For obvious reasons, I was compelled to be more attentive to what I was doing. I needed to evaluate and re-evaluate my present position in terms of the deal. I needed to identify my weaknesses before they broke me down. I was doing fine, I thought, except for one fundamental problem. And I needed to attend to it more seriously.
I must recognize that I had fears about Nur Hussain. True, he had consistently maintained his silence when it came to our business; he had not argued or contradicted me over payment; and I had enjoyed his loyalty throughout; but at this critical point I really needed to know who he was, what he was thinking, what his plans were for the future, so that I could trust him or suspect him or at least keep him within reason. I wanted to know how I must adjust to him for the sake of survival or make him understand why he must adjust to me for the sake of a meaningful future. Considering all our previous conversations, our meals together, our experiences of working together, and considering every thread of communication we had had, I found that I still did not know him.
His loyalty to me might come from his helplessness. He was nothing without me. He was one of the millions of lost young boys who would end their lives pushing bullock carts in busy waste management centres. His loyalty might come from the fact that he was sent to me by Raihan Talukder. If Nur Hussain did not respect me, it would mean he had no respect for Raihan Talukder either. As long as Raihan Talukder was alive, and Nur Hussain needed to return to the village, he could not harbour any disregard for me. If he did, he would disobey the conventional system of respect.
Wouldn’t he be a different person—egocentric, incomprehensible, impertinent—once he knew he was not dependent on me, at least as much as he thought he was? What would happen if someone like me—or smarter—came forward and offered him the services that I offered him in exchange for a more lucrative deal? He did not seem to know what money was; he did not ask how much money he had earned, or how much money I had earned because of him, or even how much his talent was worth. Someone could explain to him what extraordinarily beautiful and momentous things he could do if he were more organized in his life or worked with more self-confidence in his profession. Someone could easily lay out his future—in the flash of an eye. It might also happen that one day he would disappear; just disappear, without a word or message or address. What would I do? I would look for him everywhere: at the market, at the tea stalls, in the refugee camps, throughout the city of Dhaka, in Gangasagar, and still not find him. What would I do then?
I walked in the street harbouring such deep but silent vexations. I walked for a long time, passing the stinky surroundings of the meat-sellers, the dried-up well in the market, the laundry house with its coal-heated iron. When the tailor, who had made Nur Hussain’s Mujib coat, waved at me from his door, I moved on without waving back. At the corner of the road, where the council had placed a massive garbage bin, two beggars blocked my way and extended their tin plates. They did not speak a word, not even when I pushed them to the ground, and threw their plates aside. No, I did not look back. The beggars would not come after me, I knew that; they were too tired to attack anyone and used to being assaulted and beaten regularly.
When I felt worn out, and thought I could not take even one more step, and could not speak a word, good or bad, I found myself on the premises of the Mrittunjoyee school. I sat on the veranda, where Abdul Karim had once given me peanuts to eat, looking at the sea of tents before me. I felt disgusted by the human cries coming from the passages criss-crossing the field. There were people everywhere, standing idly or sitting on the ground like corpses, quarrelling, fighting, chasing or cursing one another. At least two dozen children had crowded at the corner of the field where there was a mountain of garbage. This was garbage from the tents, from people who would throw their babies away before throwing away food, but the children turned upside down every piece of dirt, every can, every bottle, looking for treasures.
Then there was the woman right before me, who fell to the dust in a feverish hallucination to express her sorrow at the loss of her son, drawing a large crowd around her. She looked like a spectre of evil, a creepy amputated monkey jumping to burn itself while loudly cursing its most unavoidable misfortune. I wanted to run there and hit her on the head to relieve her of her unendurable pain. Any person feeling so overwhelmed with hardship had no right to exist. The famine is a time for the able and the strong-willed, I thought. It is a time for the intelligent to reign. They will introduce new ways of life. They will make their own laws to protect themselves from non-existence, the way I have found my own path. They will create a religion of their own, if necessary, which will define success and morality in a completely different language. The famine will set apart the fit from the weak-hearted.
It is not mandatory, I thought, that a society must have people who are vile and who rear filthiness instead of grit and ambition. What will these people do with themselves, if suddenly this field before me turns into a beautiful mansion, and all the tents beautiful suites, and the heap of garbage a dining table with plenty of delicious food and drinks? I could not imagine a different scenario: they would still find something to condemn in one another, chase one another and cancel one another out. All the able and intelligent men in the country, people who are creative and do not surrender to the demands of hungry stomachs, should rush to this camp at this very moment to burn these tents down, to peel the skin off these shameless human animals. Sheikh Mujib should pass the necessary orders to his militiamen to dig a deep trench to bury all the faint-hearted people alive, thus ushering in a new era for the intelligent to grow up with beautiful minds, and help advance this country. It does not matter how many unfit ones are buried to nurture the fit ones; those who cannot fight for a sustainable existence should perish without mercy.
Sheikh Mujib was right to turn a blind eye to these people who insulted the human spirit so extravagantly, I said to myself as I walked out of the school premises. He was right to block the images of death from the media. If it were not for him, more people would have died watching those images than from the famine. If they would not be dead, they would be blind or infertile or eternally beyond control and correction.
As I came closer to the tea stall, I saw a man crawling after a shiny coin thrown two yards away by another man. He had gangrene in both his legs. Repulsed by the stink from his sweaty body, I went inside the stall, and looked back only to find that the second man was engaged in a game with the crawling man. He turned out his pocket to show he had plenty of coins there, and the gangrened man could win them all if he was ready to please him by crawling. The man crawled once again and the crowd around clapped at him.
Though he won’t walk again, I thought, this man is more transparent than Nur Hussain; more readable and considerate. This man is trying to live; reaching for every coin makes his face brighter and his desire to crawl stronger. He is doing exactly what he needs to do at this moment: exercising his right to degrade himself, and to enter a voluntary madness for the sake of a stable tomorrow. Suffering is not an other-worldly affair; it will never be that a person won’t be able to unearth the mystery of his suffering in his lifetime. This man is not acting like a phantom, accusing metaphysical molesters and creatures of the shadow world of working against him. It is better to be mad than dark. He is doing the impossible, I thought; he is a human jewel in a heap of human rubble.
By contrast, I thought with utter frustration, Nur Hussain did not say anything about himself; he did not say how engaged or disengaged he was to and from his commitment with me. For the sake of his gratitude to me for everything he now had, he could have opened himself up to me once in a while, and taken it as his solemn responsibility to tell me he had no rage against me and I would not need to growl or bark at him to know his mind. He was killing me with his silence. He was insulting me with his lack of distress, his imperceptible rashness. If I had a prison of my own, I thought, I would surely have locked him up with the Taiwanese lock. I would have brought him out when I needed him to speak for Sheikh Mujib. I would have starved him of food, of sleep, of conversation, of all human contact, if he had refused to deliver his speeches. I would have beaten him up morning and evening until he gave in, until he learnt to refuse to admit he was in pain when in severe pain, until he had licked my shoes more abjectly than Basu and Gesu took the dust of his feet to their chest, until he had served me with the last drop of blood in his body.
The truth was I did not have any such prison, and he was a citizen of a free country as much as I was. If he decided to create fences around himself, he could do that. I only hoped he would not.
‘It’s a gift from me,’ I said, placing the box before him. It seemed my only option was to make an effort to enter his imagination. ‘A simple thing, not very expensive; looked beautiful on the shelf.’ He was going to speak for Sheikh Mujib; nothing could be more delightful for us. ‘We must celebrate the moment. We must celebrate our success.’
He did not ask what I had in the box. So I sat on the sofa and told him to open it and see. He opened the box indifferently, put the pair of black shoes on the floor, next to his feet. He thought his old pair was good enough, he said. Weren’t they?
‘Try them,’ I said, instead of answering. ‘Don’t be so serious now. See if they fit you.’
He tried only one shoe, the right one, and took a few steps.
‘Any good?’ I asked. ‘If not, we can return them.’
He looked at me. I could not read exactly what he had in his eyes.
They were impenetrable.