The Black Coat

by Neamat Imam

  Sometimes he spoke at home. He would say a few paragraphs and then take a long, long, pause before speaking again. Did he fall asleep momentarily? Did he faint? I would run to see him. Then he would speak another paragraph or a few lines and lie down. Sometimes he spoke behind closed doors. I understood he was not sure what I might think of him. Well, I did not think anything. If I thought anything, I thought about the unfathomable fear I had in my mind that something bad would happen to us very soon and we would be undone. I could see it coming, coming speedily and dangerously, but I did not know how fatal it would be. Let it come. But before it came, and washed us away with its ruthless terror, let us live fully. So I gave him freedom in the flat.

  Though I needed some quiet time for myself, and did not want to drag the moneymaking process up to my bed, I shrank my existence at home as much as possible. I wanted him to be happy with our way of life. I wanted him to be thankful that we met each other at such a critical moment of our lives. If he needed more space for himself, that was perfectly all right with me.

  One day I advised him not to wear his Mujib coat when we went out to buy groceries or for evening walks or when we went to watch the neighbouring children play with small round marble stones on the street. ‘Just for a few days,’ I said. ‘Maybe a few weeks, after which we’ll evaluate the situation.’ He would wear the coat, I said, only when we went to collect a crowd for Moina Mia. He did not ask why. He never asked questions. But I had to be frank with him. I needed to educate him so that I did not need to explain to him every little thing we might encounter every day.

  There might be some wicked characters lurking in the crowd who had no common sense and did not appreciate what we were doing, I told him. Some people might behave badly simply because they had not been trained to be courteous when they were children. Some people might be insane or just rude to the world because they cared for nothing. Some of them might seek a different society because they believed in something that Sheikh Mujib found hard to endorse and fight for, for example, a country based singularly on the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by the post-Leninist soviet leader, Leon Trotsky. Those belligerent hotheads, who could not be easily identified among the crowd, might get violent with us. They might want to stifle us whenever there was an opportunity. My fear was not baseless. Of late, people had become rather stubborn and inconsiderate. They would not concede favours to anyone, or for anything. Society as a whole was turning increasingly desperate and confrontational. Often there were fires in our neighbouring areas, in the market. Some of these incidents could be traced back to angry and mentally unstable individuals, a few of which were suicidal, but most of them remained a mystery. The mystery did not happen by chance, I told Nur Hussain; somebody must have been behind them, somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. That somebody could be anybody from the neighbourhood, from the tea stall, from the street corner or from the bus or even from the Friday prayers. A bank teller was arrested the other day on the high street. Allegedly, he was carrying a canister of kerosene and a matchbox. He was old and experienced, a respected man in the community, but he would not speak when asked about his intention. ‘I am guilty,’ he said. ‘Do whatever you want to do with me; but remember: I will not be the last one to carry fire.’ That was all he said.

  There were confrontations among rickshaw-wallahs, some of them ending in serious physical assaults, blood on the dust, gouging of eyes, stabbings. Traders yelled at one another more frequently; there was no courtesy. The rules of fair competition were buried for good. Excessive price hike had its curses. Public properties were stolen or vandalized at a record rate. Households were burning with anger. One could not walk along the streets without being distracted by quarrels among agitated neighbours or siblings. Sometimes women’s voices drowned the men’s. I saw drunken women crawling on the road, their husbands yelling at them from the dark depths of their tiny houses.

  On top of everything, an increasing number of anonymous artists were now going out every night with their paint rollers, brushes and aerosol cans to create graffiti of various sizes and colours on city walls, storefronts, abandoned vehicles and railway compartments, public buildings, monuments, construction fences, hospital boundaries, and high railings of bridges. They were hard-working people, I must admit. They had plans. In spite of the vigilance of the law and order authorities, they found their ways. One night they worked on the north side of the city, the following night they moved south.

  Though the municipality cleaning squads removed the graffiti as soon as possible, some of it stayed on for days, or even weeks, spreading previously unheard of radical political messages among the public. Because its removal demanded many special and expensive arrangements, some graffiti was left completely untouched. ‘Be Prepared to Die’, one such graffiti on the railway route leading to Dhaka read, ‘The Famine is Coming’. The artist had painted two skinny boys with big mouths and bloated bellies staring into the horizon, between the two warnings. A stencilled graffiti, which I saw only once—and which said, ‘No Rice to Eat? Eat Awami League Leaders’—was on the General Post Office building. It was highly decorative, but it was removed within a day. Later I heard that the same graffiti had surfaced on many buildings at various locations in the city and the municipality gave up trying to remove it. They engaged their resources in removing graffiti that was larger in size and appearing in crowded, prominent areas.

  During that time I came across many banknotes which were defaced with slogans like ‘Leave Now’, ‘Prime Minister for Sale’, ‘Death to the Dictator’, ‘Who is this Person? What is He Doing in Our Country?’ Some had Sheikh Mujib’s eyes blinded with fountain pens; some showed him with bloody vampire teeth, some had his face crossed out. Some came with scribbles next to his portrait. ‘What is the value of this banknote? Zero. Don’t let Sheikh Mujib turn Bangladesh into a wasteland,’ read a five-taka bill. The local grocer handed me a one-taka bill which was completely hidden behind its end-to-end scribbling. ‘Believing in freedom is not a crime,’ it read. ‘But believing in Sheikh Mujib is. Because he does not stand for freedom. Not any more. Give me my country back. Give me my rifle back. God condemns the Awami League.’ When scribbling on banknotes went out of control, the government forced the Central Bank’s director to go to the media to declare that bills with such writings or stamps or additional signs would be considered invalid. In a press release the government also said possession of defaced banknotes might lead to arrest and imprisonment.

  It was obvious a good number of individuals or underground organizations were out there who did not want to let the time pass by without a fight. I was sure they were not active only in the capital, but also in other cities and towns. They were doing what nationally circulated newspapers and magazines failed to do. Their intention might be to serve the people, but at the moment they were instigating the authorities against them. I did not want us to be the victims of that fight.

  17

  An Enormous Campaign Begins

  Winter was exceptionally cold that year. The temperature went down to 10 degrees, the lowest since record keeping began several decades ago. Scores of people died in the capital, in its shanty houses and slums. More people died in the countryside, especially in the northern districts where villagers lived in small bamboo huts and did not have sufficient warm clothes to wear. People died in December, January and February.

  March 1974 saw better weather. Evenings, nights and mornings were not so cold now. Calves came out early in the morning and jumped in the yard. Chicken walked in the backyards and geese flew into the ponds without hesitation. Snakes ended their hibernation.

  Still, people continued to die. They died in the south, where the lowest temperature recorded was 18 degrees Celsius. They died by the hundreds and thousands. They died every day, in every town, in every village, though Sheikh Mujib was far from admitting it.

  In the city, more pavements were now covered with tents made of old saris. The saris soaked in the f
og of the night and dried in the sun during the day and soon began to look colourless—as colourless as the faces of people that lived under them. Because of the lack of proper sewage facilities, the city air became sticky with bad smells. Blind people, people with elephantiasis, people wounded in the liberation war, people who were disabled or paralysed, found their stations on the road. In many areas, old and new refugees broke pipes to collect water. They cooked on the road, quarrelled among themselves, attacked one another, and torched one another’s tents. Their sons learnt the art of picking pockets, breaking into stores, threatening one another with knives and hockey sticks, and assaulting anyone who came their way. Their daughters and wives lost all shame, learnt the language of the street, and gradually found it natural to invite strangers into their tents, desperate for some coins to buy food.

  In April alone, Nur Hussain delivered Sheikh Mujib’s 7 March speech a total of seventeen times. It was an extraordinary number, even by our standards. It seemed the more people died from starvation, the more Moina Mia needed to convince his constituents that we must not forget the enduring spirit that had made us free, that the crises of food would end soon and every family would be happy.

  Most days we had to leave early in the morning for the venue set for Moina Mia’s rally. We ate our breakfast there with the local Awami League activists. We cleaned the venue, raised banners depicting Sheikh Mujib, and mounted the stage before midday. From time to time Nur Hussain delivered a few sentences from the speech to test the microphone and to let the neighbourhood know a public meeting was planned there that day.

  I did not have any experience of manual labour. As a result, I tired easily. I would take a nap sitting beside the piles of posters and leaflets behind the stage. It would mostly be a dark area, full of mosquitoes. The floor would be damp and even slippery. Sometimes I would see rats running from one end to the other, spreading smells of the sewage. One or two would stop next to my feet, seeking a little warmth. When I jerked my feet, they screeched and ran away. Sometimes I would wake up hearing the booming voice of Nur Hussain at the microphone. I envied his energy. His voice was always the same, clear and loud, as if he had just got up from sleep and uttered his first sentence of the day. Probably it was because of the microphone. He loved speaking into it. He freed it from the stand and walked around the stage, speaking. Sometimes he ran from end to end like a pop star and spoke in various acrobatic poses, providing the crowd with some extra entertainment. It was unnecessary, I thought. It was absolutely an exaggeration. Not part of our deal. He should not do it.

  His impromptu physical acts happened before the actual meetings began, and definitely before Moina Mia arrived with a contingent of the militia. After his arrival everything would happen very fast. Nur Hussain would deliver a few lines from the 7 March speech. Awami League workers would chant Joy Bangla a few times. Then some moments of high tension, whispering, impatient waiting. From there Moina Mia would take the crowd on a tour through our history. He would begin in the style of a conversation, asking the crowd how they were doing that day; Awami League activists planted within the crowd would loudly respond they were doing excellently. Moina Mia would not pause long, in case some starving troublemakers got a chance to ask some embarrassing question. Every new day was a great day for the Bengali nation, he would say with satisfaction, because every new day was a day of freedom in the account of our lives. He would then relate how we fought against the British, how we resisted the Pakistani move to make us speak their language instead of our own, and finally how we had defeated them in 1971. ‘Couldn’t Sheikh Mujib, who created history by freeing his people from the yoke of slavery, also feed those people?’ he would ask rhetorically. He could, Moina Mia would say, he would. ‘Yes, yes,’ the gathering would break out in a chorus. Sheikh Mujib would stand by his people, and no conspiracy—domestic or international—was going to change that. Moina Mia’s favourite quotation came from Sheikh Mujib’s 7 March speech. I call upon you to turn every home into a fortress, he would say in the voice of Sheikh Mujib, and then explain that the new fortress was to be against the food crisis while the fortress in 1971 was against our Pakistani enemies.

  The purpose of those meetings was to communicate the very important fact that Sheikh Mujib was not sitting inactive in his palace oblivious to the conditions of our people; that he was not sleeping while the whole country suffered, as I thought he was. He was doing everything in his power to feed the hungry in the country. Diplomats were being sent to different corners of the world with his special message, seeking emergency food aid. The response had been extraordinary. A large number of containers had already arrived in the Chittagong port with readymade food; more were on their way. Once they were released, after official customs formalities, they would immediately be sent to every city and every village so that not a single Bengali suffered from starvation. In Mujib’s country nobody would be allowed to die of hunger, Moina Mia would say decisively, even if nature was against us and brought us unmitigated droughts and cold for an unforeseeable period of time.

  At the height of his speech, he would ask the crowd if they believed in Sheikh Mujib. They answered in the affirmative. Then he would take a step forward and ask them again, saying he had not heard them; for some reason he was not hearing well that day. The crowd would now speak louder. ‘We believe in Sheikh Mujib! We believe in him!’ He repeated his question until the entire crowd raised its voice to the utmost, screaming that they believed in Sheikh Mujib’s vision for the country, that they would give their lives to fulfil his dreams.

  After the speech he would sit on a chair behind the stage, take a few deep breaths, and drink a glass of water. He would give specific directions about his next schedule. It was now time to ask about his performance. Who would he ask? Definitely Nur Hussain, with whom he seemed to have begun a competition. ‘So what do you think?’ he would say. ‘Do you think my words have stayed in the hole in their hearts? Are they going to hate us a little less than they did yesterday?’ He would laugh after that, though nobody else would.

  18

  Dinner with Shah Abdul Karim

  In May 1974, hundreds of refugees took over Mrittunjoyee Primary School in our neighbourhood. They occupied the school buildings, which had been devastated during the war and still lay in ruins. Those who did not fit inside the buildings pitched small tents in the field, against the boundary walls. They dug the ground to make temporary ovens and holes for toilets, made small canals to wash dishes and clothes, hung their ragged quilts from ropes before the tents, and reserved a corner of the field to dispose of their daily garbage. It was obvious they had just arrived from the villages. Their clothes were cleaner than those who had been living in the city for some time now. They lived a rather reserved life, as if trying hard to distance themselves from the world, from people who looked at them with curiosity and considered them extra trouble in a city that was already burdened with hundreds of thousands of refugees. They were still aware of the embarrassment they were in for. It was obvious they were lost, that they would not have moved to the capital were they able to support themselves in the villages.

  One of the new refugees was Shah Abdul Karim. He was a sixty-year-old singer who played a yellow folk guitar ektara. I had heard him at night when I passed by the school field. I stopped on my way and stood still listening to his music. There was something in his voice that I could not ignore. Standing in the dark, close to the edge of the refugee camp, I had heard him sing how a terrible madness had come down from the sky and turned our dreams into pebbles. We could only look at them and collect them in our hands and burst into endless tears. We tried for an eternity but could not turn them into dreams again.

  One day I saw him at the Shaheed Minar. He was singing before a gathering, jumping around inside a small circle, raising his guitar in the air. I went ahead and sat with the crowd. All will die, he sang under the yellow sun, all that lives and suffers. There is no escape. Neighbours and friends, let us sit face to face, and
be kind to each other. Lovely shadows, let us play, the night is near. Then: Everyone, everywhere. No place to hide, no God to pray to, no air that is soothing. My heart, I have not known it, is burning, falling to the dust in undisputed pains. They were not long songs, but every time he finished a stanza he repeated the intro twice, and played the guitar for some time.

  When the crowd clapped, he responded with some extra tunes. He smiled and stared at me. After that, he looked at me several times, I suppose. I clapped too, but under his gaze I felt numb. My hands became still. I felt he wanted to speak with me. And that he had a lot to say. So I stayed until after he had finished blessing the refugee children by touching their heads.

  He had seen Nur Hussain and me when we were working at one of Moina Mia’s meetings. He thought I would not come to hear him because he had no good news for Sheikh Mujib. I understood instantly what he meant. I told him, frankly, that I was living two lives. Though I was attending Moina Mia’s programmes along with Nur Hussain, helping him reach his constituents as effectively as possible, I was in fact not a part of Sheikh Mujib’s private militia or the Awami League’s vote bank. I was selling my services to the Awami League in order to survive; that was all. There were specific conditions that had to be met for me to provide my services. When I thought those conditions no longer served my interest, I would withdraw or make a new deal with a new set of conditions.

  He told me he had walked over three hundred miles in the last few months to sing for people. He had created many songs, but most of them were lost because he did not keep copies. Words came to his mouth and tunes came to his guitar. He was the medium that brought the two together. If it were not he, somebody else would, he said; the songs would have been sung, the music would have been created. On his way he had made friends with strangers, had lived in their huts, in their kitchens, and shared their last handful of rice. He had participated in many burial prayers too, watched many bodies placed in one grave, saw bodies rotting on the side of the road, in the water of the canal, bodies being eaten by dogs, bodies forsaken in deserted houses. Our neighbourhood was one of many such stops. When asked how long he would continue to walk, he smiled and began a tune on his guitar.