by Tahmima Anam
Shumon gives me something. It’s my mobile phone. I snatch it from his hand and walk away as fast as my beaten legs will let me, Shathi beside me, and we don’t turn around to see what happens to him, we just keep walking like we have somewhere to go.
Shathi has a cousin who has a friend who owns a sweetshop on Halishar Road. We can stay with him tonight, and tomorrow we’ll take the bus home. Wife and I don’t say anything to each other. She hails a rickshaw and helps me climb in. She takes a packet out of her bag and passes it to me. She holds me steady over the bumps in the road and I eat, remembering the village.
We get to the sweetshop and the cousin’s friend takes us upstairs, to the room he’s got above the shop. His wife is as unsmiling as he is. She asks about Shathi’s father. She gives us each a chom-chom. It’s so sweet I’m gagging for a glass of water. She pours me one in a tin cup. All I want to do is lie down but there’s no bed for us – we’ll sleep downstairs, once the shop is closed.
Shathi opens her bag and takes out an eggplant, a handful of tomatoes and a pumpkin. The wife seems pleased now with her vegetables from the village. Then she tells me I should take Shathi around the city, show her the sights, which is her way of saying bugger off till after dark, I’m not feeding you.
We cross the road and Shathi bargains for a guava with the fruit-seller. We sit on the edge of the pavement with our feet hanging over the drain, passing the guava back and forth. ‘My chest hurts,’ I tell her. ‘Pain,’ I say. ‘Pain, pain.’
Someone comes and shoos us away. This is his place – he’s going to set up his chotpoti stall. We start to walk. I take the phone out of my pocket. ‘I’ll get something for this,’ I say. ‘Maybe a thousand.’
‘Okay.’
‘Where did you get the money? Did you go back to the mosque like I told you? Did the Mollah give you the money back?’
‘He spent it already.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Mosque will have a new roof, everyone will think of you.’
‘What I left you wasn’t enough, where d’you get the rest?’
‘The bull. I sold it.’
‘That much?’
‘It was a big animal.’
I’m thinking about all the times she hauled herself out of bed in the morning to cut hay for that bull. And I had complained about it, saying it made her stink too much of the village, and why couldn’t we smell different, like city people, now that we had some money?
‘What did my mother say?’
‘She was crying about the fridge, and the TV.’
Shit. Of course the bull wasn’t enough. ‘Let’s go to Patenga,’ I say.
People are sitting on the big rocks and eating things and looking out into the sea. I look too and see a couple of ships far out. Shathi lays out the end of her sari and sits down. I’m noticing how everything she does she does slowly, like she means to. No accidents with her. She pulls her knees up to her chest and like that, all squashed together, she’s even more like a doll.
‘Tell me what we’re gonna do when we get home,’ I say.
‘We’ll plant mustard.’
‘And?’
‘There’s the vegetables to pick.’
‘Tell me the vegetables.’
‘Eggplant, gourd, cauliflower. Beans. Spinach.’
‘What else will happen?’
‘Nothing. It will go on like before.’
I’m thinking of before, what it was like when I didn’t have any money, when I hadn’t gone to foreign. I’m thinking of my mother’s face, and how many times a day she’s gonna tell me I screwed my life up. It’s all playing out in front of me, I’m pissed off every time I wake up by that stupid mosque with its new roof and shiny paint, and whoever has bought my TV, I’m hearing that too, across the compound, when I’m trying to sleep, and the voice in my head telling me I should never have taken that money in the first place, no, not without thinking of Pahari and his family.
‘I can’t go home,’ I say.
She get up and starts walking towards the water, skipping over the rocks. I go after her.
‘It’s not what you think.’
She stops, looks at me. ‘I’ve never asked you for anything.’
True. She had never even said my name. ‘I can’t go home,’ I say. Ask me something else. ‘You want to stay here with me?’
‘Someone has to look after your mother.’
It’s starting to get dark and the crowd is thick now, the light the colour of stones.
‘I want a child.’ She looks at me again and I’m getting that she has thought about this. And that what she’s really saying is that she wants more than a kid, that she wants to be a wife, a real wife. I wonder if I can give her this. My dream of Megna will have to go. I’ll have to kick her out like I did the first time; then again, I’ve shed blood for her. That should matter, should open the door a crack for the rest of my life. For Shathi. I reach over and hold my wife’s hand and we smell the waves, and the ocean smell reminds me of that water that fell from me when I bathed, only yesterday. We walk away from the sea and past the people, laying out their picnics, scolding their children, cracking open boiled eggs.
We get to the bus stop she doesn’t let go of my hand. Something’s stirring in me; it’s so strange I don’t even know what it is at first but then I get it. It’s my blood, pumping on the inside. Hard now, my chest hurts from it, my legs too. On the bus there’s only one seat and I stand over Shathi while she sits. It’s dark and the bus pulls away. I see the ships in the sea, standing still, but my hand is moving, holding the back of Shathi’s neck, here is her ear, here her jaw. Here is where her skin ends and her hair begins. I’m not looking at her, I’m staring out the window and reading all the shopfronts, but I’m seeing her for the first time, with my thumb, my rough thumb, her cheek, MOHONA BIRYANI AND KEBAB HOUSE, her jaw, KAZI BROTHERS CEMENT, the fold of her lip, SHAMMI RESTURA, her chin, NAVEED NAPITH (GENTS), and lower, as I get bold, the blood is booming in me now, the skin between her breasts is soft as milk, and suddenly I remember something, and with my thumb still on her skin, I squat down and I whisper, ‘Please, wife, forgive me. I don’t deserve it, but if you can, please try.’
Then I jump off the bus while it’s still moving, and I hit the pavement with a crash, crying out in pain, and after a few minutes someone helps me up, I dust myself off, I walk towards the barber-shop, remembering the phone call from a few weeks ago, telling me that Megna had stayed here, on the way to Patenga Beach, at a barber-shop with a rhyming name.
Naveed is shaving the armpits of a guy who is obviously about to get married. He smells like coconut oil and everything’s shiny about him. I get straight to the point with Naveed. ‘I’m looking for Megna,’ I say. ‘Is she here?’
He holds the blade up and looks me over. ‘You her people?’
‘Yes.’
He pulls the blade up, collecting foam, wiping it on a towel draped over his shoulder.
‘She stayed here for a few months. When she came to the city, I let her stay.’
‘With who?’
‘With no one. Just here.’ He points to the floor, between the chair and the wall. He wipes the groom’s armpit, moves to the other side. The groom lowers one arm, lifts another. Naveed starts to lather.
‘What happened to her?’
‘How the hell should I know? Stayed here as long as she paid me. She was lucky, too. People talked, wife wasn’t happy. Girl like that.’
‘Did you see the child?’
‘No. But my wife said she was in a bad way – had to go to medical.’
‘You haven’t seen her.’
‘Not since then.’
He’s done. He examines his work, runs his finger along the smooth armpit.
It’s dark now and the kerosene lamps are all on. I miss Shathi already – no way she’s gonna take me back now. I find a shop and sell the phone, they give me seven hundred for it. I paid five thousand. Now I can’t even call home.
I n
eed to eat. I need money, a job, food. Can’t believe I’m back to this after everything, and my mind flashes to when I was a kid, always hungry, rooting around my mother’s ankles for a scrap of something.
But here I am. No point getting sentimental. Naveed says best thing is to ask around the shipyards. ‘Nah,’ I say, ‘I’m a builder, not a breaker.’ I find a construction site and the foreman hires me. Fifty taka a day, rice in the afternoon, a place to sleep. The building’s almost finished, they’re doing the floors now. He gives me a pair of rubber gloves, says to pick up the piles of bricks the old women are breaking by the side of the road, bring it over to where it gets mixed into concrete to make the mosaic, chunks of brick mixed in with the sand to keep it solid.
The women sit in a line with their legs spread and pound the bricks with their little hammers. Their faces are covered in dust. Some, the clever ones, have strips of tyre around their fingers. I’m feeling sorry for them, out there in the hot sun, beating on their own fingers, but I don’t go up, don’t say, hey, baking out today, can I bring some water – because I’m new and I know everyone’s looking. Plus what do I care about a couple of old hags anyway.
I pick up their broken bricks, haul the basket on my head, make my way across the site to the mixer, unload and go back for more. My chest is still bandaged but it’s scabbed up and I can see where the scar will be thickest, right up near my neck. If I ever wear a shirt again, proper one with buttons and a stand-up collar, it’s going to show, like if I was one of those people who had an operation on my heart.
I don’t make friends. I make a small place to sleep by hanging up my lungi, keep to myself, eat my rice away from the rest of them.
I work on Naveed, finally he lets me ask his wife if we can find out about Megna at the hospital. I tell him everything, about Megna, the baby, how I’m trying to make it right after all these years. I’ve got nothing left to lose, no need to spin a story. He’s got some hard lines around his eyes from looking into people’s faces and pulling the blade over their necks, but when I tell him that, whole sad story, lift up my shirt and show him the lines from fatty cop’s buckle, his faces goes soft and I think, maybe he’ll help me, maybe not, but at least I told the truth.
V I Find Megna
When I first got to the city I was getting my footprints all over the place and wearing out my sandals with the picture of Megna in my hand. Down the roads with my head swivelling all around, staring into the faces of all the women, catching the long of one’s hair here, the small hands of another. They would look back, sometimes like they were angry, other times almost grateful, like, no one looks at me like that, a look without any kind of want or danger, just a frank glance, and I thought, women deserve to be given eyes into their eyes, and I wonder when was the last time, if ever, I gave Shathi that sort of a human thing. Probably never. But by the time I got to Naveed’s I’d given up, you know, stopped staring at every living thing like if I stared hard enough they might turn into my girl.
But then, I see her. The whole real-as-flesh girl of her, standing right in front of me like a wrapped-up gift from the heavens. It’s evening and I’ve finished my shift and I’m on my way to Naveed’s. She’s with another woman, a foreigner, but I don’t notice that at first, I just stand there like I’m hit by a stone. She’s right in front of me, not more than an arm’s length away. It’s her. Hair like a pile of electric wires, eyes tilted up, and so beautiful I can’t breathe, and then she’s gone past me, and I call out to her. ‘Megna. Megna.’ She keeps walking like she doesn’t know her own name, and I try again, louder, even the back of her head is known to me, because I held her there, I held her everywhere, and when she keeps walking I say, ‘It’s me, don’t you know?’ Other people turn around. I run after her. She sees me and she stops. I don’t recognise the look on her face. I’m waiting for a string of curses to come out of her mouth, but instead, she says, ‘Who are you?’ Like she never saw me in her whole life. ‘It’s me,’ I say again, and I think it must be the dark street, so I put my hands on her shoulders and she’s wriggling out of my hands and that’s when I get it. She’s pretending. Ha ha, very funny, I think, don’t be that way. She’s twisting around and I have to let go. Even then I just stand there while she turns away from me, disgusted, and then, finally, I see the foreigner beside her who is saying something in English. They both start screaming. Megna’s turning away and Naveed comes out of his shop. I’m running behind her and he grabs my arms and holds them behind my back. He’s stronger than he looks, and I can’t get out of his grip. ‘Sorry, madam,’ he’s calling out to Megna, and she turns and I notice her clothes, nothing like what my Megna would wear, not in this life, and the smell of her that’s rubbed off on my hands is a smell from somewhere else. Not her. I’m going crazy, seeing my Megna in the face of another woman, and when I look again, she’s nothing like my girl, nothing at all, and I squat right there, right there on the pavement and cry into my hands, because even God is playing tricks, teasing me with the sight of her, which is only in my head, which is where she only ever is.
Naveed feels sorry for me and convinces his wife to take us to the hospital. We pick a Friday and I buy some clothes, a clean pair of trousers and a T-shirt so I don’t look like a total bastard. I’ve got some things at the hotel, but no way I’m going back for it. If I see those rickshaw boys my cuts are all going to split apart open and start bleeding again.
Naveed’s wife is tall and pretty, skin pale as new milk, and she does him like he knows she should’ve married better. He’s nervous around her, telling her how nice she looks, all assy-kissy, and she puts it all away like notes down her blouse. I’m polite and thank you-ing as much as I can stomach, and secretly I’m glad she looks so fancy, because no village wife is gonna get us anywhere at the hospital.
I’m thinking about Shathi, my own village wife. Hard to sleep at night knowing there’s two women out there who hate you. I’m so out of sorrys I don’t even try to call her, but she’s in my dreams now, right next to Megna. I’m remembering her on the beach, the smell of her hair on the bus. She deserved better, little bird.
We take a bus across town. On the way I tell them everything I know about Megna, whatever will help to find her. Her name, age. Naveed’s wife helps me count the months and we figure when she might have been there. The bus stops and we walk the rest of the way. It’s the medical college, no fancy people here. Already at the entrance you can see it’s the poor man’s place, there’s sick people lying in the corridor, or curled up by the stairs, they reach out and grab your ankles, starting a long story and begging for a few paisa. Shit. Naveed’s wife knows her way around, end of the building, up some stairs that smell like piss, down another corridor full of people squatting on the floor and pointing to their rotting limbs, aching stomachs, waiting to see someone, crying for a doctor or a nurse, anyone in a white coat.
Naveed’s wife spots a nurse and she goes up all haughty and clapping on her heels, and they talk for a minute. Then she comes back and holds out her hand to me. ‘Give me some money,’ she says. I’ve heard this line before, it sends the crazy to my blood, but I knew it would be this way, so I hand over all I’ve got, minus a little for food. She twirls around and disappears down the ward.
Naveed wanders off to buy cigarettes. I look around. There’s a man with a little girl. Kid’s in her father’s arms, all limp and tired-looking, then she coughs, goes stiff, then quiet again, leaning her head against his chest. I look over at him and he nods at me. ‘TB,’ he says. I’ve heard of that, took some people in my village a few years ago. I got the letter in Dubai, sent some money.
‘She got medicine?’
‘We fed her the pills for six months. But she’s getting worse.’
I look at the girl. She opens her eyes, sleepy-like, and gives me a slow smile. ‘Hello,’ I say.
‘You got kids?’ the father asks me.
‘Yah,’ I say. ‘Nine years old. Lives with her mother.’
He nods. The girl s
tarts coughing again, and he hugs her close, putting his hands on her forehead. Then I see his lips move. He’s praying.
Naveed comes back. He opens the packet, offers me a smoke, and we light up together. I ask him about his wife. ‘I can’t believe it myself,’ he says, ‘why her people said yes. I guess I was a handsome kid.’
‘Not any more,’ I say, and he nudges me in the ribs. I wince, it’s still a bit sore there.
Time passes, we sit down in the corridor like everyone else. Naveed offers me another smoke and I take it just to pass the time. We’re thinking of going out for a cup of tea, leaving a message with the kid’s father, but Naveed’s wife comes back, folding her hands across her chest when she sees us sitting on the floor.
‘It’s filthy here, let’s go.’
‘Did you?’
She stops, looks down at us. ‘No.’
‘What happened?’ I say.
‘I’ll tell you when we get outside. This place is full of sickness, get me out.’ And Naveed’s on his feet in a flash, clearing the way so she can pass through without touching anyone.
As soon as we get downstairs I stop and make her tell me everything. Outside, it’s hot and my eyes are swimming in the sun. Naveed’s wife makes fists and puts them on her hips. ‘You look like a crazy bastard,’ she says, ‘but inside you’re just a worm like everyone else.’
She’s not telling me anything I don’t know. ‘Did you find the doctor? What did he say?’
‘You think they have all their papers in a neat little pile and whenever someone comes off the street and asks them, they just tell you what you want to know?’
I’m looking at Naveed, then at his wife. My tongue’s gone dry and heavy. ‘You didn’t find him.’
‘Of course I didn’t find him. No one would even talk to me.’ She runs her hands down her kameez like she can’t believe anyone would turn down a woman who looked that good.