by Ian Wedde
I think it was a desire to ‘sweep the path’ – to find Parveen’s kind of order and value in the chaotic and emotional circumstances of my return to Chandraghona – that prompted me to lay out five objects on the worn table in my Chittagong hotel room. I didn’t know what to do with them. I’d laid them out there, and they were asking me for a ritual response – some kind of large meaning out of modest or even trivial components, like the shapely fan of peeled carrot sticks on the woven cane platter of the kid who ran along beside your rickshaw. I felt emotional about the objects on the table, and half-arsed shy at the same time – as you can when alone in a room which someone may enter unexpectedly and catch you stifling your sobs. Not for the first time that day, I’d had to sponge up tears with Bangladesh’s ubiquitous tissues.
The last time I’d been handed a tissue was earlier in the day in the archive of the ruinous paper mill at Chandraghona, a time warp of mid-1950s optimistic industrialisation and modernisation that looked ghoulishly prescient when held up against its ‘developing nations’ ideological successor in 2005. Here, in a dim room whose paper files of company records and old-fashioned photo albums were themselves museum artefacts, I’d seen a faded black-and-white photograph of my ghostly father in an eager crowd of people on the banks of the Karnaphuli River, in what was then East Pakistan, in 1954.
As I’d sniffled modestly into my rose-scented tissues, I’d also seen, beyond the archive’s window, yellow, rusting, 44-gallon drums of chlorine gas spilling from the broken-down brick entrance to a warehouse. The gas was used in the pulp-bleaching process: it was modern technology in 1954; now it’s banned almost everywhere. It had been a by-product of the rayon mill nearby, but the rayon mill closed down and now the paper mill had to import its chlorine gas, which diminished its already minimal economic viability. Out the window I’d also seen the armed guard in his watchtower by the mill perimeter lean his ancient .303 rifle against the wall of his lookout and climb down for midday namaz. The imam was calling from the mill’s mosque, and everyone with me in the archives room politely took their leave and left me with my ghostly father and my pink, tear-soaked tissues.
Earlier, I’d looked at well-preserved pulp rollers, the very best in their day, 1953, the year the mill was commissioned. Some of them were working perfectly – the great machines looked like museum specimens of industrial revolution, with grease-nipples and shining brass handles. Down the end of the production line, where the pulp emerged as paper and was guillotined into sheets, were men with racing hands and strangely lifted elbows who could count bales of 500 or 1,000 sheets with fingers that repetition had made infallible; they were intricately callused from a million paper-cuts.
Finally, getting a grip on myself, I rearranged the objects on the Chittagong hotel table so they’d fit in a landscape-format photograph, and I took their picture. The flash and the bare room’s single fluorescent light gave the picture a faded look, like the photographs in the archive. I’d been calling this ‘research’ for weeks, but it was really an emotional solution. I needed to stop these things from becoming as ephemeral as they really were and had been fifty years ago, when the tree that the plums in the photograph had come from was planted by my mother in the bare red dirt at the front of our new house on the hill above the Karnaphuli River.
The resulting photograph was a peculiar kind of still-life. Equally peculiar was a portrait-format photograph of a narrow doorway obscured by a grubby rayon curtain, with the sign ‘Room No.1’ above it, which I’d taken earlier in the day. Room No.1 had been Dave’s and my bedroom, and our mother had planted the plum tree outside it.
Though not as neat as the Bangladeshi genius for organising objects would have made it, my clumsy still-life was a small homage to that frugal genius and the hope it kept transmitting to me while I was there – hope that I might understand more than I deserved, and that I might lay the petulant, unhappy, introspective ghost of myself at age ten.
The door’s curtain was drawn out of modesty. It was both somebody’s bedroom and decrepit. It was also – I would subsequently find out – the site of a labour union scam. The union was standing over the mill’s management, and obliging it to over-staff and accommodate non-working families in company houses. Notwithstanding its rich secret life, including its time as the bedroom door Dave and I had closed obediently in order to make our nocturnal exit by the window, the door was another clue. Its sign’s odd precision (there was, after all, only one other door, which had been our parents’ bedroom door) shows how that cultural habit of systematic neatness can also generate loony bureaucratic pedantry, with proliferating signatures, stamps, baksheesh and fee-skimming. Its appearance of bureaucratic probity may conceal a scam. It can be at once frugal and the generator of surreally organised chaos. It was this that had both delighted and enraged my father many years ago. At Ekushey lunch back in Dhaka, Mr Qureshi had hinted politely that Chick had hospital-passed his crusade against Chittagong dockside ticket-clipping to the young Qureshi, who’d then, at some peril, had to confront ‘miscreants’, including local politicians and gangsters.
The still-life objects on the table in the Chittagong hotel room included four plums from the fifty-year-old tree. After photographing them, I ate them, one by one, and flicked the stones out the window into a small garden next to the hotel. Perhaps they’d germinate there. They’d been collected by M.D. Humayunkabir Huron, who cooked at a Thai restaurant in Chittagong and night-portered the desk at my hotel. He’d agreed to come as an interpreter on my trip from Chittagong to Chandraghona (we had to drive in his nephew’s car as the river was now too silted for boats), and when we got back to the hotel in the early hours of the following morning he gave me the plums, washed and wrapped in a tissue (of course).
The other objects included a carefully unenthusiastic ‘Permission of Visit’ letter in English from Kazi Manower Hossain, the Deputy Chief of Personnel (R&T) ‘For Chief of Personnel’, Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation. Though the head office in Dhaka would have struggled to find a lower order of management willing to risk committing this unconvincing ‘permission’ to paper under the corporation’s letterhead, I knew the lengths that my ally, Mr Qureshi, had had to go to in order to obtain it. I knew he’d been rebuffed humiliatingly several times, but had finally got the corporation’s Secretary to fix it. I didn’t ask what kind of debt he might have incurred; he wouldn’t have told me, anyway. The letter arrived dramatically in a taxi the night before I was to get the early-morning train to Chittagong. Mr Qureshi rang me at the guest house around midnight to make sure it had reached me.
‘Give my regards to the desk,’ he said dryly over the phone, referring to the photograph of him and my father in the room of heavy teak desks where they worked; my father’s was inlaid with a large brass KPM plaque. He clearly didn’t rate my chances of meeting the person who now sat behind it.
The letter was cautiously cc’d to Managing Director, Karnaphuli Paper Mills Ltd., Chandraghona, Rangamati. It allowed me to present myself for permission to enter the mill site for one day only between 09-2-04 and 24-2-05.
Huron’s teenage nephew drove at breakneck speed along the truck-clogged road from Chittagong to Chandraghona – the road hadn’t been there when we lived up the river in the 1950s. From time to time, when I could get my eyes off the road and the Bangla pop-music-blaring buses that tore towards us, I caught glimpses of the river. I began to enter a strange time warp. I recognised the red-flowered trees everywhere – ‘cotton trees’, said Huron; a bazaar street of colourful cushions; the narrow side road to Chandraghona paved with reddish, brick-chip cement, another colour from my childhood.
Supported by Huron’s voluble spiels, the letter was good enough to get us past one army and two police checkpoints; the police looked at me sceptically and asked to see my camera. We arrived at the mill. Beyond the high, crumbling walls, topped by razor wire and eaten into by ancient tree roots, I could see the familiar and not-familiar vista of rusted and collapsing indus
trial rooftops, the remains of the original Alvar Aalto ‘Finnish father of modernism’ buildings. My grown-up eyes could see it for what it was, the literal, almost banal wreck of the 1950s dream of modernity that had also commissioned the Louis Khan parliament buildings at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in Dhaka, but at the same time a strange, anachronistic orienteering was taking place in my mind.
The river was over to my right, somewhere; the mill in front; there was a road that skirted the crumbling perimeter wall and descended into a shallow valley. I knew we had to drive along there, and that we would find some hills rising between us and the river. Halfway up one of these hills would be a large, isolated tree with a steep road going under it to the summit. That was where I had to go: the ‘penthouse-like’ window ledge was there.
Somewhere around the bottom of the hill there would be some two-storey, semi-detached houses; we used to live in one of them when we first arrived, when we were confined to the house during the ‘troubles’. Also at the bottom of the hill would be Robert and Magdalena Lübker’s house with the schoolroom. The brown river with its slow bamboo rafts would be flowing between the hills which, on the far side, rose towards the Hill Tracts.
The letter wrangled by Mr Qureshi got the plausible Huron through the heavily guarded gate of the mill for long enough to ring the general manager and make it face-savingly impossible for him to turn us away – though, needless to say, he hadn’t seen a copy of the letter. But Mir Muzaffar Ali was a very nice man; and even nicer once he’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t a journalist but a sentimental traveller. We had tea and biscuits, and I showed him the album of my father’s photographs that I’d brought with me. He knew of Mr Qureshi, not just because of his long career with successive incarnations of the old Pakistan Development Corporation, but on account of his articles on popular music and film. Remembering Mr Qureshi’s droll ‘Give my regards to the desk’, I noticed that it was still there, in the room where I was having tea with Mr Ali – I seemed to have stepped into the photograph of my father with his trainee team.
The third object on the table in my Chittagong hotel room was a multi-stamped and -signed permission in Bangla which Huron had procured under duress from an official of Rangamati upazila in Chandraghona. For Tk100, this impressive piece of paper did give me permission to be there from the inside, as it were. It at least gave us permission to have lunch at the KPM guest house on the hilltop where our old house was crumbling away, since the manager of the guest house, who turned out to be a functionary of the labour union, would not serve it until he knew we were allowed to be there and were not journalists sniffing after the housing scam which had transformed Dave’s and my old bedroom into Room No.1.
The fourth item was a receipt for the lunch, signed by the union guy running the guest house. There were three people having lunch: me, Huron and Jahangir Alam, the General Manager of Administration and Personnel at the mill. We had a curry potato and dhal soup, curried river fish (presumably from upriver of the mill’s toxic discharge), curried goat, mixed vegetable bhaji, and sweet mushti dhoy with chai to finish.
Mr Alam was great company. He’d escorted me around the mill and introduced me to the chief chemist, Dr Kshudiram Bhowmick, who showed me the R&D lab of ancient pipettes and wooden benches. When I asked him, he cheerfully agreed that the mill still used chlorine gas in its processes; Mr Alam gave me a sharp look, but then agreed somewhat hesitantly to take me to the archives, where I saw the energetic ghost of my father walking pugnaciously forward with the crowd of young men. It was Mr Alam who passed me tissues there; he in turn had been handed them to give me by the woman chemist whose idea it was to get out the huge old photo albums in the archive; she’d smacked them to make the silverfish run from the pages. In the album I also saw Dave and me at a crowded public event commemorating something – there were gymnasts and contortionists, and I remembered the marquee where the cook had been preparing the enormous pilau I’ve spent my life trying to repeat. In the photograph, my plump face is bisected by owlish glasses; I have my mouth sullenly clamped shut on the German teeth braces.
After namaz prayers were finished, Huron, his nephew and I, with Mr Alam riding shotgun, drove up a completely familiar (but much smaller) road around a hairpin bend that was like a comforting fold in my mind, but now overgrown with immense, unfamiliar trees, and arrived on a hilltop with our old house straight ahead. The mill’s general manager Hans Meyer had once stepped out into the road with an upraised hand to stop my father speeding around the hairpin in one of the company’s clapped-out jeeps – ‘Too fast, Mr Wedde!’ Dave and I had been whooping with excitement, but we shut up as Chick, red-faced, and cursing under his breath, attempted a hill start with no handbrake while Meyer looked on. The trees my mother had planted were grown up and huge – some of the ones I walked through may even have replaced hers. But I remembered the out-of-control bougainvillea, the mynah birds and crows that were busy underneath the trees; and the plum tree I knew at once was Linda’s.
Mr Alam was boarding in our old house, in the room once occupied by my parents, and he went back to his family in Chittagong each Thursday night, returning to work on Sunday. He was moved by my fifty-nine-year-old’s retro-pilgrimage, and at the same time nervous, I realised later, of the house’s present secret. I saw him being harangued by the mill’s union rep outside the general manager’s offices, but he was making the man laugh and everybody greeted him affectionately as we did the rounds of the mill’s crumbling buildings. I imagine he was telling the union guy that I was a harmless sentimentalist who wanted to shed tears over his long-ago childhood.
He introduced me to some very old men who had known, or who claimed to remember, my father. My father was an energetic man who liked to talk to people. He walked fast. He was a kind man. He looked hard at people and scared them. He had two little boys, white-haired ones – they ran around all over the place like little goats, with no shirts on.
And since we were now completely legal as a result of the impressive upazila permission, Mr Alam and I obtained the fifth item, which was four Tk2 tickets to the Boroi Chari picnic tea garden between Chandraghona and the Kaptai dam. Here, listening to Bengali pop songs blasting out over the coloured plastic chairs and tables, we drank sweet tea, nibbled on even sweeter andosha, and then went out on the river in the same kind of beautifully curved double-ender sampan with a creaking scull-oar at the stern that had plied the huge brown river of my childhood.
‘This is your Karnaphuli,’ said Huron, and took a photo of me in the bow of the boat, with Mr Alam’s jug ear sticking in from the left. I have a look on my face halfway between sooky and bewildered, as if I’d like to ask Huron to pass the tissues again but can’t quite work out why, specifically, this time, I feel the way I do.
We went for a walk in the tea plantation across the river. Looking back, I could see the mill’s smoke rising into a humid sunset. We were going to give Mr Alam a lift back to his family in Chittagong, and I knew he was keen to go. But he didn’t rush me. He, Huron and Huron’s nephew stood on the river bank by the waiting sampan; I dithered for a while among the tea bushes. A bird was singing in the big shade trees above the plantation. It was a bulbul – I remembered its name partly because of a song Chick used to sing in Chandraghona when we were kids, one he’d learned in the Army: ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’.
The sons of the Prophet are brave men and bold
And quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
Was Abdul Abulbul Amir.
I was moved as much by my companions’ courteous sympathy and patience as by the photograph that had given me such a shock in the ruined paper mill’s archive – my father, his bent smile and intense gaze, always going somewhere else.
The blanket
In the course of talking to Mr Alam and his boss Muzaffar Ali, I’d found out that another of my father’s team from the 1950s was still alive – Mr K.R. Qurim. Mr Qureshi had talked about him back in Dhaka,
but he’d lost touch and hadn’t seen him for years. The enterprising Huron spent half an hour on the phone at the guest house where we had lunch, and tracked Mr Qurim down. We drove at high speed past swerving headlights and through crescendos of passing horns, and arrived back at Chittagong around ten at night.
We dropped Mr Alam off at his family home, and then went in search of Mr Qurim’s address. His house was in an old part of Chittagong, in a maze of narrow streets on a low hillside. It was by now the hour before midnight, and the street was busy and crowded with roadside food stalls. Most of them seemed to be playing competing music through tinny speakers. Huron went to check we’d found the right place, and then came back to get me.
We took our shoes off at the street door, which opened directly into a small reception room. Mr Qurim was here to greet us – a short, bespectacled, beaming haji with the white, moustache-less beard. We shook hands formally, and then he uttered a cry halfway between a laugh and a sob, and clutched me in a close embrace.
‘Mr Wedde!’
I wasn’t sure if he was embracing me or my father.
Then we sat side by side on a sofa and began to talk. There were religious texts in frames on the wall, some wooden folk-art birds, embroidered flower arrangements and some photographs of Mr Qurim’s family. He lived alone, with a maid to clean and cook for him. His wife had died long ago, and his children were in America and Kuwait. One daughter was a doctor, the other a businesswoman. One of his sons was also in business, the other taught in a university.
Unprompted, Huron went out to the car and returned with the album of my father’s photographs. We looked at them – Mr Qurim remembered all the people by name. He asked cautiously about his old friend Mr Qureshi, who’d become important and influential before retiring; I got the impression this had required some political skills which Mr Qurim treated with silent deference and a show of ordering tea.
