The Black Coat

by Neamat Imam

  We went to Mrittunjoyee Primary School which he called home. He did not have a tent there. He lived on the veranda of the school building. There were many around who have had to accept the same fate. It was not a place to live for a human being, and definitely not a place where someone could invite guests, but he would invite me, he said. We sat together, a yard apart, watched the refugees who cooked in the field, their children playing in the dust, young ones crawling, moving in any direction they liked, eating mud, cow dung, guava seeds, sundried banana peels. A few yards away a woman of eighty was caning her fifty-year-old son. He had assaulted his wife when she had refused to go look for work. The wife wept sitting on the dust. She said she had looked for work day after day, but did not find any; she had offered to work the first day free for the second day’s payment; that was also not enough. Now she was showing her mother-in-law the bruises on her knees.

  Abdul Karim said he wanted to continue singing as long as he lived. An entire life devoted to music would not convey the sorrows he had seen—so deep were they. He had seen death in all its possible shapes and colours. One did not need to walk three hundred miles to see death, he said; death was at our doorstep, happening every day, exposing itself concretely to the elements. He walked because he could not stop walking. The more deaths he witnessed, the more pressure he felt to move on. If nature would teach him how to overcome the thought of self-annihilation, he could stop somewhere. Unfortunately it did not. He gave me some peanuts from his bag and threw some at the children, who tumbled upon them. Those were a gift from an admirer from the market, he said. The admirer regularly offered him something.

  What one was going to eat for supper was the most awkward question at the time. It was more deeply personal than the question of faith. I did not want to embarrass him. If he would be kind enough to give me company for an hour, I said, I was going to eat something in the restaurant before going home. Of course if he was not busy; I did not know if he had other engagements.

  He was not busy, but he must return at sunset to sing for them—he pointed at the tents. ‘Good people,’ he said, ‘very good people; sadly enough, many of them won’t survive another evening to listen to my music. Their souls will fly to a world fairer than the one we live in, so tomorrow is always a better day than today.’

  We walked to the restaurant where we sat in one of the front tables. I ordered parata roti and bhaji with tea for both of us. There were not many customers at that time, so we got our food pretty quickly. As we ate, I told him I had been a journalist and had worked with the Freedom Fighter for over two years. He had never seen it or heard of it. So I gave him a brief description: when it began, who the editor was, its role during the war, and why it thrived so well compared with other journals of the day. I told him one day I would have my own paper, which I would call the New Sun. I would write in it whatever I believed the times demanded. I would be its editor; I would change the job description of an editor so that no editor could become rude and inert. I would talk about how life was now, the real life, from the very first issue. I would recreate it as it had been for a long time; I would recreate it in all its ironies, pitfalls, pretensions and sensations. I was keeping notes of everything that I thought and everything that I saw, I said to him, and in that paper I would print them all in a very straightforward language. I would not wait for history to judge. If I waited, it would be too late. I would use my own judgement. How could we disregard something that was so obvious? I would say it was the fault of Sheikh Mujib, who did not see people dying, because he did not want to accept that death would exist in Bangladesh as long as he led the government.

  I could go on and on and on, but I just wanted to give Abdul Karim an idea of the intense fury I carried in my heart. I did not want my country to be ruled by a morally bankrupt fascist force like the Awami League. By working for Moina Mia I was saving money for that purpose, I told him finally. Once I had enough money to print a four-page newspaper, even if only once a month, I would not stay idle for a day. ‘Believe you me,’ I said to him. ‘I am not kidding. This is the single most important thing I am aspiring to accomplish.’

  He still looked hungry, after eating his second parata. So I ordered one more for each of us. He ate and then burped several times—an indication he had enjoyed the meal.

  ‘I feel so good now,’ he said in the end. ‘As if I have become innocent again.’ He burped noisily. ‘Ah, what a feeling! I need to sleep.’ He smiled.

  ‘Sure.’ We both stood up. ‘Please go ahead.’

  ‘Don’t forget to stop by.’ He looked back from the door as I paid the bill. ‘You know where to find me.’

  I nodded.

  After Abdul Karim had returned to the school, I walked down the street. At the crossing I saw a woman sitting with a little boy lying like dead before her. She was weeping inside her veil. Rickshaw-wallahs passed before her, pedestrians passed, looking at her indignantly.

  I had seen her many times before. I had seen her in various places—in front of the mosque, at the market, at the mouth of the refugee camp, at the bus stop, under the flyover, at the yard of the local two-storey Hindu temple. She always wept with the same sadness. Every time I saw her, she had the boy before her. Though I knew he was not dead but only pretending, I gave her a coin and left without question.

  At night I spoke to Nur Hussain. I told him it was my great desire that we invite Abdul Karim to live with us. ‘He is a harmless person, as harmless as a singer could be,’ I told him. ‘He will eat whatever food we have and sleep in the living room. Since he is a wanderer, he does not have any luggage; just a small bag that we won’t even notice. If he lives with the refugees, he will not survive for long. It will be a mistake to let such a visionary person perish. What do you say?’

  Nur Hussain remained silent, which angered me. He could remain silent even in the face of the worst atrocities happening in front of him—such an ignorant, mean, worthless person. Simply irritating. Our country desperately needs people like Abdul Karim—doesn’t he see it? Soon there will be nobody around to give us higher knowledge. For its regeneration a nation actually needs knowledge that is not useful, rather than knowledge that is useful. A nation needs to get back its own heart. Only people like Shah Abdul Karim could bring it back to us.

  It was useless to consult him, not only about the singer, about anything, important or unimportant. He would choose silence over words, as if he never spoke. He would look into my face, as if I would not have asked the question if I had not had it answered already.

  He did not care.

  He had no feelings.

  19

  A Guest in the House

  Abdul Karim loved sleeping on the couch, leaving his bag and the guitar next to his pillow. He relished the tea that Nur Hussain or I made in the morning and ate with great appetite every item of food we put on his plate. We would leave him at the flat when we went to work for Moina Mia. Upon our return, we would find the flat clean and tidy. He wanted to prove his appreciation by providing small services to us. I would turn to Nur Hussain and say, ‘See, I told you. He’s a person with a conscience. He knows how to be courteous. How many people of this stature do you see around here, and how many of them are as humble as he is?’

  Frequently he entertained us with new songs. In one he said: How shall we escape the claws of misfortune? The snake is there, waiting; and the rhinoceros, its rocky mouth eager to strike. And in another: What evil is this? The heart, stiff, and memory, mechanical, the ceremony of formal feeling is over; what continues is eternity with its great pain. He had an outstanding ability to create serious songs with very ordinary words. In his voice those ordinary words became musical; they came out of the gloom that we had imposed upon them due to the sad life around us and became beautiful. He played the guitar with one hand, while with the other he slapped his forehead, sometimes also hit his chest, as if by torturing himself he might evaporate the expanse of sorrows inside him. A few times he woke up early and left the flat f
or the refugee camp, to see his new friends there, to sing for them under the morning sky. By singing and talking he was able to erase much of the dismal mood of the day. He forgot to return home at night; he returned only when we went to look for him. He saw us and instantly remembered he was living with us. We could tell by looking at his face he had not eaten the whole day. That his friends always fed him was a lie. At home we would give him food, and then he would take up his guitar to sing for us out of gratitude. Nur Hussain or I would take the guitar away and prepare the sofa for him. ‘You are tired,’ we would say. He would fall asleep within minutes.

  Obviously, Nur Hussain and I did not speak to each other a lot. I should say, we did not speak much outside of our business needs or small everyday matters. He knew his job and I knew mine. We trusted each other so much that only silent physical presence was sufficient for our communication. But he spoke a lot with Abdul Karim, and I guess he also bonded deeply with him within a short time. Together they ate food and then drank tea sitting in the living room. They went out together; from the window I could see them walk side by side, talking, stopping to look at each other. I would see them until they were lost behind the walls or the trees. At night sometimes Abdul Karim started a song, and when he came back to the intro, Nur Hussain added his voice. He swung his head while following the notes of the songs. The songs seemed to pierce his heart.

  I guess Shah Abdul Karim gave him what I could not. He gave him ease and friendship. He made Nur feel at home in my home. By contrast, I crushed him under the obscene necessities of life. I reduced him into a shiny coin on which I also engraved my own portrait. He was mine, I thought. His energy was mine. His words, his silence were mine. His future was mine. It was my future now. He had nothing for himself. He would be mine, the same stuff, the same creature, the same nothingness, as long as I needed him. Probably that was not what he had expected when he came here. Probably he was at a loss with me, and he did not know how to get out. If he knew how to get out, he would not have come to me in the first place. All these things made him silent around me. At the same time I also did not know what else to do, what else a person could do at such moments.

  I had lost much of my self-respect. If there was an accident in Moina Mia’s meeting, say an explosion, and I got killed, newspapers in the country would print features on how a journalist ended up accumulating wealth from the most destitute in society. They would print my picture with a caption: ‘The most unpredictable end of a very predictable man.’ That was not what I had thought my life would be like. I had never thought that one day I would have to accept myself in such a pitiful condition.

  What was happening to me?—I asked myself this when Nur Hussain was not around. I sat before the window and thought how rude and impolite I was to him. It was almost indecent. My responsibility was to give him courage, to inspire him, to make a better human being of him, or at least to try to make him explore his potential so that he could decide his own goals. In times of such crisis we needed to cultivate human virtues with more perseverance than ever; we needed compassion and generosity. Instead, I seemed resolved to do the opposite.

  Abdul Karim lived with us for only three weeks. He behaved strangely in his last few days. He began cooking for us, gave us some beautiful advice about everyday life, as though he was our father, who had just rediscovered his role after an early retirement.

  ‘Do not burden yourself with problems that you do not understand,’ he said. ‘If you do, then only the problems win. Human life becomes a tragedy.’ Or this one: ‘No man is more of a stranger to you than you are to him. Receive him with trust.’ Or even this one, which he said taking us by the arms: ‘Look beyond your self-importance and pain. You will know yourself better.’

  I could not stop myself from asking him about Sheikh Mujib. But he said: ‘Love or hate for Sheikh Mujib will not end this. Who is Sheikh Mujib? Is he imperishable? Can he tell when seeds will wake up, and the sky will shine? The answer to hunger is in our hearts, not in the food. It is not in politics; but in our feeling, divinity, in the very essence that makes us human. Our hearts have to cry to end our tears. Our minds have to be free to end this suffering.’

  I understood there was a sphere beyond politics and famine where he lived as a man free from illusions. When he sang, he came down from that sphere, became an everyman, soiled his feet, and crawled in the dirt willingly, after which he raised himself again to his ideal dwelling place. There was no government in that sphere. It was not cluttered with human complaints and sighs.

  One day he got up early in the morning, drank tea with us, gathered his bag and guitar, and sang one last song, before stepping out. ‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘Don’t look for me.’ That was all.

  20

  You Give Me Good Money, I Give You Good Publicity

  Moina Mia told us one evening that Sheikh Mujib was not satisfied with the way the Awami League was handling the party’s publicity. It was not that the Awami League could not define itself in the post-liberation period, or that it did not know what to do with the liberated country after fighting to liberate it. The Awami League had always been the Awami League—an up-to-date political party with a clear vision and objectives. In fact, it had recently taken on a long-term key project called ‘Bread, Water and Electricity’, which was going to play an extraordinary role in the party’s rejuvenation. A group of wise men from within the party had already been selected to execute it. However, the party’s traditional publicity tactics were ineffective in conveying its message in these new times. As a result, it was facing a potential danger.

  The responsibility of helping the party grow, and of keeping its popularity alive, lay, first, with the central leaders, then, in descending order, with the regional leaders, the local leaders, and, finally, and most importantly, at the microcosmic level, with individuals like us who worked directly with the people. We needed to serve the party’s interest more aggressively and, if necessary, invest more time into it. Moina Mia believed that we needed to find a way to engage and convince a particular section of the populace so that it did not get the opportunity to damage ‘our unity’ and harm our nation with its ‘anti-people agenda’. ‘Nothing is wrong with the country,’ Moina Mia said with emphasis, ‘but Sheikh Mujib is losing popularity among the people because of these naysayers. They are tainting his name by saying that he is not relevant to our future. They say this because he fought to liberate the country while they opposed liberation, and because they want to plunder us and control our lives. They say food aid is not distributed properly, though all aid is evenly distributed, to the last grain. They are torturing people in the villages to force them to relocate to the capital in order to humiliate the government. By showing the world that our capital has an ugly face they want to prove that we have failed in our mission.’

  His voice rose further as he moved on. ‘What about the floods?’ he asked. ‘Did Sheikh Mujib hit the clouds in the sky so that rain came pouring, causing the rivers to overflow? Did he make this summer hot, hotter than all previous summers, so that the crops dried before the harvest was ready? Certain people will actually believe all this. Certain people who admire these heinous conspirators will never accept Bangladesh as a stable nation—not even fifty years after our independence.’

  He looked at Nur Hussain’s Mujib coat and became upset. ‘The coat does not look black,’ he said. ‘It does not look pure black. Have you overused it? Nothing is really useful if it is not pure. Let me give you an example. What do you feel sitting before a colourless sunset—excited? It is not to be seriously admired, is it? If an Awami League representative does not know how to keep his clothes in order, how will people think his party will be able to keep order in the country? We have to be more cautious about everything we do; especially about small details, like wearing a coat, keeping shoes shiny, hanging the portrait of Sheikh Mujib in a spotless and expensive mahogany frame, choosing an effective typographic style for banners, choosing images with warm colours for the po
sters. These are things that are easily overlooked, though they create the first impression.’

  He asked how many coats Nur Hussain had. We said, why, one, was that a problem? ‘Only one?’ He could not believe us. We must buy half a dozen immediately, he said, if possible that day, so that if one was damaged or discoloured or lost, Nur Hussain had another ready to wear to work.

  ‘It is his voice that is important, not the coat,’ I said resolutely. I did not hesitate to argue, as I felt a little bit embarrassed by his interrogation. ‘It is the way he delivers the speech. Everybody can buy a coat, if there is money; but hundreds and thousands of beautiful coats will not make anyone serve the Awami League the way Nur Hussain does.’ I looked at Nur Hussain for support. He was as lifeless as a yellowed picture in a frame. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘coats are worn over the punjabi; they are meant to be discoloured, aren’t they? There is the sun. There is humidity. And a world of dust out there. They cannot glisten all the time, can they?’

  He got my point and brought out some money from the soft interior of his pocket and handed it to me. ‘The purpose of having money is not saving it. It is to complete a job efficiently.’ He asked if we understood what he had just said. We nodded. ‘Good. Also buy a pair of punjabis. A new coat without a new punjabi is meaningless. It means we respect neither the coat nor the punjabi.’