Nothing is as delicious as that sweet stream water.
Hasina dips the end of her numal into the stream and wipes her face, her hands, the back of her neck. She stretches out across a flat rock and closes her eyes.
The question now is, what to do next? Baba said to wait. So they will wait. But for how long? Another problem occurs to her. How will Baba find them when they are so well hidden?
With a shake, Hasina stops herself from thinking about it. First things first, as Asmah says. And the first thing is to find her way back to the others so they too can have a drink. Maybe she can find something to take water back? She circles the stream again, wider and wider, like a tiger. Then she follows the water.
The stream is clear across the rocks, but as she follows it into the woods it gets deeper and faster. She can see runs all the way to the cliffs and waterfalls that spill into the Farak upstream.
Ouch! Her toe hits something hard. She bends and rubs her foot. In the dirt is an old beer bottle, half-buried. So people did come here. People who drank beer. But they aren’t here now. She drops to her knees and digs up the bottle, rinsing it clear in the stream.
In another ten minutes, she finds herself back at the groundwater bubbles. She fills the bottle, then turns and retraces her steps to the hollow where Araf and Ghadiya are waiting.
‘You move over.’
‘No. You move over.’
‘NO. YOU. MOVE. OVER!’
Hasina cannot believe her ears. Ghadiya and Araf are quarrelling at the tops of their voices! How is she supposed to keep them safe if they go on like this? White fury fills her. She will teach them a lesson.
Slowly she creeps forward, then yanks aside the fringe of branches. ‘Grrr!’
Ghadiya shrieks and Araf bursts into tears. Stupid girl, Hasina admonishes herself.
It takes a while to calm them down, and then they wait just to be sure no one has heard them. Finally, when they have finished the spring water from the bottle, she takes them back to the stream, flower by flower.
She shows Araf the spot where the bubbles come to the surface. He puts his whole head into the stream. Then it is Ghadiya’s turn. Then it is her own.
‘Come here, Araf.’ She washes his face with her numal.
‘Ouch, stop it!’
She grins at him. ‘So, it is a boy under there, not some wild animal.’
‘Grrr,’ he replies, his little hands made into monster claws. Then he stops. ‘Hina, who were those men?’
Hasina sits back on the rocks. She too wonders who the demon men are. They did not wear uniforms. ‘I am not sure, Araf.’
‘They were army, for sure,’ Ghadiya avers. ‘Just like the men who came for my father.’
‘What have they done with Mama?’ Araf asks, his voice tiny.
‘Baba will protect Mama.’
‘And Dadi too?’
‘And Dadi too.’
‘And my mama?’ Ghadiya asks, her voice also tiny.
‘Your mama too, I am sure of it. He was awake in time to save us, so we know he will have taken care of them.’ Hasina makes sure her voice sounds confident, although she doesn’t feel it.
For the rest of the afternoon, they sit beside the stream. Araf wades in the shallows. Ghadiya limps to a deep brown pool where she drags her numal through the water.
Hasina thinks about what to do next. They cannot stay here indefinitely. There is no food. And even though there is water, she knows very well that water like this soon causes sickness.
Besides, like Araf and Ghadiya, she is desperate to know what has happened to her family.
But she is also afraid to go back, afraid of what she will find. With a shiver she remembers the demon men and their torches. The screams of her neighbours.
Suddenly, there is a shriek from Ghadiya. ‘Look!’
Ghadiya holds her numal open to reveal two fat grey river prawns, still squirming. Hasina could shout with happiness. Prawns! Prawns mean lunch.
Hasina and Ghadiya use their numals twisted across hastily tied frames of bamboo to fish out more prawns. When they have five of them, Hasina starts a small fire using the glass bottle and bark and kindling Araf has gathered. In no time, a cheery little cooking fire is going.
Hasina, Ghadiya and Araf splay the fat prawns on sticks, wrapped in pennywort leaves, and roast them over the coals, fanning the flames to keep the smoke down. Soon, the aroma of cooking flesh drifts upwards, making their mouths water.
If the water was delicious, the prawns are even more so. They eat them straight from the leaves.
Sweet juice runs down Hasina’s mouth and along her fingers. She crunches through the shells, licking her fingers and relishing each bite. If not full, at least they are no longer ravenous. Hasina lies back on the warm rocks.
‘When do you think Baba will come for us?’ Araf asks.
‘Soon, I am sure.’ She keeps her voice light, but she isn’t at all sure that Baba will find them today.
She thinks about the hollow, and how it was only a few steps before she lost sight of it in the undergrowth. How would Baba find it? But how could they stay safe in plain sight? She doesn’t know the answer. And now, the afternoon shadows are getting longer.
‘How long will we have to stay in the forest?’ Araf persists.
‘I don’t know,’ Hasina replies.
‘Maybe they ran away.’
Thanks a lot, Ghadiya, Hasina thinks. Not helpful. She stands up. ‘If Baba doesn’t come today, we will just spend another night under the teak tree.’
‘Make him come!’ Araf insists.
‘How about we walk downstream to the cliffs? We might be able to see across the river.’
‘Let’s go,’ Ghadiya cries, limping ahead.
They pick their way along the stream until they reach the cliffs. Here, the stream shoots down a rock face into a dark pool. Far below, the Farak River churns. Through the trees, all they can see of Third Mile Street is a plume of smoke.
For a long time they watch the stream flowing into the waterfall that cascades into the foaming pool below. When the light starts to fade, and they turn for the hollow, Hasina leans over for a last look. Suddenly she sees a swimmer, his arms trailing lazily through the water. She is about to wave to him, to shout out that they need help, when she realises that this man isn’t swimming. He is dead, his body carried along by the current.
Chapter 14
‘Where is Baba?’
Araf’s voice is high-pitched. Loud. Whiny. It hurts the ears. It makes the hot space of the hollow hotter, smaller, darker.
‘Why hasn’t he come?’
It has been two nights and one full day now. Each day, they are weaker. Each morning, Hasina is woken by hunger. Her belly doesn’t rumble with just hunger either. She fears illness.
They are dirty and damp. When she rushed from her home two nights ago, she was barefoot in pyjamas. How much longer will she have to go around undressed like this? It makes her feel naked and vulnerable.
And there is the sheer boredom of hanging around the forest. Of wondering if anyone else is hiding nearby. Of being careful, of forgetting to be careful, and then, with a jolt of fear, remembering to be careful all over again.
We are in an impossible position, Hasina thinks. If we stay here much longer, we will get sick or starve. But if we go? With a shudder she remembers the men with eyes like demons.
So when Araf whines, again, ‘Where is Baba? Why hasn’t he come?’ Hasina wants to scream at him in frustration. She would like to know the answer too.
Ghadiya isn’t helping. This morning, when Araf asked, ‘Where’s Baba?’ for the fifteenth time, she growled, ‘My father had to run away.’ Hasina had to use all her willpower to not yell at her cousin, not to speak sharply, but to softly say, ‘Our baba will come. He’s just been held up.’
But by mid-morning, as they sit beside the stream, Hasina is out of willpower.
‘Where is Baba?’ Araf whines.
‘Coming,’ Ghadiya mock
s, sarcastically. Hasina can feel her temper rising.
‘Araf, go see if there are prawns in the pool,’ Hasina orders, and Araf trots off.
‘If Baba says he’ll find us, then he will find us,’ Hasina insists.
‘My baba said he’d find us too.’ Ghadiya’s voice is sulky.
This is when Hasina loses it. Why does it all have to be up to her? ‘Not all babas run away,’ she snarls. ‘Not all babas leave their children. Some stay, no matter what.’
Ghadiya’s face crumples, and instantly Hasina regrets her words. ‘Sorry. Your father is a good man.’
Ghadiya wipes away her tears. ‘He is a good man.’ She hangs her head, stares at her fingers. ‘The day the men came, it wasn’t just my father who went to catch the boat. It was all three of us.’ Ghadiya’s voice takes on that remembering quality again. ‘The boat engine was already going when we got to the docks. The captain threw a plank to shore for us. It was high up over the water. All the people on the deck were shouting, “Hurry, hurry.”’
She pauses.
‘I couldn’t cross the plank. I froze. Father took this bag.’ Ghadiya unhooks the orange Shan bag from her shoulder. ‘He looped the strap around my body to hold me as he backed over the plank.
‘But the boat jumped. I fell back onto shore. He fell in the water. A woman pulled him onto the boat and the captain dragged in the plank. Father begged them to wait.
‘If I had crossed that plank, my mother would not have been beaten. My family would still be together.’
Hasina’s insides clamp with pity for her cousin. ‘You were only a little girl.’
Ghadiya shrugs. ‘Maybe Uncle Ibrahim will come. But maybe he can’t.’ She stands up and hooks her father’s orange bag across her body. ‘Maybe we have to decide what to do for ourselves.’ She limps to the pool where Araf is searching for prawns.
Hasina turns over Ghadiya’s story in her mind. Her cousin has a point. What if something has happened to Baba? She has another thought. What if he went to the Lower Forest? He would not know that the men at the standpipe had forced them across the river to the High Forest. It could take ages for him to find them.
She gathers the others. ‘I think we need to find out more about what is happening in Teknadaung. Soon.’
‘How?’ Araf demands.
Hasina glances at her cousin. ‘I could go to the bazaar. I’d be sure to hear news there.’
‘It will be dangerous,’ Ghadiya says.
It would be risky. And the thought of coming up against those demon-eyed men again makes her feel icy inside. But she doesn’t feel as if she has much choice.
‘I will be careful. I won’t wear my numal.’ Hasina feels a pang at going bareheaded. She has always resented wearing her numal. Now it feels like she is leaving something of herself behind.
‘I will come to protect you,’ Araf insists.
Ghadiya rolls her eyes. As if. But for once, Hasina is ready. ‘If you come with me, who will be here waiting for Baba if he comes?’
‘Ghadiya will,’ he counters.
‘True. But Baba will be bringing breakfast.’
‘Breakfast?’ Araf says, thinking it over.
‘And soft drinks …’
‘Soft drinks! I will stay here.’
Hasina speeds across the paddy fields, her belly empty, her heart pounding. If things go well, she might find that the men with demon eyes have gone, that they can go home. If things go really really well, she might even find Baba at the stall. And he might tell her that Mama and Dadi and Aunt Rukiah are safe at home, that most of what she saw was a nightmare. But if things go badly … well, she won’t think about things going badly.
The sun on her face is much warmer here in the open. But it is good to be walking in their fields.
She drops down from the rocky forest path to the soft, sandy laneway through the Arakanese rice fields. She keeps low. But there is no one to see her. Not a single farmer is out. She runs past the Basic Education School. The gates are closed. No students are gathered in the yard. At the bazaar, the door is shuttered. Never before have the doors been closed during trading hours.
Hasina shrinks against the bazaar wall. What should she do? Maybe the back door is open. She creeps around the corner of the bazaar. A soldier stands before her. A soldier with a gun.
Hasina freezes.
The soldier has not noticed her. He is too busy searching through the piles of boxes, discarded from the bazaar. He is absorbed in this task, gingerly using the barrel tip of his rifle to poke into the pile, shifting the boxes apart.
Hasina can tell the soldier is afraid. That he is concentrating out of fear. A week ago, before the men came, there were those stories about explosions and bombs at police stations. Is that why the soldier is here now?
If she backs away slowly around the corner, he might not see her.
Silently, Hasina takes a step back, then another, her eyes trained on the soldier. She puts a hand out to the corner of the building. But this time she puts her foot down on something sharp, something that pierces her foot. Something that hurts so much she cannot stifle a cry of pain.
The soldier’s head whips up, and along with it the barrel of his gun. It’s pointed at her heart. His dark eyes, behind the gunsight, lock onto hers. Those eyes are wide with fear.
There they are, Hasina and the soldier, like a cobra and a mouse. Each one convinced that they are the mouse and that the other is the cobra.
The soldier wears a green uniform with a red scarf and red badge. Sit Tat. But he is young, only a few years older than she is. Maybe that is why he looks so frightened. And so confused.
The soldier shoots a glance behind him. Hasina follows his gaze. Beyond the bazaar is a line of olive-green trucks. Is that where he came from? She can’t see any other soldiers there.
He turns his face back to her. His expression is still confused, but something else is in his eyes. Pity. And sorrow.
From behind the bazaar, Hasina hears a voice. Loud, gruff, shouting orders in Burmese. The young soldier’s eyes widen again in alarm. He jabs his chin to the right, pointing back the way she came. ‘Go,’ he hisses. ‘Run!’
Chapter 15
Hasina runs. She bolts from the bazaar as fast as she can, limping on her painful foot. She rounds the corner of the school at speed, and sprints down the deserted main street.
She doesn’t stop until she comes to the paddy field where she ducks into the first ditch, head down.
She waits and waits, half-submerged in water. Her foot throbs and her brain swirls. She listens for the sound of boots running. Of that harsh voice barking in Burmese. ‘Round them up. Round them all up.’
Is this what happened to Baba? Did he meet a Sit Tat soldier on the way to find them? As she lies panting, Hasina realises the risk of leaving the forest is too great. But that they need information more than ever.
Only once the sun has passed far to the west does she risk raising her head above the ditch. No one is in sight. She breathes a deep sigh of relief and hauls herself from the water to limp back to the forest.
In the hollow, as she wraps a strip of her numal around her foot, Hasina tells Ghadiya and Araf about the soldier, the trucks, the angry voice shouting in Burmese.
‘I think he said, “Round them up, all of them.” ’ What she doesn’t tell them is how terrified she was to know that she is one of them. Someone to be rounded up. And so is Ghadiya, and Araf. Her mother’s words on the day of the protest return to her. You are a Rohingya.
Ghadiya has an explanation. ‘First, it was the men that came to my town. Men like the demons we saw in Third Mile Street. Then it was the police. They came for my father, but he’d gone by then.’ She gives Hasina a look. It was the police, then, who beat Aunt Rukiah.
‘Finally, it was the soldiers. We saw them when we were hiding alongside the road. For days we saw their trucks driving past. Mama made us leave the road then. She didn’t want the soldiers to find us.’
With a
shiver, Hasina remembers the rough voice, the cruelty in it, and the young soldier’s face. The way he too was afraid when he heard that barking voice. She would not like to meet any more soldiers. Not if she can help it.
But what Ghadiya said makes sense and gives her a tiny glimmer of hope. The soldiers closed the bazaar. That is why it was surrounded by their trucks. The soldiers may have prevented Baba from coming, just by being there. Which surely means that when the trucks leave, Baba will come. When the trucks are gone, they can go home again, although Hasina is frightened by what they might find.
But how will they know that the trucks have gone?
Hasina gazes up at the teak tree behind their hollow. It is tall, and on a hill. ‘If I can climb to the top of the tree, I should be able to see right across Teknadaung—’
‘Which means you will be able to see if the trucks are there or gone,’ Ghadiya finishes.
‘Right,’ says Hasina, although she is a bit annoyed at Ghadiya for finishing her sentence.
‘I want to climb the tree,’ says Araf.
‘Too dangerous,’ Hasina replies.
But with her injured foot, she finds she cannot climb the tree. Araf gets his way. She watches him, her heart in her mouth as he hauls himself upwards, branch after branch, hand over teeny hand.
Araf calls down that he sees the trucks. Lines of them near the bazaar. He sees them in Third Mile Street too. He isn’t able to count them, but he sees ‘many many’.
Many many trucks. The three of them settle into their hollow to talk over what that might mean.
‘I think there must be soldiers all over town,’ Hasina says.
Ghadiya agrees, and the three of them decide that when the trucks are gone, it will be safe for Baba to come.
Over the next few days, the sky clouds over and rain falls in bursts. In between showers, Araf climbs to the top of the teak tree and scouts for trucks.
On their fifth morning in the forest, Araf calls down, ‘Not so many trucks.’ When he returns to the ground, he has a big grin on his face. The trucks are leaving. The soldiers are going. Baba will be coming. Finally, they will go home.
Hasina: Through My Eyes Page 7