The Black Coat

by Neamat Imam

  ‘I see you,’ he said to me, between chases. ‘Don’t stay here, go away, go away; leave this place. Fighting is not fun; it favours nobody; it wants everything—your body, your mind, your heart. Go away right now. There are just too many of them; they are in the sky, in the water, in the land; they’ve taken hostage of the whole universe. Hear that noise, that striking, brutal, monster noise, ruthlessly echoing in ten directions? That is from a twin-barrelled self-loading mortar; soon the whole area will be covered with a dense white smoke spiralling to the sky. Through that smoke they will come like ravenous beasts, searching for prey and glory and meaning. But I will not give up; I will not let them steal dust or a drop of water or a small leaf from this land. They will not touch any of our flowers, our fish, our beautiful evenings, our songs and waterfalls. You stay away, go to a safer place, find yourself something to eat, sleep well; there will be fights for you too, many of them, after this fight. Fights never end.’

  I stood up, shouting through the smoke. ‘I can’t leave you alone,’ I said. ‘I’ve to learn fighting; I’ve to learn it watching you. Let me stay here, please; let me know what blood is when it is warm, what hate is when it is good, what endurance is when it is indispensable.’

  ‘You make me happy, kid; you make this war more inevitable and pleasing than it has been; you make this gun fire by itself. But staying here won’t do you any good. This is my fight; it had become mine long before I was born, before my mother uttered her very first word. Let me win it or die. Here they come. Close your eyes.’

  I stayed. I did not close my eyes. I saw the destruction. I saw the elation of the human devils as they stood before him, pointing their weapons at him.

  After he was bayoneted, and the earth became red with blood and then black, the air smelt of sulphur, and the military left, laughing like hyenas, spitting in his face, feeding his balls to hungry crows, I took him in my arms, wept for several hours, and carried him to the nearest deserted char land, where I buried him in the sand. It was useless writing an epitaph on the grave. The sands do not remember for long. There are heavy dust storms, which irritate the ground, sweep away sea crabs and their skeletons, and fill every snake hole. Frequently tidal waves come. But I wrote his name. I wrote his name in letters twelve yards long, perhaps expecting someone from the sky to look after him.

  It was not a complicated dream. Its suggestions were also not complicated. I believed that the war in 1971 had happened for me and for me alone. It happened to boost my spirit, to keep me rational, to make me responsible. And Mostafa Kamal died only for me. He became history so that I would know exactly how important it was to remain motivated. I believed it was my turn now: I must do for Nur Hussain what Mostafa Kamal had done for the country. I felt ashamed of myself for not looking for a job for him.

  So I began.

  5

  A New Picture

  Too many people had moved to Dhaka after the war: those that were directly affected by the war; those that could not find any employment in their villages, like Nur Hussain; those that suddenly became ambitious because they were now citizens of a free country. The homeless made up the largest group among them. They came from all areas of the country, but mostly from the districts that had seen repeated natural disasters. Homes lost; entire crops damaged; cattle mad or dead; the only hope was the railway that ran between cities. They got on the trains, crowd upon crowd—children, the elderly, the newly married, widows, widowers—anyone who did not think life was limited to the confines of their village. In Dhaka, they slept on pavements, at railway stations, in hospital corridors and abandoned buildings. Every morning, they came out on the streets, begged from pedestrians, robbed them, squatted openly on the sewerage, and then slept in their inadequate and filthy clothes, only to prepare for next morning’s struggle. Innumerable tent houses rose in different unclaimed city plots and public parks, next to newly built multi-storey office buildings, glitzy five-star hotels, dazzling mosques and temples. Smoke from their portable earthen kitchens blackened the Dhaka skies day and night.

  Until then, I had been engaged in finding a superior meaning in the freedom that had come to us at the cost of thousands of lives. To be honest, I had engaged in theorizing about that which did not exist and which we had never known—stability. I saw people coming to Dhaka, but I did not know why Dhaka was the only solution for them. Now I saw what I did not want to see. I saw hunger, dissatisfaction, rampant poverty, looting. It was only eighteen months into Bangladesh’s independence, and the country was falling into a deep pit of brutality.

  I went to a friend who sent me to another friend who sent me to yet another friend, looking for a job for Nur Hussain. I went to my distant relatives, to their relatives, their relatives and their relatives. I spoke passionately about him. He had already made a serious effort by coming to the capital from the remote countryside and dared to live with a stranger to better his luck; I thought he deserved my reference. He was a gentleman, I said. He was caring and never got involved in arguments of any kind with me. Anyone who hired him would be doing themselves a favour. It was not easy to find someone who would not steal from his master or suddenly disappear without trace. He would not do that.

  Nobody took any notice. Those who did, did so negatively. ‘Do not come with any such requests, please,’ they said. ‘We are worried we might lose our own people. We have no time for one who is already lost.’ What has happened to these people: has freedom made them heartless and selfish? How can they be so apathetic? Every night I returned home and ate my supper with him in silence. Every night I looked at him less and less, and yawned more and more, to give the impression that I was terribly tired. I could not forget I was failing scandalously in a very simple matter. I was failing before someone as trivial as Nur Hussain, who knew nothing and understood nothing.

  Perhaps he did. He began to chop onions regularly with me in the kitchen, trying his best to make every slice fine and equal. He washed his hands before and after touching food, swept his room every day, cleaned the kitchen and my bedroom, scrubbed the walls and the floor of the toilet, and dried his underwear in the privacy of his own room. He made the pile of newspapers tidy, arranged them according to date, and one day pointed out that I was wearing a soiled shirt, a shirt without two lower buttons, its collar damaged by sweat and salt.

  I gave him money and he bought our groceries. At the end of the month, I gave him letters to post, bills to pay. He did everything as directed and returned home immediately. He walked fast—and I guess sometimes ran—through the sad, distracted, unmoving crowd to finish his work quickly. He had no interest in the city; he didn’t care what went on there. His world was my flat with its uncomplicated compromise between space and furniture, and his contribution to my life became wider and stronger.

  I visited Lutfuzzaman Babul. After a brief introduction about the daily state of affairs, I told him I had thought about it a lot and every time I thought about it, I knew I had to do something. He looked at me with wonder.

  ‘What do you mean? Haven’t you been doing what you wanted to do? Don’t you enjoy it any more?’

  I told him I wanted to write something different.

  ‘Different?’

  ‘Something new,’ I answered. ‘Substantial.’ My country was suffering. Good-for-nothing politicians were playing games with people. There was emptiness in people’s stares. It was rapidly contaminating those that were still active and dreamt of a better life in the future.

  I gave him a detailed account of my recent experience across the city.

  ‘And what difference would that make?’

  I did not know. ‘Freedom is freedom when it surfaces as a lifestyle for people,’ I said. ‘The first step is to ensure food for everyone, then a place to sleep. At the end of the day, everyone must go home. Where is Sheikh Mujib? Where is the Awami League? Don’t they see these people?’

  Lutfuzzaman Babul remained silent, although he looked troubled. I understood that as an editor, he had to co
nsider the circulation of the paper before implementing any major policy shift. His daily bread, along with that of the whole team, depended on it. Change would not come in a day. But I reminded him that the paper actually originated from a highly devoted political project and it had achieved its present position only because we had been persistently presenting the truth, irrespective of our political affiliation. We wanted our people to go public about the most burning public problem of our time: to be free or not to be free. Was daily bread everything? I asked. Didn’t we call our paper the Freedom Fighter?

  He stared at me for some time and then abruptly ended the meeting. Within a week, he made the decision to lay me off. ‘Financial constraints,’ he said.

  I became like Nur Hussain.

  6

  My Valued Companion

  Not entirely like him. I had experience, he did not, I said to myself. I had a month’s salary in my pocket and some savings that I had put aside over the last two years. I saved money by quitting smoking, by walking from place to place instead of hiring a rickshaw, by taking buses for long-distance trips instead of renting a taxi, by not inviting friends to my flat on social occasions. By contrast, Nur Hussain was penniless. I knew people; I had connections that could be of immense help. He had nobody. My friends had not done anything for him, but I was sure they would do something for me. At least they could make some phone calls to potential employers in their circles. They could spread the news: ‘One hard-working, vibrant, dutiful, far-sighted and forward-looking journalist with an extraordinary writing portfolio, Khaleque Biswas, is now available for hire.’ They would be happy to stand as referees for me. If they could not do that, what was friendship for? And I had ideas, I said to myself; finding a lucrative job would not be that difficult for me. By contrast, Nur Hussain was stuck; he would go nowhere; his life was created to be wasted. My accidental caretaker, then somebody else’s professional caretaker, and then one day, after many seasons, an old man who couldn’t even take care of himself. He would disappear as nature’s unplanned production.

  I stayed at home for a week coming up with a strategy. I must begin serious and well-organized networking with the specific purpose of landing a suitable job. There must be a crack somewhere in the industry. I must find it and enter through it. Then I would make my presence felt, using my energy, intelligence and perseverance. I would move so fast that that crack would soon turn into a tunnel leading to a golden gate. My colleagues would be astonished at my capacity.

  I prepared my résumé, revised it several times to perfect its wording and to rectify all spelling errors, used bullet points to highlight my skills, clearly stated what I was going to bring with me to my new workplace—like leadership, management, investigative skills, and the ability to produce an extraordinary piece of writing within a short period of time. I then wrote customized cover letters for every appropriate position I could think of. The newspaper industry was expanding rapidly. It had drawn an obscene percentage of the new investment in the private sector. Money was pouring in from nowhere. Who could tell before the war we had so much money in our country? Who could tell that in a country with only a twenty per cent literacy rate people would love and respect the print media so much?

  Soon, thanks to my good luck, I met two editors of daily papers and had a long, unhindered, stimulating conversation with them. They were two rising non-academic political thinkers of the country who kept themselves away from salacious trivia. I knew they were jealous of the extraordinary growth of the Freedom Fighter; I had the insider’s information. Wouldn’t they want to know what had made that growth possible and the secret to making that growth sustainable in the post-war period? I had my thoughts about a well-governed society, but I did not want to overwhelm them with my arguments and interpretations, especially in our first conversation. I wanted them to go home and think about me, look at my résumé when they were free, and then decide how I would add a new dimension to their papers. But I could not resist mentioning one point. I said the time of process journalism was over; it was important we offered readers news as it happened, so that people believed we were on their side. We could not hide anything. People had become conscious and they had proved it during the liberation war. Guns could not terrorize them. Tanks could not stop them from marching. Wave after wave of carefully fabricated propaganda could not break their determination. The only way for us to go forward was to respect our readers and countrymen.

  One of the editors opened his cigarette pack and lit a cigarette, releasing a large spiral of smoke. The other walked to the kitchen and poured a glass of water for himself. I have been able to torture them, I thought. I have put them on the sword. They are now suffering. They will suffer until they have heard the rest of the story from me. My strategy was working.

  Everyone I spoke to in the press encouraged me. They understood my plan. Some of them who hesitated to support me before their superiors patted me on the back in private. ‘Extraordinary,’ they said; ‘smart thinking. Go ahead. We’re with you.’ They would do anything to help me out. They were real people, I thought, people with brains and vision. They sensed danger before everyone else.

  I was satisfied with my progress. I needed only one opportunity, and I had the unshakeable confidence that it was going to come from one of the papers. It was only a question of time.

  At home I began to share more and more hours with Nur Hussain. He could not talk about anything other than Gangasagar and its seasons, its landscape and marketplace, animals and vegetation. But I accepted him with kindness. I spoke softly. We went to the market together to buy stuff. We ran in the school field together and went to the lake to swim.

  ‘There is a famous song in Gangasagar,’ he said one day. ‘Everyone seems to like it there.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, seemingly curious. ‘Can you sing a line?’

  He sang the opening four lines of ‘O My Gold Bengal, I Love You.’ He did not even know that was our newly declared national anthem. I let him sing the lines twice and then said, calmly: ‘Yes, that’s a lovely song, a very lovely song indeed; no wonder people love it so much there.’

  When he got to the story about the bamboo bridge that connected the village to the main road, and the fact that it broke down every year because of the huge current in the canal during the monsoon, I knew that that was the end of his stock. He always ended there. That bridge brought the whole country to the village, thus it had a symbolic significance, which did not escape his attention. Nostalgia choked his voice. He could speak no more.

  In contrast, I could tell him stories of the whole war, chronologically dividing it month by month, analytically dissecting it incident by incident and area by area. In fact, I told him the story of the subcontinent beginning with 1757, when India fell to the British imperialists. The British had bribed Nawab Seraj Ud-Daulah’s army chief, Mir Jafar, and with his help had captured and brutally killed the Nawab. I spoke about their barbarism, which had lasted almost two hundred years. They enslaved us to produce raw materials and then compelled us to buy their processed goods. I also narrated how they divided the subcontinent in 1947 on the eve of departure, and what happened in Pakistan in the two decades that followed. With reference to the general election of 1970, I told him how Pakistani dictators did not bother to democratize the country when the grand occasion came, and how they wanted to control us with might in our own home.

  It was not clear how much of it he understood, but he respected the passion I put into my story. Since I did not go out every day, I told him the story of the war again and again, and he heard me again and again with the same reverence in his eyes.

  My savings were dwindling fast. It was not my flatmate that I worried about now; I worried about myself. In particular, I worried about losing the flat, becoming one of the homeless, the utmost tragedy at this time. It would be too much to bear.

  When I did not hear from any of my potential employers and no offer came from my friends and colleagues, I reflected on my convers
ation with the editors. I could not understand what had gone wrong. If they were future keepers of our democracy, they would have needed me. Then I read their papers. Their columns were boring. They created a surreal world with words and pictures. They filled page after page with garbage, as if they had willingly surrendered to the stifling control of the government instead of attacking it. I guess they considered me an enemy of the people. The person who goes against the government is not an enemy of the people. Those who accept their government’s limitations in silence are the real enemies. I had never felt so disheartened.

  The situation compelled me to go back in time, to refocus on Sheikh Mujib’s speech delivered in Dhaka on 7 March 1971.

  It was a historic speech—the seed of our independence. It had the unique power to motivate Bangladeshis from all walks of life to stand up for their right to self-determination. It kicked off the celebration of our Independence Day. The Freedom Fighter regularly published a quote from it in a box in the upper-right corner of the front page. This is the struggle for independence, it read; this is the struggle for our freedom. Now that we had achieved our nationhood, I wanted to understand what Sheikh Mujib had in mind for me as an individual citizen.

  I played a part of the speech on my cassette player, listening to every sentence carefully. I played it in the morning and at night. I played it whenever I could not decide what else to do. I listened to it loudly, quietly, and spoke along with it so that the words could not cheat me and I felt them in my heart. Sometimes I carried the player in my hand, walked from my bedroom to the sitting room, where I sat for hours listening to it. I pressed the auto-reverse button. The speech ended and began again only to end and begin again.