Vengeance of a sort

Rakib frowns. The same tall Usmani Bhai is standing over his shoulder. Rakib forgets to press the key for the next letter. Usmani Bhai is holding his portable typewriter, an old Olivetti, in his long hand almost like a fruit hanging at the tip of a stem. Rakib hates Usmani Bhai because he corrects his English.
In this computer-mad world Usmani Bhai keeps saying nothing is better than an old manual typewriter. Once, in a heated discussion among the colleagues at the desk on the night shift they argued that the computer worked like a small god, so helpful for any one who wanted to write.
Listening to them from his editorial desk, separated from the section of the reporters and subeditors by Thai glass panels, Usmani Bhai cast a long look at them as if he meant that that should be the end of their talking as nothing in it was to his liking. Farukh, the sports reporter, who had already caught Usmani Bhai's attention for his natural flair for language, said, 'I like the computer as it autocorrects, and gives synonyms and antonyms.'
Usmani Bhai, unwinding a typed page from the roll, cried out in his bass-toned voice, 'Nothing is stupider than that. Listen, the word that comes to you easily is also the word that the readers would easily understand.'
People with enormous height, Rakib noticed, had a genial nature. Usmani Bhai was genial and generous both, but about English he considered it sacrosanct and would not even accept so much as a misplaced punctuation.
And Rakib, a fresh graduate from journalism has already been taken to task by Usmani Bhai for his levity in prepositional blunders.
The time of the year when Rakib joined this newspaper coincided with the advent of the monsoon rain. Before that he had just left a private college for they had failed to pay him the salary for even the first month.
Paru, his newly-wedded wife, said nothing, but in her looks Rakib saw signs of utter confusion, as if she could not decide what kind of a man she was married to.
Joining the paper office was rather like an apple on the platter. Mr Rabbani, the owner of the paper, a short-statured middle-aged man, with tonnes of flesh on his body, interviewed him in his chamber. After a few introductory questions, the owner asked him to go to the other room and write a few pages on any topic that came to his mind. He sat at a table near a semi-circular wooden desk, which he later on would realize to be the working place for the subeditors, one of whom he would become for nearly two years before his promotion as a reporter.
Completing his writing, he entered the owner's room with permission. There he saw a very tall man standing, his head almost touching the ceiling, and carrying a leather-covered something in his hand, funnily small for his size. He was talking to the owner in a bass-toned voice, and was wearing a white-starched shirt tucked inside a black pair of trousers, and sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
Rakib never encountered any man as tall as this. He looked up at the man's face; a curious pair of eyes was gazing down at him from behind a thick black frame. There was a well-trimmed Chaplin-like moustache under his nose. Rakib's interest in the man grew so instantly that he even took a look at his head, the hairline decently parting a thick cropped bunch on the right side. There was something childlike about the face. The man looked to be in his mid-fifties, but bore a straight carriage.
As the owner received his sample writing, he introduced Rakib to the stranger. 'This is Mr Usmani Chowdhury, and if I take you, young man, you will work under him.'
The man quickly left the room, while the owner pored over his writing. But the telephone on his table kept buzzing every other minute, which he attended, while running a pen through his piece.
Rakib looked around. Behind the owner's chair a big file cabinet with glass door showed the bound volumes of each year's issues of the paper. The newspaper was a daily with a modest circulation. There was a rival English daily published from the same city enjoying a greater readership, and people there spread the rumour that the paper Rakib was working for had profited from illegal sale of the newsprint quota allocated to it by the government.
The question did not bother Rakib, however. Moral questions were impertinent. What he needed was a job, a kind of identity for himself and for his wife.
Mr Rabbani was a clever man of society. He remarked returning his essay to him that it smacked of a teacher's English. The comment, Rakib realized, came from the owner's knowledge that he was in the teaching profession before, and not from any ability of the owner to make such a judgment.
It took no time for Mr Rabbani to elicit from Rakib that he was recently married and needed a job badly. Peering at him through his thick glass the owner heaved his great mass of body forward,  rested his thick hairy hands on the table by shoving aside a paperweight and said in a gruff voice, 'Well, it looks like you're in crisis, so I would pay you this much.'
As Rakib came out of the room, he had a glimpse of the office in its entirety, and he spotted the now familiar figure of Mr Usmani hunching over his typewriter in a corner. A lamp in a purple shed burned on a steel frame beside his desk.
Mangoes were in good supply that year, and on a particular Saturday Rakib reached his office by taking a shorter route through the mango market. As things would go that day, their staff photographer, Md Idris dished out a couple of pictures from his camera of the mangoes, ripe and juicy piled up on the vendors' vans and stalls near the New Market area.
Rakib drew out one of the pictures from under the big register and thought for a second before he wrote a caption for one of the more prominent pictures: 'Mangoes ablaze in the market.'
It was a smart caption he thought, and feeling inwardly satisfied waited for the ultimate.
Usmani Bhai rose up from his seat and trudged slowly toward their desk. Promptly Rakib stood up on his feet and held out the picture with his caption pasted at its bottom toward him, only, however, to get snuffed off, as Usmani Bhai taking the picture from him, silently put the word 'are' in between 'mangoes' and 'ablaze'.
Rakib was stung blue. He knew that he was at fault, that his English was not good, but at the same time he did not like that somebody else should correct it. Instead of feeling grateful, he felt humiliated, and the deep scar of insult he bore stayed for hours in his mind even after he had left the office in the ungodly hour of the morning.
His hatred for Usmani Bhai intensified, and, as if it was more important than anything else, he started getting interested in Usmani Bhai's personal life.
Rakib would be then seen joining a conversation with his office pals in the tea-room, which would at some point veer toward speculating about what Usmani Bhai did in his personal life. Contributors toward satisfying his demand were not in the want, and he would come across bits of information about Usmani Bhai's life and then at home when sleep would not come to him for his anxiety over his poor English, his mind would unconsciously get engaged in piecing together the several facts gathered by him from the office conversation.
If, in the process, he found a comprehensive picture, what you can call a model kind of life, he resented it. But on some nights when after coming late from office sleep would desert him like that, he would resort to his obsession, and found Usmani Bhai's life full of relishing gaps, holes which  could be filled up by juicy improvisation.
Though Rakib knew that making Usmani Bhai the target of his anger was the outcome of his harrowing bitterness with himself, still his reporter's instinct told him that there was a subject worth pursuing.
Soon he found out that Usmani Bhai had more than one fault. His straightened life with his wife, who now lived separately with her brother's family, was more than well known. His house, a rented two-bedroom quarter on the roof of a three-storied dilapidated house, was owned by a Bihari railway employee before the independence, and now Usmani Bhai kept it in his possession for nearly thirty years paying just a nominal rent to the concerned agency. After his wife's departure for her brother's house, their only son had stayed with him for a few months before he also left for the U.S.  
Usmani Bhai's father lived in West Pakistan before the birth of Bangladesh. He was stationed in Karachi at the office of the Pakistan Western Railways. But after the independence when they took a flight to come to Bangladesh he died in the plane of a heart-attack, leaving his mother and himself stranded in Chittagong until they found a shelter in Lalkhan Bazar.
Usmani Bhai attended a nearby high school, while his mother found a job in the postal department. Very hard time it was, but Usmani Bhai managed to get his B. A. degree, and interestingly enough, it all happened in the same year that he got a job in the present newspaper, married a girl of a neighbourhood  family, whose father ran a grocery shop, and his having become a father of a son. Unfortunately, the same year his mother also died.
Usmani Bhai, in his long lanky figure and imposing height, dressed suavely in a white shirt and black trousers with a shining pair of black shoes, his typewriter hanging from his hand like a fruit at the end of a stem. Occasionally, at parties, he posed for a press photo with a cigarette dangling out of his lips and a glass of drink in his hand.
All this, and his frank childlike smile gracing his appearance, he was easily a budding reporter's idol. News, however, floated in the paper office that Usmani Bhai earned the ire of the members of a local club for shouting at guests in a high-profile party.
Pouring a few quick gulps down his throat, Usmani Bhai would loosen up, and his gravel-thick voice dominated the drinking party. His friends and acquaintances would pamper him to speak politics, and he would holler out, 'You see, these Pakistanis would have put chains around our necks if Bangabandhu had not declared the independence of Bangladesh.' Then he would vociferously continue, 'My father was beaten up by the Pakistanis before he was packed into the plane. What he said, you know, the Pakistanis would never win, because the soil was not in their favour.'
Usmani Bhai could speak fluent Urdu, and with his tall figure, dark complexion, he looked more like a Pakistani to Rakib.
One day Rakib was emboldened enough to broach this matter to Usmani Bhai. 'You have a touch of Pakistani in your movements, style, the carefree gait, the way you puff at a cigarette.'
This was the time when Rakib came to fully grasp the picture of the seedy side of Usmani Bhai's life. He rented his place out to friends and acquaintances who enjoyed women other than their wives.
Usmani Bhai gave out a rare smile. Rakib noticed that though Usmani Bhai was more at ease with Farukh and others, but with Rakib he was a little more reserved, let alone responding with a smile.
'Look,' Usmani Bhai started, 'every body is a Maradona in life. To carve out an opportunity to score. You score somehow. In a football match there are rules visible and known to every body, so you can't score with hand, which Maradona though did, evading the eyes of the referee. In politics Bangabandhu did the same thing, he brought the independence, though he didn't personally take part in the war of liberation. He scored the best way he thought it was possible to score. Today, we the fickle-minded, small Bangladeshies say this or that about him, without ever realizing that he actually made himself a sacrificial goat for earning the independence for us. What guarantee was there that he would have been let alive? Any conspiracy from any end could have been set up to blow him up by a bomb or pierce his body with bullets. If he had lost his life in imprisonment, or if he was poisoned in the plane that took him to Pakistan in the 25th March night, today you would have considered that as much a greater deed achieved than the earning of the independence itself. Only the small minds cavil at a great mind.'
Rakib volunteered, 'Usmani Bhai, criticism must have a say in society. People may be small but they must speak about the flaws and virtues of the great. It is the crowd who sees the mistakes that the players are committing.'  
'Rakib, the players also do realize their mistakes, but they have to move forward, they can't sit back and pine for their mistakes. Politics is such a game and Bangabandhu played it the best way possible.'
Usmani Bhai had recently started using pipe, which became him so well that even the evanescent childlike look of his face glowed with a confident tinge.
'Usmani Bhai, with all your good English, why don't you publish a book, containing all your political columns?'  
Usmani Bhai did look disturbed by this question, but that is for a moment only, then he promptly replied, 'A book, who would publish my book, nay, rather, who would read my books!'
Usmani Bhai leaned back on his chair, and tying up his hands in an arch over his head first yawned then gave a violent jerk to his body and then cracked his fingers first of this hand and then of that hand in a rhythmic way, and then settled back in his chair.
Then bending forward close to him said almost in a whispering tone, 'Rakib, you see, you've been working in this paper for nearly five years now, have become father of two children, but you still hesitate to produce a report on your own. I must call you a lazy man, the uninitiated. But for you it's a greater problem than it is with others in a similar situation. You are weak in English, but you want to write in English, so the problem is complex. Let's see. Select your priority, and then pursue it.'
Rakib grinned and said in a challenging voice, 'But I try, but my mind deviates—I get distracted by other things.'
'Then,' Usmani Bhai added, with a note of finality in his voice, 'then you should stop thinking of writing in English.'
More put off than ever before, Rakib came back to his seat, sat at the computer, contemplating a new act of vengeance.
He browsed out an adult website, chose an x-rated action flick, then went to their own paper website, collected Usmani Bhai's photograph, and then through a tricky maneuvering pasted Usmani Bhai's bespectacled face over the body of the man in action, and zoomed it on the whole screen, and relished in glee seeing Usmani Bhai going through the motion.  
Then he took out his BenQ Siemens digital cell from his pocket and shot a picture of the now clownish-looking tall and naked Usmani Bhai.  

Professor Mohit Ul Alam writes fiction, criticism and poetry and is A reputed academic