The Good Muslim Read Free Page B

eyes. She heard people shuffle around her. Her head kept slipping sideways and when she opened her eyes the room was empty.
    She found Ammoo in the kitchen.
    ‘Ma?’
    ‘Oh, you’re up. I didn’t want to wake you.’
    Her lids were heavy. She took a few steps, faltered. Ammoo led her to the sofa. She wanted to talk to Ammoo, tell her about Nazia and the mud they threw at her window. And the lashes. She wanted to tell her about the lashes. But it was one thing for Ammoo to smile at her, to greet her tenderly, and another for the years to fall behind them. She collapsed on the sofa, struggling to keep her eyes open. ‘I have to tell you something.’
    ‘How did you come?’
    ‘The train, the ferry, the train.’
    ‘You must be tired. Lie down for a bit.’
    She felt herself nodding off again. ‘I brought you a tree.’
    ‘I’ll wake you up; it’s only three now.’
    She pulled her eyes open. There was a brown box against the wall. She hadn’t seen it before – the upstairs women had covered it with a tablecloth. ‘When did you get that?’ she asked, stumbling to her feet and examining it.
    Ammoo’s face brightened. ‘A little gift to myself.’
    ‘Seriously?’
    ‘I saved and saved. Took me two years of leftover rent. There’s a German man living in the big house now, always pays the rent on time. You haven’t seen Magnum, P.I. ?’
    ‘There’s no television in Rajshahi.’
    Ammoo’s eyes widened in mock horror. ‘That’s very sad.’
    They laughed. Ammoo sounded so cheerful she almost erased the loneliness of it, waiting with a plate on her lap for the BTV news at eight.
    Maya lay her head on the cool pillow. Just for a moment, she thought, then I’ll give Ammoo the mango tree and explain everything. She slept. Through the shutters she glimpsed the tiger stripes of sunset, and later Ammoo came in to cover her with a blanket. She heard the muezzin marking the end of the day. A whisper in her ear: did she want something to eat? She curled her hand around her mother’s knee. No. Later, a cat slipped into the room and lay across her feet. She felt the quick heartbeat, the warmth radiating out of the little body.
    She dreamed of Rajshahi.
    In her dream it is the pineapple field that marks the end of everything. There is one day when she is as fierce and impenetrable as winter fog, walking around the village with the stetho wrapped proudly around her neck. No chains of gold; she is a doctor. Early that morning she saved a mother and a pair of twin boys, performing the emergency C-section herself, the cutting and stitching in perfect rhythm, her hands sinking deep into the shared womb. And, although she reminded the family they should have loved the babies just as well had they been girls, she enjoyed the tight embraces of the women, the relief; she munched on the triangle of wrapped betel leaf they offered her. Now she is striding through the village and on to the dirt path that leads to the road that leads into town. Her arms are swinging, January wind pinching at her face, and she is passing the pond, where she waves to the boy who lost a brother to snakebite last year (too late, that day), and she ducks under a pair of mango trees and decides to take a shortcut through the pineapple patch. A few steps in, and the sun is high, the field looks wider now than she had thought, but she is not the sort of person to turn around, so she lifts her sari above her ankles and treads delicately, avoiding the sharp thorns of the pineapple plants. She is tempted to peel back the leaves and check for a ripe joldugi, but she knows it is not the season. Still, the air is sweet and bee-heavy, and when she has reached the end of the field she lowers the hem of her sari and continues, humming a nursery rhyme she was taught by little Maya the night before. And then she sees the meeting. A dozen men in a circle. Masud stands in the middle. ‘It’s the doctor,’ he says; ‘she’s the cause of all the trouble.’
    Maya