amela
Qur’an 2:216
“But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah knows, while you know not.”
The line of track that ran behind their house was a river of iron and rumor. It carried gossip and grain, passengers and patience, and the slow swing of seasons as surely as it carried coal. To the village, the track was a promise; to little Aamela Begum it was a lullaby that didn’t care whether she slept or listened. She learned to name trains by their breath: the long-bellied freights that wheezed like tired buffalo, the quick passenger coaches that panted like boys late for school, the rare mail train that sliced open dusks and mended mornings.
Their house—whitewashed and wide-chested, with a veranda that swallowed the sun—belonged to Majid Shorkar, whom the village called Zamindar even though zamindari had long been abolished. “Old habits,” he would say with a shrug, as if tradition could be folded like a lungi and tucked under his arm. People came to him with petitions and quarrels and sacks of rice. If he was in a mood, he sent them away with the quarrels halved and the sacks heavier. If he wasn’t, he pinched the bridge of his nose and told them to try again tomorrow.
He loved his daughter as a man loves a last mango in Baishakh—turning it in his hands, unwilling to share, unwilling to eat. When she was six, he taught her to listen to the rails. “Put your ear,” he said, patting the track. “The world speaks before it arrives.” When she was twelve, he added a second lesson: “The world takes before it asks.” At fourteen, he told her the story of her mother’s death; at fifteen he told her the story of his life—the single story that justified all others: I did what I had to, so you would not be broken by the world that broke me.
Soon after, he announced his condition to a circle of men on reed mats: No man will wed my daughter unless he comes to my courtyard riding an elephant. The men laughed and nodded and later told their wives, who told their sisters, who told the bamboo groves. An elephant! It was a joke, until it was not. It grew into the air like a banyan root and then into the soil, until it held the house itself.
“Why an elephant?” asked Julekha, the neighbor girl who mouthed all the village’s questions before the village knew it had them.
“Because,” said Majid, “a man who can sit atop that which others fear is a man worth my daughter.”
“Or a man who can rent an elephant,” Julekha muttered later, when they were washing mango sap off their wrists in the pond.
“Baba doesn’t want to let me go,” Amela said. She didn’t say it to complain. She said it to test how the sentence sat in her mouth. It sat like a sweet she could not swallow.
Majid’s condition did more than crowd out suitors. It organized the village’s imagination. When gossip flagged, people fed the condition with hypotheses. The tea-stall men listed animals from goat to whale and argued which ones would make acceptable substitutions. The schoolmaster wrote an essay on Symbol and Suitor that no one read. Children drew elephants on slates and added crowns.
Only the stationmaster, Babar Ali, took the matter seriously. “Your father is building a door that leads in and out at the same time,” he told Amela when she brought him leftover pitha during the winter fair.
“How can a door lead both ways?” she asked.
“That is the trouble with doors,” he said.
Majid never explained the condition to his daughter. When she pressed, he sent her to Kulsum the midwife with guavas and a morning smile. When she pressed harder, he told a story from his own wedding: how he had walked barefoot along seven miles of road, his uncle refusing to rent a horse because the horse had injured its hoof. “I swore,” Majid said, “my daughter would never have to walk.”
“That is not about elephants,” she said.
“It is about everything but elephants,” he replied.
In time, the condition became less ridiculous. Or perhaps time formed a shell around the ridiculousness and called it custom. When a boy appeared with a bicycle, he was sent away with tea. When one arrived with a horse, the horse ate their grass while Majid washed his feet and asked about his family and then told him to buy shoes.
Then, one Nababarsha afternoon, the elephant arrived.
It was not the thunder of the animal that spread first but the bell at its neck, a little sound made enormous by expectation. It turned into their gate sideways, as elephants do, mahout perched above like a minor god directing weather, and atop the elephant sat a man who seemed to have been poured rather than carved, his posture clean even in the village’s heat. He wore a simple white punjabi and a watch that ate light. When he stepped down on a wooden stool placed by the mahout, he did it as if he had always been going to.
“My name is Rahi,” he said, with a small bow to Majid. “I apologize for the spectacle.”
Majid’s mouth uncurled into something almost a smile and almost a surrender. “You have apologized to the wrong god,” he said, nodding toward the elephant, which accepted a banana as if reconciling two religions.
Amela watched from behind the lattice. The elephant’s eyes were half-lidded, old-man kind and clever, lashes long as palm fronds. The man—Rahi—had a face that did not hurry anywhere. Later, she would tell Julekha the wrong thing first—that his wrist veins were beautiful, like tiny railway lines. “You are hopeless,” Julekha said, hugging her hard enough to hurt.
The village said the suitor belonged to a family in a nearby town that made its money gently, the way curd thickens—slowly, without drama, and then all at once. Rahi worked in a government office that no one could describe. “The sort that moves papers that move people,” Stationmaster Babar said, snorting. The mahout was named Dinesh; the elephant was called Gouri; the bell had been bought in a fair in Mymensingh. These were the details that made the impossible ordinary, and ordinary things are the most binding.
Majid kept his condition, and his word. The courtyard was washed with turmeric and water. The mango tree hung prayer flags like accidental blessings. In the shaded place where Kulsum usually spread mats for laboring women, musicians tuned harmoniums. Old men with long stories shaved their long stories short and fitted them between mouthfuls of biriyani. A boy named Shuvo climbed the elephant’s tail when no one was looking and came down with a private miracle lodged under his ribs for later use.
Amela married Rahi under a sky that did not blink.
Qur’an 42:49–50
“To Allah belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. He creates what He wills. He gives to whom He wills female [children], and He gives to whom He wills males, or He pairs them, [both] males and females, and He renders whom He wills barren. Indeed, He is Knowing and Competent.”
Their first days were a tender rehearsing of future memory. Rahi’s mother, a woman who smelled of cardamom and caution, taught Amela the household’s quiet rules: where the jars lived, which tap coughed, what to do with a kestrel feather if you found one on the veranda (wrap it in newspaper and set it under a stone). Rahi’s father had died long ago; his absence lived lightly on the walls, like the yellow line the sun leaves when it migrates across rooms season to season.
Rahi was attentive to the point of disappearance. He anticipated Amela’s drinking water before she thirsted, warmed the edge of the bed in winter, learned the ways her shoulders tightened when others spoke over her and became the person who did not. He did not push, did not sulk, did not insist on being read before he had been written. When she wished he had a temper—as a handle, a shadow, a proof of content—she found herself ashamed of the wish. He was the sort of good that left no scratch to prove he had been there.
On Eid mornings he rose early and returned from the masjid with sweets and stories, picking the tamest ones for his mother, saving the knotty ones for his wife. He carried a fountain pen and wrote letters to cousins for whom letters were still a public event. He never raised his voice. The village men called him bhodro, which meant gentle and safe and slightly invisible.
Amela’s father came often. He brought sacks of rice and baskets of guavas as if the marriage were a hungry animal that had to be fed to keep it from wandering. He pretended to complain about roads and inflation. He tried not to look at his son-in-law’s perfection as if it were a mirror in which he saw an unflattering thing about himself—his own appetite for control wearing a new suit made of kindness.
It was a house of soft weather, which is to say it had no thunder to measure itself against.
After the second year, the aunties’ questions arrived. They were arranged like fruit on a tray, polite and heavy. Any news? Then: You mustn’t overthink. Then: Allah’s time is precise. The village midwife, Kulsum, came with fennel and folklore. The hakim came with a bottle that smelled like the back room of a spice shop. Rahi’s mother said nothing and said it exquisitely. Only once did she suggest a shrine to visit. “Not because it works,” she told Amela in the kitchen, grating ginger. “Because it hurts less to think you are doing something while you wait.”
They went to the shrine in a bus that organized humans into a kind of temporary intimacy: calves pressed, shoulders overlapped, strangers’ breath braided. The imam there had eyes like polished pebbles. “The sea keeps what it keeps,” he said, passing his prayer beads through Amela’s hand. “It is not a punishment to be asked to live with what is not here.” Rahi nodded as if he had already made friends with the sentence.
In the third year, they went to Dr. Rahima Qadir in the city, who wore her white coat like armor and called Amela apa in a way that turned the honorific into solidarity. She drew charts and took blood and asked questions that were kind without being merciful. “Do not let the village turn this into a referendum on your womanhood,” she said, as if she were prescribing medicine. “That referendum is always rigged.” She looked at Rahi. “And you—do not become so good that your wife has nowhere to put her rage. It is a real organ, rage. It needs a body. It needs bone.”
On the bus home, Rahi made a joke about the posters for coaching centers—how everyone looked fifty and hopeful—and for the first time since their wedding, Amela snapped. “You make everything easy,” she said. “Even when it is not.” He turned to her with the soft astonishment of a man who had always been good at gentleness and suddenly discovered its failure.
Tests became a calendar. There were pills and prayers, teas and injections, a quiet schedule of aphrodisiac meals that made Rahi laugh into his sleeve and then eat them anyway, because eating was a tangible way to say yes, I am here in this with you. Their room filled with little medical things: thermometers, syringes, strips. The words luteal and follicle entered their mouths and turned them into tourists in their own bodies.
Rahi’s flaw began to show, or rather, his lack of flaw began to chafe. When the village women sharpened their pity into advice, he absorbed it and returned bread. When a cousin remarked—gently, always gently—that his lineage would end with his library, he brought the cousin’s boy a cricket bat and taught him cuts no one in their neighborhood had the bowling for. His goodness softened all sharp edges so thoroughly that sometimes there was nothing left to push against. “I cannot even be angry at you,” Amela told him once, not as a compliment.
“Perhaps you should be,” he said. “Anger is a way to stay.”
“Against what?” she asked.
He did not answer. Perhaps he did not know. Or perhaps he knew that if he named it—named himself as the thing she could set her teeth in—she would bite and not forgive herself later.
Qur’an 65:2–3 (excerpt)
“…And whoever fears Allah—He will make for him a way out, and will provide for him from where he does not expect. And whoever relies upon Allah—then He is sufficient for him…”
At the tea stall, men spoke in undertones when she passed, undertones that said we mean well but were built of pity she could hear without seeing. The stationmaster learned to greet her without asking anything. Julekha, now married to a man who managed a rice mill with the seriousness of a judge, came with stories about her boys and burned fish and her new mother-in-law’s old superstitions. She made Amela laugh until laughing turned treacherous.
Majid kept looking for a different problem to solve. He invited an astrologer. He funded repairs at the madrasa. He paid for the poor man’s daughter’s dowry and then told the poor man to say in public that he had not. When a flood carried away half the paddy, he set up a table by the road and handed out envelopes like a lazy magician. The village blessed him and discarded the blessing and blessed him again. None of it fixed the one thing he could not fix. His condition—his glory and his joke—mocked him from the corner of the courtyard where the elephant had stood.
Rahi, who had never liked politics of any size, began to carry home extra kindness as if it were vegetables. He praised Amela’s cooking too quickly, as if praise could make the dish more itself. He read to her in the evenings from a book of poems in which people were always saying farewell with elegance. He never said the word child unless she did first. He learned a patience that left him alone in his own company.
One evening, under the mango tree, Kulsum Apa said, “Some women do not bleed with the moon, they bleed with the train schedule. You are not broken.” Amela thanked her and went to the pond and let a dragonfly land on her finger until it felt like endurance.
She did not go to the shrine again.
In the seventh year, a doctor hinted at a procedure they could attempt. It involved needles like thin intentions and hormones that would turn her body into a crowded room. “There is hope,” the doctor said, with the bedside smile that belongs to those who stand at thresholds and sell keys. Rahi waited for his wife to speak. She did not. On the bus home, he tried to tell a story about a cow that had learned to open its own gate, and she said, “I am tired of being a woman who makes decisions inside a joke.” He did not understand, and loved her anyway.
When the tenth year arrived like an uninvited guest, she woke with a quiet that did not coo. The quiet felt like a hard pear: not ready, not ripe, at risk of going straight from green to rot without passing through sweetness. She made tea. Rahi was stirring sugar the way he always did—slowly, then faster, then slowing again as if the tea might tire. His mother was asleep. Outside, the crows were starting their parliament.
“Marry again,” she said.
The spoon paused. He did not look up, not yet. “What?” His voice was mild, which was his problem.
“Marry again,” she repeated. “You deserve a family. You deserve a noise that is not this.”
He set the spoon down with the care one gives an heirloom. “You are my family,” he said. He said it the way a man says water in a desert. He did not reach for her hand. That was also his problem. He knew when not to reach.
“Your flaw,” she said, and now he looked at her, as if someone had opened a window he had not known existed, “is that you do not have one. If you were unkind, I could anchor my decision to leave in your unkindness and call it justice. If you were careless, I could be dramatic and say I am saving myself. But you are good, and your goodness makes me a coward.”
“Then be a coward and stay,” he said, the first unkind sentence he had offered her. His mouth trembled at its edges, as if it had spoken without permission.
The hour that followed was a parliament more serious than crows. They had the old argument as if it were new, as all old arguments are when you invite them to breakfast: what marriage is owed, what love cannot be asked to bear, what a person may demand of herself without becoming a ghost. They were eloquent and they were ugly. He put his face in his hands. She put water on to boil and forgot what for. When the kettle burned, they laughed in a ruined way that ached and felt good.
“I cannot stay and make you perform gratitude for a quiet house,” she said at last.
“I do not,” he began.
“You do not,” she agreed. “That is the trouble.”
He slept on his side of the bed because the bed had sides. She lay awake and watched the ceiling draft a future in chalk. In the first version, she stayed and learned to be a woman who mothered other things: trees, nieces, neighborhood children who came to read beneath their fan. In the second version, she stayed and became bitter in a subtle way that only she could taste. In the third version, she left. In none of the versions did she know what the word peace meant. The only thing she knew was the taste of honesty: iron and rain.
Before dawn, the track hummed like a held note. She rose and dressed in the light of the courtyard lamp. She stood in the doorway and watched him breathe. She placed her palm over the place his ribs met, like a blessing or a theft. On the table she left a note that did not explain enough and explained too much: Forgive me my courage. Forgive me my fear.
The stationmaster, Babar Ali, sold her a ticket without asking if she was traveling alone. He was an old man in love with people’s dignity. “The world speaks before it arrives,” he said, handing her the slip of paper.
“I remember,” she answered.
He walked her to the steps as if she were his own. The train leaned forward like a man beginning to rise. She climbed.
Qur’an 2:286 (opening)
“Allah does not burden a soul beyond that it can bear…”
The city gave her another name the way a big river gives a little boat another current. Maliha, she told the landlady, a woman named Shanta who ran her building like a ship and knew all her tenants’ griefs by their electricity usage. “We do not ask questions that can drown us,” Shanta said, which is one way to offer mercy. The room was on a lane that smelled of fried things and worry. It had a window that looked onto the back of another window. There was a hook where a swing might once have been.
She found work in a tailoring shop that specialized in school uniforms. The children came with their mothers, the mothers came with their lists, and Maliha—who had been Amela who had been Begum—learned the arithmetics of hem and hope. She stitched pleats into girls who would go on to become women with pleats of their own. She learned the city’s breaths and pauses. She learned to cross roads with an immigrant’s grace—watching everyone else and believing in no one’s rules.
There were friends of a kind. A nurse named Lopa who worked nights and slept days and sometimes woke at odd hours just to drink tea and hear a voice. A boy named Shuvo—no relation to the train boy—who delivered packages and once asked if she missed anyone. “Everyone,” she said. He nodded and brought her mangoes with the solemnity of a secret.
She wrote letters to Rahi and did not send them. She wrote letters to her father and did not write them. She learned the geography of not-knowing: which tea stalls had radios that said her village’s name in storm season; which newspapers listed train mishaps where you could measure panic by the number of line breaks. When she dreamed, she dreamed of Gouri the elephant coming sideways through the door.
After two years, a rumor that her father had taken to his bed traveled along ropes of cousins and somehow found her. She took the rumor into her mouth like an unripe fruit. Shanta said, “Go and see,” but she did not. She held her staying like a bruise and pressed it to make sure it still hurt.
In the shop, she became indispensable. She could fit a shirt by eye and a grief by tone. “People who sew uniforms sew the future into straight lines,” Lopa joked once, folding her white coat into an origami that looked like surrender. When a school decided to change its emblem, Maliha supervised a hundred badges: fierce tigers that softened if you looked too long. She rode buses standing up and learned when to shift her weight to keep from falling. In the mirror at home she saw lines on her face that were not sadness but the map of having lived.
Once, in a clinic where she had gone to deliver uniforms for a health drive, she saw a woman whose profile unclipped her breath. The woman’s hair had more silver than her memory allowed. Her hands moved with the efficiency of someone who had arranged too many vials for too many decades. When the woman turned, Maliha saw it was not Rahima Qadir but a woman who looked like her in the way strangers sometimes look like answers. “Do you need anything?” the woman asked. It was an unbearable question. “Bobby pins,” Maliha said, and they both laughed and then were ordinary.
Years built themselves out of days that resembled one another until one didn’t. She met a child in the lane who had taught himself elephant calls from the internet and made the sound of a creature that had lived and died and lived again inside her. She bought him a bell from a toy shop and told him it was magic. He believed it for three days, which is longer than most magic lasts.
Sometimes, when the city was too loud, she walked to the train station just to listen to the rails and remember that the world still warned you before arriving. Sometimes, when the city was too quiet, she went to the river and watched water be water despite the plastic and spitting. She learned to be a woman who was not waiting but whose bones still practiced the shape of waiting when she slept.
In her fifteenth year away, she walked past a shop window and saw a television with a grainy wedding video paused on an elephant. The animal’s bell made no sound inside the screen but rang behind her ribs. The bride’s face was turned away. The groom’s profile was the profile of every kind man in the country. For three days after, she could taste turmeric in water.
In her twentieth year away, Majid Shorkar died. The news found her through a man who sold insurance and gossip in equal measure. She cried like a child who had skinned both knees and pretended, when Shanta asked, that she had caught onions in her eye. She could have gone. There is no law against grief wearing a train ticket. She did not. The track hummed three times that night and none of them were trains.
She grew older. Her hair gathered white in it like winter birds. Her hands remained clever. The city forgot to be cruel to her, which is a kind of truce.
Qur’an 13:11
“Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.”
At seventy, she woke one Betar morning to a desire that felt like appetite. Not for a person. Not for a place, exactly. For an angle of light in which she had once stood and been named. It seemed both ridiculous and essential. She bathed and wrapped her hair in a scarf the color of boiled spinach and told Shanta she would be out and back.
“Out where?” Shanta asked, then stopped herself. “Back when?” She stopped again. She had loved many people by letting them be unspecific.
“To the station,” Maliha said, letting the old name flicker for a moment like a saint’s shadow. “To listen.”
The tracks were there, as tracks are, which is the point of tracks. The station had grown into its future in the small ways that matter to men who count: the signboard repainted thrice over faded thrice, a tea stall with a television, a new poster about swine flu and another about mathematics. On the bench opposite hers sat a young woman wrapped in a wedding saree that had not yet learned to sit. Her eyes were bright and a little confused, two conditions that often travel together.
“Traveling far?” Maliha asked, the way strangers ask when they want to say I see the weight you are carrying and I will not steal it.
“Not far,” the young woman said. “Far enough to make me wish I had worn different shoes.”
They smiled the women’s smile that means I will pretend we are not both standing in the doorway of a thing we cannot see the inside of. A boy selling peanuts called out his inventory as if the peanuts were opera tickets. A porter slept with his forehead on his bundle as if the bundle were instructing him in economics.
“First journey after marriage?” Maliha asked.
“First journey after everything,” the woman said. “My name is Ameena.”
The name fell into the space between them like a sweet dropped in dust. Not Amela, which would have been narrative’s cheap trick, but close enough to pull a stitch she had forgotten she’d left loose. “I am Am—” she began, then let the name move through her like rain through bamboo. “Maliha.”
Ameena’s setor hands were hennaed with vines that ended in little teeth. “I was married three months ago,” she said. “We are going to visit his grandmother. He had work today. I am going ahead with his mother. His mother likes trains.” She glanced toward a woman in a lavender saree negotiating tea with the vendor as if the tea were a difficult relative.
“Does your husband like trains?” Maliha asked, for no reason but that fathers and trains and husbands braided in her mind.
“He likes maps,” Ameena said. “He likes to know where things end.”
“That is a dangerous hobby,” Maliha smiled.
Ameena sighed. “The house is good. The family is good. The man is…” She searched for a word. “His fault is that he is without fault.”
Maliha’s throat made a sound she did not recognize as her own. “That is heavy,” she said.
“Everyone thinks it is light,” Ameena replied, and in that moment Maliha loved her.
There is a kind of advice that is really autobiography wearing a shawl. Maliha arranged hers carefully. “Life will ask you to choose between being understandable and being alive,” she said. “You cannot be both all the time.”
Ameena laughed, then looked suddenly tired. “I sometimes think if he slammed a door once, I would know where to put my hand.”
“Yes,” Maliha said, in a tone that made her vowel a chair. “Yes.”
They spoke of small things, which are the big things you can say out loud: whether mint in tea is necessary (it is), whether people get kinder with age (they get clearer), whether one should wear bangles every day (one should wear what one can hear oneself in). Ameena showed her a photo on her phone from their wedding reception. It was a poor photo—too much flash, the faces white as bread—but in the blur there were details that held. Behind the couple, on the wall, there was a framed black-and-white of an elephant in a courtyard, a man dismounting with a shy smile on a wooden stool set by a mahout.
“That picture?” Maliha asked, keeping her voice a corner smaller than her heart. “Your family?”
Ameena nodded. “My husband’s grandfather. It is a story in the house. He went on an elephant to his bride’s home because…” She stopped, suddenly aware that she might be giving away something that did not belong to her to give. “Because a father asked it,” she said carefully.
Maliha let the picture’s light burn on her retinas. The courtyard flagstones in the photo could have been any courtyard. The mango tree might have been metaphor. The stool might have been universal. Only the bell at the elephant’s neck was particular—its shape a small pear with a nick on one side, like a tooth lost to sugar.
“Do you know where that courtyard was?” she asked, too casual.
“In a village near Barendra,” Ameena said, turning the phone in her palm as if turning an answer. “They say the bride left many years later. They say many things.”
The train announced itself in the rails the way truth announces itself in dreams—too early, then right on time. Ameena’s mother-in-law returned with tea, looked at Maliha, looked through her, and smiled. “Come,” she said to Ameena. “We will stand where the ladies stand or we will lose our seats to men with briefcases.” She spoke with the unassailable confidence of a woman who had earned every seat she had ever taken.
Ameena rose, then leaned down so close that Maliha could count the points of light in her irises. “If you could tell your young self one thing at a station,” she said, “what would it be?”
Maliha looked at the clock, the sort that turns minutes into scoldings. “That whatever you cannot carry now,” she said, “you will drag for years. So either carry it on purpose or put it down on purpose, but do not drag.”
Ameena made a face that was half-bow and half-wince. “I will try to choose on purpose,” she said.
“Try to choose with kindness for the person you will be after the choosing,” Maliha added, because she had learned that most people remembered the advice but misremembered the target.
The train came in with its usual arrogance. The platform tilted toward it the way wheat tilts toward wind. In the shuffle, Ameena vanished into the women’s compartment doorway, her lavender mother-in-law holding the handle with a pirate’s grip. Maliha remained on the bench because remaining is a verb. The train pulled and then moved and then went, and when it had gone far enough that the bell in the video could pretend to ring, the station remembered how to be itself.
She stood and walked toward the exit because exits are where stories pretend to end. A boy with a bell on a string jangled it at her, hoping for a coin. She gave him one and the bell’s cheap sound braided itself with another bell, older, heavier. For a moment she was a young woman behind lattice, then a woman under a mango tree, then a woman in a city room with a hook, then the woman at the station again. Her name expanded and contracted in her mouth like lungs.
Near the gate, the stationmaster who had replaced Babar Ali sat on a high stool tallying things into a ledger that looked too clean to be true. He had the relaxed posture of a man whose job is to make lines meet. “Ammu,” he called, because old women are the nation’s aunts, “there is an announcement for an Am—” He looked down to get the syllable right. “For an Amela Begum.”
She stopped. The sound came into her like history. She could feel the turnings of it—the way a cart rolls into a rut it has made on previous days and you cannot say if the cart seeks the rut or the rut seeks the cart.
“That name is common,” the stationmaster added, rehearsing mercy.
“Common enough to be mine,” she said. Her voice forgot to be steady.
He gestured toward the loudspeaker on a pole. The voice up there was the usual official—a man trained to make emergencies sound like recipes. “Passenger Ama—Amela Begum,” he tried again, “please come to the stationmaster’s office. There is a message.” The word message made a private room inside her chest.
A child ran past with a paper windmill. A porter yawned sociology. The tea man washed a glass with his thumb.
Maliha—or Amela, which is what the station said—walked not toward the stationmaster’s office but toward the opposite end of the platform, as if the message might lose interest if she did not catch its eye. She moved through the crowd the way a person moves through their own house in the dark, hand to familiar edges. At the far end, a man of about her age stood by the fence looking at the track with the expression of a person who had buried something there. He wore a white punjabi the color of memory. His hair was a field that had forgotten rain and then remembered it all at once. In his hand—dangling like a small, patient ghost—was a bell. Pear-shaped. Nicked.
She did not call his name because names are nets and nets hurt fish. He did not call hers because perhaps he had grown tired of indicting air. They stood close enough that if they had been younger the station would have scolded them. He lifted the bell half an inch and it said the softest thing a bell can say, which is I am still here. She lifted her hand without deciding to. The space between bell and palm was the space a decade occupies when it is done.
“Passenger Amela Begum,” the loudspeaker said again, as if the nation had become suddenly private. “Please—”
The man smiled the smile of a person looking at a photograph whose caption he cannot bear to read. He turned the bell once, twice, like a pen thinking of a sentence. Then he slipped the bell into the worn pocket of his punjabi, and the small shape there became a proof that some sounds can be kept when they are not made.
He did not step toward her. He did not step away. He did not ask Where did you go? or Why did you leave? or Do you know that I learned to cook rice two ways because grief is hungry at different hours? He did not say I married or I did not or We named someone after you or We forbade your name in the house. He did the thing flawless men do when their flaw has finally learned to speak: he waited for a woman to decide her own sentence.
A younger man, breathless and polite, hurried along the platform carrying an old envelope as if it were a child. He looked at her, looked at the man, and then—reluctant to interrupt a physics older than him—looked away. “Aunty,” he said to no one in particular, “there is a message in the office for…” He let the name evaporate, as if names could be spared.
Amela felt the map of herself and saw the lines that might be called roads and the blank places men like maps cannot resist labeling. She could go to the office and receive a message. She could walk past and go to the lane where tea tastes like simple mercy. She could speak to the man and ask him to ring the bell once, for old time, for old bruise. She could not do all of these things. She had learned at last that choices ripen or they rot and both are a kind of honesty.
She turned—small, decisive—and began to walk. Not toward the office. Not toward the gate. Along the platform, which is neither arrival nor departure but the place where you become the person who can do both.
Halfway down, a group of schoolgirls in uniforms she might have stitched were gathering for a trip. One of them took a photo and the photo accidentally included an old woman in a spinach scarf whose eyes were practicing astonishment. Another girl tugged her friend’s sleeve. “Cholo,” she said, “we’ll miss it.” The word miss opened and closed like a door between rooms.
Behind her, the bell made no sound. Ahead of her, the rails said what rails always say: that the world announces itself before it arrives, and sometimes you answer, and sometimes you do not, and sometimes answering looks exactly like walking away.
At the very end of the platform, where the signboard’s paint had begun to flake into the names of other towns, a small boy bounced on his heels beside a woman in a lavender saree. He was playing with a toy bell that did not ring so much as it remembered ringing. “Nanu,” he said, tugging her sleeve, “what was the name of Dadu’s first photo? The one with the elephant?”
The woman in lavender smiled down at him the way a person smiles at a story that refuses to be finished. “That,” she said, and then, seeing the old woman passing with her spinach scarf and her unsent letters and her deliberate feet, she changed the sentence she had been about to say into something else entirely.
“That,” she told the boy, “depends on who is listening.”
And because it was the hour when trains become decisions, the loudspeaker cleared its throat, and the nation called a name that many women have owned and many have put down, and a door somewhere opened onto a road that was not there yesterday, and the bell in a man’s pocket did not ring, and the rails kept talking like they had all along.
October 2024
Disclaimer: This story was inspired by a post from GMB Akash on Instagram. While it draws from real life themes, all characters and events are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.
