by Adib Khan
Hamid finally notices me. He asks for my passport. ‘Australian!’ he exclaims. ‘How long have you lived there?’
‘Thirty years,’ I reply in Bangla.
His expression softens as though in approval of my fluency in the national language. ‘Are Australians prejudiced against Muslims?’
‘I’m an Australian. I’m not prejudiced against myself.’
‘There’s a difference between someone like you and the descendents of the British.’
‘There are people from all over the world living there.’ I’m too jet-lagged to be bothered with a further explanation of the country’s ethnic diversity.
‘Do Muslims feel threatened in Australia?’
‘You need to ask a practising Muslim.’
He examines the immigration card. ‘You wrote nothing where it says religion.’
‘It’s optional.’
‘Your country invaded Iraq.’ There’s a note of accusation in his voice, as though he has irrefutable proof that I was part of the decision-making process that sent Australian troops to the Middle East.
Another man in a khaki uniform takes the passport and disappears behind a partition. The woman tips the contents of my suitcase and backpack onto the counter. She continues chatting with Hamid. Mindlessly they poke and probe each item of belonging.
‘Video camera? Laptop?’ Hamid inquires. ‘British pounds? Euros? American dollars?’
‘Mobile phone.’ I place it on the bench.
They take turns to examine the mobile before returning it to me. I’m led behind the partition and searched.
Most of the clothes and gifts for family members are tossed back into the suitcase. The rest is dumped in the backpack along with my letters and documents, which have been perfunctorily examined. The woman motions towards a partly open door.
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘What about my passport?’
She shrugs nonchalantly.
I glare at her.
‘Please wait in there. Your passport will be returned. You can leave your suitcase here. You may take the backpack.’
The room stinks of cigarettes, even though there are no butts in sight. Several chairs are placed around a clunky wooden table in the middle. The walls are painted avocado green. The flecked mosaic floor looks invitingly cool and clean. A ceiling fan creaks and whirls overhead. I move the chair to ensure that I’m not sitting directly under it.
Already I yearn to return to my inconspicuous life as a librarian in Melbourne.
AT HOME MY workdays are full of book matters, emails, order forms and purchases, organising and attending meetings, arranging lectures and catching up with the news on websites. I leave some of the more difficult jobs to my assistant, Danielle Banks. She’s adept at dealing with budget cuts and staff stress. Over the years we’ve both learned that compliance and compromise achieve much more than confrontation. Danielle also happens to be a more affable diplomat than I am, with the rare gift of being able to say ‘No’ without offending.
I live in a weatherboard house in one of the quieter streets in Richmond. It’s a dull existence, although I rarely question it. If there are moments of dissatisfaction, I quickly think of the circumstances that led me to Australia on the shrapnel-strewn road of migrants.
When I left Bangladesh soon after the liberation war, I pretended that it was no more than an indulgent adventure, a transfer of life’s priorities without any apprehended loss to my selfhood. And now, in my whimsical moments, I imagine I’m a prophesier, since I can usually tell what is likely to happen the next day or the following week. There’s an unvarying routine about most things in my life—the time I leave for work and when I return. A run on the Richmond oval most mornings. Competition racquetball after work on Tuesday. Wednesday nights devoted to the washing machine, and the weekly jaunt to the supermarket on Thursday evening. I can even guess when my young neighbours are gearing themselves for a noisy party. The unpredictable and the chaotic seem far away. I’ve learned to cage the familiar turbulence of the past somewhere in the maze of my inner being, where it remains perpetually dark.
My spare time is taken up with walking, computer chess, reading, listening to music and watching movies at art-house theatres. Occasionally I go to the football. In summer I watch international cricket with fanatical interest. I enjoy camping and hiking. I have a few friends who share my interests, but I see them infrequently.
And there’s Amelia.
Amelia works in a bookshop. She’s a widow and lives in Hawthorn with her two teenaged daughters, Angela and Skye.
I met Amelia five years ago, at a ‘Writing about the Past’ session at that year’s Writers’ Festival. Deliberately I’d chosen an aisle seat so that I could make a quick exit if the speakers became self-indulgent and boring. Someone bumped against my legs. The woman was out of breath and profuse in her apology. I tucked in my legs and squeezed sideways to make way for her and the paper bags she was carrying. She collapsed into the chair next to me.
‘Thanks!’ she whispered breathlessly.
At the end of the discussion, I asked the panel if writers of memoirs were entirely honest in writing about their past. How much did they exaggerate and fictionalise for the sake of maintaining narrative interest? And how authentic were the images created by memory anyway?
How did they deal with the events they did not wish to reveal? Drop them in the ‘Not to be Disclosed’ bin? Merely bypass them?
I sensed the woman in the adjacent seat turn and look at me. The answers to my questions were evasive. I tried again. If deception was part of the writing process, then was it necessary to lie in order to write about former times? But this was one question too many. There were titters of amusement and the microphone passed on to another member of the audience.
‘That made them uncomfortable,’ the woman chuckled. ‘Are you a migrant?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘So am I,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you about the questions you asked.’
I liked her forthrightness.
Afterwards we headed off for coffee.
‘I’m Amelia.’ She held out her hand.
‘Masud.’
‘Are you…’ she hesitated. ‘Indian?’
‘Bangladeshi.’
‘A Hindu? Sorry! I don’t mean to pry.’
‘A lapsed Muslim.’
‘Oh.’ The Oh was prolonged and somehow seemed mysteriously meaningful. Then she laughed, as though bemused by the word lapsed, and told me her surname.
It was my turn to say, ‘Oh.’
NOWADAYS AMELIA AND I occasionally go out for dinner and then to a concert or a play. We no longer talk of our shared migrant experiences. Sometimes we make love as though it’s a reminder of a mutual obligation in our relationship. She has stopped asking how I feel about her or whether I have any plans for us to live together. She’s exasperated by the way I’ve remained vague and shifty about this.
Amelia’s justified in accusing me of indecisiveness. ‘You dither so much, Masud!’ she said to me once. And then lost her temper when I agreed.
‘Your problem is that you don’t passionately believe in anything! You don’t seem to have any need for anchorage.’
An accurate assessment, I thought. ‘I’m an emotional Bedouin,’ I said limply.
But Amelia hasn’t stopped telling me how much she appreciates my patience with Angela and Skye. Maybe that’s the reason she keeps her discontent under control.
Recently, we’d been arguing over travel plans. We intended to go overseas together. Turkey, Syria and Jordan, I suggested.
Italy and France, she insisted.
And then, after not hearing from my brother for more than a year, I received a lengthy email from him, advising me about our father’s failing health and the ongoing saga of Uncle Musa’s profligacy. Zia was worried. Abba was struggling to recognise people and his speech had deteriorated to such an extent that it was difficult to understand what he meant. There were t
imes when he was unexpectedly articulate and precise about the past. Such moments were followed by periods of silence, as Abba returned to the confusion of the present.
‘Bangladesh?’ Amelia sounded dubious.
‘It’s one of the safest of the Islamic countries,’ I said light-heartedly. ‘If you prefer, we could meet somewhere else. Istanbul or Amman?’
To my relief, Amelia pulled out altogether. I would have had an impossible time explaining her to Ma.
Our honour was in danger of being tarnished again, Zia had warned in his email, like a stuffy guardian of familial values. Then he concluded, officiously, intervention is necessary.
THERE’S A HAUNTING tale about the oldest item in our family jewellery collection. A twenty-two carat gold armlet, studded with a hundred tear-shaped rubies, had been presented to my great-grandmother Hasina by Abdul Ghani, the then Nawab of Dhaka.
Abdul Ghani first glimpsed Hasina at a wedding at Ahsan Manzil, that palatial building on the banks of the Buriganga River. It was customary for the impulsive Nawab to peek into the great hall where female guests gathered on formal occasions. He was a curious man and an aesthete—a lover and patron of North Indian classical music and painting. He was known to be a poet of some merit, dedicating his verses to those women he found attractive. A harmless idiosyncrasy, one could say. But not in Hasina’s case. Befitting her name, my greatgrandmother was renowned for her beauty.
An aide informed the Nawab that Hasina was married, to a zamindar’s son, and had already borne him four children. At the time she was only twenty-one. So it was in despair that the Nawab sent her the armlet as a gift. It was accompanied by an explanatory note: each ruby, he said, was intended to represent a bloodied tear he’d shed over his unrequited love for her.
‘Begum Hasina, I beg you not to lose the armlet or give it away,’ the Nawab wrote. ‘Keep it close to you as a token of my love. I’ve asked a holy man to bless it.’
Ismael Alam was infuriated by the Nawab’s behaviour and sought to confront him and return the armlet. But Hasina was so moved by the aristocrat’s gesture that she insisted on keeping the present and writing to her admirer. My great-grandmother was a wilful woman, prone to bouts of temper. She resisted Ismael Alam’s instruction to stop all communication with the Nawab. Hasina raged, abused anyone who dared to enter her room, smashed furniture and set a part of the house on fire. She went on a hunger strike until her husband withdrew his demand. With great reluctance and growing anger, Ismael Alam acquiesced, but insisted that his wife deposit the armlet in the family’s safe, which stood in a corner of his room. In return, my greatgrandfather showered her with jewellery of inestimable value. Still Hasina sulked. She then moved to a small room in a corner of the house and refused to see her husband.
A month later, during the peak of the monsoon rains, Hasina went missing. A hundred men were employed to search for her. All they could find was her pair of leather sandals floating in the Buriganga.
Inevitably, conjectures followed about an ill-fated affair between the Nawab and the wife of the zamindar. But the Alams remained tight-lipped and maintained their composure. In the end they announced that Hasina had committed suicide after being diagnosed with an incurable disease.
My great-grandfather wept and grieved in public. He fasted, fed the poor, donated money to the local mosque and prayed over long hours. Some reluctantly concluded that his death from a broken heart was imminent. Yet Ismael Alam went on to live for another fifty years, marrying for a second time, studying the Koran and setting up an orphanage.
When he was finally near death, he cried for Hasina’s forgiveness and prayed for the Devil to keep away. He hallucinated about snake attacks, and sank his canines into his arms in several places. He wanted to shed his skin and become a new person, he cried out in his sleep. Allah was beneficent and merciful…Ismael Alam kept mumbling incriminating words of guilt and contrition until he passed away.
Izzat. Family honour. It’s a priceless virtue in our family.
My father told us this story late one afternoon during Ramadan as we sat on the terrace of our house, waiting for the siren to sound the end of fasting for the day.
‘And the armlet?’ I asked. ‘What happened to it?’
‘It was in my father’s possession for some years,’ Abba explained. ‘I thought he then gave it to my brother. But Musa Bhai denies that he ever received it.’
‘So, it just vanished!’ Zia exclaimed.
‘Just as well,’ Abba said indifferently.
We allowed the gathering dusk to hide us in its silence. Neither Zia nor I were inclined to ask the obvious and probe further into Hasina’s fate.
Never again did Hasina Alam figure in our conversations. It was as if, by some tacit agreement, we had banished her from our minds.
I TAKE THE printout from my backpack and reread the part relating to my father’s brother:
Walnut’s behaviour has become even more outrageous. He’s a source of constant embarrassment to us all. Living in the ancestral village, he continues as if still in the days of zamindari rule. He’s secretive and stays in that hideous house he’s built for himself in Manikpur. Incidentally, he had no hesitation about stripping the remains of our old family house and using most of its bricks for building his new place. He’s looked after by that cunning fellow Nur, and other sycophants who gladly tell him whatever he wishes to hear.
I now feel it was a mistake to convince him to leave the city, to rid him of his addiction to gambling. He should move back to Dhaka where we can keep an eye on him. The problem is that he doesn’t want to talk to me after the arguments we’ve had over the past few months. Recently I brought up the matter of the black pearls. He accused me of being impertinent and ranted about his right to dispose off his share of the family jewellery as he pleased. He still claims to know nothing about the other 200 pearls that went missing all those years ago. Other items of inherited jewellery, supposedly in his safekeeping, are unaccounted for. He pretends that they were never passed on to him.
Should you decide to come, I’d like you to visit him. You may have greater influence on the old man. He likes you because you’ve humoured him and given in to his whims. Coming from you, he’s likely to listen to the advantages of living near proper medical facilities. Even a whiff of prolonging his life is likely to tempt him to leave his serfdom. His latest plan is utterly disgraceful! It has upset Ma no end. It could be every bit as humiliating as that other business, years ago, which led to his injury. Do you remember how the matter had to be silenced? It sounds unkind, but I wish that he had been permanently debilitated in that fall. It would have removed the source of his greatest temptation in life.
It’s typical of my brother to leave me guessing about the exact nature of this next potential scandal. Whatever the octogenarian is planning has evidently rattled everyone. I’m sad about the pearls, not for their monetary value but for their significance in locating the coordinates of our family’s history. But then we’ve been known to be careless about looking after our assets. Allah gives and He takes has been our fatalistic motto. The acceptance of human helplessness in controlling the fortunes of life has brilliantly hidden our failures.
As for Uncle Musa’s accident, which Zia mentioned in his email, I recall the incident that had sparked that family scandal. A careless romp with a village girl in a paddy field on his forty-ninth birthday had led to her pregnancy. Her father had the courage to create a fuss about his daughter’s condition. He threatened to publicly name the culprit. The affair was hushed up after Uncle Musa agreed to give land and a large sum of money to the outraged farmer. The girl was whisked away to another village where she had a stillborn baby. Within weeks she was married off to the local school teacher who was nearly thrice her age.
Several months later, Uncle Musa was being transported on a palanquin to a neighbouring landowner when a servant buckled under the weight of one of the poles he was shouldering. The imbalanced litter crashed to the ground. Uncle Mus
a managed to climb out of the wreck and hobble away. But the fall injured a delicate part of his body adjacent to his pendulous anatomy and incapacitated him so severely that he was unable to pursue any further conquest in the village for several years. Someone coined the nickname Crushed Walnuts, and Uncle Musa had to bear the humiliation of being teased about his smashed manhood by those who knew him well.
Weeks later it became known that an aggrieved brother of the girl was the palanquin bearer who had caused the accident.
I WATCH A gecko snare a fly on the wall. A retinue of black ants crawls into a small hole in a corner of the room. I hear voices outside. An argument flares. Then a hostile silence. Clicking heels.
The customs woman enters the room. She’s visibly agitated. ‘Mr Alam! There’s been a terrible mistake! Please accept our apology. We didn’t know you were a freedom fighter in our liberation war against Pakistan. You’re a war hero!’
I glower at her.
She returns my passport. ‘So sorry! You can go.’
This sudden elevation in my rank is hardly flattering. I’ve never thought that I was any kind of a hero. But then people have funny notions about valour. Once I was among those classified as freedom fighters. Terrorist to some…insurgent to others. Miscreant to the Pakistani soldiers. I was nicknamed Explosive and even made it to the top ten on the army’s MOST WANTED list.
I collect my luggage and walk out to the terminal hall, which is teeming with armed security guards.
I brace myself for home, and all impending attention. My mother will probably lead the charge with inquisitorial enthusiasm. I have no doubts that there will be probes into my personal life, revolving around my unacceptable bachelor status. My future intentions. A pointed reminder of the diminishing numbers in our family. Responsibilities.
THREE
En Passant
He leans against a pillar, checking the time on his watch. The aura of haughty aloofness hasn’t deserted my brother. But the emblems of success are no longer apparent.