One of the conditions of working for Moina Mia was that he had absolute control over Nur Hussain’s speaking schedules. The purpose of Nur’s performances was to bring people under the umbrella of the Awami League. At no time should that agenda be undermined.
Though there was no need to speak at the market any more, as Moina Mia kept his monetary promises and paid us a generous fee for our services, I often noticed Nur Hussain felt like talking whenever the fishermen or the rickshaw-wallahs threw the Joy Bangla slogan at him. ‘How is Sheikh Mujib doing today?’ they asked him, and when he did not begin the speech, after I had given him a hard look, they asked if he was not in the mood; if he was suffering from stomach ache or constipation. ‘All right, another day. Maybe when the wind falls and the mangoes ripen.’ Then they would pass.
Many times he would start delivering the speech as we returned from one of Moina Mia’s scheduled appearances. He would not look at me, thus very consciously and categorically avoiding me. He would look back to make sure no other rickshaw was following us, then say: My brothers, I have come here before you today … He would continue until he finished with: I look back on the past twenty-three years, and I see nothing but a history of bloodshed. Then he would repeat ‘bloodshed’ several times; every time the word turning softer and softer before getting lost between his lips. The rickshaw would continue moving, the rickshaw-wallah pedalling silently—probably he did not want to distract him—and we would sit next to each other, without talking, as if we were returning from a funeral. Then no noises on the road, no songs or familiar music coming from roadside stores, no neighbourhood policeman, postal officer, banker or teacher, whoever we met on our way, could push him out from his silence. He would sit as if he had lost the will to live and the material world did not have the ability to touch him again. Reaching home he would go to his room, I to mine. The night would pass in uninterrupted silence.
Sometimes he spoke at home. He would say a few paragraphs and then take a long, long, pause before speaking again. Did he fall asleep momentarily? Did he faint? I would run to see him. Then he would speak another paragraph or a few lines and lie down. Sometimes he spoke behind closed doors. I understood he was not sure what I might think of him. Well, I did not think anything. If I thought anything, I thought about the unfathomable fear I had in my mind that something bad would happen to us very soon and we would be undone. I could see it coming, coming speedily and dangerously, but I did not know how fatal it would be. Let it come. But before it came, and washed us away with its ruthless terror, let us live fully. So I gave him freedom in the flat.
Though I needed some quiet time for myself, and did not want to drag the moneymaking process up to my bed, I shrank my existence at home as much as possible. I wanted him to be happy with our way of life. I wanted him to be thankful that we met each other at such a critical moment of our lives. If he needed more space for himself, that was perfectly all right with me.
One day I advised him not to wear his Mujib coat when we went out to buy groceries or for evening walks or when we went to watch the neighbouring children play with small round marble stones on the street. ‘Just for a few days,’ I said. ‘Maybe a few weeks, after which we’ll evaluate the situation.’ He would wear the coat, I said, only when we went to collect a crowd for Moina Mia. He did not ask why. He never asked questions. But I had to be frank with him. I needed to educate him so that I did not need to explain to him every little thing we might encounter every day.
There might be some wicked characters lurking in the crowd who had no common sense and did not appreciate what we were doing, I told him. Some people might behave badly simply because they had not been trained to be courteous when they were children. Some people might be insane or just rude to the world because they cared for nothing. Some of them might seek a different society because they believed in something that Sheikh Mujib found hard to endorse and fight for, for example, a country based singularly on the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by the post-Leninist soviet leader, Leon Trotsky. Those belligerent hotheads, who could not be easily identified among the crowd, might get violent with us. They might want to stifle us whenever there was an opportunity. My fear was not baseless. Of late, people had become rather stubborn and inconsiderate. They would not concede favours to anyone, or for anything. Society as a whole was turning increasingly desperate and confrontational. Often there were fires in our neighbouring areas, in the market. Some of these incidents could be traced back to angry and mentally unstable individuals, a few of which were suicidal, but most of them remained a mystery. The mystery did not happen by chance, I told Nur Hussain; somebody must have been behind them, somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. That somebody could be anybody from the neighbourhood, from the tea stall, from the street corner or from the bus or even from the Friday prayers. A bank teller was arrested the other day on the high street. Allegedly, he was carrying a canister of kerosene and a matchbox. He was old and experienced, a respected man in the community, but he would not speak when asked about his intention. ‘I am guilty,’ he said. ‘Do whatever you want to do with me; but remember: I will not be the last one to carry fire.’ That was all he said.
There were confrontations among rickshaw-wallahs, some of them ending in serious physical assaults, blood on the dust, gouging of eyes, stabbings. Traders yelled at one another more frequently; there was no courtesy. The rules of fair competition were buried for good. Excessive price hike had its curses. Public properties were stolen or vandalized at a record rate. Households were burning with anger. One could not walk along the streets without being distracted by quarrels among agitated neighbours or siblings. Sometimes women’s voices drowned the men’s. I saw drunken women crawling on the road, their husbands yelling at them from the dark depths of their tiny houses.
On top of everything, an increasing number of anonymous artists were now going out every night with their paint rollers, brushes and aerosol cans to create graffiti of various sizes and colours on city walls, storefronts, abandoned vehicles and railway compartments, public buildings, monuments, construction fences, hospital boundaries, and high railings of bridges. They were hard-working people, I must admit. They had plans. In spite of the vigilance of the law and order authorities, they found their ways. One night they worked on the north side of the city, the following night they moved south.
Though the municipality cleaning squads removed the graffiti as soon as possible, some of it stayed on for days, or even weeks, spreading previously unheard of radical political messages among the public. Because its removal demanded many special and expensive arrangements, some graffiti was left completely untouched. ‘Be Prepared to Die’, one such graffiti on the railway route leading to Dhaka read, ‘The Famine is Coming’. The artist had painted two skinny boys with big mouths and bloated bellies staring into the horizon, between the two warnings. A stencilled graffiti, which I saw only once—and which said, ‘No Rice to Eat? Eat Awami League Leaders’—was on the General Post Office building. It was highly decorative, but it was removed within a day. Later I heard that the same graffiti had surfaced on many buildings at various locations in the city and the municipality gave up trying to remove it. They engaged their resources in removing graffiti that was larger in size and appearing in crowded, prominent areas.
During that time I came across many banknotes which were defaced with slogans like ‘Leave Now’, ‘Prime Minister for Sale’, ‘Death to the Dictator’, ‘Who is this Person? What is He Doing in Our Country?’ Some had Sheikh Mujib’s eyes blinded with fountain pens; some showed him with bloody vampire teeth, some had his face crossed out. Some came with scribbles next to his portrait. ‘What is the value of this banknote? Zero. Don’t let Sheikh Mujib turn Bangladesh into a wasteland,’ read a five-taka bill. The local grocer handed me a one-taka bill which was completely hidden behind its end-to-end scribbling. ‘Believing in freedom is not a crime,’ it read. ‘But believing in Sheikh Mujib is. Because he does not stand for freedom. Not any more. Give me my country back. Give me my rifle back. God condemns the Awami League.’ When scribbling on banknotes went out of control, the government forced the Central Bank’s director to go to the media to declare that bills with such writings or stamps or additional signs would be considered invalid. In a press release the government also said possession of defaced banknotes might lead to arrest and imprisonment.
It was obvious a good number of individuals or underground organizations were out there who did not want to let the time pass by without a fight. I was sure they were not active only in the capital, but also in other cities and towns. They were doing what nationally circulated newspapers and magazines failed to do. Their intention might be to serve the people, but at the moment they were instigating the authorities against them. I did not want us to be the victims of that fight.