The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam Read Free Book Online Page A

ordinary cab, one of those trucks that are used to carry bricks or crates of fruit. Tajuddin stood on one side, Sheikh Moni on the other. The cab was strewn with flowers. As it went by, Mujib was looking the other way, and she could see only the back of him, his coat, his white kurta. The convoy must have been moving rather slowly, but to Maya it sailed past, and she fell into its wake, swimming into the crowd. She locked arms with Saima and they inched ahead. By now they could see the backs of all those men who had finally returned from war, the people who would make their victory into a country, who would write the constitution and give them passports and anthems.
    Maya felt someone tugging at her sari; she tried to speed up and pressed into the person in front. Saima’s arm slipped out of hers as she pushed ahead. Then there was a tap on her shoulder. She turned around, irritated, and saw a man reaching through the crowd, a laugh in his eyes. She stopped. He stopped. They stood still and looked at each other, people flowing around and between them, like stones in a river. She reached for his hand, the one nearest to her, but he offered her the other, and it turned into a handshake. ‘Hello, Joy,’ she said stupidly.
    ‘Maya-bee.’ Stings like a bee, he used to say. It was impossible to stay in this position, against the tide, so she turned around and continued to walk. She felt him following. Occasionally they were jostled, and she could feel him crashing lightly into her. She began to hum a revolutionary song, and she heard him pick up the tune. Moved, she reached again for his hand.
    Then she found it, the gap where his finger should have been. Hand swaddled by a thick bandage. Slowly, she moved the tip of her finger over what was now the tip of his finger, the bandage stretched tight and smooth. She turned around again, releasing his hand, and stared into his face. ‘Where is your finger?’ she asked.
    ‘Army took it.’
    She reached for it again, the crowd impatient at her back, and brought the interrupted finger to her lips. ‘Goodbye, finger,’ she said.
    ‘Goodbye, Maya,’ Joy replied, ‘I’m going away.’
    ‘Misunderstanding,’ she said, We’ll have to give your finger a proper burial.’
    ‘I’m going to America.’
    Impossible. She jerked herself away. ‘Now, you’re going now?’
    ‘Day-after-tomorrow.’
    It came back to her, the crudeness of his character. How he had bullied and cursed his way through the war. Looted a cinema hall for the projector, still rotting in her mother’s garden shed. She clung to this evidence of his criminality. ‘Goodbye, then,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’ And she reached out to shake his hand,’ the uncut one, as if to say, go on, you broken thing, I have no need of you.
    Now, Maya counted Joy’s losses and stacked them up against her own. He had lost his brother in the fighting, and then, after being captured by the army, he had come home to find his father gone. She was comforted by the nearness of this man, this man who had survived far worse than she.
    *
    There was a pile of boxes in the tin-topped garden shed, sheeted with dust and cobwebs. Rifling through it, Maya found her school report from Class VI. Mediocre marks, and a note from the teacher complaining that she talked too much and frequently interrupted the lesson.
    A short shadow in the open doorway: Zaid.
    ‘Well, there you are. I called for you yesterday – where were you?’
    ‘At school.’
    ‘Really, you went to school? What did they teach you?’
    ‘French.’
    ‘French? What a very nice school. Are you sure it wasn’t one of the women upstairs?’
    ‘No,’ he shook his head; ‘it was a proper school.’
    ‘And you wore pant-shirt?’
    He was holding something behind his back, and he produced it now, a package wrapped in brown paper. ‘For you,’ he said.
    Maya tore it open. It was a brand-new Ludo board, with coloured pieces and a pair of dice. ‘For me?’ she asked.