One
I have watched Moklesh Miah die twelve times. A different man killed him each time.
Who killed him the first time, I do not know. I know the names of nine. They are written in pencil on the binding of the lockup register at the thana. Beside each name there is a reason, except one. That one I have still not been able to write.
The other three I cannot account for, and one of those three is the first of all. It was to find out who did it that I stood on that verandah the other eleven times.
Moklesh Miah was brought in on the first day, in the afternoon. The complaint came from Moyez Sheikh of Kankordoho. A goat had gone missing from his pen, and on the evening before it went, Moklesh Miah had been seen on that road. That is the whole case. There is nothing more on paper.
The thing is, Moklesh Miah is not a man who steals goats. His trade is witnessing.
For thirty years, in the courts of three thanas, he has stood in the box and said, I saw it with my own eyes. What he saw changed according to the case; the shape of the sentence did not. The lawyers called him by name, the clerks called him uncle, and the villagers did not call him at all, they changed their road when they saw him coming.
This man has been brought in on a complaint about a goat. Somebody, somewhere, found that funny.
In the evening he is given rice. He does not finish it. He leaves half of it, pushes the plate aside at the foot of the bars, then draws both knees up to his chest and sits with his back against the wall. I set the lantern down at the base of the last pillar of the verandah, so the light will not fall on his face, because when light falls on a man’s face he cannot sleep all night, and a man who has not slept says any wild thing at the morning questioning.
My duty is the night, and I could describe a night at Boroitola thana with my eyes shut. The well in the middle of the yard, the paved rim of the well slippery with moss the whole year round. Beyond the well the kitchen, and on the kitchen step Nuru piles his ashes. Toward the middle of the night the smell of ash turns heavy and settles over the yard, and when I catch that smell I know how deep the night has gone, because there is one clock in the thana and it is locked up in the big room.
Around the third watch a dog barks outside and pulls me out of my doze. I get up and hold the lantern to the bars.
Moklesh Miah lies on his side on the floor. Above the right ear, just where the hair has thinned, there is a broken place. There is not much blood. What has come out has run along the slope of the floor and stopped near the threshold.
The grille door is padlocked. The key hangs on the nail in the wall opposite.
How the rest of the night passes, there is no need to write. At dawn Daroga Neyamat Ali comes, Horihor the doctor comes, Moyez Sheikh comes wanting to withdraw his complaint and is scolded and made to sit on the verandah. Nobody says anything to me. Silence means they have not settled yet whose neck it goes on.
The morning roll call is held in front of the big room. The constables stand in a line. The clerk calls out the names, and each man steps up when he hears his own and signs the attendance book.
My name is called. Makbul Hossain. I step up and pick up the pen.
The moment the nib touches the paper the sunlight shifts from the left side to the right.
I am standing in the same place, the same pen in my hand. The clerk is calling names. In the line Rashid stands beside me yawning the same yawn as yesterday morning, and finishing it the same way, with a hand across his forehead.
Moyez Sheikh is not on the verandah. There is nobody in the lockup.
This afternoon Moklesh Miah will be brought in.
Two
All day I tell myself it was a dream, that the night’s strain has jumbled my head. Still, around noon, I work up the courage to go into the big room and say to the daroga,
“Sir, a man will die in the lockup tonight.”
He does not lift his face from his papers. He asks,
“How many accused are in the lockup?”
“Not one.”
“Then who is going to die?”
I say,
“The man who will be brought in this afternoon.”
He raises his face now and looks at me for a while. Then he caps his pen and explains that a report cannot be written in advance against a man who has not been brought in yet, because a report needs a date on it, and the date of an incident does not go down before the incident. Then he says,
“You would do better to go and sleep a little.”
I come out without saying anything.
In the afternoon Rashid and I go to Kankordoho and bring Moklesh Miah in. On the road he says exactly what he said yesterday.
“I never took the goat, son. The goat went out through the gap in the fence.”
Then he falls silent and says nothing more the whole way.
A dream is not like this. In a dream the words are not this clear.
That night I cannot sit still. All night I pace the verandah in front of the bars, this end to that end, that end to this end. Moklesh Miah opens his eyes once or twice and looks at me, then shuts them again. The man has no fear in him. A man who has lied for so many years and got away with it has no fear left.
A little before the third watch I need to pass water. I go quickly across the yard to the tap behind the thana. Going and coming back takes exactly as long as it takes.
I come back and find Moklesh Miah’s own gamchha wound round his throat, the two ends tied to two bars of the grille. The body is not hanging, it is sitting, because the grille is low.
On the kitchen step, beside the ashes, lies Nuru’s tobacco tin. Nuru is the thana cook. He does not leave that tin anywhere, he sleeps with it under his pillow.
In the morning, the instant I take the pen at roll call, the sunlight shifts again.
But the sleep does not come back. I stand in the line of constables carrying two nights without sleep, and yet the day has gone backward again. I did not understand the arithmetic then. I understood it later. The day goes back, my tiredness does not.
Three
This time I get hold of Nuru.
At noon I go behind the kitchen and ask him whether he knows Moklesh Miah. Nuru pushes wood under the pot and says he does.
“Why wouldn’t I know him. He is the one who put my elder brother on the gallows.”
Then he lowers the lid on the pot and washes his hands, and says nothing further.
That afternoon, after Moklesh Miah is brought in, I take his gamchha away, fold it, and put it on the top shelf of the almirah in the big room. I take the cord off his waist. I do not take the evening rice from Nuru’s hand, I serve it myself. At night I bolt the kitchen door from outside, and Nuru sits in there cursing until at some point he stops.
It happens anyway.
Late in the night Moklesh Miah calls out that he needs the latrine. Before I can move, Rashid is up, lifting the key off the nail, saying he will take him, saying I should sit.
Moklesh Miah’s head strikes the paved rim of the well.
Rashid shouts for me. I run with the lantern and find Rashid’s eyes dry.
“He slipped, boss. I could not hold him.”
Whether it is a lie I do not know. But if he had truly failed to hold him, his hand would be shaking. In Rashid’s hand the lantern light does not move at all.
In the morning, the signature again. The sunlight shifts again.
This third time my hand is so heavy that it hurts to hold the pen. The clerk looks up and asks,
“Are you unwell?”
I say,
“No.”
What else can I say. Say yes and they give me leave, and with leave I am not at the thana at night, and if I am not at the thana at night Moklesh Miah dies and I do not learn who killed him.
Four
On the fourth day I understand that blocking it does not stop it, it only makes it happen another way.
So this time I do everything myself. I take away the gamchha and the waist cord and put them on top of the almirah. I serve the evening rice myself. I take him to the latrine myself, bring him back myself, lock the door and push the key into my waist. I tell Rashid,
“Today you will not touch him. If you touch him I will put it in writing against your name.”
After the night prayer, Daroga Neyamat Ali sends word from the big room. He says,
“Send the accused across, I have a couple of questions.”
I say,
“Sir, at this hour?”
He says,
“Night is when men talk.”
I take Moklesh Miah across and sit him on the bench in the big room, then stand outside the door. No voice comes through, no sound of a chair moving. Nothing at all. After a while the door opens. Moklesh Miah walks out, walks back into the lockup, and lies down against the wall.
At the third watch he stops breathing.
This time there is no mark on the body. The place above the right ear is untouched, not even the hair disturbed. Whatever has broken inside stays inside.
In the morning the daroga writes the paper in his own hand, and while writing he asks me,
“Your eyes had closed in the night, hadn’t they, Makbul?”
I say,
“Yes sir.”
There was nothing else for me to say then. Now I would say it. But what is the use of saying it now. Tomorrow morning he will ask the same question again, and it will be new to him.
Five
On the fifth day a simple idea comes to me. Keep him out of the thana and it is finished.
That afternoon, after he is brought in, I do not put him in the lockup, I sit him on the verandah. When dusk comes I open the gate and say,
“Uncle, go home.”
He gets up. He shakes off the dust, crosses the gate, steps down onto the road and starts walking toward Kankordoho. I stand at the gate and watch his white panjabi dissolving into the dark without ever quite dissolving, hanging on the road instead like a pale smear.
At a hundred paces the smear stops. Then it starts coming back. Moklesh Miah comes in through the gate and sits down on the verandah again.
“Go out without paper and I am an escaped man, son. An escaped man has no house.”
I say,
“I will write the paper for you.”
He laughs. He says,
“And who will put his signature under it?”
That one question empties my head. A bail bond needs the daroga’s signature, and the daroga does not touch paper after sundown. That custom has run at Boroitola thana since before I was born. In the morning he will sign. But in the morning the sunlight will shift, and Moklesh Miah will be sitting in Kankordoho again, and in the afternoon I will go and bring him in again.
That night he dies outside the lockup, at the base of the last pillar of the verandah, where I keep the lantern.
Six
After that I open the lockup register.
A long book, the cover flaked away. Inside, six columns are ruled: name and father’s name, village, date and hour of admission, case number, release, remarks. Every column is narrow, only the remarks column is wide. Whatever happens to an accused that cannot be entered under name, date, or case number has to be written in that column. In that column stands has absconded, in that column stands released on bail, and in that column stands death.
On the right side of the page, outside the remarks column, hard against the binding, a little white space is left over. There I write in pencil: Nuru, brother, gallows. Rashid, his father’s land. Neyamat Ali, do not know. I shut the book and put it back on the shelf under the table.
The next day, after roll call, I run and pull the book down and open it. It is there. All three names are there, the pencil marks exactly as they were.
Which means that when the day goes back, not everything goes back with it. The pencil marks stay.
After that discovery my work changes. Preventing the murder is no longer the main work, because it cannot be prevented, and preventing it only changes the hand. The main work becomes taking down names.
I begin asking. At noon, in the afternoon, before Moklesh Miah is brought in, when the thana is drowsy and everyone is busy with his own business, I take them one by one and ask whether they know Moklesh Miah.
Not one of them says no.
Horihor the doctor says there was an explosives case against his son. The boy was a college student then, and the witness Moklesh stood in the box and said he had seen the boy with a bomb in his hand. The boy came out seven years later and came back to the village. Since coming back he speaks to nobody, he only goes and sits by the pond in the afternoons.
Jumman from the hotel says his father died in a lockup. In which case, he does not know. He only knows who the witness was.
Poncha the sweeper says there are three cases against his own name, the same witness in all three, and he has never in his life so much as laid eyes on a cow.
Sofi, Moklesh Miah’s son-in-law, says he is so afraid of his father-in-law that he will not send his wife to her father’s house, not once a year.
Moriom Bibi does not speak. She only unties the knot in the end of her sari, takes out a paper and holds it out to me. Old paper, torn along the folds. Across the top, in printed letters, death warrant. Below it, in handwriting, a name has been entered, and the name is her husband’s.
Nine in all. Nine names, nine reasons.
I write Moyez Sheikh’s name last of all, because it takes me time to understand what he says. His goat was never stolen. He sold it himself at the market, and then came to the thana and filed a complaint.
“Once a man goes inside a thana he is not a man any more, sir. I only wanted to see what his face would look like when he went in.”
Seven
The days after this get muddled in my accounting, but I set down what I remember.
On Jumman’s turn there was glass in the rice. The glass was ground so fine that once it was mixed into the rice the eye could not catch it. Fine work comes easily to Jumman’s hand, because he cuts onions all day at the hotel.
On Sofi’s turn he brought a pillow, a pillow for his father-in-law, and a pillow is not forbidden in the lockup. I did not let the pillow in. Even so, at dawn the pillow was over Moklesh Miah’s face, and nobody said who had brought it in.
On Horihor the doctor’s turn he came to check the blood pressure. Who is going to stop a doctor. If an accused falls ill in the lockup you have to call the doctor, and if the doctor comes you have to let him inside, and what he does once he is inside only he knows.
On Poncha’s turn there was a rope. A rope is the easiest thing to pass off as suicide, because when there is a suicide in a lockup nobody has to answer for it.
On Moriom Bibi’s turn something had been put into the water pitcher. Women do not come inside a thana, but a pitcher comes in.
On Moyez Sheikh’s turn nothing was needed at all. He only sat on the verandah from dusk onward, and in the middle of the night Moklesh Miah stood holding the bars, looking at him, and sat down, and did not get up again.
Every time I block it. Every time a new man comes. The more I block, the newer the hand. And the place I come back to keeps getting smaller.
At first I came back at the morning roll call. Then one day I came back and found it was noon, the shadows short in the yard, Moklesh Miah already brought in. The time after that I opened my eyes at dusk, a lantern in my hand, the handle of the lantern warm. Meaning I lit it a little while ago, and I have no memory of lighting it. Toward the end I come back at night, standing right in front of the bars, the lantern in my right hand and the key in my left.
That night, moving the key to my left hand, I see that the skin is scraped off the knuckles of my right hand. The scrape has dried and gone brown, meaning it happened long ago. The arithmetic I did from the warm lantern handle does not survive the skin on my knuckles.
The day keeps shortening from both ends. Whatever is left is what the work has to fit inside.
Sleep does not come back and the tiredness does not go down. Walking the verandah from this end to that end, I now have to stop once. Everything else in the thana turns new every morning, only my body does not. Each night’s tiredness settles in my body. What settles has to be spent somewhere.
By now my name has been rubbed out of the attendance book. One day the clerk stops in the middle of calling names. He runs a finger down the page and says,
“Your name is not here.”
I say,
“Then put it in.”
He says,
“It cannot be put in, permission is needed from above.”
From that day on I do duty, I draw no pay, and nobody objects either. If a man works in a thana and asks nothing in return, who is going to trouble himself about him.
One or two of them stop using my name. They call me sentry, and leave it at that.
Eight
The white space in the register runs out.
Nine names have been written, a reason beside each. Writing the reasons, I see the same few words coming round and round: land, gallows, seven years, false, signature. The words run short, the people do not. In this district the store of sorrow is not large, only the distribution is wide.
One afternoon I walk out through the gate. I come down onto the road and start walking toward Beltoli. Past the market, past the footbridge, and then I go and sit under the shelter at the bus stop. I am going nowhere. I only mean not to be at the thana. That is the whole of it.
On the post of the shelter somebody has written names in whitewash. Over those names newer names have been written again, so that not one of them can be read. I sit looking at that. A bus comes, people get on, the bus goes. I do not get on.
Dusk falls. Sitting under the shelter, the weight of the lantern handle comes into my hand. And in front of my eyes the bars of the lockup come and stand. So it runs whether I go or not. I am not needed there, I am only put there. That same night it comes clear, and I am angry with myself for taking so long over something so plain.
There are only the nine. When the nine are used up, who comes then?
And among the nine, one man’s column is blank. Beside Neyamat Ali’s name I could not enter a cause, for the reason that there is none. Moklesh Miah never took his land, never put anyone from his household in the box, never in his life spoke a word against his name. Yet Neyamat Ali sent for him at night, and in the morning wrote the paper in his own hand. Nothing was owed to him. He went against Moklesh Miah all the same.
Then I understand that this is not only a murder. There is a queue behind it.
There are queues on the court verandah, queues at the ration shop, queues at the revenue office. Everyone stands for his own business, one after another goes up to the front. It is the same with Moklesh Miah. Every night one of them comes, then the next. In the morning the queue forms again from the start. After understanding this I no longer want to prevent anything. I prevent it anyway. It has become a habit.
Nine
The last night, nobody comes.
I come back standing right in front of the bars. There is no wind outside. Nuru’s tin is not on the kitchen step, because Nuru’s turn is over. There is nobody in Rashid’s bed. The lamp in the big room has gone out. Moyez Sheikh’s place in the yard lies empty, and across that place a cat walks by, unhurried.
The queue is used up.
I set the lantern down and sit at the foot of the bars. Sitting down, I have to put a hand on the wall.
After a long time Moklesh Miah speaks. In all those nights it is the first time he speaks of his own accord.
“What is your case number, son?”
I say,
“I have no case.”
“Nobody sits by me without a case.”
Then I ask the question I have not asked in all those nights. I ask,
“Why did you tell lies?”
He is quiet for a while, and then he answers.
“Somebody had to. If I had not stood up, another man would have stood up, and you would not have known his face.”
Then, looking up at the roof, he says a year, and the name of a village, and the name of a man. The year is the one after the big flood, the village is Beltoli, and the man’s name is Amjad Hossain.
Amjad is my elder brother.
I was nine then. After the hanging our land went behind the lawyers, the homestead went to the mortgage, my mother went to live at my aunt’s. I came to this thana verandah as a boy, carrying tea. Carrying tea, I grew up. Grown up, I was given the constable’s uniform. Given the uniform, I was given charge of this key.
Which is to say, the man whose testimony put my brother on the gallows is the same man who brought me and stood me on this verandah. Without his evidence I would have farmed, or pulled a rickshaw, or gone to the city and been lost there. Because his evidence exists, I am sitting here tonight with this key in my hand, in front of his door.
Did I not know all this before? I knew. But knowing and keeping in mind are not the same. Keep it in mind and you cannot hold a job.
Moklesh Miah says,
“That evidence was false, son.”
Then he says,
“All these nights, why did you not ask.”
I say nothing. The oil in the lantern has burned low, the flame drops and turns blue, and then it goes out. What comes after that, I do not remember.
Ten
What one does not remember is not to be written down. It has to be written anyway, because a blank cannot be left on paper.
In the morning I find the lockup door open. The padlock hangs open, the key hangs on the nail. Moklesh Miah lies on his side on the floor. Above the right ear, that same broken place. The blood has run and stopped near the threshold, exactly as far as it went on that first night.
The death on the first night and the death on the last night are the same. The nine in between are different. So the last man in the queue and the first man in the queue are the same man.
The sun comes up over the yard. I sit at the base of the last pillar of the verandah, right where I keep the lantern. Rashid goes past me and says nothing. Nuru lights the stove. Moyez Sheikh comes to withdraw his complaint and is scolded and made to sit on the verandah.
Roll call is held. The clerk calls the names. My name is not called, because my name is not in the book. I step up all the same and pick up the pen. The nib rests on the paper. The sunlight does not shift.
Eleven
At noon, when the thana empties, I take the lockup register down from the shelf under the table and open it. Whatever is to be written in the remarks column has to be written. But the column is not blank, it has been filled in. The ink has dried. I know the handwriting.
Name and father’s name: Moklesh Miah, son of the late Jonab Ali. Village: Kankordoho. Admitted: every afternoon. Case number: relating to a goat, number not entered. Released: not done.
Remarks: Death inside the lockup, night, approximately the third watch. Mark of injury on the upper part of the right ear. Whereas the persons who struck are more than one, the column for cause is hereby left blank.
On the row below, the date column is blank; the name column is not. There, lightly, in pencil, it is written: Makbul Hossain, son of the late Younus Ali, village Beltoli.
The pencil strokes are the same strokes with which I set down nine names on the binding.
