The Black Coat

by Neamat Imam

  One of the men I found, sitting deep in the corner, was the keeper of the tea stall, where I had once entertained Abdul Karim. The Awami League would no longer be called the Awami League, he was explaining to another man; instead, it would be called Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League from now on. ‘Why?’ asked one listener who looked like a factory worker or a rickshaw-wallah or a truck-assistant. ‘Weren’t Krishak (farmers) and Sramik (workers) part of the Awami League before? Then who did we support for so long?’

  ‘Why do you ask me why?’ said the keeper, irritated and angry. ‘I am not Sheikh Mujib. I do not make rules.’ A man who stood next to him touched his shoulder to request him to keep his voice down. The keeper nodded but when he spoke he became louder than before. ‘I am a shopkeeper,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything. If you have guts, go to the president and ask him.’

  I pushed the gate open and walked into the street. ‘Come back,’ said someone, probably the imam, but I did not care. As I walked, I heard him say with concern: ‘Don’t go there; they’ll shoot you; come back.’ I walked on. After the pharmacy building, I saw some people standing along the old brick wall. I saw the newspaperman among them. He knew me as a journalist and gestured at me to listen to him. When I went closer, he whispered that he had some bad news for me. Many newspaper offices were ransacked last night, he said, and all national dailies and periodicals were banned except four that were published under the guidance of Sheikh Mujib’s intellectuals.

  I started walking again. As I moved towards the main road, I saw a line of police cars there, now under the command of the militia. They were occupying the intersection to face and dismantle any anti-Awami League demonstration. All the cars were covered with numberless posters showing Sheikh Mujib’s headshots.

  The militia had shot six dogs in the morning and gathered their bodies on the road, a bystander told me. He was hiding behind the large garbage bin at the corner of the road, from where he observed the movement of the militia. ‘There,’ he said, pointing at a place twenty yards away. I saw the dogs’ bodies scattered upon each other, a few other dogs attending them sitting on their butts nearby. ‘Can you tell me what they want to mean?’

  Another man who stood next to him hurriedly grabbed his neck to silence him. ‘They want to mean this,’ he said. ‘Will you shut up now?’

  The two men moved further into the shade to make room for me but I did not want to hide. The fact that I could now walk in the middle of the road without being bothered by rickshaws, vehicles or pedestrians gave me an unbound happiness. I took a long breath, stretched my neck and arms and began to walk. As I approached the intersection to see the dogs more closely, one of the militiamen came to me on his motorbike. He said he had recognized me though I could not remember having met him before. He advised me not to be on the road on such a day because someone who did not recognize me might take me for a troublemaker which he was sure I was not. He asked me where I wanted to go, if he could give me lift. I did not know where I wanted to go, so I stood before him, silent, looking past him at the dogs. He was called by a tall, middle-aged man with a finely trimmed beard, who I guessed was his commander and who ordered him to leave immediately. Holding the clutch lever to the minimum position, the militiaman said he was going to Moina Mia’s and if I was also going there I could go with him. I looked back at the dogs, their mysterious silence sending a chill down my spine, but the militiaman pulled me to sit behind him.

  ‘I did it,’ I said, when I stood at Moina Mia’s door. ‘There is no need to send the militia. Nur Hussain is now sleeping in the depths of the earth in some unknown grave with hundreds of others who have died from the famine. I did it; I did not procrastinate.’

  Startled, he took a few swift steps towards me and then watched me silently. Perhaps for a moment he thought Nur Hussain did not deserve to die for the crime he had committed, however odd and menacing the circumstances. Perhaps the massive man inside him quickly surfaced through the narrow buttonholes of his Mujib coat, and made his murky eyes glitter for a moment. It would be a moment only.

  He invited me in and offered me a seat on the sofa. When I sat, he stood beside me quietly and put his hand on my shoulder.

  I looked up at him. ‘It is okay,’ I said. ‘I am not sad. Nobody could go unpunished after assaulting our Supreme Leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.’

  He was glad that I had come to him to tell him my latest news. He would find something to say to Sheikh Mujib, he said. He would not have to fabricate a story. Sheikh Mujib would understand if he said the famine had taken Nur Hussain.

  ‘A leader like Sheikh Mujib does not depend on one person’s genius for maintaining his legacy,’ he said, probably thinking I was considering myself guilty for letting him down. ‘It needs a whole nation of people to create a leader like him and the same to keep him at the helm of power.’

  Then he sat. His eyes became deep. He became the man I knew. He advised me not to talk about it and move on. It would remain between us. If I were asked where Nur Hussain was, I should say I did not know; he lived with me some time and then disappeared. Why he had disappeared was not a question to ask me; it was a question to ask him, Nur Hussain.

  I would not talk about it, I said. What was there to talk about? One body among a million bodies would get lost as easily as a sesame seed. It would get lost without sound, without trace. Then I said goodbye. I would see him again, I said, and I would not forget his generosity; he had given me a chance to serve my country.

  ‘Would you like to mentor another speaker?’ he said, as I walked out of the door. ‘One who is obedient? One who follows the rules? One who speaks only, and does not think or dream or analyse or speculate? One who does not have that troubling part called conscience in his head, a worthy and desirable citizen? One who does not transgress?’

  ‘I will let you know if I do,’ I replied and walked towards the gate. ‘At this moment one seems to be enough.’

  30

  Thirty-five Years of Darkness

  When the last money was spent, sometime in August 1975, I left the city for a small community in suburban Dhaka where I lived among strangers. I became a salesman at a vegetable market, then took an apprenticeship as a light-duty mechanic, then became a digger for the city corporation on their dam construction project. Two consecutive seasons I worked as a mosquito sprayer. I was good at it. At the end of the second season my supervisor wanted to make me Lead Hand for the local unit. I said I did not want to be a Lead Hand; I did not want to take responsibility for others; would he please offer the position to someone else? He did not have anyone more efficient than I, he said; I must accept it. He would try to grant me more compensation for the extra responsibilities and a few days’ leave after the peak season.

  I disappeared the next day without sending in an explanation, and went to another community, just a few miles away, to become a schoolteacher. I taught history to schoolchildren. I was glad that the textbooks said nothing about the 1974 Famine, although they spoke about what happened after that, the killing of Sheikh Mujib in 1975. Following the syllabus, I introduced and reintroduced him as the father of our nation. I quoted from his 7 March speech while teaching the lesson covering the history of our independence. My voice did not match his voice at all, but I found the students listening to me as attentively as the refugees had listened to Nur Hussain at the Shaheed Minar. There would always be an audience for that speech, I thought; it would never cease to raise one’s hair. Then I explained how unfortunate we were as a people—we had murdered our father; we had not given him even five years to organize himself, to take the necessary measures to make the country thrive. As a conclusive statement I said that although the killers had killed him like cowards in the dark of the night, they could not kill his spirit; it would live on to inspire us through our tumultuous journey to democracy; he would be available to us at any moment. It was history edited, a history lavishly distorted; but I enjoyed the fact that I did not have to speak about the
famine, thus nothing about the inheritance of an immense dishonour. I could teach history decade after decade in Bangladesh without ever remembering Nur Hussain and my sinful past and explaining actually why Sheikh Mujib was killed so brutally.

  I taught history for three seasons and then quit. How would students know about honour if they did not know that dishonour was easier and more penetrating, if they did not know people could die in their millions even if the earth did not move? These students would be judges, lawyers, executives, soldiers, and of course, leaders; they would be in charge of our nation and guide it through time. It was important that they knew the problems of our past so that they learnt exactly how to avoid them in the future.

  I entered more humble professions in the days to come: cobbler, bricklayer, poultry worker, for some time a boatman on the Dhaka–Keranigonj route. Every so often I did not know what my job would be for the day. I stood in line with day labourers waiting to be hired. I did all sorts of work—cleaning backyards, removing fallen trees, cutting harvests, drying jute fibre on the highway, dyeing winter cloaks, rescuing drowning people from the river. Even these appeared satisfactory after a while; they gave me ample time to contemplate my life. I had my evenings free; I had the respect of my fellow workers. They invited me for tea, brought sweets for me on religious occasions. The poultry owner gave me a dozen eggs every month; his mother repaired the sleeves of my shirt.

  That was not what I wanted. With time passing very slowly, I wanted to be hated and tortured; I wanted something punishing; something that would resurrect me from my own dead existence. I had sold my heart to the killer that I was. I had sinned. In everything I saw and heard, I wanted to feel the pain that I had caused Nur Hussain at the very last moment of his life.

  While working as a rescue worker, I saw a small vacancy notice for the Anjuman in a local newspaper. They were looking for a gravedigger. Gravedigger? That job was mine, I thought. It was mine, and it would be mine until someone had to dig my own grave. Nobody remembers a gravedigger, neither the living nor the dead; nobody wanted a relationship with a gravedigger. I thought it would be appropriate work for me, an appropriate punishment. Every corpse would remind me of Nur Hussain, and every evening I would cry for him sitting in my lonely room.

  I ran to the Anjuman office, told the recruiting manager I was interested in the position and that I was strong and had strong nerves. I was a survivor, I told him; I had seen many deaths from up close; I would not become emotionally involved while interring a body. I was not allergic to bad smells either, I added, and he could pay me a reasonable salary for my service. The manager asked if I had used a shovel before. I had; spade, hoe, plough, everything; particularly a shovel. I was born in a village and I had lived there until I was sixteen, when I moved to the city. Then for a long time I did small jobs that involved lots of hard labour. I specifically mentioned the digging job that I had done for the city corporation. He watched me keenly, as if he had never seen anyone with so much enthusiasm for such a job. Then he asked if I knew how deep, wide and long a grave was, and how much it could be raised above the ground. I had done my homework; five feet, four feet, six feet, and one foot, respectively, I answered at once. He gave me a form to fill out.

  Seasons changed, children who survived the famine grew up and begot children. Several rivers ran dry; devastating floods and tsunamis killed thousands of people. A few thousand more were shot dead, hanged or kidnapped and tortured by dictators and elected governments, including the Awami League. The population of the country doubled; more mass graves of the nationalists who had sacrificed their lives in the liberation war were discovered; half a dozen memorials were erected in their honour. Surprisingly, the country’s archaeologists did not find the graves or remains of those that had died during the famine; therefore no memorials were erected for them. Governments and political parties opposed to the Awami League did not talk about them because they themselves were ruthless like the Awami League; they too had lots to hide and distort; they too needed protection against the truth. I myself had grown old, old and irrelevant, because of my self-contradictions, because of my memory, which clearly contained the face of one Nur Hussain, who cursed and loved me simultaneously.

  When I was alone, alone before a green, open field, I saw him sitting on his bed, his face between his hands, squeezed and dark with some pain he could not digest or ignore or explain. Then I saw him speaking, standing at the Shaheed Minar, speaking to bring all Bangladeshis together under one roof. I heard his voice—in all its defectiveness and perfection. I heard him memorizing the 7 March speech phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, trying to pronounce every word correctly, giving them the typical Mujibist phonetic character. And I saw myself standing beside him, coaching him through the whole process of learning the speech, wearing the Mujib coat, and disciplining him so he did not speak too much. I saw everything that happened afterwards, how one day things changed and I cut short his life with my ill-gotten decision. Sometimes the images came with all the details; sometimes they were just outlines, one or two disconnected moments from the past. They came and went away and came back again; they sat on my chest and tortured me constantly.

  I lived in many places; so did not buy very many things. I shed my needs gradually and came to be satisfied with a bare flat, with a mat, a quilt, a pillow, a saucepan, a stove, a plate, a mug in the toilet, two plastic containers for dal and salt, and two sets of clothes. And when I moved to a new place, I left everything behind to erase my past. I did not keep any copies of the Freedom Fighter or any newspaper published during the famine. They were not necessary. I had them in my head. I could easily remember how dark the water had been that the refugees drank to catch cholera. I could give a proper description of the night when Basu and Gesu were shot and Ruhul Amin entered a temporary phase of self-evaluation and decided that he was right to pull the trigger.

  Though the Anjuman buried around seventy unclaimed bodies every month, more during general strikes, elections and religious festivals, and I dug almost half of the graves, soon I understood it was not enough for me. Gravedigging had its piety, but it could not salvage me. No act of generosity or kindness or punishment was adequate to make the wrong right. I could dig a thousand graves and cry a thousand nights, but it would not match what I had done. I would still be avoiding the truth that I wanted to see reflected in our national consciousness—guilt for the dead. It was only by admitting to the world that I had killed Nur Hussain could I finally deal with the matter, if dealing with it was at all possible.

  Epilogue

  The sun is setting. I can see the last glow of the day on the sprawling coconut leaves in the school field. The wind is slow. The dust is returning to the earth.

  This is my last evening under the open sky. If I come here again, and stroll in these streets, and view these landscapes, it will be in my imagination, through the tunes, images and colours that I have gathered in my memory.

  And I have gathered enough of them.

  The cement floor of the Shaheed Minar is very inviting for a short and undisturbed break, before I finally withdraw myself from the world. With my cheek on the floor, I can hear footsteps, the noise of rickshaws running frantically—they are now returning home carrying weary party workers. I guess Sheikh Mujib’s birthday party is now over. His ghost will retire at least for a night.

  When I was a small boy, they said the more I ran, the quicker I would grow up. I ran mile after mile in rice fields, wheat fields, jute fields; I stumbled on hard mounds of earth, and jumped into ditches and canals before learning how to swim. I think I grew tall before my time. After my confrontation with Nur Hussain, I ran again. I crossed a vast distance, but this time to become small, to detach myself from everything that I knew and wanted to be, and to become extinct. I wish I had never learnt to run in the first place. Growing up is a curse, if one failed to grow a sense of responsibility as well.

  I can see a line of birds flying south. So many days I have watched them until they
became small, indistinct and finally disappeared in the flares of the horizon. Today, my sight is blurry; I cannot see far. But I can still imagine the shock that will surface in people’s eyes when they find out who I really was. My colleagues in the city’s excavation team, when they read my story in local newspapers, will be able to decipher the riddle of my sudden disappearance. They will say that they knew from the beginning that there was something unpredictable about me. Gatekeeper Ruhul Amin, if he is still alive somewhere under the sun, will read my story only to condemn himself for showing me respect when I went to see Moina Mia. I was a cold-blooded killer, he will say, indeed, so cold-blooded that even a killer like him could not stand a person like me.

  From these stairs, I can see the floodlights of the Sheikh Mujib police station on Sheikh Mujib Drive; I can see several security vehicles sprinting down Sheikh Mujib Street, blowing emergency horns. Have they arrested one or two protesters at the square, who joined Sheikh Mujib’s birthday ceremony peacefully, but then, when the first opportunity came, displayed placards portraying him as a man wearing human skulls around his neck, and said he was our founding father but also our deadliest dictator? It would not be a surprise. It would not be a surprise, either, if all Sheikh Mujib followers in the country came out on to the street and, with their most hateful voices, demanded death sentences for the protesters.

  I guess they will do the same in my case. After my confession, they will instigate a whole country of people against me and together condemn me for good. Why make such a fuss after so many years, they will wonder; why bring the dead back to life? Is it because a sinner will always refuse to drown until other sinners have gathered themselves under his arms? I am not afraid of them. There is no room for fear in my heart. At this moment, I can accept only pain and remorse and despair. I must remember my cruelty as long as possible and as honestly as possible. I must relive it every day as a process of atonement, until I am done. So leaving all details behind, and all debates, I say to myself: the story is long but it is simple; I have carried an excruciating guilt on my shoulders; it was pulling me to the ground every moment of my life. I have not admitted this guilt for a long time, have fought against it bullishly, and have also won for a long time. I do not want to win any more, especially by defeating part of myself again and again. Sheikh Mujib and the Awami League may not recognize the deaths they caused by allowing the famine to grow deeper with their maladministration, but I will recognize the death that I have caused with my misjudgement. Then I will be free.