Hari Hassan is relieved when indifferent Malay Nurse enters his room for the routine check-up, rather than the other one whose kindness seems to have led inexorably to her engaging with him, to her interfering. He is quite sure that even if he is writhing in agony and speaking in tongues, Malay Nurse would simply check his pulse, administer a mild sedative, and let him get on with it. No psychobabble for her, no imposition of cheerful golfers and softly spoken middle-aged women in beige suits. A cheerful young student, one of those volunteering at the hospital, pops in with a leaflet while Nurse is replacing his drip. ‘Hello Hari,’ says the student overfamiliarly, ‘Are you going to come to the movie showing tonight? We could arrange for you to be wheeled down to the room. We’re trying to drum up interest, as no one turned up last week. This time we’re making popcorn as a bribe.’
‘Mr Hassan could choke to death on popcorn,’ says Nurse pragmatically, dismissing him, and the student looks slightly hurt and leaves. Thank you, Nurse, thinks Hassan, for making decisions for me, for scaring people away. I know you’d be perfectly willing to let me die, but just not on your watch, not on your shift. As the disease slides deeper into Hassan, inhabiting his legs so he no longer has the use of them, into his chest and throat so eating and swallowing are now difficult and soon talking will be too, it takes hold of him with a muscular, personal embrace, gripping him hard enough to kill little pieces of him, like cold fingers inching along his flesh. Hassan has had dreams sometimes where he has been placed in his coffin, his body shrunk to nothing, his skin stretched across the fleshless bone, his eyes lidded, his cadaverous smile fixed by the embalmer, and people pass and pay respects, shuddering at the horror of his mummy-like, reptilian form, as though he has regressed centuries, as though he has just evolved and crept slimily from the sea, and no one notices that he is still there, hidden inside the body, screaming silently for someone to hear him, to notice that his dry little heart is still pumping red blood to the strangled veins. I’m still here, he cries without moving his lips, pinned invisibly into place over his teeth, I’m still here in these paper walls, caged in my bones. He continues to cry out as the silk-lined coffin lid is shut over his face, as he hears the earth pound on him from above. When he has this dream, Hassan wakes to feel grateful for practical Malay Nurse, as he knows that she alone would not walk by him with creeping sentiment, but would look at his desiccated remains without affection, and efficiently check his pulse. She alone will make sure that he is dead before he is gone.
The student is back again already; this time with a little flyer he has probably made himself on his laptop. ‘Forgot to give you this,’ he says amiably to Hassan, ‘Has all the films we’re planning to show this month, and a section for suggestions.’ He adds, ‘It’s a shame you can’t come tonight,’ looking reproachfully at Nurse, who ignores him. ‘It’s a real classic.’
‘What is it?’ asks Hassan despite himself. For some reason, at the word ‘classic’ he has a sudden image of the Gone with the Wind movie poster, that had been everywhere in Calcutta at the beginning of the war. He remembers how the Indian artists had somehow done something to Clark Gable’s eyes and eyebrows and skin, that made him look like an Indian himself, as he hovered over a snowy-white Vivien Leigh.
‘Thelma and Louise,’ says the student.
‘Oh,’ says Hassan in bald disappointment. The student hovers, as though about to justify his choice, but a cough and a glare from Nurse send him from the room, and this time he doesn’t return.
‘No letters today?’ Hassan asks Nurse hopefully.
‘No letters today,’ repeats Nurse flatly.
‘It’s just that yesterday one was left in the office,’ Hassan begins to explain.
‘No letters today,’ says Nurse, with the exact same intonation. This tone reminds Hassan that there is no point hoping for the letter; the letter will or will not come whether he hopes for it or not. In fact, there is no point to hope, even; hope is just a veil we draw over future disappointment, Hassan reflects, remembering a line from one of his prose pieces on the war. Anwar had a rather chirpier take on the subject, and had written a snappy couplet, ‘Better to deal with the hangman’s rope, than live your life knotted up in hope.’
Hari Hassan’s collection of poetry that followed Partition, The Road from Hell, was published to great acclaim; he received glowing reviews in the British and Indian press, and although the book was a commercial failure, it made his name in the subcontinent. He was praised for his subtle intertwining of external and internal conflict, for how he sought connections between the public and the personal while somehow managing to avoid the charge of being too ‘political’. ‘He twists steel swords and loaded guns into love knots,’ said the Manchester Guardian; ‘A young man in the service of anger, love and indiscernible truth,’ said the Times of India. ‘The prophet for our troubled times, his verse is a luminous guide to those who seek their own atonement,’ said Anwar Shah, a journalist and lesser-known poet, in West Pakistan’s Tribune.
In fact, it was his own atonement that Hassan sought. After Nazneen’s burial, he buried himself. He refused invitations, received no one, and sat into the early hours, writing, writing, writing himself into insanity, and back again. He poured his violence, guilt, regret and self-loathing onto paper, and in doing so reflected the spirit of the age, as his countrymen reflected on the political botching of Independence, on the thousands killed during the flights of Partition, as Muslims and Hindus sought safety among their own kind. Hassan remained in Calcutta and remarkably, despite his best efforts, survived. When his house was burned to the ground, he gave Ruby enough money to return to her village in comfort, and went to East Pakistan, where he hid in the relative calm of Cox’s Bazaar, in a bungalow near the long stretch of beach. He visited Chittagong on the way, and Mr Ali failed to kill him, or else failed to notice his presence there in the aftermath of all the troubles. He sat by Nazneen’s grave for a little while; she’s not here, he realized.
He looked for Nazneen instead in the eyes of every little girl he saw, being hurried along by their sari-clad mothers outside the ice-cream shop, riding in their rickshaws, walking to school. As the years passed, he looked for traces of her in the young women laughing with their friends, on their way to the beach, the park, the campus; they misinterpreted the hopeful questioning in his face, and either nudged each other with knowing giggles, or looked away with distaste. It was pointless to hope; he knew that he wouldn’t find her, the parents had emigrated, the aunt wouldn’t pass on their details and then passed away herself, and so the girl who carried his and Nazneen’s blood could be anywhere in the wide world, a droplet floating in the Indian Ocean before him. The truth was, despite all his accomplished, self-obsessed verse, he did not know the road from hell, he did not know what would atone for the wrongs he had done Nazneen and their child. Death was an option, but it had thus far eluded him, and it seemed to him to be an excuse, an escape; it wouldn’t make things right, it would only close his eyes. He kept himself busy, taking up journalism and finding himself in demand; with the civil unrest in the late sixties, he became overtly political at last, and wrote articles advocating Bangladeshi independence that were printed in the international press; he donated to charity, he was kind to children, animals and strangers. But he did not know whether he would ever again look in the mirror, and feel himself to be proud of what he saw; he did not know if he would ever again see himself as someone who was good.
One day, some twenty years after Nazneen’s death, he came home from walking along the beach, and found Anwar seated on his veranda in a kameez so blindingly white in the sunshine that he might have been an angel. ‘My dear old chap,’ Hassan said, his eyes bright and swimming with too much sun and emotion, and he stumbled blindly onto the veranda, to hold his best friend, ‘it’s been so long.’ He was doubly touched, as it was a dangerous time for a West Pakistani to be visiting; especially a military man, which Anwar now was, having given up writing after his patchy success. Civil war was looming, and everyone knew it.
Anwar held him close, comforting him as though he was a child. ‘I have your last letter, Hari,’ Anwar said. ‘I hope it’s not too late for you, because I think I may have found you a road out of hell.’