Passage on a Monsoon Day

continued from last week

He breathed fear onto the poor people in the villages around. He was the toy-dragon in his abode in absence of all able men gone to fight for the country.
Only a few men stood in his way. Mollah headed that list.
The morning Meena returned to her village, her grandfather was not sure how safe it was. Rumour was that the army was on its way to Chandanpur. There was so much work to do; the Pakistan army was burning everything that fall in their way. They burnt down any houses they found books in. They picked up women and young boys.
Mollah had put most of his books and small valuables in a wooden chest and buried it underneath the earthen floor of his home. His oldest daughter’s son Ismail helped the old man do that. They covered up the hole with soil, smoothened the floor and put his four poster bed back on top of it.
Ismail would take the remaining books on an oxen cart to his own house further up north. Ismail had a limp from his childhood and had not gone to the war. He helped where else he could.
‘Don’t worry about me nana. I will leave when evening falls,” he reassured the old man that day.
Mollah’s family was generations of real mullahs – the surname had not been theirs without reason. They were all highly educated unlike the new breed of opportunistic cap-wearing zealots who only proclaimed their faith to terrorise the weak.
As Meena and the other women cooked and rested in his house, Mollah slowly circled the area around his own on the lookout against trouble.
As soon as Ikramullah and his goons noticed the smoke from the cooking in his yard, all hell would break lose. He knew this. It was a good thing it was Friday and the likes of Ikramullah were likely away at the larger mosque in the bazaar for Jummah prayers till late noon.
Seven women with ten children in tow had arrived with Meena at midmorning. Mollah’s heart had broken at the sight of his pregnant granddaughter. Her clothes were dirty, her eyes ghostly and it was visible that the child had not eaten properly in a while.
‘Dadu, we had nothing to eat but chira since yesterday, we need to eat,” was the first thing Meena said on arrival.
“There is rice in the tin under my bed, there must be vegetables in the garden,” he had responded automatically. “Ask someone to light a fire in the stove. The dry wood is under the kitchen shed.”
Turning to Ismail, he was about to say something when the young man said,
“I know what to get.”
Pulling down the large gamcha hanging on the clothesline across the courtyard, Ismail had rushed down to the river calling out to Raju as he left.
The rivers were roaring full from the ceaseless rain. The monsoons had been generous. It had become the Bangalis’ saviour. Villages surrounded by tributaries of rivers on both sides were not easily accessible by road. The Pak army tended to avoid such places. It was hard enough moving with ammunitions in the never ending rain.
Nature had also been kind. The rivers were abundant with fish in a year people were scattered everywhere with no access to their regular sources of food.
“I have never seen so much fish in the rivers Raju. Not in my twenty five years, just look at them!” Ismail said to Raju as he lifted the border of his lungi, hiking it up to tie it around his waist before entering the water.
“Watch me,” he called out to the boy as he lowered the spread out gamcha like a net into the water. He pushed it forward under the water and then lifted it, letting the water sieve out of the cotton garment. He came back to the shore to show the tiny river prawns and other tiny fish trapped on his gamcha.
Raju lifted the boder of his lungi and holding out the drop of the garment like a pocket for Ismail to drop the fish into his lap. A few rounds later, there was enough.
“Run off home now and give them to your sister,” he said sending the boy ahead of him.

to be continued next week