The Black Coat

by Neamat Imam

  The unit controller of the city fair treated us with respect. Why wouldn’t he? He wanted his part of the fair to be filled with visitors; especially in the morning hours, when the city refused to wake up. He came to us the third evening and proposed we come early the next day and speak. With his delivery, Nur Hussain could pull the limited number of visitors from other units to this part of the fair. That might help the businesses make some good money right at the start of the day.

  ‘Our pleasure,’ I said. ‘We’ll come here at nine sharp tomorrow, when the fair opens. We’ll do the speech as many times as needed. But you may ask your business partners to be generous to us. They might send someone with a few coins for us before the night falls. Wouldn’t it look odd if they made money because of us but did not share it with us?’

  Nur Hussain always kept a copy of the speech in his pocket. Sometimes he read it loudly between his speeches, usually sitting on a rickshaw. That happened when he remembered he had skipped a sentence or a paragraph during the speech. Even though I had heard him many times, and had read the speech many times before, I did not notice what he had skipped. My attention was locked in the space before him, the small warm circular space where the crowd would throw their coins. I had seen him look at that solemn space once or twice while standing with the pipe in his mouth. That was all. It was my space; I knew what was happening there. I had to make sure that it protected us, and it was well protected. I kept it clean and threw some coins from my pocket on a handkerchief before he began speaking so the crowd knew what to do.

  But he was a perfectionist. Failing to maintain the proper sequence of paragraphs in the speech worried him. That worry came from his heart and covered his face with irritation. I had seen him refuse food or drink when that happened. Consulting the copy in his pocket did not always remove that irritation. I told him he mustn’t speak like Sheikh Mujib because he was Sheikh Mujib. I told him he must speak without worry, without bothering about what he had skipped. If Sheikh Mujib was worried he would not have been a pioneer to people. He would have scared his audience. His political disciples would have thought he was not in control and he was not the man they wanted to trust with the future of the country.

  ‘I am trying and trying but I cannot control my mind,’ Nur said, worrying me more. ‘I speak a sentence and I look at the people before me. I get angry when I see the same people sitting before me hour after hour. If they follow me carefully, they may understand I am speaking the same paragraphs in many different ways.’

  He sat looking at me, searching for a solution. The crowd did not have the speech memorized by heart, I said, and they were not there to test him. They gathered before him because of the feeling they had experienced when Sheikh Mujib spoke on the 7th of March. His job was to feed their imagination, to recreate that exact Mujibesque feeling by adding words to words, by stacking passion upon passion; minor changes in the order of paragraphs or speaking an incomplete paragraph did not harm anything. He was doing a great job, I said, and to give him courage, scratched out some sentences from the speech and let him read it.

  ‘See,’ I explained, ‘even after those brutal deletions the message of the speech remains the same.’

  He looked at me with utter disbelief, as if nobody had the right to modify the words of Sheikh Mujib. I had to respond reasonably. ‘Do the Awami League play the speech in full on the national day?’ I asked. ‘They do not. They repeat the most effective passages from his speech whenever they need to. They have edited him more brutally than anybody else. Then why should you concern yourself about losing a few sentences?’

  ‘It wouldn’t bother you if I skipped something?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’ I could not tell from where he had got the idea. I was surprised, but there was no time to show my surprise at that moment, he needed to be assured immediately. ‘Who cares about Sheikh Mujib, anyway,’ I said, ‘when we are in the field? I do not. This is business. I do not care even about them that sit before us. They are nationalists and will accept the devil as prophet if Sheikh Mujib recommends it. Becoming a nationalist is not a matter of decision; it means one has locked one’s mind forever. No reason or practical advice or evidence is strong enough to unlock it. These people are in a trance—the indolent, seductive trance of Bengali nationalism. We are creating a trance within that trance so that they reach into their pockets. Whatever you speak or do not speak will not move them from it.’

  Because of my intervention, Sheikh Mujib’s speech became shorter and shorter in Nur Hussain’s voice day after day. Sometimes he began with Joy Bangla and ended with Joy Bangla. Sometimes he continued chanting Joy Bangla until he believed the crowd had thrown enough coins. A few times he ended the speech in the middle and then by going back uttered some popular quotations before chanting Joy Bangla to end the speech. That happened towards the end of the day, when he felt tired, but I pushed him hard, telling him repeatedly we had at least three more groups to speak to before going home. Sometimes it happened that he chanted Joy Bangla in the middle of the speech to draw the attention of the people who had stopped on their way, and then began the speech from the beginning. Then there was the rain. It came suddenly. Sometimes it came with thunder and lightning when he was halfway through the speech. He had to chant Joy Bangla immediately so that the crowd had enough time to throw coins before running into a shop, a tea stall or the nearest post office.

  As long as he delivered the passage where Sheikh Mujib said—We had given blood in 1952, we had won a mandate in 1954, but the Pakistani military government continued to enslave us year after year—I told him, he was sure to satisfy the crowd. Did he think a longer speech generated more money? My calculations did not say so. More money depended on visiting more places, speaking to more crowds. Smaller crowds were better, I said; people standing at the end of large gatherings did not come forward to throw coins for us. Except for one or two, they moved on once he had finished the speech.

  Every time he spoke to a crowd, I surveyed the people who made up that crowd, and watched who threw coins. I applied a value system to their clothes, their sense of cleanliness, and their ways of expressing excitement at the speech. I could tell if they were moved by his speech, if they believed in what he said, and if they were having some sort of conversation with themselves.

  By observing the formation of the crowd, I came to a conclusion. If the crowd consisted of poor, illiterate, working-class people, unemployed, rootless people, people from slums, rescued from mudslides, devastated by cyclones, we earned more coins than if it were moneyed, middle-class, educated people working downtown. I saw shopkeepers extend their heads out of the window but never saw them put their hands in the cash counter to take a coin out for us. At best, they saluted us when we passed and offered us paan. I also noticed, regretfully, that only the poor heard the speech from beginning to end attentively and applauded Nur Hussain after it ended, while the educated stood some way off, heard a sentence or two, and then went on their way. The poor sometimes got tearful; they wanted to touch Nur Hussain’s hands to receive his blessings. Some of them even ran closer to embrace him wearing their filthy clothes. Often I had to stand between him and them. I had to tell them he had another speech elsewhere, his coat mustn’t be soiled. They would not give up until I had embraced them on his behalf.

  I hated those that did not throw coins at us. Among them I hated most the clean ones; the ones that gave me the idea that they understood our trick. Sometimes I thought they were accusing us of cheating people. They stood for one or two minutes and then left. Why did they stop for that short time? Because of the magnetic power of the speech. Then why did they leave? The only answer I could come up with was they did not need a sovereign country; they did not need Sheikh Mujib’s leadership. They did well during the British period, under Pakistani dictators, and they would do well if the country fell to dictatorship again. They were egoistical and snobbish. I believed they had not gone to the war and had never spoken to a fr
eedom fighter like I had.

  My observation affected our strategy to a large extent. I selected smaller roads, shanty houses, and polluted and densely populated areas of the city, instead of its popular markets where the petty-minded condescending well-off people shopped.

  It worked.

  13

  A Story for the Press

  Since selecting a venue was my responsibility, I would sometimes go out alone. I would walk from street to street, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, looking for places with floating crowds. I would survey which spot in the slum was easily accessible for people, where rootless people gathered to pass their idle noon, where they sat to play cards. Sometimes I would take a bus and sit in a corner seat looking through the window, watching people milling about on the pavement, walking into stores, waiting in the sun for buses. I would take notes in a small notebook and review them before going to sleep to select the most suitable venues for the next few days.

  While on these tours, sometimes I would have a conversation of my own. I would take a hard look at my life, at my career, and then review what I was doing with Nur Hussain. Just months ago I was a journalist. I had a set of responsibilities, a set of properly defined tasks to perform every day. I had a dream, and I could speak about my dream. I was surrounded by people who understood what I thought—at least I believed so. There was excitement in it, if not satisfaction. But now I had no plan. Most shamefully, I was now living on someone else’s ability to earn. I could well be on the street tomorrow, one more rootless person in the company of thousands of rootless persons; without a future, without any goal. In addition, I was playing with people’s helplessness. With a fake Sheikh Mujib I was manufacturing dreams for them. I was convincing them the future was behind us; it had frozen the moment Sheikh Mujib opened his mouth in 1971; now we must live in the past forever; we must rot there year after year after year.

  As the bus moved past the slums, I imagined myself living in one of the tents, passing a fortnight without a proper bath, hungrily looking at colourful food in nearby luxury restaurants, stealing from someone just as hungry as me. I envisioned myself walking in the rain, waking up in the rain in the middle of the night, and then running to look for a shelter for my children—perhaps inside the abandoned sewer pipes, underneath the unsafe railway bridge, in the deserted stables behind the hospital morgue, places I had seen crowded with hundreds of ill-fated people. Sometimes I thought I saw someone sitting on the pavement looking at the sun, disconnected from the chaos around him and forgetful of his clothes. His brain chemistry had changed. His ability to cope with stress had reduced. Any war, abuse, disaster, violence, accident or medical emergency would not be able to distract him. He would not know if the high wind from the northwest stole his body parts one by one, finally evaporating him one sunny day. I thought I knew that man. I thought I had known him for years. He lived with me, wore my clothes, used the same toilet, drew his eyes across the same newspaper columns, and knew everything about me. I looked at him more closely as the bus moved forward. It was a flash, just a flash, but I knew I was looking at myself. My body became cold with fear, my heart ached, and after that I saw nothing, until the bus reached its destination and the conductor freed me from a pathological state of numbness by shaking my shoulder.

  Sometimes I would buy a copy of the Freedom Fighter and scan all its reports, features, editorial, comments, columns, from end to end. I would take my time. After all, this was the world I knew best. I turned the last page and checked the masthead at the bottom to see if Lutfuzzaman Babul was still its editor. He was. Why was it so difficult for him to see what I saw? Why couldn’t he realize the ever-changing political reality of the nation? I went to the Freedom Fighter office that week. Lutfuzzaman Babul was in; he greeted me warmly and led me to his room.

  We spoke about the weather: how hot the summer was, how cold the winter was going to be. He offered me tea for old times’ sake, pushed his pad and pen aside, as he used to do when he was in a good mood.

  He knew what I was doing. He hesitated to talk about it, filled the silences with scratching the back of his hands, cleaning the surface of the table with a feathery brush, checking the time on the wall clock every second minute; but finally he broke his silence, when I said I was not ashamed of myself. ‘Everyone has to do something for survival, but that something does not have to define the real character of a person. I am what my head tells me I am. I am what my feelings say I am. I do not depend on anyone’s approval.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘That’s what I tell my staff all the time. A person cannot be anything until he knows what he is, and he can be anything when someone inside him says what he is not. But they are rude, immature, very unprofessional people to deal with; they do not believe me. They say, “Why is Khaleque Biswas doing this? Has he lost his mind? Does he want to embarrass all journalists in the country? If he cannot find employment as a reporter, let him serve as a compositor, a distributor, a news stand man, a paperboy. Is it good for him to leave the industry without looking for an opportunity because he can earn more money by entertaining beggars? Lutfuzzaman Babul, you’re praising him for what he is not. You are just wasting words. Maybe you can send a message to him. Maybe you can explain to him that the last thing the country now needs is confusion, speeches about authority and governance. People have suffered a lot; let them have some rest now.” I tell them they don’t know you as I do. I tell them they should not underestimate Khaleque Biswas; he’ll always be worth a piece of gold, not like them—shallow, cheap, foul-mouthed fraudsters. I tell them Nur Hussain is a brilliant addition to our political scenario. His is an extraordinary story. It is not about rags to riches—what they all expect it to be, so that they can make big headlines—but about anonymity to remembrance. He questions our collective memory, and highlights the tension between our political aspiration and political reality. It is interesting to notice how geniuses find their way into the world and stun a whole generation of people with their vitality and imagination.’

  I told him meeting Nur Hussain had been an extraordinary incident for me and that he had extended my horizon. ‘Without him I might not have seen what I now see. It is because of him that I understand what it means to be one of the people, or even deeper—to see how their minds work, and why they dare to trade their last coin for a slice of an obsolete dream.’

  He looked for something in his drawer, but seemed to have not found it. ‘When I heard the story from one of my reporters,’ he said, ‘I told him: let us follow Khaleque Biswas. He may not be working with us any more, but we know what he can accomplish; let us follow the story closely. Maybe we’ll hire him back; we won’t be in this downturn for long.’ He searched his drawer again, and again he failed. ‘If there is any chance that we can help him to say what he wants to say, it is our duty to help him. He was one of our founding reporters and he has done so many good things for us during the war.’

  I felt irritated; what was he trying to do, blind me with those sugary words? ‘I’m not here to talk about myself, though I’ve done a lot of that,’ I said sternly. ‘I want to talk about Nur Hussain. He’s the speaker and far more important than I am. I want to talk about what his speaking means for me, for you, for anyone for that matter, including Sheikh Mujib.’

  If it had been during the war, he would have locked the door immediately and pulled his chair closer to mine. He would have asked, in whispers, as if we were engaged in some clandestine projects, what amazing new thoughts I had come across, what my point was, if I had enough information, if my sources were genuine, if he should send a photographer to take a quick snap, and how fast I would be able to give my thoughts written shape. I was not allowed to leave my room until the story was ready, he would have said; if it were to be a late night, let it be a late night. What was one person’s suffering compared to keeping a whole country waiting? But now he sat with his hands together, fingers between fingers; boorish, unmannerly.

  I gave him the story I had written about Nur
Hussain. ‘This is an exclusive,’ I said. I put the envelope before him and told him I had contextualized Nur Hussain in our broader national background, analysed him as a man on the road who had no clear idea about what freedom meant for him and what his life would be like a few years from now. I had concluded that a fake Sheikh Mujib like him was an indication of our political malady; that the number of fake Sheikh Mujibs would rise if the real Sheikh Mujib failed to act and prove his worth. People had not fought to live on pavements; they had not sacrificed their sons and daughters in a devastating war to go hungry and to remain unattended in sickness. The course of events had cast huge doubts over our country’s leadership. Nature did not understand what it was doing to people by increasing the heat of the sun; nature did not have feelings. Pakistanis did not understand what they were doing by suppressing us, because they never understood the real value of freedom; they had always lived under generals and dictators. But Sheikh Mujib must know what harmed people because he was a leader of the people; people trusted him, they believed in his ability to lead and provide. An unthinkably dangerous situation would arise if Sheikh Mujib failed to administer the country as a visionary leader, reflecting the desires of its people. We might even end up with civil war.

  ‘I wanted to show you the instructions I have given to the reporter whom I’ve advised to follow you,’ he said, ‘but I can’t find them at this moment. A newspaper office is a no-man’s land, things get lost pretty easily around here; you know that. But I can assure you this, Khaleque Biswas, whatever you’ve produced is good enough to be printed in the Freedom Fighter. I will give it to one of our specialists to look into and prepare a final version. In the meantime I want you to know that I think Nur Hussain can be our springboard for revisiting and pinpointing the role of political and intellectual leadership during times of national crisis. Through him we may be able to determine the bargaining capacity of an effective leader as well as the potential consequences of his failure. It is the responsibility of all concerned to keep real vigilance against the manifestations of failed leadership, in order to divert a national disaster.’