by Tahmima Anam
Dolly kneeled in front of the safe and pulled out another box. She popped the button and opened it, and inside was a wide gold collar. I was reminded of a National Geographic spread on an African tribe whose women wore thick brass cords to stretch their necks. ‘This story is racist,’ my mother had commented, taking the magazine from me. ‘Don’t read it.’ I shook the memory from my mind and focused on Dolly, attempting to read her expression. I returned the ruby necklace to its box and dabbed at the gold collar. ‘This is nice. It looks old.’
‘It belonged to my mother-in-law.’
‘Ammoo said you set everything up. She called it a mercy.’
Dolly turned back to the safe, so I couldn’t see her face when she said, ‘By then she was desperate. Bulbul and I couldn’t stand to watch her suffering any more.’
I pictured my mother, and found it was easy to imagine her younger, to cast grief upon her features. ‘Can you tell me where it was – where I was from?’
‘Do you want to wear the gold?’
‘I’m afraid it might be a bit formal,’ I said, retracting my hand. Looking closer, I saw how gaudy the piece was, how crudely the jewels had been placed in their setting.
‘You always go simple,’ Dolly said. ‘Weddings are for dressing up.’
‘It’s just – I don’t know the couple very well and we’re just going to drop in for an hour.’ I hated these things, but Rashid said he had promised the groom’s father, someone he did business with.
‘I don’t remember anything,’ Dolly said, closing the box and returning it to the safe.
‘Was it an orphanage?’
‘No, it was a girl. A girl in need.’
‘I’ll wear the ruby,’ I said.
She passed the box to me and then I watched as she put everything back in its place, and I wondered if any of the servants knew about the safe, if they had pressed their hands against the door and tried to guess the combination. ‘You don’t remember anything else?’
‘No,’ she murmured.
I didn’t believe her. ‘There’s no documentation? Birth certificate, adoption papers?’
‘There was. But it was all lost when we renovated the house.’
She sighed, as if she had told me this story a thousand times. ‘Your parents were upset. We did everything we could to make it easier. Bulbul even greased some palms at the registry and put Joy and Maya down as the mother and father.’ She moved to her dressing table, which was crammed with perfume bottles and small cylinders of lipstick, and began to unravel her hair. I was dismissed. As I turned to go, more in the dark than ever, she said, ‘I can’t tell you what to do. But you should stop eating that filth.’
Rashid and I attended the wedding the next evening. I wore the rubies around my neck and tried to hold onto the feeling I had experienced at Sally’s confession. I made light conversation with the other wives and ate biryani with a fork and wondered what, after all, was holding the universe together. Afterwards I fell asleep in the car on the way home and stumbled into bed. In the morning Rashid woke early and I started telling him what his mother had said. The air was heavy with his aftershave. ‘No one will talk to me,’ I complained. He opened his side of the closet and stood there for a moment, sliding a tie from one of the articulated hangers.
‘Did you hear what I said? I’m not getting anywhere.’
‘Maybe they don’t know anything,’ he said. He wrapped the tie around his neck.
‘How can they not know? A baby, a whole live person, appeared out of nowhere. I wasn’t immaculately conceived.’
‘Why don’t you drop it, Zee?’ he said, pulling the silk through its loop.
I peeled the comforter off the bed, ready for a fight, but I was at a disadvantage because he looked and smelled so much better than me, so I folded myself back into the blankets and banged my fist against the pillow. Rashid left with a curt goodbye, reminding me to call Nanu because she was having a check-up that afternoon and I should ask about her sugar level. How did he hold such a catalogue of mundane information in his head? No one loved Nanu more than me, but I was hardly going to keep track of her diabetes. I whispered a curse under my breath as the door slammed shut.
I called my parents – no reply on either phone. I sent them each an identical text message. I waited for what seemed like the entire day, but was probably a few hours. Finally, I went to their apartment and Bashonti opened the door. Ammoo was in the centre of a small tornado of people in the living room and I could smell something frying in the kitchen. I stood on the fringes of the group, catching Abboo’s eye a fraction of a moment before being noticed by a woman – one of my mother’s friends – who smothered me against her chubby shoulder. ‘It’s good you came,’ she said. ‘We all need to be together at a time like this.’ I nodded, pretending to know what she was talking about. Bashonti emerged from the kitchen and passed around a plate of samosas. I couldn’t tell if the moment was a solemn or a happy one, but I was hoping for solemn, because then no one would notice if I looked preoccupied or upset. It was always something I’d hated about people, the way they looked into your face and felt they had to make a comment about your appearance, like ‘You’ve lost weight’ or ‘Are you depressed?’ when I wished they would say ‘Tell me why the sperm whale carries oil on the front of its head’, which would have been a question I was equipped to answer. Not that the location of the spermaceti was an evolutionary puzzle anyone had thus far been able to solve, least of all me. But as a topic of conversation it was far superior to what I was usually offered.
‘How’s your gorgeous husband?’ my mother’s friend asked. So nobody had died, then.
‘He’s fine, thank you.’
I tried to detach myself, but she grabbed hold of my arm. ‘Newlyweds. So romantic. Better enjoy it before the babies come.’
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and it was Ammoo. ‘I’m going with Salma and the other lawyers – do you have a car, or do you want to go with your father?’
‘I’ll go with Abboo,’ I said. ‘What are we doing at the courthouse?’
She squeezed my hand. She had forgiven me, or perhaps forgotten altogether. ‘They’re opening it to the public today.’
I stuffed a few samosas into my mouth as the plate hovered near me, and then followed my father downstairs and into his car.
‘The road looks clear,’ Abboo said, looking ahead to assess the traffic.
‘I have no idea what’s going on.’
He peeled his eyes away from the road. ‘Don’t you read the newspaper? They’re announcing the Ghulam Azam verdict today.’
Of course. Only a person whose head was buried deep in the sand wouldn’t know that. I was reminded again of the difference between my parents’ household and Rashid’s – the conversation around the dinner table last night had been about the rising cost of labour and how so-and-so had to shut down their factory because the workers had gone on strike. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.’
‘A big day for your mother. Try to be supportive.’
‘I am supportive.’
‘She feels you don’t care about the trial.’
A car stopped abruptly in front of us, and Abboo jammed his hand on the horn. I knew my parents questioned whether I cared about the country as much as they did, and I had never really felt the need, or had the courage, to confess that I did not. I was proud that they had been in the war, proud to call my parents freedom fighters, but in reality I resented the space that it took up, the way all their conversations would eventually rotate back to reminiscing about the war, as if there was nothing but a bead curtain between this moment and that, so that all it needed was a brush against history to reveal the shiny betterness of the past. It was difficult to compete with, even more difficult to imagine that my life would ever amount to anything significant. They often said that the country lived in the shadow of that moment, that because the deaths had never been fully accounted for there was no way to move on, but what they never admitted was that it wasn’t ju
st the dead, or their families, who felt the dark cloud of those nine months following them wherever they went, but the rest of us, the children of the people who survived, all of us burdened with what we couldn’t do, our imaginations limited by the protean, whereas theirs were set free by having done the impossible.
We pushed through the crowd of reporters and cameramen who had gathered at the entrance to the courthouse. I had only seen the building from the outside – a classical façade made grand by its brilliant white colour – and now, up close, it was impressive, wide marble corridors with double doors leading to the individual courtrooms. As we followed the group up the stairs through the corridor on the upper floor, we found Ammoo. She caught my eye and waved, and I noticed that her features were somehow rearranged, made bigger by the event, and I wondered if this was the face she had worn throughout the war, the look of majesty that comes over a person when she is assured of her role at a crucial moment in history. She entered the courtroom and the doors shut behind her, and we stood and waited outside. Abboo reached over and took my hand. I couldn’t remember a single question I wanted to ask him; all the curiosity I had gathered up the evening before vanished in the dusky light of this afternoon and the cluttered murmur of the crowd. I saw a few familiar faces, friends of my parents, colleagues, people who I might have gone to school with. A chant rose up and gathered volume. ‘Death!’ I heard. And then: ‘Hang him!’
The door opened and we fell silent, but it was just someone leaving. He waved his hand to indicate his irrelevance, then shut the door behind him and ducked away. I saw a woman holding the hand of a small child, and remembered a story my parents liked to tell me about how they had taken me to Suhrawardy field to attend the mock trial of Ghulam Azam. Back then, twenty years ago, only a fake trial for this man could be held, with actors playing the prosecution and a stuffed effigy in place of the real villain. He had been found guilty, sentenced, and executed at that trial, but it had all just been play, not like now, when Azam and the other men like him were in fear of their lives, their pasts finally catching up with them. That’s why my mother defended this government, no matter what its other sins might be, because it was the first time, and the only time, that anyone had made Azam account for what he had done. The man was heavy with the dead, and now he was standing in front of a judge and being asked to explain the deaths of children, and he would have nothing to say. He was old now, over ninety. His reckoning had come late, but it had come, and I was here to witness it. I swelled with the weight of the moment, understanding what it was, possibly for the first time, to be my mother’s daughter.
The door opened again and the news spread in a ripple, passed on from one person to the next until someone announced, ‘Life imprisonment!’ Cheers clashed with shouts of disappointment. Everyone started talking at once and trying to push into the courtroom. Abboo’s hand was still gripping mine, and we were moved along until we were close to the doorway. I peered inside and saw a group of people surge towards the front of the room, raising their hands up to the bench to get the attention of the judge. People held their cell phones above their heads and took photographs. Finally the crowd became so thick that I couldn’t hold on to Abboo’s hand and we were separated.
After a few minutes there was a commotion as Ghulam Azam was led out of the courtroom. A ring of policemen surrounded him, but they could only move very slowly, and as they passed me I took a good look at him. He was in a wheelchair, his feet apart but his knees pushed together. His hands were cuffed in front of his body, a cap stiff and large on his tiny face. One of the policeman had placed an almost kindly hand on his shoulder as they processed slowly out of the courtroom. Ghulam Azam would be taken to prison that day, and a year later he would die, mourned by people all over the world who didn’t know, or didn’t care, about what he had done. My mother would repeatedly curse her computer screen as she read the stories of the crowds that showed up at his funeral, her triumph diminished every time he was referred to as ‘Professor’, every time he was written about as a religious leader rather than what he really was – a murderer. But that was later. On this day, the satisfaction was substantial, if not complete, a guilty verdict, a sentence, and he sitting birdlike in a wheelchair with only a policeman for company. As for me, catching those glimpses of the man, my own father solid and devoted somewhere in the room, I hung in the balance. My own discovery contracted and swelled like the chambers of a heart, and one moment I decided I didn’t need to press my matter forward, because, as Rashid had reminded me, I was loved and that should be enough. But in another, the desire to resolve my story, to call time on the silence that had surrounded me, was inescapable, and finally it was this urge that won, and as soon as the scales had tipped, I couldn’t wait another moment. Ghulam had trumped me, but now that he was finally defeated it was my turn. I jostled my way towards the exit, pushing against the tide of people, the only one going the other way, until I was spat out of the building, struggling for breath as I reached the gardens outside the courthouse.
I hailed a rickshaw, too impatient now to wait for Abboo, and pointed in the direction of Nanu’s house in Dhanmondi. As we crossed Mirpur Road I took out my phone and sent a text message to my parents. I have to know the truth, it said. Otherwise I am leaving home and never coming back. I couldn’t help sounding hysterical, suddenly all the years I had not known clambering on top of me. I peeled back the rickshaw’s sunshade, trapped in my own chest, unable to fill my lungs with enough air.
The front door was ajar and there were voices coming from inside. I entered and saw a man seated on the sofa with his back to me, a massive back, broad and padded, a white turban on his head. He turned to face me and then quickly turned away.
‘It’s only Zubaida,’ my grandmother said.
The man stood up and came towards me. Under the turban, the pair of thick-rimmed glasses, the beard that brushed his chest below, he had a beautiful face, dark, soft eyes and a kind mouth. ‘As-salaam alaikum,’ he announced. On his forehead was a black bruise like Ali’s, only wider and darker, shiny from years of prayer. ‘How wonderful it is to cast my eyes on you.’
‘Your uncle is visiting from America. He just arrived this morning.’ Nanu was smiling in that wistful way she did whenever she mentioned my uncle. I myself had no memory of this man. He had come to Dhaka only once, as far as I could remember. He had given me a Kit Kat and frightened me with a story about the heat of hellfire. My parents often talked about him. Before the war, Ammoo told me, Sohail was a charismatic young man who kept a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book in his front pocket. Their father had died many years before, and in their modest bungalow in Dhanmondi it was just him and Ammoo and Nanu, and something about being surrounded by women had made him delicate, almost fragile. Certainly not a fighter. So it came as a surprise to everyone when he crossed the border and joined the Mukti Bahini. Sohail, Ammoo says, did not distinguish himself as an assembler of crude explosives, or as a crack shot or a fearless running-into-the-line-of-fire type. He is rumoured to have baulked at crucial moments, like the igniting of a device or the running over of an army checkpoint. But what he lacked in skill, and courage, he made up for in conviction. When it came to believing what he was doing was right, Sohail was unbeatable.
But Ammoo doesn’t recall what he did in the war as much as what he became after the war was over. It was not fashionable then, as it is now, for young people to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, or to encourage their wives to cover their heads, or to pepper their sentences with appeals to God. But Sohail Mama adopted the cloak of religion just after the war and did not shed it for the decades that followed, not through the death of his son, or the shifting of the world order, or the isolation from his friends and his past that were demanded by this new, lean life. In his own way he was a man who pushed against the tide, breaking hearts along the way, mowing over his friendships and his family because he was convinced he was doing the right thing, no matter how high the price – the highest price being that he and A
mmoo rarely spoke, and whenever Ammoo mentioned his name or told me anything about him, she would always end with a sigh and say that it was as if her brother, like Abboo’s, had died in the war.
I sat down beside Sohail now and he offered me a plate of dates, which he said someone had brought to him from Mecca. The dates were stuffed with whole almonds. I put one in my mouth and when I bit down I tasted a cloying sweetness. We said very little, regarding one another openly. I consumed one date after another. Sohail occasionally peered over his glasses and exhaled deeply, pulling and smoothing his beard with one hand, then another.
I wondered about his sons, whether, if I happened upon them, I would find them at all familiar, or if they would be just like all the other bearded men at airports and shopping malls, their wives trailing a few feet behind them. ‘Nanu,’ I said, turning to my grandmother. ‘Rashid said you were getting your diabetes checked.’
‘Sweet boy,’ she said, smiling. ‘He sent me his car so I could go to the doctor.’
Bastard. ‘What did the doctor say?’
She waved her hand. ‘Nothing to worry about. I’m not going to stop eating my Toblerone.’
‘I came to ask you something.’
Somehow Sohail’s being there made me believe that it would all finally come out. In fact, I was unsure whether anyone would be capable of lying in his presence, and I wondered whether this was the secret to his success, the reason he was able to convert many dozens of Americans every week, not only at his mosque, but also as he went about his life, shopping at the supermarket, refilling at the gas station, picking up his wife from her Islamic exercise class on the other side of town.
