To Hussein Shaheb’s deep left, the oily waters of the South China Sea captured the continent sky and heaved it straight back. By the pavement grew a young Deodar too precocious for the metal cage that Hong Kong’s forestry department had installed around it. The limbs of morning joggers on Tin Hau Temple Road rippled, their faces inscrutable as sweat dripped like tears, their measured paces locking in an effortless insularity usually craved by monks. The wind picked up, salty with hints of fragrance scooped up from Aroma Walk below. Hussein Shaheb sniffed the air. The hazy, unfulfilling notes of local jasmine pushed him closer to the adolescent cedar he knew from home.
“Chittagong Chickrassy. Scientific name: Chukrasia tabularis,” read the metal tag that the forestry people had stuck at the robust end of the trunk.
“Chittagong. Chittagong,” muttered the old man nudging the end of his seventies. His brown face was spent and furrowed, grey hair brushed back with rare-to-find Jabakusum oil, a shapely nose whose end quivered on occasion and large eyes that now tended to water even without remorse. “Chittagong. Chittagong,” his lips pursed and flared as he pulled himself up, his morning ruined, memories afire.
Imagine a lifetime spent without knowing the feral, formal name of the homely Deodar! He regarded the growing tree with the piquant malevolence of the betrayed, wanted to tear out its tender leaves that folded with the sun. Hussein Shaheb had hoped to smell home in its halo and came away with the breath of death at the back of his throat.
As he trudged to his daughter’s flat, shoulders slumped and footing unsure, a hurtling green minibus caressing the footpath pressed a rush of air into his sweating back. His shirt stuck to his skin, collar chafing the back of his neck. He put his hands on the small of his back and looked up. The sky over distant Kowloon had a tint of lead that clashed with the scudding clouds—it was bound to rain later that day.
Under the shade of a Chinese banyan, Hussein Shaheb rubbed his neck, looking for his grandson in a throng of schoolchildren waiting for the bus in front of his daughter’s block of flats on the opposite side of the road. He had missed the child, again. Shaking his head, the grandfather muttered, “Chittagong, Chittagong.”
Slightly averting his gaze from the cliques of self-conscious mothers too carefully dressed for a morning see-off and nannies hovering protectively around their charges, Hussein Shaheb crossed the lobby to wait in front of the lifts. The plump guard-cum-attendant smiled at him, her short hair dyed a shade of auburn this week, and, with a solicitousness that he had found unnerving in his early days in Hong Kong, pressed the bell and waved him in as the lift doors rolled open. As he rode up to the ninth floor, alone in a box of mirrors that ruthlessly assessed only him, Hussein Shaheb felt trapped. He brought up his hands to his face and rubbed them hard as if to scour out the resident anguish. “Chittagong, Chittagong,” his soul cried, his eyes dry.
In the shadowed foyer of his daughter’s spacious flat, shaking loose his walking shoes, the former civil servant, who had been shunted from one rural Bengal district to another for most of his career, sought the same sense of calm and rootedness that he used to in the nondescript government quarters he had been allocated with each posting. Separated from family on arduous stints and brooding over the nuanced slights that his name and his faith openly invited in majoritarian India, he stepped into their uniform emptiness after each working day with the trepidation of a casually invited guest.
This is not my world, he would tell himself then and he told himself now. His daughter’s large, high-ceilinged drawing room furnished with pieces of seasoned teak and rosewood gave onto a wide balcony far below which the severe blue of the South China Sea, on clear days such as this one, appeared so immediate and shining that it was possible to imagine being on a forgotten ship.
Not today.
An enormous flat screen TV mounted on a wall was silently on. A sombre man with a microphone seemed to make emphatic points in a sea of jostling people laden with bundles and babies. Inside a smaller window, an anchor steepled his fingers as he asked rapid-fire questions. Soon, tanks were seen to be rolling in the background as a woman in an anorak, her eyes wide and manner agitated, urgently spoke to the camera.
Rashu was rooted near the table which she was clearing of breakfast dishes, her torso twisted towards the TV. She was in a faded saree with the end wound around her waist. Impossibly thin brown hands stuck out of a bright blouse, lending her slender frame an elfin aspect that was pronounced by her large eyes, pert ears and a prim nose over purple lips that parted often to show white, well-kept teeth. Rashu was the household’s general factotum.
“Ki hochchce?” Hussein Shaheb broke the silence in his clearly-enunciated Bangla, pointing questioningly at the TV.
“Shahebra marpit kortese. Judhdho lagse. Oi dahen Dadu, saebra bou-beta niya bhagtase. Oh, ki judhdho lagse go,” Rashu lifted a finger at the screen to tell the older man in her peasant’s Bangla using the Sub-continental catchphrase Shaheb to describe White people, saying how they were at war, scrambling with family to safety as bombs bloomed on millions of LED panels around the world.
“Are they going to be refugees just like us?” Rashu, the barely literate migrant worker, married at fourteen to a marginal farmer and widowed with three children at thirty, enquired with brows knitted, crossing her arms to face her employer’s father.
“Looks like that, Rashu. War spares no one.”
“White men as refugees! Who would have thought that? Are they going to be penniless and hungry? Their wives and daughters sold, sons missing? Homeless and living in leaky tents?” Rashu prattled on, incredulous.
“Like I said, misfortune spares no one, White, Brown or Black.”
“Yes, but White men have money and laws and leaders…”
“You are too young to know Rashu. Think you can spare a cup of tea for this old man?”
Sticking her tongue out and biting it to indicate how remiss of her, Rashu turned in the direction of the kitchen.
Hussein Shaheb sighed, turned the ceiling fan on, slumped on a curved-back Chinese bench seat and thought about Rashu as gusts straight from the sea dispelled the sticky air straddling the room. The young Hindu widow who left her three children in the care of a relative to work as a domestic helper in Hong Kong knew a thing or two about being broken by the world.
She was from the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove delta shared by Bangladesh and India which the tidal fingers of Bay of Bengal squeezed harder with every passing year, sucking in more and more land. There, water steadily stole up the trunks of mangroves, salinity sucked out the life of soil and embankments got steadily eroded. The Royal Bengal Tigers grew frisky, their habitat shrinking, and they hunted man and beast with the determination of seasonal cyclones that killed thousands and displaced millions in Gangetic Bengal almost every summer.
A man-eater had carried Rashu’s husband off on a wet morning five years ago. Sudarshan was an apprentice honey hunter, a middle-aged former farmer who knew only the soil and the seed. When the sea gobbled up his land that was then of no more use with all the salt sitting in it, when its legendary yield of sweet rice that smelt like milk became a distant memory, when his youngest died on a tree strapped to Rashu, gasping for breath as a cyclone sucked out air and marauding rivers ran over each other, when his wife told him calmly and in the flat, non-negotiable tone of the defeated that she would go sell herself because the cries of her children made her hungrier, he went out for a smoke. A sudden squall snuffed out his light, wasting a matchstick, robbing him of transient comfort. Trembling, he ran to Joychand, his fisherman friend who no longer fished because the salinity and the cyclones had driven most of the shoals away. In the stoop of Joychand’s hut whose roof leaked because it was between eating and sleeping dry, the two men shared a measly smoke. The men, who had never starved as children, decided to raid the deltaic forest. They still loved their land, the land that had failed them. Their forefathers had told them that those who ran away from it ended up beggars, or worse.
When they went to the honey hunters, the crab catchers, the firewood scavengers with folded hands, they were warned that it was a matter of specialization—dodging tigers and evading crocodiles that lurked in the brackish waters to squeeze out the forest’s wealth.
The two friends got up early the day they changed their careers, unable to meet the eyes of their wives. Memories of their childhood bellies swollen with good food chased them like the scent of bubbling rice as they entered the forest, like they had entered the ramshackle village school together decades ago—knowing even then in their pure hearts that it was not for them. Sudarshan’s body was never found, only the paw marks of a tiger and spilt blood, and Joychand dragged his family out of the Sundarbans soon after. Rashu didn’t know if they ended up beggars, or worse.
Rashu had shared this with Hussein Shaheb on an afternoon shortly after he had arrived in Hong Kong. Ladling dal onto rice on his lunch plate, arranging the bowls of vegetables and fish around it with the assured movements of someone who had invested in the ritual of feeding so much that even when it involved strangers who paid for her service, she did it with a grace and neutral self-sufficiency that could not be bought.
Hussein Shaheb’s eyes had watered because he had seen a flash of his mother in Rashu. Just before India was formally partitioned in 1947, she had crossed the drawn-up border with millions into Calcutta as a young widow clutching a toddler. She had returned to her city of birth where she had grown up in an upper-class Hindu household, the only child of her parents.
She had met the man she would marry at university. A Bengali Muslim lawyer who was the first in his family of marginal farmers to go to school. Their inter-religion marriage had caused a scandal in Calcutta, fuelling luxurious gossip laced with contempt for educated girls and the choices they made. It followed them to suburban Chittagong in the east of undivided Bengal where the young couple settled, earning them social scorn and also a formal fascination. The few friends they made as they built a new life in the void of familial exclusion were young and earnest like them, hopeful and clear-eyed, an educated generation that confidently reposed faith in the future of a country on the cusp of shaking colonialism loose.
Social restraints irked them in a milieu in which the larger picture was in desperate danger of being missed, and in the marriage of Hussein Shaheb’s parents they saw sparks of a refined, achievable rebellion so much more admirable because so much more was at stake. There was a black and white photo in his mother’s album, taken at his parents’ drawing room in Chittagong in the mid-1940s - a bunch of laughing dhuti panjabi-clad young men lounging on a couch and chequered floor. Books were stacked between them. Some clutched leaves of newspapers, sticks of cigarettes burning in their hands. His pregnant mother smiled in a doorway, her face drawn, eyes shining, his father presumably behind the camera.
India was about to become Independent and was alternately in the throes of stubborn optimism and blind opportunism that often missed the point. Communal riots broke out, hundreds of thousands were killed. His young father—preserved in a pre-War wedding photo in a formal suit, hair brushed back and eyes content, smiling at his bejewelled wife who held the end of her saree framing her softening face—was hacked to death in the aftermath of the Noakhali riots.
When news reached Calcutta, a cousin who was in Chittagong was called on to bring the wayward daughter home. Back in her parental home, her grief restrained and outrage on a long, slow burn that would sustain her stoicism for the rest of her life, she was firm that her son would keep his father’s name and as much of his faith as possible. Her parents were ordinary people who sought familiarity in established prejudices. The riots had brought a grudging tolerance, a respect for the specificity of tragedy and also a stark appreciation for what it meant to have your flesh and blood in your home, thriving and unafraid, their sleeping breaths singing life into voids they never before knew could possibly exist. His grandparents willed little Hussein’s mother their house and a healthy annuity. The young mother got a teaching diploma and rose to become the vice-principal of a girls’ school where she met her future daughter-in-law while interviewing her for a job.
Hussein Arun Choudhury
Bol, tor Babar nam ki?
On visits to relatives with his grandmother, his distant cousins would accost him with the ditty, slyly probing his provenance, querying his father’s name with the implied insult of willing him to come up short. Their mothers would be within earshot, having forewarned their children not to bother little Hussein in the presence of his grandmother, participants in an unspoken conspiracy to savour the boy’s puzzled discomfiture as he didn’t get the point until he was older, at which point he refused to tag along for the visits. The women buzzed, “Ki bhalo chele,” praising him, patting his head in the presence of his grandmother who didn’t know that the maid had been told to scour well the plate he had eaten from, that their children were herded to take a shower to wash away the sin of playing with him the moment they left.
His grandmother assumed that because her widowed daughter had been brought back to the fold, the relatives would let bygones be bygones. Her simplemindedness that made her adopt prejudices unthinkingly till her daughter’s tragedy hit home also shaped her assumptions, more so because these women’s husbands were often in debt to her own husband who ran a successful printing press. These men, separately, would turn up towards the end of the month, mopping down their brows first before broaching the subject in a whisper, seeking small loans in voices slick with supplication to help them tide over until the next payday.
At a birthday party he was invited to with his mother not too long after starting primary school, he was welcomed with the shiny enthusiasm grownups show compulsorily at congregations of young children. Then, after the cake was cut, he was sat at a small card table at a corner, separate from the other children at the family dining table, portions for him set out on paper plates as cutlery clinked on porcelain all around him. When he got up to pour himself some juice from a jug kept on the big table laden with food, and also to move closer to the boisterous circle he wished very much to be a part of, sudden silence dropped like ice-cold water on the room. The mother of the birthday boy, stealing crafty glances at other mothers who had stiffened, batted him away with a hardened look, a smile still pasted on her face. The baffled boy, trembling and in tears, struggling to comprehend the slicing slight after an obvious welcome, got his first taste of organised alienation that he would eventually learn to identify as convenient, furtive untouchability practised by the privileged. His grandmother, who came to drop him off because his mother was working, had left the room to chat with other elderly members. She entered that instance, took it in at a glance, and led her grandson away without a word. Back home, distraught with humiliation that was particularly searing because it came from people beholden to them, she forbade her husband from helping out the extended family. It became clear to her then, after a lifetime of sheltered social transactions, that people who could not afford self-respect could readily summon petty, potent prejudice because it was far easier to muster.
When at family gatherings his mother met relatives who had called her a whore to her face years ago for marrying a Muslim man, or had questioned the provenance of her son when she was still grieving—that steady train of visitors at her parents’ house gleaming with curiosity and a taste for someone else’s comeuppance—she was always polite, her eyes unsmiling, hugging her son close, the widow’s white she habitually wore, a resounding repartee. At some point in his teenage years, when his mother’s cousins started calling the shots and their parents began receding to the background, the boycott was suddenly over. He was this Hussein who just had a different name. At his wedding, there were a thousand guests —his mother’s unquestionable redemption.
Growing up, he depended on his grandmother for everyday needs; his mother was this precious marble he took out of his pocket gingerly to marvel at, fearful of dropping it because it was so fragile. Playing in his mother’s study where she graded homework after dinner, the little boy wished she would grade his.
“Ma, o Ma,” he would sometimes call, standing on tiptoe to catch the mystery of the lined copies that seemed to hold all her attention.
“Ki manik? Ki shona?” She would look up and, setting down her pen, would pull him close, kissing his brow, cooing. It was a ritual they had, like two little birds calling out for each other, because the delight that sheltered proximity brought was sturdier than their nest. Twirling the end of her saree in his fingers, he would follow her around when she went about housework, offering morsels of his hours at the morning kindergarten. Sometimes, his mother would abandon whatever she was doing, pick him up, take him to the balcony and spend long minutes with her nose buried in his hair, the fragrance of his mother compressing his chest, clouding his eyes with unspoken longing, his little hands pressing her closer till he thought he would break.
The self-sufficiency he had eased into far beyond his age while still in primary school made him a man of interiority. On each death anniversary of his father, his mother, weeping, would always hold back as he garlanded a large photo of his father, lips trembling but with adult solemnity. Every year on that day, Gonumama, the cousin who had escorted his mother and him back to Calcutta after his father’s death, would visit with his family.
Gonumama was a tall, muscled factory supervisor with a salt-of-the-earth air about him. Rumour was he had done time as a freedom fighter during British rule and spent a few years hiding in Chittagong. His waif of a wife, whom he always treated gently, seemed the unlikely mother of two robust girls who liked rolling on the floor when they were little and broke a china piece or two on every visit. The elder daughter had confessed her love for Hussein Shaheb on such a visit when they were in their teens. The young boy had laughed her off, pulling her pigtails, giving her a chase down steep red oxide stairs, embarrassed delight driving up adrenaline, making him, for a while, someone else that he didn’t know lived inside him.
“Nyen, Dadu,” Rashu placed a cup of golden Darjeeling on a Chinese nesting table, vapour coiling like incense from the fine bone china. Hussein Shaheb eased himself out of the past and smiled at the descriptor that Rashu had borrowed from his grandson, identifying him as a grandfather, the ring to it as lilting as his only grandchild’s—the gift from his daughter he savoured with the growing delight of someone who had kept owed happiness at bay for far too long.
His daughter was the beacon that pulled him to home in Calcutta on the weekends from his civil service postings, resenting the distance that had to be put and pared weekly, his life segmented. His assumptions of togetherness were shaped by his wife who taught school and decided early in the arranged marriage that the spans of compulsory separation did them good. She accommodated Hussein Shaheb with the specific measure of a wife who did not love well but was faithful and willing to be a good mother. And, because of the empty quarters he floated into from one assignment to another, his compulsory transience making him a forever outsider, his comforts basic but never satisfactory, he became a man inured to the ornamentations of marriage—the crisp bedsheets, the folded clothes in the closet, the proper order in which meals were served and savoured, the daily fuss over a child whose birth had altered fundamentals. So he accepted the arrangement. The undercurrent of unfiltered amazement painted his time with his daughter with a happiness he never knew was possible.
He hovered over her at birthday parties and gatherings of the extended family, watching out for the deliberate slights of his childhood. His daughter was a self-aware child, in the manner of the young who knew their parents shared a different covenant and she loved her father with the absolute faith that all daughters brought to the world. In the Art Deco ancestral house the family lived in, the little girl was the fragrant air that Hussein Shaheb’s mother took her breaths from till she went missing in Chittagong.
An airmail had made its way from Chittagong in neat Bangla hand a month before his father’s death anniversary, addressed to his mother, introducing a half-sister Hussein Shaheb never knew he had. A library was to be named in his father’s memory and the family was invited to be present at the dedication. When his mother called at his place of work, he was touring the Sundarbans with a delegation from a multilateral donor. The guests frowned at every naked child running barefoot in the mud, gave pointed looks at Hussein Shaheb and other Indian officials accompanying them, faces grim, looked embarrassed in a village of tiger widows who said they wouldn’t hesitate to kill the man-eaters given a chance, and nearly had a fit spying children working the fields or washing dishes at tiny village tea shacks dotting the delta.
In the evening, over dinner and expensive whiskey at a resort favoured by tourists seeking mangrove safaris, one expert leaned over to say in clipped, affronted English, jabbing the air with his index finger: “Mr Choudhury, I must say the state of affairs is very, very bad. Those children should be in schools. It is the responsibility of any elected government. What are bureaucrats like you doing? That’s your job!”
An embedded journalist, who found war zones irresistible, tucked her blond curls behind an ear and hissed, “Unbelievable!”
Hussein Shaheb smiled his calm, long-suffering, official smile and tried tackling the delegation’s ill-concealed disdain with data—how the sea was rising, how people were being displaced and losing livelihoods, how tigers were turning into man-eaters in a shrinking habitat fuelling both man-animal conflict and rampant poaching, how seasonal cyclones wreaked one disaster after another, how women and children tended to get trafficked first whenever disaster hit. How, despite all the aid flowing in and well-meaning policy actions, it boiled down to composite grassroots expediency because everyone had to eat, eat, eat. It ended in a shouting match—drunken experts hurling righteous indignation at him and his colleagues, and eventually, at each other. Hussein Shaheb didn’t mind. Hardscrabble hunger was hard to handle, even for those born into it.
He called back his mother a couple of days later and learnt of the letter. Father was someone who lived firmly in a photograph, in the memory of his mother and in the dim and elusive dreams of his childhood rising from fumes of sleepy sadness that the heckling of distant cousins brought on. His grandfather had been the paternal figure in his life till his early twenties and the life he knew was defined with the living people in it. The existence of a half-sister, and his mother’s flat acknowledgement of it in a voice that made probing over the phone useless, opened up a world where his father existed without the impermanence he had always ascribed him. When he reached Calcutta, his mother was packed and ready to travel. And, Gonumama, who had brought her back home as a widow so many decades ago, was the chosen escort in this reverse journey. Neither wanted to meet his eye.
He ventured calmly. Did his mother know about his father’s other family? Yes.
When did she come to know? Soon after he was born.
Did she confront her husband? Yes, she did. He had brushed it off as a child marriage conducted without his consent, a union of a few months which he abandoned when he received a scholarship to study in Calcutta, hence disowned by his family.
Did his father know about the daughter he had never met, the one who grew up without a father as well? No, he said he did not, till a postcard reached their Chittagong home, carrying a plea for money to treat his six-year-old daughter’s pneumonia.
What did she do about it? Well, she had made up her mind to leave him but he was murdered a few days later.
So why did she never share this with her son? Because it didn’t matter anymore. She had moved on, thought the other child must have died without treatment. Those were turbulent times. There was nothing to tell, no knots to unravel.
In the orbs of collaborative self-sufficiency that Hussein Shaheb, his mother and his wife lived in, in the permissiveness that went with accepting boundaries without distasteful confrontation and in the denial that the fatherless, adult man found himself in, he chose the entrenched tragedy of the past. If his mother wished to look back, to peel back layers to explore the part of her past she had papered over, and if she chose not to invite her son into that exploration, it was an indulgence he would afford her.
A cyclone warning had been sounded the day his mother left. Seeing her off, sniffing the sticky air in the developing lull, Hussein Shaheb had hoped it would rain hard. It was the season of Nor’westers, right after the Bengali New Year, and the rare wind from the Bay of Bengal did not sit right. Five days later, a super cyclonic storm, one of the most powerful ever recorded in the Gangetic basin, made landfall in Chittagong.
Hussein Shaheb managed to attach himself to an Indian disaster relief contingent after frantic wrangling when the news of devastation in his place of birth blew in, in numbing waves from neighbouring Bangladesh.
The stench hit him first—putrefaction distilled by salinity into an odour so foul that one felt that it was coming straight from the gut. In the blur of the cloying smell of decaying flesh that rose like a phosphorescent wall in a bleak, endlessly inundated zone where signs of life seemed incongruous, leaded incredulity blotted out grief as wreckage floated, snagging pitted, swollen, swirling bodies and carcasses in reels of absurd reality.
Hussein Shaheb remembered gagging after accepting a drink of barely potable water at his half-sister’s wrecked house—it had the compressed aftertaste of nearly 140,000 rotting victims, 20,000 of them from Chittagong—his mother one of them. Their meeting was perfunctory, desperate, exhaustion overriding relief at finally locating the person who could provide clues about the whereabouts of his mother and Gonumama in that disaster zone. His half-sister couldn’t much—she had lost a son herself. Her relatives invited him into a waterlogged courtyard from which rooms rose without any roof. Drenched domesticity, steeped in headachy, foetid, crowded helplessness was on display. Plastic dippers and colourful slippers bobbed in the clogged water and tiny waves lapped at unmade beds on which sat sacks of rationed relief, winter bedding, a portable TV, pots and pans; even one naked, curled up infant, chest heaving uncertainly.
The visitors from Calcutta had been billeted in a school building that was now under leagues of water, whispered an elderly man with his hand in a sling as his half-sister, strapped to a makeshift hammock, slipped back into stupor. Their long-gone father stayed buried in the past—unmentioned, inconsequential.
His mother’s body was never found. Neither Gonumama’s. On the eve of leaving Chittagong with his relief team, he carried food and supplies to his half-sister. Ragged, a dirty bandage hiding a cheek, standing in ankle-deep water in her doorway, her feet as scaly as the crocodiles of the Sunderbans, her sullenness as resolute as a caged tiger’s, she had spat out in ragged Bangla, teeth bared and eyes flashing: “Good, the murderers are dead. We are proper orphans now. Aren’t we?”
Looking back, a Blackhawk laden with relief descending as buzzards scattered in bursts against a setting sun remained Hussein Shaheb’s most enduring memory of Chittagong.
THE END
Anisha Bhaduri is an award-winning journalist, fiction writer and artist from Kolkata, India who lives and works in Hong Kong. A finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize 2023 and a semi-finalist for the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Laboratory 2024, she has won a British Council prize, has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, nominated for Best of the Net 2023 for her first short story published in North America and for Best of the Net 2024 for her first work published in the UK. She has been published in Joyland, Tampa Review, Harpur Palate, a Random House India anthology and elsewhere. A Konrad Adenauer Fellow, her journalism has been published across Asia. You can find her on Facebook @Anisha Bhaduri and Instagram @anbhaduri.
Photo by: Sadek Husein on Pixabay