Shaheed<\/em>, with the long ee. Sona Mia argued that the newspapers write it both ways; even so he had to scrub the paint off and letter it again. Lettering it, he muttered that he could not understand why the living made such a business over the spelling of the dead. Sona Mia the painter died long ago, but his double e stayed on at the mouth of the lane, and it was under that double e that this man set up house.<\/p>\nHe went nowhere else. The people of Kagojitola saw that at night he spread a sack at the foot of the nameplate post and slept, and in the day sat leaning against the post. If anybody asked him he said the same thing he had said the first day: I am Asmat Ali. I’m going to my house. He did not beg; Rashid at the tea stall sometimes gave him a bun and tea, and he ate it, and afterwards did not raise his hands and pray for Rashid, only said, There’s one up in the sky, He’s watching everything. How this made Rashid feel, Rashid could not have said.<\/p>\n
Where the man had come from \u2014 to that question the people of Kagojitola heard various stories at various times. Some heard he had been in a jail in Pakistan all these years, Karachi or Multan, it was not clear. Some heard he had been in India, at a shrine in Basirhat, out of his mind, and that on a winter night after forty years he woke under the tree at the shrine and remembered everything. And some said it was none of this, that he was in fact a swindler from Faridpur whose trade was posing as a martyr’s heir to eat up land, and that he had been caught at it once before in Munshiganj. The man himself neither confirmed nor denied any of these stories. Asked directly, he would stay silent a long time and then say, What good is it where a man was. Look where he’s come back to. This answer put the people of Kagojitola out of temper, because when a question yields no answer people begin to dislike the man who raised it.<\/p>\n
But the real trouble lay elsewhere. The people of Kagojitola worked it out that if this man really were Asmat Ali, then a great many things no longer sat where they belonged. The martyr’s family allowance had been drawn all these years by Hasmat Ali, as his brother’s heir, and there was nothing wrong in that, because a dead brother’s money is eaten by the living brother, that is the rule; but if the brother is alive, then what becomes of all those years of money \u2014 working that out made the neighbourhood’s head hot. Then there was the matter of the homestead. Hasmat Ali had pulled down the tin house of his father’s time and raised a three-storey building, and in the deed it was all in his name, and in Kagojitola a deed is the most sacred object after the Quran. And then there was Meherunnesa.<\/p>\n
Meherunnesa, Asmat Ali’s wife, who was nineteen in seventy-one and five months pregnant. Four months after Asmat Ali went missing, in Aghran, Mansur was born; Mansur never saw his father’s face. In seventy-four, the year of the famine, the elders of the neighbourhood married Meherunnesa to Hasmat Ali, because a younger brother marrying his brother’s widow is barred neither by religion nor by society. That way the orphan boy got a father in his uncle’s house. Mansur grew up, got a job on the railway under the quota for children of martyred freedom fighters, posted at Kamalapur, and now Mansur’s own son has passed his intermediate and bought the forms for a government job, and on those forms too the box for the grandfather’s martyrdom is filled in. That is to say, the people of Kagojitola saw that standing on Asmat Ali’s death there was a three-storey building, a household, two jobs, an allowance book, and a blue plate at the mouth of the lane; and that the man had come back alive and pulled the ground out from under all of them.<\/p>\n
On top of that there was the business of the gateway. Commissioner Makbul Hossain had become a councillor by then. He had got an allocation passed by the city corporation for a martyrs’ memorial arch at the mouth of the lane, with Shaheed Asmat Ali’s name on it, to be inaugurated by the MP sahib himself in December, in the week of Victory Day. Makbul Hossain explained to people that the arch was the honour of the neighbourhood; and he did not say that a photograph of the arch would also be on his posters at the next election, though even unsaid the people of Kagojitola understood it, because they understand everything, they only do not discuss it.<\/p>\n
So one evening in Aghran a meeting was held in the neighbourhood clubroom. On the long bench sat Councillor Makbul Hossain, Afsar Uddin the commander of the thana freedom fighters’ command, the imam of the mosque, and Hasmat Ali. Behind them stood as many of the neighbourhood as were curious, hanging in the doors and windows. The man was fetched from the foot of the nameplate with his bundle. He was not offered a place on the bench; he squatted on the floor.<\/p>\n
Commander Afsar Uddin \u2014 about whose own war in seventy-one two or three versions were current in the neighbourhood, but with whose signature a great many lists in that thana had been finalised over fifteen years \u2014 pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and said, You say you’re Asmat Ali. All right. Show me papers.<\/p>\n
What papers?<\/p>\n
Any paper. ID card, birth certificate, land record, school certificate. One paper with your name on it saying you are Asmat Ali.<\/p>\n
The man then opened his bundle. Out of the polythene came a faded gamchha, two quarter-rupee coins from Pakistan days, a broken tin whistle. And a photograph, so soaked and dried and ruined that nothing could be made of it but the shadow of a man. Commander Afsar turned the photograph over in two fingers, put it down on the bench, and said, This is not a paper.<\/p>\n
Then he said what the people of Kagojitola remembered for a long time afterwards. He said, Listen, mister. The name of Shaheed Asmat Ali is in the gazette. It’s on the list. There’s a certificate, there’s an allowance book, there’s the plate on the lane. The dead Asmat Ali has no shortage of papers. And you have no papers at all. So the reckoning is clear. The Asmat Ali who died is the genuine one; and you, being alive, are the fake.<\/p>\n
Some in the clubroom laughed, but the laughter did not take. The man sat with his head down a long while, then looked up and said, The dead have papers. The living have bodies. And he raised his left hand and showed it: the index and middle fingers crushed, healed crooked and fused together. He said the two fingers had gone in a lathe in sixty-nine, at Khalek ustad’s workshop, that Khalek ustad had taken him to Mitford on a rickshaw and the rickshaw puller’s name was Jabbar. Khalek ustad is dead, and nobody knows where Jabbar the rickshaw puller is, so the only witness to the fingers is the fingers, and fingers are not paper.<\/p>\n
Then Rajab Ali pushed through the crowd to the front, the oldest barber in the neighbourhood, whose hands shake so that he no longer holds a razor and only sits in his shop. Rajab Ali came forward and said, Bend your head. The man bent his head, and Rajab Ali ran his shaking fingers into the man’s matted hair and pressed the skull here and there, the way for fifty years he had taken in the shape of a head before cutting. The clubroom was so quiet then that you could hear the steady grinding of the lathes in Dholaikhal. Rajab Ali took his hand away. Then, without looking at anybody and without a word, he pushed out through the crowd and left the clubroom, and however many times he was asked about it afterwards, Rajab Ali said every time that he did not remember.<\/p>\n
Meherunnesa was brought in last of all. She came with her head covered in a black chador, holding her daughter-in-law’s hand. She stood about three cubits away. Seeing her, the man tried to get up and could not; half risen on one knee he said, Meru!<\/p>\n
The people of Kagojitola had never heard that name before. They knew Meherunnesa, knew Mansur’s mother, knew Hasmat sahib’s wife; the name Meru had not been uttered in this neighbourhood in forty years. The man said, Meru, is there still a burn mark on your right wrist? The first winter after the wedding the pan of dal went over, I put ground turmeric on it, you were laughing and crying at the same time.<\/p>\n
Meherunnesa drew her right hand inside the chador. She stood looking at the man’s face \u2014 for how long? Some of the people of Kagojitola said ten seconds afterwards and some said ten minutes. Then, when she spoke, her voice was as level as if she were asking the price of dal at a shop. She said, I don’t know this man. Then she turned and, holding her daughter-in-law’s hand, went out the way she had come.<\/p>\n
Then Mansur, who had been standing all this while leaning against the wall, shouted that what more was needed, his mother had said she didn’t know him, this fake old man had come to live off a martyr’s name, hand him to the police. The veins stood out on Mansur’s neck. Sitting on the floor, the man looked a long time at those standing veins, at the bone of the jaw, at the lines on the forehead, the way a man looks at his own face in an old mirror. Then he asked very quietly, Son, the boys of our line have a mole on the left side of the back from birth; on your back is there \u2014<\/p>\n
The sentence did not finish. Mansur came forward two steps and struck him across the face, and the sound of the slap came back off the tin roof of the clubroom. The man did not fall; his head only went to one side and came straight again, and he said nothing more. The finding of the meeting was that the man was a fake, a swindler, a defamer of a martyr; Councillor Makbul Hossain said that out of regard for the honour of the neighbourhood no police case would be brought this time, but that by tomorrow morning this man must leave Kagojitola.<\/p>\n
The man did not leave Kagojitola. He went to the foot of the nameplate.<\/p>\n
The arch was not built that December. The release of the allocation was delayed, the contractor was changed, then the price of brick and sand went up. Victory Day passed, two bamboo posts stood driven into the ground at the mouth of the lane, and Councillor Makbul Hossain told everybody he met, Next year, inshallah, next year.<\/p>\n
The people of Kagojitola gradually got used to it. People get used to everything, to the smell of the drain, the noise of the lathes, the load shedding; they got used to the old man under the nameplate too. The winter passed, the tin of the plate rattled in the Baishakh storms, in Ashar water gathered at the foot of the post and the man spent his nights under the bench outside Rashid’s stall, and winter came again. The boys of the neighbourhood teased him \u2014 Asmoitta the madman, oi Asmoitta, tell us the name of your lane! And in this way the people of Kagojitola came at last to call him by the very name they had taken from him; but they gave it back as a madman’s name, because any name suits a madman, and a madman needs no papers.<\/p>\n
And it was in this period that the people of Kagojitola began to see a certain thing at dawn. After the call to Fajr, when the fog is such that you cannot see from one end of the lane to the other, the small gate of Hasmat Manzil would open. A woman with her head covered in a black chador would walk to the mouth of the lane with a covered plate in her hand. She would set the plate down at the foot of the nameplate post and, without a word, come back. On the plate there would be rice, dal, sometimes a piece of fish. Those of the neighbourhood who went to the dawn prayer saw this, and did not see it. That is to say, they saw it perfectly well, but going home they did not tell their wives, and sitting in the shops they did not discuss it, because the people of Kagojitola knew that there are some sights which, once spoken of, make it impossible to go on living in the neighbourhood. Only the imam asked Hasmat Ali once, casually, after Fajr, where bhabi sahiba goes at dawn; and Hasmat Ali lowered his eyes and said, Feeding the poor turns away calamity, huzur \u2014 you said so yourself in your sermon.<\/p>\n
As the next December drew nearer the work on the arch picked up speed; this time the money did not stick. The bamboo scaffolding went up, the brickwork was laid, the masons put paint over the cement. The councillor’s men came and worked out that where the MP sahib’s car would stop and where the ribbon would be cut, right there, at the foot of the plate, was where the old man sat. So three days before the inauguration a police pickup came and took him away; they did not beat him, only took him and put him down somewhere out towards Jatrabari, the way people put out a cat. And the way a cat comes back, the man came back two days later, on the night before the inauguration, barefoot, with fog on his head, and at dawn the people of Kagojitola saw him again under the nameplate.<\/p>\n
But that dawn the man did not sit up.<\/p>\n
He lay on his side with both arms round the post, the way small children in their sleep put their arms round their mother’s neck, and the fog of Poush had settled on him as dew. Beside him lay the covered plate, the rice untouched. A crow sat on the rim of the plate pecking at the cover. Rashid, coming to open his stall, saw him first; then a crowd gathered, and the crowd thinned again, because the living have not much business with the dead for long. The police came and held the inquest. Since no claimant for the body could be found, before evening the Anjuman Mufidul Islam van came and took it away. In the register it was written: unidentified male, age approximately seventy. The man in whose name there is a whole lane was buried at Jurain in a numbered grave, without a name. What the number of the grave was, nobody in Kagojitola ever wanted to know. The gate of Hasmat Manzil stayed shut all that day.<\/p>\n
As the van turned out of the mouth of the lane with the body, the woman in the black chador was seen standing on the third-floor veranda of Hasmat Manzil. She did not come down, she did not call out; she only stood until the van had gone past the Dholaikhal corner, and then went inside. And that Thursday Hasmat Ali had a milad said at the mosque and jilapi distributed, and when one of the congregation asked in whose name the milad was, Hasmat Ali said, telling his beads, God knows.<\/p>\n
The arch was inaugurated on time. Fairy lights burned, the Quran was recited over the loudspeaker, and the MP sahib cut the ribbon and said that this nation would never be able to repay the debt of Shaheed Asmat Ali’s blood. Councillor Makbul Hossain was photographed with a garland round his neck. The next year Mansur’s son got his job too, under his grandfather’s quota, in the food directorate. Before the inauguration the nameplate had been repainted; the blue a deeper blue, the white letters bright, and Sona Mia’s double e catches the light when the sun is on it.<\/p>\n
The people of Kagojitola can no longer say exactly when the man came or when he went. Some say he really was a swindler from Faridpur and died in the end of fright. Some say he was a madman who had done time in a Karachi jail and thought he was Asmat Ali. And one or two, in very low voices, late at night, say that the man really was Asmat Ali, and that dying had been his mistake. Not the first time; the second. Because the first time he died, he had papers. But this argument has never been settled in Kagojitola and never will be. Because they all agree that whoever the man was, he had no papers, and without papers nothing about a man can be proved, not even that he is a man.<\/p>\n
Only for a while, after the call to Fajr, the place under the nameplate felt somehow empty to the people of the neighbourhood. Then one day that feeling went too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The people of Kagzitola can no longer recall precisely when they first laid eyes on the man. But all agree that he was first spotted at the mouth of the alley, right beneath the blue street sign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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The people of Kagojitola can no longer say exactly when they first saw the man. Some say it was in Kartik of 2011, about a week before the marriage of Jumman the butcher’s middle daughter. Some say earlier than that, in the Ashwin of the year the transformer at the Dholaikhal corner burst and two men died. On one point, though, they all agree: the man was first seen at the mouth of the lane, under the nameplate. He had stopped a boy in class three with a school bag on his shoulder and asked him, Son, what does it say on that plate?<\/p>\n