On the day the container is raised from the bottom of the Buriganga below Sawarighat, the people of Islambagh stand on the slope of the ghat from dawn waiting for the smell. They know that whatever comes up out of a river has a smell; they have seen many times before how the divers go down and come back, and then something wrapped in black polythene comes up, and then the people at the ghat press their gamchhas over their noses and step back. So that morning, when the crane’s cable pulls taut and first a reddish rusted corner and then slowly the whole iron box comes up out of the water, the people of the quarter are ready with their gamchhas in hand. But no smell comes. After the container has been set down on the cement apron of the ghat, people and police and the fire service men stand around it for nearly an hour and a half and there is still no smell, and it is then that the people of the quarter feel their first unease, because they understand that this thing is not what they had thought it was.
Around a quarter to twelve the hinges of the door are cut with a gas cutter. When the door is opened it is seen that there is no water inside. Inside the twenty-two-foot iron box it is dry, and there is dust on the floor, the kind of dust that does not settle at the bottom of a river. A fire service man goes in with a torch and his shoes leave prints in the dust, and the people standing outside can see those prints. There is no body inside.
What is inside is arranged in three parts. Along the left-hand wall, shoes in a row. In the middle, mobile phones in a plastic basin. And in the right-hand corner, a bundle of identity cards held with a rubber band. The shoes were not arranged in pairs; one beside another, straight, toes all facing the same way, as they are in a shoe shop. Counted later, the shoes come to forty-one. So at least one shoe had no pair, and about that number forty-one the people of Islambagh go on talking for many years afterwards. The mobile phones are nineteen, the identity cards twenty-three. These three numbers do not tally with one another in any way, and because they do not tally, the people of the quarter keep counting them again, and every time they count the number is the same, and still they count again.
Abdul Malek the diver, who goes down at this ghat three times a year and who has a cataract in his left eye, says afterwards, sitting in the tea shop, that he counted them himself and there were thirty-nine shoes. On the other hand a man from Posta, who nobody knows why he was at the ghat that day, says there were forty-three. What the men from the police station write on paper is forty-one, and since it is forty-one on paper, forty-one is what it stays. But Abdul Malek goes on saying until he dies that he counted thirty-nine, and since he had a reputation in the quarter for being able to see underwater even with his bad eye, people do not entirely dismiss what he says.
Whether the container fell from a ship, or whether somebody dumped it, or whether it had been lying at the bottom of the river all along, to none of these questions is any answer ever found. Men come from the police station, photographs are taken, a ghat labourer from Islampur and the manager of the ice factory are called in for questioning and released before evening. After a few days the journalists stop coming. The container lies on the apron of the ghat and the first two letters of the number painted on its side go under the rust.
What happens with the identity cards is more important. Among the twenty-three cards there are thirteen national identity cards, four garment factory cards, two rickshaw pullers’ licences, one college student’s card, one paper issued to a launch serang, one hospital outpatient card, and one card which nobody in the quarter can identify as a card for anything. When the names are written up in white chalk on the wall of the ice factory, the list stands like this: Yunus Mia, Abdul Barek, Suruj Ali, Mohammad Shahjahan, Harun-or-Rashid, Nurul Haque, Jahangir Hossain, Ratan Chandra Das, Bilkis Akhter, Shukkur Ali, Moslem Uddin, and twelve more names that nobody can now recall.
Beside the list the dates are written too. And after those dates are written up, the people of Islambagh go quiet. The launch serang’s paper is from nineteen ninety-six; that man, Nurul Haque, went missing the following winter. Bilkis Akhter’s garment card is from a factory called New Star, a factory which has not existed since two thousand twelve. Ratan Chandra Das’s voter ID was made in two thousand nine. The student’s college card expired in two thousand twenty-one. Moslem Uddin’s card is from two thousand eighteen.
That is to say, the people whose things were found inside the container were not all lost at the same time. There are twenty-five years between their losses. The people of Islambagh try to understand this, and for several weeks they stand in front of the ice factory wall and arrange the dates in order. First they think that arranging them from the oldest to the newest may produce a meaning. Then they arrange them the other way round. Then they set the dates aside and arrange them by age. Nothing comes out. A master from the Nalgola school, who used to teach arithmetic, copies the list into a notebook and comes back eight days later and says he has found no rule in it. Five months after that he is transferred to Narayanganj and where the notebook goes nobody knows. Meanwhile the rains come and the chalk on the ice factory wall washes away. The people of the quarter do not write it up again, because by then they have other things to do.
By then the shoes have been laid out on a tarpaulin on the apron, and people have begun to come.
How the news spreads is hard to say, but nine days after the event a family comes from Netrokona, then from Bhola, then from Kishoreganj, and then people start coming from places whose names the people of Islambagh have never heard. They set out on the night coaches and get down at Sadarghat at dawn and walk to Sawarighat and kneel down in front of the tarpaulin. At first the police stop them, then they stop stopping them, then a constable sits down with a register and starts writing names and addresses, and in three weeks a hundred and eighty-six pages of that register are filled. People pick the shoes up. Turn them over. Put a finger inside. Look at the stitching, look at the patching, look at the knot in the lace. Most of them, after a while, put the shoe down and stand up, and then you cannot tell from their faces whether they are relieved or grieved.
Rahela Begum, whose son Yunus Mia went out one Thursday evening seven years ago saying he was going to the shop and never came back, recognises the shoe the moment she sits down in front of the tarpaulin. Seventh from the left, brown leather, torn near the heel and so stitched with blue thread. Rahela Begum did the stitching herself, because Yunus Mia would not agree to buy new shoes. The blue thread was the thread used to bind her daughter’s school fee book. Even after seven years under water the thread is still blue, and Rahela Begum sees that.
She takes the shoe in her hands. Holds it a long time. Then, when the constable holds out the register and asks, “Do you recognise it?”, Rahela Begum puts the shoe back on the tarpaulin in exactly the place it was and says, “No. This isn’t my son’s.”
The constable asks again. Rahela Begum says again that it is not her son’s. Then she gets up and climbs the slope of the ghat and gets on a bus and goes away. The next morning she comes again. Sits in front of the tarpaulin, takes up the seventh shoe, puts it down, and says it is not her son’s. In this way she comes eleven days running. At first the people of the quarter are irritated, then they come to know her, and then Akkas Ali, whose tea shop is against the wall of the ice factory, brings out a stool for Rahela Begum to sit on and takes no money from her.
On the tenth day Akkas Ali asks her, “Khala, what is it you come and look at every day?”
Rahela Begum says, “I look to see if the shoe’s still there.”
“And if it is?”
“If it is, then nobody’s taken him yet.”
Akkas Ali does not understand what this means, but he does not ask again. Later, much later, the people of the quarter discuss it among themselves, and the clever ones among them say that it is not that Rahela Begum failed to recognise the shoe. They say that on the day she says it is her son’s, from that day Yunus Mia will no longer be missing, from that day he will be dead, and Rahela Begum did not want to do that job with her own hands. But other people in the quarter do not accept this explanation. They say Rahela Begum’s eyes are bad and there is no shortage of shoes stitched with blue thread in the city of Dhaka.
The business of Chhabi Begum happens thirteen days after this, and it is a different kind of business. Chhabi Begum’s husband Shukkur Ali went missing four years ago and Shukkur Ali’s name was on the list on the ice factory wall, because his identity card was found inside the container. Chhabi Begum comes and sits in front of the tarpaulin and picks up a black plastic sandal and says it is her husband’s.
The sandal was not Shukkur Ali’s. The people of Islambagh know this, because Shukkur Ali did not wear sandals, he wore keds all year round, even to weddings, and the quarter used to laugh about it. But that day nobody standing in front of the tarpaulin says anything. The constable writes it in the register. Chhabi Begum gives her thumbprint. Then she puts the sandal in a cloth bag and takes it home.
Chhabi Begum has three children, and a case was running against her husband’s brother over a portion of her father-in-law’s homestead, and in that case some proof of her husband’s death was needed. The people of the quarter knew this, and that is why they kept quiet that day. Later, of course, some of them say the keeping quiet was wrong. And others say it was right. Neither party stops speaking to Chhabi Begum, and Chhabi Begum does not lower her eyes when she speaks to anybody.
Chhabi Begum keeps the sandal under her bed. About a month later her younger son Nadim puts it on one day and goes out in it, and Chhabi Begum beats him and takes the sandal away and puts it back under the bed. But it never becomes Shukkur Ali’s. Chhabi Begum knows that herself. At night when she has put out the lamp and is lying down, under the bed there is a plastic sandal that belongs to nobody, and on that belonging-to-nobody thing the future of three people is standing.
Moslem Uddin, who breaks ice at the Sawarighat ice factory and who has ice powder in his hair all year round, was at the ghat from the morning on the day the container was opened. He stood with everyone else preparing for the smell and felt uneasy at getting no smell. In the afternoon, when the police lay the identity cards out on the apron and read the names out one by one, he hears his own name on the seventh card.
At first he laughs. He pushes through the crowd to the front and says, “That’s mine. Give it here.”
The constable holds the card up and compares. The photograph matches. The name matches. The father’s name matches. The address matches — Islambagh, ice factory lane. The constable looks at Moslem Uddin’s face, then at the card, then at his face again. Then he puts the card down and says, “This is evidence. This can’t be given out.”
Moslem Uddin was still laughing. He says, “Evidence of what? I’m standing right here.”
At this the people at the ghat laugh, and that afternoon the matter ends there. But it does not actually end, because the next morning the manager of the ice factory calls Moslem Uddin in and tells him that men came from the police station to make enquiries, and that his name has gone onto the paper, and that once a name is on the paper it cannot be taken off.
What happens after that happens slowly, and so slowly that nobody can say which day it starts. Moslem Uddin breaks ice every morning, eats his rice at Akkas Ali’s shop every midday, goes home every evening. But after losing the card he has no paper in his hand. Since the ice factory wages were paid hand to hand, for the first few months there is no difficulty. Then the factory makes a new rule that wages will go into the bank, and the bank will not open an account without a card, and Moslem Uddin goes to the election office and is told there that his card cannot be shown as lost, because it is not lost, it is at the police station. He goes to the police station. The man there says, “You’re not the complainant in the case, and you’re not the owner of the evidence. Your card belongs to the state now.”
Moslem Uddin comes back and sits in Akkas Ali’s shop drinking tea and says, “My card belongs to the state now.” The people of the quarter laugh. Moslem Uddin laughs too.
But within the following year the people of Islambagh begin to leave Moslem Uddin out when they are talking. His name is not written on the mosque committee’s subscription list, because the subscription list is made from the members’ cards. When the water line is put into the quarter his house number does not go onto the list of houses. On his child’s school admission form the box for the father’s NID number is left blank, and the headmaster says it is not in his hands to accept a form with a blank box. These things happen one at a time, and because they happen one at a time nobody thinks much of them.
Then one day Aziz the grocer refuses him credit. Moslem Uddin says, “I’ve taken credit here six years.”
Aziz says, “You have. But how am I to give credit to a man there’s no trace of?”
Moslem Uddin gives no answer to this. He comes out of the shop, and that evening he asks his wife, “Can you see me?”
His wife says, “Don’t talk madness. Shall I serve the rice?”
He eats the rice. The rice goes down. That much was certain, and Moslem Uddin’s wife says this many times afterwards, that the rice went down, and every time she says it the people of the quarter nod, because rice going down is a provable thing.
Moslem Uddin’s elder brother Nur Mohammad, who worked as a truck helper in Keraniganj and with whom there had long been friction over the division of the homestead, turns up in Islambagh at about this time and stays three days. On the third day he says to Moslem Uddin’s wife, “The little brother’s got no papers at all. The homestead deed needs an heir. If I’m not around, what’ll you people do?”
Moslem Uddin’s wife says nothing. At night she tells her husband. Moslem Uddin is quiet a long time and then says, “Brother’s right.”
On this one point the people of Islambagh later divide. Some say Nur Mohammad took advantage. Some say there was nobody but Nur Mohammad to save that homestead, and that there is no way in this world for a man without papers to keep a house. The argument in the quarter has not fully died down even now. Moslem Uddin himself has never said anything about it. He breaks ice, drinks tea, and now and then goes onto the apron of the ghat and stands with a hand on the container, because the iron goes hot in summer and cold in winter, and he likes that.
About the mobile phones there is not much to say separately. Seventeen of the nineteen had swollen and the battery casings had split and the insides had come out. The police send them to a repair shop in Islampur for examination, and the owner of that shop, Alauddin, spends two months trying to start seven of them. Not one starts. Only one small white phone, which had no camera in it, when it is put on charge the company’s name comes up on the screen and then goes out. And every time it is put on charge the same thing happens, the name comes up and goes out. The boys of Islampur used to come and pay a taka each to see this. How much Alauddin made out of it in six months he has told nobody. Then one day the phones are taken back by the police station, and after that no more is heard of them.
Nadim has to be mentioned here, because without Nadim the account of the shoes is not complete. Chhabi Begum’s younger son Nadim, aged twelve, three months after the event begins taking shoes from under the tarpaulin at night. He takes one at a time, sometimes two, and sells them in Posta to a dealer in old shoes. Since there are no pairs the price is low; the dealer gives five taka each, and with the five taka Nadim buys red iced sherbet.
On the fourth night he lifts out a black leather shoe much bigger than his foot, and this one he does not sell. He puts it on. That shoe on the right foot and nothing on the left, and in this way he walks about the lanes of Islambagh for seven months. The people of the quarter catch him one day and beat him and take the shoe away and return it to the apron. The next day the shoe is on Nadim’s foot again. They beat him again. The third time they do not beat him, and after that a boy with a shoe on one foot goes about Islambagh and it becomes ordinary in the eyes of the quarter.
In the constable’s register the number of shoes stands at forty-one to the end, although by then there are no longer forty-one on the tarpaulin.
Haji Idris Ali, who is secretary of the quarter’s mosque committee and who has a cloth warehouse in Islampur, proposes a milad eight months after the event. He says that the souls of the dead should be prayed for and that it can be arranged on a large scale on the apron of the ghat and journalists can be called. The committee agree and a date is set. But four days before the date the imam raises a question. He asks in whose name the milad is to be read. None of the people whose names are on the list has been declared dead. There has been no funeral prayer for anybody, because there is no body. There is a rule in the shariah for declaring a missing person dead, and that rule requires a reckoning of time, and here everybody’s time is different.
The committee sit for three days and cannot arrive at a solution. Idris Ali says, “Read it without names. Just the prayer.”
The imam says, “A prayer can be made without names. But people will ask why a milad is being held without names.”
In the end the milad is not held. After this the people of Islambagh understand one more thing, which until then they had not understood. They understand that with what was found inside the container nobody can be mourned, because mourning requires a date, and a date requires a body, and there is no body. They also understand that this is why Rahela Begum comes every day and says the shoe is not her son’s. They do not say this to Rahela Begum.
The container lies on the apron for two years and three months. In that time a cat has kittens inside it, the ghat porters sleep in it at midday, and once, in the rains, a launch ticket seller takes shelter inside it at night and comes out in the morning saying that no sound could be heard inside all night, no sound at all, not even the sound of the river. This gets about the quarter, and after that the porters do not sleep in it.
Then the port authority issues a notice to clear the apron. A release comes from the police station saying the container is no longer needed as evidence. The container goes to auction and a scrap dealer from Posta buys it and brings a gas cutter and in seven days cuts it into pieces.
The iron sheets spread through Islambagh. Akkas Ali buys two sheets and takes down the wooden shutter in front of his tea shop and puts up an iron one. One sheet goes to the chicken coop behind the ice factory. A big sheet becomes the yard fence of a house in Kamalbagh. Several more pieces go to the dockyards of Keraniganj and are used there as patches on the bottoms of boats, and those boats go on plying the Buriganga. In this way the thing that came up from the bottom of the river goes piece by piece into the quarter, and the people of the quarter sit inside it drinking tea and keep chickens behind it and cross the river standing on it.
What the police do with the shoes nobody exactly knows. It is said they went into a store. It is said they were burned. Chhabi Begum says they were sent somewhere outside Dhaka, though she cannot say where she heard it.
Only the seventh shoe, brown leather, stitched with blue thread near the heel, stays in Islambagh. How it stays there, there are two versions. One party says Akkas Ali gave the constable fifty taka and kept it. The other says Nadim stole it and, unable to sell it, left it behind Akkas Ali’s shop. Either way, after the new iron shutter goes up Akkas Ali hangs the shoe on a wire above the shop door, because shops draw the evil eye and hanging a shoe to turn away the evil eye is a long-standing custom in old Dhaka.
Rahela Begum still comes to Sawarighat once or twice a month. On the apron of the ghat there are heaps of ice for the fish market now, and where the container stood the trucks turn round. She does not look at the apron. She comes and stands in front of Akkas Ali’s shop and looks a long time at the brown shoe hanging above the door. Akkas Ali makes her tea and takes no money. Sometimes Moslem Uddin is at the shop at that time too, with ice powder in his hair, and he pays cash for his tea, because having no card he gets no credit. Nobody speaks to anybody.
Before leaving, Rahela Begum says the same thing every time. She says, “This isn’t my son’s.”
Akkas Ali nods. Moslem Uddin nods. Whoever of the quarter is wherever he is, nods. Then Rahela Begum walks off down the lane and the shoe goes on hanging from the wire, and on rainy nights, when the rain comes down, the people of Islambagh fall asleep listening to the sound it makes on Akkas Ali’s iron shutter.
