A Golden Age Read Free

doesn’t matter if you are big boy or small. Accident doesn’t discriminate.’
Rehana rolled down the window. ‘Sohail, do as your abboo says.’
In the end Sohail piled sullenly into the car, with Iqbal fol- lowing. It was tight, with all four of them in the back. Maya’s
     
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dress swelled out in front of her like a small blue high-tide. Iqbal’s white sharkskin suit was getting crumpled. Really, Rehana thought, he should have just let the poor boy sit in front with the driver. It was so hot. She rolled down the window defi- antly and motioned for Sohail to do the same on his side. Maya’s ribbons lapped gently in the breeze.
By the time they had reached Tejgaon, Iqbal had begun to worry about the journey again. If they were stuck on the train, how would anyone know? What if Kamal was late in arriving at the station? He mentally calculated the odds of this happening. As Kamal drove them up to the Tejgaon Station, he had an idea.
‘Rehana, you go with the children. I have decided to stay.’ ‘What’s that?’
‘I will stay in the car with Kamal. We’ll drive beside the train. That way, if anything happens, you can just leave the train and ride in the car.’ Ingenious!
So that is what they did. She remembered it clearly: the man in the car, his family on the train, the train carriage on the new rail line and the new foreign car on the adjacent road, the taste of kabab rolls and lemonade lingering lazily on their tongues, and her husband, beaming to himself, satisfied at last that no harm would come to his family, because he, Iqbal, had made absolutely sure.
     
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March 1971 ‌
     

     
Shona with her back to the sun
     

     
    E
very year, Rehana held a party at Road 5 to mark the day she had returned to Dhaka with the children. She saved her meat rations and made biryani. She rented chairs and called the jilapi- wallah to fry the hot, looping sweets in the garden. There was a red-and-yellow tent in case of rain, lemonade in case of heat, cucumber salad, spicy yoghurt. The guests were always the same: her neighbour Mrs Chowdhury and her daughter Silvi; her tenants, the Senguptas, and their son, Mithun; and Mrs Rahman
and Mrs Akram, better known as the gin-rummy ladies.
So, on the first morning of March, as on the first morning of every March for a decade, Rehana rose before dawn and slipped into the garden. She shivered a little and rubbed her elbows as she made her way across the lawn. Winter still lingered on the leaves and in the wisps of fog that rolled over the delta and hung low over the bungalow.
She dipped her fingers into the rosebush, heavy with dew, and plucked a flower. She held it in her hand as she wandered through
     
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the rest of the garden, ducking between the wall-hugging jasmine and the hibiscus, crossing the tiny vegetable patch that was giving them the last of the season’s cauliflower, zigzagging past the mango tree, the lemon tree, the shouting-green banana tree.
She looked up at the building that would slowly, over the course of the day, cast a long shadow over her little bungalow. Shona . She could still hear Mrs Chowdhury telling her to build the new house at the back of her property. ‘Such a big plot,’ she’d said, peering out of the window; ‘you can’t even see the bound- ary it’s so far away. You don’t need all that space.’
‘Should I sell it?’
Mrs Chowdhury snapped her tongue. ‘Na, don’t sell it.’ ‘Then what?’
‘Build another house.’
‘What would I do with another house?’ ‘Rent, my dear. Rent it out.’
Now there were two gates, two driveways, two houses. The new driveway was a narrow passage that opened into the back of Rehana’s plot. On the plot stood the house she had built to save her children. It towered above the bungalow, its two whitewashed storeys overlooking the smaller house. Like the bungalow, it had been built with its back to the sun. The house was nearly ten years old now, and a little faded. Ten monsoons had softened its