Who draws the lime line that appears in Mridha’s haat on the morning of Pahela Baishakh, we do not know. We, the shopkeepers of Mridha’s haat, come to the market after Fajr and find the line there, running from the foot of the jam tree to the edge of the pond, thin, white, fresh, not yet wet with dew. We look at it, and when the looking is over each of us opens his shop and gets busy with the halkhata. Who drew it, we do not ask. There was a time when there was no need to ask, because we knew.
Naimuddin the tailor drew the line.
For thirty-three years he drew it. Every year, on the morning of the first of Baishakh. Just after the call to Fajr, when the only light in the market lanes is the mosque bulb and a thinness in the eastern sky, he would come. A small man, washed panjabi, a gamchha over one shoulder, a tin of slaked lime in one hand and a bamboo switch in the other with a rag tied to the end. He walked bent over and drew the line. He never hurried. Now and then he straightened up and put a hand on his back and got his breath, then bent again. The whole line took him about an hour. Then he rinsed the tin at the pond, wiped his hands on the gamchha, and went back the way he had come. By noon the same day a thousand feet had rubbed the line away. And we knew he would not come again before next Baishakh.
We all know the route of the line by heart. From the foot of the jam tree straight east, under the roof of the fish market, close along the platforms of three stalls, then through the middle of the cloth row, then through the inside of Majid’s grocery — in at the front door and out at the back — and finally stopping at the broken landing steps of the pond. About a hundred and fifty cubits long. Those hundred and fifty cubits were once the northern boundary of a homestead. The homestead belonged to Naimuddin’s father, Sadar Ali.
How the homestead became the Mridhas’, on that there are three versions current in the market. Some say that in the famine of ’74 Sadar Ali mortgaged the land to Shamsher Mridha and took twelve maunds of paddy for it, and that the paper he put his thumbprint on was not a mortgage paper but a deed of sale, which he would have caught if he could read. Some say the paper was made up afterwards, forged, and the real mortgage bond rotted in Mridha’s strongbox. And some say Sadar Ali did sell it, that in a famine year what does a man not sell, and that later he was ashamed to tell his son and invented the story of the mortgage.
What does not move is the land. First a market sat down in the yard of the homestead twice a week, then tin roofing went up, then brick shop rooms, row upon row, and the market took Shamsher Mridha’s name and became Mridha’s haat. Nothing was left of the house, only the jam tree at the head of the fish market, and the pond, where the market people now wash their hands. There was talk of felling the jam tree at the very beginning. It was not felled. On why it was not, there are two versions as well. Some say Mridha himself said, Leave it, it’ll give shade. And some say that after the saw was set against the trunk it fell out of the man’s hands, twice, and the third time he would not put his hand to it.
The case ran twelve years. Sadar Ali died with the case still running, and Naimuddin ran the rest of it. By then he had gone to town and learned tailoring, because when a man loses his land he becomes what such a man becomes, and he had set up a machine in a one-slope tin shack near the level crossing. Judgment came in Ershad sahib’s time. Naimuddin lost. Why he lost, this too we have in three versions. Some say his first witness, the old surveyor from the homestead days, died the week before the judgment. Some say the lawyer had been bought. And some say there was no need to buy anyone, that the land belongs to whoever holds the paper, and the law cannot step outside that sentence. On the day of the judgment Naimuddin stood a long time on the court veranda, then went home and spoke to nobody. Then the winter passed. He sat at the level crossing and worked — Eid clothes, school trousers, wedding sherwanis — and we assumed the matter had ended there. Around Magh he came into the market one day and bought half a seer of lime from Majid’s shop, and we thought nothing of that either. Lime is bought for any number of things. Chewing paan. Whitewashing a house.
On the morning of the next Pahela Baishakh we came into the market and saw a white line on the ground.
That first year we did not understand what was happening. Somebody thought it was the municipality surveying, somebody thought it was the decorator’s men, halkhata decoration. Then Kalam from the fish market saw a man sitting at the foot of the jam tree dipping a bamboo switch in a tin, and the man was Naimuddin. The news went to Shamsher Mridha. Mridha came, a chair was brought, he sat in the chair and watched the line being drawn, then laughed, laughed for a long time, and when he stopped laughing he told the boy at the shop, Give the gentleman a cup of tea. Naimuddin stopped drawing and straightened up, took the cup, drank it, gave the cup back and said, Salaam alaikum, Mridha sahib. Then he bent again and drew the rest of the line. When Mridha’s laughter stopped we did not notice; we only noticed that the chair had been standing empty a long while, that Mridha had gone.
The second year Mridha put three labourers on to rubbing the line out. Buckets of water, sacking rags, brooms. Rubbing it, they found that wet lime smears; the line does not come off, it widens; and by noon a hundred and fifty cubits of thin line had become a hundred and fifty cubits of white road, and the market people were stepping over it as they walked, as though crossing something. From the third year on there was no order to rub it out.
The third year Mridha sent word to the police station. That Baishakh the daroga came himself with two constables, and they stood at the foot of the jam tree and watched the whole line being drawn. Halfway through, the daroga asked, You there, what is it you’re doing? Without stopping, Naimuddin said, Drawing a line. A line of what? Lime. The daroga did not pursue it. When the line was finished he sat in Majid’s shop and drank tea and ate biscuits, then went back to the station, and nothing was written on any paper. We heard later that no section could be found. A case can be brought against a man; a case cannot be brought against a lime line.
The year after that, Mridha posted four men with sticks under the jam tree from before daybreak. Naimuddin came, gave the four of them salaam, then stood quietly about ten cubits from the tree, tin in one hand, switch in the other. The light came up, the market began to fill, and the people who gathered stood and watched four young men with sticks guarding one old tailor, and the old tailor doing nothing at all, only standing. Guarding is not a thing that can be displayed for long. Before noon not one of the four was under the tree any more, and that year the line was drawn late, in the full middle of the day, in front of the eyes of the whole market. Mridha never posted a guard again.
Then year followed year, and the line entered our reckoning of time. Chaitra ends, the halkhata cards are printed, the shops get their coat of paint, and we know that on the morning of the first the line will appear. Naimuddin would come and draw it, and with the shopkeeper whose shop it passed through or brushed against, he would exchange two sentences. Salaam alaikum. Business all right? Those two only. What one was supposed to say in reply, we did not know at first; later we learned. All right, chacha. And you? He would nod and move on, drawing. Because the line went through the inside of Majid’s grocery, his acquaintance with Majid was the oldest, though acquaintance is not the right word; we were never able to give the thing a name. On the night of Chaitra Sankranti, Majid used to shift his sacks of rice to the right, clearing the middle, and sweep it. Asked why, he would say, Year’s ending, I’m sweeping the shop, what else. And on Majid’s cement floor, from years of taking the lime, a permanent shadow of the line had settled in, faint and whitish. It did not wash out, not in winter, not in the rains. The hundred and fifty cubits in the market lived half a day; only the seven cubits inside Majid’s shop lived all year.
And there was an old man, a neighbour from the homestead days, whose name none of us properly knew, who lived on the char across the river. Every year on the morning of the first he came to the market, bought nothing, walked once from one end of the line to the other, slowly, as though checking a measurement, then sat a while on the landing steps and took a boat back. What he came to see, who he came for, was never asked. As the years went his walk got slower, and then one year he stopped coming.
Once a new man came into the fish market, a man from Barisal, whose platform went up right on the route of the line. On Sankranti night he was told to shift the platform a little. He would not. Whose land, whose line — nothing is passing through the inside of my shop. Next morning Naimuddin came drawing and stopped at the platform. Then, having drawn the line up to this end of it, he stood, went round to the far side and started again. That year there was a gap of about five cubits in the line, and the strange thing is that the five cubits of gap caught people’s eyes more than the hundred and fifty cubits of line. All day, people who came to buy fish looked at the platform. They said nothing; they looked. The next year, on Sankranti night, the Barisal man moved the platform himself and swept the place clean. Nobody had to say anything to him a second time.
Somewhere in these years a saying got about in the market, and it was never found out who started it. The saying was that the shop the line passes through prospers. That Majid does good business is true; but whether Majid did good business before the line as well, nobody could any longer remember. The result was that when a man put up a new shop he would enquire which way the route of the line ran, and the rent on positions along the line rose above the rest of the market. The line that had been drawn against the market raised the market’s rents; and whether Naimuddin knew this, and what he thought if he did, we do not know.
The year Ershad fell the country was shut down with strikes and the market was closed too, shutter after shutter. That Baishakh the line was drawn in a completely empty market. Nobody saw it, no one to buy, no one to sell, no feet to tread it. In the afternoon one or two of us cracked our shutters and looked, and the line was lying there whole, gleaming, white in the falling light. In thirty-three years that was the only time the line lived until evening.
And in time we began to keep our own accounts of when things happened by the line as well. What year was the fire in the cloth row? The year the line was not drawn. When did the Barisal man come? The year of the line with the gap. Every marriage, every shop raised, every man’s father dead, we tagged with a year of the line — beside the Bengali calendar, a calendar of our own, whose first day began just after the call to Fajr, in the hands of an old tailor.
Only one of us ever put the question to Naimuddin directly — Hasmat from the cloth row, and that only after many years, working up the nerve. Chacha, what’ll come of the line? You’re not getting the land back. Naimuddin did not stop drawing; still bent over, he said, I don’t want the land, baba. I’m only seeing whether I’ve forgotten the measurements.
This went round the market, and in going round it did something, which we understood only much later. After we heard it, the line no longer looked to anyone like an attempt at possession. It looked like keeping a lesson by heart, like prayer, like a thing a man does because if he stops doing it he stops being himself. And a thing that is not about possession cannot be stood against. Whether Mridha understood this we do not know. If he did, it must have hurt him, because possession can be stopped, and there is no road, not even in the courts, for stopping a thing a man knows by heart.
The other three hundred and sixty-four days Naimuddin was the tailor at the level crossing. A good tailor. The market shopkeepers’ panjabis, their children’s school clothes, the sewing done through the nights before Eid — he did all of it, for a fair wage, and when he chalked a line on cloth his hand ran so straight that it seemed no ruler had been used. He did not turn away work from the Mridha house either. Shamsher Mridha’s granddaughter’s school frock was his stitching, and the Mridha people did not hide it and neither did he. He kept the account of thread and the account of earth in separate ledgers; this much we understood, though not the whole of it.
His son grew up and went into the truck business, on the long-distance routes, and never once in his life set foot in Mridha’s haat. If his father’s line came up he turned his face away. Once, sitting in the shop at the level crossing, he said, Abba, don’t go any more. People call you mad. Naimuddin was setting a sleeve into a shirt on the machine; the pedal did not stop, and only while cutting the thread did he say, Let them. The son never raised it again.
One year in the middle of all this the line was not drawn. That Chaitra, Naimuddin’s wife died, and on the morning of Baishakh the foot of the jam tree lay empty. Some of us waited until the sun was high, then went off into our halkhata. That same year, in Ashar, fire broke out in the cloth row; seven shops burned, Hasmat’s among them. There is no connection between the fire and the line, we all knew that, and it was because we knew it that none of us said it aloud, because a thing with no connection, said aloud, makes a connection. Only the following year, on Sankranti night, it was noticed that everyone in front of the new shops in the cloth row had swept the ground clean, and on the morning of the first many of us were sitting in the market before Fajr, drinking tea and looking towards the jam tree. Naimuddin came, bent, drew the line. We watched, and then went home and slept. What we had watched, and why, was never discussed among us.
One year it rained on the morning of Baishakh. Lime does not hold on wet ground; who knows that better than the man who works with it. Naimuddin stood under the jam tree and looked at the sky a while. Then he began drawing the line in the rain. He drew, and about ten cubits behind him the rain washed it away. From the jam tree to the pond he drew the whole thing, and never once looked back, and we stood under the roofing and watched a man draw a line a hundred and fifty cubits long that was nowhere. At the landing steps he rinsed the tin, though there was nothing to rinse. That year’s line none of us laid eyes on, and yet it is that year’s that we remember best.
His hands had begun shaking in the last ten or twelve years. One year, reaching the corner of the cloth row, the lime in his tin ran out. He stood there straight, and Majid fetched half a seer of lime from his own shop and poured it into the tin. Naimuddin wanted to pay; Majid would not take it; and on the next market day Naimuddin would not take the wage for two of Majid’s son’s panjabis. Neither of them told anyone about this transaction. We knew, because nothing stays hidden in a market. And from the year after that a line appeared in the market committee’s expense book. Below decorator, sweets, tea and refreshments, in small letters: for lime, ten taka. Who wrote it, on whose orders, at which committee meeting it was passed, none of this do we know. Once a thing gets into the book it does not come out; that much we know.
Towards the end his line went a little crooked. His hands shook, his back would not bend the way it used to, and the line from the jam tree to the pond had a wave in it. The new shopkeepers, who know nothing of the case and have never heard Sadar Ali’s name, some of them thought the line was the municipality’s, some thought it was a halkhata custom, part of the Baishakh decoration. One year the school’s Baishakh procession came through the market, children in masks with paper fish in their hands, and they found the line and walked along it in single file, like a game. Naimuddin stood to one side with the switch in his hand and watched the whole thing. Then, when the procession had gone, he went over the places their feet had rubbed out, laid lime on them again, and drew the rest of the line. Seeing him that day, it seemed to some of us that a crooked line was the correct line. The boundary of an old homestead — does it stay straight.
Among the older shopkeepers, though, there was an argument about the route of the line. Some said that in the early years the line ran further north near the fish market, and that Naimuddin had straightened it later to suit himself. Some said the line had not shifted by a hair, that it was the market that had shifted — shops pulled down, new shops raised, roofing pushed forward, platforms drawn back, and in thirty-three years who knows how many cubits the market itself has walked. The argument was never settled. Only the thought stayed with us. It might be so. The line is where it always was. It is we who are moving.
Shamsher Mridha died before all that. The market emptied itself into his funeral prayer, and in the last row, a shawl round him, Naimuddin stood. When the prayer was over he left without speaking to anybody, and about this the market made up its own accounts — that he had come to forgive, that he had come to see, that he had come to settle the sum. All three are current. Mridha’s grandson owns the market now, a boy educated in Dhaka, and he once raised the idea of felling the jam tree and putting up a two-storey market building there, and the objection came from us, from the fish market men. The shade will go, we said. The tree stayed. What else stayed, we did not work out.
Naimuddin died in Magh, in his sleep, in that one-slope shack at the level crossing, on the cot beside the machine. On the day of the funeral the shops of Mridha’s haat were shut for half a day. That a market should close for a man who never owned a fistful of its land, none of us said aloud that day; only, pulling our shutters down, we could feel that somewhere in the accounts there was a discrepancy that would not go under any heading. The shack at the level crossing his son has not let out, and he has not sold the machine either. Asked why, he says, I don’t get the time. The machine is lying there under a cloth; that much we know.
Then Chaitra came. On Sankranti night the cloth row people swept out of habit, and having swept, stopped short — who did we sweep it for. Majid shifted his rice sacks to the right, cleared the middle, and set a full tin of lime outside his shop, switch and all. Why he set it there was never asked. On the morning of the first we came into the market, and from the foot of the jam tree to the edge of the pond, under the fish market roofing, through the middle of the cloth row, through the inside of Majid’s open shop, the line was lying there. Thin, white, fresh. A little crooked, like before.
Who drew it? Some say a man was seen in the fog before dawn walking bent over, and whether he was tall or short could not be made out, because in fog a man has no measurements. Some say Naimuddin’s son’s bicycle was standing at the level crossing that morning — the son who never in his life set foot in Mridha’s haat, who called his father’s line madness. Somebody asked him and he said, I was asleep. Nobody asked a second time. Some say Majid’s tin was found half empty in the morning, and the rag on the switch wet. And some say nobody drew it, that the line knows its own way now, that in thirty-three years even the earth learns a thing by heart.
Since then the line appears every year. None of us asks the others who draws it. Each of us knows his own reason for not asking. Every one of us believes that if he raised the question, all the rest would look at him.
Only one thing has not changed. Every year after the halkhata the committee’s expense book is written up — decorator, sweets, microphone, tea and refreshments — and below that, in small letters, there appears: for lime, twenty taka. Last year the new cashier, a young fellow, stopped his pen and asked, Lime for what?
We said, Just write it.
He wrote it.
