The Courthouse
‘Dear Milord. No. Dear Your Lordship. Dear Judge-Saab. Dear Sir. My son Sohail is seven years old. He was born on July 8, 1952. I thought he would be a girl because I never felt tired, not once. Even though my husband told me to rest, I was always running around; I even planted hydrangeas that year. The day he came I sent for the midwife and she told me to squat and push and he didn’t make a sound, just looked up and told me he was going to be my Lucky Boy. He looks just like me, though I fear he has inherited his father’s unruly eyebrows; someday he will have to keep a special comb in his pocket. I tried to give him books for children, like Five Go to Smuggler’s Top and Mystery of the Flying Express, but he climbed into my steel almirah and found Wuthering Heights, the copy I rescued the day my father had to sell his first editions to the debt collector. My daughter, Maya, is dark and thin, like her father, and already she has caused me tears because of her steely will. But she sings, Your Lordship, and not childish rhymes, she has already started on the ghazals. Milord, Your Judgeship, the children are still in a state of shock at the untimely demise of their father. They need me, and their home, to ease the burden on their little hearts. Please, take pity. Take pity. Take pity.’
As she rehearsed her speech, Rehana felt the thickness of her tongue and thought, the poets are wrong, the taste of defeat is not bitter but salt. She leaned on the gate, here in front of the house, despite the sun blazing powerfully above her, unchecked, a punishment. She closed her eyes against it, against the moment, and was exactly this way, still and salty and hot, hearing nothing, not the chime of the ice-cream man, or the lazy passing of stray rickshaws, or the cries of the vegetable and fish hawkers, when Mrs Chowdhury came out of her gate at No. 12 with a packet of glucose biscuits and a glass of water. She made a wide-hipped beeline for Rehana.
‘Where have you left the children?’ Rehana asked, shielding her eyes with a hand.
‘They’re playing with Silvi. You should eat something.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘So thin,’ she heard Mrs Chowdhury mutter, and she, too, expelled a tired breath at hearing the familiar phrase. Yes, she was thin. As thin as any woman could be without disappearing, she had overheard once on a visit to the gin-rummy ladies, snapping their card wrists at the Dhaka Gymkhana Club. Why should anyone be surprised? Still, she couldn’t help feeling self-conscious, a little ashamed at the way people looked at her, as though they were afraid of contracting her misfortune. Her hair had grown long, and she had started wearing it loose, like a cape, covering the pointed shoulders, the jutting-out clavicles. Her eyes she could not hide; they dominated her face, great pools of black, reflecting nothing, only giving away what was within: a swell of held-in sorrow.
‘Why don’t you drink some water at least?’
Rehana swallowed. ‘I can’t break my fast in the middle of the day.’
‘You should let me come to the courthouse with you.’
‘It’s nothing. The lawyer says judges don’t just give children away.’
But in the slight pause before she said it, and in the way she held her arms so stiffly before her, and how she had pinned her sari so tightly that it had pressed flat against her forehead, and how she didn’t complain of the heat or even wipe the sweat from above her lip, Rehana revealed her uncertainty; it was entirely possible the judge would force her to give up the children. She was a widow. She had no money. And here were her husband’s elder brother and his pretty, film-star wife, generously offering to take them in.
Mrs Chowdhury sighed and turned back across the road. As she ambled away Rehana nervously dipped into her purse and touched the photograph that lay within. She told herself she would not take it out again; it was already worn with her looking. Sohail was in her arms, six months old, a fat, serious child. Looking straight into the camera, Rehana radiated an unchecked happiness. It was her husband’s eye behind the lens, her son’s weight against her chest, and joy, it seemed, was plentiful and cheap. She had not even given Sohail a black mark on the forehead to ward off the evil eye.
Before it turned the corner, Rehana heard the shiny newness of Faiz’s car approaching; she heard the hiss of the radiator grille, the throb of the engine. If she concentrated, she could even hear the pleasure Faiz took in sitting at the back with his wife while their driver navigated the dusty, winding streets.
The car stopped in front of the gate. Faiz waited while the driver hurried out and opened the door for him. Then he emerged, slow-motion, first with his polished shoe, then with the soft drape of his suit, to smile tightly and greet her.
‘Rehana.’
‘Brother,’ she replied, moving towards the front seat.
‘Sit at the back,’ he insisted, trying to be kind, ‘with your bhabi’. And he opened the door. As she lifted her sari to step into the car, Rehana noticed she had forgotten to change out of her rubber house-slippers. She thought about asking them to wait while she went back, but decided against it; it was getting late; they would roll their eyes impatiently and consider it another symptom of her misfortune.
It was a different world inside, close and airless and full of the collective scent of Faiz and Parveen. Rehana felt a quiet longing as she breathed in the heaviness of Parveen’s perfume, the rounded, buttery warmth of Faiz’s pomade. She imagined herself gripping the back of the seat, her fingers pressing into the cream leather and releasing its fragrance, new and factory-bright, and saying, please, please don’t take my children. I beg you. I beg you, for the sake of my dead husband — your brother, Faiz — to let me keep them. With their mother. But instead she leaned awkwardly against the seat and tried to smile at Parveen.
Sitting beside her, Rehana felt brittle and small.
As Faiz’s wife, Parveen was comfortable in shape and position. A sharp face — chiselled, people had called it in her actress days — had softened and settled. She was still pale, still had that narrow nose, the bow-and-arrow lips, only now she had the self-possession of a rich man’s wife, her earlier fame a mere side note. Faiz had forbidden any more films, and Parveen happily agreed, proud of her husband’s jealousy. But they had no children, and when Parveen wasn’t looking, Rehana saw a kind of greed etched on her prettiness.
‘How are you today, Rehana? Feeling better?’ Parveen asked.
Rehana wondered what answer she might give. They assumed it was a matter of resolve, like recovering from an illness. She started to reply, but changed her mind and said nothing. Fixing her gaze on the road as they drove past her neighbours’ houses, the shutters closed to the force of the afternoon sun.
‘This heat!’ Parveen said. ‘Only March and such heat!’ She took out a red-and-blue polka-dot fan from her handbag and began passing it back and forth across her face in quick, restless movements.
Dhaka, the almost-city, shook beneath the wheels of the car. Made out of a colonial outpost, it was now called upon to perform the duties of a capital; it laboured under the weight of such expectation, and this gave the city its air of accident, the empty expanses of hastily covered delta swimming beneath the asphalt of new roads; large plots of land beside the signs of decay; newness and rot jostling for space.
As they left Dhanmondi Rehana noticed a hush on the streets, as though everyone had decided at once to stay indoors, or if they had to venture out, to do so sparsely, in ones and twos. Even the air seemed not to move, the giant banyan trees silent on the side of the road.
‘What’s happened?’ Rehana heard herself say.
‘Martial law, sister! Don’t you know?’
Yes, of course she knew; she just hadn’t cared. So this was what it looked like: a quiet day, people’s sorrows hidden inside them like relics.
‘Putting order to the mess we have made of ourselves.’
Parveen looked out of the window and quickened the pace of her fanning.
‘I don’t care what anyone says,’ Faiz continued. ‘Authority is what we need.’
Rehana had stopped listening; they were driving past Ramna racecourse. She couldn’t see inside, but in the distance, where she knew there was a field, a pair of kites chased one another, floating and dipping through the air. Perhaps there was a breeze, she thought, and wished she could open the window.
‘…I don’t think Iqbal would have disagreed,’ Faiz said finally. But Faiz had got his brother wrong. Unlike his friends at the club, Iqbal wasn’t interested in politics. He didn’t get sweaty and energetic over the threat of a divided Pakistan, or where all the jute money was being spent. He was absorbed with more variable matters: the growth of the children (measured along the garden wall), the protection of his wife (against illness, the sun, the gazes of men), the prevention of rainy days. The sidestepping of consequence.
They turned into the university compound and were met with loud banners flapping from the dormitory windows. DEATH TO THE DICTATOR! they said. DEMOCRACY: PEOPLE’s RIGHT and AYUB KHAN MUST GO! As they passed the art college they saw a crude painting of a naked peasant whose back was bent before a field of paddy; men in army uniforms pointed guns at him; one of them had a whip; he cut crudely into the flesh. An enormous red sun dominated the background.
Faiz made a strange sound between a sneeze and a laugh, as though waiting for some provocation. ‘Dogs,’ he said with a grunt.
Rehana took out her photograph and stared hard at it, willing her tears to remain balanced in the crease of her eyelids, not spilling down her cheeks, not tracing the line of her nose, not falling on to her shoulder and blooming darkly on her white sari. Parveen said only one more thing during the ride: ‘It’s for your own good.’