by Selina Hossain
Translated by Ali Ahmed

The man is complicated. His emotions are as powerful as is his reasoning. The man is talented. Talents have only furthered his complexities. He is, for this, a little isolated in the family, at the office, and also in society. This entails for him a lot of pain. Compromise he does not know how to strike. But it is needed to be struck with parents, wife and children in the family, and with colleagues and bosses in the office. Despite knowing all these, he always suffers from pain, even his promotions are stalled. Still, he thinks what he does is right, just and proper. He establishes his own reasoning with all such synonyms as are available to him.
   The ego of this man is very strong. He takes a stand if his ego is hurt. None can make him budge from that stand. So his wife sometimes complains, ‘Selfish! You understand only what is yours, and never try to realise the state of others.’ These outpourings from the wife only embitter him. He then starts thinking that there are deep reasons behind his wife saying all this; probably, she has started liking someone else. That is why she has begun to find fault with him.
   Then begins a quarrel involving all their past, present and future. That quarrel sometimes takes up the whole of the night. It even extends up to a few days. At some point the intensity of the quarrel subsides, days again start rolling by as before. But the man remains highly strung, nothing in the world around him appears likeable to him. He thus spoils his own pleasure both at home and in the office.
   He behaves in such a manner with his old parents as to make them think as if he were their guardian. They make no move whatsoever in the face of their son’s stern administration. Not that they have any option. They only look at their famous, successful son with unblinking, doleful eyes. The parents are, of course, proud of their son’s social status. The father at times becomes rather pleased at the sternness of the son, thinking he has attained a powerful personality. But the mother is often hurt, taking the sternness simply as outright discourtesy to the parents. But the man is heedless to all these and remains rigid with his own ways. Other people’s pain and happiness touch him only temporarily, don’t leave any permanent imprint, and he thinks of no remedy to those sufferings. His love for his parents follows this line. There are scopes for misunderstanding as his loneliness has very little outward manifestation. The man considers it an excess to allow any expression of emotion on anything.
   His own children are afraid of him. They have never known what a father’s love is. Not that he always rebukes them. He often takes them out, buys ice-creams for them, and takes them to theatres and some other cultural events. He jokes and makes fun with them. Yet, the children cannot overcome their fear of him, because they cannot wipe off their memory the distorted face of their father when he becomes angry.
   Some of his colleagues and some others in his known circle think he is amiable, but others take him for a proud, conceited man. In expansive moments of gossips in friendly gatherings he won’t let others speak. He has mastery over a variety of subjects. He travels with complete ease from subjects like nuclear cold to castigating the problems in Kalimuddin’s household. When he speaks, his delivery is so saucy that others find it simply enjoyable. The art of speaking of the man is excellent and he delivers it with complete ease. But others take exception when his condemnation of them crosses the limits of tolerance. His sarcastic manners hurt many. People desert him, only one or two remain close. For this the man doesn’t have any close friend. The wife considers the man unfathomable, because he is very difficult to handle. He is sometimes very attentive, but at other times he becomes so distraught for trivial reasons that not a trace of that attentiveness can then be found. So bitter becomes the relation. So ugly becomes the day-to-day life that she feels like fleeing the family or even committing suicide. The wife cannot look at the man’s face, wondering how she could live the last twenty-five years with this man. This living together is, as if, the eighth wonder of the world. The days still roll on, the sun rises and sets, and the night falls. The conjugal life has to be lived on the same cot. When nausea becomes too strong, they sleep with their backs to each other, still clinging on to the same bed. This is all about the man’s complexities. He wants to completely control all that is under his command. He also thinks, looking at his wife, as to how these twenty-five years could pass by. He is familiar with the body of that woman, knows of her heart’s thoughts, and understands her brain. Why then hatred surges up in him? The man still doesn’t break the family. He hates breaking families, because he is keenly aware of his social status.
   The man is now fifty-one. He has two sons and a daughter. The children are talented, and scores high grades in examinations. Their appearances and physical structures are good. Their behaviour affords no scope for anyone to lament. The wife is educated, and teaches in a college. Her subject is economics. She has a good grasp on the subject she teaches, and has earned a good name as a professor. Both the husband and the wife have studied in the same batch and in the same subject. Theirs is a love-marriage. Their parents had objected to this union. But as time wore one, although the man’s father has grudgingly accepted the marriage as a fait accompli, his mother is yet to reconcile with the reality. There are occasional quarrels over this very noisome and intense quarrel, between the wife and her mother-in-law. The man silently listens to this. The wife calls the mother-in-law an old vulture. What an appearance, she says, as if it is a goblin. The mother also shouts back with full force, and gives a free rein to her tongue, calling the son’s wife a witch, and accuses her of bewitching the husband. She also charges her with a discount from a lineage of madmen, and calls into question the moral character of her mother. She then bemoans her own fate, and reasons that because of their guilt her son has been trapped.
   At that point the man leaves the house through another door. But where shall he go? The world starts shaking before his eyes. He doesn’t see any shade anywhere.
   His mother was a schoolteacher. She has retired as a headmistress. She is sufficiently cultured. A new dimension is added to his own complexities of character at the behaviour of those two educated ladies. He realises that with such obstinacies as they have don’t make a happy family. Nor do they earn people’s praise, nor their love. Still their days roll on like that.
   The man likes smoking and good clothes, but is not a connoisseur of good food. At the club, he occupies a seat at a corner table and relishes his Virgin Mary soup. The waiter becomes a little surprised. Others indulge in idle talks, drinks, and fill the whole house with uproarious noise. He sometimes sides with them. But even silent, he only dips his spoon from the steaming soup bowl and lifts up to his lips, and its aroma refreshes his memory. He then inwardly plays with the bright scenes of lore of his life. In adolescence he loved a girl whose deep, dark eyes would appear to him as a bank of monsoon clouds with possibilities of rains. But it was a one-sided affair. The girl’s name was Kankon. Once when he told the girl of his simile of rain-filled clouds, she almost fainted with laughter. He then told her a look at your cloud-like eyes makes one fell tempted to pray from there a burst of torrential rains. The girl had filled his time with a loud laughter. How sweet were those days! The girl then dropped out of his world one day. He was not grieved, only stored her memories in his dreams. He doesn’t have problems in finishing his lunch. The man is ascetic and worldly at the same time.
   The man loves Tagore; in fact, Tagore is almost his only love. He does not listen to Tagore songs nor does he read his writings only as a pastime. He is in fact an avid reader of Tagore. He reads and rereads some of his writings, like the collection of his letters, short stories and essays. He himself has written essays on almost all types of writings by Tagore. But the majority of his writings are on Tagore’s Poems. Readers have dubbed them as complicated and unintelligible. His known circle opines that his prose works are as complicated as his own character. It is, of course, bound to be so, because people’s mentality is reflected more in their creativity than anything else. The wife complains, ‘Nothing can be understood of what you write.’ He only smiles. It is not in his nature to be grieved at opinions about his own writings. He knows that these types of on-the-spot compositions cannot stake any claims to permanence. He does not nurture any illusion about these writings of his being read after a hundred years. He, therefore, easily replies to his wife, ‘What can I do if you don’t understand? I write in an intelligible manner, if one doesn’t understand, the fault is in his brain, not mine.’
   The wife becomes angry and asks, ‘What did you say, don’t I have the power to comprehend your writings?’
   The quarrel starts. Despite his not being overtly ambitious about his own writings, the man carries on with his debate. And at one point he feels he likes this meaningless debate. Then at a certain point the debate leaves his writings to creep into varied other subjects. The debate itself occupies the centre stage pushing the subjects out.
   He then introduces the subject of his wife having been called twice in a day by the principal in his office room. And says he, with a rather distorted face, ‘Why did Sharif Aftab call you twice in his room that day? And why did you stay there for eighty minutes? Have you fallen in love with him?’
   ‘What did you say? Didn’t your taste stand in the way of your saying a thing like this?’
   The wife goes wild with rage. She also starts narrating episodes of which girl her husband had been staring at on which day, whose wife he was talking to more than was normal and so on. That’s it.
   The hours of the night roll on. The children become annoyed. The domestic helps listen. They all find fun in it. Losing all senses of surroundings, they become intoxicated with their own blabbering.
   When, in the early hours of the morning, he goes to bed without dinner, he contemplates he shouldn’t have said certain things. But it was then too late to reverse all that had happened. He wants to sleep with his back to the wife. It’s already 10 o’clock when he wakes up. He reaches the office late. He takes his seat but feels tired. He scolds his subordinates and becomes annoyed if anyone wants to say anything. At this point he misbehaves with Ashfaq when the latter enters his room. A few days back Ashfaq had taken his typewriter on loan on the plea of performing an urgent piece of business. He had promised to return it in two days, but didn’t do so in twenty-five. He, therefore, flares up at the very sight of Ashfaq.
   ‘I reached the typewriter at your house when you had needed it. And you have been keeping it with you still when you don’t need it any longer. Shouldn’t you have returned it? You back this little bit of courtesy.’
   Ashfaq vacantly looks at him for sometime. Can’t comprehend how a friend from schooldays can speak like this. He then pushes back his chair and stands up. ‘I couldn’t even imagine you would talk to me like this.’
   ‘I speak the truth like this,’ the man replies with equal verve.
   ‘Okay, I’m going. I’ll right be reaching the typewriter back at your house.’
   Ashfaq leaves the room without looking at any direction. The man reflects, ‘Have I done anything wrong by saying what I have said? It’s Ashfaq who is guilty. He shouldn’t have become angry. Ashfaq will probably not talk to me after this. Never mind, I will still say what I feel I should say.’
   This is how he justifies his actions and tries to attend to his duties.
   Then his telephone rings and it is Abedin. The man again becomes angry at hearing his voice, and says, ‘I called you thrice on three different days and you didn’t have the courtesy to call back even once.’
   Abedin hesitates. He cannot understand what to say in reply. He is familiar with the character of the man. He silently swallows the rebuke and then comes to the point. He knows that the man will do the job for him and will also dish out some scolding. There are some people who accept all these and come back to him. They later become pleased with his rather urbane treatment of them, and forget the rest.
   In order to keep his temperament cool, the man then opens the pages of either ‘Gitabitan’ or ‘Sanchayita’. He has pondered a lot over the issue and has found out that Tagore is his last refuge. There is no shortage of words or lines in him. What a great universe to roam about. This universe metamorphoses him into a different man. He remembers Ashfaq while leafing through ‘Gitabitan’.
   Ashfaq says, ‘How can you like Tagore? He is not for you.’
   Is Tagore then only for those who don’t have complexities in them? What is complexity? Is it rubbish? The man doesn’t worry about complexities. Nor can he accept what Ashfaq says.
   He knows his stay in his own house is not one of happiness. His relations with his wife and children are not intimate. But he doesn’t care. He remains alone. He understands that a longstanding relation with friends and acquaintances is not to be. His own role is still his own. Unreasonableness, complexities, pride, idiosyncratic or whatever might be said by others, he knows himself better. There is no chicanery or bluff in this knowing. He is satisfied with this. The man who is honest to his conscience has nothing else to ask for, he thinks. He doesn’t have anything to ask for. He would be satisfied if his rightful dues come to him on their own.
   The name of this man is Mashiur Hasnain. His father is Imajuddin. And his post office is Amalholme while his district Faridpur.

by Purabi Basu
Translated by Shafi Ahmed

Kalyani alias Palani narrated her strange dream to me. In all its detail. I looked at her in surprise.
   It was early September. The departing monsoon was still making its presence felt. After an earlier shower, it had become warm and sunny. We sat side by side on the stairs of the ground floor veranda. In front, there was a wide, redbrick road. Across the road was a kitchen garden of vegetables and carrots. A clean garden absolutely without any weeds. The shower had washed the greenery and made it look livelier and lovelier. It was a charming scene: violet blossoms peeped from the tangle of bright green pui creepers, while the reddish carrots created a contrast in the canvas of casual green.
   There was no special purpose for my visit to Kalyani’s workplace. I had spent some days vacationing at Jessore with Tapan, and was heading toward Dhaka via Savar. I remembered that
   someone had told me that Kalyani worked at Ganoshasthya Kendro. I almost took it as a joke. How could that be? There had been so much gossip about her. Whom should I believe?
   Someone said she had left her son and children.
   Someone said she had eloped.
   Someone said Kalyani was now a sex worker in Dhaka.
   Someone said the poor girl had drowned herself in the Buriganga.
   Someone even said Kalyani had been seen crossing into India.
   No one either in her parents’ or her parents-in-law’s family knew her whereabouts.
   Only the other day, probably Madhu or somebody else had mentioned seeing Kalyani buying bananas at Savar bazaar.
   On enquiry, he came to know that she now worked at Ganoshastyo Kendro, as a gatekeeper. It sounded a little absurd to me. So I wanted to check it out for myself. Kalyani who had never been able to hold the key to open or close the door of her own life and had always been under the control and dictates of others as she grew into womanhood, how could she take charge of the gates of such a large organisation?
   ‘Well, Kalyani, don’t you think of your children?
   ‘Yes,’ she said in a very soft voice.
   ‘Don’t you feel bad when you think of them?’
   ‘Of course, I do.’
   ‘How could you leave them? Why did you?’
   Kalyani directed her small, bright and black eyes at me and, a moment later, turned her look downward.
   ‘Look, I am a bad mother.’
   ‘Who says so?’
   ‘My mother-in-law. My husband. I realise that myself. My mother-in-law sometimes fabricated tales about me and my husband believed her and called me names. My husband often pointed to my abdomen that had become awfully wrinkled since I sustained a burn. He said he had been cheated. He would have never married a woman with such burn marks. Then I often used to lose control over myself. I used to beat my two children very hard to quench the fire of my indignation. Afterwards, I used to take them in my arms and weep bitterly.’
   Kalyani’s voice choked. This was the same Kalyani who had once been brought to our house by her father, who had had grown old prematurely. Kalyani was a burden in a poverty-stricken family. Her stepmother could not stand her. Kalyani belonged to my paternal village. We had never lived in the village, so I had never seen her before. My parents used to know Kalyani’s parents though. I had no idea whether Kalyani ever had a formal name. But, when her father left her with my mother, he said, ‘I leave Palani, the runaway, at your mercy. Please look after her.’
   We misheard the word. We heard ‘Kalyani’ for ‘Palani’. From then on, Palani transformed herself into Kalyani. The mistake was detected later. But by then Palani herself preferred her newly-acquired name to her earlier one. She even told us how she disliked the earlier name since it was linked to her getting lost in a village fair and subsequently heading for her aunt’s house. We never called her Palani after we heard the story.
   Kalyani was perpetually nervous. She was always afraid she would make a mistake, cause some disaster. She was so awkward and self-conscious that something untoward always used to happen, like dropping tea from a trembling cup, breaking dishes or burning rice on the stove. No sooner had Kalyani begged pardon for a mistake that another followed almost immediately. Or something coincidentally happened somewhere, and Kalyani would make herself responsible for that and she would deeply suffer from a sense of guilt.
   Kalyani would associate the rage of the untimely nor’wester with her stars. Once Khokan, my younger brother, came down with typhoid. Kalyani started weeping and said that recently Khokan had looked lovelier and healthier in her eyes. And her appreciative look had caused his illness.
   Sometimes she got on my nerves. She developed a highly irritable masochist habit of suffering from a sense of guilt for all the wrongs taking place in the world. She tried hard to overcome this feeling, but in vain. A sequence of unfortunate and tragic events haunted her. Her mother had died giving birth to her. Her stepmother babies were stillborn. Her father’s boat sank, causing big loss to his business. She and one of her friends had set some jute sticks on fire for fun, and been badly burnt, almost dying. Moreover, the people around and her stepmother made sundry silly comments. All this led her to believe that she was ill-omened, a companion of evil. Everywhere she went, mishap would dog her. So, Kalyani took care not only to conceal her burnt abdomen but also her entire existence. She possessed endless afflictions within her.
   I felt deeply for Kalyani. But it was all the more painful when, after a few years, her father came to our house to take her back for a prospective marriage. There was no end to Kalyani’s tears as she left us. I also wept. I found my mother wiping her tears with the end of her sari. Subsequently, we came to know that Kalyani had been married off. My mother gave a good sum for the wedding expenses. We did not see her after that. Sometimes the villagers who used to visit us gave us news information about her.
   All of a sudden, one day, we got the news that Kalyani had run away. A dream had drawn her out of the house. Though it was simply unbelievable, but now from Kalyani’s face, I understood that it was true. What was that dream that put such strength in a girl who was otherwise so hesitant, so utterly dependent and perpetually engrossed with afflictions? Kalyani said that in her dream she had seen her face in the face of the goddess Durga. How could that be possible? No idea. But Kalyani’s face corroborated her veracity. I knew her since childhood. She had never had the habit of lying.
    ‘Aren’t you in touch with your husband and children?’
   ‘No. From time to time I send some money orders. The first two orders were refused. But in the last few months, they’re not being returned.’
   ‘Don’t you want to go back to your children?’
   Kalyani said nothing.
   I repeated my question. ‘Do you want to go back to your in-laws?’
   ‘No.’
   ‘Who are looking after your children? Don’t they suffer?’
   ‘They have their grandparents, their father, their aunt. Maybe their father will now marry somebody of his choice. And if there is not too much dearth in the family, probably the stepmother will show some affection to the children as well. They won’t have any difficulty.’
   ‘Don’t you feel very lonely here?’
   ‘Yes, sometimes.’
   ‘Who asked you to come here? With whom did you come really?’
   ‘Rabi.’
   ‘Who is Rabi?’
   ‘One of my in-laws’ neighbours.’
   ‘Where is he?’
   ‘He works on the poultry farm here.’
   ‘Do you love him?’
   ‘Don’t really know.’
   ‘How old is he?’
   ‘Maybe, about six years younger than me.’
   ‘Does he love you?’
   ‘He has never told me so.’
   ‘Do you see each other often?’
   ‘Every day. We have tea and snacks together. We talk. Wait for a while. He will come soon.’
   ‘Will you marry Rabi if he asks you?’
   Kalyani looked as if she had seen a ghost. She said, ‘No, never. How can I do that! Don’t you see the vermilion mark on my forehead? I am married.’
   I saw her vermilion mark. On one wrist there was a married woman’s conch bracelet with marks of wear and tear from long use. On the other wrist she was wearing glass bangles.
   Kalyani had had a strange vision. It was during the month of October. Kalyani had become pregnant for the third time. She wasn’t keeping well. After all the cooking and domestic chores, that day she was on her way to the pond for a bath. Her mother-in-law blocked her way. Her son had been looking forward to having a special fish dish. But Kalyani had put aside the fried head of the fish. Her mother-in-law insisted on Kalyani’s preparing the dish immediately. Kalyani tried her best to convince her mother-in-law that she was very tired. She would do it in the evening. Now after her bath and lunch, along with other women of the locality, she would visit various puja mandaps, designed and decorated in honour of the goddess Durga. But her mother-in-law was obstinate. At that moment, Kalyani’s unmarried sister-in-law appeared on the scene. Though otherwise she was not on good terms with her mother, when it was Kalyani, she always took her mother’s side. Kalyani knew that no explanation was enough, so she walked toward the bathing ghat. She couldn’t bear it any more. Since morning, she had been in the kitchen. A feeling of restlessness took over her. She urgently needed a bath. But she had hardly reached the pond, when the angry paws of Sushil, her husband, pulled her back.
   ‘What? Such insolence! Talking back to my mother? How dare you disobey her?’
   Till that day, Sushil had never assaulted Kalyani physically. Now he had gone to that extent. That made her furious.
   ‘How dare you lay hands on me?’
   ‘I dare, and I will do it again. How dare you insult my mother?’
   Kalyani had a strange feeling as she tried to draw back from Sushil. Her head spun and she fell down beside the pond. For some moments, she seemed to lose consciousness. And during those brief moments between slumber and awakening, Kalyani experienced that strange dream that changed the course of her life. With her eyes closed, Kalyani saw that she was standing in front of the altar of Durga, clad in a sari with red borders. While performing her puja, Kalyani saw something amazing. The eyes of Durga did not look like those of an earthen idol. They seemed to blink, and her lips seemed to be stirring. Did the goddess want to tell her something? The face seemed to be very familiar to her. Who did she look like? Who? Quite unconsciously, Kalyani caressed her own lips, face, forehead and eyes. She looked carefully at her image in the water of the pond and then up at the face of the goddess. She discovered that Durga’s face was her very own. Kalyani realised that she herself was a beautiful and gracious woman. Her beauty seemed to glow in a red benarasi sari, jewellery and fresh flowers. She had ten hands. In one of them was a lotus, in another a mallet. She felt herself to be big and tremendously powerful. It was as if the universe was under her control. She saw herself standing on the body of Asura and trying to hook him with a weapon. And yes, she also recognized that the face of Asura was that of the bushy-haired Sushil. And that Durga’s symbol as annihilator of evil, the severed human head was also not unknown to her. It was Sushil’s mother’s. Then she looked at Saraswati, her daughter, and Kartik, her son. How strange! Sitting on the swan and peacock, her son Deepak and daughter Bhabani were giggling. She was mounted on a lion. But why did the lion not have a mane? Instead its face sported a moustache and a beard. Who was that? It was Rabi, the man who worked somewhere near Dhaka. Sympathetic to the hardships of Kalyani, he had told her again and again that if she wanted, he could find her a job in the city
   After a while, Kalyani opened her eyes to see that her anxious husband Sushil was dabbing her face with water. She got up. Her fall and fainting spell did not generate only that strange vision, but also led to some other incidents afterwards. She suffered a miscarriage and later left her house stealthily with Rabi as her companion.
   Kalyani does not repent what she has done. I look at Kalyani with wonder in my eyes. This is the same Kalyani who cried bitterly when my elder brother could not pass the chartered accountancy exam. She felt that she was responsible for his failure as my brother had seen her ominous face before going to take the exam. But Kalyani no longer blamed herself for what had happened. She is so unruffled and calm!
   It’s time for me to leave. Rabi appears, in lungi and banian. His moustache and beard cannot conceal the innocence and attractiveness of his face. He has a paper bag of snacks for Kalyani. They both sit on the ground and enjoy the fresh snacks.
   I take a bus back to Dhaka. I have not slept the previous night, and the rhythmic movement of the bus makes me drowsy. I am returning to Dhaka where I work, leaving Tapan alone again at Jessore. I really don’t know whether I will go back to him, whether he will come to me or whether we will live separately for the rest of our lives. We have been married for eight years. For the last two years, we have been living apart. I am getting used to this kind of separation. This time as I said goodbye to Tapan, I did not feel the usual inner pain. I don’t know whether Tapan also felt the same way
   On the wide open road, the bus gathers speed. I feel terribly sleepy. Before succumbing to sleep, I realise that I haven’t been dreaming these days, that I haven’t been dreaming for a long time.

by Mahmud Rahman

The boys are processed through my station here on the banks of the Jamuna.
   They think they are so smart. They try to rob a bank. To raise money for the struggle, they say. Or they attempt to snatch a policeman’s rifle. To collect weapons for their people’s army, they say. The adaptable ones — those with the rural equivalent of what might be called ‘street smarts’ elsewhere — don’t get caught easily. But I would estimate that as many as eight out of ten of the others do. With few exceptions, they are from what we call ‘good families’. Children who grew up in privilege in the city. Why they think they can survive in the villages — swimming like fish in the sea, they quote Mao — I will never know. To me, they look like fish out of water.
   When I say boys, I do mean boys. I am only responsible for those who are under sixteen. That is my charge from the ministry: to interview the youngest prisoners and choose who qualifies for rehabilitation.
   By the time the boys face me, the constables have already knocked some sense into their skulls. But I have made it clear to my superiors that I shall not have my hands dirtied with that job. I have even managed to get them to agree that the prisoners will be given a bath before I see them. I do not want to see any signs of blood.
   You will observe that I am a sensitive soul. Before the liberation struggle, I used to be a writer. I even had a collection of stories published the first year after independence. Why, I have managed to acquire a complete collection of Rabindranath’s prose and poetry. I especially enjoy what he wrote while he lived on the houseboat supervising his family’s estates. Sometimes, here in this station on the banks of the river upstream from where he used to live, I feel a spiritual bond with him. It is as if we shared a common destiny. However, we are not all as fortunate as Tagore who came from a wealthy family. Other creative souls like me face difficult choices in how to eat and write. Mine was because of this woman I loved. The only way I could get her family to allow her to marry me was if I took the civil service exams and joined the government. They would not give their daughter to a starving writer. So, I paid the price. The second price I did not anticipate. My wife, a city girl through and through, won’t set foot in this provincial town. I only see her when I am on vacation.
   The ministry considered my qualifications closely before they assigned me to this job. I have been with the party since those harsh years when most of the leadership was in jail. I proved my loyalty during the liberation war. They also understand that I am someone with a heart, not just a bureaucrat. I was honoured to accept this posting, but still, did they have to establish this station so far from the capital? I cannot fault their logic. We are located near the heart of the northern region where the troublemakers are active. Now I understand why. What I saw here even shocked me — people eating grass and clothed only in jute sacks. I have been assured that the government is doing its best to develop the region. How will that happen? That’s the domain of other branches of the government, not mine.
   I have plenty of headaches doing my own job.
   Some of those brought before me are terribly weak. Two out of eight, I think. They start to beg for mercy right away. They tell me who their fathers and uncles are. Frequently, these uncles are their families’ influential friends. Within days, we get a signed deposition from them that the boys will now solidly march on the side of the state and our guiding Four Principles. In many of these cases, their parents rush to send the boys abroad. It occurs to me that this reveals an absence of trust. Do they not trust us to keep our promises or do they not trust their sons to keep theirs? I am not sure. But it is outside my specific charge to worry about that.
   On the other extreme are the incorrigibles. Nearly half are like this, remaining stern till the very end. Even after our constables have dealt with them, hatred glows in their eyes. These boys have only contempt for our entire society. They do not appreciate that foreigners no longer rule over us. I suppose in Tsarist Russia they would have called them ‘nihilists’. When they talk, they only spout ideology. I have no stomach for ideology. My conversations with them are brief. I try to coax them into talking about real experiences, but they give me nothing. The least they could do is give me some material that I could use in my writing — you know, I still write stories in the evening — but they only abuse me, calling me a lackey and a running dog. It gets tiring to see them use phrases they have picked up from other countries. But all right, if that’s how they want it, that’s how it shall be. Within a few days, Special Branch sends someone to get them.
   They take them out of my hair. Where? I don’t sweat my brow thinking about that. It is beyond my area of responsibility.
   The rest of the boys fall somewhere in between. Once in a while, though, I get someone I can actually talk to. And that makes this job worthwhile.
   One got brought in last week. He had robbed a bank in Sirajganj. He didn’t get very far. Someone tipped us off that he was on a steamer trying to cross the Jamuna. We were waiting for him on the other side of the river. He surrendered without a struggle.
   When I first spoke to him, I asked him about his family. He replied that he did not have any. I said, ‘All right, name me the orphanage you grew up in.’ He was silent. I asked him if he had any relatives. He still remained mute. The constables had to spend a day with him before I saw him again. I had thought it rash to take that step, but we need our charges to be a bit more agreeable about their family origins.
   It is times like this that I wish my wife were here. It would help take my mind away, though I must say that I have become an expert in keeping my personal and work lives separate. When I am off duty, I do what a writer should — I take refuge in the realm of the imagination.
   I was right about the boy. On his return visit, he proved to be more cooperative.
   ‘Everyone has always called me Reza,’ he offered. He identified his family. I knew of them. Who doesn’t? They are a prominent Dhaka family who own several factories and businesses. Reza said that he had run away from home and joined a terrorist group right when it was founded. Of course, he didn’t refer to them as terrorists; he called them by their party name. I looked up the name. I have compiled quite a history of these organisations of the extreme left, you know. Maybe someday, if my superiors agree, I can publish a book with this information. Historians will find it useful.
   If what he said was true, he would have joined before independence. He couldn’t possibly be that young. In this job you have to be suspicious. There are some young men who try to sneak into our rehabilitation system by claiming they are younger than they really are. I examined the boy standing on the other side of my desk, his hands tied behind his back and his feet chained together. His mud brown face was smooth, without facial hair. Walking over to get closer to him, I lifted his chin to get a better look at his face. There were lines on his forehead, and his skin was quite leathery. It could be just from the sun.
   ‘You must be older than sixteen. This office does not handle young men of your age,’ I announced as I reached for the telephone.
   He showed no sign of panic. My hand stayed on the phone. With assurance in his voice, he said, ‘You may find this hard to believe, but I was twelve when I ran away and joined the party.’
   ‘Twelve? You are right, I don’t believe you.’ I picked up the phone.
   ‘Sir, do you remember that time in Dhaka when the peasants poured in, red flags in their hands and red caps on their heads, the day when their leader threatened to encircle the city with an army of militant peasants? That’s the day I left.’
   I still did not accept his story. But I remembered that demonstration. We were fighting for our national freedom and these red caps stormed in, shouting that the real issue was class against class, landless against the wealthy. Thankfully, we were able to convince the people that this was a disruptive manoeuvre. We trounced them in the elections. And they never did have the numbers to encircle the city.
   Returning the phone back in its cradle, I said, ‘Talk. You have won yourself a hearing.’
   He was staring at the mango sitting on my desk. I ordered the constable standing by the door to untie Reza’s hands. I motioned to him to sit down in the chair, then picked up the mango and offered it to him. He grasped it in his hands and pressed the flesh, testing it for its firmness. It was soft, nearly overripe; I had meant to eat it yesterday. Without thinking, I took out a penknife from my desk drawer. He noticed my hesitation and said it would not be necessary. As he began to talk, he kneaded the fruit with his fingers. I observed that although his hands were callused, his fingernails were clean. He was probably telling me the truth.
   ‘It all started with a mango seller.’ The writer in me was charmed. I could perhaps use that line as the opening sentence of a story.
   
   The boy had never seen coins so shiny as the bunch his uncle thrust into his small hands just before he’d left for work. Reza had been almost done with breakfast. He gulped down the rest of his milk. He retreated into a corner of the living room where the morning sunlight poured in through a large window. Sitting down on the floor, he slowly counted through his new treasure. They were all brand new 50 paisa coins. One… two… three…. Ten! That makes five rupees, he smiled with glee. His uncle had just given him five rupees!
   But that wasn’t the end of it. When he’d dropped the change into the boy’s hands, his uncle had also told him that he would take him to the cinema that evening.
   Reza was agitated the entire morning. He tried playing with his cousin but she was only two years old, and neither could keep the other occupied for long. The boy went through all the books and magazines in the house, but there wasn’t much to occupy an eleven-year old. He tried hanging around his aunt, but she was busy with chores in the kitchen or trying to keep little Sonia fed, cleaned, or entertained.
   This was only his second day here. For his summer vacation Reza had been invited by his mother’s brother to visit them in Sirajganj. His uncle had come to get him, and together they caught the train that took them northwest from Dhaka until they reached the eastern bank of the Jamuna. They crossed the huge river on a paddlewheel steamer and then another short train ride, this time on a broad gauge railcar, brought them to Sirajganj. This small North Bengal town was in the heart of the tobacco-growing region, and Reza’s uncle worked for one of the foreign tobacco companies.
   Evening wasn’t coming fast enough to satisfy Reza. Every so often, he would jingle the coins in his pocket and tell himself, I’ve got five rupees. Somehow the money made him feel like he had power over an otherwise alien place.
   He ended up standing near the front gate, looking out into the street. It was only a narrow lane coming off the main road that crossed the heart of Sirajganj. There were a few other brick and cement houses nearby, but most were wooden or bamboo thatch structures with roofs of corrugated iron. Most of the houses had trees in their front yard. Reza recognised mango, tamarind and grapefruit. The trees provided plenty of shade over the lane. But unlike his home in Dhaka, everything felt deserted. Once in a while a lone rickshaw passed by. A few servants came back carrying the day’s shopping.
   A faint chant made its way into Reza’s ears. He looked in the direction of the voice and spotted, near where the lane met the main road, a man selling mangoes, the fruit basket perched on his head. Reza wasn’t supposed to leave the compound, but his boredom, the saliva that started to flood his mouth, and the coins in his pocket made up his mind for him. Taking a quick look behind to make sure that his aunt wasn’t looking, Reza made a dash for the mango seller.
   When the man saw the boy rush toward him, he stopped and placed the basket on the ground. His dark face, with several days’ stubble on it, flashed a warm smile at Reza.
   ‘Ekta aam koto?’ The boy asked the price of one mango.
   ‘Panchash paisa.’
   ‘Tumi pachish paisa niba?” Reza had no idea what a fair price was for a single mango. But he’d always seen grownups offer half of what any peddler asked, so he just thought he would do the same.
   The man’s smile disappeared. His shoulders sagged as he gravely shook his head. He put the ripe mango he’d picked out back in the basket. The knife was tucked into a corner. And he rolled the small towel back into a ring shape and put it back on his head. After he lifted the basket back on his head, he looked at Reza and said, ‘Why do you call me tumi? I am an old man, your father’s age. Maybe even older. Should you not call me apni? Do you call me tumi just because I am a poor man?’
   Reza’s heart sank. He had no answer. The man’s rebuke hit him harder than any slap he’d ever received at the hands of his mother or father. As he felt tears rushing into his eyes, Reza turned around and fled back to the house.
   He sat down on the red steps of the veranda. He would have preferred the security of his bed where he could weep on his pillow, but his aunt might notice. He wasn’t up for an interrogation. He knew he had done something wrong, but he wasn’t sure what it was. He wondered if the mango seller was right. Did he use tumi because the man was poor? In Bangla there were three ways of addressing ‘you’: apni, tumi, and tui. He always used what others around him used, he’d never thought about any of this. Wouldn’t it be simpler, he wondered, if we could just use one word, tumi, to address everyone?
   Reza had placed his head between his knees and crossed his arms over his forehead. He sensed a shadow nearby. When he looked up, the mango seller was standing above him. With one hand balancing the basket on his head, he offered a mango to the boy.
   ‘Here, take this. It is for you. You don’t have to pay me anything. All I ask is that you remember what you called me and what I said back to you.’ The man then turned and walked away.
   Reza jumped up and caught up with him. He reached into his pocket, and offered up all his coins.
   The man stopped, looked at the shiny coins in the boy’s hand, then frowned and shook his head. Again he looked weary.
   ‘No, I don’t want money. You can’t right all things with money. Yes, I am a poor man, but I am not a beggar. I just want you to learn how to respect someone, no matter if they are rich or poor.’
   Once again, Reza felt as if he’d been slapped. But it didn’t sting as much this time. He nodded to the man and walked back to the veranda steps.
   He felt the mango in his hand. It was not a big one, but it was ripe and he could smell its sweetness. The boy delicately kneaded the fruit so that the flesh inside broke down. The trick, his cousin Selim had once taught him, was to knead the pulp without breaking the skin. The first few times he had never managed that. But by now he was an expert at improvising mango juice right inside the fruit. Once the pulp was all broken down, Reza used his incisors to puncture a small hole on one side, and then he sucked up the mango juice.
   When his holidays were over and Reza returned home to Dhaka, he found that his mother had hired a new boy to work around the house. The boy was perhaps a year or two older. Reza was happy to have Ali as a sometimes playmate, but the first time when the boy had addressed him with apni, Reza squirmed in discomfort. He decided that he would not address Ali with tui, as the rest of the family did, but with tumi. He wasn’t always consistent and would often fall back into whatever the others were using. Troubled by guilt for backsliding, he would make a new effort. If Ali noticed any of this, he didn’t show it.
   One day Ali and Reza were on the roof of the house. They’d gone there to watch the kites being flown by older boys in the neighbourhood. Ali asked Reza for an old schoolbook. He said he’d started school and begun to learn how to read, but when his father lost his land to the moneylender, he had to drop out. Work proved impossible to find the village, so he came to the city.
   ‘I would still like to go to school,’ he said.
   Reza agreed to give the boy a reader. He said, ‘I’ll ask Ma. Maybe she will let you go to school.’
   Later that afternoon, when his mother was helping him with his homework, Reza asked her, ‘Can Ali go to school?’
   ‘Why do you ask?’
   ‘When we were playing on the roof, he said that he had started to go to school but had to drop out. But he still wants to go.’
   ‘Did he say that?’
   ‘Yes. And he said that if he went to school in the morning, he could do extra work in the afternoon and evening.’
   She didn’t respond.
   He knew she was a generous person. When beggars came to the door, no one was turned away without a cup of rice or some food or coins. He had no doubt she would agree.
   The next day when Reza returned from school, Ali was nowhere to be seen. He felt a knot in his stomach. He went to the kitchen and asked the woman who cooked, ‘Where is Ali?’
   She replied, with sadness in her voice, that Reza’s mother had let him go.
   ‘But why?’ Reza squeaked out.
   ‘She said he had begun to demand too much.’
   The mango seller’s tired face came back to Reza. He rushed out into the streets. None of the nearby storekeepers knew where Ali had gone. At that moment Reza did not think about what he would do if he did manage to find Ali.
   
   I felt for this boy sitting in front of me. I could see he was a sensitive soul. I suspect that both of us at young ages were gifted with a keenness of observation, me about the good and evil inherent in the human personality and him about the inequities embedded in our society. I could turn my knowledge into stories, but this poor boy, what could he do with the kind of knowledge he was given? He tried to do right. But the servant boy ended up paying the price for some rich child’s inability to handle the truth. I don’t worry about Ali. He and his family had already paid at the hands of rich people all their lives. He knew this was life. He would survive better than this boy’s guilt-ridden soul.
   ‘So did you find him?’ I asked out of curiosity.
   ‘No. But a year later when the red caps came into the city and their march went by our house, I thought I saw a boy who resembled Ali. I went up to him. It wasn’t Ali, but we ended up talking and he was someone who I instantly felt comfortable with. Later that day I left home.’
   ‘Why did you think that joining the Party of Those Who Have Nothing would help?’
   ‘I’d exhausted myself trying to make things right in my own house. None of it worked. I had no say. The boy in the march convinced me that there were others who felt like me, that it was possible to find a place where I could be at ease. They have become my family now. And we share a common goal: to end the oppression in this society and create a new world.’
   My eyes began to glaze over. I could see that after a very human story, he was about to start into the ideology thing. I was not wrong. He proved to be even more incorrigible than those who shout phrases from the Big Men of revolutions in other countries.
   What choice did I have? After he was returned to his cell, I picked up the phone and dialled Special Branch. Then another thought sneaked into my head. I hung up and dialled a different number. I needed to know something for certain. I needed some information from the Missing Persons files. Later that day I asked for the boy to be returned to me. I ordered the constable on an errand to the market, assuring him that boy, shackled and cuffed, was harmless.
   Reza’s story had left me thinking. We say we are creating a democratic society. But can we make any progress when at the very core of our language, in the way each of us relates to another, we make distinctions of rank and class? True, it’s not my job to worry about such questions, but sometimes you just can’t help it.
   I asked Reza, ‘Would you be opposed to me contacting your family? I am sure they have missed you a lot.’
   ‘Sir, you know I cannot live with them. I do not belong in that old life.’ He looked down at his feet. ‘It would be like living with a chain around my neck. They have not changed.’
   ‘At least you would be alive. You are, I am sure, aware of the alternative.’
   A grim little smile crossed his face. ‘There must be a price for what you are offering.’
   ‘Well, I am sure we could come to an agreement reasonable to all of us. Your family has money and connections. I am a writer, did you know that? My wife lives in Dhaka, totally opposed to moving here. Perhaps your family could find me a suitable job.’ There, I had said it. Still, the words coming out of my mouth tasted bitter. Had I become so tired of this God-forsaken job in this shit-hole of a town?
   He stood there, mute again. He couldn’t be shocked; by now he must know how things really work in the world.
   ‘Well?’
   ‘But, sir, I cannot sign any pledges of loyalty.’
   ‘You are underage anyway. They can sign for you.’ Maybe they could find me a job in one of their businesses.
   ‘At the first chance, I would return to the movement.’
   ‘Perhaps.’ I was willing to bet that his family would quickly find a way to ship him out of the country. Meanwhile, I wondered what business position would suit me best.
   ‘You know I will.’
   ‘Maybe.’ I never did care for those who took up business as a career, but I could visualise its advantages today. No, not a manager in a factory. Never again do I want anything with authority over other human beings. Perhaps something in sales. Or accounts. In this job I’ve become pretty good with facts and figures.
   ‘You don’t believe me.’
   Yes, an accounts position would be ideal. I got the highest grades in mathematics when I was in college. I am sure I could handle all the work in a few hours and spend the rest of my time writing. It would be nice to afford a house. Nothing fancy, just something agreeable to my wife. We could finally consider having children. And I could see about publishing a second collection of stories.

by Farah Ghuznavi

Even before she came into view, Shumi could hear her voice as she made her way through the bamboo groves, on her way back from school. The madwoman was sitting in her usual place, under the shade of the spreading banyan tree; a few yards, and a world away, from the raised earth of the village road.
   Her matted hair was long and dark, almost covering her face at times; hiding the high cheekbones that pushed up against the skin stretched so tautly over her face. Her body was painfully thin, the ribs sticking out clearly; they could be seen even from a distance. It wasn’t that no-one ever gave her food, but even if she had food, she might not always eat it. Sometimes, Shumi had seen her scattering grains of rice around the place where she sat, as if feeding invisible birds. At such times, she looked almost happy, as she chattered away to those birds.
   Most of the time, she talked to herself. Most of the villagers avoided her, afflicted by a kind of superstitious dread. Perhaps they feared that the no-doubt inauspicious aura emanating from her would somehow rub off on them. A few of the kinder ones occasionally gave her food or a piece of clothing, but she was no more responsive to them than she was to anything else around her. She lived in her own world.
   It was only the children who tormented her, that ever managed to elicit any kind of direct reaction. She would scream gibberish at them and make clawing gestures, while they laughed at her from a safe distance. They soon grew out of it, bored with the limited entertainment she offered. But they were always replaced; by the next group of village youngsters to reach the requisite age. The smallest children though, kept their distance — fearful of the threats made by their parents, to deliver them to her if they misbehaved.
   Shumi often saw her sitting under the banyan tree. Few people disturbed her at this spot; perhaps that was why she came. The tree lay between the village road and a number of bamboo groves. The superstitions that convinced people that the bamboo groves were inhabited by ghosts meant that none of the other children were willing to walk through there by themselves.
   But Shumi did not believe in ghosts. Baba had inculcated in her a healthy scepticism for what he considered to be old wives’ tales. Besides, she had already developed a capacity for rational thought that all too often proved to be a curse rather than an advantage. At least, that’s what Ma told her.
   And she should know. After all, Baba had laboured all his life under a similar burden of rationality, further complicating things with his sense of integrity. He had been the headmaster of the main government school in their locality for over 20 years. But although he was highly respected and well-liked by most of the local inhabitants, he had been forced to take early retirement due to his incurable habit of honesty.
   This was not always appreciated by his fellow teachers. They made rich pickings by tutoring many of their students in the afternoons, alongside their official duties. Baba did not approve of the fact that such teachers provided a better quality of teaching and useful crib-notes to their private students, while depriving their poorer students of the help that they needed in school.
   Most inconveniently, his high standards would not allow him to look the other way when students attempted to cheat during exams. As he was one of the chief invigilators, every set of public exams resulted in a few students being expelled.
   The school authorities began to dread the exam season. Things came to a head when Baba expelled the son of Keshab Pandit, the Brahmin priest in their village, who was both powerful and well-connected. Shortly thereafter, he was advised to retire early, or risk being forced into a battle that he could not win.
   Undaunted by his punishment, Baba continued to receive a stream of guests in their home. Some were students, who came to pay their respects, others came seeking advice. All of them were welcomed with tea and pithas (cakes), and most left with lighter hearts. That was one of Baba’s best qualities — even in the direst of circumstances, his common sense and kind heart provided one with a measure of solace.
   He had passed on both of these to his eldest daughter. Shumi’s real name was Shumoti, but everyone called her by the abbreviated version of her name. After all, ‘shumoti’ meant ‘good sense’. In Shumi’s context, that should have meant that she was a quiet, well-behaved, practical girl, with all the domestic skills expected of a good Hindu girl of her age. But as her mother pointed out, that was far from the case!
   Of course, Ma had high standards; she made the most amazing kashundi (mustard sauce) and achar (pickle) herself. And her jalpaiyer achar (olive pickle) was a particular favourite, famed far beyond the confines of their home. All this was enough to make anyone seem inadequate by comparison! Therefore, Shumi reasoned, she had nothing to be embarrassed about, and she did not worry herself too much about these matters…
   In reality, she was not without practical skills, but her clear preoccupation was with her intellectual pursuits, in particular her love of storybooks. She could most often be found with her nose in some book or another, much to her industrious mother’s frustration. Shumi had a strong sense of integrity, and many ideas about how things should be. She was a dreamer, but one whose passions were aroused by the world around her; by injustice and inequality, above all. In that sense, she was very much her father’s daughter.
   And perhaps that was why Baba defended her when others teased her about her name. As he pointed out, it would have been far worse if they had named her ‘Srimoti’, which meant ‘ladylike’! ‘Shumoti’, on the other hand, could also be interpreted to mean ‘good intentions’ — and there was no doubt that she had plenty of those.
   Besides, ‘good sense’ was often an issue of definition, as Baba well knew. There were plenty of people who had advised him not to give up his job; to swallow his pride and knuckle under the pressure to allow Keshab Pandit’s son to re-enter the school. But as far as Baba was concerned, that was not an option.
   On most days when she walked through the bamboo groves, Shumi would see the madwoman sitting in her usual spot under the tree. Sometimes she wasn’t there, but there were still signs of her presence; a piece of tattered cloth, a broken comb (why did she have that, Shumi wondered; her hair was always so wild and matted, she clearly didn’t use it), and an odd assortment of twigs and string, scraps of paper and unrecognisable bits of rubbish — different things on different days.
   Shumi could not help wondering about her. Who was she really? How had she come to this strange way of living? Had she always been mad, or had something happened to her? Shumi had a million questions she wanted to ask her, even as she acknowledged that her interest in the woman was not quite appropriate. She didn’t even know her real name! Everyone in the village just called her ‘Pagli’ (the madwoman). Did she not have a proper name…?
   Finally, one evening, she plucked up the courage to ask the one person that she knew would give her some kind of answer. ‘Baba, you know that Pagli – why is she like that?’ Shumi asked. ‘Ram, Ram, listen to the girl! How do you come up with these questions?’ her mother exclaimed, ‘If you spent half the time on your chores that you do thinking about these crazy things, you would be the best radhuni (cook) in the village!’
   Shumi sensed that her mother was uncomfortable with her questions, though she didn’t understand why. Determined to get a response however, she kept her gaze resolutely on her father. ‘It’s all right, Nirmala. She’s not a little girl anymore; she is old enough to understand.’ ‘This is not the kind of story you should be telling an unmarried girl!’ her mother remonstrated. But to no avail; Baba had already made up his mind.
   Shumi would never forget the story that she heard that night. The truth was well beyond what she had imagined…
   Pagli’s real name was Anandita, a name given to celebrate the fact that she was the first grandchild born into a wealthy, landowning family; a miracle child, born to parents who had resigned themselves to barrenness, after 15 years of married life failed to produce any offspring.
   In fact, five years prior to her birth, Anandita’s parents had adopted the daughter of a distant relative — a practice not uncommon in childless families at that time — a girl named Radhika. Sadly, her own birth was to herald the beginning of a difficult period for Radhika, who — in the way that such things tended to happen — was completely overshadowed, even neglected, in favour of the new arrival.
   Anandita means ‘joy-giver’, and as far as her family were concerned, she lived up to her name. She was a beautiful little girl, with huge dark eyes and thick black hair. Although everyone spoilt her, she remained good-natured, and her naughtiness was seen as the sign of a lively intelligence rather than bad behaviour. Besides, she had all the charm in the world, which she used to great effect on the adults around her. The only one who remained immune to her attractions was her older sister, Radhika.
   The beloved child grew into a graceful and lively teenager, excelling at her schoolwork as well as the more traditional female pursuits of music and classical dancing. She was the apple of her parents’ eye, and they guarded her jealously, dreading the day when she would inevitably leave them for a new life with her husband. There was considerable speculation in the village as to who that husband would be, along with a pleasurable sense of anticipation at the undoubtedly grand scale of the festivities that lay ahead.
   But before that could happen, tragedy struck. Anandita’s father, Shailendranath Thakur, was killed in a road accident, while returning from a visit to supervise one of their more distant estates. His death was to bring a sea change in the lives of all the inhabitants of the Thakur household — or the Thakurbari, as it was known.
   Shailendra’s younger brother, Mahendra, had never married, and lived in the city. Their mother, Savitri Devi, long a widow herself, now insisted that he return to his ancestral home, and take over the task of managing the estate. Mahendra, however, did not aspire to the life of a country gentleman. It was only with great reluctance that he returned to do what was expected of him.
   Shailendra’s wife, Sunita, and his daughters were bereft, and allowed Savitri Devi, a strong-willed matriarch, to take charge of matters. Unlike her older son, Thakurma (as Savitri Devi was known), did not believe in education for girls, and she lost no time in making it clear to her granddaughters that they were now being groomed for marriage.
   For Radhika, who was then nineteen, this was natural enough. For Anandita, so long indulged and brought up to value education by her scholarly, cultured father, it was too early at fourteen, to give up all she had been working for. Perhaps inevitably, she began to clash frequently with her grandmother; even as her despairing mother looked on, recognising that this was one battle that her headstrong daughter would not win.
   After Mahendra’s return, Savitri Devi decided to fulfil her religious duties by undertaking a major pilgrimage to a number of holy sites. She was away for several months, and an already tense domestic situation was complicated further shortly after her return, by the arrival of a newcomer.
   No-one in the village quite understood how Ananta had come into the lives of the Thakur family, but in what seemed like no time at all, he was well and truly entrenched in that household. Some said that he was a distant relative, from another branch of the family. Others, who knew more about these things, insisted that it was no such thing. And yet others whispered that he had met Thakurma at one of the pilgrimage spots, and had somehow wormed his way into graces; and eventually, as became all too evident, her heart.
   There was little doubt that Ananta could be charming, and those to whom he displayed that side of himself were rarely able to resist him. That he had a cruel streak, however, was evident in a certain sneer that sometimes hovered around his lips — as well as a temper that quickly became legendary.
   That temper was never evident around Thakurma, towards whom Ananta was always deferential. But the servants in the Thakurbari learned to dread his mercurial temperament, and occasionally violent rages. It was difficult to believe that the Ananta who beat poor Nondai black and blue because his bathwater was not warm enough was the same kurta-clad, urbane man often seen conversing with Thakurma on the verandah in the early evenings, as they drank cup after cup of fragrant clove tea.
   Despite his charm, Sunita found that she did not warm to Ananta, and Anandita followed her mother’s lead in this matter. There was something slightly sinister about Ananta; something nameless that lurked in the obsidian depths of his dark eyes. Radhika, however, often sought his attention. Perhaps she was taken with his brooding good looks, or perhaps it was just some form of revenge on her younger sister, who had for so long been the focus of all attention.
   As for their uncle, Mahendra, he bitterly disliked the usurper. And usurper he undoubtedly was. Within two months, Ananta had taken over the running of the property by persuading Thakurma that Mahendra was too inexperienced, too much of a city boy to manage such a large estate.
   Within a short time, things had changed beyond recognition at the Thakurbari. After a final, massive argument — the last in a series of increasingly bitter exchanges — Mahendra left them to resume his life in the city. Sunita seemed to retreat into herself after his departure, and even Anandita’s irrepressible high spirits — that had for so long been at the heart of their household — were little in evidence.
   Thakurma was increasingly seen turning to Ananta for every decision. She relied utterly on his advice, and would not hear a word against him. Even as she drew closer to him, however, she became more distant and unapproachable with the other members of her family, including her once-adored granddaughter. With Sunita, she barely maintained the most basic of courtesies, instructing her to run the household according to Ananta’s instructions, and obey him as she would have her own husband.
   This was too much for Sunita, who had already been demoted to that most inauspicious of creatures, a Hindu widow. Being a dutiful wife, after Shailendra’s death, she had willingly broken her shakhas, the bracelets on her hands that had signified her status as a married woman. She wore only the plainest of white saris, and fulfilled all the required rituals of prayer and fasting. But she knew that she had done nothing to deserve such humiliation. After all, Savitri Devi herself was a widow, and had been one for more than 10 years!
   A gracious and dignified woman, Sunita never allowed others to see how she was affected by this daily humiliation. But she shed bitter tears in the privacy of her bed chamber, where the only witness was her younger daughter. Initially, Anandita had spoken out against this treatment of her mother. But as the atmosphere in the house changed, and it became clear to all concerned that everything was done according to Ananta’s whims, even Anandita began to change. The high-spirited teenager was replaced by an unnaturally silent, tense young woman, whose deep unhappiness was evident to all those around her.
   And less than a year later came the decision that shocked everyone. Thakurma had decided that Radhika would be married to Ananta! Bizarrely, there was barely a week between the announcement of the wedding, and the wedding itself. That a daughter of Shailendra Thakur — even an adopted one! — should be married off to a man whose origins were unknown, was bad enough. That the marriage should take place in the midst of such unseemly haste, without even sufficient fanfare and festivities, was completely inexplicable. The villagers talked endlessly about the scandal of it all, but few of them fully understood the significance of what was happening.
   Some did say that with this marriage, Ananta had ensured that his position in the Thakur family was well and truly secure. Others wondered why he had not married Anandita. But the answer to that question was all too obvious to those who knew anything about the family. Anandita would never have married Ananta. She hated him with a passion, holding him responsible for the way that Thakurma treated her mother.
   But by then, even Anandita knew better than to allow her feelings about him to show. So, if she seemed unnaturally pale and a little withdrawn for a joyous occasion like her sister’s wedding, she nevertheless dutifully played the role that was expected of her.
   In the months thereafter, her withdrawal became increasingly pronounced, leading to whispered speculation in the village about the possible reasons for such a change in a lively young girl. There were even rumours that Anandita had fallen foul of Ananta’s priapic desires, but few dared to suggest this out loud — less out of respect for the late Shailendra, who had been well-liked, than for fear of possible reprisals from Ananta.
   Almost two years to the day after Radhika’s wedding, Anandita was married to the son of a wealthy merchant from a nearby town. Her wedding was also not without controversy. Most people felt that she had married beneath her. But there was little doubt that the merchant family would have been willing to accept her without much of a dowry, seduced by her aristocratic background. Girls like Anandita were not usually sold so cheaply…
   From the very beginning, things did not go well. Anandita seemed unable to settle down properly in her in-laws’ home. She missed her mother desperately, a situation made worse by the fact that Sunita was not allowed to visit her without Ananta’s permission — a permission all too often arbitrarily withheld. Furthermore, her husband’s family responded to her evident misery by insisting that she limit her visits to the Thakurbari, perhaps assuming that time and distance would be the best cure for her homesickness.
   They were wrong. Over time, she became listless and utterly withdrawn, losing weight and becoming increasingly haggard, until she bore little resemblance to the beautiful young woman who had come to that house just a few years ago. No-one could understand how to deal with her, and despite repeated visits from doctors, no solution was found.
   Then, miraculously, things began to improve. There was good news! Anandita was pregnant, and the prospect of motherhood seemed to reawaken her interest in life, giving her back an energy that had been missing for too long.
   Her pregnancy was uneventful, and her in-laws breathed a sigh of relief at the advent of normalcy in their son’s married life. Anandita’s husband was not an unkind man, but he had been as much at a loss to cope with her problems as others around her. Besides, as a dutiful wife, it was in any case her role in life to look after him, rather than the other way around.
   After all the hopes that were raised by her pregnancy, Anandita’s baby turned out to be a girl. Far, far worse than that though, the child was stillborn. That loss broke the young woman’s already fragile spirit.
   The silent, stony-faced grief with which Anandita greeted the world after her baby’s death did not go down well with many. She was viewed as unnatural and uncaring. Things were not helped by her immeasurably bitter comment - made in her mother-in-law’s presence — that it was perhaps just as well that the baby had died, since women in her family were cursed anyway.
   In the months after the birth, she began to behave increasingly strangely. She would stare into space for hours on end; or speak suddenly, uttering meaningless phrases, or laughing out loud at nothing in particular. She spent hours walking around by herself, sometimes pacing back and forth like a caged animal. Her husband would wake up late at night to find that she was no longer in the room; instead, she would be found standing alone in the darkness, in some distant part of their massive house.
   Her in-laws were at their wits’ end as to what to do with her. Finally, they sent her home to visit her mother. Sunita had aged overnight, both as a result of the treatment she had received at home since her husband’s death, and as a result of worry over her daughter’s future. It was a surprise to no-one when she fell ill with a high fever, slipping away quietly within a few days.
   This was the final straw for Anandita. Now, the last person who had loved her was gone. She became aggressive and unmanageable — refusing to speak, and repeatedly leaving her in-laws’ house to disappear for hours on end. She would shout at passing strangers, addressing them in familiar terms. Although she was regularly found and retrieved by her husband’s family, she resisted all attempts at communication, speaking gibberish and screaming whenever anyone touched her.
   After months of this, her in-laws finally gave up trying to salvage the situation. This time, when she left the house, they simply let her go. There was no-one else who might have tried to help her. Ananta had settled into a life of debauchery in the Thakurbari, spending his time bringing in women from the village, who were willing, or who had husbands willing to allow them to provide certain services in return for money. He was well on his way to drinking himself into an early grave, while Radhika was preoccupied with surviving his temper, in between producing one child after another.
   Thakurma remained utterly mesmerised by the Rasputin-like figure that she had brought into their family, and allowed to bring about its destruction. In any case, she was herself both aged and frail. As for Mahendra, he never came home anymore, the rift with his mother now final, despite a few sporadic attempts at reconciliation.
   The villagers who knew what had happened tried to be kind to Anandita, but as the story gradually faded from their collective memory, she became nothing more than the local madwoman — Pagli — to most of them.
   Shumi remained silent for a long time after Baba had finished the story. She did not know quite what she had expected to hear, but it was not this epic tale of betrayal and loss. Anandita’s story touched her quite profoundly. Not only because her life had been such a sad one, but also because of the awfulness of her current predicament.
   Perhaps inevitably, Shumi could not help contrasting Anandita’s ordeal with her own situation, cocooned as she had always been against the outside world by the knowledge of Baba’s unconditional support, and the love and protection of her formidable mother. Anandita’s plight made it all too clear what could happen to a girl in their society who had neither of those things…
   For the next two or three days, Shumi did not see Anandita anywhere, not even at her usual spot under the tree. She was just becoming concerned, when she saw her walking near the bazaar the following day. As usual, she was talking aloud, and there were some small boys laughing at her behaviour. Because they were doing it from a distance, Shumi said nothing, but she realised with some surprise that she felt a strong urge to protect Anandita from their teasing.
   Over the next few weeks, Shumi developed the habit of carrying small things to leave for Anandita by the banyan tree — sometimes it was a pitha (cake), or some leftover khichuri (dry rice and lentil dish), once it was half a bar of soap. She had no idea whether she ever used those things, but somehow it made Shumi feel a little better to just to be able to do something for her — anything at all.
   Anandita never acknowledged Shumi’s presence, even if she was there when Shumi made her daily pilgrimage. But gradually, Shumi realised, the volume of her chatter grew lower. And eventually, Shumi found herself taking a few minutes whenever she stopped by there, to sit nearby — never right beside her — and say a few words to her. It would be misleading to say that she spoke to Anandita, more that she said something aloud that only the two of them could hear. Anandita never reacted to her words, and at times, Shumi wondered at herself for speaking at all.
   She was a little embarrassed by her own behaviour, but felt compelled to reach out to Anandita somehow. At least, she reasoned, she was doing her no harm. That is, except for the time when she made the mistake of addressing her by her name. At first, Anandita didn’t react. Then, to Shumi’s dismay, she started shrieking, ‘Jah! Jah! (go away)’ and waving her arms in the air — even as she refused to look at her — as if warding off the unwanted embrace of some invisible person.
   Shumi left her alone for several days after that. But eventually, she resumed the earlier routine. Anandita also behaved much as she had earlier; appearing to ignore her, but at least tolerating her presence. Perhaps she didn’t even remember what had taken place.
   Shumi did not mention what she was doing at home, somehow sensing that it might be awkward. But she suspected that Ma might be wondering where some of the odds and ends she took were going; if that was the case, Ma did not confront her about it.
   A month or so later, Shumi was walking home on her usual route when suddenly she heard the sound of Anandita’s voice. She was screaming at someone, but this time, it didn’t sound as though it was the children who were tormenting her. There was an undercurrent of real fear in her tone, and Shumi found herself running through the bamboo groves, in a hurry to get to her.
   As the tree came into view, she could see the figure of Anandita cowering on the ground, and screaming her gibberish, while two men were standing over her, one of them holding her down with the stick in his hand. Without thinking twice, Shumi yelled, ‘Hey, what are you doing to her?’
   The two figures turned towards her, and Shumi saw that they were not men, but older boys who attended the nearby Intermediate College. They were laughing at Anandita, as she struggled against the stick pinning her down. A haze of rage descended on Shumi, as she realised how terrified Anandita was. And they thought that was funny!
   Shumi was well-known in the area as Master Shaheb’s daughter, so she had no hesitation in marching up to the boys and giving them a piece of her mind. Grabbing the stick away from the boy holding it, she flung it away as far as she could. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself! Can’t you see how scared she is, you idiot!’ she raged.
   Suddenly aware that their game appeared ridiculous to her, the boys looked a little chastened. ‘I don’t see that it’s any of your business!’ said the older one belligerently. But after walking off to retrieve his stick, he did not bother coming back to the banyan tree. His friend followed him, and the two of them sauntered off with studied casualness, talking loudly about stupid girls who nosed about in other people’s business.
   Shumi turned to Anandita, who was still sitting on the ground, making high-pitched keening sounds, like an animal in distress. ‘Come on, don’t cry, please don’t cry. It’s all right — they’ve gone,’ she said, awkwardly reaching out to touch her shoulder. Anandita suddenly reached up and caught the hand Shumi had placed on her shoulder. She was amazed at the strength of Anandita’s grip, but even as she started to speak, Shumi suddenly realised that Anandita’s mind was somewhere else.
   That she was lost in some distant memory became evident to Shumi, as holding her hand, Anandita suddenly said, ‘Ma!’ Her face lit up with a radiant smile, but even as Shumi realised what she was saying, who she had mistaken her for, the light in Anandita’s eyes went out, to be replaced by a totally vacant expression; her hand fell away from Shumi’s limply.
   Shumi fell silent, as she wondered what to do next. She was not quite sure what she had expected. Was it that Anandita would actually speak to her? That was hardly likely! But she could not rid herself of the lingering suspicion that for a brief moment, the look in Anandita’s eyes had been one of pure clarity.
   After standing there hesitantly for a few moments, Shumi suddenly felt overwhelmed, unable to cope with the emotional complexities of the situation. Feeling utterly inadequate, she could not think of what to say. She would have to think about this later, she thought to herself desperately. Perhaps Baba could help. Now, she just needed to get home.
   As she turned and walked away, she heard Anandita begin her litany of gibberish. Those sounds, Shumi finally realised, were her defensive weapon against the world around her, shutting out what she could not bear to deal with. And now, as she seamlessly resumed her lonely conversation, Shumi could have been forgiven for wondering if that strange little interlude had ever even taken place. It was as if Anandita’s monologue had never been interrupted…

by Abeer Hoque

When I was young, I had nightmares about marrying a silent man, like my father. In the beginning of the dream, he would start off garrulous, and then gradually the weight of the world or something else would swallow up his words, one by one. I would ask him increasingly louder questions, hoping my volume would turn his up. Instead, I would end up shouting into his silence. Sometimes my shout would reach across from the dreaming place into the waking place, a diminished sound that yet roused you, my sister. You slept beside me on a prickly pati in our one-room shack, and despite not being able to fully wake, you would pull me close to yourself, reminding me where we both were.
   ‘Asho,’ you would murmur into my hair, smoothing it with your hand, ‘Come. I’m here.’
   My hair was my only asset that surpassed yours. Your hair had always been thin, while mine grew glossily, copiously from my scalp. Everything else though, marked you for more. You were fairer, taller, sweeter. I knew you would marry well.
   My father was a rickshawallah. He sometimes made enough money for two meals a day, but almost certainly not enough for two dowries. Each night, he would return exhausted, his gaunt face made even more pitiable by his expression. The other fathers never looked as tired or thin. What was it about my father’s lot that had aged him so? I didn’t know, and it made me angry. He made me angry. Did he have to suffer so outwardly? It only made things worse for the rest of us. As soon as he entered our home, we had to stop playing and stand about looking as sad as he. You could sometimes make him smile. You would silently act out the day’s adventures in clownish detail and if you caught him at the right time during his smoke, then something would lift and the evening wouldn’t be as oppressive.
   I was twelve when I left home. My first menses coincided with a pregnancy but I lost my husband and then my baby in quick succession. Everything in the village reminded me of everything I didn’t want to think about. So I went to Dhaka where nothing looked familiar.
   A few months later, you ran away with a poor and handsome boy from another village. If I had been at home, I would have told you not to go. To wait even just one more year because you had grown even more beautiful, and surely you would find better. You would have listened to me. You always did even though I was a year younger. There was something about you that was childlike. It made me afraid for you. I was the one who held your hand jumping across the ditch leading to our slum, the one who chased away the boys grasping for your attention. But when I heard the news, I was far away, working as a maid in a lavish flat filled with glassy-eyed knickknacks, and I only heard about it weeks later when you showed up at my employer’s doorstep. I couldn’t talk to you very long because the Sir of the house was very strict and would beat me for any transgression, sometimes for nothing I could understand.
   I shuffled nervously at the front door and then asked, ‘What are you doing now?’
   ‘I’m working at a garment factory in Bagher Bajar, outside Dhaka. I love it,’ you said earnestly, seeming more naïve than ever.
   ‘Where are you living?’
   ‘In Gazipur, with Mintu. He wants me to quit because the overseers at the factory are always harassing me. But I won’t. At the factory, they pay us more than Abba made as a rickshawallah, and my money is all mine. I don’t have to give it to anyone.’
   ‘Listen, I cannot talk long,’ I told you, taking your soft hands into my callused ones. I did not know that this would be the last time I would see you.
   ‘Come with me,’ you said, ‘Forget working as a maid. We can live together and work at the same factory.’
   ‘I have to go,’ I said, not even considering your offer for a second. At the time, I was so consumed by fear of my employer, it was impossible for me to think of alternatives. The elevator door opened making me start. But it was only a peon going to the opposite flat. You left then, after touching my hair in that old familiar way. I shut the door and went back to work.
   I heard nothing from you in months and so I took two days off and went looking. I finally found your lover who told me that you had not come home a few weeks back. He had searched everywhere, hearing all the while rumours, pretty garment workers being sold at high price, to be sex slaves in India. He told me this story in a surly manner, his voice dry, as if it meant nothing to him. I could not shake the feeling that he was somehow responsible for your disappearance, but there was nothing I could do and I was late. So I returned to my employer’s flat.
   But this is all history. Unforgotten, but so many years ago, it no longer moved me. Until now. Until you. My love, my husband, I am beginning to understand how dreams come true. When I married the first time, I was barely out of girlhood and had no real conception of what it meant to love. When my first husband died and then God called my baby daughter only months later, I thought my time for love had run out. But years later, Tahsin was born, the younger son of my new employers, and I felt a new lease beginning, a pulling inside my chest when I held his tiny plump body to mine. In no time at all, it felt as if my heart had always been this full.
   When Tahsin left for London, 17 years later, I cried harder than his own mother. I had reasons to. It was I who had raised him after all. I knew when best to wake him in the mornings before school, how much rice to put on his plate, what each of his gestures and expressions meant. Some mornings, I wake and find myself standing in his old room. I look around, my thick black braid swinging across my back, and the neatly made bed only confuses me further. Then I remember that he’s gone.
   It was not long after that I met you, my heart, my bane, you with your quick smile, your quicker hands. I thought God had blessed me yet again. All the beatings, the barren hours, it all faded under your gaze. I was so proud when people saw us together, when they saw you, your hair shining and perfect, your clothes, carefully pressed no matter how well-worn, and most of all, your eyes, so large, so lashed. Seeing you made my heart contract. It still would, despite my anger.
   You haven’t come to see me in ten months. Perhaps it’s a blessing. Perhaps if you came, I’d throw my pride to the wind and forget myself. I’d believe your protestations of love and preoccupation, once again. I might even give you more money, even though I’ve promised myself no more. It’s just that when I hear your plans, your filmi-deep voice, so excited for a future that I thought included me, I want nothing more than to make it work. For you. For us. But it seems that you’vedeliberately forgotten me, your beloved, your wife in the city.
   I had to cancel my trip back to my village this winter because of you. For weeks, you didn’t take my calls. I’d hear ring after hollow ring in my tin ear, the one that has buzzed since my well pump accident. Each successive call, the number of rings would get shorter, until finally, you just shut off your phone and I gave up. The space between my reaching out and your rejection too small to bear. Then finally one day, you called up and as soon as I answered, I felt my heart treacherously open. Still, I had to ask, though I was so afraid it would push you from me.
   ‘Where have you been?’ I asked as evenly as possible, ‘I have been calling for so long.’
   ‘I have been so busy, my dearest. My former friend was minding my store while I went to Chittagong. Then when I got back, I found he had cheated me by starting his own mobile shop and stealing my best supplier. I have spent the last week trying to find another supplier. It has been very difficult…’ Your voice trails off, hurriedness mingling with quiet.
   ‘You went to Chatga?’
   ‘I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you might be angry.’
   ‘Why would I be angry?’ I asked, though I could already feel myself becoming angry.
   ‘You know why.’
   ‘You should not be talking to that man. I am sure he sold my sister away, or had something to do with it. I wish you had never met him.’
   ‘Mintu knows a man who knows things. He could help me. Us. Maybe even your sister. But the man is half mad and he doesn’t speak to everyone. So I had to use other means.’
   I know what you did. You have power in those womanly potol-chera eyes of yours. You recite from the hadiths, backwards, and the unintelligible staccato words make men thrill in fear, make women do what you want. Is that how you got me? Did you mumble a prayer in reverse under your breath when we met? Did I fall because of your secret art or the darker art of love? God may strike me down for saying it, but does it matter? I cannot breathe either way. I hurt. My heart hurts. Perhaps if I had learned, if I had been able to go to school... I know that people who have learned something in school hurt less. Rich people even less. I am not educated or rich, so I don’t know how to escape the pain, nor can I buy my way out of it. I know nothing except for how to cook, how to clean, how to love all the wrong people. My first husband. Then Tahsin. Now you. Only my sister did not betray my love. But yet she is gone.
   ‘I wanted to go to my village,’ I told you, feeling a keen desire for my childhood home, ‘But I could not. I cannot return without you. How would it look?’
   ‘I cannot go now.’
   ‘Then come visit me here.’
   ‘I cannot,’ you said flatly.
   ‘Are you angry with me?’ I asked you, ‘Because if you are, I will die. I will.’ And I felt the truth of the statement. His anger filling me, pushing the air out of my body, leaving me hollow.
   ‘I am not angry,’ you said, ‘I will go to your village next month. After Eid. If this man whom I met has told me the truth, then all will be well. You can have your wedding feast as you wished so long ago. I just need enough money for this next month and then the profits will start pouring in. We will be swimming in it.’
   This cold marble floor that I clean every day, this is where my life begins, this is where it ends. I see now I made a mistake. But I’m going to fix it. I’m going to make you do what you must. I know how I’ll do it too. I’ll lure you with the promise of the money you need. You haven’t paid your shop rent in weeks. Your oldest son needs to pay tuition. The youngest needs new shoes. So, when I tell you I want to draw up the papers to share my property, my money, you’ll jump at the chance.
   I never asked you for much. I didn’t care if you never returned the one lakh taka you borrowed from me three years ago to start your shop. Money I had saved from years of breaking my back for people who would throw me out for one shattered glass animal, one wrong word. I didn’t ask you to leave your wife and children in Mymensingh. I didn’t need jewellery or pretty saris. All I wanted was time. A visit a few times a year. A weekend here. A week there. Perhaps twenty days altogether. Isn’t that only fair, a score for love?
   Weeks passed before I was able to put my plan into action. I had to find someone I trusted to write the contracts. The darwan (guard) gave me his name and the name of a man who would be the security man. I met them both separately and spoke at length about my plan. Finally the day came. You arrived late in the morning. We had been sitting in a tiny airless office that the contract man had access to for almost two hours. The security man had relaxed his upright stance long ago and was slouched against the wall. Three mismatched cups and saucers sat in front of us on the old wooden table, filled and refilled, and refilled once again with watery tea. I had not seen you in more than a year. You looked the same beautiful same, while I felt I had aged terribly. When I took your hand and held it, you looked at me strangely. You couldn’t know, could you, how I was going to keep you close?
   Two pieces of paper lay on the table. The first one, the one whose colour and shape I had memorised, listed all my assets, cash money, my father’s thatched shack in the village, along with a small corner of land. When the contract man had first showed me the ivory coloured sheet with its typed ink depressions, I felt bereft. Could someone’s life, her worth, fit onto one side of a sheet of paper? In between the words, words I couldn’t read myself, was space. There was space above the words, and below. It looked wanting. Where were the decades I had spent in my current employer’s house, the years in the glass filled flat before that? Where marked the day Tahsin was born, the night I met you, the last afternoon I saw my sister? What about the dozen years I shared with my family in my village? You wouldn’t know from reading this thin page how my body travailed during the day, how my heart folded at night.
   This paper, the rolls of taka, the piece of land, these were the only physical things I had. Perhaps it was better this way, to focus on these. The intangible things, the ones that made you feel, that made you hurt, I was better off without them.
   The other contract, a blinding white sheet of paper, had even more empty space on it. As I had instructed the contract man, it stated that you had borrowed one lakh taka from me three years ago with the intention of paying it back within ten years. We had seven years left though I had no intention of making you pay me back. I only wanted a way to hold on to you. A way to bring you back if you lost me.
   You shook my hand loose and started reading the contracts. It took you longer than I expected but I waited.
   You picked up the second paper, the one outlining your debt to me, and asked, ‘What is this for?’
   I said nothing, embarrassed at my need. Now that you were standing there, so solid, so real, the precaution seemed unnecessary. Like a tattered white flag of my dignity.
   ‘You want me to sign this?’
   I nodded and then shrugged.
   ‘And this other document?’
   Your tone was distant, giving my shame room to lie down, spread out.
   I gathered breath and said, ‘It means everything I have is yours. If you sign this one, you must sign the other one too.’
   ‘And then what?’
   ‘And then nothing. It’s only to show you what I have, what I want.’
   ‘We know what we have, jaan,’ you said, ‘We don’t need these papers to tell us that. But if this is what you want to do, then so be it.’
   You bent and signed both papers with a flourish. I painstakingly added my signature on the line the contract man pointed to and then carefully folded them and put them into my purse. Madam had given it to me years ago, an old aubergine coloured leather purse she was going to throw away because the inner cloth pockets had torn. The contracts fit perfectly under the silver clasp. As I tucked the purse under my arm, I caught you exchanging a look with the contract man. Did it mean anything? I don’t know. What I do know is that you didn’t stay the weekend as you promised. You stayed one night, and the next morning you were gone, as was my aubergine purse containing the contracts and the new red lipstick I had bought at a terribly expensive store in Bashundhara City, for the occasion of seeing you.
   I wish you would have stayed longer. I could have given you the money I had saved out of my month’s salary, kept the lipstick. Instead I cried all day. In the evening, Madam opened the door to my room. I thought she was going to scold me for neglecting my work. Instead she told me there was someone here to see me, a relative of mine. I knew no one who would come visit me, but still I wiped my face and went downstairs.
   I opened the heavy wooden door, and it was you, my sister, standing straight, looking older, yet younger. I never thought I would see you again. You must have gone so far, but then returned. The space in my body contracted to an endless point.
   ‘July,’ I said, starting crying all over again. This time encompassed. This time in fullness.
   Mahalingapuram, Chetput, Egmore, Chennai Central
   6 little girls your age
   Gudur, Nellore, Vijawada, Eluru
   5 about your height
   Rajamundry, Samalkot, Duvvada, Vishakapatnam
   4 skipping instead of walking
   Berhampur, Khurda Road, Bhadrak, Kharagpur
   3 who made my heart alight
   Kolkata, Howrah Junction, Marquis Street, Haridaspur
   2 tossing hair as fine
   Benapol, Jessore, Dhaka, Kamalapur Bus Station
   1 with feet as small
   Motijheel, Tejgaon, Mohakhali, Gulshan
   after all the love
   Gulshan 1 Circle, Gulshan Avenue, Wonderland, Road 103
   there are endless ways to fall