THE TRUANT
by
Dibakar Barua
Haji Ghani wanted his only son, Siddig, to inherit his garment shops and a row of flat houses in Chittagong, and also the homestead in Kanchanpur, near the hills of Rangamati. But at twenty, Siddig dropped out of college, becoming some sort of a cross between a bohemian and a nature buff, joyriding with bell-bottomed, long-haired young men to mountains and beaches, and gaining the nickname "vanish fakir" from his half-sister Nasrin. So Haji Ghani decided to put him to work in the garment business.
One morning at breakfast, Siddig, the darling of all the women in the family, was served his favorite binni rice cooked with date syrup and milk, while Masuma, Haji Ghani's second wife, made fried eggs and toast for the father.
"Tell Rahmat to teach you the books," Ghani said to his son.
"Abba, I...I..." Siddig temporized.
"I what?"
"Going to Sitakund with a friend. The biggest fair of the year. We'll climb the mountain, all the way to the temple on the top."
"Why go to a Hindu affair, son, when you have a business to look after?" Haji Ghani said, as if merely curious.
"But you don't really need me. Rahmat takes care of everything."
"Rahmat isn't family."
"Take Nasrin then."
"Yes Abba," Nasrin piped in on cue, her eyes sly and smiling. "I can help out, I'm sure. Let the vanish fakir go."
"The only business you have, girl, is here at home," Haji Ghani said, enraged by twin treachery. "As for you, nimakharam, ingrate, you'll do what I tell you to do as long as you live under my roof."
Siddig didn't come back under Ghani's roof that night. The "vanish fakir" had done it again. In times of sulk, he had gone before to Kanchanpur where his mother, Hasina, lived with a servant girl. Mother genes dominated over father genes in the family, Ghani thought. Siddig was shiftless and dreamy like Hasina; the girl, Nasrin, had the spunk and wiles of his second wife, Masuma. He wished he could have a son from Masuma.
When a week passed without a word from Siddig, Ghani overcame Islamic scruples and took Nasrin to the shops, also hoping to shame Siddig when he returned. After two weeks, Ghani began having nightmares. In the dream, he'd stand on the backyard of his two story ancestral home of mud and plaster, looking at a bare, stubbled rice field where Siddig stood eerily still while bullets from unseen guns whizzed by. Haji Ghani emitted muffled cries which woke up Masuma.
"Please go to Kanchanpur and get him," Masuma said, propped up and wide-eyed on her elbows. She also wept after the second occurrence of the dream, and off and on through the days that followed. Nasrin took charge of things at the shop.
__________
Even for a fat man like Haji Ghani, the jerky two mile rickshaw ride on an unpaved road was hard on the bones. At last the raised embankment of Kaptai Road -- the major link between the Hill Tracts and Chittagong -- came toward him across a dark green paddy field, through a row of date palms. The morning blue faded into a noon glare. Haji Ghani removed his skull cap and massaged his brown pate with a silk handkerchief. He took out a plastic comb from a side-pocket of his poplin kurta and raked his beard, itching from tension and sweat. "Merciful Allah," he muttered, his palms held forward like a bowl, "look after my Siddig."
His visit to Kanchanpur was a waste. Hasina knew nothing. Was she a donkey or a fox? Sharp features under a grey head gave her a witch look. "He's probably hiking in the hill tracts," she said, flatly. Ghani had an urge to shout and kick her. Foolish woman. The hill tracts were overrun by rebel tribes, ready to cut off any Bengali head, especially Muslim heads.
These hill tracts had once been a paradise. Bobbing along in the rickshaw, Ghani remembered a visit with some loud, unsteady cohorts to Sialbukka, drinking rice wine, bedding down tribal women -- a mother-daughter team. The blunt-nosed cream-colored daughter had wiggled under him, saying with a sly smile, "You are my father!" Oh Allah! What was her name anyway -- Einu, Meinu? Tribal names, tribal customs. It now occurred to Ghani that Hasina might be right. Siddig, misguided Siddig, had a fascination with the exotic. He read books on Santals and Mundas.
"Hiking in the hill tracts!" What a strange woman Hasina had become since that stillborn boy when Siddig was two. Rabeya, the midwife, had described that as a jinn-birth, the feet coming out first. Hasina nearly died too, recovering slowly after a month of surah-reading, incense burning, and sprinkling of rose water. Then all that talk about the spirit world, not sleeping with him anymore, saying jinns were watching, a year or more of that.
Abdul Ghani had not then made the holy hajj to Mecca. He had wanted one more son. Masuma, a boatman's daughter, was lower in class, but young and fresh. In her blunter features, he saw the Chakma girl -- Einu, Meinu -- who had called him a father years ago. Ghani couldn't forget that day. Now his second child, eighteen year old Nasrin, looked like Einu too -- both innocent and knowing.
__________
At the marketplace where Chittagong-bound buses stopped, an ominous quiet sliced through Ghani's reverie. The row of tea-shops and groceries were empty. Everyone had gathered outside around a drug store, Amana Pharmacy, milling about and shaking their heads. Ghani went up to the one armed pharmacist whom he knew.
"Ifti, what's going on?"
Ifti gestured at a corner with a shrouded body on a cot. "They found him a few miles up the hills," he said. "Face down on a fern bush. Don't look. Bad."
Ghani felt dizzy. His stomach churned. "Oh Ifti," he said, "I must look."
A cluster of blow-flies jumped at Ghani, humming, as he pulled the shroud. His first impulse, strangely, was to praise Allah. The face, though bruised, was unmistakably Siddig's, thin and sharp as his mother's. The eyes were open and unsettling, mocking. An amorphous, jagged wound stretched from the hips to the thighs. Blood and tissues smeared the shirt and trousers. Grasping the corpse's head in his arms, Ghani started sobbing.
After a fit of uncontrollable sobs, which startled everyone into mute gaping, he stared into a blur of a crowd, and barked, "My son. Call the police." Ifti, the pharmacist, came toward him and laid his only arm, the right one, on Ghani's shoulder.
"Haji saheb," he said, "the police's already come and gone. Sure it's your son?"
"What kind of a fool are you!" Ghani growled. Ifti bit his tongue in shamefaced apology and sent one of the grocers to fetch the police.
Whispers went around in the crowd. "It's Haji Saheb's son... Siddig...." All knew Ghani by name, and some claimed to have seen him before in situations worth recounting. They knew of his pilgrimage to Mecca, his business in the city. They marvelled at the coincidence, or was it superior intuition, of the haji being there on that day. They offered him consolation, tea and snacks. Ghani declined all offers and sat on a chair, staring grimly at the floor.
The khaki-clad Daroga, the local police inspector came in a jeep. He wore a pistol on his hip, and swung a club, a lathi, to disperse the crowd. "Assalamu alaikum," he said, greeting the bereaved man, taking out a notepad and pencil to write down Ghani's statements.
"Please sign here," the Daroga offered a filled up form. After Ghani had signed, the policeman took his hand. "You've solved a great problem for us, sir. We couldn't establish the identity of the deceased, having not found any wallet or personal effects of any kind. We were going to send the body to the city morgue for more..."
"Please," Ghani said, firmly pressing the proffered hand. "I want you to find my son's killers. Money no object."
"Oh, I see... but, Haji Saheb, eyewitness accounts report only an accident. He picked up a mine or a pipe bomb of some sort, something left behind by the freedom fighters of '71 may be, we aren't sure. We'll be happy to give you a full report."
Ghani wanted to slap the Daroga whose bosses must have told him to drop all hill tracts cases. Cowards. Yes, he would like a full report of the so-called accident, about this mine or a pipe bomb of some sort, left behind by "freedom fighters maybe" and vanishing eyewitnesses. But first he had to arrange a funeral for his eldest child.
__________
A day later, with a bright sun shining, Haji Ghani put up a red and green canopy over his spacious front yard, tying the four corners, stretched tight, onto rafters and mango branches. Relatives within seven generations, friends of the family, came, group by group, walking in single file across the green paddy field from morning till afternoon. Women shrieked as soon as they saw the canopied yard, and were led away, by Nasrin, to the zenana so the men could talk in peace. A helpful neighbor, Khandakar Alim -- the same khandakar who had circumcised Siddig as a boy of thee -- butchered two prime bulls in the helal way, with three strokes of the blade -- quick, sharp, deep -- letting the blood ooze out.
By the decorated bier inside a pandal, a mullah recited the janaja verses, enunciating the throaty Arabic with heartbreaking melody. Everyone, even the men, cried. Ghani couldn't cry. Something about Siddig's open eyes, now covered by two old Pakistani coins, troubled him. The still visible corners mocked him, accused him. He kept coming to the bier and walking away, making all marvel at his stoic poise.
Late in the afternoon, just before the bier was to be taken to the white-walled village graveyard, Nasrin took her father's hand.
"Come inside, Abba. Hasina, elder mother, wants to see you."
"I'm busy now," Ghani said, but Nasrin's grip was firm. She wouldn't take a no. Ghani stepped into the zenana behind a checkered bamboo door, sending unveiled women scurrying into corners like scared squirrels. Nasrin guided him past the veranda into the bedroom which was emptied, for his benefit, of all except Hasina.
"Oh Siddig's abba," Hasina whispered fiercely, as soon as he entered, "whose child are you burying today? Who's that on the bier?"
"Why Siddig's ma," Ghani said, sitting on a wicker stool near the teak bed, "what do you mean?"
"Don't talk loudly, please. You'll disgrace all of us. Why do you think I'm not crying. Been thinking and thinking all day all night. Something about him just not right. He looks like Siddig, same hair, same face, but he's not my son. O Allah, he's not even a mussulman."
Haji Ghani leapt to his feet, ready to strike this babbling, mad woman, but Nasrin stepped between them, shielding Hasina.
"Don't be a witless be-akel," Ghani roared. Storming out of the zenana, frightening women and children, he rushed up to the pandal where Siddig lay. The janaja recitations over, the mullah was sprinkling rose-water from a bottle, sanctifying the assembly. Ghani remembered the abdominal wound, unseen under a white shroud. "How would she know if he's a Mussulman or not?" he muttered. "Fool."
__________
Ghani spent his nights after the funeral in Siddig's room in Chittagong, an attic just large enough to hold his bed and a desk. Posters of an ocean sunset and a tribal warrior aiming an arrow hung on the walls. Ghani lit a candle which threw dancing shadows all around. He closed his eyes, waiting for a revelation, but heard only the light wind and a drone in his ears. He wanted to believe that the dead ones really came back to give a message, to finish any unfinished business. It happened on the seventh night.
Hearing a light tap, Ghani opened the door an inch. He saw an ethereal shadow, his son's long profile between the candle and the moon. Unsurprised, he raised his palms in prayer, shielding his eyes.
"I'm not dead," Siddig said in a fierce whisper.
Ghani's head reeled, as it had that day in the marketplace when he identified a body as his son's. Something was knocking him down or lifting him by the scruff. Something terribly wrong was happening.
"Look," Siddig turned once around and held out his hands, doing a dance of sorts. "I'm alive, alive!"
Ghani staggered onto the narrow bed and, long used to taking charge of things, mustered a calm in his voice, demanding accountability.
"Where have you been all this time?"
"Well," Siddig said,"you know, Abba, I don't like the clothing business. Now, I've got a job in Comilla."
Siddig's voice was low and faint; he seemed absorbed in something he saw. He had been going to Comilla, he said, off and on to see a friend who worked for the Academy of Rural Development , run with foreign money. He had walked and mused among acres and acres of gardens, ponds, and groves, smelling flowers and herbs, playing with squirrels. Then the Agency gave him a job of collecting rice seeds.
"Rice seeds?" Ghani asked in surprise.
"Vanishing species, Abba. Indigenous ones like the coarse gelong, thin white parba, fragrant kanchan, savory binni. Not the Irri rice we get from Japan. Irri is killing all the other rice."
"What's wrong with that?" Ghani said, "you get twice the rice with Irri."
"Oh I don't know. It seems such a waste to lose all that."
"What else did you do, son?"
Siddig remained quiet for a full minute, as if mulling over things. "I also climbed trees," he said.
"Toba, toba! Aren't you a bit old for that?"
"Did you ever know," Siddig said, ignoring his father's contempt, "what it feels like to sway with the wind, look into a pond, the puti fish jumping, now here now there, sending out ripples..."
Ghani felt a surge of affection for his dreamy son, growing up all these years with him, practically motherless. He lunged toward Siddig with open arms, trying to cradle the curly head. Siddig sprang back like a startled deer.
"No, Abba. Don't."
"Can't I hold my own son," Ghani complained.
"I am dead, you know."
Haji Ghani sensed danger. This was no dream, no visitation from the other world, but a knotty problem that had to be solved coolly.
"Who else knows about your being in Comilla?"
"Nasrin does. Mother does. Both mothers."
"I see," Ghani muttered. "I see."
He saw that his daughter and his wives had joined his son, keeping the father in the dark, shielding the old man, as it were, from his own foolishness. It would be so simple to claim his son back and tell the world he had made a bad mistake, but he couldn't do that and his family knew. He didn't want to look like an utter fool for having buried, with all honors and religious rites, a stranger, probably a Hindu kaffir, in a cemetery for good Muslim families. He would lose honor, maybe his business too. Men would politely shun him, women gossip, and little children chant "son killer, son killer." No he couldn't face that. But, oh Allah, what in the world was he to do?
Sensing his father's thoughts, Siddig spoke.
"Don't worry. Just send me some money every month. I'll change my name if you want, leave Comilla, go to another country, India, Nepal. I've often wanted to travel, you know."
"I'll send you money, all the money you want," Ghani said, relieved. "But I won't have to support you for ever, I hope," he added.
"You wouldn't have to, Haji Saheb."
Weeks later, Haji Ghani woke up one morning with a fever. Nasrin felt his forehead and asked him to stay in bed.
"I must open the shops," he grunted.
"Let me do that, Abba. You stay home."
"You, alone?"
"Why not?"
Haji Ghani's hand fumbled inside an attache case, fished out a ring full of brass keys, and held them out to Nasrin.
"You need to rest, Abba," said Nasrin, kissing his forehead.
"I'll rest in my grave," Ghani said. "I hope I can rest then."
"Oh Abba," cried Nasrin, her voice a trill, "what a thing to say!"
THE END
Composed: Early in 1994 Published: Short Story International 2/95
