Free A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam Page B

his face. He motioned for Rehana to do the same with her sari. She held the sari to her nose and with one hand clung tightly to the rickshaw frame, because the road was uneven here; when she looked down she saw scraps of litter scattered over the street. She thought she saw a prayer cap and a pair of unbroken spectacles. People must have dropped their things as they ran. She wanted to pick up the spectacles and wave them around, see if anybody was looking for them, but the rickshaw had already driven past. Now there was a thin length of red ribbon on the road; she leaned over; she couldn’t be sure. It was glistening wet.
They continued and the rubble grew denser; Rehana became aware of the growing crowd on the street; the rickshaw-wallah strained to get them through the uneven road and the people that were laced around them. Now there were bricks and bits of
     
63
plaster and layers of dust that had settled on the road and turned it grey-white.
They were in front of Curzon Hall. The wet ribbon had fol- lowed them all the way, and now it poured into a gutter, which was also red, and on the side of the gutter was a pair of hands, the fingers clasped together in prayer or begging, and next to the hands was a face. The mouth was tiny, only a pale pink smudge, like the introduction of a bruise.
It was a little girl. Her hair swallowed the top half of her face. Beneath the clumped-together strands Rehana could see an eye squeezed shut.
She wrenched herself away from it; she looked for only a minute, but it felt like so much longer, felt so close she thought she could smell the girl’s breath escaping from her nostrils and from those too-small lips.
‘Move on,’ she said to the rickshaw-wallah. She didn’t see anything after that. Later she would say she had seen it all: the corpses piled onto the pavement like cakes in a window; the rickshaw-pullers dead with their heels on rickshaw-pedals; the tank-sized holes in the dormitories, Rokeya Hall and Jagganath Hall and Mohsin Hall. But as they clattered through the compound her eyes had been closed, squeezed shut against the sight of her ruined city.
     
When Sohail and Maya returned, they were mute, their faces lined with ash. The story of the night unfolded slowly. First, Mujib had been arrested and flown to West Pakistan. The army had started its attack at the university, demolishing the dormitories and The Madhu Canteen. On their way to the old town, the tanks had bulldozed the slums that clung to each side of the Phulbaria rail track; they needed that rail line to get across the city, so they had swiped their guns through the cardboard and tin shacks, the flimsy homes held together with glue and cinema posters. And then they had gone into the Hindu neighbourhoods on jeeps because their tanks were too wide for the narrow lanes, and mounted on their jeeps
     
64
they had fired through shutters and doorways and shirts and hearts.
In the evening Rehana and the children heard the announce- ment on the radio:
I, Major Zia, provisional Commander-in-Chief of the Bangladesh Liberation Army, hereby proclaim, on behalf of our great national leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the independence of Bangladesh. I also declare we have already formed a sovereign, legal govern- ment under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. I appeal to all nations to mobilize public opinion in their respective countries against the brutal genocide in Bangladesh.
So this was it: a war had come to find them. Whatever was going to happen had already happened; now they would have to live in its shadow. Rehana wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed tight, willing the old strength to rise up within her again.
     
65
     
April ‌
     

     
Radio Free Bangladesh
     

     
    T
he city slowly adjusted to occupied life. It adjusted to the stiff-backed soldiers who manned the streets, their uniforms starched, their pale faces grimacing. It adjusted to the tanks sitting fatly in the middle of roads, and to checkpoints where sol- diers