The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

Author:Tahmima Anam
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins US

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Ammoo grew weaker every day. The change was hardly perceptible, but occasionally Maya would notice something, the angle of her cheekbones, the sleek profile she had acquired. She tried to monitor other things – her eating, her bowel movements, the vomiting from chemotherapy. But Ammoo remained scrupulously private, refusing to talk openly about her disease, always preferring Sufia’s help to hers. She was so careful to obscure the details of the cancer that Maya began to wonder if she should be there at all.

But she couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Her time away had dissolved, like sugar in water, leaving no imprint. She rarely thought of Nazia and whether she might call again. The season of mangoes had come and gone in Rajshahi, and she might have spent a few moments remembering the currents of scent that blew into the village and made everyone’s mouth water, but she didn’t. She thought only of Ammoo, only of banishing the premonition. She was a regular visitor upstairs, sitting on the fringes of their strange world, transfixed by its rituals, the air of calm and certainty that surrounded them. She once asked Rokeya what she thought of President Zia’s death, and Rokeya looked at her blankly as though unaware of which Zia she meant. Was there a Zia in the Qur’an, she saw her wondering. A Zia in their extended family? But instead of experiencing the familiar surge of anger, instead of repeating her usual lines – about citizens who do not deserve the freedom they had fought so hard to gain, about how they deserve their dirty politicians, and about how it was people like her who had brought all of this upon the country – Maya found herself relieved. She was tired of letting everything break her heart, the politicians and crooks and the women whose babies died because they didn’t make it to the hospital on time. This was a world in which it didn’t matter that two of their presidents had been assassinated, and that they were now fully in the throes of irony, with their very own Dictator, their own injustices, their own dirty little war down south. There was just this room, this hot room with its stink of men and its stink of women, and the feeling that she was pulling the end of a rope with all her weight, pulling her mother back as she careened towards death.

Zaid forgave Maya for the incident in the market, and came and went as usual. As before, she fed him and tried to teach him things. Halal things, no card games, no television. She was working on addition and subtraction. His frenzied energy was the only bright thing in the bungalow. He tiptoed into Rehana’s room and sat at her feet, radiating a sort of brisk optimism, no matter that she was sinking into the mattress, that she was as frail as a bird in its nest, a trembling, bruise-breasted robin.

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