Epilogue

The sun is setting. I can see the last glow of the day on the sprawling coconut leaves in the school field. The wind is slow. The dust is returning to the earth.

This is my last evening under the open sky. If I come here again, and stroll in these streets, and view these landscapes, it will be in my imagination, through the tunes, images and colours that I have gathered in my memory.

And I have gathered enough of them.

The cement floor of the Shaheed Minar is very inviting for a short and undisturbed break, before I finally withdraw myself from the world. With my cheek on the floor, I can hear footsteps, the noise of rickshaws running frantically—they are now returning home carrying weary party workers. I guess Sheikh Mujib’s birthday party is now over. His ghost will retire at least for a night.

When I was a small boy, they said the more I ran, the quicker I would grow up. I ran mile after mile in rice fields, wheat fields, jute fields; I stumbled on hard mounds of earth, and jumped into ditches and canals before learning how to swim. I think I grew tall before my time. After my confrontation with Nur Hussain, I ran again. I crossed a vast distance, but this time to become small, to detach myself from everything that I knew and wanted to be, and to become extinct. I wish I had never learnt to run in the first place. Growing up is a curse, if one failed to grow a sense of responsibility as well.

I can see a line of birds flying south. So many days I have watched them until they became small, indistinct and finally disappeared in the flares of the horizon. Today, my sight is blurry; I cannot see far. But I can still imagine the shock that will surface in people’s eyes when they find out who I really was. My colleagues in the city’s excavation team, when they read my story in local newspapers, will be able to decipher the riddle of my sudden disappearance. They will say that they knew from the beginning that there was something unpredictable about me. Gatekeeper Ruhul Amin, if he is still alive somewhere under the sun, will read my story only to condemn himself for showing me respect when I went to see Moina Mia. I was a cold-blooded killer, he will say, indeed, so cold-blooded that even a killer like him could not stand a person like me.

From these stairs, I can see the floodlights of the Sheikh Mujib police station on Sheikh Mujib Drive; I can see several security vehicles sprinting down Sheikh Mujib Street, blowing emergency horns. Have they arrested one or two protesters at the square, who joined Sheikh Mujib’s birthday ceremony peacefully, but then, when the first opportunity came, displayed placards portraying him as a man wearing human skulls around his neck, and said he was our founding father but also our deadliest dictator? It would not be a surprise. It would not be a surprise, either, if all Sheikh Mujib followers in the country came out on to the street and, with their most hateful voices, demanded death sentences for the protesters.

I guess they will do the same in my case. After my confession, they will instigate a whole country of people against me and together condemn me for good. Why make such a fuss after so many years, they will wonder; why bring the dead back to life? Is it because a sinner will always refuse to drown until other sinners have gathered themselves under his arms? I am not afraid of them. There is no room for fear in my heart. At this moment, I can accept only pain and remorse and despair. I must remember my cruelty as long as possible and as honestly as possible. I must relive it every day as a process of atonement, until I am done. So leaving all details behind, and all debates, I say to myself: the story is long but it is simple; I have carried an excruciating guilt on my shoulders; it was pulling me to the ground every moment of my life. I have not admitted this guilt for a long time, have fought against it bullishly, and have also won for a long time. I do not want to win any more, especially by defeating part of myself again and again. Sheikh Mujib and the Awami League may not recognize the deaths they caused by allowing the famine to grow deeper with their maladministration, but I will recognize the death that I have caused with my misjudgement. Then I will be free.

My heart beats, fast and faster, and then becomes normal again, when I stand before the station gate, and when I feel I am there, finally there, very close to the moment when I won’t need to be anxiously thinking about my salvation any more. I do not have any weight now but the weight of tears rolling up my throat, looking for a way to come out. My life has been a waste. By destroying Nur Hussain, I have only destroyed myself.

‘Good luck, my country,’ I whisper, as I proceed through the gate. ‘Good luck, and goodbye, my misery; a very happy goodbye.’