by Tahmima Anam
I’m up and dressed before the sun, folding my towel on the rail and making it all neat, in case a miracle happens and she comes with me tonight. I go downstairs and I can hardly stomach my own saliva, it’s bitter and foul in my mouth. Downstairs the hotel owner is waiting for me, hot cup of tea in his hand. He wants to chat but I’m in no mood, I barely swallow the tea he gives me. I just want to sit quiet with my thoughts. Soon enough Shumon comes in, sits opposite me. ‘You got the money,’ he says, no hello, no nothing.
It’s tied up in my lungi, all one hundred seventy thousand of it, a trick I learned from my uncle. He used to fold his wages into the knot of his lungi, a few notes at a time, folding and knotting, folding and knotting. Then he would wear a loose shirt over it, and just look like one of those men with a paunch, maybe a lazy guy, someone who liked eating the fatty parts of the cow.
‘Ya, I got the money,’ I say to Shumon. ‘Take me to her.’
‘You stay here, I’m gonna give him the money, come back with the address.’
Something about the way he says it, I don’t like. That scar over his lip is looking all twisty-curvy, and all of a sudden I’m not so willing to just hand it over.
‘No, I’ll come with you. That way when he tells us where she is, I’ll just go over.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’
I order a glass of water and pass it across the table to Shumon.
He looks down at the glass. Takes a sip.
‘Why don’t we do this: I’ll give him the money, then when he tells me I’ll call your mobile?’
‘Yaar,’ I say, all friendly-like, ‘I’m coming with you, that’s that.’
‘Okay, let me make a call.’ He takes a mobile out of his shirt pocket and goes outside. For a second he disappears, then I see him talking again, holding the phone to one ear, bending over to close out the street noise.
I’m starting to get restless now, I can’t wait to see Megna, my stomach is high up where my heart should be, everything tight, I can’t breathe. I down another cup of tea. The hotel owner comes in again, tries to catch my eye, but I can’t talk to him now. Shumon comes back and Awal is with him.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘let’s go.’
Awal puts his arm on my shoulder.
‘Brother,’ I say, ‘no rickshaw pulling today?’ I know how much his family needs the money. One day out and they’re over the edge.
‘Important day for you, brother. I’ll do the night shift.’
I’m glad Awal’s here. If that guy from Dewanhat tries to pull anything, there’ll be three of us. Awal and me get into Shumon’s rickshaw, and he turns the cycle around, taking us down the main road. Traffic isn’t too bad, we only stop at a few lights. Shumon’s legs are young and quick. I toss a coin to an old woman at the intersection. This way I’m sending a message to God I’m not ungrateful for what’s about to happen. She reminds me of my mother, who still isn’t well. Shathi told me this morning when I called to tell her I needed more money. Not a lot, just enough to get me through a few more days here. Did I tell her what I decided last night? No. In the morning it seemed like the worst idea I ever had. Better to just bring Megna home and deal with it later. Nothing anyone can do when you just show up and say what’s what. Maybe I felt sorry for Shathi. Maybe I was a coward, who knows. She would find out soon enough, let her wait.
The slum is behind a new shopping mall. Shopping mall makes me think of Pahari, but I quickly push him out of my mind. We leave Shumon’s rickshaw and enter an alley behind the mall. We cross a bridge over a canal that’s just an open drain, and then we’re inside the slum, rows and rows of shacks and a lot of stink. Dark rooms with skinny cats and children and piles of rotting garbage.
I’m following Shumon as we go deep into the stomach of Dewanhat. I can’t see the sky because there are wires strung up everywhere, between the houses and over the tin roofs. Dewanhat has electricity. Awal tells me some of the shacks even have cable TV. ‘Lucky bastards,’ he says. I don’t think so. I’m the lucky one. I never had to move to the city. Out there in the village, no matter how hungry you are, you wake up every morning and you smell paddy, you smell mud and earth and dung. Dung is roses compared to human shit. We rule the world but our shit smells worse than any animal’s – we had to get brains, big brains, just to find ways to cover up our own stench.
At the end of another long row, we stop and Shumon ducks his head inside. He comes back and he says, ‘Okay, now give it to me.’
I’m better than these people. I have the sun in my face and a house and a little patch of land. I’m even thinking, time for me to go back to earning a wage. Blood money’s not gonna last for ever, its gonna dry out, and anyway I want to be working again, sweating over something so my days have a start and a finish. All this I’m thinking while we’re walking, so when Shumon asks me for the money I’m not ready to hand it over.
‘I want to meet this guy,’ I say. ‘I want to make sure he knows my Megna.’
‘He knows, he knows,’ he says.
‘What about the kid?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘If he knows where Megna is, he knows where the kid is. What does he say about the kid?’
Shumon comes up real close to me now. ‘You’re going to kill this whole thing,’ he says. ‘He knows about the kid. The girl and the kid are together, just give me the money and he’ll tell you where they are.’
Awal turns when he thinks I’m not looking, so I push past Shumon and before I know it I’m inside the shack.
It takes a minute for me to take it all in. Then I see them all, the hotel owner, the rickshaw boys, the kid making the samosas. All of them.
They’re in a room with a table and two chairs. There’s a tube light fixed to the tin wall and everything’s bright. I’m about to call them by name, and then I see the hotel owner’s got an orange stain on his lips. In fact, now I notice they all have orange lips. They’ve been sitting here and chewing paan and waiting for me.
I start to shout. Words are coming out of my mouth I’m not sure what they are. Curses. Bad words. Threats. They all sit there and stare at me, not moving, all looking me in the eye, and for a second I think, am I crazy? Are these people really sitting here and staring at me? Or is it a trick of my mind, actually nothing is happening and after all these years of not finding Megna, nothing is worse than a bad thing, so I am hallucinating a bad thing, wishing for it – actually these men are really my friends, and in a moment we’ll sit around and drink tea and laugh at something rude. I hear a sound behind me and it’s two more men – I’ve seen them before too, the policemen from the hotel, the fat one and his sidekick. They raise their sticks and just before the pain blinds me and I black out, I think, at least I am not crazy, at least I have that.
Before I departed for Cambridge, I called Anwar. I had been thinking of his story – in particular the moment he had been betrayed by his friends. What did he think of them now, I asked. Was he angry with them for giving him hope and then snatching it away, or did he forgive them? And he said, for a long time he’d harboured fantasies of taking revenge on them. Not just them, but also the foreman in Dubai, and his uncle, who had persuaded him to leave Megna in the first place. He said he had sometimes lain awake at night and counted all the ways they might go. But now that time had passed, he had decided to keep his memories of those events at a distance, to tell himself the whole thing had happened to someone else. And now that it was going to be put down in black and white, he could say this: he was grateful to them, because one thing leads to another, and on balance, he had won. It wasn’t a religious thing, he was careful to say, he wasn’t lying down in front of his fate. But, he said, you can’t be angry at the past. Not for ever.
I wish I could be as sanguine as Anwar. I wish, as I wrote down our story, that I could be grateful it existed at all, that I fell in love with you and discovered there was something beyond, something grander than the mystery of my origins, something bigger than the little life I
had imagined for myself. But I am greedier than Anwar, and I want more, and anyway it was me, you see, who had taken you away. I had no one else to blame, no one to murder in my sleep.
IV I Go to Jail
Someone throws a glass of water in my face and I wake up. My head, heavy as an elephant’s, tells me I’ve been here a long time, but a small window shows me it’s still light out. It’s still today. That means no time has passed and the worst is yet to come.
The policeman, the fat one, hawks a wad of spit into my face. I try to brush it away but my hands are tied behind my back. The spit and the water stay wet on my face. The policeman heaves himself up, and I curl into a ball, waiting for him to kick me. He’s not wearing a uniform. The other guy, who I see now has marks on his face – maybe he got the pox too old – he’s there too, standing by the door. It’s dark but I can see a little more now, a cot in the corner of the room, a bucket on the other side. A metal door with no handle.
The two of them talk to each other but no one says anything to me. Then the pox guy comes over and pulls me up by my armpits. I make myself heavy and he struggles. Fat one unties my hands – are they letting me go? They don’t talk; I’m afraid to ask.
As soon as I’m untied, I feel metal where the rope used to be. Fat one is breathing close to my ear, and the other is pulling something, and before I know it my arms are going up, like a puppet, and they’re stretched tight like that, like I haven’t seen someone in a long time and I’m opening my arms wide to grab them, and like that I’m frozen, can’t move.
Finally the fat one talks. He says, ‘You’ve pissed yourself.’ I look down and he’s right. My lungi is soaked. The money, of course, is gone – I can feel it straight away.
I’m scared but I’m also angry. ‘You stole my money,’ I say.
‘That’s right, country bastard.’
‘Then why am I here?’
‘We don’t like little rats coming from the country and finding their slutty girlfriends.’
‘She’s my sister.’
They look at each other and laugh.
‘You think we bought that, even for one day? Shit, been laughing about it for weeks.’
‘So what,’ I say, ‘you got my money. You skinned me. Why bring me here?’
‘Couldn’t just let Shumon do his job – you had to follow him. You had to see all of us. You think we wanted that?’
I get it now. I dirtied their clean job. They would’ve disappeared, no one would have believed me, but now I knew where they lived.
‘What happened to Shumon?’
‘Bastard brought you all the way to us, didn’t he. We took care of him.’
‘Good.’ So he was dead. ‘You gonna kill me too, or what?’
‘We could,’ he said, ‘or we could leave you in here to rot. No one would notice. You know the cells next door? Hundred, hundred-fifty men in each one. Soon you all start to look the same, you’re all as dirty and piss-your-pants stink as each other. No one will even know you’re gone. Or –’and he looked at me like he could mean anything.
I try to think of what would be the worst bad thing. He could beat me some more, that would be bad. I remember the tooth that fell out after foreman kicked me in the face, shit hurt for weeks and I couldn’t eat anything. But it healed up and I got used to a little stiffness in my jaw, nothing big. Worse, he tortures me, filmi-style, pulls out my fingernails, something like that. I shudder. But then I think, not like he’s trying to get some information out of me, so what would be the point? No, they won’t do that. But they would teach me a lesson. I want to roll my eyes to the back of my head so I don’t have to look at whatever he’s going to do. I don’t want to be in the room with him and me and the cot and his pockmarked partner. He’s talking now about all the ways he can fuck me up, his words running right along with my thinking.
He starts to unbuckle his belt. I’m looking at him. There’s a slick of sweat on his lip, and he has to try hard to pull the belt off because it looks like it’s holding up the whole top half of his body and if he takes it off his body’s going to melt off him like syrup.
He pulls off his belt and he’s holding it in his hand and for one second that feels like a year it comes to my mind that he’s going to do something else, something like sex to me, which is worse, much worse than anything I had thought of and my legs start to go, they go, and I’m just hanging there by my arms, and when I finally feel it, the knot of the leather on my chest, buckle cutting deep, I cry out with the pain, but also with relief, because it’s not the worst, worst thing, until the second lash, and the third.
I don’t know where I am, nothing, just the fire on my chest, for what I can’t say, days maybe or even a week. I think someone’s coming in, putting something on the fire, fat cop or pox cop, fat or pox, pox or fat, putting something cold on me, but I can’t be sure, I’m just in and out, and when I’m in I want to be out, leave me to my dreams, I don’t want to know the square of light in the window, and the hard of the cot, and the feeling of my own shit curling out between my legs and staying there, stamping the truth on my nothingness, a person with no people and no pride, a piece of trash.
It’s Shumon. He’s pouring water over me, and everything hurts like I’m being hosed with salt, and then he covers me with a bandage, and puts a blanket over me. Then he goes through the door without saying anything. He’s talking to someone on the other side, and then I hear him walk away, and then the door opens again and there’s food in front of me, dal and rice. I’m surprised to find that my hands still obey, and I eat, then I fall asleep again, like someone has crushed a pill into my rice.
Shumon’s back the next day, and the day after that. When I feel a bit stronger I mouth a bunch of curses at him. He doesn’t say anything. I reach my hand over to slap him but it comes out soft, like I’m giving him a sweet one on the cheek.
‘You need to get more money,’ he says.
‘Fuck off.’
‘They’ll let you go, they told me.’
‘They told me they took care of you.’
He lifts up his shirt, bandage all across his chest. ‘Lucky my father took me to hospital,’ he says.
‘I’m not so lucky.’
‘No.’ He looks down at his hands.
‘They want two lakhs.’
‘I don’t have it.’
‘Call your father.’
‘My father’s dead.’
‘Everything you said was lying?’ Says it like his feelings are hurt, the bastard.
‘At least I’m not a thief.’
‘It wasn’t my idea.’
I turn my face away. ‘Fuck off.’ And he goes.
He nags and nags. Holds up his mobile and says, ‘Call someone, get the money. They’re going to move you to the blocks; then I won’t be able to get you out.’
A few days later and the fire on my chest is starting to fade. It still hurts but mostly when I try to sit up, or cough. I start to think about getting out of here, and when Shumon comes I take the phone and dial the only number I know. Shathi picks up on the first ring.
‘Wife,’ I say, ‘I’m in trouble.’
‘Are you alive?’
Before I can tell her what a stupid question that is, I feel a swell of grateful that she would ask this, as if she didn’t care about a single other thing.
‘Ya,’ I say, quiet like.
‘Sobhan Allah.’
‘I need money.’
‘How much?’
‘Two.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Shumon,’ I say, ‘where am I?’
He tells me. I tell her.
‘I’ll send your brother.’
‘There isn’t two in the trunk. Where will you get the rest?’
I hear her breathe on the other side of the phone, little cat breaths. ‘Don’t worry, I will get it.’
‘I gave money to the mosque. Get it back, talk to the imam.’
‘Okay.’
I hang up and I start to cry. Li
ke a baby. Like a girl. A girl baby. A suckling goat.
Guard gives me a bucket of water. I pour it over my legs, rubbing my feet together. Even on the cement floor, I can see the water runs black from my body. I’m disgusted by my own dirt, the smell that’s coming off my body. My fingernails are long; I chew them; I tear off the extra, scraping my fingers against the rough walls to smooth out the ragged. I go behind my ears, the back of my neck.
Then I sit on the edge of the cot. I wait. Dal and rice come so I know it’s lunchtime. Sun sets. My brother’s not coming. I tilt myself back onto the cot, killed by another day.
I wake up to the door opening. Shumon. I don’t even lift my head.
‘You’re out,’ he says.
‘Not going anywhere with you.’
He hovers over me, little scarry lip pressed right up on my face. ‘Your money came.’
‘Where’s my brother?’
‘He’s not here.’
I can’t be sure if this is another trick. I could even be dreaming the whole thing. Or I’m dead and stuck between earth and hell and this is what they make me do, see if I’m still as stupid as I was when I breathed.
Shumon gives me clean clothes. I recognise the shirt, the lungi. ‘Where did you get those?’
‘Your wife. She’s waiting outside.’
I follow him out the door, through the corridor. Nobody stops us, no one even asks, we just stroll through like we’re ghosts. Maybe I am dead. But then I see Shathi and she’s holding a bag with both hands, so when I go up and hug her she just stands there like a stone.