I Look at the Face

Shahidul Zahir

Translated from the original Bengali by V Ramaswamy

Translator’s Note: Shahidul Zahir is the first and only author I read in Bangla as a reader, greedy for his prose. And I felt compelled to begin translating him at once. Commenting on my translation of Zahir’s novella, Life and Political Realty, Shruti Debi, my literary agent, said it was all about cadence, and that I had got it right. I could just as well have got it wrong, for all I knew. All I was doing was hearing the Bangla and rendering that into English as exactly as possible, while stretching acceptable English usage and syntax as far as possible. As with Subimal Misra, I treated Shahidul Zahir's text as almost sacrosanct, the evolved work of a great master, taking no frivolous liberties as a translator!

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Perhaps Chan Miya of Ghost Lane had been nourished by monkey’s milk as an infant because if you ever met someone like, say, Mamun, i.e. Mahmud’s Ma, Mrs Zobeda Rahman, who was witness to that, at their residence in No. 25, and if the conversation turned to the subject of Chan Miya, she never forgot to say, ‘O toh bandorer dudh khaichhilo, Oh, but he drank monkey’s milk’, and if anyone ever cast doubt on that, she would definitely get into an argument and, if necessary, quarrel. For instance, take Fakhrul Alam Ledu, he was Mamun’s childhood friend, they were both first-year Intermediate students, let’s say he went one day to Mamun’s house looking for him, but maybe Mamun was not at home then, something like that could definitely happen, Ledu might have gone there, and Mamun may well not have been there then, and so it was a most normal thing for Mamun’s Ma to have then met Fakhrul Alam Ledu when she emerged from her room. And after that, if Mamun’s Ma said, ‘Since you’re here, come, have a cup of tea’, and if Fakhrul Alam Ledu agreed, then, in that case, the circumstance would have been created for some stray conversation between Ledu and Mamun’s Ma as they sat together in the house; the subject of Chan Miya could have come up in the course of this conversation, and if Fakhrul Alam Ledu made any caustic remarks in that connection, Mamun/Mahmud’s Ma would definitely tell him, ‘You don’t know anything!’

But why wasn’t Mahmud ul Hye, a.k.a. Mamun, at home? And so Fakrul Alam Ledu asks Mamun’s Ma, ‘Where’s Mamun, where’s he gone?’ Perhaps Mamun’s Ma knows where he’s gone, or maybe she doesn’t know, maybe she says, ‘I don’t know where he’s gone,’ or maybe she says, ‘He went to fetch sawdust.’ Mrs Zobeda Rahman used a sawdust-fired stove in her kitchen.

Perhaps one day, because their school was closed, Mamun left home with an empty wheat-sack – the same sack which his Ma had lengthened by stitching it together with another sack – and proceeded towards the timber yard in Noyabajar. Perhaps he walked down the Twin Bridge and Lalchan Mokim Lane and then made his way through Malitola and presented himself at ‘The New Chondroghona Saw Mill & Timber Depot’, perhaps it was raining that day, and the sawmill had closed in the evening after running all day, and after reaching there and bargaining with some employee or sawyer about the price of sawdust and a price of three taka for a sack was finally agreed upon, he descended into the pit of sawdust at the base of the mechanical saw. The dust from the wood sawn all day had accumulated in the pit, so after descending into this pit and seeing the mountain of sawdust there, perhaps he felt happy like Ali Baba, and perhaps on account of being rapt or perhaps for some other reason, he somehow got buried under a mound of sawdust while trying to fill his sack, and since the employees of the mill didn’t notice that he remained concealed like that. That night, four 5-ton lorries belonging to Abdul Wodood Chowdhury, the brother of the sawmill owner, Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, were parked in front of ‘The New Chondroghona Saw Mill & Timber Depot’, and a group of porters who were ready in advance carried sawdust from the pit in baskets to the trucks and poured it on top of some white sacks that were already inside, thus concealing them. The porters asked the drivers of the lorries, ‘What’s going today?’ But the drivers of the lorries didn’t reply, they furrowed their brows and looked deadpan as they sat with a lordly air, their hands on the steering wheel, but nothing was lost thereby because these porters were extremely intelligent, they reckoned, ‘It’s fertilizer, it’s going to Burma.’ Or perhaps these porters weren’t intelligent, but be that as it may, the problem that should have arisen in this regard irrespective of whether the porters were intelligent or otherwise did arise, and Mamun Miya left Dhaka for Chittagong together with the fertilizer and sawdust. This is how it happened: while these intelligent or stupid porters were loading their baskets with sawdust, they surely found him, perhaps he was lying unconscious within a mound of sawdust when they discovered him, but given that they were unable to turn the lights on while working and therefore it was dark inside the mill, they bundled the unconscious Mamun into a basket and threw him into one of the lorries, but it did occur to them that perhaps it was a piece of wood, it wasn’t farfetched on their part to think so, after all, they were porters who were the offspring of porters, and so they thought that whatever lay within sawdust couldn’t be anything but wood, perhaps it was something expensive, like teak or beech, it could also be siris or gorjon, or some sundry tree, like kadam or chhatim, or perhaps just any kind of wood. Or perhaps they didn’t think along those lines, perhaps they were not so stupid, and when they were using their hands to load the sawdust into their baskets and found Mahmud ul Hye lying there, they realised, notwithstanding the darkness, that it was a man and not a block of wood. Because they found that he had two arms, two legs and a head, and these porters knew that it was men who had two arms and legs and a head, and so they got scared, it occurred to them that perhaps this was a corpse, and then they displayed their intelligence: without saying a word, they carried Mamun in a basket and dumped him inside a lorry. Because they thought that if they tried to report this matter now, it was they who would get into trouble with the police, who would beset them with a thousand-and-one questions, perhaps they’d kick and punch them too, so it was best to dispatch the stuff found in the mill-owner’s sawdust in the lorry belonging to the owner’s brother!

Perhaps Mamun was unconscious as he lay amidst the sawdust and so, when the lorry left for Chittagong late at night, he wasn’t aware of anything; because it had been raining that day, the lorries had tarpaulin covers, and when they left Noyabajar, they would go down the road beside the Dolaikhal, turn at the Jatrabari crossroads and get on the road to Chittagong. It’s difficult to say where exactly the lorries would have gone to unload the goods that day, the stuff might have been loaded on a trawler or sampan in Chittagong, either at Firingibajar or Sadarghat or at the foot of the Kalurghat bridge, but before that the lorries fell into the clutches of the mobile squad of the police near Chouddogram, in Cumilla District, and although the police halted three lorries, one lorry didn’t stop, and amidst the fluster the veteran driver quickly turned into some side road and escaped. But perhaps the lorry driver got scared, and so he took the lorry directly to Satkaniya, where the export merchant, Abdul Wodood’s village house was, or perhaps the lorry went to Firingibajar or Sadarghat, and when the merchant’s employees heard about the lorries having been chased by the police, they decided that the goods ought to be taken to the village house. So in this way, Mamun Miya arrived, together with the consignment of smuggled urea, at Abdul Wodood Chowdhury’s house in Boyaliyapara, in the Satkaniya region of Chittagong District, and after that, he encountered Asmantara Hoore Jannat. And so one day, Mahmud ul Hye’s Ma narrated to Fakhrul Alam Ledu the story of Chan Miya, and said, ‘Just go and ask Chan Miya’s Ma, Khoimon, what he consumed.’ Perhaps that was because there were monkeys in the moholla during the time of Chan Miya’s infancy, and those monkeys could be seen on the roofs and walls of the houses in the moholla, with their brown backs, whitish bellies and red backsides; they used to walk along walls or lie on the parapet of some house with their tails hanging. Perhaps there were one or two or many female monkeys in this troop of monkeys then, with the baby monkeys hanging clinging to the breast between the legs of the female monkeys. Perhaps Chan Miya had drunk the milk of some monkey like that when he was an infant, when his Ma, Khoimon, a.k.a. Mochhommot Koimon Begum, left him unattended at home, latched the door from outside and proceeded from her house at No. 36 to the house of Nurani Bilkis, a.k.a. Upoma Begum, at No. 37 and requested her, ‘Aafa amare ek kaap chini dhar daen. Sister, please lend me a cup of sugar.’

Nurani Bilkis’s husband, Fajlur Rahman ran a ration shop in Raysha Bajar, and so there were huge quantities of sugar, rice and wheat in his house, but she simply glared at Khoimon Begum; perhaps Moyna Miya was alive then, or maybe he wasn’t, because Moyna Miya went missing in 1971, he used to sell taro stems and gourds of different kinds in Thataribajar, he was a vegetable-seller in Thataribajar; so hearing Khoimon’s request, Nurani Bilkis glared at her, she observed how comely she was, and so she got annoyed once again, and she thought that a missing vegetable seller's wife, who, like the proverbial washerman’s dog, belonged neither here nor there, oughtn’t to be so comely, and so she said, ‘Ekdin ahosh tyaler laiga, ekdin ahosh chinir laiga – khali chaya mainga khach ki tui! You come one day for oil; you come the next day for sugar – do you just go around begging for food!’

Perhaps Khoimon felt ashamed and replied, ‘Please give it to me; I swear I’ll give it back to you as soon as I draw my rations next week! 

But Nurani Bilkis was not moved by such talk. She kept Khoimon waiting – she thought that Khoimon would get annoyed and perhaps leave after some time, but she didn’t leave; she squatted in the kitchen and waited silently, holding a cup made of porcelain with a broken handle. Nurani Bilkis carried on with her cooking, she poured out the rice starch, tempered the dal, after which she went inside on the pretext of some important task and then returned with a busy air, and all the while Khoimon had just sat there, so Nurani Bilkis addressed her again, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

Khoimon proffered the cup in her hand and said, ‘I told you, I’ll return it!’

Nurani Bilkis felt utterly helpless, she got angry, and after that, she turned despondent when she realised that there was no way she could drive out this coarse, shameless and cunning woman; she said, ‘Go and get my wheat ground.’

Khoimon agreed, ‘I’ll do that.’ 

Nurani Bilkis was adamant, ‘No, go now and get it ground first; you’ll get the sugar after that.’

Khoimon told her that the wheat-mill wasn’t open in the afternoon and that she’d get the wheat ground when the shop opened in the evening; there was nothing Nurani Bilkis could do then, and so she was compelled to give Khoimon the sugar. Returning home with the sugar that day, Khoimon saw that the door was unlatched and that a troop of monkeys was jostling inside the room. Perhaps the monkeys had entered the room with a purpose, and if they found bananas or radishes inside, they would carry that away; but they had found Khoimon’s pot of cooked rice, they brought the rice down from the shelf and began to eat it up, but perhaps the infant Chan Miya woke up and began bawling then, and so the monkeys became alarmed, they were afraid that perhaps hearing Chan Miya’s screams people would arrive there – and that’s when the incident of a female monkey suckling Chan Miya occurred. Perhaps there was a mother-monkey in the troop of these thieving monkeys, and perhaps she was very clever, or maybe she had turned soft-hearted on account of being a baby’s mother, so she then advanced and thrust a hairy nipple into Chan Miya’s mouth, and slurping noisily as he sucked at the teat, Chan Miya drank the monkey’s milk and fell asleep. When Khoimon went later, in the evening, to Nurani Bilkis’ residence to get the wheat ground, perhaps she herself narrated this tale, and said, ‘When I returned home I saw there was a troop of monkeys inside the room and they had brought the rice pot down and were eating that, and a baby monkey was playing with my boy; or perhaps the monkeys hadn’t unlatched the door and entered the room on that first day, perhaps Khoimon made a mistake, or simply made it up; perhaps when she returned from Nurani Bilkis Upoma’s place with the sugar, she saw one or two or maybe five monkeys sitting quietly atop a wall near her room, and perhaps the female monkey with a baby was also among them, and that day Khoimon observed that the female monkey’s eyes looked ashen and melancholy as she gazed into the room through the window grille, perhaps they were glistening. Seeing this, Khoimon’s heart missed a beat, and she said to herself, what’s this? What are so many monkeys doing here? And then, rushing inside the room, she saw to her relief that Chan Miya was sleeping spreadeagled on his back. After that, Khoimon went in the evening to pick up the wheat to be ground and seeing her, Nurani Bilkis exclaimed, ‘Why have you come so late?’

Khoimon replied, ‘Give me two measures of wheat-flour!’

Nurani Bilkis turned breathless with rage when she heard that, and she retorted wheezingly, ‘You’re a crooked one indeed! When I gave you sugar in the morning, you said you’d get the wheat ground, and now you ask for two measures of wheat-flour! You don’t need to do anything. Go away!’

Khoimon said, ‘I’ll return it’, but Nurani Bilkis didn’t feel like saying any more, she said, ‘Just go. You’re plain greedy!’

But Khoimon went to the wheat-mill in Bongram Lane and returned after getting five or seven seers of wheat ground, and Nurani Bilkis came with an old lidless, medium-size can of Robinson’s Barley and said, ‘Wait, let me measure it.’ 

Khoimon began to walk away. She said, ‘You measure it. I’m off!’

When Khoimon then neared her house, she saw that the door was latched, but there were monkeys sitting quietly on the wall; seeing the monkeys, Khoimon’s heart once again trembled with fear, she wondered, what’s this? It seems whenever I’m not at home the monkeys come and sit here, and after that, when she unlatched the door and entered the room, she saw that like before, Chan Miya was lying on his back on the cot, fast asleep.

[This excerpt comprises the first 2,500 words of the translation of the Bengali novel, Mukher Dike Dekhi, by Shahidul Zahir.]