In May 1974, hundreds of refugees took over Mrittunjoyee Primary School in our neighbourhood. They occupied the school buildings, which had been devastated during the war and still lay in ruins. Those who did not fit inside the buildings pitched small tents in the field, against the boundary walls. They dug the ground to make temporary ovens and holes for toilets, made small canals to wash dishes and clothes, hung their ragged quilts from ropes before the tents, and reserved a corner of the field to dispose of their daily garbage. It was obvious they had just arrived from the villages. Their clothes were cleaner than those who had been living in the city for some time now. They lived a rather reserved life, as if trying hard to distance themselves from the world, from people who looked at them with curiosity and considered them extra trouble in a city that was already burdened with hundreds of thousands of refugees. They were still aware of the embarrassment they were in for. It was obvious they were lost, that they would not have moved to the capital were they able to support themselves in the villages.
One of the new refugees was Shah Abdul Karim. He was a sixty-year-old singer who played a yellow folk guitar ektara. I had heard him at night when I passed by the school field. I stopped on my way and stood still listening to his music. There was something in his voice that I could not ignore. Standing in the dark, close to the edge of the refugee camp, I had heard him sing how a terrible madness had come down from the sky and turned our dreams into pebbles. We could only look at them and collect them in our hands and burst into endless tears. We tried for an eternity but could not turn them into dreams again.
One day I saw him at the Shaheed Minar. He was singing before a gathering, jumping around inside a small circle, raising his guitar in the air. I went ahead and sat with the crowd. All will die, he sang under the yellow sun, all that lives and suffers. There is no escape. Neighbours and friends, let us sit face to face, and be kind to each other. Lovely shadows, let us play, the night is near. Then: Everyone, everywhere. No place to hide, no God to pray to, no air that is soothing. My heart, I have not known it, is burning, falling to the dust in undisputed pains. They were not long songs, but every time he finished a stanza he repeated the intro twice, and played the guitar for some time.
When the crowd clapped, he responded with some extra tunes. He smiled and stared at me. After that, he looked at me several times, I suppose. I clapped too, but under his gaze I felt numb. My hands became still. I felt he wanted to speak with me. And that he had a lot to say. So I stayed until after he had finished blessing the refugee children by touching their heads.
He had seen Nur Hussain and me when we were working at one of Moina Mia’s meetings. He thought I would not come to hear him because he had no good news for Sheikh Mujib. I understood instantly what he meant. I told him, frankly, that I was living two lives. Though I was attending Moina Mia’s programmes along with Nur Hussain, helping him reach his constituents as effectively as possible, I was in fact not a part of Sheikh Mujib’s private militia or the Awami League’s vote bank. I was selling my services to the Awami League in order to survive; that was all. There were specific conditions that had to be met for me to provide my services. When I thought those conditions no longer served my interest, I would withdraw or make a new deal with a new set of conditions.
He told me he had walked over three hundred miles in the last few months to sing for people. He had created many songs, but most of them were lost because he did not keep copies. Words came to his mouth and tunes came to his guitar. He was the medium that brought the two together. If it were not he, somebody else would, he said; the songs would have been sung, the music would have been created. On his way he had made friends with strangers, had lived in their huts, in their kitchens, and shared their last handful of rice. He had participated in many burial prayers too, watched many bodies placed in one grave, saw bodies rotting on the side of the road, in the water of the canal, bodies being eaten by dogs, bodies forsaken in deserted houses. Our neighbourhood was one of many such stops. When asked how long he would continue to walk, he smiled and began a tune on his guitar.
We went to Mrittunjoyee Primary School which he called home. He did not have a tent there. He lived on the veranda of the school building. There were many around who have had to accept the same fate. It was not a place to live for a human being, and definitely not a place where someone could invite guests, but he would invite me, he said. We sat together, a yard apart, watched the refugees who cooked in the field, their children playing in the dust, young ones crawling, moving in any direction they liked, eating mud, cow dung, guava seeds, sundried banana peels. A few yards away a woman of eighty was caning her fifty-year-old son. He had assaulted his wife when she had refused to go look for work. The wife wept sitting on the dust. She said she had looked for work day after day, but did not find any; she had offered to work the first day free for the second day’s payment; that was also not enough. Now she was showing her mother-in-law the bruises on her knees.
Abdul Karim said he wanted to continue singing as long as he lived. An entire life devoted to music would not convey the sorrows he had seen—so deep were they. He had seen death in all its possible shapes and colours. One did not need to walk three hundred miles to see death, he said; death was at our doorstep, happening every day, exposing itself concretely to the elements. He walked because he could not stop walking. The more deaths he witnessed, the more pressure he felt to move on. If nature would teach him how to overcome the thought of self-annihilation, he could stop somewhere. Unfortunately it did not. He gave me some peanuts from his bag and threw some at the children, who tumbled upon them. Those were a gift from an admirer from the market, he said. The admirer regularly offered him something.
What one was going to eat for supper was the most awkward question at the time. It was more deeply personal than the question of faith. I did not want to embarrass him. If he would be kind enough to give me company for an hour, I said, I was going to eat something in the restaurant before going home. Of course if he was not busy; I did not know if he had other engagements.
He was not busy, but he must return at sunset to sing for them—he pointed at the tents. ‘Good people,’ he said, ‘very good people; sadly enough, many of them won’t survive another evening to listen to my music. Their souls will fly to a world fairer than the one we live in, so tomorrow is always a better day than today.’
We walked to the restaurant where we sat in one of the front tables. I ordered parata roti and bhaji with tea for both of us. There were not many customers at that time, so we got our food pretty quickly. As we ate, I told him I had been a journalist and had worked with the Freedom Fighter for over two years. He had never seen it or heard of it. So I gave him a brief description: when it began, who the editor was, its role during the war, and why it thrived so well compared with other journals of the day. I told him one day I would have my own paper, which I would call the New Sun. I would write in it whatever I believed the times demanded. I would be its editor; I would change the job description of an editor so that no editor could become rude and inert. I would talk about how life was now, the real life, from the very first issue. I would recreate it as it had been for a long time; I would recreate it in all its ironies, pitfalls, pretensions and sensations. I was keeping notes of everything that I thought and everything that I saw, I said to him, and in that paper I would print them all in a very straightforward language. I would not wait for history to judge. If I waited, it would be too late. I would use my own judgement. How could we disregard something that was so obvious? I would say it was the fault of Sheikh Mujib, who did not see people dying, because he did not want to accept that death would exist in Bangladesh as long as he led the government.
I could go on and on and on, but I just wanted to give Abdul Karim an idea of the intense fury I carried in my heart. I did not want my country to be ruled by a morally bankrupt fascist force like the Awami League. By working for Moina Mia I was saving money for that purpose, I told him finally. Once I had enough money to print a four-page newspaper, even if only once a month, I would not stay idle for a day. ‘Believe you me,’ I said to him. ‘I am not kidding. This is the single most important thing I am aspiring to accomplish.’
He still looked hungry, after eating his second parata. So I ordered one more for each of us. He ate and then burped several times—an indication he had enjoyed the meal.
‘I feel so good now,’ he said in the end. ‘As if I have become innocent again.’ He burped noisily. ‘Ah, what a feeling! I need to sleep.’ He smiled.
‘Sure.’ We both stood up. ‘Please go ahead.’
‘Don’t forget to stop by.’ He looked back from the door as I paid the bill. ‘You know where to find me.’
I nodded.
After Abdul Karim had returned to the school, I walked down the street. At the crossing I saw a woman sitting with a little boy lying like dead before her. She was weeping inside her veil. Rickshaw-wallahs passed before her, pedestrians passed, looking at her indignantly.
I had seen her many times before. I had seen her in various places—in front of the mosque, at the market, at the mouth of the refugee camp, at the bus stop, under the flyover, at the yard of the local two-storey Hindu temple. She always wept with the same sadness. Every time I saw her, she had the boy before her. Though I knew he was not dead but only pretending, I gave her a coin and left without question.
At night I spoke to Nur Hussain. I told him it was my great desire that we invite Abdul Karim to live with us. ‘He is a harmless person, as harmless as a singer could be,’ I told him. ‘He will eat whatever food we have and sleep in the living room. Since he is a wanderer, he does not have any luggage; just a small bag that we won’t even notice. If he lives with the refugees, he will not survive for long. It will be a mistake to let such a visionary person perish. What do you say?’
Nur Hussain remained silent, which angered me. He could remain silent even in the face of the worst atrocities happening in front of him—such an ignorant, mean, worthless person. Simply irritating. Our country desperately needs people like Abdul Karim—doesn’t he see it? Soon there will be nobody around to give us higher knowledge. For its regeneration a nation actually needs knowledge that is not useful, rather than knowledge that is useful. A nation needs to get back its own heart. Only people like Shah Abdul Karim could bring it back to us.
It was useless to consult him, not only about the singer, about anything, important or unimportant. He would choose silence over words, as if he never spoke. He would look into my face, as if I would not have asked the question if I had not had it answered already.
He did not care.
He had no feelings.