The Storm

by Arif Anwar

  She finds leftover boat rope in the hut. Limping back outside, she looks for a sturdy palm tree, soon deciding on one nearby. It is thick-trunked, tilted at an angle from many years of weathered storms. She crawls along its length, her ankle screaming in agony when she puts weight on it. The rising tide rapidly swallows the shore behind her, seawater engulfing the base of the tree.

  The wind strengthens, sending tin roofs cartwheeling across the beach with enough force to cut a man in half. The tree sways and groans. With the birds gone to whatever mysterious sanctuaries they seek out in times like these, the skies hold only the storm’s dead fury.

  She firmly pushes thoughts of her husband and son aside to focus on the act of living, surviving the storm. Jamir is a man grown, with God to watch over him at sea. He will find a way. Her son is with Rina, protected by the brick and mortar of the zamindar’s house. She knows he will be safe there. It is on herself that she must now focus.

  She reaches the tree’s crown. Even at an angle, she is a comfortable ten feet above the ground as she begins to tie herself to the trunk with the strongest knots she can devise.

  How did things become so bad and with such sudden ferocity? Like a rotten tree branch that one day snaps off on its own accord, all her troubles are culminating into this final calamity. Were she to look back, could she pick one decision she might have made differently? One she might have undone in the light of what she now knows?

  She finishes tying her legs first. Strong sturdy legs that have carried her all these years, that once carried her to the far west end of the beach, where she met Siraj, who said he was a typist.

  There was no reason for her to sit down next to him—with enough of a distance to be demure but still close so she could hear him above the noise of the surf. He was plain. His face held no magic that led her to inquire who he was; why he sat there with the disbelieving awkwardness of a city boy.

  She was half her current age, a child in a woman’s blooming body. He was four years older, with a thin trim mustache, brylcreemed hair so black it was as if it never saw the sun. He was from Dhaka, finished with university and dreaming of writing books. He was supporting his elderly parents and a younger brother back north by working as a typist at the local post office.

  It was dusk. They spoke for more than an hour, as the sun fled the world. He told her that he thought she had something beyond literacy, education and books—that she was in touch with the infinite. Not in the way the fools prostrating themselves in temples and mosques claim to be, but with the truly unknowable worlds, the radiant beauty and the primitive forms that lay behind the false faces of all things.

  With one word, with many, he charmed her. And after they said good-bye that first day, she trawled the beach daily for the next week until she found him again at that same lonely spot, his face brightening when he saw her.

  She told him that she had a dream the night before—that the sea, the ocean, all the waters of the world were littered with paper so that every cresting wave was composed of the pages of a great, endless book. Did he know what that meant?

  He said he did not, but over the days and weeks he told her of other things. He taught her.

  Often, he would bring books—nine times out of ten in English, the authors bearing exotic names that she still remembers: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Joyce, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Forster, Brontë, Waugh, Owen, Maugham.

  He would stand as he read, his strong straight back leaning against a salt cedar, pausing at the end of each paragraph to translate, explain. She would listen, transfixed—a desert sopping up the rain of words. His patience seemed endless; he would answer her innumerable questions, repeat passages and phrases that fascinated her. It seemed impossible to her that one man could contain so much knowledge, be aware of so much and not simply go mad from the wonder and beauty of the world.

  Sometimes as he read, she would reach out and trace the curvature of his head, across the widow’s peak demarcated by his hairline, disbelieving that the organ inside was the one responsible for reading, interpreting and reciting those beautiful words. It was so easy to give herself to him, completely and utterly.

  The following month, her moon blood did not come. Fearful and shamed, she told Siraj. He held her, told her that she had no reason to worry, that they would elope, that his family would embrace her. They went to the forest then, made love once more under the watch of the stars and the surf.

  They parted that night with the promise to meet again the next day. In the meanwhile, Siraj would write to his father, inform him of his decision to marry.

  But she would never see him again.

  Jamir was her childhood friend, and even as she had drifted from him in the early years of her womanhood, he had continued to love her quietly and fiercely. As the village and her family turned on her, it was he who came to her rescue, offering to marry her even before her child was born. To raise it as his own.

  HONUFA grimaces as sand peppers her skin, the same skin her father once compared to her religion. She could cast neither aside and live.

  She was born Rakhi Jaladas, literally—Rakhi the Slave to Water. As for many Hindus, her name was more than a name—it also applied to her the strictures of her caste. A Jaladas could never aspire to be anything other than fisherfolk.

  Yet the fisherman’s life for Jamir, a Muslim, was not one he had been consigned to. Rather it was one that his family had chosen because of the confluence of skill, circumstance and tradition. She thought the concept just and pure—one could be what one wanted, not what one was fated. Already obligated to him by his offer to marry her, this was the tipping point for her to become a Muslim, even though Jamir had already offered to become Hindu if it should make him more acceptable to her obstinate family, who opposed the marriage. For her love, he was willing to take on the name Jaladas and become a slave to water rather than just a servant.

  But Rakhi stopped him, telling him that the beauty of his existence must continue, that she wanted to partake in it as well. She told him that the wives of rich men take on the names of their husbands. But given that he was too poor to possess a last name, she would take on his religion instead. And like one candle giving its flame to another, her immortal soul would glow with the light of his.

  Rakhi, pregnant and seventeen, would become a Muslim for her husband. More than nine in ten in the village were Hindu, most had the same last name—Jaladas. By converting she would remain in her community and leave it permanently at the same time.

  Clinging tightly to the tree, she makes the mistake of opening her mouth to gasp for breath, and it fills immediately with dust and dirt. The same mouth that uttered the sacred words of the shahada so many years before, in the sight of Jamir and a cousin who served as the second witness. Three times she uttered that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet.

  She left the faith of her birth to enter another, and took the name of Honufa. Her way back was sealed by the members of her family. She was dead to them, literally. Her mother and father would pass her by and not acknowledge her presence, pretend not to hear her if she spoke to them. When those from outside the village inquired after their daughter Rakhi, they were informed that she had died in a storm.

  Any other time, the irony would make her laugh.

  Her lowest moment still awaited. The villagers appealed to Rahim—who had offered her quiet support and encouragement in those dark days—issuing him the ultimatum that his patronage of Honufa, the woman once known as Rakhi Jaladas, who had become with child out of wedlock, and was marrying a man outside of her religion who was not even the father of the child, would result in the loss of faith in his leadership.

  By then Rahim was showing the first afflictions of age—fear and caution. Too worried about the consequences of maintaining an overt relationship with Honufa, of inviting her to his house as he had over the years to teach her to read and write, he arrived one night at their hut to beg her understanding as he distanced his life from thei
rs. Please understand. My love for you and Jamir will not change, but my role requires that I consider the needs of the entire village rather than that of one family, even one so dear to my heart.

  A month later, she gave birth to Siraj’s child. Small, gray and stillborn.

  Jamir wept with her as they buried him up in the hill, in a small quiet ceremony that beseeched no God and drew no mourners but them.

  Her grief quickly gave way to fury, its wider target the village, but with Rahim at its red center. Shattered by what she saw as his abandonment, she sought severance instead. Despite entreaties from both Zahira and Jamir, she refused to meet with her once-mentor, her antipathy for him swelling to such a degree that she returned all the gifts she received from him over the years, selling a cow he helped her buy and returning the money to him in an envelope she left with his chowkidar. Plates, saris, clothes and other gifts were stuffed into cloth bags and left before his gate. In her frenzy of spite, she even wished that she could return the more ineffable of his gifts, and unlearn the letters and numbers he had taught her.

  Jamir witnessed these manic acts of physical and emotional divestment with a wary sympathy, and warned her only once. We are too poor to afford this pride, he said. It may kill us one day.

  SHE wraps the rope around her belly, which for so many years following her first tragic pregnancy housed a quiescent womb, until that magical event three years before when her son was born, so late in their lives that they had begun to accept that her estranged family had placed a curse upon them.

  When he received the news of the birth of Honufa’s second child—a son—Rahim sent gifts and favors through a servant: fruits for the mother, pure fatty goat’s milk and milled rice for the child, young hatchling chickens and vegetables from his own fields.

  It was only her son’s small pinched face that stopped Honufa from spurning these gifts as well.

  ANOTHER swing of the rope. This time around her midsection, above her stomach.

  Even as her womb blossomed, the bay withered inexplicably the year following her son’s birth; the shoals of fish, so thick and abundant in the years past, thinned to vanishing. Jamir’s forays into the bay grew longer, the catches smaller. Where before the floor of his leased boat could not be seen because of the hauls of writhing, wriggling silver, now all one saw was wood, flecked here and there with the odd fish. They ate less and less. The milk in her breasts began to dry. He bought time for them by loaning out his boat, working as a sharecropper, receiving little money for a back-breaking amount of labor. Trawlers were more and more common in the bay, and he lobbied their owners for a spot on their boats as a fish-hand. But these captains were loathe to offer these lucrative spots to anyone but family or the most experienced sea fishermen.

  They were starving.

  SHE finishes tying the rope around her chest, her clever sure hands fluent in the language of knots, hands that washed dishes and scrubbed floors when she was forced to take on work as a housemaid in Abbas’s house, by then the prosperous owner of several trawlers.

  SHE squeezes her gray eyes shut against nature’s onslaught. Eyes that can decipher words, that saw the letter when she found it in a bookshelf two months ago, as she dusted in Abbas’s house.

  Abbas had completed a few years of schooling and fancied himself as an erudite man. Hence the two cases of Bangla (and the odd English) books that had likely never been opened yet graced his sitting room for all to see.

  Her first brush with the rooster-feather duster threw up a cloud that left her coughing. So she took the books out individually and wiped them with a damp cloth. She found a copy of Kapalkundala, a book she read many times as a child, given to her by (and then returned to) Rahim. It was the force of sentiment that lead her to sit on her haunches and open the pages to read a few lines of Bankim. The prose that she had missed so much over the years.

  The letter was tucked between the pages where Kapalkundala—the eponymous heroine—meets the hero—Nabakumar. It slipped to the floor and she picked it up and began to read. It was addressed to Abbas. From a man named Motaleb. It concerned Rahim Choudhury.

  She hid the letter on her person, feigned an illness to Abbas’s wife and went home. Next day at the docks, she found Abbas alone and confronted him with what she knew. Enraged, he at first denied all, until slowly breaking before her unshakeable conviction.

  Why did you do it? she inquired.

  Why does anyone do anything? For the money.

  That’s not what the letter says.

  Why ask if you already know everything?

  I want to hear it from your mouth.

  He considered, then shrugged. The previous zamindar received word that Rahim was having second thoughts about the house exchange, about relocating here entirely. The old man was desperate to leave here, and he coveted Choudhury Manzil as it was in the heart of Calcutta. As for me, I had my own reasons to want Rahim here. So we had to provide him with incentives to leave India. What better way to make a man sour on his country than to make him feel unwelcome, in constant danger? Motaleb was Rahim’s driver, drowning in gambling debt. I traveled to Calcutta in secret to meet with him. We hatched a scheme to have random thugs dress up as a militant Hindu gang and abduct Rahim. It apparently worked because we soon received a telegram from him saying that he would go through with the house exchange after all.

  It nearly killed him.

  That was a risk we took. Now tell me how much this will cost me.

  I’m no beggar or common thief, she said, the words sticking in her craw because of the hypocrisy of her actions. I don’t want your money.

  What then?

  You will take him on your trawler, my Jamir, she said. He can do the job. The simple justice of eating is all I ask.

  So you do want my money, just with the fig leaf of your husband’s work to cover for it. Isn’t it enough that you work at my house?

  That pays a pittance.

  I’ll pay you more.

  No, give my husband the opportunity to prove himself. Give him a cut of the fish if he meets his worth. He’s a good man. He deserves that much. Without work, men die.

  Abbas stepped close. She was tall for a woman, but she felt dwarfed by the bohoddar. If I’m so dangerous that I can arrange for Rahim’s abduction from so far away, what’s to stop me from eliminating a fisherman’s wife who threatens me?

  Because I’ve given the letter to another, she bluffed. Should anything happen to me, it will reach the zamindar and he will know of your treachery.

  Abbas appeared disbelieving but was unwilling to take the chance. Through Rahim’s abduction, I was obeying my master, serving him faithfully. But you took from Rahim for years. He raised you like a daughter. You’re the traitor. Not I.

  She stood silent as the truth of that statement wormed into her. Do we have an agreement or not?

  Tell your husband to come see me tomorrow, he said before climbing back into the boat.

  Later that day, when she suggested that Jamir ask Abbas a final time for a spot on his trawler he looked at her with suspicion.

  Why? What has changed since the last time I spoke to him?

  The more fish they catch, the more men they need. Just ask.

  So he went to see Abbas, and later returned excited, eager to share the news that he had a place as a fish-hand on the largest trawler on the docks.

  Do you realize what this means? After a year of hard work, I might be able to get my boat back. Then, narrowing his eyes, he asked. How did you know to ask? Did you have something to do with this?

  Call it a woman’s hunch, Honufa said, making light of it. And he let the matter rest.

  But she could not forget Abbas’s comment about her betrayal of Rahim, realizing that by not revealing the existence of the letter to the zamindar, she had become a conspirator to his kidnapping so many years before—a traumatic and life-altering event for him. Abbas’s words, burrowed beneath her skin, multiplied like a parasite, poisoned her blood, robbed her of slee
p.

  Jamir had been working on the trawler no more than a few months when she came to the decision that the letter could not remain with her. But once again, her pride stopped her from approaching Rahim directly. She did not wish to traverse the ashes of all the bridges she had burned over the years.

  She decided to put the letter that secured Jamir’s employment in the post, send it anonymously to Rahim. What he chose to do after was up to him, but it would at least absolve her of guilt. It would come at the cost of Jamir’s new job, and kill whatever sapling of confidence had taken root in his psyche. And would create a powerful enemy in Abbas.

  She was coming to the grim realization that they would likely have to flee the village.

  But that was before the storm. Before she discovered that the letter was missing.

  And knew who had taken it.

  THE storm roars.

  For hours it rages. It does not tire. It does not relent. It does not show mercy. Trees standing since before her birth give way, snapping and crashing to the ground with a force that shakes her.

  She has seen many storms over the years and knows that this is only a taste of its fury, that there will be a calm when the eye of the storm arrives, which can be a trap for the unwary, the storm’s cunning trick. She had an aunt once who had gone out to inspect her livestock as the eye of a storm passed over. But it found her before she could return. As she ran back to her hut, her daughter witnessed her mother get caught in gales of such force that she was swept up into the skies in a flash, just yards from shelter.

  Sand is driven into her skin. Her eyes are bloodshot from the spray of salt water—her lips parched and raw. Her palms and chest are bloody from scraping against the tree’s bark.