by Ian Wedde
Looking at the photographs of the mill in its glory days, he began to circle an idea. Wasn’t I now about the age my father had been when he worked at the mill? No, I said – he’d have been forty-eight when we arrived there; I was now fifty-nine. Ah, said Mr Qurim, but even so he would have been old enough to be the father of the young men he taught. Qureshi, myself and the others! And so he was – he was like a father to us!
We were drinking tea and eating biscuits. Mr Qurim suddenly put his cup down with a clatter and seized my hand.
‘When did he die, your father? Excuse me for asking?’
‘About twenty years ago.’
‘And your mother? With the smile?’
‘A few years later.’
‘And they remained happy together?’
I told Mr Qurim the story of Chick making lunch three times in a row because, having taken Linda’s and my sandwich plates from the garden back to the kitchen to wash up, he forgot that he’d just made lunch and did it all over again.
‘That was his record – three times.’
‘Of course you and your mother ate it all.’
‘Yes we did. And my mother thanked him and gave him a kiss each time.’
‘And this happened often?’
‘Only once that I know of. But I think his mind was beginning to get tired.’
‘He had a very excellent mind, your father. Exceptional. Make no mistake!’ Mr Qurim gripped my hand. ‘You know, Qureshi and I are fundamentalists. Because of your father.’
I must have looked startled, because Mr Qurim went to great lengths to explain his joke. He lamented the takeover of religious madrasa schools by ‘fanatics’; he complained about the activities of armed Bangla Bhai Islamic militants and, in the same breath, the violence of Bangladesh’s various communist cadres – the PBSP, the CPEB ‘Red Flag’; he poured scorn on the corrupt ruling Bangladesh National Party.
I had the eerie feeling that Mr Qurim was talking to my dead father through me. It was as though he was giving my father an account of himself. I was in a fog of anachronistic patronage and paternalism, lit by flashes of Mr Qurim’s courtesy. Another tray of tea arrived, and Mr Qurim dismissed his weary maid – it was by now about two in the morning. Huron was struggling to stay awake. The racket of traffic and music in the street outside had died down. I guessed Huron’s nephew would be asleep in the back of the car.
‘A fundamentalist,’ explained Mr Qurim, ‘believes in the fundaments. Truth, kindness, honesty. This is not simple.’
I was beginning to get it. Mr Qurim was apologising to me for aspects of life in Bangladesh that he knew my father would have disliked. Rather than agree with him (or my father), I told him how much I admired the social patterning and order I saw around me; I quoted Rubana Huq’s exhortation, ‘We must clean the path.’
‘This is exactly what your father would have said!’ exclaimed Mr Qurim with delight.
There was no escape – I’d become my father, only ten years older. The man who was projecting himself as my son was nearly twenty years older than me. It was time to leave.
Outside on the road, the old man held on to my hand. ‘I won’t let you go!’
We embraced. I promised to send a copy of the photograph of us that Huron had taken in the small, plain room with its pictures of Mr Qurim’s prosperous, modern children and the hajj texts that commemorated his two pilgrimages to Mecca. In the photograph, Mr Qurim is beaming and wide awake; I look knackered, and I seem to be suppressing a phantom twist in my smile.
Mr Qurim was wiping his eyes with one of those pink, rose-scented tissues. ‘Your father was my guru,’ he said as I got into the car. It was one of his twinkly jokes, but he also meant it.
Back in my hotel room, my eyelids sandpapery with tiredness and road dust, I set up my small shrine of objects: the plums Huron had handed me when we parted, the Tk100 upazila document, lunch receipt and picnic-garden tickets. Then I had a good cry. Earlier, in the mill’s archive, where herds of silverfish had fled from the huge album’s pages, I’d photographed the image of my father advancing purposefully with the crowd of eager young men. I brought it up on the screen of my camera. There he was, my father, transformed into a cloudy spectre by the camera’s flash. The lovely old man I’d just visited was about the age my father had been when he died. Mr Qurim was almost old enough to be my father; yet he’d addressed that impatient fundamentalist, my father, through me, his fifty-nine-year-old son.
I took my shrine photograph and then ate the plums. I envied Mr Qurim and Mr Qureshi their time with my father, whom they wouldn’t have known as Chick; but I didn’t envy them his pep-talks on ‘fundaments’ or ‘essentials’. I’d spent much of my life trying to find ways to complicate those, or move past the stubborn non-negotiables that Chick would get peeved about, some of which sheeted back to his subaltern relish for what he called ‘rounded vowels’, low-level residual patronising racism, and his shoulder-chip about education and betterment. I’d spent even more of my life trying to cultivate the irresponsible, contingent, illicit likings of my imagination – partly to rebel, but also to find a way of being at home in myself and in the places where I was living.
I’d also spent quite a bit of my childhood trying to understand why, in contrast to Mr Qurim’s affectionate memory of Mr Wedde, Chick at some fundamental level hadn’t wanted to be a father at all. Recently, I found among his papers a yellowed, water-stained, handwritten ‘Address of Farewell to Mr. F.A. Wedde, B.Com., F.R.A. (NZ), F.C.I.S., Chief Accountant, K.P.M. Ltd., Chandraghona’, dated ‘Feby 17, 1958’. This must relate to the farewell lunch I remember, of which some black-and-white photographs survive. Two-thirds of the way through the beautiful calligraphy of the presentation address, I read the following careful sentences: ‘We have seen you occasionally working late hours in the Office at the cost of your family attachment. This had apparently been possible due to Mrs. Wedde whose inspiration towards your endeavour can not be ignored and we offer our note of felicitations to her.’
Love that is compromised by conditions has to find a way to be unconditional, and I’d got there with my father many years before returning to Bangladesh – many years before his death, for that matter. Now I remember his blue eyes which, after he’d had a few drinks, my mother used to call ‘pee-holes in the snow’; they often watered when he looked at Lindy. I remember his snail’s-pace, mostly inaccurate family stories; his gentle groans when I massaged his sore back in the months before he died. But it was meeting Mr Qurim and seeing my father’s camera-flashed ghost in the Karnaphuli paper mill’s archive that gave me the measure of the gap between sensing that Chick didn’t really want to be a father and loving him anyway.
In some way, I was measuring this gap in my mind the following morning on the way to Bandarban in the Hill Tracts, or puzzling over the way a sense of grief or loss had suddenly transformed into relief about the time I’d photographed the little assemblage of objects in my Chittagong hotel room. After taking the photograph, I’d slept soundly for a couple of hours, and then had woken up feeling blissfully happy, with the pi-dogs yipping in the street outside, and echoes of the dawn muezzin calling to prayer across the city.
In Dhaka, I’d organised a lift to Bandarban through an agent called Hasan Mansur, who ran tours to the coastal Sundarban mangrove forests, ‘domain of the legendary Royal Bengal Tiger’; his son and daughter had a television and film facilities business for wildlife projects. For the equivalent of $US42 I had a permit to enter the Hill Tracts, a lift there and back to Chittagong, and three nights in a bamboo house above the Sangu River. Hasan ran his business from an office on the first floor of the bazaar at the traffic island near my guest house; I made the arrangements there during the hartal of 14 and 15 February as enforcers on scooters and in rickshaws emblazoned with slogans circulated through the mostly empty streets, shouting through loud-hailers. Hasan was unperturbed – he made it clear he had his fix in. Besides, he said, as a journalist, wasn’t I looking for a good st
ory? His own brother had been abducted by tribespeople in the Hill Tracts.
‘Cost a lot of money to get him back. Grade A1 experience for a journalist – give you a real story!’
I got the impression his brother had been in unwise proximity to certain commercial activities in the region. The newspapers had been full of the ongoing skirmishes in the hills – a ‘tribal man’, Ongthoyaiching Marma, had been arrested in Bandarban on 13 February with two AK-47 rifles and 150 rounds – he was selling the weapons to a Chittagong middleman, Nurul Islam, whose clients weren’t specified. There were reports filtering out from Bandarban that the Mru were organising armed resistance to the construction of an eco-park on 5,500 acres of Mru communal land. A Mru rally had been held at Empu Para, thirty-six kilometres from Bandarban. They were protesting the likely eviction of 700 Mru families if the Bangladesh government implemented plans to build the park in Sadar, Roangchhari, Ruma and Lama upazilas.
Of course, this was the story I should have been looking for, not the one about the late-middle-aged man who’d woken up feeling absurdly happy, had said goodbye to Mohammed Humayunkabir Huron over a cup of tea, and driven off across the river towards a childhood memory of woodsmoke-hazed sunset and lanky Mowgli-men playing bamboo pan-pipes.
In the jeep that constituted my lift were two aid workers from Dhaka, Lucy Jenks and Janet Raynor; they’d driven overnight from Dhaka, and were tired and fed up, not least when my ‘permit’ from Hasan Mansur turned out to be worthless. The command post at the Hill Tracts crossing was formidable: there was a fortified lookout with a flag up on the hill, sandbagged gun emplacements by the road, a concrete pillbox, and a heavy metal beam across the road. My worthless piece of paper went up the hill with my passport, and came back down again accompanied by the day’s list of authorisations. I wasn’t on it. Lucy and Janet had the stiff-necked deportment of people close to making a radical suggestion. But, in the euphoria of the previous day at the mill, my mood was invincible. The name on my piece of paper was the same as the one in my passport – and see? The signature there is the same as the one I’ve just entered on the authorisation sheet. And Tk100 for your patience. The lieutenant who’d walked down the hill with the authorisation sheet gave me a look between amused and indignant. Then he went away again with my passport.
When he came back, he gave me the passport and a receipt in Bangla with numerous stamps. Mr Mansur’s driver translated what he said. As I left the country, I was to give this document to the passport control. If I didn’t, I would be arrested. If I’d done anything I wasn’t supposed to, I’d also be arrested when they received the piece of paper. The driver kept a straight face. And thank you, they will buy some cold Coca-Cola with the money.
I didn’t bother trying to unravel the logic of the multi-stamped piece of paper. Some days later, when I did hand it to the official at passport control, he threw it in the bin without looking. That didn’t surprise me. It had done its work. It was just another talismanic object, like the upazila permission of the day before which had allowed Huron, Mr Alam and me to be where we already were, have lunch and then go out on the river of my childhood; and like the ‘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, which had allowed me to meet the ghost of my father face to face in a place I was forbidden to enter, while the mill’s staff were at namaz and the broken-down perimeter fence was unguarded.
Despite my euphoria, many of the photographs I’d taken of the mill are hellish. Almost obscured by stinking smoke, the old wreck looms behind huge rotting stacks of sap-wood timber; yellow chlorine-gas drums spill from a broken brick warehouse; turgid scum swirls downstream from the mill’s pulping discharge. I’d taken the pictures while Mr Alam wasn’t looking – or else with him in them, smiling dutifully, and with something harmless in the background. These images were on a memory chip I’d removed from my camera in the guest-house washroom, replacing it with another on which I then photographed the tea garden, river, bamboo rafts, Mr Qurim, and my hotel-room still-life. Soon to join these were picturesque images of my little creaking bamboo house above the Sangu River, my bamboo-slat bed with its mosquito net, misty views of the forested hills across the river, and photogenic canoes stacked with produce arriving for the market at Bandarban.
To the hellish chip I added images of military watch-towers on hilltops, the military cellphone-jamming installation, and a Danish teak reforestation project in the Manza Reserve which appeared to have a significant military presence associated with it. Military convoys ground up and down the hill. Army helicopters clattered overhead a couple of times a day. There was a deforested saddle up the road from where I was staying where the cellphone jammer didn’t work; there was a sign saying this was an authorised telephoning site, and a steady stream of motorbikes went up there from the village below, watched by a command post on a hill.
Janet Raynor told me that when she worked in Chittagong they used to hear the covered freight trains grinding out of the city marshalling yards at night under army escort with loads of illegally felled teak. NDFB (National Democratic Front of Bodoland) cadres were reported to be active in Bhutan, resisting Indian security forces in the north-east, and they were said to have links with tribal cadres on the Bangladesh side. An Ericsson engineer had been kidnapped near Bandarban the week before. The cadres’ common foe on both sides of the India–Bangladesh border was Bengali settlers operating under the protection of government forces, both Indian and Bangladeshi.
One day, I went for a tramp with a Mru guide called Raoul, whose village abutted the Manza Reserve. We walked through a desolate landscape of cut-over scrub above the Sangu; there were no animals – Raoul said they’d all been eaten long ago, even the monkeys; the snakes, too, he said, but I think he was pulling my leg. Besides, there was nowhere for them to live.
And the forest? Wasn’t it being replanted? In answer, Raoul pointed to burn-off smoke rising from hillsides downriver. We hired a canoe to take us down to the landing at Bandarban; on the way we passed the burn-off hillsides. These were Bengali settlers, not slash-and-burn tribal people. They’d rigged loudspeakers by the burn-off and were blasting Bangla pop songs across the river. Even by Bangladeshi standards, the volume was aggressive. The implication was clear: despite the occasional plantation project such as the Danish one up the hill, much of the former giant bamboo and teak forest was being left fallow for Bengali settlement. There was a large military cantonment in Bandarban; the tension between Bengali and tribal people in the town was low key but obvious. In the street outside the walled madrasa, an elderly mullah was walking along accompanied by a young man carrying an AK47.
Back in Dhaka, talking to Mr Qureshi about this, I encountered a standard strain of Bengali prejudice: the tribal people were primitive; Bengali settlement since the War of Liberation in 1971 was part of an inevitable programme of rural expansion and patriotic reward. Mr Qureshi was one of the most urbane and civilised men I’d ever met, but his discreet racism no longer surprised me. Like his old friend Mr Qurim, he mocked the ‘fundamentalist’ mullahs who were radicalising and in some cases militarising the madrasa. But his disapproval of my trip to the Hill Tracts was clear, if subtle – as was his impatience with armed indigenous resistance.
The disdain of Justina and Parveen back at my little Dhaka guest house was theatrical by comparison. The recycled poultry-food bag in which I’d brought back a woven blanket from the Mru village near the Manza Reserve was ordered from the room by Parveen while she held her nose with one hand and wagged a disapproving finger at me with the other.
The blanket, too, offended her. It wasn’t new, but smelled of the baby who’d been wrapped in it. More offensive to Parveen than the baby’s smell, however, was the object’s cultural significance. Why was I buying this low-value, primitive rubbish? Why not new fabric from Aarong chain, superior quality? Beautiful saris for my wife? Beautiful nakshi kantha
, if I want village craft? Don’t I know famous poem by Jasmuddin, about nakshi kantha?
‘At least we are washing?’
But I took the blanket to my room unwashed. It wasn’t in the least dirty, just a bit faded, with one edge unravelling, and with a faint aroma of baby and wood smoke. The woollen yarn was thick and soft, the weave loose, with faded natural-dye stripes in reds, browns, greys and blues. It was large enough just to cover a double bed. I didn’t want the bright new ones that were being rattled together on looms for the market in Bandarban. I especially didn’t want one of the woven Bible satchels the Baptist missionaries had got the people making. I wanted something that would reach back into the emotional place I’d been allowed to re-enter. I wanted another talisman, a passport to the happiness I’d felt when I woke up after visiting the mill and Mr Qurim. The young Mru woman whose baby was wrapped in the blanket was surprised, and so was Raoul, when I said I’d buy that one. But she was happy to sell it. She wanted Tk250 – about five New Zealand dollars. I gave her Tk300 and still felt like a cheat.
It was too hot to sleep under the blanket, but I kept it across the end of my guest-house bed, and on the chair when I was writing. Every day, when I came back to my room, the blanket had been banished to the cupboard where my suitcase was stored. Parveen and Justina made jokes about it – ‘How was your blanket today?’ ‘Are you missing your blanket?’
But the blanket’s magic was impervious. It was better than a memory. It was much better than the tangled narrative that had knotted up my brain and made me lurch from tears to bliss the day I went back to our old house at Chandraghona. Its supple weave and the soft symmetry of its stripes were more important than the grim images I’d collected on my furtive camera-chip – and more honest, too. What’s more, it had a nice smell. The blanket told me that what I’d gone there to find had nothing to do with writing up the ‘situation’, camouflaging my incoherent need under practical, investigative activity, note-taking, interviewing, press-clipping, research … all I’d really wanted was the simple comfort of coming to terms with a leave-taking – a leaving-home that had happened when I was beginning to leave childhood. Later, the blanket was on our bed in the Wellington home Donna and I occasionally shared with our grown-up, transient boys. These days it’s with us in Auckland and it still reads well; it’s simple.
