The Black Coat

by Neamat Imam

  I realized it would not be easy to make a philosophical point about death and heroism to him. Telling him that there were levels of valour, and there were many kinds of good deaths, even if all of them happened in the same place, at the same moment, triggered by the same hazard, would end in futility, because he had already accepted death as the Great Leveller. The simple solution was to ask him if he thought there were differences between him and Sheikh Mujib, though both of them loved our country. There were, he said immediately, lots. ‘What kind of a question is that?’ I knew that would be his only response. ‘Sheikh Mujib is not an average human being like us,’ I said; ‘he is special, superior and incomparable. The same way, there is something special about Mostafa Kamal that separates him from other martyrs.’ Raihan Talukder accepted my point thoughtfully.

  After he had left, I put out the hurricane lamp and tried to visualize the very moment when Mostafa Kamal decided to take charge of the situation. I wanted to enter his heart. I wanted to be a blood cell in his veins and see what his eyes saw in that enormous chaos. I wanted to experience how a simple moment—a moment in a small village and of horror and ferocity—defined a whole life and made everything else insignificant. I wanted to imagine I was he, a non-commissioned soldier, and I was telling my mates that I was their protector, their most dependable and dynamic guardian angel; I could bargain with death and successfully deny or postpone or defy it for them. Then I wanted to see how my end crept up on me, inch by inch, following my own decision: a decision that he had taken for me; a decision that I had taken for him.

  I woke up early and silently, dreamily walked to the spot where he was killed. It must have been the place—a valley between prehistoric mountains—which had influenced him to take his decision, an influence he could not ignore. I walked around with my shoes soaked in the dew, and filled my chest with cold, translucent air. I walked from side to side, corner to corner, stepping on my footprints, looking around, looking for something I did not know existed but hoped would explain to me the very heart of the place. I found nothing. It was a place of nothing; it had been a place of nothing, for everyone, today and yesterday, and it would be a place of nothing for centuries. That was what I understood. I was not Mostafa Kamal, I thought, then, to satisfy myself, to cover up my truth. I did not have his eyes to see, his heart to feel, his moral stature to commit to serving the life force. Whatever I would see or feel would be mine, completely mine, not his. I felt a small vibration in my fingers, a mild increase in my heartbeat, and my footsteps became slower and more lethargic and finally stopped. That was mine, I knew. It was not vast, definitely not as immense and overwhelming as Mostafa Kamal’s feeling, but it gave me something.

  The sun came out, making the surroundings luscious and flamboyant. Raihan Talukder joined me. I asked him what time of day it was when Mostafa Kamal was killed—if it was a morning like this or a dark cloudy day or an evening retiring fast into night. He did not answer, as if it was no longer necessary to know what time of the day it was. Mostafa Kamal would have made the same decision no matter what. Raihan Talukder sat at the foot of a bamboo clump; I sat beside him and we looked at the field before us as if something were happening there: the past was unravelling, and Mostafa Kamal was advancing towards the very moment of his non-existence like an oyster creates a pearl, little by little.

  Back in Dhaka, I examined the entire liberation war from Mostafa Kamal’s perspective. I considered his final moment as a long moment that lasted nine months, the entire course of the war. I believed it could last longer, until eternity—if need be, until all the dictators in the world fell and all discrimination came to an end. Together Mostafa Kamal and his fellow fighters constructed one large moment of truth. Their eyes did not see, their nerves did not feel, their rational faculties did not function, but their human spirit worked without fail. By engaging with that moment, they knew they were serving the most valuable and inevitable cause in human history: the cause of freedom.

  I posted a copy of the article to Raihan Talukder. I was grateful to him for his hospitality and friendship, I wrote in a note. The firsthand information he had provided was absolutely invaluable. If he ever came to Dhaka, even for a day, he must see me; it would be a pleasure to buy him a cup of tea.

  Life moved on. I did not hear back from him immediately, and I did not bother to send him another letter, because I had new stories to focus on, new assignments to complete. Until one morning a young man appeared at my door and gave me a letter.

  3

  Nur Hussain

  Raihan Talukder had received my message, the letter said, and everything was well in Gangasagar. Strangers came there almost every week looking for their lost ones. They walked around the place where the battle had taken place, sat in the tea stalls, asked villagers about the dead, if they were of a certain skin colour, age, body shape and height, if they had left anything behind: letters, shoes, clothes, combs, specs, handkerchiefs, wallets and rings. They gathered at the graveyard, prayed for the unidentified valiant fighters, and then left with tears in their eyes. Some of them came again and again; they brought fish heads, cow shank soup, sweet fried rice balls, green chillies, ripe palm fruits and scallions for the villagers, invited them to their houses, attempting to create a lasting bond with them. Sometimes journalists came; they came from different papers, radio and TV channels, sometimes from as far as the Indian city of Kolkata. They took pictures, interviewed villagers and bought goat’s milk yogurt before leaving. It was encouraging to see that Gangasagar had drawn the attention of so many good people from across the region.

  But the fame of the village had not made life any easier for its inhabitants. Raihan Talukder used the rest of the letter to introduce to me one Nur Hussain, bearer of the letter, who desperately needed employment. He described him as a ‘loyal, patient, sociable and diligent young man’ and believed that among all his acquaintances, only I was in a position to help him find suitable employment. In the last passage, he also gave some hints about what that suitable employment might be. Nur Hussain could serve in a responsible position in the government, he wrote. The nation-building process was painstaking and challenging; the government needed honest and dedicated people to work in its various departments; there would be many positions in the newly created ministries that he would be fit for. He would work with commitment and devotion; I would never have to regret helping him out.

  I removed all the old newspapers from my storeroom and placed a single cot there for Nur Hussain. I gave him a mat, a bedsheet, a pillow and a pillowcase. In the village, people slept on hogla mats or mats of jute fibres or rough wooden floorboards. Their pillows were often greasy and stinky, and filled with cotton compressed by years of use and moisture. I had seen people use bricks or stones as pillows and straw blankets as quilts. In comparison, I made comfortable arrangements for him. There were mosquitoes, hundreds of them, but I never spoke about them. From my bed inside a net, I frequently heard him slapping them. ‘He’ll get used to them,’ I said to myself as I closed my eyes. ‘He’ll have to. A person can accept anything and everything when he faces the question of survival.’

  Dhaka was not an easy place to conquer. I told him this in our first serious conversation, a day after his arrival, when I thought he had recovered from his trip. Dhaka had too many things going on, too many people involved in too many things at the same time. But he shouldn’t worry; the city had a strange capacity to accommodate anyone from any background. He too would settle in. At least he had a roof over his head, which many newcomers did not. He would eat with me, stay with me and, in due course, would have enough money of his own to rent a flat as big as mine, if not bigger.

  Gradually, I learned that he had no transferable or marketable skills. Skills were the currency in the new labour market, where employers looked for more than knowledge and credentials. He could not speak standard Bengali, let alone English. He never browsed the newspapers that I brought home with me every day, not even the sports pages or the ent
ertainment advertisements. He was just not interested. Raihan Talukder had said he was a fast learner. I did not understand what he meant by that. In the evening I made him tea and asked what level of schooling he had had. ‘Please don’t feel embarrassed by my asking this,’ I said. ‘I need to know exactly what you can do, so that I can find something that’ll suit you.’

  ‘Fifth class,’ he said, then sat for some time with eyes cast downward, perhaps wondering if it was actually fifth class. ‘That is great,’ I said, quietly, though I felt uncomfortable. ‘I know loads of people who have never been to school. But they are raising their families like everybody else.’ Then I asked if he knew how to stitch clothes, lay bricks, and work with wood or iron; if he knew bicycle mechanics, welding, plumbing, digging, scaffolding, anything. He did not. All I understood was he could sleep all day and all night without ever asking for food. When I invited him to dinner, and he sat to eat, he ate silently and ate only what I put on his plate. He was shy, introvert, principally a useless human being in a city of four million human beings.

  It was not easy to approach someone about a job for one who had lived all his life in his father’s bamboo shed without caring to fix or learn or earn anything. He might be intelligent with goats, know their body language, grazing and foraging strategies, and reproductive cycles, but there were no goats in the city. Here, people had to deal with people—hard, solid, rubbish, despicable people with very low or no self-esteem. They must know how to give commands or how to live under constant commands without whining all the time. He gave me a serious headache. I had no idea how he would fit into the highly competitive and ambitious culture of city life.

  Just to give him the impression that I was looking for a job for him, one day I told him we had an opening for a staff reporter position at the Freedom Fighter. The salary was good, the job was interesting, and, most importantly, he would meet many political and business leaders as part of his professional responsibility, which might open further career opportunities. If recruited, he would travel to remote corners of the country, to the hills and borders, to collect information, to investigate favouritism, conspiracies, poisonings, murders, mass killings, to report on various developmental activities, to interview people in a range of different circumstances for stories of human interest, to build reliable contacts to collect facts on developing incidents, and the paper would pay for all his expenses. Wouldn’t he want to enjoy such an exclusive opportunity? It was an honourable job too, I said with emphasis, mimicking my editor Lutfuzzaman Babul, but immediately added it might not be ethical for me to recommend his name because he did not have a proper education and the technical knowledge for it. Writing a report is an art, I explained. One has to begin with a clear idea about the purpose of the report and end it with an equally clear point of view. Understanding the difference between the mundane and the significant points is one of the guiding factors. Besides, he was not well informed about what had happened to our country in the past few years, I said as if I had known him all my life. He had seen the assault on Gangasagar; after the war he might have also seen the evidence of atrocities committed by Pakistani soldiers in the surrounding twenty villages. But did the war begin in Gangasagar? No. Did it end there? Absolutely not. That meant many more causes and decisions were associated with it. Until he could explain them one by one, his knowledge of the war was limited and his analysis of it irrelevant and dangerous. In contrast, a journalist with the Freedom Fighter knew what the war was about. He knew its typology, its ambiguous complexity. He knew when a difficult time was approaching, raising its horns like an angry bull. He remembered at all times which minister said what, what Sheikh Mujib’s six-point demands were, where they were written and declared, who the British attorney was who helped get him out of the Agartala conspiracy case, which song George Harrison sang at Madison Square Garden in New York in support of Bangladesh. I also pointed out that Nur Hussain was not aware of what was happening at the moment. He did not know for example who Dr Kamal was, even though Dr Kamal was engaged in writing a full, workable and acceptable constitution for the country.

  It was not his fault, I finally said. He lived in the countryside, where people survived on agriculture, traditional neighbourly goodwill, religious values and ethics, happy to know only ordinary matters; rules of political engagements, statesmanship and diplomacy did not apply there. They did not watch TV, listen to hourly BBC broadcasts, read newspaper editorials or attend weekly discussion programmes at the national museum on aspects of our national life. I did not expect him to be well prepared for a profession he had never heard of.

  Another day I said I had a friend who needed a locksmith. Not a prestigious job like being a newspaper reporter, probably the payment was meagre too, and the working hours odd and longer, but good enough to begin with. I asked him if he had seen those black electroplated 300 gm keyless pin-controlled locks hanging from the doors of banks. It was the technology of the future. Who would want to carry a set of rusty keys if they could do without them? He said he had never seen a bank and the only lock he had seen was the one used to protect their cow from thieves. That would be a small nineteenth-century solid padlock with an iron key made in India. The key must turn 180 degrees to undo the hook. Those locks were out of fashion now. Thieves knew too much about them.

  I gave him a concise description of the steel-made Taiwanese locks that had three columns of digits from zero to nine with almost unlimited resettable combinations, perfect for home, business, garage, school or post office. From my cupboard, I brought out the one I had. ‘How strong do you think it is?’ I asked. ‘You think you can unlock it with a piece of wire? There is no hole to slip a wire into it. There is no way you can tamper with it or damage it.’ He gazed at it for at least thirty seconds. ‘Hold it, here,’ I said, and gave it to him. The country was developing fast, I told him as he played with the digits, and every locksmith must know how to operate new locks that provided maximum security and protection if they wanted to remain employed in the future.

  4

  An Embarrassment and a Dream

  His prospects looked grim. I did not know what to do. Telling him that I was busy, I spent two days without speaking to him. I kept a newspaper at the dining table and read it again and again while we ate. Then I went to my room and closed my door.

  I could not ask him to leave. That would be too embarrassing, considering the fact that in my mind I always believed I was an immensely powerful person. But, most importantly, it would be a social crime. It would destroy my reputation with Raihan Talukder. He would think I had let him down. You’re an educated person, he would say. How could you do something like that? If you yourself were not enough, couldn’t you talk to Sheikh Mujib? Nur Hussain had to leave of his own accord. I could only make things so complicated and confusing for him that he would give up and say goodbye.

  Today or tomorrow, he was going to accept that Gangasagar was not only an easier and better place for him to live in, but that it was also a gross mistake to leave it for Dhaka. Perhaps one day he would understand why I had failed him, and would be able to forgive me.

  Two more weeks passed. He did not appear unhappy or distressed. Instead, I noticed, he had adjusted to the wild attacks of the mosquitoes and the untarnished solitude of the flat as if he was on a pilgrimage and would accept any hardship. The only change was that he was more silent now, more detached, and more occupied with himself. When it rained, he sat at the window the whole day, leaning against the wall. He coughed a few times as the humid air entered his nostrils and got slightly frightened when thunder struck nearby. Then, once again, that awful silence, with his eyes upon the rain. I gave him one of my woollen hand-knitted pullovers. He accepted it without a word, wore it over his T-shirt, crossed his hands, and looked at me with gratitude. Then, stretching his neck, he watched me as I tidied the living room, but never rose to help me, not even when I struggled to lift the sofa to clean underneath it. Probably he did not want to do anything that I might consid
er foolish, insane or disturbing—or he had noticed the sharp anger I had to hide day after day. I was angry not because of my failure to find him a job, but because he was there every moment to remind me of that failure. ‘He has no right to embarrass me like this,’ I kept on telling myself. ‘Why on earth did Raihan Talukder send him to me? I would never have accepted his hospitality if I’d had the faintest idea this would happen.’

  The only option I could think of was to engage him as my caretaker. I did not need a caretaker; in fact, I hated the concept of enslaving someone to secure my own comfort. That was obvious exploitation.

  But he needed me. If enslaving him protected his existence, I should happily go for it. I decided that he would cook for me, sweep the house, wash my clothes, go to the grocer, and guard the door in my absence. If there was time, he would collect water from the market when tap water was unavailable. His compensation would be regular meals, clothes and lodging. I asked him if he wanted to do it, if he really wanted to do it. ‘I won’t be unhappy if you don’t do anything for me,’ I said. ‘If you find it condescending, that is okay, I’ll understand. Many people value dignity over comfort. I consider that a sign of character and strength. I just wanted to help.’

  He nodded. He would like to begin right away, he said.

  One or two evenings he chopped onions, washed the dishes and proved himself disqualified. He was absent-minded. He was not hygienic. He did not know how to peel potatoes or handle a knife safely while cutting through the spine of a three-inch freshwater fish.

  Did I want to see blood on my floor?

  Absolutely not.

  On one of those nights, as I was lying on my cold, moonlit bed, tired from trying to think of someone who could employ Nur Hussain in a temporary but real job, I dreamt of sepoy Mostafa Kamal. I dreamt I was a young boy, younger than Nur Hussain, and I was in Gangasagar, just outside Raihan Talukder’s house, and was watching him fight against the mighty Pakistani military. Hiding behind a high mound of earth, soaking in my sweat, trembling with fear and anger, I saw how fiercely he chased the enemy with his automatic machine-gun. The colour of the sky changed from white to grey, darkness fell in the surrounding rice fields, the wind brought rain, stars shone and sank in the morning lights, but the battle continued. It continued for seventeen hours, and for seventeen hours I observed him from my hiding place.