The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam Page B

resist that, even if it was only a joke. Everyone knew there weren’t any real revolutionaries left, not in Dhaka, not in the world. It was 1984 after all.
    They drove to Kolabagan. The woman who answered the door introduced herself as Mohona. ‘Come with me,’ she said, leading them down an unlit corridor that smelled of old books and damp. The corridor opened into a drawing room with large windows on one side. Money plants climbed up the grilles and fingered the ceiling. There were a handful of people there already, seated in a loose circle. It was a long time since Maya had been to a meeting, but the scene was familiar: the women in plain cotton saris, the sparse jute furniture, the smell of paper and incense. She drifted away from Joy and sat down beside a man in a uniform.
    ‘Hello, I’m Sheherezade,’ she said, using her formal name.
    ‘Lieutenant Sarkar,’ he replied, nodding. ‘You have been to the meeting before?’
    ‘No, my first time.’
    ‘Jahanara Imam is coming today.’
    Maya’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’ Jahanara Imam had written a book about losing her son in the war. Everyone had read it; they called her Shaheed Janani, Mother of Martyrs . Joy was right about bringing her here. Maybe she could even write about it for the newspaper. She settled into her seat and pulled out her notebook. Soon the room filled up; when the chairs ran out, people leaned against the wall or crouched on the floor. ‘That’s her,’ the army man said, pointing to an elderly woman who had just taken her seat.
    The meeting was called to order by Mohona. She welcomed everyone, including, with a nod to Maya, people who were joining them for the first time. Joy found a seat in the row behind her, tapped her on the shoulder. ‘What did I say?’
    Jahanara Imam rose. Tiny, in a white cotton sari, she looked insubstantial, like a froth of smoke. Her voice, however, was firm, her words direct. ‘It has been thirteen years,’ she began, ‘but I know that, like me, you have not forgotten. It has been thirteen years and our war is not over. Perhaps we gained our freedom, perhaps you can hold your head high and say you have a country, your country. But what sort of country allows the men who betrayed it, the men who committed murder, to run free, to live as the neighbours of the women they have widowed, the young girls they have raped?’
    She told the story of Ghulam Azam, whose thugs had collaborated with the Pakistan Army, led them to guerrilla hideouts, helped them burn villages. Not only was he acquitted of any wrongdoing, but he was being considered for Bangladeshi citizenship.
    Maya had always prided herself on remembering exactly who she had been before the war broke out. She remembered her politics, the promises she had made to herself about the country. She remembered the sight of dead men with their hands tied behind their backs, their faces lapped with blood, and she remembered every day she had worked in the camps, scooping bullets out of men with nothing but a spoon and a hunter’s knife.
    She remembered everything she had done and who she had been and who she had vowed to remain. But now, listening to this woman, she felt herself pulled and folded back into another body, one that hadn’t been lonely all these months and years, one that hadn’t left home and trodden carelessly around the past decade, one that could shore up the memories of that time and get angry when the moment came for anger.
    She clapped along with the others, between Jahanara Imam’s sentences. The room was growing hot now, bright sunlight filtering through the thicket of money plants. Someone turned up the ceiling fan, and the women readjusted themselves as the folds of their saris flapped open. Maya held down the pages of her notebook.
    When Jahanara Imam was finished, Mohona stood up again. ‘How many of you have lost a loved one to the war?’
    Hands went up. Maya’s too.
    ‘Madam,’ said a man in a grey suit, ‘I lost my father