The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

marriage only if she meets a prince. Otherwise men are bastards.’
    ‘My,’ she said, ‘I could sign you up right now – first male feminist of Bangladesh.’
    ‘Do it!’ he said, slamming his fist on to the table. ‘We’ll make an official announcement in the next issue.’
    ‘You’ll be a celebrity,’ Aditi said drily. ‘Now come with me, Maya, I’ll show you the rest of our humble establishment.’ They went down a corridor and into a smaller room. There was a desk at the back with a large rectangular box on top. ‘You’d better look out for Shafaat, he’s a flirt.’
    ‘He reminds me of my brother.’ There was something about the way he thumped his hand on that desk that brought back a flash of Sohail.
    ‘Really, I thought your brother had gone the religious way.’
    ‘He was different before.’ No one seemed to remember the old Sohail. They heard he had become a mawlana and forgot how he had been before. Only Maya had archived his image – hands wedged into his jeans, the cap he wore with a red star in the middle.
    Aditi showed her the typesetting machine. She had to take every letter of every word and slot it neatly into a groove. The words were then dipped into the ink and pressed on to the paper. ‘Try it,’ Aditi said. Maya pulled out a few letters, arranged them on a tray. Dipped into black ink. MynameisMayaHaque .
    ‘You have to remember the spaces between the words, Doctor.’
    *
    The typewriter’s keys were tight. Probably angry with her for all the years it had spent under Ammoo’s bed. There was a time you couldn’t take it from her; she would bring it to the table and tap away while eating her dinner. And when she wasn’t banging on the keys, she was scribbling on anything she could find, an old newspaper, a piece of brown paper that the vegetables had been wrapped in. Now she struggled to find the words. Chronicles of a Crusading Doctor ? That sounded pompous. There was nothing so lofty about what she had done. She began to write about the Dictator, the sight of him tossing flowers on the Martyrs’ Memorial. She tore the paper out of the typewriter. No one wanted to read about that. Five hundred words on the true story of the countryside. The true story. She remembered all the children she had brought into the world, all the mothers she hadn’t been able to save. She thought of Nazia – Nazia who had been punished because it was the hottest day of the year and she wanted to cool her feet. She started at the beginning. I once knew a girl called Nazia . What was she thinking – she couldn’t use real names. Nazia. Zania. Inaaz. Aizan. I once knew a girl called Aizan.

1972
April
    Sohail’s friends couldn’t understand his conversion, because they hadn’t really grasped what had come before. They had thought his life was full of happiness; they used words like jolly and cheerful to describe him. Happy-go-lucky. Happy and lucky, jolly and laughing, bell-bottomed. Rock and rolled. Before he found God. They remembered how good-looking he was, and that he showed his teeth when he smiled.
    Had they known him better, they would have seen that the teeth, the smiling, the happy and the lucky had been taken by the war. By a girl whose captors had shaved her head so that she could not hang herself. Purdah, the preaching – all of this followed naturally, filling the hole left behind by his old mutinies.
    And people misremember about the Book. They assume that Silvi gave him the Book and told him to read it, because by the end of the war Silvi had lost her husband and already found God, and she had defied everyone and been the first to cover her head, to turn her back on her country and face life after life.
    But it was Rehana who had given Sohail the Book, a few months after he returned from the war. This was how it happened.
    It is a Wednesday, Rehana’s shopping day, and she is walking along New Market, wondering how high the prices have risen since last week, wondering if she can