by Arif Anwar
“I can understand that,” Jamir says. “We’ve had our own difficulties with him.”
Abbas nods. “Of course. We all remember how he abandoned you and Honufa when the two of you most needed him.”
Jamir shrugs. “If anything, he was closer to my wife. Ever since she was a child, she saw him as a father. But it has been years now, and we are fine without his help. As for me, all I need is a boat to stand on and the use of all my limbs so I can provide for my family.”
Abbas puts a warm, heavy hand on his shoulder. “So long as I am alive, you will always have a boat to stand on.”
JAMIR returns to the deck to inspect the nets for rips. Nearly a mile long, it is wrapped around a great iron winch. By the time he finishes, a fat sun is dipping its toes into waters that have turned a sparkling peacock blue. They are far from shore.
He stretches, ready to stop, when he is startled by the sound of a splash. A school of flying fish leap up beside the boat, their mouths agape, the fin-wings glowing pink against the setting sun, a prolonged silver streak as they skim across the water. Jamir is reminded of the first time he encountered these incredible creatures, the first time he realized how alien he was to the ocean, to this depthless world of wonders. The flying fish’s brief forays into the air are like his own journeys into the heart of the sea—a fleeting excursion into a dazzling otherworld.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” Jamir starts when a voice speaks next to him. It is Gauranga, wearing a lungi wrapped like pantaloons around his legs and a thin white shirt. He wears a patch over his left eye that—combined with his craggy, unshaven face and windblown hair—makes him look the part of a sailor.
“Fish jumping out of the sea, birds diving into the water. What a wonderful world God has created for us.”
“It is,” Jamir says, at ease in Gauranga’s company.
“I saw you speaking to the captain. Is something the matter? Are you in trouble? Are we?”
“None of you are in trouble. As for me, I don’t know.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Gauranga says. “You see those lush clouds? Dark as a woman’s hair? Those bleeding red lines like the vermillion in her part? It means a storm is coming, a big one.”
Jamir follows Gauranga’s finger. Clouds have indeed massed in the west, bunched as though shoved into place by an angry cosmic hand.
“Have you told the captain?”
“No, because I suspect that he isn’t blind. In any case, the storm looks as though it’s headed to shore. We should be able to skirt it, given that we’re headed east, toward Burma.”
The shore then, where Honufa and his son will face the storm alone.
Gauranga guesses at his thoughts. “I wouldn’t worry too much about your family. Unlike the sea, on land there is always somewhere to run to.”
“Provided they have warning,” Jamir says, his gaze caught by the pendant around the older man’s neck. Gauranga smiles when he notices, removes and hands it to Jamir. It is unlike anything he has seen before. Long as his hand, serrated and sharp. It resembles a spear tip made of bone.
“The tail of a stingray,” Gauranga explains.
Jamir nearly drops it. Stingrays are rare in the bay, but he has seen a few in his lifetime. Their mystic glide, their great wingspan combining to make them one of the sea creatures he fears.
He makes to return the pendant to Gauranga, who shakes his head. “Wear it. See how you feel. It helps to find something physical through which to channel your worries. I’ve always calmed myself by touching this pendant at times of stress.”
“I can’t possibly keep it.”
“You can, and you will. Keep it until your mind quietens. Then you can return it to me if you wish.”
Jamir dons the string, tucking the odd pendant under his shirt. It digs into his skin, the dimensions and hardness unsettling against his chest.
“You’ll get used to it soon enough,” Gauranga says. “My father said that it’s good to always be a little uncomfortable. It keeps you honest.”
“Then I must be very honest indeed,” Jamir says. “Thank you for this.”
“Happy to help.” Gauranga leans closer and drops his voice an octave. “No doubt you’ve worked hard all day. When you have a moment to yourself this evening, join me and Humayun in the engine room for a drink.” He points to the stinger. “Maybe I’ll tell you where I got that.”
AFTER Gauranga departs, Jamir works a half hour further before heading down to the galley for a quick catnap. But when he walks down the stairs and arrives at his bedroll, he finds someone rifling through it.
He crosses the distance between him and the figure in three strides, but Manik holds up the letter so high that he cannot reach it.
“What’s this I’ve found?”
“Give it back. Who said you could go through my things?”
“Easy.” Manik pulls the letter out of the envelope. He frowns, fixes exaggerated puzzlement on his sweating, pockmarked face. He shakes his head as though the act will better finesse the meaning of the words into it.
“What’s this? A love letter from your wife? I didn’t know you could read. What are you doing on a boat? You should be at university.”
“Manik.” Abbas stands at the door, his countenance grim. “Put it down.”
The captain pushes his bulk into the galley. Sweat trickles down Jamir’s back from the heat of three bodies in such a small space.
Stared down by his father, Manik drops the letter on the bedroll and departs sullenly.
“It’s never easy to see your children grow up, behave badly,” Abbas says. “I’m sorry for my son. He is my youngest, and because of that, escaped the allotment of beatings that I should have administered. Perhaps he would have turned out differently if I did.”
“I work for you. It is I who should apologize,” Jamir says. More words escape his mouth in a confessional tumble before he can stop them. “The letter your son was holding. I found it in my hut. I think my wife was hiding it from me.”
“I see. Do you wish for me to read it to you?”
“Yes.”
“We can also just throw it away, forget of its existence or that you ever found it.”
Jamir shakes his head. “No. I must know what it says. I humbly request that you read it to me.”
“So long as you are sure.” Abbas holds out a meaty hand. The boat sways, as does the light bulb hanging from the ceiling, drifting Abbas’s face in and out of shadow. Jamir hands him the letter and steps back as though a malevolent spirit might escape from it. In what is the longest minute of Jamir’s life, Abbas scans the letter silently, front to back. Upon finishing, he turns and looks out the porthole window.
“What does it say?”
“Horrid things. Shameful things,” Abbas says.
“Tell me what exactly. Who is it from? What does it say?”
“No name is given. It is better that you not hear the illicit things that are written there.”
Jamir falls to his knees. “Read it to me. I beg of you.”
The captain raises him to his feet. “I won’t poison the air by uttering the words on this page. What more do you need to know? I’m sorry, my son. I’m your neighbor, your friend; I’ve known both you and your wife for so long. Even that time a few months ago when she worked as my housekeeper, my wife had nothing but praise for her. Her betrayal only brings me sadness.”
“I don’t believe you.” Jamir shakes his head. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
“Is it really so hard to believe?” Abbas holds his gaze.
The allusion to Honufa’s past makes Jamir rage. “How dare you bring that up? She was barely more than a child. I’ve forgiven her, even if others haven’t.”
Abbas holds the letter to him. “If she is innocent, would you not simply ask her?”
He takes it, manages to walk away. The captain says something more, but the words register as noise to his ears. The boat has hit a patch of calm waters. Sonamoti is ste
ady and for that he is grateful, for he thinks his legs may fail him. He somehow ascends the stairs and comes onto the deck, where blue-black shadows have pooled.
The scuppers need to be cleaned.
He weaves his way to the grates. Falling to his hands and knees, he works on them until his fingers bleed.
Shahryar & Anna
Washington, DC
AUGUST 2004
SHAR reads to Anna until she falls asleep, kisses her cheek and steps out of her bedroom.
He goes downstairs. On his way to the foyer, his eyes catch hold of the long credenza against the wall, lined with photos. He stops to study them. A set shows Anna, Val and Jeremy attending a show at Wolf Trap, another, them at the Mall on a summer day, his daughter perched on Jeremy’s broad shoulders. The pictures proceed chronologically along the length of the table. In the earliest ones, Anna is small, swinging a tennis racket at a ball not yet in the frame, walking hand in hand with Val as she looks back at the camera, sitting on fresh snow, legs splayed, face peeking up from the hood of her jacket. At the other end, among pictures of a younger Jeremy, are ones of Val. In one, she is blowing out candles on a birthday cake, one hand pushing an errant lock of hair away from her face. In another, she lazes on a chair by the fireplace, heavily pregnant. Here she is, surrounded by friends, raising a glass of something or the other toward the camera, and then alone, her profile contemplative as she looks out a window to distant hills.
He is in none of the photos.
SHAR returns his rental car and takes the subway home, reaches his apartment in Southwest DC well after ten. He eats cold rotisserie chicken and coleslaw in front of his television.
The coming presidential election dominates the news. He watches with mild interest as the junior senator from Maryland, Pablo Aguilar, speaks at the ongoing Republican National Convention. With his height, glossy brown hair and bright teeth, Aguilar comes across well on the screen. He speaks with passion and apparent sincerity, his voice booming as he expounds on the importance of seeing through the war in Iraq, then wavering with emotion as he recounts his background as a son of Mexican immigrants. His father drove a truck, he says. His mother cleaned hotel rooms—jobs they were vastly overqualified for, but that they accepted to provide a better life for their son, who would go on to attend Yale and become a Rhodes scholar. What helped them succeed, Aguilar concludes, was their indomitable belief that hard work was rewarded in America, and that where one comes from is never as important as where one is going.
The typical Horatio Alger fantasy that conservatives like to cling to in the face of a mountain of contrary evidence. Shar scoffs and turns off the television.
HE sits on his bed later, processing the day.
Time is running out, Val had said to him earlier, and he had tried to reassure her that he has something of a plan, that he will find a job.
It is not as though he is unemployed. For the past year, he has worked as a research analyst at the Institute for Policy Dialogue, a federally funded think tank focused on public policy such as health, immigration and consumer protection, among others. The job was facilitated by a member of his thesis committee who referred him to the director, Albert Volcker, who previously worked for UNICEF, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for several years following the War of Liberation in 1971.
The job offer was precipitated by a coffee meeting one morning between him and Volcker that stretched to lunch as the two men connected on the role of civil society in urban development, the eternal battles between two entrenched dynastic parties that dominate Bangladeshi politics and the merits of chicken biryani compared to mutton. The following day, an email from Volcker appeared in his inbox, offering him a position with the institute, which—he would soon discover—is best described as a glorified internship: For twenty hours a week he helps draft policy papers and coordinate speaking events for the director. The salary is adequate for covering rent, but little beyond. Despite all this, he asked Volcker about the possibility of an extension of his contract, receiving in response a gloomy shake of the director’s head. They do not have the money or resources to sponsor a foreign student. When Shar’s work visa expires, so will his job.
He exhales and rises to perform the final component of his nightly rituals. From the upper shelf of his closet he retrieves a cloth bag, a bag as old as he is, the two objects within older still.
He takes them out and stares at them a long time before he can fall asleep.
Rahim
Calcutta, India
AUGUST 1946
On a morning a year before India is to be cleaved in two, Rahim Choudhury is being driven to work in his ’34 Morris Wolseley. With a copy of the day’s Statesman on his lap, a thermos full of tea, his briefcase by his side and his driver, Motaleb, at the wheel of the car, this morning is a typical one for him.
Rahim reads the paper with growing dismay. There is little news on the front page that does not concern tomorrow’s strike, called for by the Muslim League.
India has fumed and seethed this year, its foundations trembling in anticipation of strife between Hindus and Muslims that independence would inevitably trigger. The secular, Hindu-dominated Congress party opposes a subcontinent divided along religious and ethnic lines, which they believe is nothing but a ploy of the departing British to leave weaker the country they have ruled for two hundred years but now must abandon. The Muslim League, on the other hand, supports separation, having long argued that without the patronage of the British, Muslims would suffer as minorities in an undivided India. And to press their claim for an independent homeland of their own, they have called for a citywide strike—a Direct Action Day.
Rahim is a lukewarm supporter of the Muslim League; he does not approve of its leaders, who in recent months have traveled the nation, delivering incendiary speeches to crowds already combustible as kindling. Nor can he fully disavow them, aware that as a wealthy and successful Muslim in Calcutta, he is by far the exception.
He is still absorbed in the paper when his vehicle reaches a block in the road. The flow of cars, rickshaws and red double-deckers is stymied by something up ahead. Rahim makes the mistake of rolling down his window, for along with the noise of the street, smog and dust billow in.
“There’s been an accident,” reveals a rickshawallah, standing up on his pedals to catch a better view. “A boy, hurt badly by a car. There’s blood everywhere. The crowds are threatening the driver.”
Rahim begins to step out and approach the scene. But Motaleb stops him.
“Careful, sahib. The people are already angered, the sight of another rich car owner may be oil on the fire.”
He sits back down, feeling powerless. The Morris Wolseley extricates itself from the street and squeezes into a narrower one that connects Park Street to Hungerford Road. Here, along the crumbling multi-storied tenements built in the past century, colorful tin billboards advertise everything from fancy tailoring to Ayurvedic cures for venereal diseases. Saris, petticoats and dhotis hang from railings. Rickshaws and pushcarts trundle past, respectively pulled and pushed by bare-chested, single-minded men, who leave dark drops of sweat on the ground. The scent of bodies, sewage and old wood mingle with dough, cumin and potatoes frying in oil.
As the car makes stately progress, some pedestrians pause to mutter and point to the cap that identifies Rahim as a Muslim.
They reach the main road before long, having bypassed the jam. Soon, he can spy in the distance four central steeples that come together to hold aloft an observation deck; the building that houses Britannia Biscuits was an observatory before it was converted for business use.
A thickly sweet smell wafts in from the nearby factory. In his first months, when he would go home redolent of baking dough, his wife, Zahira, would playfully complain that she did not know whether to embrace him or dip him in tea. Now she barely notices.
The guards at the gate offer him smart salutes as his car glides past them and stops at the main door. Rahim springs out, taking the steps two
at a time and evading an orderly scrambling to carry his briefcase for him. He likes to arrive early for important meetings, and the morning’s detour has cost him precious minutes.
He runs up the central stairs to the second floor before taking a right at the landing into a long porticoed hallway.
Breathing hard, he stops at a door that says Theodore Drake—Managing Director. He looks at his watch. He has a minute to catch his breath.
At the exact moment the second hand on his watch flicks onto twelve, he knocks on the door.
“Come in.”
Theodore Drake sits behind a sea of Burmese teak. His smile is warm and friendly.
“Choudhury. Great to see you. Have a seat.”
Rahim produces a folder from his briefcase. “I’ve prepared what you asked for, sir.”
“Excellent.”
As Drake studies his work, Rahim’s eyes are drawn to the framed map of Rangoon that dominates the wall behind. Before Britannia, Drake was a colonel in the British Army. He served with General Wingate in Imphal when the Japanese invaded Burma, and was a crucial part of Mountbatten’s offensives to retake the country. After the war, he left the military to join private service in India, an unusual choice for an officer.
Drake looks up. “This is quite good. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble to put it together at such short notice.”
“No,” Rahim says, even though compiling the folder required a great deal of work. In it are articles of incorporation, bylaws, minute books and organizational charts, the details of accounts receivable and payable, inventory, general ledger and a list of physical assets and intellectual property applications. It is as thorough an overview of the enterprise as could be produced in the two weeks he was given.