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  In a thousand years they have raised storms,

  And flowed rivers of blood and offered it to their God.

  Where is Paradise? The promised angels? The flowing rivers of wine?

  In their endless hunger for sex over eternal time

  They have become ravenous feral beasts!

  Is there another dozakh14 more terrifying?

  Does hunger burn less than hawiya15?

  Does hunger burn any less than passion?

  Those who raise hell for their eternity,

  Let them find their way to Paradise—

  Let us live here on Earth,

  In this blue world—so we may dream of tomorrow,

  And sow equality

  Along the draught of our belligerent times.

  Religion had brought us light once.

  Today some selfish foul people,

  Hawk its bones and rotting flesh—

  R must have been livid. He had used the swearword ‘foul’ without a pause in the poem. He used to speak with a lot of cusswords anyway. Despite the word ‘foul’ giving me a moment’s pause I kept repeating the last couplet to myself—

  They plug the gaps left in time with fables,

  Not opium, religion is hemlock.

  We would have invariably fought over this had he been nearby.

  Note: The book was originally banned in West Bengal because of accusations that certain sections might incite communal tensions. Despite the injunction being later revoked by the Calcutta High Court persistent concerns over renewed communal tensions have forced the author to excise the section from further Bengali publications and leave a blank page in its stead.

  The state of Bangladesh too was in the doldrums. Having read the writing on the wall Ershad was trying to use religion to save his own skin.

  He has hung a holy carrot in front of us,

  A smokescreen for his greed and fear.

  So wear the blindfold,

  The more unseeing, the more faithful—

  More benevolent will be the Light.

  Pluck out your eyes and toss them aside,

  Padlock all rational thought in your brain.

  Bravo! And so you become loyal.

  Other Worlds

  Much happened in 1989, a few good things, quite a few bad ones and some which were neither. In the latter category I can immediately consign the publication of my own book of poetry, Nirbashito Bahire Ontore (Exiled Without and Within), published by Shokal Prakashani and financed entirely by me. This publishing house had been an earlier venture, much before the Shokal Kabita Parisad, and its first publication had been a verse drama by the poet HA. One would have to retrace one’s steps further by two years to talk about HA. I had just begun working at Mymensingh around that time, having been transferred there almost magically after working at the Nakla Health Centre for only a fortnight. Friends from college had all moved to various parts of the country. R had been busy with his prawn farm in Mongla port and rarely, if ever, came to Dhaka.

  When one is alone one is ready to socialize with anyone. I had socialized with HA, a poet hailing from Sirajgunje, whom I had met hardly twice before in Dhaka. Since I used to publish poetry in my literary journal, Senjuti, R had sent me across a host of poetry by many young poets; Awlad had been one among them. After finishing college many of R’s friends—Ikhtiar Choudhury, Kamal Choudhury, HA, Mohammed Sadiq, Farooq Moinuddin—had given up on their dreams of writing poems and short stories, rid themselves of the stench of alcohol and weed and got crewcuts and shaves, acquired nicely fitted suits and, mustering their most serious expressions, joined magisterial posts. One morning I had gone to the Circuit House grounds for an interstate sports meet—not as a spectator but as a doctor for the injured athletes—when I heard my name being called. Turning to see who it was I was greeted by the sight of a man in a suit, his hair neatly combed and parted, smiling sweetly at me. I had had no trouble in recognizing HA.

  ‘Oh, fancy seeing you here!’

  ‘Yes, I work here. It’s only been a few days since I have come here, to join as the information officer. How are you? Where is R? Is he well?’

  ‘I work here too. I don’t know where he is, or how he is.’

  He had smiled widely and left with an invitation for me to drop by the information office at Gulkibari.

  One day soon, while on one of my usual afternoon rickshaw rounds through the city with Yasmin, I had decided to take HA up on his invitation. At the information centre—a yellow single-storey house with a small meadow—HA had wrapped up his work and patiently listened to me narrate the tale of the demise of my relationship with R. As for himself, he had mostly stuck to his poetry and the verse drama which he had been quite hopeful about and had resolved to get published. R used to sing praises of his poems; I was convinced he was a good poet. Besides my duties as a doctor this was what occupied me—a desire to form a society of poets or bring out poetry magazines, or even seriously getting into publishing. I was earning, getting my salary every month, living with my parents and feeding off them, while spending my money caring for artists and writers. As if everyone and everything, in art as well as literature, had been ailing without my assistance! Doctor care for thy patient, let literature be! But it was easier said than done. Old habits were hard to beat and they goaded me to take HA’s precious verse drama to the German Printers one fine day. HA had given me his word that he would arrange for the sale of the books. Without even trying to fathom the merits of the verse drama I had gone ahead and gotten it published. The new publication house was named Shokal16 (Morning), the nickname no one called me by any more. This particular morning had no sunshine though; as it turned out it was beset with darkness and foreboding from the outset.

  Bandi Debota (Captive God), HA’s verse drama, was published by Shokal Prakashani after I had proofread it and spent money out of my own pocket for it. HA had promised to buy the first two hundred copies himself; the remaining three hundred had ended up under my bed, of which a few I had later given to R to sell. I had also taken him to HA’s house but their meeting had not made R happy. In fact, he had been so enraged that on returning to Dhaka he had written a filthy short story about it called ‘Itor’ (The Foul) accusing me of sleeping around with random men, including HA. Unfortunately I was the only one who knew the truth—that I had never considered HA anything other than a friend and nor had I entertained the possibility of anything more. It was becoming difficult to keep calling HA a friend anyway, especially since I had begun to notice certain oddities in his behaviour. He used to come across as indifferent but he had not been entirely so. He would be perennially in a haze, keep talking ceaselessly, sometimes laughing out loud without reason or playing a plaintive tune on the harmonium. Just as suddenly he would go absolutely quiet and nothing would be able to stir him. Even amidst a din he would be lost in his own thoughts.

  He would go on long drives in the office car, working the driver to death all night, while on other days he would give the man some money and casually give him a day off with a smile. The same HA had many faces and it was too difficult to discern which one was real. I also found out about his frequent visits to a pir in Shambhugunje; they would sit and smoke weed, and rumour had it HA was giving the man money too. I noticed he was becoming unpopular in his office with every passing day, unable to remain on cordial terms with his colleagues. It had not been possible for me to solve his work problems but there was one problem I did try to solve—when he fixed his sixteen-year-old maid Miriam’s marriage to a seventy-year-old man. The latter used to be a peon in his office and HA had claimed since the two were madly in love he had decided to get them hitched. I did try talking to Miriam separately to ask her why she was going along with the plan but Miriam had only smiled; the bashful smile a girl smiles when her paramour is mentioned.

  Regardless, I had not been convinced that Miriam and the toothless Abdul Hamid were madly in love. It was possible that the man had some money and a piece of land and so the poor girl’
s father had agreed to the match thinking his daughter would be well cared for. Despite my best efforts, however, I had been unable to stop the wedding. Instead I had attended the marriage of a doddering old man with a girl the age of his granddaughter and even had dinner there. Ever since this incident I had been convinced that HA was hiding something, but he never revealed his secrets, remaining an impenetrable puzzle behind a smokescreen. I would later get to know that HA had beaten his wife and thrown her out of the house and the poor woman had taken the children to Sirajgunje. She used to sing beautifully and he had married her when they had been very young. They had had children early too, much before most of his friends. Whenever I used to ask about his wife, his son or his daughter, he would confess to have no news of them. Neither did he ever send them any money. I could not fail to notice that he did not have an iota of kindness in him for them; to him his wife had been disobedient and so he had punished her. He was the husband so he had the right to do as he pleased. He had been a poet and a thinker, he was this and he was that. He was a lord and a zamindar and I lost all interest in keeping tabs on him. I had been more concerned with the unknown wife, having seriously begun to empathize with her situation.

  Nearly a year passed, the Shokal Kabita Parisad happened and many poets and orators began joining us. At someone’s suggestion that we should invite HA to join our group I had tried looking him up, only to discover to my utter shock that he had morphed into a completely different person. Gone was the suited clean-shaven man, only to be replaced by a homeless destitute, having given away all his belongings to the seer from Shambhugunje with whom he used to smoke pot. He had lost his job as well as his sanity. Barefoot, his clothes filthy, face almost hidden behind a bushy beard, he would turn up at Arogya Bitan and beg Dada for a few spare bucks. He even came to me one day asking for money and stricken with pity I had ended up giving him some. He used to roam about with a big bound notebook under his arm, telling everyone he had written a new verse drama which he was convinced, if printed, was going to cause a sensation the world over. From a first-class gazetted officer and son of the zamindar of Sirajgunje, HA had been reduced to a beggar within the span of a year. What could I have done for someone who had brought this upon himself? I had decided I was not going to entertain his problems and neither was I going to give him any more money. My money was better spent in other endeavours.

  Tariq Sujat took on the responsibility of completing one such endeavour, the one that was neither good nor bad: my book of poems. A young man with a boyish face, Tariq Sujat was one of the poets who had spent sleepless nights when the Shokal Kabita Parisad was being formed. Starting the Parisad, organizing a National Poetry Festival on the crossroads in front of the university—at such an exciting and invigorating juncture R and I had gotten to know many such young poets like Tariq Sujat, Mozammel Babu and Shimul Mohammed. My relationship with R was rapidly deteriorating at that point of time. Even when the relationship was almost over, in its last painful stages I had been in touch with some of them. Mozammel Babu was an engineer; he used to publish a fortnightly literary journal called Saili (Craft) out of an office on the first floor of the stadium. His dedication to the world of literature had made him forsake the material world; despite being a rich father’s son his appearance was exceptionally plain. Even Tariq Sujat was the same. I would travel to Dhaka to give him the money for the print job in instalments. To my delight the cover was being made by Khalid Ehsan. Hailing from Chattagram, Khalid, a poet in his own right, used to travel to Dhaka before the book fair to illustrate covers of the books about to be published.

  Unfortunately, not only did I not get the printed books on the promised date, but nearly a month passed with no sign of them. Tariq too was nowhere to be found. After turning the world upside down searching when I finally did find him it was to learn that work on the book was not over yet. Of course I realized immediately that it had been a mistake dumping the entire responsibility on someone who was dividing his time among a hundred things at the same time. When the books finally emerged from the press it was almost the end of February—Mother Language Day was over and the book fair was nearly in its home stretch. I stashed most of the packets of books under the bed in Chotda’s house. Although I did send some to a few shops in the book fair, I usually avoided passing by them, embarrassed and anxious that I would find my books lying on the shelf unwanted! Neither did I keep track of any sales or inquire about my share of the proceeds. Instead I passed my entire time there chatting at the tea stall, before returning to Mymensingh with the sack of books after the end of the fair.

  I also sent some books to the Kabir Library and Parul Library by the Ganginar, to be put up for sale, and I frequently visited the libraries to glance at my unsold books and sigh. It was NM who brought me out of my depression. I had met NM through SHA. SHA, who used to write beautiful rhymes, had come to Mymensingh for a poetry recital. He used to be on good terms with poet Ataul Kareem Shafeeq of Mymensingh. Ataul Kareem had brought him along to a Poetry of Resistance event organized by the Shokal Kabita Parisad in the courtyard of the Town Hall. SHA was to recite a poem there. There were not too many people in the audience that day. Nevertheless, SHA had been so impressed by the group recital by members of the Shokal that he had gone back to Dhaka and informed Swarasruti, a leading poetry association. Swarasruti had been in the middle of preparations for a big event in the auditorium of the British Council, with leading and talented poets from both sides of the border scheduled to attend. Invitations were being sent out to various artists and groups of both Bengals for solo and group recitation events and Shokal Kabita Parisad had received one too.

  Medical college student Pasha, Rosalyn who used to study at Agricultural University, small and bespectacled budding intellectual Dolan, Yasmin and I—with unbound energy we had set ourselves to preparing for the programme. The rehearsals were conducted at Abakash where our voices rang out with lyrics on equality, equity and a society free of discrimination. The girls clad in jamdani saris and the boys in white kurtas, we had arrived at Dhaka for the recital. We had gone up to the stage and recited our poems, some solos, some with two of us or three, and even the entire group. There had been not one mistake, not one nervous tic and our little recitation team from the suburbs had received thunderous applause from the audience. Usually a team from the suburbs got a raw deal at Dhaka; the city’s poets and artists have always been bullies to a degree. However, paying no attention to any sort of bullying, we had long and stirring get-togethers with our poet friends from Dhaka on the British Council grounds. It was at one such gathering that SHA had introduced me to NM.

  Rather unattractive, with raised teeth, a raised forehead and unkempt hair which had begun to grey rather early, NM could best be described as a bag of bones. He gesticulated wildly while speaking and his tiny ass in his tiny fifty kilo frame would sway whenever he moved. NM was the editor of a weekly literary magazine called Khabarer Kagaj (Newspaper) which published articles on a mix of topics—politics, literature, society, culture—and which had slowly built up quite a reputation. He published it cheap too, on newsprint. Of the few dozen weeklies published across the country Khabarer Kagaj was the most different. Many renowned poets and writers had contributed to various issues of the journal; we had always felt the need for something just as ingenious in our country. As the journal gained popularity, NM too was becoming more well known in literary circles. A journalism student could not have suddenly gotten into the good graces of poets and literary figures just like that unless he had talent of his own, irrespective of how he looked.

  Just like Tariq, NM too was always trying to do multiple things at the same time. He was the president at Swarasruti, or something of that nature, even though he was not a poet; nor was he someone known for his recitation skills. He had one exceptional quality though: he had no qualms about admitting his shortcomings. That is not to say he was any less proud of his achievements either—his pride would become apparent from time to time, sometimes unobtru
sive and sometimes too stark to miss. At first glance there had been no reason for me to like this man who spoke in a strong Komilla dialect. But it did not take long for our meeting to advance into acquaintance and from there to friendship. To be fair it was NM who had decided that he was going to be friends with me at any cost and he usually had a way of getting what he wanted. Another quality of his that I admired was his enthusiasm about doing new things. He was always planning new things and then jumping head-first into implementing them. A passionate, earnest, tireless and hard-working man, NM, like SHA, was the same age as me. Our tête-à-têtes too used to be especially engaging.

  Despite having left the medical profession, SHA had done well for himself—he had started an advertising agency called Gati. He used to say Gati was for sustaining his life and literature was for sustaining his soul—to his credit he was managing both just fine. SHA’s friend Sayed Al Farooq had a garments business; he was a poet too and used to publish his poetry with his own money. The two of them used to also run a poetry journal together. After they had a falling out SHA would often say the most vicious and unkind things about Al Farooq. Despite their numerous differences this was one aspect where both NM and SHA were remarkably similar—if they were to like someone they considered that person to be the best in the world, their respect for them almost reverential as it were. However, if they were to dislike someone then they would not hesitate to verbally eviscerate the person. Not that I figured all this out immediately; it took me a long time to understand these things.

  Eventually it so happened that despite having met him through SHA I was meeting NM more often than the former; the latter’s enthusiasm too was partly to blame for that. As for SHA, our meetings became less frequent solely because of his own actions. One day he invited me to his house. On reaching there I realized his wife was away from Dhaka and we were alone in the house. At first the conversation was fairly staid, until I suddenly found him right next to me praising my beauty and trying to kiss me. I tried pushing him away discreetly, repeatedly, even tried moving and sitting elsewhere and each time he kept trying to come nearer and touch me. I tried explaining to him that I was not interested in letting him kiss me, that he should not destroy the beautiful friendship we had. When he still refused to back down, refused to keep his hands to himself, I was left with no choice but to leave. After kissing me perhaps he would have gone back to his wife, Muniya, and, chanting the Hajar al-Aswad, performed a penitent lover’s Hajj by kissing her on her black lips.