by Tahmima Anam
‘And she was a whore. Worked at that place.’
‘Nothing wrong with being a whore.’ He’s chewing fast, as if someone’s going to steal it right out of his mouth. ‘Whoring never killed anyone.’
I go for his face. He crashes to the dirt floor, holding his jaw. Then I’m on the floor too, my arms around him, touching his blood, and I’m bleating like a goat while the other guys stand around and stare.
Dulal’s nose is broken. I say I’m sorry but he waves me away. ‘Man’s gotta do sometimes,’ he says. Later, we’re about to bed down and he has rags stuck in his nostrils. He asks what I’m going to do now.
I’ve been asking myself this question all day. I say, ‘I wait to die. Nothing left for me. I lost my money, my wife, my kid. Now this girl’s blood is on my hands. I die, then God sends me to Hell, that’s all.’
‘Motherfucker,’ he says. ‘Shit wasn’t all your fault. But you’re in a hole, I can see that.’
One of the other guys is smoking a biri, I can see the little orange light. I close my eyes and wait for sleep, wait for death, cursing the blood that flows stubborn in my veins. I think, God made us hard to kill. It takes a knife, a bullet. Your heart breaks, you still go on living.
Dulal’s got an idea. We’re carrying a piece of the ship from the beach to the road, a big piece of metal that cuts into our shoulders. Ten of us on each side of the metal, Dulal right behind me, guy at the front counting our steps.
‘We gotta go back to the whorehouse,’ he says. ‘The madam, she knows something.’
‘Can’t do that,’ I say. ‘No way.’ Also, I don’t tell him, I spend all my days thinking about what Megna had to do. Men she had to fuck. All the ways she had to fuck them. It’s a sex cinema in my head, except nobody’s getting hard, I’m just making myself sick. And worse. At night I’ve been going back to the whorehouse. I don’t go in, I just hang around outside. Lights go on, go off. Sometimes from the street you hear the women laughing.
I put these people into my picture. This guy with the long arms, he held down my Megna, he forced it into her mouth. These two guys, sharing a cigarette, they took turns with her while the other one watched. All day I think of this, and at night I fill my picture in a little bit more. I don’t tell Dulal about the poison in my head.
‘I’m not going back in there,’ I say. ‘I’ll kill that woman if I see her.’
‘Let’s kill her, then,’ he says. ‘Cut that bitch’s head right off.’
‘I’m tired. I can’t fight any more.’
‘That’s a lie, brother. You broke my nose.’
I almost laugh, but the weight of the metal is killing me.
‘Nothing left for you but your kid,’ Dulal says.
‘Kid’s probably dead too. Nothing left for me.’
‘Don’t be an asshole. Madam’s gotta know who she left her kid with. Where she sent the money.’
It makes sense. But so many times I thought, I’m close, this is it, and look where I am, I’m nothing. Lots of guys looking for their people in this town. They all have a story, some sad tale of getting separated at a mela, or their kid ran away and got mixed up with the wrong people. Happens all the time. I’m just one sorry bastard in a city of lost people. Nothing special about me. I didn’t love Megna any more than the other people looking for their lost ones. The kid doesn’t even belong to me, never even clapped eyes on it. So why should I keep looking? What makes me think I’m going to find my girl when everyone else’s girls are lost too? I don’t deserve it, that’s for sure. No doubt about that.
Dulal presses me. ‘What’s it to you?’ I finally say.
We’re almost to the machine now, the one that flattens the metal. We take a few more steps, and then the man at the front calls out, and like a dance we all let go of the metal at once, jumping back as it crashes to the ground.
‘Same shit here every day,’ Dulal says. ‘Ship comes, we take it apart. Sometimes a guy dies, or one of us gets cut, loses a leg. It’s black. So if you have a chance you take it.’
We head back to the ship for another piece of metal. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But don’t think we’re gonna find that kid. Nothing good is ever happening me to me again.’
It’s late on a Friday and the place is busy. Men coming in and out, the smell of sweat and horny everywhere. I ask for the madam. When she comes out she doesn’t recognise me, but when she sees Dulal, she says, ‘Eid, I remember. You want more?’ She’s chewing her paan again, little bits of green and orange on her mouth.
I let Dulal talk. On the way over here, I said, ‘This is your party. You want something to do, you do it.’
The scars on my chest are itching. Guy brushes past me and I swear I’ve seen him on the ship. They probably all come here. Boss too. Maybe his whores are more high class, maybe not. You never know with richies, they always surprise you by being more perverted than the rest of us.
‘We’re looking for someone,’ he says. ‘Megna. She used to work here.’
‘No one like that.’ She spits her paan into the gutter. ‘I’m busy. If you don’t want a girl, get lost.’ She turns. Dulal grabs her, arm so soft he looks like he’s squeezing a loaf of bread.
‘Bitch,’ he says. ‘We know she worked here. We know you worked her till she died. No use lying.’
She looks him up and down.
‘Yes,’ she worked here. ‘But nobody killed her, ask anyone. She got sick, I even paid for the doctor. Now you know, so get out.’ She points to the alley.
But Dulal’s just getting started. ‘Tell us about the money.’
‘What money?’
‘The money she borrowed.’
His fingers get tighter on her arm. Now her face is red and puffed up.
‘Listen, you son-of-a-bitch. Get your dirty hands off me. I know where you work. I’ll tell everyone. I know you like boys – you want people to know? Bokul here, all dressed up pretty, has a surprise between his legs, and you almost sucked it right off him, you sick little bastard.’ She laughs, her mouth slick with spit.
Dulal lets go of her arm and looks at me. I shrug. I don’t give a shit.
‘Listen, I say,’ coming between them. ‘We’re not here to spoil your business. Just tell us about the kid – we know she had one.’
She’s rubbing her arm, about to turn away, and for a minute I think she’s just going to keep laughing and tell us to fuck off, but she stops and turns to me.
She breathes deep. ‘The kid was here. I’m only telling you because she’s more trouble than she’s worth.’
She. A girl. My heart stops. I die, right there in front of her. ‘But that other whore told me she was somewhere else.’
Madam laughs. ‘They tell you what I want them to tell you. You think I would let a girl go? A girl who’s going to carry me when I’m old? I’m going to starve with so much stupid.’
‘Where is she?’
The bitch smiled like she was enjoying torturing me. ‘She’s gone.’
‘What did you do to her?’
She spits. ‘I was getting rid of her. She was too much trouble, always crying over her mother. And there was a man, had his eye on her.’
She waves her arm.
‘He was going to keep her, I don’t know what she was complaining about. Then, yesterday, she cuts all her hair off. Fuck knows where she got the scissors, but she looked like a bald chicken, the little cunt.’
I double up over myself and gag into the street.
Madam spits at my feet. ‘Get out of here, I don’t have anything for you.’
It starts to rain, hard like someone’s hurling it out of the sky. Finally the rage devils into my body and I lift up my head and drive it into her stomach. I’m pounding madam’s stomach with my fists, thinking about Megna and Pahari and Shathi and my father who made me dig out the latrine, and my poor little seedling who was in this hellhole all the time, just past my fingertips, until madam slumps against the wall and through the blood bubble at her lip, she says, ‘Go to the b
each called “Prosperity”. There’s a kid that hangs around, a boy. Your daughter’s with him.’
VII My Girl Falls from the Sky
Dulal and me run all the way back down the road and the rain feels like fire on my back and my scars are beating with my blood. Dulal slows down, his hands on his knees, but I say, ‘Come on, we have to find that kid.’ I’m not letting myself think about anything except finding him. We go all the way up and down, asking which yard is called ‘Prosperity’ and we’re wetter than dogs by the time we come upon a group of men standing around in the dark and the rain. ‘What’s going on?’ Dulal asks.
‘Do you know what they’re doing, these richies?’ someone’s saying. ‘They’re sending an air-conditioned truck to pick up a piece of furniture. Yep, ship there, there’s a big, black chair, bigger than any chair you ever saw. Owner’s selling it to some rich American, won’t even let the thing come out into the air, wants to take it to Dhaka like a bride, wrapped up and protected from the hot. Can you believe it? A chair’s got a better life than us.’
‘We don’t want trouble, we’re just looking for a kid,’ Dulal says.
‘Someone’s going to die getting the chair out.’
We always die, I think. That’s why we’re here. Even when we live, we die.
Dulal gives up. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘We have to find him,’ I say. ‘He’s got to be here.’ I don’t give a fuck about this chair or whatever asshole is taking it to America. ‘A kid,’ I say to everyone I see. ‘I’m looking for a kid who hangs around here.’ No one’s listening. I raise my voice. ‘Ask Selim,’ someone says, ‘he’s in charge.’ He points to the front of the crowd. Dulal and me follow the men down the beach till they turn into an alley.
We walk a few shanties down and go into a long room. Inside, there’s a mess of arms and legs. Everyone got something broken. They show me their stumps and their scars. They have arsenic and all kinds of shit in their veins and all over their skin. So this is how it’s going to be. Even Shathi wouldn’t have me this way, not even she, the saint who forgives everything. You couldn’t love a man broken like that.
Selim’s a big guy with long arms and a chest full of meat. He’s saying they’re going to march onto the ship with the chair and bring the whole thing down. In the morning, holding the chair high above their heads, they’re going to walk all the way from the beach to the town. There’s a foreign girl who’s going to put the whole thing on TV. I keep shouting for the kid. ‘He has my girl,’ I say to everyone. They look at me like I’m bringing all the crazy into the room. I try to push my way to Selim, and when I find him he looks me up and down and says, ‘There’s a boy here, it might be him. Come to the beach with us.’
Soon we’re making our way to the beach, holding kerosene lamps, torches, whatever will get us through the dark. It’s raining so hard everything’s blurry and we can’t see more than a few feet in front of us. The shipyard gates are locked but all we have to do is get out onto the water and cross over. ‘Which one is it?’ ‘The pretty one,’ Selim says, ‘all white like it’s dressed up for a party.’ Selim carries one of the broken men on his back like it’s nothing. We wade through the water, across the end of a tanker, past a pair of propellers on their last cutting, and finally we see it, a pretty little cruise ship half broken.
‘What do we do now,’ we ask Selim. ‘Where’s the kid?’ I say. ‘Hey,’ he shouts, ‘where’s that kid?’ No one’s seen him. We wait for the chair to come out. ‘See – there’s the men, they built a ramp halfway up the ship because the chair’s so heavy.’ We stand around and wait for something to happen. The rain lets up for a few minutes, then hardens and throws bullets of water onto our heads. Soon the sky starts to turn yellow and it’s about to be morning, and just as the light is making its way onto our little piece of the beach, we see something coming out of the ship. ‘It’s here,’ Selim yells. ‘The chair is coming!’
A crate’s loaded onto the ramp. Six men are holding on and one of them’s shouting. Now that it’s light I start making my way to the front to see if I can find the kid. Instead I see a woman. She’s got hair plastered to her back and she’s shouting to the chair guys. ‘Hai, Allah,’ we say. Our stomachs are in our mouths watching this crate like a boulder rolling down the ramp. It’s going fast now, faster than it should, and we’re watching as it speeds up, running away from the men, and then, like a bar of soap, it slides off the ramp, and we’re all running back until we hear a crash, something so loud and crazy we scream back at it like it’s going to eat us alive.
We circle around and I see pieces of the black chair scattered like giant grains of sesame. I see a woman, hair plastered across her face, a trickle of blood coming out of her head, and there’s a boy pinned under the crate, and then another kid, head shaved clean, and that’s when I start to cry, ‘My girl, my girl, my girl,’ because even without the curl of her hair, I know she’s mine, that face, that blessed face I thought I’d never see again.
You see now why I had to tell you, Elijah – or rather, why he had to tell you? I wasn’t the only one in Chittagong in search of a self. I wasn’t the only one who felt like the loneliest person in the world. The whole time I was there, as I made friends with Mo and got to know the workers on the beach and fell in love with you, he was right beside me, carrying around my secret like a talisman dangling from his neck.
It’s time to turn now to the matter of us, to your days on the beach, that perfect bubble of bliss I couldn’t help but shatter.
The Arrival of You
Did you know, Elijah, that I was named after the Abbasid princess Zubaidah bint Ja’far, who inspired The Thousand and One Nights? My mother, who everyone calls Maya but whose formal name is actually Sheherezade Haque, was herself named after the narrator of that great epic, the Persian queen Sheherezade, a name given to her by her father, Iqbal Haque, who died of a heart attack when my mother was only six. Zubaidah bint Ja’far herself was not called Zubaidah at birth, but Sukhainah. And my name at birth – well, I will never know that, will I? There was some debate as to whether I should, like my mother and most of the people we knew, have a nickname as well as a formal name. The privilege of choosing the name was given to my dadu, my paternal grandmother. She chose the name Putul, which means ‘doll’, and would not be persuaded to change her mind, even after my mother protested that no daughter of hers could possibly answer to the name Doll.
In an effort to remove the name from its meaning, my parents shortened it further, and Putul became Putlie, Pootsie, Poo, Potla, Potlu, and Potato, until finally only one stuck: Poots. Poots was the girl I was back home, when it was just my parents and me. Poots was what my dadu and my nanu and the servants called me. When my friends came over I went to great lengths to make sure no one would call out to me from the kitchen or accidentally let slip that I had the most embarrassing nickname in the world. In high school I put a ban on Poots, the sobriquet by then completely revolting to me, and my parents obeyed, settling on the diminutive of my formal name, Zee, which is also what Rashid and all my school friends and even some of the people I knew in college and graduate school called me.
It was at some point in the first hours of your coming to Chittagong that I told you my nickname. You said the name aloud to me a few times. Putul, Putul, Putul. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar sound that made it a softer, sweeter word in your mouth, the emphasis on the second syllable, and for you it did not carry the baggage of its meaning in the same way. After hearing you say it, I began to grow fond of the name, and later it even became the way I began to refer to myself. Zee was the girl who married with a gold chain fastened to her head; Putul was the girl who hated the smell of henna on her hands and left home to find a new patch of air among the scrapheap of the world, Putul the bird who flew south in search of a warmer climate and a place to spread her wings.
It was early in the morning when you finally called me back; I was lying in bed and watching the sky brighten through the gauze of my
mosquito net. ‘Hello,’ you said. ‘It’s Elijah.’
You sounded distant. ‘How are you?’ you asked, formal.
‘I’m well,’ I said, trying not to cry.
‘I’m sorry it has taken me so long to return your call.’
‘Were you busy?’
‘No.’
The tone of your voice told me everything. You weren’t busy, you were angry. Disappointed. What could I say to you now, knowing that I’d been wrong about you? I started telling you about Dera Bugti, leaving long pauses for you to murmur your sympathy for my failure, for Zamzam, but you didn’t. You let the silence sit between us. Then you asked me what I had worn to my wedding, and I described with shame the brocade sari that had hung so heavily on my shoulders and cut into my waist.
‘Can I see you?’ you asked finally, and we migrated to our laptops and I noticed that you had grown your hair over your ears, and something glinted in the hollow above your collar – a grey, porous stone attached to a leather string around your neck. I was talking to you but I was taking note of all of this, and for some reason I couldn’t understand I experienced this alteration as a betrayal, a sign that time had passed, time in which we had done everything but be together. And of course this was my fault. I had married Rashid – all you had done was grow your hair out and put a piece of string through a rock.
It was late by the time we finished talking. I promised to call again the next day. The next day, I had my speech all planned. The first thing I said to you was: ‘Please come to Bangladesh.’ And you said, ‘I don’t think so, Zubaida.’ I gave you all the arguments I’d prepared: I said it was because of the piano, that you had to hear it for yourself, and that you would never again have the chance to see a piano bolted to the floor of a ship, and then watch that very ship get taken apart. ‘That has got to be,’ I said to you, ‘one of the strangest and weirdest things one could possibly witness.’ The sheet music was still there – I had left it exactly as I’d found it, wedged between the keys and the lid. You would have to come and you would have to play that music on that piano. I have no idea what went through your mind, but you resisted for a long time, for the rest of that phone call and the several others that followed, but I kept pressing you, and finally you relented. When you agreed I thought you might fix a date in the distant future, and I was getting ready to argue again, to remind you that the piano may not be on Grace for much longer, but you said you would be there the following week. I know now that you are the sort of person who can do that, get up and materialise on the other side of the world on short notice, but at the time I remember being surprised, and then deciding, not for the first time – and certainly not for the last – that everything about you was tinged with magic.
