On the afternoon of the ninth of Shrabon an aeroplane comes down on the school across the main road, and the seven boys of Mollabari lane, who had gone off that morning packed into the cage of Karim’s van, do not come back. After this the people of the neighbourhood discover that their lane was never in fact silent. Because the thing they had all this time taken for silence has, now that silence has actually arrived, quite another face.
They notice it first through sound. The call to Maghrib is so clear now that it seems the muezzin has come into the lane itself. You can hear the refrigerator grinding, you can hear a crow walking on the tin roof, you can hear a rickshaw bell three lanes away, and nobody knows the answer to the question of where all these sounds were until now. At this hour there used to be mothers’ voices rising from window to window — Ei Milon, ei Tuku, Badla re — the boys’ names turning in the air, the tail of one name catching the head of another and making the particular sound of evening. Now, after the call to prayer, nobody calls anybody’s name. After the fortieth-day rites some had thought that out of sheer habit some name would escape from some window, but the habit in the mothers’ throats went the same day the boys went, and where the uncalled names live now is not something the neighbourhood keeps track of.
Their reckoning of time has changed too. They say now, that was before the ninth of Shrabon, or, I haven’t seen him since the ninth of Shrabon. They used to reckon by Eids, by floods, by the year the electric poles went in; now every reckoning goes and stands on one side or the other of that one date, the way rainwater on a slope divides in two.
From four in the afternoon until dusk is the hardest time for the people of the neighbourhood. That was when the cricket was played in the lane. Everyone still knows the rules by heart: one drop one hand, four if it hits the wall, out and the ball confiscated if it goes straight into Rais Uddin’s window. Apart from the rules of the game the players had rules of their own. Palash could not play on the off side; if the ball pitched on the off he would not swing, he would just stand there, and because the whole lane knew this weakness everybody bowled at him on the off. Sajal was the smallest and got neither batting nor bowling, so he was made umpire, and he umpired so strictly that everybody stayed inside the crease for fear of one finger of his. Imon went home once in the middle of every game for a drink of water and came back asking what had happened, and if Badal ever took a catch the story of that catch ran for three days. Everyone still knows the rules by heart; things learned by heart do not go easily. It is only the ones who made the rules who are not there.
On Rais Uddin’s west wall there are three long lines drawn in charcoal with one across the top: the wicket. Since the ninth of Shrabon seven rains have gone over those lines; they have faded, but they have not gone. Every morning on his way to the market Rais Uddin walks past that wall and does not look at the lines, and the amount of attention he has to spend in order not to look is more than looking would cost him.
He used to sit by the window in the afternoons like a sentry. Three years ago a ball off Tuku’s bat broke the left-hand pane of his window, and he never had it replaced; he said, What’s the point, it’ll only break again. One afternoon in Bhadro a glazier wanders into the lane calling for work, and Rais Uddin comes and stands in his doorway, and the glazier points at the broken pane and says, Chacha, let me fix it, four inches by six, twenty minutes’ work. Rais Uddin looks at the glass a long while and then says, Leave it. When the man has gone he lies down without eating his midday rice, and waits for the air that comes through the hole in the glass.
In his room there is an old Nabisco biscuit tin, and inside the tin there are eleven balls. Six tennis balls with the green fuzz worn off, three wrapped in tape, one cork ball, and one red plastic ball with teeth marks in it — a dog’s or some boy’s, nobody knows. He confiscated these balls year after year, and each time he confiscated one he said, One more ball on this side of my window and it goes to the police station. The boys knew he would never go to the police station, and he knew the boys knew, and yet the sentence was a kind of contract between the two sides, made in order to be broken.
He once said to Milon, With you lot I can’t sleep in the afternoons; have you no death in you? Nobody else in the neighbourhood remembers that sentence. Rais Uddin remembers it. He waits for somebody to remind him of it, to stop him at the corner of the lane and say, You said that. Nobody says it. At Kashem’s tea shop he sits as he always did, people call him chacha as they always did, ask whether he wants a butter bun with his tea, and this ordinariness grows heavier on him by the day than any punishment.
At the mouth of the lane is Siddique’s grocery. On the front shelf there is a glass jar of orange boiled sweets, one taka each, three for two, a rate Siddique has not raised in seven years. Coming back from school the boys would get down from the van and crowd the shop, opening sweaty fists to get the coins out, and the coins would be so warm that it seemed to Siddique they had just come out of the frying pan. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight sweets went a day on average; Siddique kept no account of it, and still knew, the way a man knows he has a fever without taking his temperature.
On the afternoon of the ninth of Shrabon there were seventy-two sweets in the jar. Counted that evening, there were seventy-two. After that the number does not move, and after a while there is no need to count either, because in the wet air of Shrabon the sweets begin to stick to one another, and by Ashwin the whole jar has set into an orange stone in which nothing can be told apart.
The dealer’s boy comes twice a month with the van. At the end of Bhadro he opens his book and says, Siddique bhai, no sweets? Chocolate?
Siddique lights a bidi, lets out the smoke, then says, Give me tea leaves. Give me dal.
The sweets look nearly finished, though.
They don’t sell, Siddique says.
The boy does not press it. He crosses something out in his book, and the sound of his crossing out stays in Siddique’s ears a long time.
In the wooden box at the shop there is small change. After the ninth of Shrabon, Siddique starts keeping the two-taka coins in a separate box. Why he keeps them he does not really know himself; asked, he says, You need change. The box goes on filling, because two-taka coins go in and do not come out. And Tuku owed him four taka; it was not written anywhere, it was a spoken thing, he had said, I’ll give it tomorrow, mama. About those four taka Siddique tells nobody, and the ledger the sum is not in, he now opens in his head once every day.
In the month of Ashwin, Hasmat’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Munni gets down from her mother’s hip one day, stands in front of the shop and points at the jar. At first Siddique pretends not to see, then he opens the jar. He pokes at the orange stone inside with a spoon for a long time, a knocking sound, and at last a corner breaks off. He gives the corner to Munni. When Munni’s mother goes to untie the knot in her sari, he says, Leave it, what price is there on a broken thing. That night, before shutting up, he takes the jar down from the front shelf and puts it on the bottom shelf, behind the soap cartons, where it cannot be seen from outside. Nobody in the neighbourhood asks him about the jar having moved, but everybody notices, and having noticed, nobody says it to anybody.
Milon’s red kite caught in the electric wires four days before the ninth of Shrabon. That evening, coming down from the roof, Milon had said, The line’s still there, it’s only the kite that has to come down; I’ll get it Friday. Tuesday falls before Friday, and the Tuesday was the ninth of Shrabon. The kite is still on the wire. One day in Kartik, Kashem does a sum in the tea shop and says, A hundred days now. Nobody checks his arithmetic and nobody corrects it. The red of the kite goes first to pink, then bleaches in the sun to a colour for which nobody in the neighbourhood has a name. In the Bhadro rains the paper softens and hangs down; in the Kartik sun the hanging paper dries and falls away; and what survives into Poush is two sticks, half a tail, and a cubit of line twisted round the wire. By then it can no longer be called a kite, and still the people of the neighbourhood look up at it and say, Milon’s kite.
In the middle of Kartik a man from the electricity office comes into the lane with a ladder and a hook, cutting away the kite lines gathered on the wires as he comes. When he goes to set the ladder against the pole in front of Milon’s house, Hasmat steps up and says, Brother, leave that one.
The lineman looks up and says, The line makes trouble, it burns the wires.
It hasn’t so far, Hasmat says.
The lineman looks once at the two sticks and once at the faces of the people gathering round him. What he sees in those faces he alone knows; then, folding up the ladder, he says, There’s no paper on it anyway, just sticks. Leave it. He moves on to the next pole and takes three kites off that one, and nobody says anything.
Milon’s reel is under the cot in their house, line and all. Sweeping the room, Milon’s mother knocks against it sometimes, and there is a fine sound of thread against wood, and after that sound, for as long as the room stays quiet, Milon’s mother stands there with the broom in her hand.
Rana has to be mentioned here too, because Rana was the one who put manja on everybody’s line. Boiling the sago glue, mixing in the powdered glass, running the line between two poles, he would work at it for hours, and charged two taka or one lump of pickle, and there were so many fine cuts on the fingers of both his hands that you lost count trying to count them. Now the people of the neighbourhood sometimes get things muddled: was it Rana or Palash who did the manja, was it Tuku or Sajal who drew the wicket, was Badal younger than Imon or older. When the muddle shows they go quiet and turn the talk to the price of rice.
Karim has taken the cage off his van and put it behind his house. There are still cartoon stickers on the bars of the cage, and on one bar two letters cut with a blade, TU KU. With the cage off, he now carts produce, bringing vegetables from the wholesale market before dawn and delivering them to the bazaar. On the way back there is the corner on the main road, where if you turn right you come to the school, and near that corner the van’s speed drops of its own accord. That it has dropped Karim only notices late, after the corner is past, and then he pedals hard to make up the time, as though the delay belonged to the vegetables and not to him.
Baten master used to teach five boys on his own veranda in the evenings — Milon, Tuku, Sajal, Palash and Imon — five hundred a month each. At seven he would put the veranda light on, the boys sat on sacking, and at half past eight they were let go. While they were being taught there would be a noise, five of them reciting tables together, learning translations together, chanting, and that combined hum reached three or four houses around, and people in their kitchens, on their beds, in their yards, listened to it without listening, the way people listen to a fan. Even now, at seven, Baten master puts the veranda light on, and at half past eight puts it out, and for that hour and a half the veranda is silent, only insects turning round the bulb, and what he does out there for that hour and a half cannot be seen from the road; only the light can be seen, and the people of the neighbourhood use that light as a clock — when it comes on they know it is seven, and when it goes out they know it is night.
One evening in Agrahayan, Milon’s father Yusuf comes up onto the master’s veranda and puts a five-hundred-taka note on the table. He says, Master sahib, Milon’s last month’s fee wasn’t paid.
Baten master does not look at the note. He says, What is this you’re doing.
Dues are dues, Yusuf says, and goes down without another word.
The note lies on the table all night. Next morning the note is found pushed under the door of Yusuf’s house. Three days later the note is seen again, folded and wedged into the bars of the master’s window. After that the note is not seen anywhere. The people of the neighbourhood have worked out many times where the note finally went. Some say the master dropped it into the mosque collection box on a Friday; some say Yusuf’s wife has put it away in the folds of the Quran; and some say the note still goes back and forth between the two houses at night, when nobody is looking. There is no proof for any of it, and it is because there is no proof that all of them survive.
Of the boys of the lane, Tipu did not go that day. Why he did not go, there are three answers current in the neighbourhood. Some say Tipu had a fever, that he had been burning up since the night before. Some say three months’ fees were owing, that the school had sent a notice, and that Tipu’s mother was too ashamed to send him. And some say Tipu’s mother had a bad dream the night before. Ask Tipu’s mother and she says a different one each time. In Shrabon she said she had seen water, muddy water, her son walking through the water and her calling and the boy not turning back. In Ashwin she told somebody she had seen fire, and did not say what was burning. In Agrahayan, when Jabbar’s wife asks again, she says irritably, No dream or anything, the boy had a fever, don’t talk about it any more. Because all three answers could be true the neighbourhood has kept all three, and uses one or another as required, whichever anybody happens to need on a given day.
But however often they put the question to Tipu’s mother, they never once put it to Tipu. They give Tipu other things. Siddique, seeing him pass the shop, calls him over and tries to press a packet of chanachur into his hand; Tipu does not take it and goes on with his head down. Rais Uddin stops him one day and then, not finding anything to say, asks, Are your studies going on? Tipu moves his head. Which way he moves it Rais Uddin cannot tell, and not being able to tell, he says, Good, study properly.
In the lane’s cricket Tipu used to field more and bat less; his name came last among the eleven, and he had a buried resentment about it, and once he had said, I won’t play with you lot at all. In the first weeks after the ninth of Shrabon he used to come and stand at the head of the lane in the afternoons. The whole lane empty, the whole pitch his, nobody to send him off to field. He would stand ten minutes, look at the marks on the wall, and then go inside. Since Kartik he does not come out in the afternoons. The neighbourhood sees him now in the mornings, going to school — another school, on the road in the other direction — walking alone, and walking in such a way that it looks as if he is following somebody or somebody is following him, though there is nobody else on the road.
One dawn in Kartik the Nabisco tin is found outside Tipu’s door. Eleven balls inside: six tennis, three taped, one cork, one red. Nobody saw who left it, but everybody in the neighbourhood knows, and because they know, nobody raises it, Rais Uddin included. The tin lies beside the door two days, wet with dew, dried by the sun. On the third day Tipu’s mother brings it inside and puts it under the cot. Tipu does not look at the tin and says nothing about it, but he always knows where in the room that one thing is, the way a man knows even in his sleep which side the wall is on.
When the cold comes, one more thing becomes noticeable. There used to be a line of children going to the maktab at dawn, caps on their heads, primers in their hands, going through the fog towards the huzur’s house, and the flapping of their sandals used to wake the dogs of the lane and make them sit up. That line is small now, and walks without a sound. Out of old habit the dogs sit up at dawn, then prick their ears and lie down again. Jabbar’s wife, they say, slept two hours straight one afternoon; nobody woke her, no ball fell on her tin roof, no shouting, nothing, and when she woke she sat a long time with her head down, as though she had stolen the sleep. Whether it is true nobody knows; Jabbar’s wife has said nothing herself, but the neighbourhood believes it, because the afternoons really are long now, and in a long afternoon sleep comes, and sleep coming is now like a crime in this neighbourhood, a crime for which there is no trial.
The word has got about among the hawkers too, because it is hawkers who hear the news of a street first. The candyfloss man used to come into the lane twice a week, and at the first sound of his bell boys came out from roofs, from inside houses, from both ends of the lane, and the man sold more time than candyfloss, because he took five minutes over a one-taka portion, telling stories as he wound it on the stick, and the boys stood round in a ring and watched. After Ashwin he is not seen in the lane; he goes straight along the main road now to the neighbourhood to the south. The kulfi man wandered in by mistake one day, came half the length of the lane, set down his box and called out, and then — who knows how his own call sounded in his own ears — he put the box back on his shoulder and turned and went out, holding the bell shut in his fist as he went, so it would not ring. There are two views current in the neighbourhood about this. Some say, those men have some sense. And some say, they’ve decided our lane is a graveyard now. Both being somewhat true, no argument gets going over either.
The last day of Poush is kite day in this city. On the far side of the river and in the neighbourhoods to the south, loudspeakers play from the roofs from dawn, and after midday the sky over there begins to fill; from a distance it looks like a flock of kites, the birds, except that kites are not that still. In Mollabari lane a strange busyness is seen from the morning; people do more work than is needed. Hasmat cements the base of the tubewell, which has been broken three years. Kashem paints the bench outside his shop. Siddique brings his shutter half down at midday and sits with his account papers. And nobody goes up on a roof. You can see the sky without going on the roof, of course — through a window, going out to bring in the washing, through a gap in a door — because the sky is a thing you cannot help looking at, and that day everybody notices how full the southern sky is and how empty their own piece of it.
At about half past four a red kite goes up from inside their own neighbourhood.
Which roof it went up from, the people of the neighbourhood were never afterwards able to agree. Hasmat’s wife says she saw with her own eyes that it came up from behind the water tank, which means Jabbar’s roof. Kashem says Rais Uddin’s roof, though there are at least four witnesses that Rais Uddin was sitting on the bench at the tea shop at the time. And some say nothing and look towards Tipu’s single-storey house, the house whose roof stairs are broken, and having looked, stay silent.
The kite does not go to tangle with anybody, nor towards the crowded southern sky. It only rises. As high as it can go with the line paying out, as far as the reel will allow. At some point it leaves far below it the two-stick skeleton of Milon’s kite caught in the wires and goes higher, growing smaller until it is a red dot, and then the line suddenly slackens and comes down in a long wave through the air. Those in the neighbourhood who have ever flown a kite know that the far end of the line is tied to the reel, and that knot does not come undone by itself; it has to be undone. The kite drifts north, growing smaller, becoming a point, and then the eye cannot hold it any longer, although many go on looking, thinking that perhaps it is the eye that is at fault and the kite is still there.
Whose reel was emptied that day, the neighbourhood does not ask. The cut line is found next morning lying long across three roofs and a guava tree, glittering in the sun, a line with manja on it, and the manja is old, because there is nobody left in the neighbourhood to put on new manja. Nobody takes the line down. After a few days it goes off somewhere by itself, into the air, or a crow takes it for a nest.
That evening the dealer’s boy comes with the goods. Siddique takes tea leaves, takes dal, takes two cartons of soap. The boy writes it in his book and is about to get on the van when Siddique says from behind him, Bring a carton of sweets next time.
The boy turns his head and says, The orange ones?
Siddique looks at the bottom shelf, where the old jar stands behind the soap cartons, and then says, Bring half a carton.
