1
The fourth of Bhadro, twelve minutes past five in the morning. It is raining outside, though not enough to put up an umbrella for. Only enough to wet the veranda railing and the dust of the yard. Water drips from the koroi trees on both sides of Shimultoli Road. The sound that reaches the ear is less the sound of rain than the tap and drip of water rolling off the leaves.
Abdul Hai Sarkar put down the number four telephone.
His first attempt had been Tofazzal sahib’s house. It rang eleven times; nobody picked up. The second was the cantonment exchange, and the man at the other end said the line could not be given just now, try again in a little while, and there was nothing in his voice as he said it that anything could be read from. The third call was to the police station. OC Jahirul was not there, and the man on duty did not want to give his own name. The fourth was to Patgati, to the house of his brother-in-law Bazlu Mia. There too it rang a long time and nobody answered.
The news had come at a quarter to five. Somebody had gone into Bazlu Mia’s house around three in the night. The man who brought it said three lines and put the phone down, and he did not know anything himself either, only that they had gone in. That word, gone in, and the words what happened — the empty space between the two is where Sarkar sahib has spent the last forty-seven minutes.
He wiped his glasses with a corner of his shirt. A grey half-sleeved shirt, a checked lungi. In the breast pocket a pen with a broken clip. In his right hand a brass paan box, nineteen years old, the hinge of the lid gone loose so that it goes click, click as he walks.
Standing in the corridor he looked once towards the inside of the house. In the room to the left, Tuku is sleeping — seven years old, and when he sleeps he keeps his right foot outside the quilt. The myna is stirring in the cage hung on the window grille. The bird’s name is Montu; Tuku named it himself, and the household accepted the name without objection. In the room to the right, Saleha is asleep. She has no reason to be up this early. In the last two rooms, Helal and Badsha. Two sons of twenty-four and twenty-one who do not sleep before three in the morning, so their doors stay shut at dawn.
The gate is visible from the window. To the right of the gate is the sentry box, tin, with a stool inside it and a kerosene lamp. The lamp is burning. The stool is empty. The man who ought to be sitting there is called Abul Bashar, under thirty, and he has not come back to work since his Eid leave. Sarkar sahib moved away from the window. The suspicion that an empty stool ought to raise in a man’s mind did not raise itself in his.
There are nineteen steps in the staircase. Some years ago he slipped on the fourteenth, and since then he counts the steps going down. It is not exactly a habit; it is a kind of obligation. On the eighth step he stopped short. His eyes were on what was below.
Seven men were standing there.
Four in khaki, three in black. All of them armed, muzzles pointing upward, that is, at him. Through the small stairwell window the morning light fell on the shoulders of the two in front; the rest were in the dark. But the smell of a man does not respect darkness. The sharp smell of powder, and mixed with it the close, steaming smell of sweat and wet cloth. They came through the rain, but their boots are dry. Which means they got down from a vehicle and came straight inside the house.
Every one of them has flaming red eyes. Not the red a man’s eyes go from staying up all night. A different red.
The three in front he knows.
Right at the front, Naib Subedar Mozammel. Two years or so ago, at a unit function, it was this boy who handed him a bouquet. His hand shook so much as he gave it that two flowers came loose and fell on the cement floor. Behind him, Sepoy Nuru. Nuru’s father Sona Mia worked twenty-four years in a jute godown. For the last three of them he was not paid. Sarkar sahib himself once signed a paper on his behalf and got him his wages.
The third man’s name will not come to him. A boy from Boalmari, with a large mole under his eye. During the war this boy walked seven and a half miles in one night to deliver a message; the message was two lines long, and after delivering it he stood a long while at the door, because nobody had asked him to come in and sit. That day the boy had no shoes on his feet. Now he has — boots, laces pulled tight, and because the end of the left lace has torn off there is a knot tied there.
Not being able to recall a name is not the same thing as never having known it. When a man sees someone he knows, his hand goes up of itself. But Abdul Hai’s hand did not go up. The fingers of his right hand stayed clenched around the paan box. The hinge made a small click.
It occurred to him: those who could kill him do not know him. And those who know him this closely cannot kill him. Standing on a staircase of nineteen steps, both these sentences seemed to him at the same moment absolutely true and absolutely false.
He put his foot slowly on the seventh step.
2
There was a sound.
It did not reach his ears at once, though. It came a little late, the way the sound of a hammer in a distant field arrives after the hammer has come up again. And when the sound arrived it was no longer a sound; it settled on his ribs as an enormous weight.
There was no pain.
He waited a while. Pain has its rules. As after a tooth is pulled and the ache starts up from the root, something of that sort should be coming. It did not come. What came instead was a piercing cold.
This cold does not bite; it presses down like a heavy stone. First it settled in his collarbone, then went lower. In the end it settled between the two sides of his ribs as though somebody had shoved a pillow soaked in ice water in there. It is not like the wind that comes across you when you sit at the river landing on a Magh morning. That cold passes through you. This one does not pass through; it stays.
His glasses began to feel very heavy. A shola frame, hardly any weight at all, and yet it pressed on his nose so hard that it seemed somebody had come in the night and changed the frame. His left hand is numb. Not exactly numb either — it seems as if the hand is not his own but the hand of some other man standing behind him, a man who out of politeness is saying nothing.
One by one, he could feel things leaving his body.
The nine-year-old ache in his right knee, which announced itself every time he took the stairs — that is gone. The taste of paan in his mouth, and the burning at the tip of his tongue because too much lime had gone in — that too is gone. The sound of his own breathing, which age makes audible even when he is silent — gone. The click of the hinge of the box — gone. The pull below his waist these last seven days, which the doctor said came from the way he lay — gone.
The list of what stayed is short. The cold stayed. The weight of the glasses stayed. And the smoke.
Smoke had come out of the mouths of seven barrels. There is no fan in the stairwell, so the smoke ought to rise slowly. It did not rise. Like torn cotton it hung still, exactly six inches from the muzzles. Sarkar sahib went on looking at that smoke for an eternity. Though when he worked it out afterwards, that eternity was in fact a fraction of a second.
Time had not stopped. Time had only stopped collecting rent from him.
A sound came from upstairs. Something heavy falling on a floor, and then several more, out of rhythm. Sarkar sahib thought, they must be shifting the almirah. Saleha has a habit of moving the furniture about in the early morning; three or four times a year she rearranges the whole room, and every time she says this is the last time. He thought, why so early. Then he thought, I can ask later.
That thought was one of the last of his thoughts to contain a future tense, and he did not notice it.
The body would not carry any longer. He sat down on the seventh step. Having sat down he felt quite comfortable. At his age nineteen steps really are very hard.
3
Mozammel lowered his weapon.
The way he lowered it was the way a man takes a sack down off his shoulder — not heavy, but it takes both hands. He set it against the wall, muzzle down, the way people stand an umbrella on a wet day. Then he wiped both hands on the sides of his trousers. Seeing his unconcern, the six behind him lowered their weapons too.
— Sir, don’t be afraid.
Sarkar sahib did not answer. The apparatus in the throat that answering requires seemed to have dropped out of his body. But a moment later he was astonished to find the words coming out perfectly well, and with no effort at all.
— Have you come to kill me?
— What a thing to say, sir. Why would we kill you? You’re like our father. Does anyone shoot his father?
There is no hurry in the voice of the boy who is speaking. It is exactly the tone in which a man haggles with a shopkeeper over rice in the market. Sarkar sahib noticed a dried paan stain at the corner of the boy’s mouth. He has had paan this morning, or has been holding it in his mouth since the night.
— Then why have you come this early?
— Early is when you have to come, sir. In the daytime, the crowd there is around you! You can’t say what’s in your mind in a crowd. We’re ordinary sepoys. Nobody takes our words upward.
That pleased him. The weight of the wet pillow sitting inside his chest seemed to ease a little. He thought, there it is, they are angry because nobody listened to them. When men are angry they come at dawn, they come at dawn and stand there with weapons, because they know no other language for putting their claims. Explain it to them and it will all come right. Their fathers and uncles he made with his own hands, and many of these boys he knows personally.
He looked at Nuru and asked him gently,
— How is your father?
— Father’s dead, sir. Two years ago.
— I didn’t hear!
— I came to tell you. They wouldn’t let me in at the gate.
— Who was on the gate?
Nuru did not answer. Mozammel did not answer. Not one of the seven answered. Sarkar sahib saw seven pairs of eyes turn together in one direction, beyond the window, towards the tin sentry box. The lamp is still burning. The stool is still empty.
The answer is not being told to him. It is being shown.
Mozammel came up to the third step, and before sitting brushed the place with his hand. Then he took a paper out of his breast pocket. Folded in four, the corners gone soft. You can tell it has been opened many times and folded many times.
— Sir, let me read you something.
— Read.
Mozammel began to read. As he read, the note of his voice changed. The voice that had been buying rice a moment ago became the voice of a man sitting in front of a microphone.
— Special announcement. This morning a deep conspiracy long carried on against the country has been brought to an end. The principal author of the said conspiracy, Abdul Hai Sarkar, having concluded a secret agreement with a foreign power, had planned to hand over three of the country’s river ports. He had prepared a blueprint for the dissolution of the armed forces. He has repeatedly struck at the faith of the God-fearing populace. Seven secret accounts had been opened abroad in his name. Patriotic soldiers have delivered the nation from this danger. In the matter of the said person…
Mozammel stopped.
There is one more line on the paper. Sarkar sahib can see it, printed letters, and after that line there is nothing. Mozammel did not fold the paper, nor lower it; he only stayed silent.
— Read the end.
— That’s all of it, sir.
— There’s another line at the end. I can see it.
— That doesn’t go with the announcement. That’s separate.
— Separate meaning what?
— Separate meaning it’ll be settled later.
Sarkar sahib wanted to put out a hand towards the paper. The hand would not go up. He noticed that his own voice was calm. Exactly as a man’s voice is when he sees an error in a document. All his life he has corrected faulty documents. When there is an error in a paper the error must be pointed out; that is the rule, and nobody has informed him that the rule has changed.
— This man written about here, who is he?
— That’s you, sir.
— My name is written?
— The name is written. The spelling’s correct too.
— You said three river ports. There are twenty-six river ports in this country. Which three?
— The names aren’t written, sir. Any three.
— Who put the number in?
— Sir, the number isn’t the point.
— Seven accounts abroad?
— Yes sir, seven.
— If there are seven accounts there have to be seven banks named. Where are the names?
— The names aren’t written.
— Then where did the number come from?
— The number goes in first, sir. The names can be put in later.
Sarkar sahib asked no further questions. What is in front of him is no longer an accusation, it is a defective file, and what one does with a defective file he knows.
— Correct it.
— No need, sir.
— What do you mean, no need? If a false thing is on paper it has to be corrected.
— This isn’t a paper for correcting, sir. This is a paper for reading out.
Sarkar sahib did not understand. He made some attempt to understand, but the attempt stopped halfway, because by then Mozammel had taken a pencil out of his pocket.
— There’s one thing that doesn’t tally, though. Your father’s name is written two different ways in two places. In one place Moulvi Yakub Ali, in the other Yakub Ali Sarkar. Which is right?
— Both are right. On papers it was written Sarkar, in speech it was Moulvi.
— Then I’ll keep the paper one.
Mozammel struck out one name, wrote another above it, then bit the pencil and looked carefully to see whether the writing was legible.
In the whole paper, that was the one thing he was permitted to correct.
— What else is written?
— At the end there’s a time.
— A time for what?
— Five twenty-three in the morning.
— I asked, a time for what.
— A time is written, sir. What it’s for isn’t written.
Sarkar sahib wanted to look at the wall clock. The wall clock cannot be seen from the stairwell; it hangs in the upstairs corridor. He worked it out in his head. He put down the number four telephone at twelve past five. Then the corridor, then the window, then the eighth step.
— When was the paper typed?
— In the night.
— What time in the night?
— After twelve.
The wet pillow sitting inside Sarkar sahib’s chest for the first time neither moved nor grew. It only changed position.
— Who gave you the paper?
— The one who gave it is outside.
— Outside, meaning outside the gate?
— Outside means outside, sir.
Sarkar sahib turned his head to the left.
The boy from Boalmari is not looking at the stairs. He is looking at the wall, and rubbing his left boot slowly on the floor — the foot with the knotted, torn lace. Some years ago this boy walked seven and a half miles in the night to bring a two-line message to this house. Tonight too a paper has come into this house from outside, and it was this boy who carried it.
Now the name came back to Sarkar sahib. It came back, and nothing followed from it. He did not say the name. There was nobody in that stairwell to say it to.
4
— You took an oath.
— We did, sir.
— Do you remember what was written in the oath?
— I remember.
— Well then?
Mozammel folded the paper in four and put it into his breast pocket. He buttoned the pocket. Then he put both hands on his knees and leaned forward, the way men lean forward at a village arbitration when they know that in the end it is their view that will stand.
— Then let’s come to the real business, sir. We’ve made an arrangement.
— What arrangement.
Sarkar sahib asked the question. Having asked it, it occurred to him that he had not received an answer to the previous one, and the moment that occurred to him he forgot what the previous question had been. A weight came off his shoulders. What you cannot remember you do not have to carry; nobody granted him this convenience, his own body granted it.
— This time we’ll run it. Not one corrupt man will be left. In the first three months we’ll take four hundred of them in.
— Are there names?
— There are names.
— Show me.
Mozammel put a hand into his bag. The hand stayed inside a few moments, moved, then came out. Empty.
— The list is in the vehicle.
— Where is the vehicle.
— Outside the gate.
Sarkar sahib did not raise the matter of the gate again.
— You won’t have to do anything, sir. You’ll just be a shadow.
— Shadow meaning what.
— Meaning you’ll be there, but not in front. Do you know Kanthalbari? On the bank of the Shirisha. We’ve put up a tin house there. Four-sided roof, cement veranda, between two koroi trees. In the rains the water comes up to the steps of the house, no higher; we’ve measured it.
— Who will live there.
— You. Bhabi sahiba will. The little one too. We’ll give you a cook, her name’s Shukurjan, fifty-five years old, a Kanthalbari woman herself, cooks fish well. You’ll just sit in an easy chair and take the river air. You spent your whole life in prison, after all.
Sarkar sahib’s eyelids grew heavy. He thought of how many times Saleha had said, let’s leave the city. She has said, I need a yard, I don’t need a fence, just a yard. Tuku has asthma, the city dust makes it worse. There ought to be less dust in Kanthalbari.
— Helal and Badsha?
— Let them stay in Dhaka. Let them study. They don’t need to get into any of this.
— They never did get into it.
— They didn’t, but the name is there. If the name is there, you’re in already, sir.
— Can the little one bring the bird?
— Take it, cage and all. There’s room in the truck.
He nodded. Nodding, he realised that his neck was not moving at all. But the intention of the nod reached Mozammel accurately enough, because the way he answered showed that he had understood the consent.
5
Mozammel took a file out of his shoulder bag. An old yellow file, the corners torn. Two papers inside. On the top one, in printed letters:
Form Eleven (b). Consent form relating to temporary withdrawal and safe residence. Branch: Rearrangement. Effective: from the date of signature, but to be reckoned from the date of the incident.
Below it, small boxes. Name, father’s name, permanent address, present address, reason for withdrawal. In the reason box it is already typed: Public interest and personal rest.
At the foot of the page, four conditions in small type. Sarkar sahib read the second condition. The withdrawn person shall make no public statement concerning his own withdrawal, but if advice be sought, he shall be bound to give advice. The third read, The acceptance or non-acceptance of such advice lies entirely within the discretion of the receiving authority. The fourth condition could not be read; the ink there had smeared.
— What’s written in number four.
— Don’t trouble your head over that. That’s an internal matter of ours.
— Where do I sign.
— No signature needed. The rule about signatures was cancelled last week. You give a thumbprint.
— Why was it cancelled.
— A signature can be forged. A thumb can’t.
Sarkar sahib wanted to raise his right hand. The hand would not go up. The brass box was still held in his fingers. Nuru came forward and put a hand under his elbow. He lifted the hand gently, took the thumb, pressed it on the ink pad, then on the marked box on the paper. He did the job with great care. After setting the thumb on the paper he turned it a little, so the print would come up clean. Then he set the hand back exactly where it had been, on the box.
Sarkar sahib looked at Nuru’s face. He saw the boy was pouring with sweat. On this cold rainy morning there is no reason to sweat in a stairwell. By then Mozammel had brought out the second paper.
6
On the second paper there is nothing printed. A blank white sheet, with one word written at the top by hand: List.
— Now give me some names.
— Names of what.
— Who’s to stay. Who’ll work in the new arrangement. Your own choices. We’ll keep them.
Sarkar sahib was pleased. This is what he had wanted all his life — that somebody would sit down in front of him with paper and pen and ask who ought to be kept. He began to speak. Slowly at first, then quite fast. Tofazzal sahib, because the man is honest and is alone because he is honest. Kamaruddin, from the railways, because he can work twenty-four hours. Nadim from Patgati, young but he understands complicated accounts. A doctor from Kushtia, the name will not come, the face is there, a pockmark on the left cheek… number six, number seven, number eight…
Mozammel goes on writing. Beside each name he writes something small; from this distance it cannot be told whether it is a number or a letter.
After eleven names Sarkar sahib stopped. Not from tiredness. Because he realised that after he said each name, that name was being wiped out of his head. He can no longer call up Tofazzal sahib’s face. Which line Kamaruddin works on, he has forgotten. As if a name going onto the paper and a name going off the brain were the two faces of one coin.
— Say more.
— Enough.
— Why enough. There’s another list. This one’s easy.
— What list.
— The names of your own people. Who’s close to you. If there’s need, they’ll be informed.
Sarkar sahib said, Saleha.
Mozammel wrote it.
He said, Tuku. Helal. Badsha.
Mozammel wrote three names, and put three separate marks beside the three.
He said, my elder sister Hasna Banu, she is at Gopaldi.
Mozammel wrote it, then looked up.
— And?
Sarkar sahib tried to think. The names would not come. The room where the names were kept had been emptied out, the door open, no furniture inside. He understood that the second list was doing what the first had done, only faster. He tried to bring Saleha’s face to mind and what came was the border of a sari, green, and even that blurred. He has lost the face.
— One last list, sir. What will you take with you.
That is an easy question and Sarkar sahib felt relieved. He began. The third shelf of the bookcase, the whole of it. The easy chair, the cane one, the cane come loose on the arm, it can be mended. Saleha’s sewing machine. Tuku’s inhalers, two, one in the bag and one in a pocket. And the birdcage.
Then all at once he remembered something very dear to him. Having remembered it he was quiet for a while.
The notebooks. Three bound notebooks. There is a water stain on the cover of the first. It is written up to page one hundred and fourteen and then it stops. Saleha keeps them hidden in the folds of the winter quilts on the bottom shelf of the almirah, because once a notebook was lost and never found. Whatever was to have been written after those hundred and fourteen pages, that unfinished part has never had the chance to become false, and for that reason he has held it to be true forever. Sitting at Kanthalbari the rest can be written. On a riverbank there is fine light for writing in the mornings.
— Notebooks. Three.
— Notebooks, written.
— And.
He thought. After the fifth item the sixth would not come. What books had been on the shelf, that too will not come now. Which side of the easy chair’s arm the cane had come loose on, right or left, he considered for a while, and could make nothing of it.
— Let it stay at five.
— Five written. Whatever you say I’ll write; a thing not said can’t be written.
Sarkar sahib said:
— Have you sent word upward?
— Word has been sent upward, sir.
— Who sent it.
— We sent it. We sent it before.
By then the cold was climbing his throat. Slowly, the way tidewater comes up a channel a little at a time, without hurry, by an exact rule. He thought, let me stand up. The Kanthalbari truck must be waiting at the gate. Saleha must be called and told to keep Tuku’s inhaler in the bag, and to take the tray out from under the cage and carry it separately, or the jolting of the truck will spill the mess.
He went to get up.
7
The body feels very light. So light that at first he thought he had stood up. Then he saw the stair railing in front of his eyes. If the railing is in front of his eyes, then he has not stood up.
He looked down.
The grey shirt he is wearing is no longer grey. From the right side of the chest downward the colour of the cloth has changed completely. That dark red has come down and down until the waist of the lungi is soaked through. The blood is not only running down the cloth; it is seeping through and falling drop by drop onto the stairs. And because the steps are of stone, those drops are running down to the sixth, to the fifth, to the fourth.
What he had been taking all this while for the river wind of Magh was not wind at all.
He raised his face.
On the face of Mozammel standing in front of him there is no longer that gentle, quiet look. There is no face, as such, either; there are only teeth, the bone of a set jaw, and two eyes. The eyes are so red it is hard to find any white in them. He is not sitting on the third step; he is standing straight with his legs apart. The weapon in his hands is not resting against the wall; it is pressed hard into his shoulder. Nuru is not holding his elbow. Nuru is standing seven cubits away with the muzzle pointed upward.
There is no yellow file anywhere. No ink pad. No list has been written anywhere. Nor was there any conversation. There was no conversation at all.
The polite, well-ordered sentences he has been hearing in this stairwell now collapse in a heap and go back to their true shape. Going back, they turn into one continuous, hideous metallic noise, the noise of a burst of automatic fire. A noise that has a beginning but no gap inside it to draw breath. Like our father, they wouldn’t let me in at the gate, the spelling’s correct too, this is a paper for reading out, outside means outside, if the name is there you’re in already — every one of those merciful illusions melts together into that roar of powder.
His glasses have slipped off his nose and caught on his lip. One arm at his ear, the other hanging in the air. There is a crack in the left lens; the crack was not there before. On this side of the crack and on that, the stairwell has split into two, and the number of killers standing in the two halves does not agree. Four on one side, four on the other. He counted twice. Where did eight come from? Looking for the answer to that question, halfway through he forgot what it was he had been looking for.
There is no paper in Mozammel’s breast pocket. There is no paper anywhere. But the last line of the paper can be read now, because that line no longer needs to be written on paper. In the matter of the said person, subsequent measures have been taken.
There is noise from upstairs. There was noise before too; in his trance he did not hear it. Saleha’s voice was heard once, then everything went quiet.
The sound of Helal’s door being broken. The door is old teak; it is taking a little time. Tuku’s voice was heard. The boy is calling Montu’s name in fear. Once, twice, three times. There is not exactly fear in the calling, there is an irritation — the irritation of a bird beating its wings in the cage for no reason and breaking a light sleep. Then that calling stopped too.
The men are going up the stairs with their boots ringing. Going up, some of them stepped over his legs. One did not step over; his boot came down on the foot and went on — not deliberately, in a monstrous hurry.
Sarkar sahib understood that he is not in fact going anywhere. No Kanthalbari truck is standing at the gate. Because there is no place on earth called Kanthalbari, and no river called the Shirisha, and the fifty-five-year-old woman named Shukurjan who cooks fish well was never born. There is no ink on his thumb.
The last thing that came into his head was not philosophy or memory, simply a calculation. A staircase of nineteen steps, and he had come down twelve. The remaining seven somebody will come down, today or tomorrow. And whether that unknown man will count the steps is no longer anything he needs to trouble his head about.
The brass paan box has slipped out of his lifeless hand and come to rest on the fourth step. Because the hinge is loose, the knock has opened the lid. The white lime inside has spilled across the stone. Over that spilled lime a stream of fresh blood is running down. Falling on the lime, the red of the blood seems to go a little pale. An ant was climbing up along the edge of the lime. The stream of blood swept it away and carried it down a step. The ant lay a while as if dead, then set itself to climbing again in the same fighting way, by exactly the same route.
The cage is hanging on the grille of the upstairs window. The cage door is shut. Inside, the myna has shifted to one corner of the perch and is huddled there. Its beak is not tucked under its feathers; it is out. Outside it is still drizzling, and the tapping of water falling from the trees is much clearer than the sound of the rain.
8
Form Eleven (b), serial 419.
Time of receipt not entered. Name and father’s name of the withdrawn person typed; both address boxes blank. Printed matter in the reason-for-withdrawal box unaltered. Thumbprint box blank. Witness signature box blank.
Two lists are referred to as annexures; the two lists were not found in the file. There is nowhere any mention of a third list.
At the place of the fourth condition the ink is smeared. What that condition was is not on record.
In the remarks column, in a slanting hand, only: The file is to be kept.
The date box is blank, because he who was to set the date had not yet been decided upon.
