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Elephant Road
by K Anis Ahmed
ANINDA Basu could not understand why he did what he did on Elephant Road. It was true that Bangladesh had completely thrown away a series-winning match against Zimbabwe the night before. He was also fired from his twelve-year-old job that morning. But nothing could explain what he did.
Aninda had trudged over to that congested shop-filled street, where the buildings jostled shoulder to shoulder as densely as the pedestrians milling in their shadows, to buy a pair of PT shoes for his daughter. No need for the girl to go without new shoes one more day, he reasoned, just because I lost my job. Besides, he needed to digest the news by himself first.
‘We have found severe discrepancies in the bank reconciliations,’ Aninda was sternly informed by the young son of the boss. Truth be told, Aninda did not enjoy his place of work anymore. He liked it in the easygoing days of the big boss, when they could enjoy long afternoons of free papers and endless cups of tea. With the boss’s son arrived a new regime of software and audits, meetings and agenda.
Aninda cursed himself for not having quit before they had a chance to fire him. It wasn’t as if he had nothing else to fall back on. He had put up a store of his own a few years ago, looked after by his wife’s brother. But a regular paycheque was a hard habit to kick.
When he walked out of the office, for what he fancied might be the last time ever, he decided to head for his favourite restaurant at Shahbagh, at the top of Elephant Road. The shoe store would be close enough afterwards. He stared out the second-floor window, comfortable in his air-conditioned perch, and tried to judge by their looks if any of the passers-by were also fired that day.
At 4 o’clock Aninda stepped out of the restaurant and headed for the corner that the Bata shoe store had occupied for decades. He picked out a pair of blue Keds with two white stripes and strong rubber soles. It would go well with his daughter’s uniform, and also hopefully hold out longer than the last pair. When he walked out of the store, suddenly he heard a cry rise from the crowd, ‘Catch him! Catch him!’
Aninda did not even hear clearly what the crowd was shouting. Aninda could not see anything that looked like a crowd. Just the usual jostle of people, and wending through them, with cheetah-like swiftness, a young man with a half-open shirt, and eyes wide with terror. Then he saw the chasers, also young, eyes full of rage, fingers pointing, hairs flying, spearing through the pedestrians.
‘Catch him! Catch him!’
From the moment Aninda spotted the prey, it took barely a second for the boy to reach him. Perhaps Aninda would have acted differently if he had even a few more seconds to think, he told himself later. But, in that moment, he let the bag slip down his arm to free his hands, grabbed onto the light pole before him with both arms and stuck a foot out, catching the boy at the shin.
The boy didn’t fall down outright, but he stumbled. A moment’s slowdown was all that the mob needed. As he grabbed at air to maintain balance, someone thrust him flat to the ground with one push. He had no chance of getting up.
Someone slapped Aninda on the back, ‘Well done!’ A crowd swelled in no time around the boy’s fallen figure. Aninda could hear the curses, harsh like clashing metal. And below the shouting voices, he could hear the sickeningly muted slap of flesh on flesh.
Aninda pulled back into the crowd quietly, and then decided to walk away before anyone noticed him. He hoped that they would not kill the boy. He hoped that the boy was guilty of something. He expected to read about him in the papers the next day.
When Aninda came home, still trembling from the incident, he found his wife’s brother Nitun at the dining table. The brother was a cause for merry distraction for his wife, and Aninda could slip into his room without attention or comment. Aninda took a bath with cold bucket-water, pouring countless mugs over his head. But the boy he tripped, his terrified gaunt face refused to be washed out of his memory.
‘Don’t use up all the water,’ his wife shouted with a rap on the door. When he finally emerged, he found Nitun with a cup of tea and the remains of four person’s worth of fried chicken on an enamel plate. The dining table was squeezed into a tiny square between the kitchen and the living area. Except when Aninda watched cricket, their daughter kept possession of the TV. The adults took their tea at the table, feeling the heat of the stove through the open kitchen door.
‘I was telling Didi, brother, that what we need is a children’s corner,’ said Nitun with a clever look as if he was about to tell a secret. ‘You see, if the mothers have a place to dump their kids, why will they go to another shop? Think about it, brother. It’s a genius strategy.’
Aninda hated it when Nitun called him brother, meaning when he did it in English. Aninda hated it too when Nitun used words like ‘genius’ or ‘strategy.’ Nitun belonged to a new generation, which did not believe in degrees or toil. They gelled their hair into porcupine spikes, sported neon sneakers and carried mobile phones that rang out theme songs from movies Aninda would never see.
‘Haven’t I told you not to wear such tight T-shirts?’ Aninda said, ignoring Nitun’s business idea altogether.
‘Why, what's wrong with it?’ The boy asked with cheery exclamation. ‘It’s Hugo Boss, original!’
‘I can see your nipples, that’s what’s wrong with the shirt.’
‘You are so conservative, brother. Tight is the fashion.’
‘Are nipple displays also in fashion?’ I hate men with breasts, thought Aninda. Maybe it was Nitun that he really hated, but he could not identify any justifiable cause for such antipathy, and so did not allow the thought to become a conscious awareness.
‘Why don’t you stop picking on him, and listen to his ideas for a moment?’ Aninda’s wife intervened, as she planted a steaming dish of mutton on the placemat.
‘What do I need to listen to his ideas for? I just need to see if the numbers add up,’ Aninda said grimly.
‘Numbers will get better, brother, if you listen to my ideas,’ said Nitun. ‘We need more space to put in a children’s corner. I think the guys next door are looking to sell.’
He is not daunted by me at all anymore, thought Aninda edgily. This is not good. I have to start sitting at the cash counter myself, if I am to see profits. This boy with his gelled hair, and pointy nipples, will ruin me. I must curb him before he can strike out on his own.
***
‘Why don’t you give him some share of the profits?’ Aninda’s wife asked him, as she undressed for the night. Profits? Was this her idea, or was he ventriloquising through her? ‘You know, he’s getting older. He’s thinking about marrying. How long can he go just on salary?’
‘Who will marry him?’ Aninda protested. ‘He has breasts. Women don’t need men with breasts, they have their own.’
‘Stop being so mean,’ said his wife with a chuckle. ‘There's nothing wrong with how Nitun looks.’
Aninda was content to have deflected the issue for the moment. This was the first time his wife had raised the issue of giving her brother a stake in the business, and he knew it would not be the last. A new epicentre of anxiety had just been introduced into his cheerless life. The worry pulled him out of bed into the tiny veranda adjoining his bedroom in the middle of the night. He thought of his lost job, of Nitun, and then the boy he had tripped. He sat in a stupor overlooking a neighbour’s unkempt garden. A craggy guava tree confronted him like a question mark in the soft glow of a half moon.
Why could he not simply recount the incident to his wife? He didn’t exactly feel guilty or ashamed, yet he felt his gorge pushing up every time he thought of the moment, and the gleeful ferocity of the fast forming mob. No, there was no name, he was certain, in any known lexicon for what he felt. Regret perhaps was the closest kin to this emotion, but he was not sure, and there was no confirmation forthcoming from the guava tree, the regular interlocutor in his nocturnes.
Aninda felt a strange tremor in his limbs when he awoke the next morning, but could not tell if it was from the incident still or just from lack of sleep. After dropping his daughter off at school, he bought the five papers they kept in his office and took them to Ramna Park. He had never been a park lover, but he did not know where else to go. Cafes and restaurants cost money. He found a shady bench, and scanned every inch of each paper in futile search for news of the boy.
Three days passed, and every morning Aninda dutifully knotted a tie as if going to work. The tremors subsided but did not disappear, and he could not shake off the vision of the boy from his mind. On the fourth day after the event, frustrated by the papers, Aninda went back to the Bata store. The salesman who had sold him the PT shoes proved chatty, and recounted the incident with elaborate details at the slightest prompting. Aninda learned from him that the hijacker – as the salesman described the boy - was rescued from the mob by the police, and possibly held at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital in police custody.
Aninda bought half a dozen oranges on his way to the hospital. A small tip to a cleaner led him to the ward where the boy was held. The ward was a vast high-ceilinged room of Great War gloom. The walls mapped with peeling paint and colourful stains. The beds, ancient iron ships, were covered with loosely tucked dirty yellowed linen. The patients were grateful to have a bed though, and their hopeless well-wishers sat by their sides with gaunt worried faces.
The boy was in a corner bed near the entrance to the ward. One arm was hooked to a saline drip, the other cuffed to the iron rods of his head-post. Aninda pulled up a white wooden stool from beside an unvisited patient to sit by the boy. The boy was fast asleep, the cage of his narrow bony chest rising and falling in deep and steady rhythms. He still had on the chequered green-white shirt, now torn in places, in which he was caught by the mob. A bandage was wrapped around the boy’s head, a faint seepage of red in places.
What am I doing here? Aninda asked himself. And while he could think of no good answer, he also could not remove himself from the scene. A half hour after Aninda’s arrival the boy opened his eyes, and seeing the stranger he asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘I was there when it happened, brother,’ Aninda said. When the boy asked if he was a reporter, Aninda acquiesced to the role.
‘I wanted to hear your side of the story,’ Aninda said, getting off his bed. ‘You know how the papers are. Any hijacking gets three lines in the city page. I want to understand the entire phenomenon. Where you come from, where they come from,’ Aninda said, surprised by own fluency.
Aninda stayed until dusk during that first conversation. The boy’s eyes, heavy-lidded from torpor and drugs, brightened a little as they talked. The boy came from a small district town in the south. His father was a teacher, and thought that his son worked in a trading company. ‘Not untrue, in a manner of speaking,’ added the boy with a chuckle. He had three siblings; the oldest had gone abroad illegally – Italy – and sent them little money, and even that irregularly. The younger two, a boy and girl, were both still in school.
There was nothing uncommon in the boy’s story. Aninda did not find out everything about him on that first visit, but he came the next day, and the next day, with a notepad, jotting down everything the boy had to say. He held a series of odd jobs in the city, as a peon and store clerk. But, the pace of advancement in these positions was too slow for his appetites. He wanted to wear branded jeans, and to live in a better building. Where he stayed now, the floor flooded at the first splash of rain. He wanted cable TV, and someday a motorbike.
By the fourth visit, a week after their first meeting, there was little left to learn from for Aninda as a reporter. Aninda felt the interviews had helped to develop a certain bond between the two of them. The boy saw him as a man of rare kindness, and clearly welcomed his visits.
Apparently, his boss was the only other person who had visited him during this time. The boss had secured a bail for him, and the handcuffs were gone.
‘They’ll let me go in two days,’ said the boy. ‘And as soon as this cast is off’ – he said raising his right arm – ‘I’ll be back to full duty.’
‘Really, do you want to go back to that? After what happened?’
‘My boss is a good man. I owe it to him,’ said the boy solemnly. ‘Anyway, don't worry, we’ll be in touch. You are like a brother now. Anyone gives you any trouble, you just give me one ring, and I’ll be there.’
Nitun’s face flashed before Aninda’s eyes for a second. Nitun had dared asked him directly for a cut of the profits. Brother and sister were ganging up on him together. He felt squeezed smaller every day by an invisible vice.
Aninda had caught himself in recent days in passing reveries in which the boy roughed up Nitun for him. Aninda had also given passing thoughts to the notion of firing Nitun and employing the boy instead. He wanted to do something for the boy. He didn’t know what else to do with his guilt or remorse or whatever strange compulsion had driven him to form this peculiar rapport with his victim.
Aninda was a little disturbed however to hear how eager the boy was to get back to his work. The job he could have offered him suddenly seemed like a no-match for what the boy already had. There was not much else Aninda had to offer, except the confession. He had already balked at it for a week; there would be no better time for it.
‘You know, it is so strange that we get along so well,’ said Aninda, ‘if you think of how we came together.’
‘In your line of work, I’m sure you meet all sorts of people,’ said the boy. And then with a chuckle, he added, ‘So do I!’
‘This is not where we first met,’ said Aninda, looking straight into the boy’s eyes. ‘I am not really a reporter. I am the man who tripped you up on Elephant Road.’
The boy looked at him blankly, as if unable to comprehend the meaning of the statement just offered to him.
‘I know this will come as a shock to you,’ Aninda added. ‘Please understand that I didn’t really mean to hurt you. I don’t know how it happened.’
The boy was now sitting up in disbelief. ‘Is this a joke, you filthy sister-fucking mongrel? Why did you come here? To see the damage you had caused? To see what good work you had done, you son-of-a-whore?’
‘Call me what you will, brother,’ Aninda said in a suppressed voice, ‘I know I deserve it.’ Aninda could feel his heart pounding, but he held a calm exterior. ‘Please know that I meant no harm, it was an accident. That’s why I came to see you, to say sorry, to see if I could help. Can’t you forgive me?’
‘Forgive you? Why, so you can feel good about yourself, you shit-eater? I had already forgiven the man who had tripped me, even the men who beat me. I will not forgive someone who comes to toy with me. You will pay for this,’ said the boy, now at the top of his voice, his face red from anger and exertion.
Aninda stood up, and the other patients in the ward also sat up in their beds in alarm. Aninda took a step towards the boy, but before he could complete it the boy leaned forward and spit a thick gob of yellow mucus into his face. Aninda jumped back, and the boy too tried to swing himself out of bed. Luckily, he was in a tangle of sheets. And there was the drip. He cursed Aninda non-stop, while struggling to extricate the needle from his arm that tethered him to the saline drip.
Aninda took this momentary delay to gain a lead on the boy. He ran out of the ward into the corridor, pausing for a fraction at the door, to hurl a final apology over his shoulder, ‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean any of it,’ and then flew full speed towards the stairs. As he fled he could hear the boy’s voice exploding expletives behind his back.
A nurse was already entering the ward, and shouting at someone behind her to hurry up. Heads poked out of other doorways at this commotion. The boy was held back by two nurses, and surrounded by a gaggle of observers – patients in pajamas, visitors, hospital staff.
Aninda took one last look at the boy from the distance before bounding down the stairs three steps at a time.
When Aninda was out on the street, he kept looking over his shoulder, and moved in spurts of fast walking and runs, holding his sides. When he had turned the corner onto another street, and knew himself to be safe in the throng of the hundreds of men, who all look alike, and fill the streets and spaces of this city, did he start laughing at the indignity of his own escape.
‘I’ll find you, I’ll find you,’ that was the last threat hurled at his back by the boy. Aninda was glad that he had told the boy that he lived in Old Town, miles in the opposite direction from where he actually lived in Uttara. That was also where his store was located, far away from the areas where the boy usually worked. For the first time in years, Aninda felt thankful for the vastness of the city, and the congestion of the millions of idle men, among whom he could hide.
That evening Aninda finally told his wife that he had lost his job. Although, he told her of course that it had happened only the day before. Since he had received his final settlement the previous day, the fat check seemed to mitigate the blow. Instead of blaming him, his wife became indignant on his behalf.
‘People will use you till the moment they need you, and then chuck you like a sucked out bone.’
It was not often that Aninda and his wife agreed. It was less often that she took his side. Or so he felt. So, he basked in the warm, soothing glow of her indignation.
‘What do you want to do now?’ She asked him finally. ‘Surely, someone will want an experienced accountant like you?’
Her hopefulness, or estimation of his worth, was touching. Nothing depressed him like misplaced hope. They sat at the dining table, with the remains of a special chicken curry his wife made with tomatoes. For a flash, he could see vividly how she looked the first year of their marriage, a face completely unscarred by illness, by time. He did not want to mislead her on this issue any longer.
‘I don’t think I’ll look for another job. I’m going to expand the store,’ said Aninda.
‘Business? Wouldn’t it be good to have a steady income from somewhere?’
Aninda told his wife that in this age of ever smarter candidates, he could not land any job that would be worth having.
‘Nitun has been dying to expand the store anyway, so why not now?’ he said.
‘He will be so happy,’ said his wife. ‘You really should give him a share though.’
‘I'll think about it,’ said Aninda.
After their daughter was put to bed in her small room, or rather an abutment off the living room, they sat in the sofa with cardamom tea. They used to have this tea every night in the first year of their marriage. It was also a time when they used to talk often of the life ahead. The talks ceased unnoticed. But tonight they talked again, about the store and the future, everything that they would be able to do with the money they made.
Aninda was up again, however, long after his wife fell asleep. Not because he felt upset, as he had almost every night for the past week. For once, pressures and anxieties receded. A feeling of being restored suffused him. He watched over the tiny garden, enclosed by towering apartment blocks. He knew that this accidental sanctuary too might disappear one day. But it was here now, and all to himself, and the strange guava tree, looking like an old man on this moonlit night kept him company, and for once that was enough.
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Poetics and politics of jokes