by Arif Anwar
Dedication
To my father,
for all the books you bought me
Epigraph
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour,
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come
Dancing to a frenzied drum
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Book I: Gathering
Honufa
Jamir
Rahim
Zahira
Claire
Ichiro
Book II: Eye
Shahryar
Valerie
Book III: Surging
Ichiro
Claire
Zahira
Rahim
Jamir
Honufa
Epilogue
Rahim & Zahira
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Book I
Gathering
Honufa
Chittagong, East Pakistan (Bangladesh)
NOVEMBER 1970
In his dreams her eyes are always green. The green of grasshoppers, leaves and emeralds. Green shot with a darkness that reminds him of shattered jade.
He knows now that Honufa’s eyes were gray. The gray of cats and sunless mornings. The gray of the writhing sea.
THE sound and light conspire to open her gray eyes late this morning, in a hut whose dirt floor is tattooed with the light of a November dawn, rumbling from the surf.
Honufa sits up. On her windowsill is a house crow. Its black wings are flared, rising from a charcoal body. The curving bill half-open, as though it intends to call out. The onyx eyes focused solely on her.
It does not move as she surreptitiously leaves her bed—never taking her eyes off it—and approaches in slow measured steps.
Only when she reaches out—her hand only inches from its head—does the crow fly away, its parting caws shatteringly loud in the confines of her hut.
As if she were still a child, Honufa spits on her chest to calm her racing heart. A foreboding pads toward her like a hungry and silent predator.
The hardwood cot they sleep on was built by her father, bequeathed to her as a parting concession upon her marriage to Jamir, so many years before. Her three-year-old son sleeps on it right now. Warm and full of dreams. The side where Jamir would lie is empty. This is the first time her husband has left for the sea without saying good-bye. Gone for how long to the heart of the bay.
She splashes water on her face from a clay jar and begins her chores—first laundering a stack of clothes that has never reached more than a hand high in their married life, she then tosses the fish bones left from the previous day’s meals to the sleepy-eyed cat that often visits their hearth, and steps out to pick firewood from the branches littering the grounds of a nearby woods. From the edges of a pond whose black upward stare reminds her of the eyes of the crow that visited her, she rips dandelion leaves for the midday meal.
She does all this before the dawn can grow to morning, and the pale blue glow that floods the world can give way to violet, orange and finally the nothing color of pure sunshine.
Her son stirs in bed.
Her morning’s wares tied with a jute rope and perched on her head, Honufa walks back to her hut.
Three decades of hard living have whittled away feminine softness from her face, deep-etched the lines around her eyes, thinned her lips to less than ideal for a woman of Bengal, given her jaw a square and mannish cast; Honufa is not beautiful, but she is strong, and at five and a half feet, taller than any other woman in the seaside village she calls home. Her shoulders are wide, her hands calloused from the miles of ropes and nets that have passed through them over the years, from the hills of coconuts she has husked.
The length of tree shadows and the height of the sun reckon the hour for her, tell her that it is time to visit the communal well to draw water, an act she is resigned to complete in solitude. In the first years, she held hope that the weight of others’ scrutiny, the sting of their judgment, would become easier to bear. But it never did.
On her way, she stops. At an hour in which the beach should be barren, it instead boils with activity. The entire village is gathered here—the gray sand churned to peaks and troughs by more than a hundred feet. Men and women, sinewy—dark from the sun—pull in boats and tie them with sturdy knots to the trees, drag back and fold nets. Children carry back fish caught in cylindrical traps. Through it all, contributions are made as needed, the bright lines of sex, age and size erased for the occasion.
A storm is coming.
She swivels her head from east to west to south, the cardinal directions from which a storm might approach, but there is nothing: the strands of thatch that hang from the hut roofs are still, the sun bright and unoccluded above, yet the village scrambles.
Honufa scans the groups heaving with effort for a friendly face, even one that does not look away.
She finds Rina among a larger group of women folding nets, rolling up one end of an especially long one with the mindless efficiency that comes from years of practice. Honufa takes up the other end and mimics the older woman’s actions until the two meet in the middle.
“A storm?”
Rina nods. Diminutive and wiry next to Honufa, she is like a strip of meat left in the sun.
“How do they know?”
“They saw the Boatman this morning.”
The net drops from Honufa’s hands.
SHE rushes home. This will not be the first storm she has had to prepare for—such is life on the bay. While her son (now awake) is focused on the pursuit and innocent harassment of chickens in the courtyard, Honufa tightens the loose edges of her sari around herself and gets to work.
Their list of possessions is small, their whereabouts ascertained in minutes. On one of the two large kantha cloth bedsheets that she spreads on their floor, she places their cooking utensils—a boti (its blade wrapped) for cutting, a nora for crushing, pots and pans that have boiled rice, lentils, fish and spinach in their lifetimes. Above the second kantha, she gathers their bedding, their clothing, still damp from their morning wash. A rough burlap sack inherits their dry foods.
She steps outside. The chickens, one black with white speckles, the other a deep burnt-orange, possess a beauty that borders on the spectacular. But they are dutiful also, daily producing eggs in some corner of their home, a treasure hunt for her son that ends with him holding a prize—the shell still soft and warm from the hen’s body—in his hands.
She looks at the birds now and sighs. Her son’s love for them will make difficult what must come next.
She picks up a knife and begins to shine it against a stone.
RINA arrives to find her digging in the courtyard, the hole half-a-man deep already. The older woman retrieves a second shovel from the cow pen and begins to dig alongside, falling into the wordless rhythm of work. Between the two, the hole grows at a fast clip.
The two women stand side by side for a moment, sweating, breathing hard, admiring the work done.
“You really think a storm is coming?”
“The Boatman has not been wrong so far.”
Across a quarter century, thrice has a lone boatman been seen sailing under black sails on the bay, always headed south, his back facing those standing on t
he beach or on the craggy green hills beyond.
Each time he has appeared, a great storm has followed.
“Who do you think he is?”
Rina looks at her meaningfully. “We have our guesses. But all I know is that it is no man that stands below those black sails.”
Honufa shivers from the uncanny romance of the image.
“Where is your son?” Rina asks.
“Inside. He threw a tantrum. He didn’t take well to what had to be done.”
“Then he is well on the way to becoming a man.”
Honufa smiles. In her young son she sees more of her husband’s quiet strength and soft heart than her fire, her fierce will. Perhaps that is a good thing.
Her son has a grand name, chosen from a book that the village zamindar read to her when she herself was a child, a book of stories within stories nested like mirrors facing one another, going on until you lost yourself utterly.
The women drop the sacks into the hole (including the chicken, slaughtered, plucked and packed into clay pots) and replace the dirt after setting a long stick in the center to mark the place. They pound down the earth with the flats of the shovels.
She invites Rina into her now empty home. Her son sits on the naked cot, his dusty face streaked with tears. He runs to Rina, who lifts him up into her open arms and swings him onto the hollow of her hip.
She tickles him. “What are these tears I see?”
He points an accusatory finger at his mother. “She killed the chickens.”
“Were they friends of yours?”
“Yes.”
‘If she hadn’t, then the storm would have snatched them up and you’d never see them again anyway.”
While Rina is occupied with her child, Honufa approaches the far wall of her hut, cursing herself for not remembering such a critical detail sooner. She reaches up, standing on tiptoes, her blind hand hunting for the spot where she knows a letter rests, but finds nothing. Her heart racing, she now scrabbles and grasps at the dust and dirt, pushes her bed up against the wall and stands on it to look. The letter she deposited on top of that wall with such care and secrecy more than two months ago, one whose existence she would verify with an obsessive zeal whenever her husband was away, is gone.
She climbs down and finds Rina staring at her.
“Whatever is the matter with you?”
Her face ashen, her voice small, her throat nonetheless manages to birth a lie. “A set of gold earrings. A gift from Jamir’s mother. They’re gone.”
“Oh, that is too bad, child.”
She can only nod, her mind thrown into turmoil. She thinks of Jamir, floating like a speck on the vast ocean. He has told her so many tales of the sea, of the marvelous things he would catch, of the fights and drunkenness of sailors, the unending stretches of water housing only waves flecked with sunlight, tales that made her wish she were born a man, freed from the baggage of domesticity.
Now is one such moment.
Once, he rowed her to a key by the bay to buy pretty jewelry made of seashells and stones. The wind was fearful that day but the boat was steady, weighed down by them and sacks of sand. This is ballast, Jamir said with a smile as the wind whipped his hair. The weight keeps you safe.
Her husband and son similarly settle her in life. With them on board, nothing can capsize her boat.
She sits next to Rina. “I worry for him.”
“Why? He has been out there so many times already. He’s on a trawler, those are giants. They don’t sink like our piddly boats. They have a radio on board. He likely had news of the storm before us and is on his way home even as we speak.”
Honufa shakes her head. Rina does not know. How could she? The danger posed by the letter Jamir carries surpasses that of any storm.
“Never mind my foolish chatter. How much time do we have?”
“A few hours, from the looks of things. The zamindar is letting people take shelter in his house. That Rahim is a good man.”
“He is,” Honufa says, and does not elaborate, recalling those afternoons she spent in his mansion as a child, poring over the letters of the alphabet, one by one, as his wife served them sweet biscuits and tea. It was not long before letters would grow to words, words to sentences and soon her eyes would gallop across pages, chapters and entire books. She was—the zamindar would one day claim—a faster study than he ever thought possible for a child to be.
Rina grimaces. “I forget sometimes that the two of you are on poor terms.”
“He’s a rich landowner. We’re a family of poor fishermen. Whatever friendship blossomed between us now feels like a dream. And we all must wake up someday.”
Rina scoffs, then, surveying the hut, furrows her brows. “Are you done preparing then, Honufa? Nothing else needs your attention before the storm?”
“Just our nanny goat still grazing on the hills. I was waiting for you to get here so you could watch my boy.”
“Very well. But you don’t have much time, child. What if you’re delayed?”
“If I am, would you take my son there yourself?”
Rina considers the implications of her words. “And what of you?”
“I’ll find you, take shelter there with the others. We have to set bitterness aside when a storm comes.”
“Rahim is a kindly man. It has been years, Honufa. Why not patch things with him? It will be less difficult than you think.”
“It’s too late for that.” Honufa shakes her head, thinks of the letter that is no longer in her possession. She was the one who pushed the boat off so many years before, and by now, the currents of time and circumstance have carried her and the zamindar, Rahim, too far apart.
Her friend’s eyes cloud with disappointment. “I suppose you know best, but your family needs more friends than just me in this village.”
Honufa nods, goes to a corner of the hut to retrieve the only thing she has not yet buried. “If you do end up going to the zamindar’s house without me, I want you to take this too.”
The older woman lifts the cloth bag to assess its heft. “What is it?”
Honufa hesitates, then opens it to let Rina view the two objects inside, two things that are unlike anything Rina has ever seen. Her eyes widen; she looks to Honufa, who sighs.
“I’ll explain when I see you again.”
MINUTES later, she is climbing a hill that is a riot of jam, jarul, and toon trees, girded with dense undergrowth and dotted with brakes of bamboo. A fickle breeze stirs and lifts the dank air of the forest floor to her nose. There is the rustling of creatures around her, the cries of kites whirling above, the steady clop of her feet as she follows a narrow path that to her looks like the part of a Hindu woman’s hair, the red earth like the vermillion that proclaims one married. Under the sun of a different fate, it is the way her hair might have looked.
She reaches the summit in an hour. The goat is where she left it the day before, roped and tied with a stake driven deep. It favors her with a slot-eyed regard before returning to chewing its cud.
She extracts the stake from the ground with a grunt of effort, unties the goat and slaps its rump so that the creature waddles away, bleating. Knowing the way home, its hooved grasp of the hills surer than hers, it will descend with speed.
About to follow, she stops to assess the heavens. The sky is clear but for a few scrapes of cirrus shaped like the stalks of kans grass. In the distance, more clouds drift past, white and unhurried.
Could this be the one time the Boatman is wrong?
She heads for a nearby ring of pines. In the center is a small grave, oblong and unmarked, fenced by bamboo strips that have moldered in the rich sea air.
But for the hiss of the branches slicing the wind above the grave, the silence is complete. She stands still. As always, overcome. An intruder, she drinks in the beauty of her surroundings.
Eighteen years. You would have been a man full-grown by now, child.
Rain lilies have grown on the grave since her last visit. They s
himmer in the wind. She takes three as gently as she can and whispers a good-bye.
Close to the unmarked grave is an abandoned temple. Bodhi saplings sit atop it like wooden horns, their roots gripping the crumbling stone.
With the flower offerings in her hand, Honufa stands before the entrance. The darkness inside swirls and beckons. There is the sound of fleet feet, the chatter of vermin. But she knows who really waits inside.
She stands at the door of the temple to gather her courage. Aware that she is about to betray her faith, she closes her eyes and puts a steadying hand on the temple’s cool mortar before walking in.
Immediately, it is as though she has dived into a lake of darkness and silence, a place unmoored from time. She stands and waits for her pupils to adjust as the chill of the stone floor penetrates her calloused soles.
The interior is ten paces on each side. At the far end, dimly lit by the hole-ridden roof, is a fiercely beautiful woman. Tall, with midnight skin, she wears a garland of severed heads, a skirt of limbs. Her lolling tongue reaches beyond her chin to point to the vanquished demon she tramples underfoot.
Honufa kneels before Kali—the Black One. The One Beyond Time. The One Who Destroys.
She places before the dark goddess the offering of flowers she has brought. She prays to her, ignoring the voice inside that reminds her that her new God is a jealous one, that this act is shirk, one of the most unforgivable that a Muslim can commit—that of placing another on equal status with God Most High. But as a child burning with fever seeks her mother, Honufa cannot help herself.
When she was little, her father told her the story of the goddess’s origins as revealed to him by a Brahmin priest. Enthralled, excited, she would forever pester him afterward to retell the legend, and even so many years after her family separated themselves from her, still remembers it word for word:
There was a time when all three hundred and thirty million gods and goddesses trembled before an invading demon army led by General Raktabij—Bloodseed—whose blood once spilled to the ground would birth a thousand more like him. To battle the demon army, the gods called on Durga, who felled many demons. But when she faced their general, with each spray of blood her spear brought forth, innumerable clones of the demon would sprout, leaving the battleground swarming with even more enemies than when Durga joined the fray. In her fury, the goddess scowled until a swirling cosmic cauldron grew between her brows, and from it a new being sprang forth.