People think we sell weeping. We do not sell weeping. We sell sound.
The biggest problem at a memorial gathering is silence. A speaker finishes and sits down, the next speaker has not yet reached the microphone, and what comes down over the hall in those seven seconds is a thing no organiser can bear. In those seven seconds people take out their phones. In those seven seconds people think about getting up and leaving. In those seven seconds everybody realises that nothing is in fact happening inside them for the dead man.
We fill those seven seconds.
The firm is called Hashem Traders. The main business is wholesale shroud cloth and attar. The mourning department was opened about seven years ago, Sir’s own idea. Sir says, Where there’s demand in the market and no supply, that’s where the profit is.
There are rates. A kulkhani, five hundred. A milad mahfil, four hundred, because at a milad you cannot weep much, you can only go moist. A fortieth-day, six hundred. A political memorial meeting, twelve hundred, with a packet of biryani, and three hundred more if there are television cameras. There is no separate bonus for sitting in the front row in front of the camera, but there is, and everybody knows it.
Nobody has any use for my name. In this trade a name is not needed. Sir called us by numbers. I was number four. I worked eight years. How many places in all I have wept in I have not kept count of, but it should be in the register. If you want the number of the dead you have to look at the register in Sir’s office. Everything is written there. Date, address, name of the deceased, age, cause of death, how many are needed, what grade of weeping is needed, and whether the money has been received.
That last column was the one most often left blank. People are not ashamed to leave the money for mourning outstanding. In fact there is an advantage in it: when you go to ask for the money they say, Brother, we’ve got guests in the house, come later.
I came into this work eight months after Roni died.
Roni was my son. He was nine. Dengue. He was three days in hospital, the platelets were falling, then the falling stopped and the doctor said he was improving now, and six hours after that he died. I do not blame the doctor. The doctor said what he knew. The body does not listen to doctors.
There were a great many people at the funeral prayer. My wife’s family, the landlord, people from the shop, two of Roni’s schoolmasters.
I did not weep.
There was a lot of talk about it. On the first day nobody said anything; everybody thought it was shock. On the third day my mother-in-law said to my wife, Your husband is stone. On the seventh day the lady from the next flat asked my wife, Bhabi, was he always like this?
My wife said nothing. She knew. I used to lie awake at night, go and stand in the bathroom for half an hour, leave the tap running. But the weeping would not come. Inside I had gone so hard that there was no water in there. People think weeping comes from grief. It does not. Weeping comes from a certain depth of grief. Go deeper than that and it is no longer wet; it goes dry.
Eight months later Bachchu bhai told me about this work. Bachchu bhai is a regular at the tea shop in our lane. He said, Akbar, you sit around all day like a dead man anyway; go and sit somewhere else and you’ll get paid for it.
I asked, But I can’t weep.
He said, They’ll teach you that. That’s nothing.
Much later I understood that I did not take this work for money. I took it in the hope that, standing in front of other people’s dead and trying, one day the weeping might come for my own.
I did not tell my wife what work I did. She knew I worked at a traders, supply work, that I had to go about outside. I did not lie, but I did not tell all of it either.
Three years in, she found out. How she found out I do not know; most likely somebody told her. That night at dinner she asked, Is it true you go to people’s houses and weep?
I said, Yes.
She was quiet a while and then said, Is the money any good?
I was surprised. I had expected anger, disgust, at least a question about why. She asked whether the money was any good.
Later I understood that she was asking something else. She wanted to know: when you go there, do you weep for Roni?
That question she has never asked aloud and I have never answered. For twelve years that one question has lain on the table between us in this household, and the two of us sit on either side of it and eat our rice.
It took eight years. And when the weeping came, I lost my job.
The training was given by Master sahib. Nearly seventy, formerly with a jatra troupe, where he played the Bibek. Now on contract with the mourning department of Hashem Traders.
On the very first day he said, Sons, forget onions. Onions are a beginner’s business. An onion brings water to the eyes but it does not change the voice. People do not look at eyes; people listen to the voice.
There are three grades.
Grade A is lamentation. Full-throated, the body rocking, and now and then calling out the relation to the deceased. This is the dearest and the riskiest. Risky because once you start grade A it is hard to stop, and if it runs past its allotted time the whole event comes apart.
Grade B is sobbing. This is what mostly sells. In grade B the shoulders shake, there is the sound of the nose being drawn in, but no interruption in the middle of the speeches. The speaker goes on speaking, we sob underneath. A good pairing.
Grade C is only the eyes. Taking off the glasses and wiping them, bringing out a handkerchief, clearing the throat. For milads, for memorial meetings at big offices, when there are foreign guests.
Master sahib’s greatest teaching was about relation. He used to say, It won’t do just to weep, you have to make clear who you are. A nephew weeps one way, a younger man from the neighbourhood weeps another. In a nephew’s weeping there is regret; in a younger man’s there is reverence.
We rehearsed in the godown. Sitting among the bundles of shroud cloth. Six of us. Master sahib would raise his hand and we would start. When he lowered it we stopped.
There was another rule, about names. The dead man’s name must not be got wrong, and, more important than that, the name must not be said too often. Master sahib used to say, A name is salt. In the right amount it opens up every dish; too much and everything is ruined.
Once a new boy got it mixed up. The dead man’s name was Abdul Hai, and all through the event he kept saying Abdul Haque. At the end the dead man’s nephew came and asked, Brother, whose kulkhani have you come to? The boy was dropped the same day.
Sir said one thing about him that I remember. He said, Dock his pay and he’d understand, but getting a name wrong you can’t explain to a man. Someone who can’t hold a name in his head — however well he weeps, there’s nothing inside him.
One day in the middle of a rehearsal Chhoto Mia laughed. Master sahib put him out. He said, Laughter comes as it pleases. That won’t do in this department.
There were nine of us in the group. Six men, three women. The women’s branch is separate, under Khaleda bubu. Their rate is higher, because no memorial gathering works without women’s weeping, and nobody remembers a man’s.
Khaleda bubu is getting on for fifty. She is the oldest hand in the line, older than Sir. She used to go from village to village singing the lament for the dead; in those days it was unpaid work, people gave rice, gave cloth. She says, I came to the city and found that everything has a price here, grief too.
She had one rule Sir was never able to change. She would not go to a child’s funeral. Asked why, she would say, That weeping runs into my own, and then there’s no keeping account.
Sir insisted once. A big party, good money. Khaleda bubu said, Brother, I’ll go, but I can’t guarantee my weeping. Sir backed off then. Without a guarantee Sir does not send anybody.
There was politics inside the group too. Who sits in the front row was a three-year quarrel between Bachchu bhai and Chhoto Mia. The front row means the camera, the camera means the bonus, the bonus means next month’s rent. Once Chhoto Mia came to work while he was ill, only so the seat would not go empty.
I stayed out of those quarrels. The front row was not my line; my work was different. Each of us had his own speciality.
Bachchu bhai’s speciality was saying ah, ah. At the right place, with the right pull. He might say it fourteen times in a whole event, and every time at least twenty people in the hall would go thick in the throat. Sir had a particular love for him.
Chhoto Mia’s job was to sink down on the floor. Halfway through, suddenly, gripping his head in both hands. That comes out well on camera.
I had only one speciality: I could stop. It sounds like a small thing, but in this trade being able to stop is the real skill. When the huzur begins the closing prayer after a milad, all weeping must stop. In one second. Anyone who cannot stop is not kept on more than two years.
Sir said once to a new boy, Listen, son, we’re not weepers. We’re a sound system. A microphone doesn’t talk, it plays. We don’t weep either. We play.
I remember it because that day I went home and stood in front of the mirror a long time.
We had a system of supervision too. At every big event somebody would go with a register and sit at the back among the ordinary people. He wrote down who started when, how long it went on, whether anybody overdid it. At the end of the month the pay was fixed from that register.
The register was called the Quality Control Register. I still remember some of the entries. No. 07, began 4:12, volume moderate, but excessive nose-drawing. No. 02, ran over the speaker’s words, cautioned. No. 04, faultless.
Number four is me. Over eight years the word written most often beside my number is faultless. Sometimes I think: if the whole of a man’s working life had to be summed up in one word, and that word were faultless, then what did that man actually make.
The biggest job was the first death anniversary of a deceased member of parliament. An auditorium was hired. Four hundred and fifty chairs. A banner on the stage, the dead man’s photograph on the banner, and underneath, You live forever in our hearts. Three cameras. Eleven of us were called, which meant two had to be hired in from outside.
The organiser was the dead man’s younger brother. He is in politics himself now and wants the nomination at the next election. I heard the briefing he gave Sir, because I was drinking tea in the next room.
Look, Hashem bhai, if it’s too much there’s a problem.
Why, brother?
If it’s too much people will think we’re still weak. There should be grief, but there should be strength with the grief. Understand?
Understood, brother. Medium weeping.
One more thing. Not every time my brother’s name comes up. Leave some of them out. Otherwise it looks arranged.
Yes, brother, we know that. We give it at seventy per cent.
That is the real thing. Seventy per cent. Sir’s discovery. Of all the times the dead man’s name is spoken, weeping at seventy per cent and silence at thirty. Do it at a hundred and you are caught out. People can spot an arranged thing when it is perfect. What people take for genuine is the thing with a small gap in it.
The event went well. At one point a gentleman in the second row, who was none of ours, actually wept. Bachchu bhai said afterwards, See that? When our work’s done right you get free stuff as well. The money was paid in full. That is rare.
The day it all ended, the job was a small one.
Out towards Mirpur, in the ground-floor garage of a six-storey building. The garage had been cleaned and matting laid down. The dead person was a child. Nine years old. Kulkhani.
Sir sent three of us. The rate was five hundred each; because it was a child the organisers haggled, and it was settled at four hundred and fifty.
I did not know the age when I set out. It is written in the register; I had not looked that day. If I had looked I might not have gone. Or I might have gone, because in eight years I have done many such jobs, and a child’s kulkhani is nothing new.
I went and sat down. On the right of the matting, near the wall. The huzur came. The recitation began. Out of habit I fixed my relation to the deceased — an uncle from the neighbourhood, grade B.
Then my eye went forward. Propped against the wall was a framed photograph. Of the child. In school uniform, hair combed, taken in a studio, a blue curtain behind. Beside the photograph, a pair of shoes.
Black, laced, school shoes. Somebody had polished them. Recently. The polish was still shining, even along the edge of the sole where polish does not go.
I sat looking at that polish. Who had done this. The child had died thirty-seven days ago. On some morning or some night of those thirty-seven days, somebody in this house had sat down with a brush and a tin of polish and polished a dead boy’s shoes, properly, twice over, even in the places nobody would look at.
Then something inside me came loose. I cannot say how it happened. In eight years I had manufactured so many kinds of weeping that I believed I knew the mechanism of weeping. I did not. What came did not match anything I had learned. First my throat closed, then something pulled inside my chest as though the skin were being torn from within, and then the sound came out.
The sound was not beautiful. In our trade weeping has a tune. This had no tune. This was the sound of an animal. The weeping was not the problem. The problem was that I could not stop.
The huzur finished the recitation and began the closing prayer. During the closing prayer all weeping stops. That is the first rule of this trade and I have taught it to new boys myself. I did not stop.
Chhoto Mia pressed my knee. Bachchu bhai dug an elbow into me from behind. I felt it, but by then the thing was no longer in my hands.
The prayer stopped. People turned round.
Then came the worst part. The dead child’s mother came out of the inner room. I had heard that the woman had not wept all this time, that she had turned to stone. She came out and stood in the doorway of the garage and looked at me.
I was still weeping. She came forward. She sat down in front of me. She took my hands.
She asked, What relation are you?
I could not answer. My training has an answer for that question, six different answers, and I could not use a single one of them.
She asked again, Did you know my son?
Then I shook my head, no.
The woman let go of my hands. She stood up. She went inside. And immediately after that the household put the three of us out, handing us four hundred and fifty taka each; nobody said anything unkind, in fact one of them even said sorry.
Out on the street Bachchu bhai lit a cigarette and said, Akbar, did you know the boy?
I said, No.
Then what?
I did not answer. Because if I had said the answer Bachchu bhai would not have believed it. The answer is that I did not weep for anybody. Eight years of stored weeping came out at the sight of a polished shoe. That is all.
That night I went home and ate and lay down and fell asleep. The best sleep of those eight years.
The letter came four days later. On Hashem Traders letterhead, with Sir’s signature and seal at the bottom.
To: Mr Akbar Ali, Weeper, Serial No. 04, Mourning Department.
Subject: Show-cause notice.
You are hereby informed that during the performance of your duties at a kulkhani ceremony held in the Mirpur area on the 19th instant, the following complaints have been raised against you.
One. Weeping at a volume exceeding the permitted limit, in violation of the prescribed standard.
Two. Continuation of weeping during the closing prayer, which is in clear contravention of the first operating principle of this establishment.
Three. Establishment of unauthorised personal contact with the family of the deceased.
Four. Failure to state your identity to the said family, thereby damaging the reputation of the establishment.
Five. Above all, the display of personal and uncontrolled weeping in place of professional weeping, which is inconsistent with the standard and character of this establishment’s service.
You are directed to submit a written reply in the above matter within three working days. Failing this, action will be taken as per the rules.
That letter was the first time I saw my own name in print. For eight years everybody had called me number four. I wrote my reply. By hand, on notebook paper.
Sir, of the five charges brought against me I admit four. Numbers one, two, three and four are true.
Regarding the fifth charge my statement is this: on that day I did not weep for personal reasons. I did not weep for anybody. My own son died eight years ago and I did not weep for him that day either.
It is my belief that what occurred on that day had no cause. It came of itself. Over that which comes without cause an employee has no control.
Therefore my humble submission is that you consider the said complaint not as professional misconduct but as an unavoidable cause.
I knew the reply would do no good. I wrote it anyway, because in eight years it was the only writing in which I wrote my own words.
The hearing was held in the godown. Sir, Master sahib, and Farid bhai the accountant. Sir read my reply twice. Then he took off his glasses and said, Akbar, you’re an eight-year man. I’m fond of you. But tell me one thing: do you understand what you’ve done?
Yes, sir. I broke the rules.
No. You didn’t break the rules. Breaking rules can be forgiven. You’ve ruined the thing.
What thing, sir?
Sir was quiet a while, and what he said then I have still not forgotten.
Listen. The weeping we sell has a boundary to it. A man comes to a memorial gathering wanting to feel a little pain, not much, a little. Just enough to wet the eyes and not the shirt. Our job is to hold that measure. That day you let go of the measure.
Sir, I didn’t do it on purpose —
Who asked about purpose? Listen. When you wept for real, what did the forty people in that hall do? They forgot the dead boy and remembered their own dead. That woman took your hands and asked what relation you were. Why did she ask? Because hearing you weep, it seemed to her that you were somebody.
Is that bad, sir?
That is the worst of all. You went inside the customer’s house. We have to stay outside. We give the sound from outside. Go inside and you can’t be a supplier any more.
Master sahib had been silent till then. He said, Son, real weeping is unprofessional. Real weeping doesn’t stop, doesn’t keep to time, and above all, real weeping is no use to anybody.
The decision was dismissal. One month’s pay was given, the money for three outstanding jobs was given, and on my way out of the godown Farid bhai put a packet of attar in my hand, a farewell gift.
The attar is still there. Unopened. After that I did a number of things. Six months at a courier office, then in a relative’s shop, and now I manage a boarding house. Easy work, doing the marketing and collecting the rent.
Now and then I run into Bachchu bhai. The mourning department is still going, doing better than before in fact; Sir apparently takes orders online now. Bachchu bhai says, Come back, Sir will take you, Sir bears no grudge.
I do not go. Because there is a problem I have not told Bachchu bhai about. Since that day I cannot weep at all. Not manufactured, not real.
For the first few months I tried. At night I went and stood in the bathroom with the tap running, exactly as I had eight years before. I went through everything Master sahib taught, step by step. Fixing the relation, dropping the voice, shortening the breath. Nothing came.
One day I even cut an onion. My eyes burned, water came, my nose ran. No sound came. Then I understood that Master sahib had been right. People do not look at eyes. Not even at their own.
It is my belief that weeping collects inside a person only once. Some people spend it in good time, slowly, a little at a time over the years. I saved mine up. And then one day I went and poured out the whole of it at once for a child whose name I do not even know, and came away with four hundred and fifty taka for it.
Last year my mother-in-law died. A house full of people, everybody weeping, my wife on the floor, and me standing near the door with dry eyes, exactly as eight years before. The lady from the next flat looked at me again. After all this time her suspicion has been proved.
Last Friday I went to Roni’s grave. After a long time. I had no trouble finding the place; there is a mehedi bush on the next grave.
I sat down. I sat a long while. Nothing happened. On the way back, outside the gate of the graveyard, a kulkhani was being got ready. Canopy, chairs, microphone. I stood and watched. Four men were sitting inside in the front row, and two of them I know.
The sound started at exactly the right moment. It rose, it fell, it stopped.
Excellent work. Not a gap anywhere.
