KILLING THE WATER by MAHMUD RAHMAN
No stomach for ideology
by Shakil Rabbi
As a Bangladeshi interested in literature in English, it is impossible to differentiate the event that is the publishing of Mahmud Rahman’s Killing the Water from the work. As the newest addition to the body of fictional work by Bangladeshi writers (even hyphenated ones) to be published by Penguin India, word of it was going around word-of-mouth even before the book had probably gone through its final draft. Any work that faces such hype has to end up being extraordinary just to be called worthwhile, and brilliant just to be called good. It has to exceed just to be able to meet the expectations we, the readers, have built up about it.
That being said, Killing the Water certainly does not disappoint. The stories in this collection are set in Bangladesh, America and even in an imaginary country. Its time scales range from Bangladesh during the 1930s, when George VI was King Emperor of India, America around the 1980s, and Dhaka at the turn of the twentieth century. But while the landscapes and timelines are important, they are not central to Mahmud Rahman’s stories. And in this lies the art of Killing the Water.
These short stories are about people, not politics. In Killing the Water, Rahman displays a deep empathy and understanding of people – whether they are speaking from Bangladesh or America is secondary. The Grand Narratives of ’71, the widespread malignancies of a country experiencing convulsive growing pains, or even the immigrant blues are not fore-grounded but largely the personal baggage of its characters. When the unnamed narrator of the rather-poignant story ‘Interrogation’ says, ‘I have no stomach for ideology. My conversations with them are brief. I try to coax them into talking about real experiences’, he might be articulating the topic tying this collection of short stories together.
My favourite story in this collection is probably ‘City Shoes in the Village’ – a colonial-era tale of a man called Altaf visiting his village after living in Calcutta for much of his adult life. In this story, Rahman cleverly takes a theme of diaspora writing (that of disconnection from one’s ancestral homeland) and applies it to migration within British-India. There are also several other excellent stories that are set in or about Bangladesh: ‘Before the Monsoons Come’, a direct testimony about ’71, and the allegorical ‘Kerosene’, about the communal violence that followed, being two of especial note.
Rahman’s America is also equally present in the stories. In ‘Orange Line’ and the lovely ‘Blue Mondays at the Gearshift Café’, the writer talks about the violence and the bigotry that still burns through so much of American landscape. There is also the great little story ‘Postcards from a Stranger’, narrated through the postcards a man named Nadeem sends as he goes through a Kerouac-esque (minus the drugs mostly) road-trip across America.
But the rich literary ground of Killing the Water certainly does have a few bumps. I thought the stories ‘Killing the Water’, ‘Man in the Middle’ and ‘Smoke Signals’ lacked the understated poignancy that Rahman fleshed out so well through so much of this collection of short stories. While ‘Killing the Water’ takes on certain timely themes – such as a Dhaka dying a slow and polluted death – it is rather abrupt, reads too much like a magazine piece. And as for ‘Smoke Signals’ and the too meta-fictive ‘Man in the Middle’, I found the characters in them less interesting than the characters peopling the other stories.
This collection of short stories is a fine first book by a real writer. The blurb in the back says: ‘Sensitive, perceptive, and deeply human. Killing the Water is a remarkable debut’. This is spot on. Rahman’s sensitivity marks his every sentence and each story is deeply human. For the general lover of stories, this book would be a great addition to their library. For the Bangladeshi, or even those interested in Bangladesh, its publication by Penguin India and its significance to literature by Bangladeshis writing in English, makes Killing the Water a must have.
Shakil Rabbi is Lecturer, Department of English and Humanities, University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh (ULAB)
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