No Angel Born in Hell

Ohona Anjum Jui

That evening we had screening of “Paris Is Burning” in a tiny space that was designated for unwanted dreamers and revolutionaries who wore t-shirts that bore everything but the name of our university. A loud noise from the north rose like flames in wilderness. I took Juthi’s hand and we both were surprised at my swift instinct of being one with the city’s veins. As if I was expecting something like this to happen. It rained enough by then to clog the drains with pale blue plastic bags scattered around our feet, we ran like bitches. The loud noises went further and further away just when the orange hue started to rip across the heart of the starry violet sky. A wave of metal’s sharp edge rips my jeans vertically, painting my left thigh in the colour of dark blue. The sting of wound was awful, even worse when you are running for your life. Juthi stopped and her force made me break my momentum. Mind you, we never broke the contact of our hands. The overwhelming warmth created by the friction of our hands was enough to create the earliest invention of natural force that singlehandedly birthed the human civilization. The same natural force was rising above our heads, unable to grasp the atrocity, Juthi and I decided to take shelter in a pick-up truck that filled our lungs with cement dust and forced silence.

But it was a night of taking over, as the sky resembled a different destructive planet in itself, our silences, was too, taken away by the large group of men shouting “Inquilab Zindabad!”

Around us, an organism of sound growing monstrous. It was no longer a collection of separate noises of the city but a unified roar, pairing the raging parade with loud groans left by guns. The distinction between celebration and violence had been erased. And each percussive groan was a physical blow to the pick-up truck’s thin metal shell, making us flinch in unison. They tore apart sometimes skin, sometimes posters of the rivals. We couldn’t see the specific horrors, but our minds, sharpened by fear, painted them in brutal detail. With every wet thud we imagined, a phantom spray of warmth seemed to mist the air. With every rip of paper, we saw a face—young, old, furious, serene—shredded into confetti for this mad parade. The randomness was its own form of torture. It was a lottery of destruction, and our trembling bodies were just waiting for our number to be called.

Then, suddenly, the truck moved. We sensed it lurch backwards before flying its way out of the scene.

***

The opera played out, just as it was supposed to. Streets swirled ashes like a prophetic storm; the scent of gasoline hung in the air, and the sun above appeared to us as if performing its bureaucratic duty. After all, days would follow with or without our ability to deal with what came next. We slept on the truck, gazing upward occasionally while shielding our faces with tired hands, uneven roads made the cement bags shift as if it was ready for an avalanche at any moment. The truck driver soon called to us and left us in the middle of nowhere. But in Bangladesh, it’s never nowhere. The road lay ahead of us like any other Dhaka street, congested and polluted with noise. I could barely hear what Juthi was saying.

“I think our friends are in trouble.”

We took a bus to return to the hellscape we had left burning. Soon, we became the centre of attention among the passengers. Two girls wrapped in a blanket of dust and ripped clothes, our hair as white as ghosts. One woman said to another that we were running away, that we were “those kind of girls”; our home should be nothing but a prison.

We held our breath. We had to return anyhow. We had little shared money and empty stomachs. Juthi slept on my shoulder, as I rested my head atop hers.

Later, a police van stopped the bus in suspicion of god knows what. A hush fell, the engine’s grumble cut off like someone heard a scream midsentence. Which left only the thick silence of held breath. The officers moved with a slow, predatory boredom while their eyes scanned the passengers. They looked around and one of us met their eyes. It was Juthi. She did not look away, her gaze was a flat, exhausted sea. It wasn’t surprising to the passengers that they looked at us almost with disgust. We were the stain on the bus, the obvious flaw.

“Sir, please take them away.”

“Yes, they did wrong.”

The words were not accusations but a sort of transactions. Our removal was a public service. The policeman, nodded almost imperceptibly, he didn’t ask what we had done. The crime was our appearance: the ghost-hair, the ripped clothes, and the dust of a disaster we were clearly part of.

“Get down,”

We stood with our aching bodies. The warmth of Juthi’s head on my shoulder became a cold memory. As we walked down the aisle, not a single passenger met our eyes. We were already ghosts, being escorted to our proper haunt. The last thing I heard before the bus door hissed shut was the engine restarting, the conversation picking up again, the world moving on, now neatly cleansed.

Above, the violet sky returned bearing its stars.