The room under the ground at DMP Headquarters has no name. In government papers the room has no existence either. What is not on paper gives nobody a headache. On the four walls of the room there are old damp stains. The stains look like the map of some unknown country whose borders grow a little wider with every monsoon. A neon tube hangs from the ceiling. It lights, goes out, lights again. This lighting and going out makes no sound.
In the middle of the room is an iron table. On the table five files in grey covers. The files have numbers on them, dates, the name of the sender. Only the space for the signature is blank. Inspector Kawsar once asked in writing who sends the files. Three weeks later the reply came by letter: the matter is under examination. Kawsar filed that letter, because what gets onto paper survives, and what does not survive never was.
Kawsar has not slept in a year. During the day he is all right. He sits in this room under the ground and reads the files, drinks tea, talks about the rain with the peon. The trouble comes when he closes his eyes. When he closes his eyes, memories come into his head of things that never happened. He sees Nabila standing on the veranda making tea. The cup slips out of her hand and falls. But there is no sound of breaking. The pieces of china stop an inch above the floor. The steam from the tea neither rises nor sinks; it hangs in the air. Nabila looks at the pieces. Then she looks at Kawsar.
This memory is false. Kawsar knows it. On a wet night a year ago Nabila’s car was crushed. Kawsar identified the body himself, signed for it himself, put the earth on it himself. Nabila is gone. But the number of false memories grows.
Kawsar buys a notebook. Thick covers, a government notebook from before the price went up two taka. On the first page he writes: What did not happen. Then below it he begins a list. One. Nabila never dropped a cup while making tea. Two. Nabila never said she wished she could see snow once. Three. Nabila never bought a blue cardigan. Four. They never discussed names for a child. Five. Nabila never told him that her office had no name.
The list grows longer. Every night Kawsar sits and adds to it. In this way the nights become bearable. What has been written down is shut in a box. What is shut in a box does not bite.
Then one morning the woman who rents the ground floor comes to the door. A polythene packet in her hand. She says, Brother, keep this, it’s your wife’s, I borrowed it before Eid and never gave it back.
Kawsar opens the packet. Inside is a blue cardigan. The thread has come loose near the cuff. He carries the packet out to the veranda and stands there. Then he comes back in and opens the notebook. He looks at line three. He does not cross it out. He can find no reason to cross it out. To cross out an error in a government notebook you need a red pen, and if you use a red pen you have to write the reason, and Kawsar has no language for the reason. From that day Kawsar does not open the notebook again.
On the other side of the table sits ASP Rida Zaman. Rida is twenty-eight, her handwriting small and even, and she has a belief. Her belief is that behind every event in the world there is a number, and that once the number is found the event stops being an event and becomes data. Data does not frighten anyone. On the strength of that belief Rida has lasted three months in this room.
Rida makes columns. Event on the left, measurement on the right. The events whose measurements do not match she puts in the middle column. At the head of that column she has written in pencil: Deficit. The deficit column keeps filling up.
Kawsar asks her one day, What does deficit mean.
Rida does not look up. She says, What is left over when the accounts are done, sir.
Kawsar says nothing more. Because for the last year there has been a deficit in his own house whose measurement he has never given to anybody. He has not moved Nabila’s pillow. A fine grey dust gathers on the pillow. Every Friday Kawsar wipes it off. By the next Friday exactly the same amount of dust has gathered. Nowhere else in the room does this dust gather. Only on that one pillow. Kawsar took some of it on his finger once. It is not ordinary dust. It does not cling to the finger, it does not fall off, it floats in the air. He does not tell Rida about this dust, because dust has no number and no date, and you cannot open a file on a thing with no number.
Kawsar opens the cover of the first file. A man has been detained on platform three of Kamalapur Station. About forty. A printed shirt. The collar of the shirt soaked in blood. Blood runs continuously from the man’s nose and the doctors cannot find a cause. The report says there is no lesion inside the nose.
The man tells Rida that tomorrow is stored inside his head.
Rida puts paper and a pen in front of him. The easiest way to catch a man like this is to let him write, because speech changes and writing does not. The man writes. The stock market index, how far it will fall and at what time, minute by minute. Then he writes the serial numbers of bundles of new notes that have gone into the vault of Bangladesh Bank. Seven numbers. Rida folds the paper and puts it in her pocket.
Then the man says, A little water.
Rida gets up and pours water from the jug into a glass. Pouring it, she sees that the glass is already half full, and that the man’s lips are wet, and that his throat is moving as though he is swallowing. What she sees she does not put in the report. In the report she writes, The detained person drinks water.
Three days later the index falls. It matches minute for minute. The note serial numbers match, all seven. The brain scan report says: the patient’s hippocampus is unable to synchronise with the present time. Kawsar reads that sentence three times. Then he marks the sentence, because the doctor does not understand it either, and when a man who does not understand writes, there is a tremble in his writing.
The man could not be questioned further. On the sixth day he fell ill and was taken to hospital. His name is not in the hospital’s admission register. Nobody saw him taken in and nobody saw him taken out.
Second file. The disappearance of Imtiaz, the architect.
Six months ago Imtiaz vanished without a trace. His coat hangs on the chair in his office. In the coat pocket, keys, wallet, cigarettes. Nobody runs away leaving keys and a wallet behind, his brother-in-law said at the police station seven times.
Then certain particular people in Dhanmondi began having dreams at night.
One of them is a school accountant, Abdul Baten. Baten wakes in the morning and finds ink under his fingernails. There is no ink in his house, no charcoal; the children’s box of coloured pencils is locked away. Baten washes his hands. The next day, ink again. On the third day he leaves paper and a pencil beside the bed before sleeping, just to see.
In the morning there is a drawing on the paper.
Baten cannot draw. At school he got poor marks for handwriting. But what is on the paper is a measured drawing. There is a scale written on it, a north point, the number of steps in the staircase. Baten takes the drawing to his brother-in-law, who works in a contractor’s office. His brother-in-law looks at it and says, This can’t be built, dulabhai.
It cannot be built, because the stairs of the building go down, then there is a room, then the stairs go down again, then the same room again. The verandas hang not towards the ground but towards the sky. The roof drainpipe goes upward from the roof.
Rida collects the drawings of eleven dreamers. The eleven do not know one another. The measurements of the eleven drawings are identical. Then Rida gets out satellite images and takes the measurements of the empty spaces in the city. The places where there is nothing, the land that has lain vacant year after year, the plots whose owners are tied up in court — the measurements of all those empty spaces.
The measurements match. All eleven of them.
Rida writes in the report: The plans obtained in dreams correspond exactly to the measurements of the city’s unused parcels of land. Beside that sentence she makes a mark in the deficit column. Because if the measurement of an empty space and the measurement of a building are the same, it means the buildings are somewhere. But to be somewhere requires space, and there is no space in the city.
Moving the third file, Kawsar’s fingers shake. A snapshot from CCTV footage. A grocery in Moghbazar. A schoolteacher buying rice. The time is twelve minutes past five in the afternoon. At that same time, in the morgue at Dhaka Medical, the post-mortem on that same schoolteacher’s body is being carried out. The forensic report says the man died at least three days earlier. And yet in the footage he can clearly be seen taking money out of his wallet.
Rida sends for the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper’s name is Mansur. Mansur looks at the footage and says, Yes, master sahib, he took four kilos, he took a little at a time before payday.
Rida asks, Did you give him change?
Mansur says, I did.
Rida says, What did you give him?
Mansur then opens his cash box and after a long search brings out a two-taka coin. He says, This came out of the master sahib’s change, and later it came back to me. Bad thing. I kept it.
Rida takes the coin. There is a year on it. The year has not arrived yet.
Rida puts the coin into an evidence packet and seals it. On the packet, a number, a date, and her own signature. While doing this her hand does not shake. Rida has one gift: what she cannot understand she gives a number to, and once it has a number the not-understanding leaves her alone.
In the fourth file there is an audio tape. A girl of seven. The girl sits in an empty corner of her room and plays chess. Her mother thought nothing of it at first, because a child alone plays alone. But six months later the mother notices that the girl does not make both sides’ moves. She makes one side’s move, then waits. Sometimes she waits a long time. Then she nods, laughs, and makes her own move.
The mother asks her, Who are you playing with.
The girl says, With Abba.
The girl’s father died five years ago. The girl was two then.
Rida puts a high-frequency microphone in the room. On the recording the girl’s voice can be heard. Knight, she says. Then a long nothing. Then she says, Again? You only ever attack with the knight. Then nothing again.
Exactly seventy-two hours later a man’s voice is picked up on the same frequency. It says, Knight. Then a long nothing. Then it says, Again. Ma, you only ever bring the knight.
The girl’s mother faints after hearing this recording. What she says when she comes round does not go into the report. Rida checks the seventy-two-hour figure three times. Every time it matches to the second. Seventy-two hours, zero minutes, zero seconds. Rida looks at that number a long time, because nature does not produce numbers that even. Numbers that even occur only in machines made by people.
The place is staying the same. It is time that is slipping.
Fifth file. A leather-bound diary. The diary was recovered from an abandoned printing press in old Dhaka. The press closed in eighty; the lock is still the old one, rusted. The pages of the diary fill with ink by themselves. The ink takes no time to dry.
What is written in the diary happens outside. But it is not the future that is written. It is the past. The diary writes: This object never existed. And then that object becomes a thing that never existed.
Last week the diary wrote: There is no krishnachura tree at the Nilkhet crossing.
Kawsar was at that crossing himself that day, on routine duty. He sees the hundred-year-old tree wiped out in the blink of an eye. Not only the tree. The rickshaw stand under it goes, because the stand was there because the shade was there. The cement kerbing round the base of the tree dissolves. The footpath becomes level. The tea seller who has sat under that tree for forty years goes on sitting, but his stall is in the sun now, and he sweats, and he does not say why he is sweating.
The next day Kawsar asks people. Nobody can remember a tree. The traffic sergeant cannot remember. The tea seller cannot remember; he says, If there’d been a tree here I’d know, sir. There is no entry for that crossing in the city corporation’s tree-planting register. There is no tree in the old photographs. Where the tree was in the photographs there is sky.
Only Kawsar remembers. And a red flower stuck under the sole of his shoe. He picks the flower up and holds it in his palm. The flower lasts four days. Then it does not dry and it does not rot; one morning it is simply no longer in his palm.
Before the tree the diary wrote other things. There are seven entries on the list submitted in evidence. Six objects. One person. About the six objects there is nothing to say. A bus stop shelter, a headstone, a school bell, that sort of thing — the kind of thing whose going leaves a place feeling a little emptier without anybody being able to say why.
The person is mentioned on a wall in Tikatuli. The wall is beside a tea stall. Credit accounts are written on the wall in chalk. Names, dates, amounts. New writing over old, newer over that, and in this way forty years of credit lies on that wall in layers. When Rida goes to photograph the wall, the stall owner shows her a name. In the lowest layer, almost rubbed away, a name of three letters, and beside it eighteen taka.
The stall owner says, That money’s owed to me, apa. But who owes it, that I can’t tell you. When I look at the name it feels like I know it. When I try to remember, nothing comes.
Rida asks, Since when?
The stall owner says, I don’t know. But every month in my account book I write down that eighteen taka as outstanding.
Rida enters those eighteen taka in her deficit column.
One evening Kawsar goes into the evidence room. The diary is kept in a wooden box with a number stamped on it. He opens the box, takes out the diary, finds a blank page, and with his own pen writes: Nabila never died.
Then he waits. Nothing happens. The ink does not dry, does not spread, does not disappear. It just sits there. Kawsar waits another hour, then another two. Around two in the morning he understands how the diary works. The diary can subtract. It cannot add. What is not there cannot be made not-there.
He puts the diary back in the box and locks it. The next morning he sees that the line he wrote is not on the page, and that the page is as white as if nobody had ever written anything there.
Kawsar shuts the files. Solid silence in the room. The neon tube lights, goes out, lights again. It makes no sound.
These are not crimes. Kawsar cannot match them to any section written in the manual of investigation. A crime requires an agent. Here there is no agent.
Rida says, Sir, there’s one place where the five cases agree.
Kawsar says, What.
Rida says, Sound. In all five cases something happens and there is no sound.
After this Kawsar and Rida go out. Their destination is old Dhaka. The architect Imtiaz’s last known location. A narrow lane behind Bahadur Shah Park. Crumbling British-era buildings on either side. Brick falling away. The window frames have been painted so many times that they are no longer any colour.
At the end of the lane, an iron door. There is no number on the door. Rida takes out her instrument and takes a reading. Far below the ground, an enormous quantity of energy. Rida looks at the figure twice, then switches the instrument off. But she does not write the figure in her notebook.
They break the door and start down. The steps are damp. As they go down, the city comes off them. First the horns go. Then human voices. Then the calling of crows, which in the city of Dhaka ought to have been the last thing to go. Then the droning of the water pump. After that, for a while, only the sound of their own shoes, and that sound has something ungainly about it, as though the shoes did not belong to this place. Then the sound of the shoes goes too.
Kawsar stops then. He realises he cannot hear the sound of his own breathing. He opens his mouth and breathes hard, and still nothing. He looks at Rida. Rida looks at him and moves her lips. Kawsar hears nothing, but from the lips he understands that Rida is saying, Come down, sir.
Very far below the ground, a vast concrete bunker. The design of the bunker is British-era. Arched ceiling, iron railings, a date cast into the corners: nineteen thirty-six. But the equipment inside belongs to another era. Black metal cabinets along the walls. Inside the cabinets, rows of processors, coiled copper, cables hanging from the ceiling, cold. In the middle, a huge glass chamber.
Over everything, a fine coating of grey dust. Kawsar kneels and takes some on his finger. It does not cling to the finger. It does not fall off. It floats in the air. He does not think about Nabila’s pillow, because there are some things you cannot stay standing while thinking. He gets up.
Rida stands in front of a terminal. Her fingers move on the keyboard. A form comes up on the screen. At the top of the form: Project name. The name field is blank. Rida runs a search; you cannot run a search with the field left blank, and yet it runs, and more than three thousand files open up.
The files have no names. Only numbers and a short description each. Rida scrolls from the top down and Kawsar reads over her shoulder.
Memory, of an absent event. Testing ongoing.
Place, occupied twice. Testing ongoing.
Sound, without source. Testing suspended.
Sound, with source but without hearer. Testing suspended.
Object, removable from memory. Testing approved.
Person, removable from memory. Testing approved.
Then many lines go by that repeat the same things with only the numbers changing. Kawsar works out that the number of approved tests is greater than the number of suspended ones. In government work that one rule never changes. Whatever is easy to do gets its approval first.
Rida takes the evidence packet out of her shoulder bag. The two-taka coin from Moghbazar. The seal is intact, her own signature is intact, the date is intact.
The packet is empty. Rida holds it up to the light, looks at it from both sides, then puts it back in the bag. She says nothing. Kawsar does not ask, because if the seal had been broken there would have been room for a question.
Against the wall there is a wooden rack. On the rack, bound registers. Rida takes one down, dusts it, opens it. Then she stands there a long time.
Kawsar comes and stands beside her. On the pages of the register, small even handwriting. Ruled into columns. Event on the left, measurement on the right, and in the middle a column with Deficit written at the head of it in pencil.
Kawsar says, That’s your handwriting.
Rida shuts the register and puts it back on the rack. She says, The date is seventy-four, sir.
Then she does not look that way again. She moves to another terminal. Kawsar has seen this ability of Rida’s before. Whatever breaks her belief, she puts back in its place. A register put back in its place does not break anything further.
Kawsar walks slowly towards the glass chamber. Inside there is a control panel. There is a paper lying on the panel. A torn page from a diary. Kawsar picks it up.
The handwriting is familiar. For a year he has been carrying a note in this handwriting in his wallet. The note says: There’s fish in the fridge, I’ve put the rice on, don’t be cross. On one side of this page there is a shopping list. Rice, dal, two dozen eggs, mosquito coils. On the other side, four lines. Kawsar reads the four lines, then reads them again.
It says: I know I will not come back. They are saying there is a deficit. I have done the sums and the deficit is not one I can settle alone. Kawsar must not be told, because if Kawsar is told he will stop me.
The blood surges in Kawsar’s head. The office where Nabila worked had no name. He heard this once in seven years of marriage, as a joke. He had assumed there was some confidentiality clause in his wife’s job, as there is everywhere, and he had not asked, because husbands pretend to know a great many things by not asking.
Rida calls him over to the terminal. A video log is playing on the screen. There is no audio.
Nabila’s face. Nabila is speaking towards the camera. There is extreme urgency in her eyes. Her lips are moving, fast. Kawsar brings his face close to the screen, because he knows Nabila’s lips, has known them for seven years, knows them in his sleep. He cannot read the lips. Nabila is saying something for which Kawsar has no words. Then Kawsar looks at what is behind her.
In the video Nabila is not standing in any laboratory. There is no server behind her, no wall. Behind her there is open sky, and the colour of the sky is like ash. No cloud, no sun. Grey particles of dust hang in the air, neither rising nor falling.
Kawsar says, Where is this place.
Rida brings up the metadata. The date field is blank. The location field is blank. In the field for the time the file was created there is a number, and the number has not arrived yet. Then Rida starts doing sums on paper. Kawsar watches.
Rida writes three pages. Then she puts down the pen.
She says, Sir, the deficit has been found.
Kawsar looks at her.
She says, On that night a year ago, madam took the car towards the city’s main power grid. That was no accident. A short circuit in the grid would have shut this system down here. Madam had done that calculation. But the weight of madam’s car does not produce that impact.
Kawsar says, And then.
Rida says, A few seconds before the car hit the grid, the reactor inside here split. Then the car hit the grid. But the impact was not as hard as it should have been. And so the system neither shut down completely nor stayed running.
She pauses a little.
The moment at which everything was supposed to end — that moment never ended, sir. An unfinished moment has been hanging there for a year. It is the pressure of that hanging moment that is spreading in every direction.
Kawsar says nothing.
Rida says, Sir, those five files on the table are not five separate events. They are five separate symptoms of one broken account. In one place people are remembering the future, in another the past is being erased, in another sound is being lost. The memories that come into your head are a result of the same cause. Time was not able to move forward properly. You’ve been keeping a list of them, haven’t you?
Kawsar has never told anybody about his notebook.
Rida looks at the machine. She says, There’s a little power left inside. With this power one person can be sent back to that night, once. Once only.
She says slowly:
You would have to go to that night and hit madam’s car from behind. The impact that was supposed to happen would have to be completed. Then the account would balance. The unfinished moment would end. The system would shut down.
She says, a little more quietly, Madam would have to die, sir. But this time exactly the way she was supposed to die.
Saying this sentence, Rida’s voice does not shake. Because Rida believes that once the number is found the event stops being an event.
Kawsar puts a hand on the glass of the chamber. The glass is warmer than his hand.
He says, Start it.
The air inside the bunker begins to shake. The boundary between light and shadow comes loose. The grey particles of dust begin to rise all together, as though somebody were blowing from below. Rida bends over the control panel, her lips moving; she is counting.
Kawsar closes his eyes.
The moment he opens them, spray from the rain strikes his face.
Dhaka at night. An empty road. The wheel of a police jeep in Kawsar’s hands. In the headlights the wet tarmac ahead is shining. The wipers are going, right, left, right. The wipers are making a sound. Kawsar hears the sound and something inside his chest comes loose, because after a year he is again in a place where everything has a sound.
The clock on the dashboard says one forty-two.
Kawsar looks at the clock. The clock in his jeep broke on that night a year ago. For a year that clock has said one forty-two. Every morning he gets into the car and sees that number, and every day he thinks he will get it fixed, and does not.
So has he come back to a night a year ago, or has he never got out of a certain night in all this year? There is no answer to that question written anywhere. The question does not come up in any of Rida’s columns, because the question has no unit.
Looking ahead, cold goes down Kawsar’s spine. A few hundred yards away, Nabila’s black sedan. Racing at full speed towards the huge power grid at the side of the road. Kawsar presses the accelerator. The jeep responds. Rida’s arithmetic is clear. A hit from behind. Add to the velocity. The deficit settled. The jeep’s speed rises. The distance closes. And then another arithmetic starts running in Kawsar’s head.
Every Friday of the last year. The dust gathered on the pillow. The same amount of dust again after wiping. The fish in the fridge that he neither ate nor threw away and kept for three months. The note in the wallet, the paper torn along its folds. The blue cardigan with the thread come loose at the cuff. The thick-covered notebook whose first page says What did not happen. Five fragments, three thousand files, one city, seventy-two hours. And one pillow.
Kawsar does not weigh the two sides against each other in his mind, because to weigh things you need a common unit, and he has no unit. He only understands this much: his hands are coming off the wheel. The power grid is coming closer. Nabila’s car is racing straight on. Kawsar turns the wheel to the left.
The jeep roars and changes course. Instead of hitting her from behind, he goes across, diagonally, into Nabila’s car. The impact comes. Kawsar’s heavy jeep buries itself in the right-hand door of Nabila’s sedan. The crumpling of the metal makes no sound. The breaking of the glass makes no sound. The rain stops too, or does not stop, but the sound of it on the roof does not come any more. Time slows. Nabila’s car is flung spinning across to the other side of the road. Far away from the power grid. Nothing strikes the grid.
On the far horizon, splitting the breast of the city, a soundless white light opens. The whole sky goes white. Then everything is dark.
Kawsar opens his eyes. He is standing in the middle of Shapla Chattar. Above his head the concrete petals of the water lily are motionless. The water below the petals is motionless. A piece of polythene on the water is motionless.
The colour of the sky is grey like ash. No cloud, no sun. No wind. Grey particles of dust hang in the air, neither rising nor falling.
The roads all round are empty. No cars, no sirens, no crows calling. A van lies tipped over on the footpath, its wheel turning, and the turning makes no sound.
A few paces away Nabila is standing. There is not a scratch on her. The end of her sari has lifted a little in the windless air and stopped there. Kawsar takes Nabila’s wedding ring out of his trouser pocket. For a year he has kept this ring in his pocket, the right pocket, not with the keys, on its own. The ring falls from his fingers. It does not reach the ground. It stops an inch above the floor.
Nabila looks at the grey city around her. Then at the sky. Then down at the still water. Nabila knew the arithmetic, and one who knows the arithmetic does not take long to understand.
Nabila does not step back. There is nowhere to step back to. In this city you can walk. Shahbagh, Nilkhet, Gulistan, Sadarghat, then the riverside, then back again to this circle. In every place the same ash-coloured light, the same motionless dust. There are shadows, but the shadows fall nowhere.
Two people in this city. There is nobody else.
Kawsar goes to her. He takes Nabila’s hand. A warm hand. After a year he feels again that Nabila’s palms were always warm. He had forgotten this. It was not in any entry in his notebook, because it is true.
Nabila does not take her hand away. She looks at Kawsar’s face, and then her lips move. Kawsar hears nothing. But he has watched these lips for seven years, has watched them in his sleep, and so he understands what Nabila is saying.
The tea’s gone cold.
Kawsar looks at Nabila. Kawsar opens his mouth. In his throat the air moves, his tongue moves, his lips move. Under the grey sky, in the floating dust, two people stand and each reads the other’s lips.
Between them a ring is turning in the air. Very slowly. To the right.
There is no sound.
