The Black Coat

by Neamat Imam

  I carried him on my shoulder, sat him on the sofa. There were several cuts in his feet, all open now, red and damp. Some of them had swelled up, the deep ones. Some looked black. I told him to raise his feet on the sofa so that I could examine the cuts better. He did—calmly, slowly. The skin on both sides of the cuts was whitish. That exposed the black line in the middle with a sharp contrast. I cleaned the cuts with cotton, dried them with a towel and covered them all with Zam-Buk.

  Then I cleaned his room, removed the quilt, put a new one on the bed, sprayed some bleaching powder on the floor, washed it, and then burnt some incense sticks. I removed the bloodstains from the walls and wiped the walls softly with a warm and wet towel. Once the white smoke with its sweet smell filled the room, I took him to his bed, and placed a pillow against his back so that he could sit comfortably. His face was dry. I poured four drops of mustard oil on my palm and smeared it on his cheeks. Now he looked lively. I combed his hair, but did not bother to give him a Sheikh Mujib look. I trimmed his nails. Then I prepared a full meal for him; rice, fish curry, vegetables, dal and chilli paste with spring onion. I had my full attention on his door, which I had not locked, and which could still be a dangerous outlet for his vengeance against me. An open door might give him the sense that he was free, though he was not free. He might be lulled into thinking he could easily get out. That too would be a mistake. I had the shovel with me all the time. I had kept it next to the hot oven.

  Sitting before him, I raised spoon after spoon to his mouth. He ate with great appetite. He ate quietly, his eyes down on the plate. Once or twice he raised his eyes at me for small glances. That was all. He asked me nothing. I explained nothing. Only at night, when I untied his feet, he said, ‘Thank you.’ I did not reply, and locked the door.

  That night I had not given him sleeping pills, and I too went to sleep without them. They were no longer necessary. I felt he was coming back to me. Soon he and I would sit together, his hands free, my mind clear. We would forget the past—the past would exist only as an idea with which we had compromised. These few days of suffering, his and mine, would have washed it away. Moina Mia, the militia and Sheikh Mujib would have nothing to do with it. They would not be a part of our world. They would not dictate anything. Let Sheikh Mujib be reincarnated with all the shortcomings of failed leaders. Let Moina Mia sing of him his entire life. Let the militia rage a war against all hungry and disgruntled people because they blamed Sheikh Mujib for their misfortune, and as a result let people die in their thousands. Let the whole country turn into a shameless tent city, never to be vibrant again. Let mothers hang their children, the young starve the elderly and kill them. Let intellectuals become slaves of their own complexes, extraordinarily obscene complexes, because they love to be slaves. We would fight to live outside that insane and chaotic canvas. There must be space for us, a small place, somewhere in the living world.

  He would grow into a complete man one day, a wise man, master of his own passions, I thought. He would use his mind creatively, and no longer need to turn to me for help. He would excel in some trade; earn his living by himself without speaking much. He was bright; he could easily acquire some technical knowledge if he wanted to. And I would have a peaceful lifetime, one devoid of dissent against people and against institutions that worked for them. I would not have to brood over my dissatisfactions with life. A Puerto Rican woman would speak in Spanish, a language I would not understand. I would find a quiet, simple, warm-hearted and trustworthy Bengali-speaking woman from one of these neighbourhoods to start a family with. I would buy her wooden earrings, oyster shell necklace, fine cotton saris with lots of embroidery and bottles of aromatic haircare oil. On a moonlit night I would take her on a boat ride on the Buriganga. When the boat would reach far, and the cacophonies of the port would fade, I would sit before her and tell her about this time. The thought of her, I would say, had saved me when I was most disoriented, and I had lived because of her. I would love her sincerely and make her the happiest woman in the world. A man like me could still do a lot of things in this country. I would create my own ideal world little by little.

  27

  The Madness

  Instead of sleeping on the bed, where I had left him the night before, Nur Hussain slept on the floor, right behind the door. There was fresh blood on his wrists, under the rope. He must have fought to untie himself at night. The knots were tight. The rope was hard. It had damaged his skin, and made him bleed. Now he was sleeping through his pain.

  He had not gone to sleep with a delirious mind, I was sure. I had seen his face. It was calm. I did not think he hated me. There was also no sign that he had any objection to my tying him down. He knew why I had to tie him down. He knew it was not that I did not care about him. He did not need to be generous to recognize that. He could just look around the room. He could remember his beautiful meal.

  So what had happened during the night? What had changed him?

  His eyes were red. When he looked at me, his face spoke of horror, like the horror I had observed in him when he condemned Sheikh Mujib at the Shaheed Minar. He sat up, gathered where he was, felt the pain of the rope; and then told me to open the door. When I did not, he kicked on the door; went back a few steps to come back to kick again. ‘Open it!’ he cried. ‘Good citizens do not stand against each other; they stand against their government. Haven’t you learnt anything? Open it! Open it!’

  I walked across the room, not knowing what I should do, not being able to concentrate on anything, and then looked at him through the opening. He tried to kick my face, but his foot could not reach high enough. So he came at me with his head. His forehead hit the door and bled.

  If only I could give him some pills! If only I could tie his feet again! It was my luck that I had locked the door before sleeping. I was saved. With that anger, and with that brutality, he could have strangled me at night, or used the knife, or the shovel, or anything of the sort, to kill me. If only I could send him to sleep again!

  He saw fresh blood on the floor. Then he looked at me with disbelief, and collapsed.

  When he recovered consciousness, he delivered the 7 March speech, just one line from it, where Sheikh Mujib said: You cannot suppress us! He said it again and again; when I watched him through the window; when he lay down idly on the bed after kicking the door several times at a stretch and still failing to break out. Soon his voice became faint, his eyes became tearful, and he whispered whatever came to his mind, as if speaking from the brink of a dream.

  ‘Land of little villages, quiet nights,’ he said, ‘land of green leaves sleeping upon the jute roof; land of white fish and golden evenings singing loud; land of sweet smiles, warm embraces filled with enormous blue sky, sudden laughter of pride in the rice fields on the tiny river; land of sweet sugarcane children, red pumpkin lovers, crowded lentil weddings of the night waking to the morning of beaten rice balls; land of dreams and promises and processions coated with mild wind and raindrops; land of celebration, knee-deep happiness sitting on the aisle, drinking date juice all through the winter; land of life broken into loss, pains, tears, sighs, and deceitfulness; land of little villages, empty, dark; endless lines of bodies falling deep into the heart endlessly.’

  I could not resist the pull, so primitive it was, and so pure, so spontaneously beautiful. I could not carry myself away from the door, from watching him and watching him with my sincerest astonishment; from sliding myself into a jar of silence, closed and asleep like a seed.

  He could do anything, anything, with me at that time, if he tried. He had changed. He had grown up. He felt the pains of the nation in his being. He had shattered all the guises a man could wear in life and emerged as a true individual with an undivided mind. He was not to be defeated.

  Cold and trembling, I stood behind the door, as he continued to disappear into his voice.

  And he said: ‘There is no question that could not be asked in this land.’

  ‘Nur,’ I heard myself say, ‘Nur! Nu
r!’ I bent forward and covered the whole window with my face. ‘Let’s go to Gangasagar. Let’s start now. You show the path, I follow you. I’m sorry for all this. The speech, the dress, the deal—they were all wrong; they were all a mistake, my mistake. I owe you a great deal. You see, I grew up in extreme poverty; I had to starve as a child, as a young man. Even when I became an adult, I was earning barely enough to fulfil my needs. I would not have agreed to let you live with me unless I knew that to not do so would have been to compromise my reputation with Raihan Talukder. I wanted to save my face because only that was what I had. I couldn’t even buy you a mosquito net—remember? Then the money came; it came from a place where I least expected it; and it came without effort, and also without the promise of continuity; it came with unfathomable excitement, with my first unsurpassable feeling of real success. I thought this was how I would fulfil myself; it was supposed to happen a long time ago but did not. I got carried away. But I can see it now. I was not against you; I was against myself. I am sorry. I really am. Give me a chance to make the wrong right. Let’s go, you and I, to the little village of green leaves and quiet nights, where the fish jump in the air to kiss the sun. Will you promise not to attack me, not here, in the bus stop or on the way, not in Gangasagar, not ever, for this confinement, for being so rude to you? I have been rude, I know. I was not myself. Will you help me be myself again, Nur?’

  He watched me intently for some time, leaned his head against the pillow and, closing his eyes, withdrew himself into his semi-dream existence.

  28

  An Insult for a Thousand Years

  His lips moved. ‘The knot will undo itself,’ he whispered from his solitude. ‘The rope will disappear, the lock will melt down like a chunk of ice; everyone will be alive again—those that are dead now, those that will die in the future.’ Then suddenly he became aware of his surroundings, got up from the bed and looked at me. You cannot suppress us! He uttered it several times, his voice growing high, and he moved towards the door.

  I guess I had become too tired to listen to him, to make sense of his very presence, to correct that which would never be corrected. I felt something on my shoulders which I could neither remove nor overcome, and which pressed down upon me more than the shame of my living in acute poverty, for which, though continuously obsessed with my own powerlessness, I dared go as far as to be the creator of an unspeakable dishonour. I shed blood, found satisfaction in despicable viciousness, and played with his life most obscenely to protect my own.

  I took a step back and heard him say: ‘I say “No”. Not in my name. Not as long as I live and walk. Not as long as I speak.’ He kicked on the door a few times and looked at me through the window. I was afraid, for he looked like a ghost, ferocious and repulsive; but I remained calm; I told him it would not happen again, that I was extremely sorry for what I had done to him, it was not in my plan. ‘One world ends here tonight,’ I said, ‘and another world begins, a very different world.’

  He watched me, called me ‘Sheikh Mujib’.

  ‘Look at that little Sheikh Mujib,’ he said, whisperingly. ‘Victory to you little, rejuvenated Sheikh Mujib. Long live, little, rejuvenated, indomitable Sheikh Mujib. May you be happy, little, rejuvenated, indomitable, indefatigable Sheikh Mujib.’

  I begged, bringing my hands together. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this? Please, please. Don’t make me any smaller than I have already made myself.’

  He was not loud, but I felt the whole world was listening to him, and the whole world would call me Sheikh Mujib from now on. One generation would tell my story to another generation; every generation would add their disapproval and hate to it. It would go on and on and on, until all was quiet, cold and dead; until the Bengali calendar came to an end never to begin again.

  But then, another day, after thousands of years, when the elements of the earth would come together again, life would grow little by little, there would be a bright rainbow over the Buriganga, blue lotuses would smile in every pond and canal, I would see strangers passing by a village road; I would see men and women returning home after a long day’s hard work in the field; I would stand beside the walkway under the bamboo clump, hoping to speak to them a word of beauty, goodness and generosity; but, with my hands upon my chest, I would only pronounce: that year we had a famine here, you know; that year one and a half million of my countrymen died; but I, Khaleque Biswas, lived through it. I lived the next year, and the next, and the next. Then, before their tired but watchful eyes, I would begin to suffocate myself with both hands at my neck, though I would not be able to stop the story; I would not be able to control the words, so speedily would they come. The strangers would get closer in hesitant steps and say with wonder: but one and a half million countrymen died, and you lived! How did they die and you live? How did you make it happen! Were you a psychic, a magician? A prophet? They would want to know if I, little Sheikh Mujib, spoke the truth, if I really lived in 1974, for it was too long ago now, it was in the dark and frozen entrails of the past. I would say I was speaking the truth; this was the best form of all truths; truth could not look any better, not even with God. They would laugh at me through their tiredness. I could not possibly mislead them, they would say; they were tired, but they were happy; their conscience was clear, they did not bear the stains of starving their fellow citizens. I would implore them to listen to me; what they knew was not what it was, entirely what it was, I would say. There were huge floods all across the country, I would tell them, all crops were damaged, cattle carried away, infrastructure broken; then came severe droughts, scorching heat cracked the soil like never before, and most importantly, there were just too many desperate mouths to feed. They would not listen. They would continue walking towards their homes and families and look back at me in pity, as if they too were present in 1974 and knew exactly what happened in Bangladesh under Sheikh Mujib’s rule. I would follow them a few steps while tightening my hands around my neck. I would have to suffocate myself a thousand times because once upon a time one Nur Hussain had called me Sheikh Mujib at the height of his delusion.

  He had realized no other name or word could be more offensive to me than Sheikh Mujib, and I would never be able to separate my life from the lives of those that now lay lifeless, and I would never be able to wash away Sheikh Mujib’s sin from my own conscience. He called me Sheikh Mujib in the voice of a boy, of a man, an old person, a hawker, a prostitute, a teacher, in every tone possible and moving his head from side to side. He called me Sheikh Mujib smiling, then pretending to sob. ‘Little Sheikh Mujib, are you hurt? Shall I deliver the 7 March speech for you? My brothers …’

  I could not take it any more. I picked up the shovel from the kitchen, threw away the lock from the door, and hit him hard. He took a step or two back, I took a step or two forward. He fell on his knees; I looked down at him. He crawled, said, ‘You have betrayed us! You have betrayed us!’ I bent over him and hit him and hit him, until his voice was heard no more, and his body moved no more on the floor.

  To be specific, I hit him only in the face; to be more specific, only in the mouth. I could have hit him anywhere on his body, his arms or shoulders; his legs; or even his head, if I wanted to smash him in one strike. But I hit him repeatedly and consistently in the mouth. That was because I knew I had no anger against him, his heart, his mind or his head. It was the mouth that called me Sheikh Mujib. It was the lips, the teeth and the tongue behind the teeth that spitted out that name at me. I wanted to punish them. And I punished them as long as they moved and produced words or sounds. I stopped only when the mouth became a dark hole gaping at me, hiding all signs that it was Nur Hussain’s mouth or any mouth at all.

  I laughed in extreme satisfaction and sat on his chest to make sure he did not come back to life to ridicule me. ‘You understand now,’ I continued to say, ‘what little Sheikh Mujib is capable of? I hope you dream of Sheikh Mujib in your afterlife and are terrified.’

  No
moonlight was shining tonight, no spring breeze came in through the window, and I was alone in a flat that I could not stand; but I was delighted to think that I had a glimmer of hope of a normal life ahead, I would inhabit the earth for the rest of my life, beautiful and unsuspecting now that Nur Hussain was no longer there to call me Sheikh Mujib ever again.

  29

  Goodbye to Moina Mia

  As I walked in the street late next morning, I did not see anyone before or behind me. There was no rickshaw on the road. The yard of the mosque, which had always sheltered some refugees, was empty now. The tea stall was closed, and the newspaper hawker next to it had disappeared.

  I saw some children when I reached the crossroads, but they were not playing today. Looking at their sombre faces I could imagine something fearful was happening somewhere very close. One of the children pointed at the tin gate of an abandoned house under which I could see people’s feet. I would be the last person to be curious about anything today, but I walked to the gate and before I had touched its handle to open it, somebody from inside grabbed my hand and quickly pulled me in. There were a number of people there, some leaning against the wall, some sitting on the dust, some looking at the road through the small holes in the tin. One of the men, and he was none other than the imam of the neighbourhood mosque, whispered to me that a state of emergency had been declared across the nation and the parliamentary system of government had been dissolved in favour of the presidential system. He said Sheikh Mujib had declared himself president for life with extraordinary power; therefore the country’s Constitution was no longer at work now. ‘I have also heard some very disturbing news on the radio,’ he said. ‘Sheikh Mujib has banned all political parties in the country but one; the only party that will decide the fate of the nation is the Awami League.’