1
My shop is called New Shapla Computer & Photostat. The water lily on the signboard was painted by a signwriter from Tajmahal Road, and it came out looking like water hyacinth. It has been hanging there fourteen years. The sun has taken the colour out of it, the rains have rusted the corner of the tin, and in all that time nobody has objected. The people of this lane do not read signboards. They only know that typing is done here.
I type. Résumés, school admission applications, complaints about meter readings, complaints about water coming through the roof, missing person notices, applications for a succession certificate after a death. A couple of love letters a month as well. Typing a love letter is an indecent business. Without handwriting a love letter has no weight. But if the customer wants it, it has to be done. Love in a Unicode font looks a good deal like a notice from the Department of Environment.
And I type deeds of divorce.
There is no shortage of kazi offices in Mohammadpur. They have their own clerks, their own touts, their own stamp vendors. Still people come here. Because I work cheap, and I keep my mouth shut. For typing the draft I take a hundred and twenty taka. Printing is separate. Three copies are needed: the husband’s, the wife’s, the kazi’s. Those who don’t know have one copy made and go away, then come back. Coming back they wear a sheepish smile, like someone who has handed in his exam paper and remembered on the way out that he never wrote the last page.
I have kept count of exactly how many deeds of divorce I have typed in fourteen years. The register is in the drawer; the termites have had some of it. Three hundred and sixty-one.
There are about seven hundred people in this lane. And of those three hundred and sixty-one divorces, not one has taken effect.
2
This lane has no official name. On the city corporation’s map it is marked as a branch of Humayun Road, without a number. The postman brings letters in envelopes that say Humayun Road, back side. But we call it Joragoli, the joined lane.
About the name, the old men say that the first two houses built here after ’47 shared a wall — one wall for two houses. Hence joined. The young men say something else, and laugh while they say it. I believe neither, because no explanation survives here in the end. Explanations come into the lane, wander about for a while, and then set up house with another explanation.
The lane is a hundred and forty paces long. I have counted, more than once, in various states of mind. At the mouth of the lane there are two shops on either side: Nabi Mia’s tea and paan, and Mozaffar’s ironing. Inside there are twenty-three houses, of which nine are still tin. On the first floor of number seventeen no light comes on after dark, though people live there. At the far end there is a burnt koroi tree, and under it the corporation’s rubbish van spends the night. When the koroi burnt, nobody can say. But every spring four or five leaves come out of it. Never more than five. Nobody counts them. I count them.
In Joragoli, whoever once loves somebody cannot afterwards let them go. It sounds romantic. In practice it is a great deal more exhausting than that.
Jamil and Rekha were divorced in nineteen ninety-eight, long before I came. The reason was Jamil’s involvement with another woman and the screaming match the two of them had over it at the mouth of the lane in broad daylight. Rekha was married to a contractor from Sylhet. Before the year was out Rekha came back. About the contractor Rekha has never said a word, and on the rare occasion she has, she has said it as though the story belonged to somebody else. They have three children now; the eldest is at the polytechnic.
Shipon and Mitali went to Kuala Lumpur. Shipon’s brother supplies garments there. Before going they sold the house, sold the furniture, sold even Mitali’s sewing machine. They came back seven months later, as tenants on the ground floor of the same house. And the man they had sold the house to sold it three years later and left. The price of houses in Joragoli never rises and never falls. The real estate people find this very annoying.
Badal and Farida’s divorce I typed myself, in February of two thousand eleven. Farida’s hand did not shake at all as she signed. Badal signed standing outside the shop, having borrowed a pen. Both of them told me not to throw the paper away, it might be needed. I have not thrown it away. They still live together. Before Eid, Farida comes here to have her son’s admission form filled in and tells me to write Badal’s name in the father’s box, and nobody ever mentions that paper.
Akhtar and Shabnam came from Geneva Camp. Akhtar has divorced her three times, twice by word and once on paper. All three times Shabnam has come back, and all three times Akhtar has opened the door with the ordinary manner of a man who has come home from the market.
There are others. It is my professional habit that lets me keep so many names in my head. The list is so long that there is no total at the bottom of it.
3
Plenty of people have come to explain it. Each time the lane has listened carefully.
The graveyard explanation is the oldest. It is said that there was an old burial ground under this lane, from before ’47, perhaps long before. It is said that in it, against the rules, a pair of people were buried together. And now everyone is paying for that broken rule. The man who tells this best is Afsar the clerk, who worked thirty years in the court quarter and is retired now. While he tells it he looks at the ground, as though the ground beneath were listening to him. At the end he says, You don’t have to believe it, and you don’t have to disbelieve it either.
Next comes the geological explanation. In two thousand fifteen three students from a private university came, took soil samples from three places, and drank twenty-seven cups of tea at Nabi Mia’s shop. They said the soil here has a high iron content, probably waste from some old foundry. They said something about the effect of magnetic fields on the human brain, in English, very fast. Then they left, and never came back. That is worth noticing. People who do not live here can leave easily.
An explanation came from religion too. A young huzur came once from the direction of the Shia mosque, very courteous, in spectacles. He said the problem here is not the soil but the intention. A man says divorce with his mouth and not with his heart, and so Allah does not accept the divorce. The lane was satisfied with what the huzur said. But Badal asked, All right, huzur, then if I didn’t say it in my heart, why did I sign the paper? The huzur was quiet a while and then said, A man does not know the news of his own heart. That answer was so good that we all went silent for a time, and then each of us went home.
Once a journalist came. Twenty-six at the most, a camera on her shoulder, a phone in her hand. She came three days and interviewed six people and photographed my shop as well. But the report was never printed. I think I saw her once afterwards over towards Shyamoli, though I am not sure. In the lane the rumour has got about that she was frightened off. My own view is that she was not frightened. Most likely her editor told her this is not a story, this is a neighbourhood where people quarrel and then make up, and there is no news in that.
The report never came out, and still Nabi Mia kept newspapers in the shop for three years. Every day’s. Towards evening he would put on his glasses and turn the pages — the inside pages, where the small items are printed. Asked what he was looking for, he would say, Nothing. Then one day he stopped keeping the papers. Why he stopped, I did not ask.
4
I am not from here.
My home was over towards Manikganj, near Ghior. At twenty-seven I came to Dhaka, learned the trade for six months in a computer shop in Gabtoli, and then moved here into a sublet. The plan was to stay two years, save money, and open my own shop somewhere near Asad Gate, where the rent is high but so are the customers. That was sixteen years ago.
I married Rahela two years in. Her father owned house number four in this lane. He liked me, because I do not talk much and I write my accounts down in a book. He died four months after the wedding, having fallen in the bathroom. I typed the application for the death certificate myself. What it feels like, as a son-in-law, to type the papers of your father-in-law’s death, nobody has ever asked me, and so I have never said.
Rahela is not tall, and not thin. There is a slight break in her voice, as though she always has a bit of a cold. In the early days I liked it very much. In her sleep she makes a small sound with her breathing, very faint, almost inaudible. Fourteen years I have gone to sleep listening to that sound.
There is nothing extra in our life together. No extra love, no extra quarrelling. What there is, is continuity. In the morning she puts the water on and I open the shop. At midday she sends rice; there is a crack in the tiffin carrier through which the dal leaks; for five years I have been saying I will replace it, and have not. At night the news is on the television and the two of us look at the news and neither of us listens to it.
There have been no children. We saw a doctor twice, and both times were told there is no problem. That no problem has been sitting between the two of us for twelve years now, like a third person who needs no food but does need room.
The first time she left was in the winter of two thousand thirteen. Why she left I cannot exactly remember. I remember the power was out that day, and I was typing a land deed by candlelight, and she said something behind me that I did not hear. Not pretending not to hear; I really did not hear. That is probably the worst thing one person can do to another. Not hearing.
She packed her bag at eleven at night. I did not stop her. That too is a habit of mine, not stopping people. On her way out Rahela turned once in the doorway and looked back. I remember that look, clear as a print. There was no anger in it. There was curiosity. As though she wanted to see what this room looked like without her.
Then she opened the gate and went down into the lane and walked a hundred and forty paces and turned left and was gone.
I looked at the clock. Eleven forty-seven.
5
She came back the next afternoon.
At the time I thought, good, the anger has passed. A person’s anger does not last more than one night, especially in winter; in winter nobody has the warmth to spare that holding on to anger requires.
She came in and put down her bag, washed her hands and face, and put the water on. Nothing was said. It seemed to me, this is how it should be.
But that night, sitting down to eat, she asked for green chillies.
Rahela does not eat chillies. She never has. In the first year of our marriage a separate dish had to be cooked for her, because my mother put in too much chilli. This is one of the oldest facts of our household.
I passed her the chillies and said nothing. She bit into two of them and ate her rice with no difficulty at all, and her eyes did not water.
Over the next few months other things came to my notice.
Below the elbow of her right arm, a long mark, about four fingers, healed white. It had not been there before. I asked. She looked at her own arm a good while, then said, From childhood. Saying it, her voice had no break in it; it was so clear that it gave me a jolt.
On the bottom shelf of the almirah I found a bus ticket. Shyamoli Paribahan, Dhaka to Sylhet, the date illegible. Rahela has never been to Sylhet.
The second time she left was in two thousand sixteen, the third time in nineteen. The second time she came back in four days, the third time the same night. Every time, on coming back, she put the water on. And every time, after she came back, something new had been added and something old had dropped away.
The day she came back the second time she came to the shop and asked why the shutter was half down. I said, It’s been shut four days. She laughed, as though I were joking. The smile stayed on her mouth several seconds longer. It had gone from her eyes before that.
After the third time she can no longer remember her mother’s name. That is, she can say the name, but she pauses before saying it, the way a person pauses in an exam hall before writing the answer to an easy question.
That was when I started keeping a register. Not the divorce register; another one. In it I write down who has gone how many times, after how many days they came back, and what changed after they came back.
Shipon, when he came back, could say three words of Malay; six months later he could not, but he had lost twenty-seven kilos, and that never came back.
The third time, opening the door to Shabnam, Akhtar said, Come in. Shabnam came in, and while taking off her shoes she looked round the room as though she had never seen it before.
The pages were filling up. I thought a pattern would come out of it at the end. It did not. Because of Anwara.
Anwara lives on the first floor of number seventeen, alone. Getting on for fifty, heavy, and when she walks she leans a little to the right. The lane avoids her. Ask why, and nobody can say clearly. They only say, She’s a bit different.
She left the lane in the year two thousand, not having got on with her husband. She came back fourteen years later. Fourteen by the reckoning here, and fourteen by her own reckoning. The two reckonings agree.
And she remembers everything.
She remembers the number of the house she lived in in Khulna, in the bank quarter. She remembers her second husband’s name, and the name of the medicine he took for his breathing. She remembers the names of the two sons she bore there, remembers the date the elder one broke his front tooth, remembers the whorl of hair at the back of the younger one’s head. If anybody wants to hear it, she tells them. If nobody wants to hear it, she tells them anyway. That is why people do not stand about in front of her. The sons are still in Khulna. They do not come. Anwara does not go either.
There is only one thing she cannot remember. Why she came back. I asked her once. She said, I’d gone to the market. Then she was quiet a long time. Because from Khulna the markets of Mohammadpur are a long way off.
That name has made my whole register useless. If there were a rule, Anwara would not exist. And if there is no rule, the other names make no sense.
I shut the register for three months. Then I opened it again, because keeping accounts is my trade and the day will not pass without a trade. I no longer look for a pattern. I only write things down.
People call it love. From outside it looks exactly like love. The one who comes back does not apologise, and the one who opens the door does not demand an account. Nobody has any grievance against anybody.
Anwara has a grievance. Anwara lives alone.
I have not written my own name in the register. This was deliberate, and also not. The accountant keeps himself out of the accounts; that is a rule of the trade. But some nights it occurs to me: have I really been here without a break for these sixteen years?
There is proof. There is the shop’s trade licence, there are the electricity bills, there is the bank book. But paper proves only what is written on the paper. In our village in nineteen ninety-four there was a man called Taleb who had three national identity cards in three different names, and all three were genuine. Paper has never saved anybody.
One thing does not add up. I used to smoke, twelve or fourteen a day. I gave it up eleven years ago, under pressure from Rahela. This I remember, with the date. And yet when I try to remember the two years after giving up, the inside of me feels somehow smooth, no notches in it, nothing catches. Two years is a lot of time. In two years a man can learn a language.
6
It took me eleven months to decide.
I do not do things on impulse; you may call that a fault of mine, or a virtue. The day it first occurred to me that I had to go, that same day I worked out how I would go. Then every day I got a little more ready.
Money first. Every month I moved two thousand out of the shop’s cash, in a way that would not fail to balance in the book. Twenty-two thousand in eleven months. I sold an old laptop for eleven. Thirty-three in all.
Then the paper. This was important. I typed my own deed of divorce with my own hands. It took me three evenings; not the typing, the wording. After typing three hundred and sixty-one of them, to be in doubt about my own wording is ridiculous, but I was. The draft that finally stood was completely plain, like a notice from a tenant giving up a house. My name, her name, father’s name, address, the date left blank.
I did not print it. I left the file on the desktop and called it Form-17. There are forty-seven files on my desktop whose names begin with Form. Nobody will find it.
Why I did not print it, I have thought about a great deal. The truth is that I did not want to leave her. What I wanted was to find out whether not leaving her was my decision or this lane’s.
Then I fixed the day. Thursday. On Thursdays this lane is empty; people go to Krishi Market.
The last night passed normally. Rahela served the rice, I ate it, the news was on the television and neither of us watched it. Before sleeping she said, Change that tiffin carrier now, the dal leaks. I said, All right.
When that faint sound of her breathing began, I got up. The bag was packed already, on the back shelf of the shop. Three shirts, a lungi, a charger, the money, and my register.
Coming down into the lane, I started counting paces. Purely out of habit. A hundred and forty paces to the mouth of the lane. I counted a hundred and forty-one. One extra.
Standing at the mouth of the lane I did not look back once. I take no pride in that. What would have happened if I had looked back, who knows, and now there is no way of knowing. In books it says that if you look back everything is finished. In reality most likely nothing happens at all. And that is the more frightening of the two.
7
I walked as far as Gabtoli.
Around three in the morning the terminal is like a field after a battle. People sleep in the chairs in front of the counters, heads thrown back, mouths open. The dogs are more confident then than they are by day. The buses stand with their engines running, I don’t know why; probably because if you switch off the engine it will not start again.
I got on a local bus to Aricha. The fare was a hundred and sixty. I got a window seat; the glass was broken and taped over.
The bus left at three fifty.
Through the window I watched Dhaka come to an end. It was less dramatic than it should have been. A city ends very untidily; first the shops thin out, then the buildings, then the signboards, and then suddenly there is darkness on both sides with a few weak lights inside the darkness, and then you understand that you have come out. There is no boundary. Nobody announces it.
I was waiting.
I was waiting for something to happen. A puncture, the driver suddenly turning back, a pain in my chest, something. Even a little grief would have done.
Nothing happened.
We passed Savar. We passed Nabinagar. Towards dawn the sky went light, fog was sitting over the paddy fields, a man was going along with a milk can on the back of a bicycle. All perfectly ordinary. I was seeing this scene after sixteen years, and the scene did not recognise me at all.
In the seat behind me two men abused their boss the whole way. In the seat in front a woman slept with a child in her lap, and the child was awake and looking out of the window and never once cried. When children do not cry they look like old men.
At one point it occurred to me: have I left something behind? I felt in my pockets. Wallet, phone, keys. The shop keys were still in my pocket, and noticing that made me laugh. A man running away does not take his shop keys with him. But I did not throw them away. The window glass was broken; it would have been easy.
I got down at Aricha ghat around seven.
There are a lot of tea shops at the ghat. The one I sat down in had no name at all, only a bench and a stove. The shopkeeper was an old man in a sweater with a muffler round his head. When he makes the tea he pours it from a great height, which is nice to watch, but the tea goes cold.
After I had taken a sip the man looked at me and said, Are you from Mohammadpur?
I did not start. I asked, How could you tell?
He said nothing. He poured tea into another cup, from a height.
Then he said, The back lane off Humayun Road. My name’s Kalam. I’ve been here eleven years.
I said nothing. When a man is telling the truth he should not be stopped.
Kalam said, Every Thursday I go. Go in the morning, come back in the afternoon. Eleven years I’ve been going.
I asked, Who’s there?
Then the man looked at the stove and was quiet a good while. Then he said, That’s the thing, brother. I don’t know who’s there. But when it’s Thursday I have to go. I go and stand at the mouth of the lane. Then I come back. And when I come back I try to think why I went. It won’t come.
He laughed. Paan stains on his teeth.
Then he said, I don’t go inside. I stand at the mouth of the lane, and then I come back.
I asked, What happens if you go in?
Washing the cups, Kalam said, I don’t know. In eleven years I’ve never once wanted to find out. I think about that sometimes, brother. The not wanting is the real thing.
I finished my tea and paid. Ten taka.
As I stood up, Kalam said, Where are you going?
I said, I don’t know.
He nodded, as though that were the most believable answer of all.
8
I do not know how long I sat at the ghat.
The ferry came and went. Trucks went on and came off. A boy was selling boiled eggs and passed in front of me twice, and the second time he did not recognise me. Looking at a river brings water to your eyes; that is the wind. By a river the wind gets into your eyes.
Then I stood up and got on a bus to Dhaka.
The reason is a very ordinary one, and ordinary reasons are embarrassing to write down. I had nowhere to go.
There is no house in Manikganj; it was sold. My brother is in Dubai, my sister in Brahmanbaria. I had thirty-three thousand taka and a bag. At this age you cannot go and stand somewhere new; nobody tells you that, you have to find it out yourself.
And yet I am not certain. Whether this was in fact why I came back, or whether the reason was put into my head and something else was in its place that I no longer remember. It is the doubt that is bad. It cannot be proved and it cannot be refuted. The doubt stays, and every night it grows a little.
I reached the mouth of the lane in the afternoon. Nabi Mia was making tea. Seeing me he said, Bit late today, brother?
I said, A bit.
He asked nothing further.
I opened the shop. Lifting the shutter I found rust on the lock, though there had been none when I closed it that morning. But that sort of thing I do not count any more.
I started the computer. Windows took its time; it is an old machine.
On the desktop I looked for Form-17.
The file was there. But the file was dated the twenty-sixth of March, two thousand seventeen. I made that file eleven months ago, in two thousand twenty-four.
I opened it.
A completed document. My name, her name, father’s name, address. A date in the date box. And at the bottom, on either side, two scanned signatures. One is mine. Slanted, with a stroke at the end; that stroke is mine. The other is Rahela’s, in round letters, the final aa without its tail.
I looked at those signatures a long time. Long enough that the screen light began to burn my eyes.
The scanner is mine. The printer is mine.
Seven years.
I tried to work it out. Seven years ago I was thirty-eight. I sat down to remember what had happened that year, eyes shut, the way you have to think where you last put a thing you have lost.
People remember a year by what happened in it. Whose wedding, who died, which year the water came up waist-high in the lane.
I started with the seasons. The winter would not come. The rains would not come.
Then I tried customers. I do not forget a customer’s face; that is the one pride of my trade. Not one face from seven years ago came.
In the end I remembered that a new printer came to the shop that year. White, with a crack in the lid, there since the day it was delivered.
Nothing else.
I did not print the file. I did not delete it either. I put it in a folder with the other forty-six files whose names begin with Form. I named the folder Old.
Then I heard Rahela’s voice behind me. She was coming down the stairs with the tiffin carrier in her hand. She said, I’ve served the rice, it’s going cold.
I said, Coming.
She stood there. Then she said, Didn’t you go out for cigarettes?
I looked at my hand.
There is nothing in it. But between the index and middle fingers of my right hand there is a yellow nicotine stain. I gave up smoking eleven years ago.
