by Arif Anwar
Kali.
The demon army withered before Kali’s fury, decimated before her four sword-wielding arms that were blurs of blood and steel, leaving her to face Raktabij, whose blood the Dark Goddess’s lolling tongue lapped up before it could hit the ground, and her mighty blows pushed him back foot by foot, until he finally weakened enough so that she could bring the demon general to her great fanged mouth and drink him dry.
Blood-drunk, her victory complete, Kali let loose a roar that made the heavens shudder, began a dance of destruction that shook the foundation of the universe, until the gods and goddesses again grew fearful and called on Shiva, her consort, to intervene. He did, throwing himself down before his raging lover, whose frenzy finally subsided at the sight of her husband at her feet.
Honufa closes her eyes and prays, not for herself, but for her husband, Jamir, her sons, both living and dead. She prays until the world fades.
Although she opens her eyes not knowing how much time has passed, when she steps outside she knows something is gravely wrong, the world without nearly as dark now as the one within the temple. The cooing birds silent. The breeze replaced by a sullen hush.
The horizon makes her gasp. Iron-gray clouds are moving toward the shore on legs of lightning—purple-white—trotting on the sea.
Cursing her foolishness for delaying at the temple, desperate to return to her son and Rina, she rushes down the hill, an eye aimed at the sky where towering clouds the color of dreams and ashes gather.
As she streaks across a now violet world, a wind that bears flecks of rain begins to blow, no longer desultory, but keening with intent, carrying memories of the bitter cold of unnamed lands.
She reaches the valley, marked by cuts and scrapes from the branches that block her way, her feet battered and bloody from the rocks. She is close to home, at the meeting point of the hill’s earth and the shore’s sand. She wraps her sari tight around her waist and breaks into a full sprint toward a sea churning with foam.
A badger-hole catches her foot. She falls. The ground rushes up to meet her face. Her head strikes a rock as a vicious bolt of pain passes through her ankle.
For moments that span eternity, she dreams
Remembers
She is a child again
Out in the rice fields
In her hand is a pail to fetch water
She is seven
A faint sound that is at first a buzz then a hum then a drone so loud it fills not just her ears but nose eyes and mouth she screams for her father mother brother but the sound eats everything eats her words. A metal bird is overhead its silver belly flashing as though it has swallowed a star on its flank a red sun set against a white field.
She opens her mouth to scream just as the sky explodes with colors
Butterflies
That fall
And fall and fall
On her face
And she sees that they are but paper
THE splash of rain on her brow returns her to a world black as night, where the wind screams, having gained the deadly sharpness of lifted sand. She extracts her foot from the hole, touches her forehead to find a painful knot. She struggles not to cry out when she puts weight on her fast-swelling ankle. She looks around in desperation. There are no branches from which to fashion a walking stick.
Honufa assesses the dilemma her injury has forced on her. She asked Rina to take her son to the zamindar’s house should she not arrive in time. Has Rina made it to safety, or is she still waiting for her at the hut? She has neither the time nor strength to make both journeys. The zamindar’s home sits in the opposite direction from hers. Should she first go to her hut and Rina has already departed with her son, that will seal her fate. Go the other way while Rina and her son are waiting, and that will seal theirs.
Storm clouds hammer lightning down into the beach like silver nails, blinding her. The sea rears and lands like a mad horse. The rain falls so hard and fast it threatens to bruise her skin.
The Earth releases a primeval moan as the storm erases God from the world.
She screams her son’s name again and again.
And when no one answers, decides.
Shahryar & Anna
Washington, DC
AUGUST 2004
THEY were on I-66, headed to McLean, toward Anna’s house. Until just fifteen minutes ago, the cars and trucks had been a solid shimmering mass in the late-day heat. But now when he looks back, the schemes of the sky are apparent, its dark plot revealed by the array of gathering clouds.
Shar feels a strange thrill when the storm arrives like a rushing train freighted with water, its ferocity reminding him of home, the first drops splattering fat and heavy on the windshield, drumming the car with an insistent, percussive beat. The wipers whip side to side to keep a billion-strong army at bay. The brake lights of the cars ahead bloom into pastel blobs. The world is melting.
Anna is in the back seat of the car he rented that morning to drive her to a fair in Gaithersburg, focused on her Game Boy.
“This is some storm, huh, Anna?”
He repeats himself when she does not answer.
“Yeah, I guess. Does it rain like this in Bangladesh?”
“For days sometimes. We even have a season known for storms. Kal Baisakhi—the Dark Spring.”
He thinks of his childhood, the parts of it he remembers: watching television, reciting the national anthem under his breath when it was broadcast before the Bangla newscast at eight and then the English at ten. The picture on the screen would wink into oblivion without warning. The darkness tumbling onto them whenever load-shedding happened. Rahim, Zahira and Rina would stumble around in the darkness calling out to each other until someone located the long, thin candles in a drawer in the kitchen and lit them using the gas stove. They then headed outside to a world lit by moon and starlight.
He recalls the two big floods in Dhaka, when boats plied the streets and the water reached halfway up the wall of their house. It was the same grand house where he would wake up to the harsh cries of crows that he misses so in America, as he does the smell of parathas frying in the morning, tea and sweet biscuits rolled in on trolleys to bedrooms while slow winter fog wet the iron of their windows. There were flying roaches. Fat moths flapping against hurricane lanterns. As a child he would run out to the brusque summer tempests—thick hard rain that scored the earth and hurt the skin, left behind giant toadstools.
He has told Anna of these things in fragments, struck every time by how that vital force of occurrence was missing in the retelling, the beauty expunged through translation. It made him question their value.
More wet lurches along the highway before she speaks again. “Are we going to get home okay, Baba?” she asks, using the Bangla word for father, one of the few words in the language she knows.
“We might be a little late, but yes.”
“How much longer do you have?”
The randomness of the question startles him, as does the unintended morbidity. “What do you mean?”
“Mom said you only have three months to stay here.”
“Just about, yes.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Hopefully I’ll find a job here by then and we won’t have to worry about it.”
“You can’t just tell them that you’re my dad and you have to stay?”
“I wish it were that simple, sweetheart.” Everything seems like a surprise now when none of it should be. He came back here on a student visa six years ago, when Anna was just three. He has always known that he would get a one-year work permit upon completion of his PhD but that there would be no permanent solution for him to remain. And yet now it is as though he is on a boat rushing toward the end of a waterfall, blithely watching its approach for long, yet only now beginning to panic.
The rain thins by the time they take the exit, the sky a bruised purple. Gusts of wind give their car playful shoves as they leave the highway, a bully reminding them he will see them in the
playground later.
Gravel crunches as they pull into the spruce-lined driveway of Anna’s house, the Chevy Malibu looking as incongruous against the facade of the large French Colonial as Shar feels. He waits, takes a deep breath and steps out.
Val meets them at the door, casual in a loose off-shoulder sweater and yoga pants, her red locks tamed by a scrunchie.
She musses Anna’s hair. “Hey, kiddo. You have a good time with your dad?”
“We had candy corn.” Anna gives her mother a hug.
“How was it?”
“Kinda gross, actually.”
Val laughs. The peck she lands on Shar has only the most impersonal warmth. “What about you?”
He smiles. “I brought her back in one piece.”
Anna is pushing past them. “Where’s Jeremy?”
The hallway reverberates with a baritone. “In here, sprout.”
Anna runs in with an enthusiasm Shar finds deflating.
“You have a minute to chat?” he asks Val.
They move out to the driveway. “Did you happen to tell Anna about my visa situation?”
Val settles her glance somewhere over his shoulder, the crow’s feet around her eyes the only evidence of the decade he has known her, and even then, only revealed when she smiles.
“I had to tell her something. She’s been asking about Christmas plans. The fact that you might not be here seemed important.”
“I’d have preferred to tell her myself. Or you could have at least given me a warning that you were going to discuss it.”
“And when would that have been?”
He sighs. “I don’t know.”
“Have you made any progress on the job front?”
He shakes his head again. “No, but I’ll find something.”
“Well. Time is running out.”
LATER, he waits with Anna upstairs as she prepares for bed, counts the seconds as his daughter brushes her teeth (stopping when he reaches 120), supervises her flossing, stands beside her door as she changes into her pajamas and tells him that he may enter.
Her room is a converted attic. Woody and warm. The bed sits under an eave that descends at an amiable angle. The single lozenge-shaped window looks out to a weeping world; the rain has returned as promised. Branches of the front-yard oak sway against the glass. Thunder rumbles soft and low.
“I have something for you,” he tells her as she burrows under her covers.
He reaches into the backpack he has carried all day, his fingers hunting past the Ziploc bags of apple slices, cheddar goldfish, bottles of water and other evidence of their day together. The book he retrieves has a fabric cover the color of a wolf’s pelt, tattered at the corners. The title is embossed in bright, socialist red. In Bangla, it says:—Fairy Tales from Russia.
“This was my favorite book when I was your age. A book of Russian fairy tales translated into Bangla.”
When her enthusiasm does not match his own, he feels that old stumbling inside, the sense that everything he does as a father is wrong.
“You don’t want to give it a try, sweetie?”
“I don’t read Bangla.”
“I know. That’s on me. But I can translate.”
Deciding that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, he begins to read about Russian heroes (inevitably named Ivan), gallant sentient horses, eagle-lords who can speak like men, Baba Yaga—the wicked witch who lives in a house that stands on the legs of a chicken. He trudges on for a half hour before putting the book down.
“You don’t like the stories?”
Her curls sway from side to side as she shakes her head.
“Why not?”
She does not answer, looks up with her large gray eyes, the one thing she inherited from neither him nor Val. “Can I tell you something, Baba?”
“Of course.”
“Jeremy wants me to call him ‘Dad.’”
It takes all his strength to keep his tone light. “Oh, really?”
“Yeah. At least I think he does.”
“And how’s that?”
“When he tucks me into bed and kisses me goodnight, I can sort of tell he wants me to.”
“And, do you want to?”
“Will you be mad?”
“No,” he says. “He’s a great dad to you. It’s totally okay for you to call him that, if you want.”
“Really?” she asks, the hunger for permission, for approval, plain on her face.
“Really.” He embraces her, still reeling from the possessiveness that this piece of news has sparked in him. He should not be surprised, he thinks. He owes Anna, not the reverse. In a life upended by revelations, this is simply one more thing to which he must adjust.
Jamir
Chittagong, East Pakistan (Bangladesh)
NOVEMBER 1970
Jamir rises before dawn. In the moonlight slanting through the window, his body is wiry, dark, the same as a hundred other fishermen in the village.
He has risen an hour earlier than he normally does for work, knowing that Honufa will not be awake. He stands by the door and lights a biri he plucks from the knot of the lungi tied around his waist. He leans against the mud and rattan wall of their home and takes deep, long drags. The sky is painted with clouds stark and strangely bright against the dawn. Other than the soft sounds of the surf, there is only the constant reeee of cicadas, the chuckle of geckoes.
By the time he finishes the biri, there is the taste of smoke on his tongue, salt from the sea breeze, cool against his skin. He enters the hut again. Taking his gear—a rolled-up rexine cloth wrapped around both his shirts and a spare lungi—he edges to the wall, and, watching the still forms of his family on the bed, reaches up to the top, where it meets the thatch roof. He shudders when his fingers again find what he discovered a few days before. A long, flat rectangular form.
A letter.
He walks out with it in silence.
BEFORE he can head west along the shore, to the far side of the harbor where his trawler is moored to a rickety pier, he must first pass his old life—a huddled mass of sea boats on the beach. Without the sun, the vessels can only be identified by their shapes—flat-stemmed sampans with two horns, long slender balams, the smaller bhelas.
Shadows flit between the boats. Other fishermen. They glance at him but say nothing.
The trawler’s blocky silhouette emerges in the gloom before long. It is called Sonamoti—the Golden Girl—the name painted in wide green letters on the hull. It is the only double-rig at the port, the grandest at sixty-five feet.
He crosses the gangplank, the thin wood grunting in protest under his weight, and heads to the bilges, where he must face water shining with rainbow patches of oil that takes him the better part of an hour to bail out. A rude sun emerges as he works.
The ship’s captain, Abbas, arrives with the remainder of the crew: Gauranga is a grizzled Hindu deckhand, who only stops talking to spit jets of red juice from the betel leaves he constantly chews. Humayun is his taciturn Muslim counterpart. Both are experienced fishermen who coach Jamir on how to grade and sort sea fish, the rudiments of inspecting seine lines, and engine maintenance.
Abbas’s son, Manik, is of an age with Jamir and a frequent antagonist he best tries to avoid.
The men toss him quick greetings and disperse to their respective stations: Abbas to the wheelhouse, the rest below decks. Soon the trawler begins to separate from the jetty, and the curious emptiness Jamir always feels at the moment of departure returns. He has spent two months as a sea fisherman—after an entirely unexpected invitation from Abbas to join his crew. Despite this time, he has not developed a knack for this type of fishing. Not an even fight between men and waters as when he was a rowboat fisherman, the trawler tilts the balance firmly toward the former, its great nets dipping ever deeper into the water.
His most pressing work complete, Jamir moves to the kitchen and galleys, the location of his makeshift bed of old army blankets and a flat, thin pillow.
As he marks inventory, he hears creaks on the floorboards above, muted conversation, then heavy treads on the stairs. Abbas descends. He is middle-aged and wears a pressed white shirt that strains against his large belly. Jamir offers a salaam to him as he unloads the contents of the bag he carries on the galley table, covering its surface with long fragrant limes, green guavas, massive spiky jackfruit, wood apples, bunches of spinach and red chard. Protein from the fish they catch will complete their meals.
The last item Abbas places on the table is a copy of the Daily Ittefaq that features above the fold the picture of a mustached man wearing a black waistcoat over white shirtsleeves, addressing a great gathering.
“What do you think of this Mujib fellow?” he inquires.
Unsure of where his captain’s political sympathies lie, Jamir does not rush to answer. He makes a show of consideration, then eventually says, “He seems to be a good man. The villagers say that they will vote for the Awami League in the coming election.”
“And you?”
“Come election day, I will be on the boat, with you.”
Abbas guffaws. “You don’t care for his Six Point Demands? So that our nation can sort its own affairs, free of the meddling and looting of the West Pakistanis?”
Jamir shakes his head, embarrassed. “Babu, don’t ask such grand questions of a man who cannot even read. Politics is the concern of rich men, the likes of landholders such as the zamindar, Rahim.”
Abbas’s mouth curls in distaste at the mention of that name. “I wouldn’t put so much stock in that man. He knows less of the world than you’d think.”
Years ago, before Rahim—the current zamindar—moved from the great bustling metropolis of Calcutta to the village and assumed ownership of vast tracts of sharecropped lands and fishing boats, Abbas was in charge of the fleet of vessels belonging to Rahim’s predecessor. After Rahim’s arrival, however, Abbas was removed from the role with shocking swiftness and lack of ceremony. Over the years, rumors have spread as to the cause of the falling-out.