Fiction
A meal at a Chinese restaurant
"It was dark." Nirmal-babu says, and then breaks, approximately for ten seconds.
Those who know him and are familiar with his style know that he can be captivating, as he used to be in classrooms, amongst those who would care to listen to him. Indubitably, he earlier has given a prelude to the current audience: the necessary details for them to be able to rise to the dramatics of his experience. For example, he has told where China (Moha-chin)is, how big is the China wall, some detail about the Indo-china war of 1962. And, why there are many Chinese people in India and Bangladesh. How they came here after the Chinese revolution, and that majority of the Chinese people eat rice, but they also eat frogs, snakes and snails. He has told how some of them are still addicted to opium, which they often put in their teas, that's why one can be hooked to drinking teas from them.
"Dark? How come?" exclaims the only active listener of his audience, which is Hashikul.
His voice is mixed with feigned curiosity as he bellows.
Hashikul seems unmindful that he will be leaving the house soon to catch his night bus to Narail. So that he is there before dawn to receive his cargo of seven trucks that would leave around midnight from Babu-bazar. It suits him well to have his dinner at Nirmal-babu's residence, and then go to the bus station, which is only half an hour away. This he does when he uses public transport for his business trips to Dhaka. It also suits Nirmal-babu to occasionally have one his ex-students, from his earlier batches, to come to see him, as it seems, just to hang on to him. But, Nirmal-babu and Hashikul goes back a long way.
When Hashikul obtained 50% on average in English in his Intermediate, he was among the chosen few of Nirmal-babu for special attention. For he had shown interest and curiosity about the abstract world of the language and literature; until one day, and for a few days after ,his face was not visible in the class. In fact his fascia was not detectable in the college precinct for many days until the day when his class mates, friends and teachers settled that it would never be seen again. They assumed, he had joined the masses of the drop-outs who would one day be known, as the ones who left studies, not completing their BAs.
In fact,Hashikul had hurriedly admitted himself into another school, to learn the basics about life where the syllabus carried 100 marks on romance and chivalry. Rahela had sent for him to meet her near the warehouses at the market place in the evening, when the curved new moon just showed up in the sky, and he could see her face in the backdrop of the pond where the moonlight reflected on the rippling water. Shehad told him that her nikha was going to take place the next day with the Kuwait returnee Kowser. They took the last launch to Khulna later that evening.
During the next three months, Hashikul experienced the cold floor of the police station, learnt the difference between abduction and love marriage, and quite a bit about The Children and Women's Repression Act. Avery defiant stand by Rahela impressed the magistrate, the police and lawyers, which equally made her brothers and fathers repugnant, but saved Hashikul from jail. Eventually they were reunited by a fresh marriage, as Rahela's father, OciKha, maintained that the first one was conducted under deceit. They were expelled to live in a house in Panii-para and Hashikul started trading on perishable goods under the patronage and guidance of one of his maternal uncles who was almost same-aged. They lived there somewhat as pariahs, and sometimes meagrely.
When Nirmal-babu met Hashikul by chance in the market centre, about a year later, he learnt all these from him. By then, Hashikul had become wiser and learnt to be careful who to mix with and who to circumvent. He also learnt that the world was not always empathetic to one who acted on impulse. It is usually the conformists who were considered steady and earn society's trust in the long run.
Hashikul was aware that he had disappointed Nirmal-babu and thought Nirmal-babu had written him off. He did not blame Nirmal-babu, as he himself could not keep pace with the journey which Nirmal-babu wanted him to take under his tutelage. Nirmal-babu however hoped that Hashikul could be coaxed back into education, and continued looking for him when he would come to the market. One day, he turned up at Hashikul's cottage unannounced and met Rahela, who was pleasantly surprised and introduced herself. Rahela put a cushioned chair for him in the shadow under the banyan in their quad. She offered him coconut water, tea and biscuits, and attended him till Hashikul came back and took over. This happened in the full view of their neighbours.
This visit was to have a far-reaching effect even though the visitor, the unprepared hosts and their neighbours all had incoherent readings about it. To Hashikul, this was an act of eccentricity by a man, whom he viewed with a mixture of reverence and annoyance. Rahela saw it as a break for their rehabilitation back in to the society, for the visit had given them respectability; she did calculatedly prolonged his stay by sending someone for the biscuits while the tea was being brewed. This was to prove unnecessary, because Nirmal-babu came to their house again, and a third time, as a brief stopover on his way to somewhere. Rahela,then understood something about Nirmal-babu: that the man who was so idyllically unaware of the aura of his own authority, did not belong to this world. She perceived he needed the protection of a strong wife.
During these visits, their neighbours were waking up to the awareness that even though Hashikul did something socially unacceptable, perhaps it was not so irreverent; and that there was a world out there, with which they were not familiar, but where such acts were regarded as courageous and noble. Over a period of time, led by the cleverest among them, one by one, they opened up to series of gestures that were designed to satisfy Hashikul that none of them ever intended any ill to him, and their behaves of social antipathy were in fact measly acts of omission.
Throughout this process, however, Nirmal-babu's hopes dwindled to wistfulness with the gradual awareness that all human minds did not necessarily sought redemption in enlightenment, where worldly or cerebral capacity played no role. But all was not lost. A sense of empathy overtook Rahela's attitude towards Nirmal-babu. She wondered why his wife (whom she referred to as Kakima or Boudi, varyingly) would not leave Dhaka to live with him in the college quarters.
It was the dawning of a relationship of convenience, that was to last many years till this day. After their second year in exile, Haji Tarash Ali, Hashikul's father, asked them back to live with the family after he gathered that Hashikul was doing well, all by himself, in his trading business. Crisis loomed when even on the 6th year of the marriage they (or Rahela more precisely who was often termed by Tarash Ali as OciKha's beti) could not present Tarash Ali by a grandson. Hashikul was, in not so many ways, hinted that Rahela was infertile; he should take a second wife; or he should abandon her. Because nobody heard that so many vowing to so many shrines ever went wasted. It was Nirmal-babu who referred to them doctors in Kolkata; and after receiving treatment wherefrom Rahela became pregnant. It was joy and relief all round and Tarash Ali's last ruse to separate Hashikul from OciKha's beti felled flat.
The child was delivered at a hospital at Nirmal-babu's suggestion, breaking years of Tarash Ali's house hold tradition. But Nirmal-babu demurred to Rahela's fervent wish that the child was named Biplob. For, in her eyes the child, at one stoke, by being born brought revolution: he ended Rahela's silent suffering, in the form of casual comments and insinuations, at the hands of her in-laws and neighbours; he established Hashikul in his rightful place (according to her, which wasat the main seat at the family owned trading station or the aroth at the market place); gave their union a sense of permanence; and shifted power-balance from TarashAli to Hashikul, within the family. The subtlety of naming and reasons behind it would not have gone missed on shrewd Tarash Ali, and for that reason he and Hashikul supported Polash or Lytton, which stood, decking 'Jadu Mia' of Tarash Ali in the poor fourth. Tarash Ali's 'Jahanara' weathered for the second born. Nirmal-Babucame to scene again for changing of 'Saddam' for Polash of the third born, and then talked into both Rahela and Hashikul to visit the Upozilla Family Planning Clinic. Tarash Ali departed the month the Iraqi soldiers surrendered to the joint Anglo-American forces in Kuwait.
Hashikul's fortune ascended when the government built the highway alongside their paddy land and he built a three storied market by the road side surrounded. That was followed by a rice mill at the Nowapara industrial site, and other ventures. He became a man to reckon with. When Nirmalbabu retired, he took stock of his lifelong worldly realizations; and under the sub-heading 'portfolio of ex-students' Hashikul ranked amongst the top few along with few diversely ranked civil servants, a chartered accountant, barristers, doctors and a son in law of a seating state minister. These ranking was disputed by Krishna because she reckoned that those who had settled in the USA or Canada (or India) were the astutely ones and should top the list.
As Hashikul was on the ascendancy, he was forever sounding off Nirmal-babu, as and when, on matters that included his children's education, his marital relationship, socio-political pre-eminence and business moves. He was keen that his children got to see Nirmal-babu every often. Nirmal-babu obliged, and he found in Hashikul a keen listener and willingness to learn everything that Nirmal-babu knew. Over a period of time Nirmal-babu metamorphosed to become a philosopher and guide to Hashikul from his ex-teacher, a role he performed sparingly, which fit in well with his yearning to change his world, (or his world), for a better place as much as he could. Nirmal-babu's world was different from Hashikul's, but he [Hashikul] developed a liking for it whenever he got a glimpse of it. Both Rahela and Hashikul thought, if Nirmal-babu were an ordinary man like them, he would have taken a second wife. That he had resisted that temptation put him in a higher plateau of their esteem for him.
Education of Hashikul's children was a matter of interest to both of them. Hashikul employed maximum number of private tutors. Hashikul thought of the periodic score card of his children as a good means by which to monitor the tutors' performance, so the tutor turnover was high. His eldest son was put in a boarding school in Dhaka from where he completed his intermediate studies.
In continuance of the amity of convenience Hashikul came to Dhaka the day before. He dropped a big basket of fruits and fresh fishes from his aggro project before he had left for his day's business, which included seeing his lawyer and releasing an income-tax clearance certificate that he needed to produce to the bank so that they would issue foreign currency for Lytton's tuition fees and maintenance for his education in Canada which he would be starting coming fall.
Lytton has grown up to be a smart young man, and now has convinced his parents that he goes abroad for further studies. He has grouped with other young men, after the result, to take admission into Prince Andrew University in Canada. The university is named after English Queen Elizabeth's second son (or Princess Diana's brother-in-law), who is believed to be its chief patron and is likely to hand over graduation certificates in the convocation ceremony. The university has been quite liberal in its admission requirements from students of the third world. So much so that, the it provides facilities, in the form of a one year Foundation Course, to make hopeful students eligible to be admitted into the University. The students are then waived of the requirement to prove their English language competence. There have been no known cases of failures; either in obtaining a visa from the Canadian High Commission to join this course or in getting admission at the main university after completion of the Foundation Course. Cases have been heard of where Bangladeshi and Pakistani graduates from the university have obtained residence permission and are working in places like NASA and Ford Motors. The university has offered a 20% of the admission fees waver where a group of five are applying together.
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