'Go and check on him,' said Nazneen gently.

'Why don't I check on him?' He spoke with relief, and hurried away. One heel flapped loose where it had become unstuck. His trousers were so deeply creased at the knee-backs that the concertina effect was almost a style. She followed him to the door and whispered in his ear.

The rice was perfect. Fluffy white grains, each one separate from its neighbour. In the rainy season, back home, when the land had given way to water and the buffaloes grew webbed feet, when the hens took to the roofs, when marooned goats teetered on minuscule islands, when the women splashed across on the raised walkway to the cooking hut and found they could no longer kindle a dung-and-husk fire and looked to their reserves, when the rain rang louder than cow bells, rice was the means, the giver of life. Precooked, it congealed and made itself glue. Or fashioned itself into hard lumps that only worked loose inside the stomach, the better to bloat the innards and make even the children lie down and groan with satisfaction. Even then it was good. This rice was superb. Just the rice would be enough for her. But fresh coriander made her swoon for the chicken. The deeply oily aubergine beckoned lasciviously. She wanted to stick her tongue in the velvety dal. Chanu could cook. It had not occurred to her that, in all those years before he married, he must have cooked. And since, he had only leaned on the cupboards and rested his belly on the kitchen surfaces while she chopped and fried and wiped around him. It did not irritate her that he had not helped. She felt, instead, a touch of guilt for finding him useless, for not crediting him with this surprising ability.

'It's good,' said Razia. 'Save some for your husband.' Nazneen was eating like a zealot. Razia put down her plate and spoon. 'Something I didn't mention to your husband about Mrs Islam.'

'She hasn't called. I offended her. Chanu doesn't know.'

'Something else he does not know.'

'You didn't want to gossip about her.'

'No.' Razia lowered her heavy eyelids. She leaned in. The lashes curled up like insect legs and the lids squared off the tops of the irises, which were, Nazneen noticed now, spattered with gold lights deep down in the black. 'It's not gossip. It is the truth.' She paused a while, the better to hook her audience. 'The woman is a usurer.'

'Tcha!'

'I check my facts. It is the truth. In the eyes of God, I say it again. The woman practises usury and she will be the companion of fire.'

'How can you say it?' Nazneen was forced to put down her plate.

'Listen to me. I had my suspicions. I said something to her about money difficulties and she offered a loan. Nothing specific. Then I was not sure. I thought maybe she offers loans from the goodness of her heart. Maybe she carries bundles of five-pound notes in that big black bag, just for handing out to poor people.'

'Stop.'

'I'm not joking. You know me, always willing to see the good side.' She smiled like a jackal. 'If you don't believe me, ask Amina. Ask her what interest she is paying. Thirty-three per cent.'

'Razia!'

'You look a little scandalized. I don't make scandal. I just report what I see. It's not me who is going to hell on the day we are judged.'

'If she repents, God will forgive her.'

'Repent? Mrs Islam?' Razia dived in her bag and came up with a handkerchief. She pinched it between thumb and forefinger and waved it with her little finger cocked in the air. 'When I was a girl, no one dared to offer such insults! The best family in all of Tangail, do you not know that everyone bows before us?'

Nazneen could not speak. She stared at her friend.

Razia's gaze slid around the room. Then she became brisk. 'Amina could not make the last payment. If she doesn't come up with it next time, plus extra interest as punishment, the sons will break her arm. What kind of penance will God accept for this?'

'Who knows about it?'

Razia shrugged her large shoulders. 'Some people. Perhaps many people. They are all hypocrites. That is the thing about our community. All sinking, sinking, drinking water.'

At the English words, the teenager as flaccid in his chair as a virgin balloon raised himself up a little and wasted a half-glance on Razia.

'You hear all sorts of things about the sons,' Razia said. 'But for all I know, those things are just rumour.'

The boy rolled his head on the pimpled stalk of his neck and settled back. His mother looked at him as though this were the final straw and began to cry into the back of her hand.

'Time for me to go,' said Razia. 'Some things to do before I collect the children.'

'Kiss them for me. Give my salaam to the estate.'

'OK. I do it'

'Your English is getting good. Say hello to the tattoo lady from me.'

'Thank you. But the tattoo lady is gone.'

This was barely credible, even following the hard-to-swallow news of Mrs Islam, which should have made anything seem possible.

'Gone to an institution,' said Razia. She tapped at her temple. 'At the end she was sitting in her own . . . you know.'

'Oh,' said Nazneen.

'Someone should have got to her sooner. Always sitting there in the window, like a painted statue. Did no one see?'

Chanu had brought her tasbee. She held the beads and passed them. Subhanallah, she said under her breath. Subhanallah. Subhanallah. Subhanallah. When she passed the thirty-third, her fingers loitered on the big dividing bead. She breathed deeply and ploughed on. Alhamdu lillah. Thanks be to God. Yes, she thought. But would He not wish me to return to my son now? Her fingers raced through to the ninety-ninth.

There had been no chance to make her prayers in the usual way. She had offered up her personal, private pleas. Now she was giving thanks. It was God alone who saved the baby. It was His work, His power, not her own. Her own will, though it swelled like the Jamuna and flowed like a burst dam, was nothing as to His. She began the cycle again, pressing the mild wooden balls fiercely. Subhanallah. Glory to God. Alhamdu lillah. Thanks be to God. Allahu Akbar. God is great. She dropped the beads and they rolled beneath a radiator, out of reach.

With a long-handled dish cleaner, borrowed from the kitchen area, she poked the tasbee out and dusted it off. Perhaps it would be better if Chanu took it home, where it would be safe. Anyway, all the repetition made her feel drugged when she needed to be alert. It would be better if he took the beads home again.

From now on when she prayed it would be in a different, better way. She realized with some amazement that, while she had knelt, while she had prostrated herself and recited the words, she had never fully engaged in them. In prayer she sought to stupefy herself like a drunk with a bottle, like a fly against a lantern. This was not the correct way to pray. It was not the correct way to read the suras. It was not the correct way to live.

She had wanted to make a barren space inside. To stop the discontents, the bellyaches, the intemperate demands from breeding. To stop them setting up home. It was like curing a case of tapeworm by starvation. Entirely possible, and unavoidably lethal.

On the eighth day, out in the corridor, she made her silent classifications. Patient. Parent. Distant relative. Friend. Doctor. Nurse. Orderly. The adult patients were easy. They were the ones in slippers and slip-on, ill-fitting smiles. They smiled to show there was nothing to worry about, that they themselves were not worried, and that they were enjoying this healthful, restorative circuit-walk of the sick lanes. Passing down the corridors of the children's wards they smiled especially hard to signal their knowledge of just how lucky they were. The parents were easy too. Every dark imagining had come upon them, and their eyes and lips were pinched by shock. The worst of it how shallow their imaginations had run. The other relatives and the friends were sometimes difficult to tell apart, except that the relatives trod more lightly while the friends took the burden of clowning, of bringing cheer and huge teddies, small chattering toys. Doctors wore their authority on their white coats and in their urgent, forbidding strides. Stop me now, and you put a life at risk. The nurses doled out nods and brief, encouraging smiles that ignited in the parents a look of expectancy, as if they had remembered something to say; on the tip of their tongue and gone again. Orderlies were a variegated bunch. They scowled and slouched along, they bustled like the doctors, they sang a fantastic kind of anti-music, howling out fragments and lapsing abruptly into silence.

Raqib's room was being cleaned. She waited outside and watched out for Chanu. Chanu had been to work this morning. The first time in over a week. Here he was. Scuttling along, turning at a right angle to pass a trolley and moving sideways like a big, soft-shelled crab. He came next to her and leaned on the radiator. If there was a solid surface in sight, Chanu would rest against it. Mental toil, he said. That is the real exercise. No harder work than mental toil.

'They're just cleaning,' she told him. 'Won't be long.'

'Ah,' he said. He chewed on his lower lip, ejected it and began to tug with his bottom teeth on the top lip.

She waited for him to speak again and grew uncomfortable when he did not. She had become used to his chatter filling up the space between them.

'Mrs Islam,' she began, and drew a breath.

'Sinking, sinking, drinking water.'

So he knew.

'Some things have to stop.'

'If she truly repents . . .'

'Enough is enough.' Chanu wound himself forward and faced her, straight as a plane tree. 'I will have to tell them.'

'Who?'

'My relatives. They will have to know. Come clean. Stop the hypocrisy.'

'Your relatives? Why should they know?'

Chanu smiled, his fat cheeks dimpled. His eyes darted here and there, looking for an escape route from this inappropriate face. He explained as if to a child. 'All this time they thought I was rich. Why should I stay here in this foreign land, if it did not make me rich? I let them think it. It suited them and it suited me. Actually, I told them some things that are not true, have never been true. Made myself a big man. Here I am only a small man, but there . . .' The smile vanished. 'I could be big. Big Man. That's how it happened.' He sighed and placed his hands atop his stomach. 'So when the begging letters come and I blame left and I blame right, what I should be blaming is this, right here.' He moved his hands up over his chest, to show how his heart, his pride, had betrayed him.

Sinking, sinking, drinking water. When everyone in the village was fasting a long month, when not a grain, not a drop of water passed between the parched lips of any able-bodied man, woman or child over ten, when the sun was hotter than the cooking pot and dusk was just a febrile wish, the hypocrite went down to the pond to duck his head, to dive and sink, to drink and sink a little lower.

'No,' she said. 'It is not a matter for blame.'

'Action, then. It is a matter for action. All matters, in fact, are matters for action. Talking is finished. From now on, I act.' He cleared his throat, a little like the old, talking Chanu. 'Something else to tell you. I resigned today.'

'What do you mean, resigned?'

'What do I mean? Are you against it? Have I not warned you repeatedly of my intention? I warned Dalloway and I warned you also.'

'So. You did it then.'

'There were some surprised faces, I can tell you.' His own face looked ambushed, raided by dacoits. All this action was taking its toll. He chewed again on his lip and a split appeared, stained with a little red. 'I'm clearing my desk in the morning.'

'They can spare you so soon?'

He coughed and hawked, and Nazneen feared he would spit on the floor. He swallowed. 'Of course not. But when I decide to do something, it is done. That's the way I am. From now on.' He waggled his head and blinked slowly to show there was no turning back. 'If who repents?'

'What are you saying?'

'You said, "If she truly repents".'

'I don't think so.' An orderly came by, pushing a bucket along with a mop. He whistled loudly, but not loudly enough to cover his dejection. 'I think they've finished his room. Let's go.' The cleaner raised one corner of his mouth as she passed and made a noise that said he really didn't know what the world was coming to, when he was the one to be standing there with a bucket and mop while everyone else enjoyed themselves. She turned to see Chanu marching after her, his head swivelling, eyes uselessly scanning, feet knocking over the bucket, and the cleaner propped up by his mop shaking his head in the dignified manner of a man deeply wronged.

Raqib was awake. 'Bah,' he said. Enough of this nonsense. He lifted his hands in front of his face and regarded them sternly. He made pincers, tested them for strength and flexibility and was satisfied. They were released. He rolled his head to the side. Nazneen cooed as he looked at her. She stroked the back of his head where the hair matted together, soft as cashmere. With a little finger she rubbed at his swollen gums, was pleased to be bitten by his little pearl teeth. Soon they would be home and he would stagger around the sitting room like a ship's deck, clinging on, undaunted by the invisible storm that buffeted him from sofa to chair to table and back again.

'Going to buy an encyclopaedia for you.' Chanu leaned over his son and touched his leg. 'Going to buy it for myself before you start asking too many difficult questions.'

'I'll go home tomorrow. Make everything ready.'

'Damn clever, this boy. See it in the size of the head.'

'Encyclopaedias are expensive.'

'Not too expensive for this boy. Let's call it an investment. All books are investments. Can't you see what a good student he's going to be?' He began to hum, then broke into song.

'We are the strength, we are the force The Band of Students that we are! Under the pitch dark night, we stir out Barefooted across the road With obstacles strewn. The soil stiff We render red with our crimson blood . . .'

He broke off. 'All right. All right. No need for faces. We used to sing that at Dhaka University. It's a respectable song.' He continued the tune, humming this time.

The baby slept. Nazneen directed her energy towards him and sat perfectly still. Chanu sat with his book. Nazneen thought of asking what they would do for money. What job he would get now. She watched him take off his shoe and his sock. He bent down to examine his corns, squeezed each one in turn and said ish under his breath. For a few moments, the book caught his attention again, then he hummed for a while, drummed his fingers, sat looking at the air, the shoe and sock abandoned and forgotten.

She put her hand on Raqib's forehead. Just for the feel of him. To give him strength. Although, of course, only God gave strength. Whatever she did, only God decided. God knows everything. He knows the number of hairs on your head. Don't forget. Amma said that when they went off to school. She called after them, shouting in her strangled voice. 'He sees you. Don't forget. He knows the number of hairs on your head.' She thought about it. No, all that she had done for Raqib was nothing. God decided. She thought about How You Were Left To Your Fate. See! It made no difference. Amma did nothing to save her. And she lived. It was in God's hands. Raqib's chest rose and fell. He stirred and passed wind, which moved her deeply.

At once she was enraged. A mother who did nothing to save her own child! If Nazneen (her husband's part she did not consider) had not brought the baby to hospital at once, he would have died. The doctors said it. It was no lie. Did she kick about at home wailing and wringing her hands? Did she draw attention to her plight with long sighs and ostentatiously hidden weeping? Did she call piously for God to take what he would and leave her with nothing? Did she act, in short, like her mother? A saint?

And something else Amma was wrong about. Childbirth is like indigestion! Yes, if a snake bites like an ant. Exactly the same. Nothing different.

No wonder, she thought and shocked herself by it, no wonder Abba went off for days. The tears flooded him out. They made him angry. Even at the burial he was angry. When he lowered her, legs first, the white winding sheet already spattered with mud while the rain raced to fill the hole, he let her go too soon. Uncle held on and stopped her rolling on her back. Abba smacked his hands together. Blue lightning ripped open the stone sky as the prayer began, thunder took the words from the imam's lips, and the rain filled all their ears and eyes and mouths.

'Go and play,' Mumtaz had said. 'I'll bring you in to see her when I've finished.' Hasina ran off, but Nazneen stayed. 'All right then,' said Mumtaz. 'Make yourself useful. You are a woman now, after all.' She gave Nazneen the brass dish to hold, while she dipped in a cloth and squeezed it damp. She lowered the sheet and washed Amma's face. Forehead, temples, cheeks, chin, over the eyelids, inside the ears, inside the nostrils. Her hand knocked against the top lip and the lip stayed curled and raised, revealing for ever two of the melon-seed teeth that Amma, all her life, was so keen to hide. Sheet raised, she turned to her niece. 'I don't know what your mother would say about it.'

'Fate!' said Nazneen, and pinched the back of her neck.

Mumtaz looked at her. 'About you being here.'

The back of her neck was on fire. 'Oh.'

'Anyway. You are a woman now.' Beneath the sheet she began to wash the right side of the upper body. She pulled out the arm and ran the cloth along it. 'You mustn't think she died alone.'

'Angels.' She wished she had a way with tears. It seemed wrong. No one was crying. The village had lost its best mourner.

'They were with her, and God. The sari is ruined, of course. Her best one. The rest you can share out with Hasina.' She washed the torso. As the sheet lifted, Nazneen saw her mother's breast lolling against her armpit. A rag, brown with blood, plugged the hole just to the left.

When Mumtaz dipped the cloth in the bowl, little blood crusts floated free and congregated round the edges.

Nazneen went to change the water. When she tipped out the bowl she couldn't help thinking it was a shame to be pouring a bit of her mother away.

'She always said,' Mumtaz reflected, 'that everything can be changed, like this.' She snapped her fingers. 'God has made His plans. I told her, "Sister, but until He reveals them we have to get on by ourselves." Well. . .' She sucked her teeth. 'Now the plan is clear. It's come and gone. Puff!'

She was displeased with something. Nazneen stood up straight, hoping she looked as solemn as she was trying to feel. In truth, she felt bored by now and squeamish at seeing the body.

Mumtaz finished with the left foot (how yellow the toenails!) and began on the winding. She uncovered Amma's lower half, and Nazneen in spite of herself stared at this unprecedented nakedness. A loincloth went around her upper thighs and hips. Another cloth tied the first at the waist. A third sheet made a kind of short, straight dress and the next became a veil. 'Oh,' said Mumtaz. 'The hair.' She removed the veil and began to plait the hair, squatting behind the choki and sticking out her tongue in concentration. It was then that the rain started. Heralded the past few weeks by electric skies and air so hot it shimmered just out of reach and scorched the nostrils of those foolhardy enough to breathe, the rain was greeted with joy. It beat down on the tin roof, it hit the ground and bounced jubilantly up, it hurled great fat globs through the doorway. Nazneen, holding her bowl, watched as children ran outside for a shower. Squeaking, they flapped each other's wet shirts, rubbed at their hair. The adults came more slowly, feigning lack of interest, as if the allotted hour of their regular walk around the compound had arrived. Abba walked across the yard and the children scattered, holding each other back before this mighty and unpredictable presence. He reached out and patted a sodden-headed small boy. He smiled and the children began to move once more. Nazneen at last found her tears, and spilled them over the final, all-encasing winding sheet that it was Amma's Fate to wear.

She woke with a stiff neck. The hospital was quiet. The room was dark except for the glow of the machines. Chanu was not in his chair and Razia was standing on the other side of the cot. Hair disarrayed, eyes the narrowest slits. Bony hands to her face, chewing on the knuckles.

'What is it?' cried Nazneen.

Razia put a finger over her lips. 'Shush. Don't wake him.'

'What is it?' This time in a whisper.

'Very beautiful,' said Razia, leaning into the cot. 'Much better at that age, when they don't answer back. My two, they need a good whipping.' Her voice was breaking, but her eyes, as far as could be seen, stayed dry.

'Do you want tea?'

'Tea? No. I'm not having any more tea. All day there has been tea drinking.' She shook herself to get rid of the thought.

'Come and sit with me.'

Razia came round and sat. Her shoulders heaved. She pressed on her chest and pulled at her long nose. Her shoes knocked together. Finally, she said, 'He is dead.'