you check the list today?’ Rehana asked.

  ‘Yes, Chachi, I checked the list.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m sorry.’ He sighed. They went through this every day. ‘Chachi, I know she’s your friend, but there’s really not much more we can do.’

  ‘But her son is lost–now we know exactly where he was last seen. We have to keep looking. Promise me you’ll keep looking.’ She stood up to go. The floor tilted towards her. She lunged forward, leaning heavily on the doctor’s arm.

  ‘Chachi? Are you all right?’

  ‘Nothing. I should probably have some breakfast–haven’t eaten all morning.’

  ‘There must be something in the kitchen. Shall I take you?’

  ‘No, please don’t worry. The list–you’ll keep checking? Sabeer Mustafa. I mean, no–Mithun. Mithun Sengupta. You got the name?’

  ‘Yes, Chachi.’

  The spinning went on as Rehana made her way to the canteen. The din of the hospital was by now familiar to her, and she had learned to ignore it, just as she could ignore the pressing mass of people with urgent faces who lined the corridors. But now there was a roar in her head like rushing water. She put her hand to her mouth and felt the flame of her breath. I need to sit down, she said to herself. Just for a moment. She was scanning the room, looking for an empty chair, when Maya intercepted her.

  ‘Ammoo, are you all right?’

  ‘Nothing, jaan, just a little weakness.’ A feathery shiver passed through her body. ‘The telegram–why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Ammoo, let’s sit down somewhere.’

  ‘OK.’ Maya grabbed hold of Rehana’s hand. They made their way though the beds. Some of the women waved to Rehana as they passed and cried out, ‘Apa!’ Rehana heard them as a warbled, rippling echo.

  ‘Maya-jaan, I’m not feeling well,’ she whispered. Maya was in front of her now, pushing people aside. ‘Make way, please!’ she was saying.

  Rehana slipped out of Maya’s grip. The people rushing into the hospital overcame her, and she let go, falling into the throng, strange, icy hands gripping her shoulders, raising her up, her arms flopping like fish fins, and then darkness.

  Rehana drifted in and out of a heavy-lidded sleep, her throat thick with questions. She dreamed of Sabeer, his cracked lips mouthing something incoherent, and Mithun, with a face like Sohail’s, under water, wailing for his mother.

  ‘Ma,’ she heard Sohail say, ‘I’m here, Ma.’

  When she woke, she patted herself; her face was still hot, but the shivering had stopped, and now there was just an aching heaviness in her limbs and a hard throbbing in her head. She rubbed her feet together; they were buttery, even the heels. Someone had been tending to them. She turned and caught a whiff of jobakusum.

  ‘My hair…’

  ‘Mrs Sengupta’s been washing it,’ she heard a man’s voice say. ‘Doesn’t speak to anybody, just does it. And your feet.’ The voice had a weathered rasp.

  She wondered if she was dreaming. ‘Sohail?’

  He leaned over her so she could see it was really him.

  ‘When did you come?’

  ‘I was coming anyway–you didn’t get my letter. Just a few days. You’ve been in and out.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Jaundice. Rao said you’ve probably had it for weeks, you just didn’t know. It’s very contagious–they had to check everyone.’

  ‘Maya?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  Rehana had so many questions, but she was too tired to form the words. ‘Hold my hand,’ was all she managed to say. Before she drifted away, she saw Sohail’s arm, caramel and shiny with sun, moving across the bed.

  ‘I have an assignment, Ammoo,’ she heard him say the next day. He had brought her a green coconut with a triangular hole cut into the top, which she was tipping slowly into her mouth. ‘We’re going to take out the grid.’

  The coconut water was milky and sweet. She dipped her finger into it and pulled out a strip of the flesh. Sohail smiled through his beard-cloud. Rehana couldn’t help noticing how beautiful he was, and so alive, his eyes electric as he told her the news.

  ‘Whole city will be in total darkness. We’re going to dig up the stash in the garden, Ammoo. I have to go back to Dhaka.’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘You too. I’ve come to take you home. And Maya.’

  Home. She wanted to throw her hands in the air and send up a cheer.

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘It’s been two months since you left and we’ve kept a close watch on the house–it doesn’t look like they know anything.’

  ‘Sabeer died.’

  ‘I know.’ His face betrayed nothing–no relief, no shame.

  ‘He didn’t die for nothing, Ma. We’ve made some major gains. Just last week we took the Pak Army out of one of their major supply routes in Comilla.’

  ‘Are we going to win?’ It was the first time she had asked him the question.

  Sohail was about to say, Yes, of course. But she gave him a weak squeeze of the wrist that meant she wanted to know the truth, and he paused for a minute before saying, ‘It’s not impossible.’ He waited another moment, and then said, ‘We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outmanned. But sometimes we can beat the hell out of them.’ And again he smiled his cloudy smile and said, ‘I can taste the end. The modhu-roshogolla-honey end.’

  When she opened her eyes again, Mrs Sengupta was at the foot of her cot. She looked like a dark apparition, the washed planes of her face muted and still. She wore a clean sari and flat sandals. Her hair was oiled and tied into a glossy braid.

  ‘Now I’m the one in the sickbed,’ Rehana said.

  The barest smile touched Mrs Sengupta’s lips.

  What happened to you, Rehana wanted to ask. Instead she said, ‘You washed my hair?’

  Mrs Sengupta bent her head but didn’t open her mouth. She waited stiffly at the foot of the bed. A few moments struggled by. ‘I’m going back to Dhaka,’ Rehana said finally. ‘Why don’t you come? The war will be over soon. It’ll be like it was before. You can stay at Shona–we’ll be neighbours again. Or come and stay at the bungalow with me. Remember Road 5? And Mrs Chowdhury, and our card-friends–they’ll all want to see you.’ Rehana’s throat was sandy. ‘It’s your home too. Come with us.’

  Mrs Sengupta showed no hint of understanding. She kept her eyes on Rehana’s face and fingered her glass bangle, moving it up and down her forearm. Then she walked around to the side of the cot. Rehana reached a hand to her hand. She felt the blood leaping under Mrs Sengupta’s skin. At that very moment she was convinced the glass bangle had kept her friend alive, like a pulse at her wrist.

  Mrs Sengupta dipped her face to the cot. Rehana thought she might be trying to tell her something; she struggled to lift her head. It was the barest, faintest touch as Mrs Sengupta’s lips brushed Rehana’s cheek. Then she rose and turned to go.

  Rehana made one last attempt. ‘Please, Supriya–come home with me.’

  But she was already gone, pulling the sari over her shoulder and moving with that slow grace Rehana had envied since the first day she had arrived at Shona, perched on her high heels with a book under her arm.

  November

  Take my affliction

  They decided to take a long ferry route, crossing the border in Rajshahi and floating downstream on the Padma, past Kushtia, Pabna, Far
idpur. It would take two days, and they would arrive late at night on Wednesday after transferring to a train in Faridpur. Sohail would stay at Shona. On Thursday, Joy would come, and they would dig up the rifles buried beside the rosebushes. On Friday, after sunset, they would take out the power grid.

  Sohail, Maya and Rehana spent most of the journey on the ferry deck, spread out on a bench that hugged the left side of the boat. The air roared past their ears, making it hard to breathe or to say much of anything. When they spoke, their words were sent up to the air, where the clouds curdled together, or into the water that swirled confidently below. The Padma spread out before them like the sea, its banks so far apart they were visible only as grey lines on the horizon, and in hints offered by the distant shore–a clutch of seagulls, the dotted wave of a fisherman.

  They swayed in silence, narrowing their eyes against the sun and the warm needles of wind.

  The ferry stopped in Pabna, and Maya bolted across the gangplank for a snack.

  ‘What do you think she’ll do?’

  Silvi. So he hadn’t forgotten. ‘I don’t know, beta.’

  ‘Sometimes you can love someone more when they’re dead,’ he said, tracing the slanting metal floor of the ferry with the toe of his sandal.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But then you can also forget them.’ He looked at her as though she should know which direction Silvi’s affections would take.

  ‘Sometimes. Sometimes they just grow with each memory. You can’t know.’

  He gripped the railing with white fingers. ‘She was acting so strangely–I just, I felt her slipping away.’

  ‘You have to wait.’

  ‘Bhaiya!’ Maya called out, running across the deck. ‘They have the best jhaal moori.’ She thrust her hand out, holding a newspaper cone.

  Sohail plopped a handful into his mouth. ‘Ouch! How can you bear it so spicy?’ He hung his tongue out of his mouth. ‘Quick, get me some water, I’m dying.’

  Maya darted into their cabin for the flask. The huts and tenements that ribboned along the river bank were tilting towards the water, as though aware of their fate; for every monsoon the rivers ate into the floodplain, stealing vast chunks of land, entire houses with their contents, cooking pots and holey mosquito nets and gas stoves and a bridal trunk in which three generations of women have carted their possessions and next year’s rice store and dried chillies and babies and doorframes and tin roofs. And every year they were rebuilt, new tin roofs cobbled together with the remnants of the old; new mud walls; the new year’s baby–hopeful little shacks bowed by the knowledge of what would always, inevitably, happen again.

  Maya returned with the flask, flushed from the effort. ‘Eesh,’ she teased, ‘still can’t bear a little morich.’ The ferry horn sounded its animal blare.

  ‘You have a stomach like a steel tank,’ Sohail said, tipping the flask and gulping greedily. The ferry pushed away, swaying left to right with the effort, its egg-white wake trailing behind like a signature.

  ‘What do you eat out there?’ Maya asked.

  ‘Whatever I’m given. You wouldn’t believe some of it. But I can always talk the mess cook into something extra.’

  ‘Still using your charms to ill ends,’ Maya said.

  He smiled a young smile, which she returned, and Rehana was suddenly jolted back to the past, when their faces were fresh, unmarked by grief or history.

  When they descended from the ferry in Faridpur, Sohail crouched on all fours and kissed the silty shore.

  ‘Will you talk to her?’ he asked Rehana.

  They were at the Faridpur Station, waiting for their train to Dhaka.

  ‘I’ll go to see her tomorrow.’

  He stalked away and returned with a box of shondesh. The sweetmaker, a lean man with an improbably protruding belly, had tied it with a pink string that matched the lettering on the box. Alauddin Sweetmeat. In Faridpur, as everywhere else in the country, only the Muslim sweetmakers were left.

  ‘She likes shondesh,’ Sohail said. ‘She likes the molasses ones better, but you can’t get those till winter.’

  As soon as she woke on Thursday she could feel the difference. It was there, even though the house was thankfully familiar–the old teak wedding bed, the shapes of the night-time shadows, the mothball scent of the cupboard, from which last night she had pulled out sheets, pillows, kathas, for them to collapse on after the long train journey home. She had kissed Sohail on the cheek and sent him to Shona, where he had curled up on the Major’s bed and fallen asleep with his chappals still dangling from his toes.

  Rehana heard her daughter’s long breathing beside her. She rose, pulling her hair into a knot, crossed to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water. As she sipped, she leaned out of the kitchen doorway and into the small side porch. It was always at this time of the day that she allowed herself a selfish moment, when the house, the world, was hers, and there was no one to love, no one to save. It lasted only a few minutes. A few minutes was all the time she would grant it.

  The air was grey and heavy with night. She ducked into the bathroom, splashed water on her hands, her eyes. The backs of her ears. She bent her knees on the prayer mat. Every day she asked for the same thing. Protect my children. Forgive me. Save that man. She could not bear to utter his name. She dared to have a hope she might see him today.

  She hurried to the kitchen and thought about breakfast. It was the last breakfast for a few weeks. Tomorrow was the start of Ramzaan. For one month they would eat before dawn and not again until sunset. She mixed flour and water and worked the dough with her fingers. She rolled out flat disks, enjoying the quick, steady movement. The kitchen was orange with the coming sun; she stacked the chapattis on the edge of the counter and covered them with a damp square of muslin.

  She went back to the bedroom and tried to wake her daughter.

  ‘Ammoo, it’s so good to be home.’ Maya burrowed deeper under her katha. ‘Come,’ she said, patting the bed, ‘give me an ador.’

  ‘I’m already up.’

  ‘Come on’–she peeled back the blanket–‘please.’

  ‘All right,’ Rehana sighed. She sank into the mattress, which smelled of sleep and talcum powder.

  ‘It’s a big day,’ Maya said.

  ‘I know.’

  Maya ran her fingers across Rehana’s forehead. ‘You feeling OK?’

  ‘Yes. Your doctor fixed me up!’ She searched Maya’s face for a clue. In the two months they had been in Calcutta, she hadn’t given anything away.

  ‘Ammoo–I want to tell you something,’ Maya said seriously. ‘The year we were in Lahore–we never talk about it.’

  Immediately Rehana’s eyes began to water.

  ‘I want you to know–it was all right.’

  ‘How could it be all right?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘You didn’t miss—’

  ‘Of course we missed you. We missed everything. But we were children. And it was only a year.’

  ‘It was a lifetime to me.’

  ‘You should forgive yourself, Ammoo.’

  ‘I thought–I keep thinking–it must have been very bad.’

  Maya shook her head. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’

  ‘Was it very good?’ This was the other thing she worried about.

  ‘No–of course not.’

  ‘What’s the worst thing?’

  ‘Parveen Chachi made me wear frilly dresses–I looked like a cake every time we went anywhere.’

  ‘No, seriously. Tell me the worst thing. I want to know.’

  ‘I don’t know…’ Maya began slowly. ‘I think it was–oh, I know–I couldn’t remember your face. I kept asking Sohail, and he would say, Ammoo has the prettiest eyes, and I would nod, but I’d forgotten.’ Maya dropped her gaze and looked down at her fingernails. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I would have given anything–my life—’

  ‘I know, Ammoo. I always knew.’

  At eleven, after they had both
bathed and Rehana had washed her clothes and Maya had strung them up in front of the lemon tree and Rehana had picked the grit out of the lunch rice, they stepped across the street to Mrs Chowdhury’s house.

  Mrs Chowdhury and Silvi met them at the gate.

  ‘You’re back! I thought I saw some lights on last night–beti, didn’t I say, that must be Rehana, but she wouldn’t come back without telling me, so I wasn’t sure.’ She turned to her daughter, but Silvi had disappeared into the kitchen. ‘Rehana, my goodness, you’re so thin! What happened?’

  ‘I haven’t been well. I brought you these–a little mishti.’

  Mrs Chowdhury peeked into the box. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ she said, lifting the lid and examining the shondesh. ‘Now tell me, what’s happened to my poor friend? I hardly recognize you!’

  ‘Oh, nothing to worry about. Just a touch of jaundice.’

  ‘Jaundice! Ya’allah! How did you get that?’

  ‘We were at the refugee camps,’ Rehana began.

  ‘What, you went to the camps?’

  ‘Mrs Sengupta is there,’ Maya interjected.

  ‘Ki bolo! What are you saying? Mrs Sengupta? Our Supriya?’

  ‘Yes, the very one.’

  ‘And?’ Mrs Chowdhury’s hips were at the edge of her armchair.

  Rehana shook her head. ‘Poor girl. She didn’t even recognize me at first, and even after weeks together she said nothing.’ She wouldn’t tell Mrs Chowdhury about the note, the bamboo pipe.

  ‘What happened to her mia?’

  ‘We don’t know. Something terrible.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘I tried to bring her back with me, but she refused. And anyway I wasn’t sure how things would be for her here.’

  ‘Aharey,’ Mrs Chowdhury said, sighing deeply, ‘we have all lost so much already.’