A Golden Age Read Free Page B

relish, she kept asking, again and again, why Rehana hadn’t gone to live in Karachi when her husband had died. ‘Everyone is there,’ she’d said. ‘Your whole family.’
When they parted at the airport Rehana had felt empty; she wanted to long for Marzia to stay, to cry and beg to be taken with her, but in the end she was just relieved to see her go. Marzia had behaved as though Rehana had betrayed them all; she had said things like, ‘Your Urdu is not as good as it used to be; must be all that Bengali you’re speaking.’ She had pronounced it Bungali . And when she had referred to the servants at her house, she had said, ‘Yes, we’re very lucky, we have two Bungalis ; Rokeya only has one and it’s never enough, you know, the houses out there are so big.’
     
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Still, there wasn’t a day that went by that Rehana didn’t think of them, out there in the sprawling, parched western wing of their country. She held them to her by a loose bit of feeling, not fully connected, not entirely severed. She wrote them letters. Dear sisters , she would begin. She never finished one; she never sent one. She kept the letters in a biscuit tin under her bed, beside the winter blankets and the dried rice balls.
The rickshaws crossed Road 5 and made their way through Mirpur Road, blue-black and newly paved. The shops nudging the road were beginning to open, their shutters rattling up, the shopkeepers clearing their noses in the outside gutters.
     
A sign above the graveyard said women no admittance. Beside it, the caretaker leaned his elbow on a new length of wooden fencing painted a dull yellow and already smattered with flecks of mud. He gave Rehana a salaam and said, ‘Hot day.’ She nodded and gave him five annas. They wove through the grave- stones. As she passed them, Rehana recognized old friends and noted a few new arrivals.
There was a man who had been visiting his wife every day for forty-three years. She had died, it was rumoured, in childbirth. The man was very old now, but he made the unsteady walk to his wife’s grave, laid down a small square of pati and sat facing her for hours at a time. So Rehana had always considered herself the second-most devoted mourner at the graveyard. She had never met the man, but once, after he’d left, she had approached his wife’s grave. begum hakim ullah hossain, the headstone read, wife and mother.
Over the years Rehana had made sure Iqbal’s was one of the best-tended squares in the graveyard. She began by doing what everyone else did: laying roses on his gravestone. But every time she came back to find the sight of the rotten flowers, she felt she had somehow betrayed him. She didn’t want to see dead things when she came to visit. So she planted a few seeds around the edge of the plot, and a few weeks later the tiny white jasmine flowers appeared, casting themselves resolutely upwards, as
     
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though pointing the way. Rehana came back regularly with her trowel and her watering can, trimming and perfecting the little white border.
Now she stood at the foot of Iqbal’s grave, facing the head- stone that said, in black letters, muhammad iqbal haque. Sohail was on her left, Maya on her right. They cupped their hands and held them up.
This was the part when her throat always tightened.
My dear Husband, she began. Here are your two grown chil- dren. Mahshallah, it is the tenth year of their return.
Your son is now nineteen.Your daughter is seventeen. They are healthy and obedient.
Last time I was here I told you about the elections. Right now we are waiting for Mujib to be declared Prime Minister. There have been many delays. Your children are waiting for the gov- ernment to change. Inshallah, once that happens they will be able to return to their studies.
She paused, took a deep breath. Steadied herself.
There was so much more she could say. I still miss you every day. Why did you leave me all alone. Why.
But she didn’t. If he was listening he would know it all anyway.