from Places you Leave (Dhaka → Chittagong)

from PLACES YOU LEAVE

Dhaka → Chittagong


You stare into the night sky around Hatirjhil (Elephant Lake). Is it the heat that makes you sigh like this? Yes, it is the heat and my delusions of suffering.

A server pours cha. You sit on the porch and shake off the dust from your Dhaka Club Chronicles.

Tomorrow, from a penthouse balcony, in the middlenight clearing its throat and through alchemic clouds of shisha.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, wait for tomorrow.

In the morning—Ahsan Manzil’s pinkness winking through palm trees—you meet Alimullah the social worker. What does it mean to the founder of Nawab Atikullah, to be known by the title ‘sponsor of art and literary activities’?

The portrait replies, cold and public. Portrait of a portrait, aversion to a versioning.

You write your name on the land paper. First in Persian, then for the British. Deeds of land evidence futureshock. The soot of empire.

1905: Land deed from Fuller to the Governor of Bengal and Assam: ‘to help this backward community’.

The eye struck blind by oblivion. Fuller, as in Sir Fooler on the banks of the Buriganga. But nobody is fooling.

Smedley signs for the Nawab [NO NAME]. Khwaja Adbul [WIFE UNKNOWN]. Khaya Parer Taram meets the queen, bows, shatters the family portrait.

During the liberation war, Sufia Kumal appeared at her window saying: ‘I am not dead, I am not dead, I am not dead.’

A full moon disappears behind thick white clouds to wipe its face.

‘She was a good horserider who even earned her good name by embracing men’. She who arises or falls, or is absent, as if missing (but not missing). Missed out.

She, the only feminist in the palace. She who worked with ‘women’s issues’. She, fighting off ‘His Lordship’s Leopard’. The longshot of logic.

You walk through your own whiteness: an open door.

***

Bamfyeld over billiards zones his eye on the Nawab’s daughter skipping into the Ballroom. He breaks, scatters the balls, fouls, leaves with a huff of apology.

In the palace painting, all the daughters sit at the front. You follow them through the canvas, call them ‘truly exotic in their beauty’. But the truth is plural and the exotic walks on air.

‘From the windows of / this / room, I sit helpless, / waiting, / silent—sister’.

Between red-washed curtains, you stare through the girl’s earlobes. Carnal ticking. Between the music, so much silence you can hear everything.

Bamfyeld will return in the Spring, without his Kentish bride. He is a young man of the world unravelling before him. A great man, a man of knowledge, of leisure and of the highest breeding.

The palace stultifies your breath.

Outside, air mollifies a skyline jagger of telephone lines. In the market, the pigeons are obediently tied to their cages. The chickens are wired. Wired up.

You climb through the fusshouse of centuries, looking for a Sadhu. His followers cram the aching darkness of hallways. They wait for him to return from lunch.

Starling scissors. Egret confetti wings. You see this, shut up inside four-walled luxury. You split the fish like protozoa.

And what will you ask when he returns? I will ask what food means to the soul of an empty body. If sleeping brings us any closer to reality. I will ask him to remove this invisible black mark from my forehead.

Windows look out on steeled cement. Fractioning of a sum. As if held by nothing and always falling, a stanchion raised to the broiling sun.

You fall away, street to river, day to dream. amphitheatre stage tends down towards the sleeping nurse-mother. Euripides among thorns, woken up, transformed into a mango tree. You wake up.

To walk through the door of your whiteness.


***


A mother sobs through cadmium, betel-stained teeth. Boys on either arm. And a third child—a daughter, younger and without legs—sits on a green muslin mat, wipes her mother’s face.

Prayer’s echolalia. Where are you from? Where do you go? Voice throwback to zero hour.

Safar, Sulami, Salaka. Tell me where and I will be going.

The footpath rips in both directions. The radio signals jam like traffic. The meeting place does not meet.

I want to meet you – I want to know what to do.


***


Old now tomorrow in the blackwater. Ganga to Ganges. The RAHMAN butcher sign’s partitional rusts turns to jade. Reflection in The Eye Palace. Fracted and replicable.

Give me Allah’s food to fill my stomach, she said.

As if it would be any clearer to you if only the dead were speaking. As if by deleting the face in the photograph, she might disappear and you would remember yourself.

Unlifed, living on. Speak now or forever speak of this.

When they stopped you at the checkpoint they put a gun to your head and asked you to beg Allah’s forgiveness for being a refugee.

Mistranslation in the electoral banner: politicians would have you for blood.

THE WHOLE COUNTRY MOVES WITHIN US. But the traffic stalls an hour, held up by two bullocks. The deep wallop of their eyes.

In Gulshan, you surround yourself with books and work, work and books. Privilege-busy and in the seed-eat of thinking—so as not to think—you forget.

Shadow pass of an auntie making sabzi from a balcony window. Mother, wear the daughters face, scliffing bamboo from the tree. Koltar tek he.

You turn up the scripture page, echo the muezzin. ‘Give charity from what God has given you…Should we feed the person whom God, if He wished, could feed?’

And so the question isn’t a question, but what remains of wishing. Allah’s food to fill my stomach. Will you meet me? I cannot meet you.

If the mother could wear the daughter’s face. If anything can be wished, wish now.

I want to meet you – I want to know what to do.


***


You wait on the balcony, cooling with lemonade. Such pleasure. Pleasuring decay.

Inside the cooking chambers of your house, meat cures in the sun. A chicken cut from the red net. Flute song of a lamb’s marrow. A river’s vein severs the sweating Delta.

It is as if you could ask for anything. A squareshare of land, a road, a garden for rain to drip through the rice. Not much to ask for, so you didn’t.

Bismillah, he said. Split me into bricks and I will build a house.


(forthcoming 2021, Arc Publications)