by Tahmima Anam
‘You persuaded them to let him go?’
‘I had to ask your Faiz Chacha.’
‘How did you do it?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’ She realized she was telling the truth; that day was a blur, as though it had happened to someone else and she had just borrowed the memory.
‘You’re braver than you thought.’
‘Or perhaps I’m just foolish.’ Rehana rifled through her bag. She pulled out the blanket and held it to her face, breathing in the scent of the sun on her clothes line.
‘You look different,’ Maya said, ‘something…I don’t know.’
Rehana wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and wedged herself between the wall and her daughter. She looked up at the dimpled ceiling. Damp patches shaped like clouds dotted the whitewash. ‘I was thinking the same about you.’
Maya flipped on to her back. ‘I needed to leave, Ammoo, I hope you can understand that. I felt so bad leaving you all alone…’
She hadn’t been all alone. She’d watched Mughal-e-Azam and fallen in love with a stranger and uttered words she’d kept hidden for more than a decade.
Maya was still speaking: ‘…and it’s been so busy here, I hardly have time to think.’ With a start she sat up and parted her hair in the middle, grabbing the left side and twisting it into a braid. The mattress pitched and wobbled. Rehana swallowed a groan. She had forgotten how restless the girl could be.
‘Was he–Sabeer–what did they do to him?’
Rehana didn’t move her eyes from the ceiling. She considered which version of the truth Maya would not immediately reject.
‘We’ve been getting reports about the prisoners,’ Maya said. ‘I already know.’
‘Then I don’t need to tell you.’
‘I still want to know.’ She was working on the second braid now and climbing into her younger, schoolgirl face.
‘He was tortured.’
‘How? What did they do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Of course you know.’
‘I don’t really want—’
‘For God’s sake, Ammoo, I’m not a child!’
Rehana sighed, resigned. ‘All right.’ Keep your eyes on the clouds, she told herself. ‘They beat him, broke his ribs.
‘They made him stare at the sun for hours, days.
‘They burned cigarette holes on his back.
‘They hung him upside down.
‘They made him drink salt water until his lips cracked.
‘And they tore out his fingernails.’ The tears travelled across her cheeks and pooled in her ears. She closed her eyes and saw the blood pulsing through her eyelids. When she opened them, Maya was at the window, folding and unfolding the torn gamcha. Then she turned around and said in a hospital voice, ‘He’s lucky you came for him. They would have made him dig his own grave and buried him in it.’
Rehana turned and pressed her forehead to the wall. It was rough and spiked with dust.
‘Ma, you were so brave,’ Maya said, collapsing heavily on to the cot. ‘So brave.’ She stroked Rehana’s back. ‘Let’s sleep, now, OK?’ She turned and curled herself around her mother. Rehana felt her daughter’s restless warmth at her back. ‘Tomorrow we’ll visit the camp.’
She lay awake and thought about the Major, his blue-threaded arm, the weight of his breath.
It wasn’t like the love for children.
It wasn’t like the love of home.
Or the accidental love of her husband.
It was a swallowing, hungry love. Already she wanted more. Not one day had passed and she wanted more. There was pain in it, but not a pain she knew. Not the pain of losing fathermotherhusband. Not the grinding pain of waving goodbye from a foggy airport window.
‘Ammoo, utho, wake up!’ A lock of hair tickled Rehana’s cheek. She opened a clammy eye to find her daughter bent over the cot, a steaming mug of tea in one hand, a toothbrush in the other. She tried to remember where she was. ‘We have to hurry,’ Maya said, handing the toothbrush to Rehana and swallowing a gulp of tea. Yesterday’s softness was gone, replaced by a charmless efficiency.
‘What time is it?’ Rehana turned on to her back, wincing at the stiffness in her neck. ‘It’s still dark.’
‘Five thirty. We have to get ready and meet Sultana.’ She waved the mug in the direction of the door. ‘She’s waiting downstairs.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I told you, today is my day at the camp.’
Rehana’s stomach was hot and empty. ‘What about breakfast?’
‘There’s a canteen–the food’s not bad–just hurry up and we might have time for a little aloo paratha before we go.’
‘All right,’ Rehana said, heaving herself out of the bowl of the mattress, ‘I’ll just change and get ready. Go downstairs, I’m just coming.’
Half an hour later, after Rehana had dressed, brushed her teeth in a downstairs toilet that smelled of sweat and wolfed down a few potatoes rolled in a greasy paratha, she found herself wedged between Sultana and Maya in the front of a shabby truck. Sultana was behind the wheel, wearing the same grey trousers and an open-necked white kurta. She’s driving a truck, Rehana mouthed to Maya, who carried a box labelled oral rehydration therapy on her lap. Maya turned to Rehana and smiled inscrutably. ‘It’s a war, Ammoo,’ she whispered; ‘we can do whatever we want.’
They stopped in front of a battered coffee house. Mukul, smelling like eggs and toothpaste, stuck his head through the open window and shouted, ‘Nomoshkar! Good morning, Auntie.’ Then he jumped into the back of the trunk and settled among the medical boxes and tins of dried milk.
An hour later the sky was not even yellow and the heavy night-time dew still clung to the trees and the windscreen. Maya and Sultana picked up a song. Sultana said something about a Pakistani soldier and a jackfruit that made Maya hold her stomach and laugh. Rehana willed the journey to pass quickly.
‘Halfway!’ Maya called out cheerfully. And then it started to rain. Criss-crossing sheets made baby rattles on the windscreen. The road stretched ahead, vague and muddy.
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.
Ins
ide 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.
Rehana reached out a hand to touch the woman’s arm, but she shifted slightly and her fingers grazed the sari instead. She ran to catch up with Maya.
They went deeper into the camp. It was getting unbearably hot and the stench was even worse there; the stacks of cement pipes had given way to shacks and makeshift shelters built out of plastic and scraps of wood. The lucky ones had a few pieces of tin sheeting to keep off the rain. Rehana pulled her sari around her ankles, and with the other hand she tried to swat away a family of flies that were following her. Everywhere she looked she saw the haunted faces of the refugees. They held out their hands, and she thought they might grab her, drag her into the muck. She had an image of them forcing her into one of their pipes, making her weave those jute strings all day. You’re one of us, they would say, you’re one of us. She imagined Maya leaving her there, going back in the truck with Sultana and Mukul, laughing all the way to Theatre Road.
‘Maya,’ Rehana said finally, ‘I can’t go on.’
‘It’s just a bit further,’ Maya said, pointing ahead. ‘There’s someone I want to see on that side.’
‘Really,’ Rehana said, feeling her stomach twist, ‘you go ahead, I’ll stay here and wait for you.’
‘Where will you wait?’
Rehana glanced around. There was no place to sit. ‘I’ll go back to the tent.’
‘Will you be able to find it?’
‘Yes–just go ahead.’ Rehana couldn’t wait to get rid of her; she could stop pretending to be interested and run back to the tent. She thought about the truck. Maybe she could go back to the truck with a cold glass of water and listen to the radio. Or sit beside those volunteers and their medicine boxes. Anything, anything but this stink.
She picked her way to the tent. Slipping quietly through the flaps, she found herself in the hospital ward. All the beds were pushed up against each other, so that it looked like an unbroken stretch of bodies. She walked through the aisle, stepping over people. It was the women who made the breath catch in her throat. It was
the way they squatted next to the children, holding up empty breasts to their mouths, their hair matted with the road.
‘Mrs Haque?’ A man approached: it was the doctor, coming towards her with a quizzical wave. A pair of white rubber gloves were stretched across his hands. Rehana saw dark spots on the fingertips, and, as he drew nearer, a smattering of red above the pocket of his white coat. ‘Chachi? What are you doing here?’
She wanted to hug him. ‘I–I came to look around a little.’
‘Well, this is it. We have a small operating theatre at the back, and a dispensary. Shall I take you around?’
‘No–it’s all right. I just–I wanted to see.’
‘There are so many,’ Dr Rao said, fixing his gaze on her. ‘From all over the country. They’ve left everything, walked for days, only to arrive at this place.’
Rehana couldn’t keep her eyes from the red smudges on his gloves.
‘There’s a register–I can show it to you.’
They turned a corner and entered another room. There were more crowds, echoes of wailing children. A grating mechanical hum shrouded all of the other sounds.
‘What is that noise?’
‘Generator,’ the doctor replied. ‘We get power for the OT, and a few hours of light in the evening.’
‘Do you stay here?’
‘Yes,’ he sighed, smiling. ‘There’s another small tent in a far corner of the field.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Kashmir.’
‘You came to Calcutta to study?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I came for this.’
‘Ammoo,’ Maya said that night, ‘Dr Rao suggested that you might want to help at the camp.’
I knew. I knew she wanted to leave me there. ‘Me? What can I do?’
‘They really need help. You could do what you did at Shona–just talk to the refugees.’
Rehana did not want to talk to the refugees. Why was it always her? Rescue this one, save that one. ‘If I’m in the way I should just go back to Dhaka.’
‘Ammoo,’ Maya said, ‘you know you can’t do that.’
‘I should never have come.’
‘It’s very serious, they could have arrested you.’
The thought of spending months there, in the shed, or worse, at the camp, was suddenly unbearable. ‘So what? I deserve to be arrested.’
