The Storm

by Arif Anwar

  Rahim gestures to his house. “Take care of your family, and put your mind to doing the same for this community. Things are going to change around here.”

  AT first he heads home, seething, then decides to go the opposite way. The only thing that can cleanse his foul mood is the surf and open air. He walks toward a tiny speck of movement he spots under a copse of palm trees in the distance. Edging closer, he sees that it is a young girl about the same age as Abbas’s son. Bare-chested, her hair bleached copper by the sun. She looks up as he approaches but does not greet him.

  “Hello!” Rahim says with forced cheer. “What are you doing, child?”

  He would say more but is distracted by the girl’s eyes, all the more remarkable given the thin, plain face that hosts them. They are gray, as though the oceans of the world have been poured into them.

  Never fully at ease with children, the girl’s fearless demeanor unsettles him. He answers for her when she does not. “I see you’re drawing.”

  There are indeed scribbles on the ground. Most look like childish attempts at Bangla letters, but there are others that he does not recognize.

  “Do you know their meaning?”

  Silence. Then, “Who are you?”

  “Your new neighbor.”

  “You’re lying. I saw you come into the big house yesterday. You and the lady. You live in the house of the old zamindar. You must be the new one.”

  He holds out his palms in a gesture of surrender. “You’re too clever for me.”

  He finds himself sitting cross-legged on the ground, pointing to one of the scribbles and saying, “Do you know what that one is?”

  “No.”

  “That’s shorey ‘aw.’” He identifies the first of the Bangla vowels, then names and redraws firmer versions of the other shaky letters the girl has inscribed on the ground—the triangular kaw , curly talibo shaw , jaw and ghaw . The girl watches him attentively, but demurs whenever he asks her to replicate his efforts. To coax participation, he finds himself writing down all thirty-six letters before long, in separate sets of vowels and consonants, and then in the many possible variations when two letters are combined into one.

  When he looks at his pocket watch again, an hour has passed, and they are at the center of a constellation of letters sketched on the ground. The sun has climbed directly above, steaming the morning’s moisture out of the sand. But despite the heat he feels calmer, more relaxed. The hour spent with this child has ground smooth the ragged edges left from his meeting with Abbas.

  “Do you go to school, little girl?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Oh. Are you parents lettered?”

  “What does ‘lettered’ mean?”

  “Do they know how to read and write?”

  “No.”

  “Then where did you learn to write these?”

  Silence again. The girl shifts her gaze to the ground, tracing her fingers over the characters he has engraved on the shore with her.

  “Do you wish to learn more?”

  She looks up with those piercing eyes again. Nods.

  “Then come to my house tomorrow, since you seem to know where it is. We’ll teach you, my wife and I.”

  He realizes as he speaks that he has volunteered Zahira for this cause without consulting her.

  “I’ll come,” is all she says.

  HE finds his wife at work in a corner of their vast backyard, her back to him. He stands and watches. She is hanging on the clothesline sets of wide white drapes. They are bright under the sun, billowing like sails whenever they catch the wind, giving Zahira the appearance of a captain on the deck of a ship.

  “How was it?” She smiles when she sees him. Her dupatta is cinched across her shoulder and waist; errant locks of hair have escaped her bun and become mired on her sweating forehead. The face she wipes with a sleeve holds a contented glow.

  He recounts to her his meeting with Abbas.

  “If this is the mentality of those in power here, then things are much worse than I thought,” he concludes.

  Zahira, who has listened attentively, agrees. “Yes, but we knew this could be a possibility. You were right to warn him, and if there are any suggestions I’d offer for the future, it’s that you do it less overtly. Rural people are very concerned about face; the politics here are subtle. It will take you time to adjust.”

  Her critique is meant to be constructive, but it crystalizes for him the scale of the changes to their lives, the enormity of the challenges ahead.

  “Maybe we bit off more than we can chew,” he says glumly.

  She takes his hand. “Don’t lose heart so easily. We lived a nice life in Calcutta, but one very much for ourselves. Here, you and I have the opportunity to do some real good.”

  “Yes,” he says, thinking of the girl with the gray eyes. “Maybe we do.”

  TRUE to her word, they find the girl at their main gate the next morning, silent and still until Zahira, looking out the window, notices her. They usher her inside together. Zahira serves her sweet biscuits and tea, and, when she notices the thinness of the girl’s wrists, puts on extra rice for the afternoon meal.

  The lessons begin immediately after tea. Rahim asks the girl to take a chair at the desk they have set up on the porch.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks her when she fidgets.

  “I want to sit on the floor.”

  “Very well.”

  But she is still unhappy. “Now what?”

  “The floor is too cold. Can we sit in the yard?”

  “We can.”

  They move to the lawn, sandwiched between sun and grass.

  “Do you remember the letters we practiced yesterday?” he asks her.

  On the slate provided her, she recreates in chalk every single letter he showed her the day before, the penmanship stunningly improved in the span of a day. He tries not to gape in shock.

  “Very good,” is all he can manage.

  She seems pleased by the reaction she has elicited in him. “I know one you don’t.”

  With unusual care, she draws a new symbol on the slate.

  Her claim proves correct, for Rahim stares long at the slate, puzzled. The girl has drawn a strange glyph, a shape emerging from a confluence of sword-like strokes.

  “Where did you see this?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl says, her gray eyes daring him to challenge an obvious falsehood.

  He changes tactics. “I just want to learn from you, as you do from me. Don’t you wish to be my teacher?”

  She is not so easily swayed. “No.”

  “Very well.” He rubs his temples. Perhaps there are worse fates than being childless. Zahira looks on from her seat at the porch, amused by his frustration.

  BUT when the girl returns the next day, she bears a cloth bag from which she produces a stack of colored paper. Rahim and Zahira gawk at the queer collection of leaflets. One shows a powerful-looking soldier in a helmet and olive uniform, his features twisted into a fierce expression as he charges toward the viewer—Fight to Free Asia from Colonial Oppression, declare the Bangla words above his head. In another, two men in turbans crawl on the street while a light-skinned soldier and similarly fair, well-dressed woman walk past—Humiliated in Their Own Country. Among many others, a particularly striking one depicts a fanged demon in black, the image of a great edifice set on its chest. Standing on the hands it extends toward the viewer, two figures wearing headdresses (one long and white-tailed and the other multihued) are about to engage in battle—Do Not Let the Western Colonialists Destroy the Unity of Asia.

  He asks the girl where she found them.

  “They fell from the plane.” She points to the sky. “I was out in the fields and the plane flew overhead and dropped all these papers on me. I thought they were butterflies at first. That’s how I learned letters.”

  He shakes his head in wonder. The World War is over, but traces of it linger in the most unexpected places.

  “And what of t
he other symbol? The one you said I didn’t know. Where did you learn that?”

  With a measure of reluctance, the girl reaches into the bag once more, this time pulling forth a folded sash.

  Rahim lays it out on the table. He caresses it with wonder. It is a dull yellow, torn, bearing splatters of dark maroon. Emblazoned in the center, along with another, is the character the girl drew the day before.

  He directs a question to his wife. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  Silent until now, Zahira approaches, points to the flag sewn with heavy thread into a corner of the sash—a red sun set against a white backdrop.

  “Just that,” she says. “On the day I found you.”

  Shahryar & Anna

  Washington, DC

  OCTOBER 2004

  WHEN his phone rings at home that Saturday morning, Shar picks it up eagerly. It has only been a few days since his visit to Ahmed’s office, when he transferred ownership of the USB drive filled with the digital files of what Ahmed asked for. The act itself felt almost banal because of the ease with which it was accomplished—walking into Volcker’s office under the ruse of updating his virus software and instead copying every file he could manage in the ten minutes that his director waited on the sofa, perusing a copy of the Atlantic. But the electronic device felt strangely heavy when he handed it over to the lawyer, as though those bytes of data had absorbed his guilt and shame.

  Attuned to emotions as lawyers tend to be, Ahmed looked him in the eyes then. “Shahryar, there’s no shame in what we do for our children.”

  He made his escape, Ahmed’s promise of quickly pushing through his job ringing in his ears, of calling in just a few days once he has news to share.

  But it is Niten’s voice that greets him on the phone. “Do you get the Post?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t looked at it yet.”

  “Do it now. First page of the Metro section.”

  He turns to the page as instructed and finds the article in question. A sinkhole of fear opens in his stomach as he reads the headline.

  “Did you find it?”

  “Yes,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Read it.”

  He does. The article on Faisal Ahmed is short, the thrust of the story contained in the final two paragraphs:

  The FBI had been investigating Ahmed for years, following allegations from former clients that he charged them thousands of dollars in exchange for promises of green cards. They allege that Ahmed colluded with a network of business partners who provided paperwork for federal labor applications for workers they would hire on a nominal basis. Ahmed would then provide these business partners with a percentage of the fees garnered from his clients.

  Ahmed is reportedly cooperating with the FBI while his practice remains closed. Clarence Cummings, a friend of Ahmed’s and a former Maryland attorney general who is running against Pablo Aguilar for the Senate this fall, expressed his shock and dismay at the indictment. He declined further comment by citing the ongoing judicial process. How Faisal Ahmed’s indictment will affect the senatorial race, just weeks away, remains to be seen.

  “Tell me for the love of God that you didn’t go through with what Ahmed asked you to do.”

  “I wish I could.”

  There is an audible intake of breath. “Jesus, Shar. What did you do?”

  Shar tells him. And when a long silence follows, asks, “What do I do?”

  “A lot of this depends on Faisal Ahmed now. There’s no way for us to unpack what ‘cooperating’ means in the article. The one good thing is that he’s been indicted on immigration fraud, and not federal data theft. But I have to assume that the FBI has seized his computers. And if Ahmed was dumb enough to leave your files in there, then that opens a whole different can of worms. The worst thing that could happen from our point of view is that he agrees to a plea bargain, that means Cummings could be a big enough fish for the Feds to focus their energies on. But even then they’re bound to ask Ahmed how he got his hands on the files.”

  The phone receiver grows slick in his grip. “What are the chances of that happening?”

  “We don’t know. Whatever it is, you need to ask yourself if the risk is worth it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious, Shar? You need to leave the country. You needed to leave yesterday.”

  HE was scheduled to visit Anna that afternoon. He arrives early. Fortunately, Val and Jeremy are both at home. He asks if they can sit in the living room to talk.

  When they ask why, he says, “My situation has changed.”

  The discussion lasts more than an hour, and both Jeremy and Val are left shocked and subdued by its end, but understanding of his decision. They agree that he should be the one who tells Anna what is to happen.

  She is away at a sleepover, and when they hear a car approach on the driveway, Jeremy and Val withdraw so Shar can greet his daughter at the door.

  “Hey, Baba,” she embraces him. “How come you’re here so early?”

  “Couldn’t wait to see you. Let’s go upstairs.”

  “Cool. I’ve got something to show you.”

  In her room, she hands him a page covered with neat repetitions of her first name, in Bangla letters written with care and grace.

  He gasps with admiration. “This is lovely, Anna.”

  “Yeah, I practiced and practiced until I got it right.”

  “I think you’re ready to write your name in full. But there are some other things you need to learn first.”

  He writes on the page—widely spaced—the three consonants that comprise her last name, which is his last name, and the last name of Rahim and Zahira.

  representing the sound ch as in church

  which is an aspirated d, as in dh

  for r (one of three kinds in Bangla)

  “Unlike English,” he says, “we can’t just place the letters next to each other and have them form a word. Because that would just read chdhr. In Bangla, vowels, when placed between consonants, or combined with them, change shape.”

  On the page he writes next the three vowels that must be combined with the consonants he wrote above.

  as in ou

  which reads oo

  like ee but originating deeper in the diaphragm

  Anna’s attention is riveted to the page as he writes. “Don’t we have to capitalize the first letter?”

  “Nope. Bangla is very fair in that sense.”

  He continues. “So, we have to combine with to get , or chou, with to get , or dhu, and with to get , or ry. The three syllables that form your last name.”

  Placing his hand over his daughter’s, he guides it on the page until her name reads in full, a stark black against the white of the paper.

  They stand and admire the result. “It’s beautiful, Baba.”

  “It is. If you keep practicing, you won’t even need my help after a while.”

  She looks up at him. “Yeah, but you’re going to be here, right? So, when I need your help I can just ask you.”

  He sits down on the bed. “About that, sweetheart . . .”

  Jamir

  The Bay of Bengal

  NOVEMBER 1970

  Night has settled in since he started. The boat is anchored, the engines stilled.

  He rises to his feet. The scuppers gleam as though new. But his knees hurt. His hands burn with cuts. And his old heart is aching.

  He was left alone while immersed in his work. Once, he thought he saw Abbas and Manik in conference in the wheelhouse. But no one has approached him since his conversation with the captain about the letter that he found in the hut.

  His work on the scuppers has leached some of the poison from him; he feels lighter as he heads for the galley. He stops when he remembers Gauranga’s invitation from earlier in the day. It would not be the worst thing in the world, he decides—caressing the stinger hanging around his neck—to find sympathetic ears.

  The turbines silenced, he
hears the pop and clank of cooling gears, muffled conversation, as he heads to the engine room.

  Gauranga and Humayun are at the far end, sitting on a ratty blanket they have spread on the floor. On it rests a platter of fried fish chunks and a bottle filled two-thirds with a cloudy liquid.

  “Finally, the prince has joined us!” Gauranga’s slurred voice echoes in the hallway. Humayun’s mouth lifts into a half-smile.

  Gauranga notices Jamir’s scrutiny of the wares on offer. “The finest tari you can get. Old Humayun himself bled his best palm trees, set the sweet juice in a pot in the corner of his hut, and forgot about it for a week. That’s all it takes. Sit, have a sip.”

  “Thank you, perhaps later.” Jamir folds down to his haunches between the two men. He assesses the tari. It would not be the first time he has had alcohol, but unlike many other men in the village, has developed no addiction to it.

  “Oh, don’t be so shy. Here!” Gauranga thrusts the bottle in his face. Jamir takes it, has a reluctant sip. The sour liquid blazes down his throat and leaves him coughing.

  Gauranga is amused. “It’s just burning a path clear. The next ones will go down more smoothly.”

  Humayun leans back against the corrugated metal wall and hums a ditty about lost love from the cinema. The two men pop fish chunks into their mouths. Jamir is not hungry. He takes another sip of the drink.

  “More, more,” the older man urges. “Once you’re back on land, your woman will harangue you and you will wish you were back here, on water, sipping on life-water.”

  “And you do not face those troubles?”

  “I have a wife, but my hearing has turned to stone over the years. Everything that hits here,” he taps his right ear, “just bounces away.”

  They eat and drink in silence. In the absence of conversation, Jamir feels discontent overtake him once again. Taciturn Humayun, a man Jamir has always thought immune to empathy, surprises by asking what ails him.

  “It is . . . regarding my family. If I tell you, you must not repeat it.”