The house does not look like a house. It looks like an announcement. Look at me. Look at who I am.
Two lions at the gate, stone, mouths open; what the two lions are guarding, they do not know themselves. Inside there is no courtyard. In place of a courtyard, grass; on the grass, light; inside the light, cars — a Pajero, a Prado, a long black something whose name Nirjhar does not know. When the door opens, such cold comes at you that the heat outside seems to have been a mistake, a poor man’s illness, curable if you have money.
Alhaj Nurul Haque Chowdhury comes forward with both hands out. He is wearing a panjabi, three stones on his fingers, four dentures in his mouth, and scent is coming off his whole body as if to cover the smell of money — an attempt that never in this world succeeds.
Nurul Haque says, The poet sahib has come! Tonight the moon has risen in my house. But the foreword to my book of verse, you’ll be writing that. I won’t put it in anyone else’s hands.
Nirjhar says, We’ll see.
Nurul Haque says, I’ve settled on the title — Blood Rose of the Heart. How does it strike you?
Nirjhar says, A fitting title.
Nurul Haque is pleased. People can never tell what a sentence means.
An enormous room, like a field somebody put a roof over. Boys in white gloves circulate with trays. In one corner two editors, in one corner a retired secretary, in one corner a girl from television whose smile is her profession, and in the middle, the poets. They have come because when you are called you cannot stay away, and if you stay away you will not be called again.
Nirjhar goes on drinking. Blue Label. The ice makes a sound in the glass, a sweet sound; even the sound has been purchased.
Around half past eleven he feels a small, harmless signal in his lower belly.
He ignores the signal, because somebody is speaking about poetry just then, saying that in the lines of Alhaj Nurul Haque Chowdhury there is the smell of earth. Nirjhar thinks, if there were the smell of earth you could not stand in this room. The smell of earth is a terrible thing. It has the smell of the grave in it too.
Twenty minutes later the signal is no longer a signal. A small animal has woken in his lower belly, and it is no longer small.
Nirjhar asks, Which way is the toilet?
Nurul Haque waves a hand. That way, poet sahib. There are eight. Whichever you like.
Eight. Eight lavatories in this house. Walking, Nirjhar thinks, a man has only one hole to piss from, so why eight? Because of the number. These people have no other language but numbers. They do not understand beauty. They can count.
The first lavatory is gleaming. Marble on the floor, Italian; gold taps; the towels folded into the shape of swans, and everyone knows that a towel folded into a swan means nobody is to dry his hands on it. Nirjhar shuts the door, brings down his zip, and then raises his eyes.
Directly in front of the commode, at exactly eye level, a framed photograph. Nurul Haque Chowdhury shaking hands with an extremely important man. Garlands round both their necks. Both of them smiling.
Nirjhar pulls the zip back up.
The photograph has been hung here on purpose, measured, exact. So that every guest, in his most defenceless moment, trousers open, alone, will lift his face and see who this man knows. This is not a lavatory, it is a notice board. A man hangs photographs in the lavatory only when he has run out of places to hang photographs.
Nirjhar opens the door and comes out. He says, In this filth I cannot.
He walks down the corridor. Doors on both sides, door after door.
He opens one door and finds a room full of saris. Glass cabinets along the walls, rows of saris in the cabinets, every one of them wrapped in polythene, every one with the shop tag still on it. Three hundred, four hundred, who knows. Not one has been worn. On the next wall, shoes, the same way, the same arrangement. The smell of naphthalene. The smell of a dead person’s room.
Nirjhar stands there. His belly is screaming. But he cannot, because a thing that has never been used is not dirty, it is dead; and pissing on the dead is not his line of work.
He says, In this grave I cannot.
The next door is a library. Shelves the whole width of the wall, shelves full of books, every book bound in leather, every spine lettered in gold. The books are arranged by colour. One shelf all red, another shelf all blue. Nirjhar pulls one out. A volume of the collected Tagore. He goes to turn the pages and cannot; the pages have not been cut, the printer’s glue is still holding them. The book has never been opened. The book is not a book, the book is furniture.
He takes out another. The same. Another. The same.
Then he sees his own book. His third collection. He knows the cover, because he quarrelled with the publisher over the cover. He takes it down. He runs his thumb along the edge of the pages.
The pages are stuck together. Nirjhar stands there a long time with the book in his hand, with fire in his belly, in the middle of this gilded graveyard. He wants to open his zip and finish it, here, over this shelf, over all these unopened golden spines.
He does not. To piss on books is no insult to the books. It is an insult to him. He puts his own book back in its place, carefully, the way a man arranges a dead man’s hands on his chest.
The next room he opens almost at a run. The room is full of packages. Floor to ceiling. Boxes, baskets, wrapping paper, ribbon, some with envelopes taped to them. None of it has been opened. This is the gift room. The transaction room. Nothing anyone has left in this room is a gift; every one of them is a question, and they will come later to collect the answer.
Here it can be done. Here it ought to be done. This is the place for it. With his hand on the zip, Nirjhar reads a name off an envelope. He knows the name. The gentleman writes a column once a week on honesty; his prose is clean, his arguments are sharp, his photograph is printed at the top of the page in a round frame.
Nirjhar’s hand stops. Because a thought comes to him, and the thought cuts his throat: is my name in this room?
He has brought nothing. He has never brought anything. But he came. He came into this house and stood with a glass in his hand, he laughed at a remark, he said, A fitting title. Being present is also a kind of gift, and the cheapest gift is the one that sells for the highest price.
He pulls up his zip. He says, Here I cannot, because here I am too.
At the very end of the corridor, on the left, a thin line of light is coming from under a door. Nirjhar pushes it.
A boy, twelve or thirteen, asleep with his head down on his study table. Still wearing his glasses, knocked crooked. A pen in the fingers of his right hand; he has not let go of the pen. A sum on the exercise book, and the sum is not finished.
On the wall a routine, printed large, laminated.
5:00 — Quran
6:00 — Mathematics (not hujur, sir)
7:30 — English
… 11:00 p.m. — Sleep
Nirjhar reads the routine to the end. Seven teachers. The boy is allotted twenty minutes a day for himself; on the routine it is written, Leisure.
He looks at the clock. It has gone past midnight. The boy is an hour late, and tomorrow morning he will have to answer for it.
His belly is burning. But in this room Nirjhar cannot say anything, not one sentence will come to his mouth. Because in this one room of this house there is a person who has not yet been bought, and who will not stay unbought much longer.
He pulls the door to, slowly, so as not to make a sound. In the whole night this is the only thing he does without hatred in it.
Back in the sitting room he finds Rakib Sultan on the floor. The poet Rakib Sultan is the father of five children, has married twice, has won three prizes. Now he is lying on his side on the Italian marble, and from under his trousers a thin stream is coming out and slowly spreading.
Nobody looks. One of the white-gloved boys is on his knees, very calmly, very expertly, wiping around him with a cloth, the way you wipe around furniture. Two men stand beside him talking about poetry. One of them is saying, Timelessness.
Nirjhar gets a hand under Rakib’s armpit and pulls. Rakib does not open his eyes, only mutters something that cannot be made out. Nirjhar lets go.
Tonight Nirjhar can save one person, and that person is himself. And he understands that Rakib has solved the problem. In this room Rakib is the only honest man. He did not search, he did not judge, he surrendered. Between him and Rakib the whole difference is fifteen minutes.
Nirjhar starts walking. Door, veranda, stairs, grass, light, stone lions. The small door in the gate is open.
Outside it is hot. Outside there is a smell. Outside it is dark. Outside is Bangladesh.
Close against the boundary wall, outside the light of the lamppost, Nirjhar stands.
And then the embankment breaks. The Jaishtha flood comes down, the river drowns every bank it has, the Kirtinasha races on destroying all glory as it goes, and out of his belly a whole monsoon comes and slams against the brick. Nirjhar’s eyes close, his knees shake, and it seems to him that what he is doing at this moment is truer than any poem he has written, purer, more inevitable. If God is anywhere, God is pleased at this moment, because this is how He made man. He did not make marble. Man made marble, to hide himself in.
A torch beam falls on his back. The gateman. Old, thin, uniform too big for him.
The gateman says, Oi, what are you doing here? Why are you pissing on the wall?
Nirjhar does not answer, because he is in no condition to answer.
The gateman lifts the beam to his face, recognises him, and at once his voice changes.
The gateman says, Oh, sahib, it’s you. Forgive me.
Then he switches off the torch and comes and stands beside Nirjhar, a little apart, and begins undoing the buttons of his trousers.
The gateman says, Don’t be angry, sahib. I do mine here at night too. I stand eleven hours. There’s no permission to go inside.
Two men stand side by side and piss against the same wall. One of them has arrived here having rejected eight marble lavatories, having completed a whole night’s moral judgement, with every weapon language has. The other has arrived because they do not let him in.
Nirjhar says nothing. The judgement he has been making all night, this man has been making for eleven years, and it has not cost him a single word.
The gateman buttons up and says, Not going back in, sahib? The food isn’t finished yet.
Nirjhar says, No.
He starts walking.
Behind him the house stands with every light burning and not one window open. Ahead of him, the city. Footpath, lamppost, broken wall, drain, a sleeping rickshaw, and the sleeping rickshawalla on top of it with his legs hanging down on either side.
Walking, Nirjhar understands that every clean place in this city is outside. Outside every wall, out from under every roof, under the open sky.
Inside there is no clean place. Inside there is only marble.
