by Tahmima Anam
I’m home now and I’ve got everything. Because Pahari’s dead and they paid me off. I’m the greedy bastard now. I’m the one who isn’t the same. The old me would’ve stayed, maybe made sure Pahari got his proper burial, maybe I wouldn’t even have taken their dirty money, maybe I would’ve made a stink about it, but soon as they handed me that envelope I was gone. Malek told me the sheikh was getting rid of foreman. We shouldn’t have been up there, not without better safety equipment. It’s not something they can cover up, like the boys who jump because they miss their mamas and can’t take another day. We were up there for an hour; lots of people saw, real people who matter. ‘We can make our demands,’ Malek said, ‘ask for better pay, overtime and a good place to sleep.’
But I didn’t care about any of that. Because when I was going to die, when I was hanging up there with the storm in my face, all I could think about was my kid. My kid, walking around with no memory of a father, a kid who would look at himself in the mirror and not know where his face came from. Who knows what Megna had told him, though if she said bad, it would all be true, because I was a bastard for letting it come into the world without a name. Now I want it all, I want my fridge and my socks and my name and Megna, my little piece of heaven, and I’m coming to get it.
II I Am a Doorway Man
I am a doorway man. I sit in the doorway and people come. In the morning, they tell me the gossip. So-and-so’s wife left him. Lost all his money gambling and she buggered off. Cup of tea and we talk politics. I’m a big man now, the parties are after me – who will I join? Awami League, BNP? They want me, they want my money, my sway with the village. I sit in the doorway while they kiss my ass. I tell the mollahs to go to hell, none of that fake Goddery. I’ve seen God, I tell them. He’s made of sand and he spat right in my eye.
My story gets bigger with every lip it crosses. First I’m up fifty storeys, then a hundred. Two hours up on that balcony. No six. Ten. Hanging by a rope. Upside down. His forehead was lucky, otherwise he would’ve been dead like the other guy.
Even Morshed is sucking up. Morshed, who took two acres from my uncle to export me to Dubai, lining his pockets with the money of every SOB who wants to go to foreign. Fat from the stink of the desperate. Now he says, let’s be partners, I’ll give you ten per cent. If I haggle with him, I can get fifty out of him, no problem. But I’m not going to dirty my hands any more. I didn’t even answer the letters from the gang, Bride and Groom both finished, now they’re building a golf club on a fake island, sand they’re getting from the sea. That life is over. Pahari’s dead and I have his blood money, and now I’m gonna sit here in my doorway and let the people come to me.
After all the visiting in the morning, I take a walk around the village. I see the chillies like red lipstick around the borders of people’s houses. I see the rice, dark green, then yellow. I walk around the mosque but I don’t go inside; if it’s there to bring me peace, I don’t deserve it.
I walk to the market to take a look. It’s winter now and all the interesting things are out of the ground. Things I could only have with my eyes before, now going into my belly. Wife is thrifty, she doesn’t like it. I gave her some of the money – only a little – and instead of having a party like I told her, invite everyone and slaughter a goat, she bought a heifer and a bull. There’s milk in my tea every morning. Rest of the milk she sells on, and the bull she’s fattening – Eid comes she’s going to sell it and buy two more. I rile her up, say I’m going to slaughter it myself, what she’s gonna do? I’ll feed the whole village, the beggars will come to me for scraps, I’ll be the king, no more dreams of hanging by my fingers to that balcony, Pahari about to marry his Christian girl, falling like a pebble from the sky.
After lunch, I sleep. No one bothers me, telling me feed the cow, fetch the dinner, dig out the vegetables. I sleep for two, three hours. When I wake up they’re at the doorway again, telling me how brave I was, how lucky.
Only my mother isn’t happy. ‘A son,’ she keeps on saying, ‘it’s nothing without a child. No, I won’t stop nagging. Divorce that darkie, you don’t need her any more. Find another one. Fair, young. She’ll give you a son by next spring and I can die in peace.’
I won’t. At night after she gives me the dinner, Shathi listens from outside until my plate is clean. Then she comes, pours a bowl of water over my hands, passes me a bar of soap. She dries my hands with the end of her sari. Then she eats alone. In the bed I can hear her breathe, her sigh as she rolls from one side to another, trying not to disturb me while the blood stirs in her. She wants to be touched. Even though she’s skinny and from the looks of it there’s nothing but bones to her, I know she has blood, I know her blood wants to be moved, circled around, so she knows she’s a woman. My hand reaches out to touch her, but I whip it back. There’s nothing for me in that body, no comfort. My hand moves again, floating across the valley between us. I reach out and put my hand on her hip. She lies very still but I can hear a tiny breath escape from her lips. My hand gets heavy on her, like it’s going to stay there, and then I can feel myself about to shift, nudge myself a bit closer to her, and Pahari and Megna come back to me, and the moment is poisoned. I push her, rough. ‘Move to your side,’ I say, soothed when I am cruel, then I turn around, I ignore the deep breath she is trying to suppress, the tiny moonsliver of a cry.
Friday and I’m walking around the village and this time I think I’m not going to avoid the mosque. Too early for the prayers, grounds are empty. I go around the side and enter the small door at the back. This mosque was built a long time ago. It was tiled in blue and white, once, before people picked off the tiles and stuck them above their own doors. There was a tiny room at the back where Megna had lived with her mother. The mosque-cleaner and her daughter. They came to this village when Megna was a just a baby. I go inside now, pulling away the thin curtain over the door. I’m waiting to see the cot, the calendar of Ganesh her mother hung under the window. She had wandered into the village and said her husband had died, there was no one to take care of her, and the imam at the time took her in, said the room was empty and she could have it.
What did I expect to find? Megna’s mother, the room exactly as I remembered? It’s empty, not a mattress or a scrap of clothing. Damp on the walls and ceiling like it’s gonna fall down. I put my hand on the wall and paint comes off easy. The way Megna had opened her legs for me, the little slut. My mind goes back to all the things we did in that room while her mother was out sweeping the mosque or planting beans in the small plot in the front. At night, I would knock on the window and she would crawl out of the bed she shared with her mother and we would lie down under the tamarind tree and touch each other like it was the end of the world.
I’m dreaming so hard I don’t hear the mullah until he’s clearing his throat and spitting a big one just next to my foot. I turn around and he’s pulling his beard and looking at me, and next thing I know he’s holding his arms out for me and I guess it slipped my mind everyone’s sweet as candy to me now, so I don’t know what to do, then I remember, I play my part and we do the three-time hug you only do on Eid with your brother. I’m a big man now, everyone wants to be related. Now he’s looking at the patch of paint that’s come off on my hand and he’s saying, Shame, that, mosque in such bad shape, you remember this place used to be much nicer. Take a cup of tea with me, son.’
We go to the tea stall, and the tea-wallah pulls out his best stool. I offer it to the mullah and I squat on my heels. We drink. ‘Village is changing,’ he says. ‘Boys are going out, they’re not coming back.’
‘Everybody wants to go to foreign,’ I say, already tired of squatting.
He slurps his tea with a loud sucking sound. ‘They leave the women behind and that’s no good, is it?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Times like this, mosque is what keeps a village together.’
I nod, thinking, how much longer will I have to stay here? It takes him five minutes maybe to finish his tea, slurpi
ng and sucking, slurping and sucking. Finally he finishes and he stands up. I stand up too, my knees complaining. Then he says, ‘Mosque was a place you spent a lot of time in, son.’
He looks at me and for a long time he doesn’t say anything, and then I realise he’s telling me he knows I used to sneak in here, knows about me and Megna, then he says, ‘We have a fund, you know, mosque fund. Been saving for six years, all the gone-away boys have been sending money.’ Then he holds his hands behind his back like he’s being arrested and I know what I have to do. I say, ‘I’ll pay. Whatever’s left, I’ll pay.’
I let him grab me again, even harder this time, so I can smell the flower oil in his hair and feel the sand of his beard. ‘Sobhan Allah! You are a true son of the village.’ Then he says, like I just asked him a question: ‘That woman who used to clean here, she died. Typhoid, I think. Daughter disappeared, too.’ I’m thinking, the bastard was waiting to tell me that. He knew all along that’s what I wanted, some information about Megna, but waited till I’d coughed up the money, and then he dropped it on me.
I can’t sleep that night. For the first time I wonder exactly what happened to Megna after I left for Dubai. Like a film I’m seeing it: I leave, I don’t even say goodbye. Her stomach starts to give up its secret. She tells her mother. Disgusting girl, her mother says. And then what happens? They leave the village together? They pack up their things and take a bus – where? Who will take them in? Who can I ask, I don’t know.
The next day, early, before the mullah has called the village to pray, I pack a bag. Shathi watches me, doesn’t say a word. I show her where I put the money, locked in a trunk under the bed. Key is on a string around my neck, hanging next to my heart. I take the string, pass it over her head. Like we’re getting married all over again, garlands and all that. She touches my feet. She’s like a wife in an old movie, black and white, doesn’t say anything or ask any questions, just accepts I’m a bastard and doesn’t flinch.
I still have to face my mother. I can’t think what to say, so I tell her the truth. ‘I’m going to look for Megna,’ I say. She slaps her forehead, like I knew she would. ‘I told you find a new wife, not dig up a girl you threw away.’
I stand quiet, knowing she has to get her words out before I can explain. She stands up. I think she’s about to hit me, like before when I was always getting into the sugar, when my father was working in the railroad and we had sugar. ‘Do you know where she could have gone?’ I ask, thinking, if she’s going to hit me anyway, I might as well get some information out of her.
‘Girl disappeared the day you left for foreign, no one saw her again.’
Her mother?
‘Dead. They said she swallowed rat poison.’
‘Mullah told me she caught the typhoid.’
‘Same thing, whatever. You’ll never find her.’
‘Megna told me her father’s people were from the south. Near Chittagong.’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, but then she looks down at her feet and I know she’s lying.
‘You know something. Tell me. Tell me.’ I’m raising my voice.
She puts up her hand up like she’s going to slap me and then she says, ‘Village is called Chondonpahar. She had an uncle. Rest I don’t know.’
I’m sorry for shouting. I’m going to touch her feet, ask for forgiveness. Then she says, ‘You going to leave me with that darkie again?’
For a change I decide to do something nice. I grab my mother’s hand. I take her across to Shathi, who is putting straw into the fire. ‘I’ve given the key to Shathi,’ I say. ‘Go on, show her the key.’ Shathi takes the key out of her blouse and holds it up but she looks away, so that Amma can’t see the grain of smug on her lips.
‘You see? She holds the money. The food, everything. You need something, you ask her. You need medicine, she gets it for you. If she wants, she can throw you out. Remember that.’
Amma is so shocked she doesn’t notice I’m touching her feet and then I’m gone.
Before I go I take some money out of the trunk and leave it with the mullah. A deal is a deal, even if I didn’t get shit in return.
It’s late by the time I leave. I take a rickshaw to the bus station on the other side of the market. Bus will take me to the ferry, ferry to the other side of the river.
*
On the road either side of me, all the paddy fields are flooded. Why, I ask the boy sitting next to me on the bus. He’s hungry, I can tell by the way he stares at my throat, like he wants to take a bite out. I haven’t seen winter rice for ten years, but I know what it looks like, yellow and brown and green. And it’s dry by now, January when it’s cold and there’s no rain. ‘That’s not rice,’ the boy says, with a big sag of his shoulder. ‘It’s shrimp.’
I look closer. The water’s dark. I try to smell it. The little worms are crawling around in there like a giant itch.
The bus stops and the boy gets up. ‘I work here,’ he says. ‘Lot of money in shrimp, if you want I can talk to my boss.’
I was wrong. Boy wasn’t hungry, he was looking at my throat thinking, this old bastard needs a job.
I ask a few other people about the shrimp. They say the water’s gone salty because the shrimp like it that way. I wonder if that’s why Shathi’s been complaining about the water in our well. I don’t believe her. I think it’s as sweet as ever. I tell her, you want to know salty? Stand out in the desert with a basket of sand on your head, then you’ll know what salty tastes like – your sweat will make your lips shrink from your teeth. Salt is the sea pounding against the shore, mocking you when you’re so dried out you can’t swallow and there’s an hour to go before the lunch bell. Salt is the tear that humiliates your cheek when you want a woman and you can’t go home.
But maybe she’s right, maybe the village water is salty and my tongue doesn’t know the difference. Another thing those bastards took from me.
An old woman sits down next to me, smelling of mustard oil. After Bagerhat the road is smooth. She takes out a triangle of paan and stuffs it into her mouth. A few minutes later she’ll be leaning over me and spitting out the window. Bus speeds up and I’m feeling the wind in my cheeks, and definitely I think I’m gonna find Megna. Somewhere out there she’s been waiting for me with my kid. I’m thinking this and I drift off with my head against the top of the window until sure enough, the old woman wakes me up, sticks her head out into the road, and hacks a mouthful of orange sludge into the shrimpy winter air.
I reach Barisal and from there I take another bus. We cross the Meghna on a ferry in the middle of the night. It’s cold and I’m wrapping my arms around myself. I fall asleep with my bag tied around my leg, and when the sun rises, I see the land is different, the trees clumped together, the road going up and down, dark hills on either side. I get off the bus and climb into a rickshaw and head for the village. Now it’s early morning and there’s a thin fog making everything sad, and for the first time I wonder if I won’t find her after all, or, worse, if she’s married to some other bastard and he’s raising my kid.
Here I come, I say to her. I’m your hero. Bollywood chorus follows me everywhere I go. Clapping and an army of dancers. I’ll give you all my money, my sins will be forgiven, we’ll live together in peace with our little magic seed.
The village is at the end of a narrow dirt road. A cluster of houses in a circle, mud and tin shacks. Villages like this all up and down the country. I’m noticing now the things wife does to make it nice at home, the little border of henna bushes and the pattern she drew on the frame of our door. Without it, a place can look empty, like no one’s ever loved it, just used the land for food, the cheap air to keep you from death, the water to drink and clean behind your ears so you can pray to God without filth in your folds.
I ask around for Megna’s people. Two or three can’t help me. A kid points me in the right direction. Then I’m standing in front of an open doorway and clearing my throat. A man comes out, old man, long arms and a weak
chest, a shawl wrapped around his head and shoulders.
‘I’m looking for Fatema Ansar’s people,’ I say, ‘from this village.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m her cousin – from the other side.’
‘Khulna side?’
‘Yes, Labonchora.’
‘Come in, come in,’ he says. Waving me inside to a room so dark I have to close my eyes for a minute. When I open them I can see a bed, a stove, and a pile of cucumbers on the ground. He squats, peels one, and offers it to me. It’s bitter but I don’t mind. I haven’t eaten since last night and I’m hungry as a goat.
‘Labonchora,’ he says slowly. ‘You came all this way?’
I had prepared an answer. ‘She owned some things there, a cow, a small piece of land. After she died the land has just been there, so I’m looking for her people. I want to buy the land, make sure whoever is owed is paid.’
‘She owned a piece of land? How much?’
‘A katha. Field next to my own. Wife thinks we should plant sesame, you know how women are. Won’t let me forget it.’
He picks up another cucumber and I’m hoping he’s going to offer it to me. He looks at me strangely and I know what he’s thinking, why don’t I just take the land, plant whatever I want on it, who’s going to say otherwise? She’s a woman, and she’s dead.
‘Thing is,’ I say, ‘people tell me she cursed the land.’
He looks up at me and nods slowly. ‘I can see she might have been a witch.’
