30

Thirty-five Years of Darkness

When the last money was spent, sometime in August 1975, I left the city for a small community in suburban Dhaka where I lived among strangers. I became a salesman at a vegetable market, then took an apprenticeship as a light-duty mechanic, then became a digger for the city corporation on their dam construction project. Two consecutive seasons I worked as a mosquito sprayer. I was good at it. At the end of the second season my supervisor wanted to make me Lead Hand for the local unit. I said I did not want to be a Lead Hand; I did not want to take responsibility for others; would he please offer the position to someone else? He did not have anyone more efficient than I, he said; I must accept it. He would try to grant me more compensation for the extra responsibilities and a few days’ leave after the peak season.

I disappeared the next day without sending in an explanation, and went to another community, just a few miles away, to become a schoolteacher. I taught history to schoolchildren. I was glad that the textbooks said nothing about the 1974 Famine, although they spoke about what happened after that, the killing of Sheikh Mujib in 1975. Following the syllabus, I introduced and reintroduced him as the father of our nation. I quoted from his 7 March speech while teaching the lesson covering the history of our independence. My voice did not match his voice at all, but I found the students listening to me as attentively as the refugees had listened to Nur Hussain at the Shaheed Minar. There would always be an audience for that speech, I thought; it would never cease to raise one’s hair. Then I explained how unfortunate we were as a people—we had murdered our father; we had not given him even five years to organize himself, to take the necessary measures to make the country thrive. As a conclusive statement I said that although the killers had killed him like cowards in the dark of the night, they could not kill his spirit; it would live on to inspire us through our tumultuous journey to democracy; he would be available to us at any moment. It was history edited, a history lavishly distorted; but I enjoyed the fact that I did not have to speak about the famine, thus nothing about the inheritance of an immense dishonour. I could teach history decade after decade in Bangladesh without ever remembering Nur Hussain and my sinful past and explaining actually why Sheikh Mujib was killed so brutally.

I taught history for three seasons and then quit. How would students know about honour if they did not know that dishonour was easier and more penetrating, if they did not know people could die in their millions even if the earth did not move? These students would be judges, lawyers, executives, soldiers, and of course, leaders; they would be in charge of our nation and guide it through time. It was important that they knew the problems of our past so that they learnt exactly how to avoid them in the future.

I entered more humble professions in the days to come: cobbler, bricklayer, poultry worker, for some time a boatman on the Dhaka–Keranigonj route. Every so often I did not know what my job would be for the day. I stood in line with day labourers waiting to be hired. I did all sorts of work—cleaning backyards, removing fallen trees, cutting harvests, drying jute fibre on the highway, dyeing winter cloaks, rescuing drowning people from the river. Even these appeared satisfactory after a while; they gave me ample time to contemplate my life. I had my evenings free; I had the respect of my fellow workers. They invited me for tea, brought sweets for me on religious occasions. The poultry owner gave me a dozen eggs every month; his mother repaired the sleeves of my shirt.

That was not what I wanted. With time passing very slowly, I wanted to be hated and tortured; I wanted something punishing; something that would resurrect me from my own dead existence. I had sold my heart to the killer that I was. I had sinned. In everything I saw and heard, I wanted to feel the pain that I had caused Nur Hussain at the very last moment of his life.

While working as a rescue worker, I saw a small vacancy notice for the Anjuman in a local newspaper. They were looking for a gravedigger. Gravedigger? That job was mine, I thought. It was mine, and it would be mine until someone had to dig my own grave. Nobody remembers a gravedigger, neither the living nor the dead; nobody wanted a relationship with a gravedigger. I thought it would be appropriate work for me, an appropriate punishment. Every corpse would remind me of Nur Hussain, and every evening I would cry for him sitting in my lonely room.

I ran to the Anjuman office, told the recruiting manager I was interested in the position and that I was strong and had strong nerves. I was a survivor, I told him; I had seen many deaths from up close; I would not become emotionally involved while interring a body. I was not allergic to bad smells either, I added, and he could pay me a reasonable salary for my service. The manager asked if I had used a shovel before. I had; spade, hoe, plough, everything; particularly a shovel. I was born in a village and I had lived there until I was sixteen, when I moved to the city. Then for a long time I did small jobs that involved lots of hard labour. I specifically mentioned the digging job that I had done for the city corporation. He watched me keenly, as if he had never seen anyone with so much enthusiasm for such a job. Then he asked if I knew how deep, wide and long a grave was, and how much it could be raised above the ground. I had done my homework; five feet, four feet, six feet, and one foot, respectively, I answered at once. He gave me a form to fill out.

Seasons changed, children who survived the famine grew up and begot children. Several rivers ran dry; devastating floods and tsunamis killed thousands of people. A few thousand more were shot dead, hanged or kidnapped and tortured by dictators and elected governments, including the Awami League. The population of the country doubled; more mass graves of the nationalists who had sacrificed their lives in the liberation war were discovered; half a dozen memorials were erected in their honour. Surprisingly, the country’s archaeologists did not find the graves or remains of those that had died during the famine; therefore no memorials were erected for them. Governments and political parties opposed to the Awami League did not talk about them because they themselves were ruthless like the Awami League; they too had lots to hide and distort; they too needed protection against the truth. I myself had grown old, old and irrelevant, because of my self-contradictions, because of my memory, which clearly contained the face of one Nur Hussain, who cursed and loved me simultaneously.

When I was alone, alone before a green, open field, I saw him sitting on his bed, his face between his hands, squeezed and dark with some pain he could not digest or ignore or explain. Then I saw him speaking, standing at the Shaheed Minar, speaking to bring all Bangladeshis together under one roof. I heard his voice—in all its defectiveness and perfection. I heard him memorizing the 7 March speech phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, trying to pronounce every word correctly, giving them the typical Mujibist phonetic character. And I saw myself standing beside him, coaching him through the whole process of learning the speech, wearing the Mujib coat, and disciplining him so he did not speak too much. I saw everything that happened afterwards, how one day things changed and I cut short his life with my ill-gotten decision. Sometimes the images came with all the details; sometimes they were just outlines, one or two disconnected moments from the past. They came and went away and came back again; they sat on my chest and tortured me constantly.

I lived in many places; so did not buy very many things. I shed my needs gradually and came to be satisfied with a bare flat, with a mat, a quilt, a pillow, a saucepan, a stove, a plate, a mug in the toilet, two plastic containers for dal and salt, and two sets of clothes. And when I moved to a new place, I left everything behind to erase my past. I did not keep any copies of the Freedom Fighter or any newspaper published during the famine. They were not necessary. I had them in my head. I could easily remember how dark the water had been that the refugees drank to catch cholera. I could give a proper description of the night when Basu and Gesu were shot and Ruhul Amin entered a temporary phase of self-evaluation and decided that he was right to pull the trigger.

Though the Anjuman buried around seventy unclaimed bodies every month, more during general strikes, elections and religious festivals, and I dug almost half of the graves, soon I understood it was not enough for me. Gravedigging had its piety, but it could not salvage me. No act of generosity or kindness or punishment was adequate to make the wrong right. I could dig a thousand graves and cry a thousand nights, but it would not match what I had done. I would still be avoiding the truth that I wanted to see reflected in our national consciousness—guilt for the dead. It was only by admitting to the world that I had killed Nur Hussain could I finally deal with the matter, if dealing with it was at all possible.