Broken dreams, shattered illusions
Shahid Alam reflects on a tale of a lost era
Derelict
Kazi Fazlur Rahman
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DERELICT is a poignant tale of a bygone age, of a group of people veritably vanished from Bangladesh, told by a person who, one can safely assume upon perusing his biographical note, is familiar with much of the period in Bangladesh's history that he sets as the backdrop for his modest-sized novel. Derelict, though, is a bit more than modest in its putative appeal to the average reader. The era that is now a much-debated period of South Asian history is that of the twilight years of the British raj, and the incipient years of what was properly then East Bengal; the dying breed in Bangladesh is the Anglo-Indian community, a misnomer if ever there was one. Yet the story revolves a male protagonist, Sudhir Sebastian Rosario, a Bengali/native Christian, a group that continues to exist, if not exactly flourish, to this day in this country.
Kazi Fazlur Rahman is a former bureaucrat, and currently is a writer of fiction and newspaper articles. Derelict, his first novel in English, is, in its essence, a love story, or, more appropriately, one of unrequited love of one man for the woman of his dreams, but it also encompasses flashes of jilted love, subtle and overt class differences, glimpses of the raj, and political issues that cropped up as the partition of India loomed and, then, as Pakistan came into being. Sudhir's unspoken infatuation, and then deep emotional attachment, for Dora Fernandes are wrapped around deep-seated prejudices within the Christian community in British India. Dora is the daughter of Robert Fernandes, an Anglo-Indian who held the high position of District Commercial Manager (DCM) in the head office of the Bengal Assam Railway Company in Pahartali, Chittagong. Sudhir's father, Bimal Rosario, held a clerical position in the company, and was a direct subordinate of the DCM who, pleased with his work and general deportment, rewarded the clerk with an independent bungalow where he could accommodate his wife Sushila and their only living son.
The very arrangement of the company bungalows marked the rank and status of the company employees, with the imposing structures up in the terraced hillocks reserved for senior management (the "covenanted staff"), which was made up of white English expatriates and Anglo-Indians, and the more modest ones down below on the flat land earmarked for the junior staff. The two types of housing were separated physically and symbolically by a wide tree-lined road, and, the inhabitants of the two worlds did not socialize with each other. Robert Fernandes was not even aware that Bimal and he were neighbours until his subordinate informed him one day! Bimal was the progeny of local Indians converted to Christianity, and, consequently, even the fact of his religion did not enable him to break through the barrier of being able to socially intermingle with the Anglo-Indians, let alone the white British expatriate empire-builders. This distinction is despondently articulated by Bimal: "I am a graduate with a good performance record, but am still a mere clerk. I have to work under persons with lesser academic qualifications --- their sole claim to the positions they hold seems to be somewhat fair complexion or fluency in English."
Fernandes exemplifies both of Bimal's closing laments, but he enjoyed his subordinate's esteem and respect because he was well-read and knowledgeable, an honest and efficient executive, and did not discriminate against other faiths and denominations, certainly not those which "some quirks of history had made them Bengali in look, Portuguese by surname and Roman Catholic Christian by faith." Rahman, through Sudhir's father, succinctly, but eloquently, portrays the other two groups of Christians in colonial Chittagong: "One was the white sahibs born in Britain who passed their working life here, usually retiring to Britain to die. Some of them worked in the railway, and others in government offices and British commercial enterprises. They ruled the country, but never dreamt of making it their home.
The surnames mentioned make the term "Anglo-Indian" such a misnomer, because they are all Portuguese, with none being English, but they were there, too, but, ironically, in view of their total sway over the country for about two hundred years, in much lesser numbers. They were the offspring of liaisons between Portuguese and other European (including British) men and local women, and they came to be collectively known as Anglo-Indians. "They felt closer to the white British than to the dark brown natives. The British gladly extended their patronage to them, and placed them below the full-blooded British expatriates, but higher than the natives." Even after the British left, in Pakistan they would speak English with a distinctive accent, and, when the necessity arose for speaking in the local vernacular in East Pakistan, would almost invariably prefer to speak in Urdu. Once the sun had finally set on the British raj, and, then, with the emergence of Bangladesh, they found themselves in a social no-man's land, neither here, nor there, and eventually dispersed to Canada, Australia, Great Britain, the United States, and other Western countries; in effect, vanishing from the land of their birth. However, as Dora's aunt Laura was to find out, after developing relationships with a succession of white British, and then, American, army officers stationed in Chittagong during the Second World War in the hope of landing one in marriage, but failing in the endeavour, she finally settled on, and married, an English army sergeant, but found herself unacceptable by her in-laws and others in the community when she went to live with him in Yorkshire.
Laura's was a cruel twist of fate because she, her sister (Dora's mother Becky), and later, her brother Michael would want to have nothing to do with Sudhir when he went to periodically visit Robert Fernandes' bungalow to make use of his library books and newspapers on the DCM's personal invitation, and thought the Bengalis in Chittagong were followers of "that bastard Subash Bose" and would follow him in supporting the Japanese in driving the British out of India. However, Becky's father had a soft spot for Sudhir as had his son-in-law, but had to suffer at his elder daughter and son's hands for his efforts.
Sudhir first developed a crush on Dora when he began his visits to the Fernandes bungalow, and then a deeper emotion as he was completing high school education, without ever eliciting anything more than curiosity, mild flirtation, or a sort of crush from Dora. Eventually, the response from her dissipated into total indifference as she gravitated towards her own kind and white British young men, but, Sudhir's feelings for her turned into deep love, which he did not have the courage to express.
Then there are anomalies. Dora was initially assigned to work under Mrs. Gomez, but later we find her superior's name had changed to Miss da Cruz without any hint of there having been a change in personnel. And, Robert Fernandes has been credited with having multiple sons and daughters on a couple of occasions, but the author unequivocally mentions only Dora and a brother Michael in the rest of the story. And the middle section of the book comes across as rather flat, and some of the emotional details appear as effusively melodramatic. Nonetheless, Derelict has much to commend it. Sudhir's eye-opener on sexual encounters is delightfully comical, while Robert Fernandes being superseded by (which eventually led to his untimely death by heart failure) a non-Bengali refugee to East Bengal due to cronyism and chicanery is a revealing observation on a phenomenon that was to be a harbinger of things to come in contentious Bengali-West Pakistani political, economic, social, and cultural relations.
Shahid Alam is Head, Media and Communication Department, Independent University Bangladesh.
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