The Wait (part 1)

Srideep Mukherjee

Syed Manzoorul Islam

Translated by Srideep Mukherjee

1

Bakul Farazi did have a longish full name, but that eludes my memory at this point in time. What I certainly remember, however, is that Bakul’s inordinately long name made him the staple of ridicule from all and sundry. His father was called Altab Ali Munshi, and they had a junk shop at Sheikh Ghat in Sylhet. Altab Munshi was a devout follower of the Pir Saheb from Chhataktala; and it was this Pir who had christened Bakul with that long name of his, so long that one couldn’t pronounce the entirety in a single breath. His mother, in turn, had called him Bakul. To put an end to all the teasing that he’d have to bear from all of us on account of his un-pronounceable name, our teacher Abdul Haq Sir had truncated it to Bakul Farazi when registering us for the matriculation examinations. Such shedding of the pomposity of his son’s name did not go down well with Altab Munshi; he had even contemplated filing a case against the school authorities. Thankfully, however, he did not persist in his plans, the Pir having successfully dissuaded him. I have a feeling, on the sly, that Pir Saheb himself must have found it difficult to utter the complete name at one go; so the decision to cut it short would have come as a welcome means to circumvent the unnecessary weight of his own creation! 

In school, the classroom walls could hardly confine Bakul; he often seemed to wander away in his thoughts. If, for instance, the teacher quizzed him on Gestapo, Bakul’s answer would be all but a vacant, lost look. Not only would Gestapo seem a bolt from the blue for him, it was as if the questioner too was someone he was encountering for the first time in life. For all he cared, Sir, himself would be Gestapo; or those boats tied by the river bank beside the school were Gestapo, or perhaps it was Gestapo stuff that the boats had transported up there from somewhere downstream!

On exam days, while walking to school together, I’d ask Bakul if he was well prepared. 

I knew for certain that he hadn’t studied one bit. For one whose mind was steeped in eternal melancholy, to one who knew no difference between the wide-open pages of textbooks on the study table and fleeting clouds that dotted the skies, concentrated studies were indeed a misnomer. Yet he would always placidly reply, “I’ll manage”. 

“What will you manage?” 

“I’ll manage.” 

Bakul had an indefatigable belief that a white kurta pyjama-clad someone would appear on the scene and write the exams for him. Not only that, he believed he’d fare the best in class. This was Bakul’s closely nurtured secret to which I alone was privy. At the end of each day, he would say that his white kurta-pyjama draped saviour hadn’t arrived that day but definitely would the next day. 

As it is, Bakul had had to take much jeering from classmates on account of his weirdly long name; over and above, if word spread about his fantastic belief in this figure of a redeemer, there would be no end to his woes. So I stayed tight-lipped about his daydream, letting nobody get as much as a whiff of this. It was only after years that his secret was revealed to Farhana Yasmin Lopa. 

There wasn’t a problem with her knowing, though. Lopa was Bakul Farazi’s wife.   

2

I have been a student of English Literature all my life, but my interest in psychology I owe to the strangeness of my friend Bakul. Here was an individual whose days were spent daydreaming, the vision of a man in white kurta-pyjama coming from nowhere to fulfil all his aspirations suffusing Bakuls’s entire existence. I was triggered into knowing if this phenomenon had a specific name in medical terminology, what could be its roots, and if there were any deep-seated reasons behind his fixated dreams. 

I did discover the reasons from my studies in Freud. Or so I thought. As he explains, there is a layer of the subconscious underlying every conscious human mind, and this subterranean self is profusely fuelled by the hankerings of an ontologically liberated psyche, that runs counter to our perforce disciplined societal selves. This would explain our dreams, or even daydreams too, perhaps. Freud further says …aah lemme leave Freud in peace for now, for a renowned psychoanalyst like Dr Mahmudur Rahman rubbished my understanding as inaccurate. Mahmud teaches Psychology at the University of Dhaka; and it is beyond the ambit of my knowledge in this discipline to disagree with his analysis. I only managed to tamely ask Mahmud about the possible source of Bakul’s luxuriant fantasies.  

In his usual patient manner, Mahmud first wanted to explain to me all about this human entity called the mind.  

I could not, however, with equal patience, keep myself awake to listen to Mahmud’s deliberation to its very end. As a matter of fact, I have this malady of blissfully falling asleep whenever I have to listen to or read some convoluted discussion. I acquiesce that for this very reason, my intellectual growth has remained stilted for over half a century now.  

3

In 1971, Bakul had fallen into Pakistani hands. At a time when Pakistani forces had established their complete sway over the whole of Bangladesh, a horrendous Punjabi army officer named Brigadier Malek was in charge of Sylhet. It was around May or June of ‘71 that the overarching picture of Pakistani dominance began to ebb, for the Muktijoddhas (Liberation Warriors) were now making steady inroads and asserting their presence across the length and breadth of the land. Notwithstanding Altab Munshi’s objections, Bakul too joined the Liberation War. Knowing full well that he was forgetful by nature and stayed immersed in a world of his own, Bakul’s mother could only advise him to try and apply his mind to impending perils as he left for the war. She even gave him a wristwatch, hoping he’d keep track of time. The watch was a gift for Altab Munshi from London, sent by an uncle of Bakul. 

For Begum Munshi, however, Bakul mattered much more than Altab Munshi at that point in time; he was the apple of her eye! The wristwatch had radium on its dial, so one could mark time easily even in darkness. 

Absent-minded that he was, Bakul threw all caution to the winds and got caught even before he could cross over the border to India. After the Fajr prayers, he had his fill of breakfast at a roadside stall and boisterously declared to the shopkeeper, “Chacha, keep me in your prayers, I’m going to the war”.  

With all alacrity, the chacha gleefully passed on the information to Kitabuddin, the razakar par excellence! Hardly had the absent-minded Bakul Farazi traversed even a distance of eighteen miles from the town that his hopes of joining the war were put to naught. 

Brigadier Malik had instructed a subordinate to extract whatever information could be got from the lad and then finish him off. The subordinate got no information from Bakul, there being none to divulge presumably. So, with the intent of breaking his bones, the subordinate beat up Bakul black and blue. He was wont to presume that in a desperate bid to save his crackling bones, Bakul would throw up a few names, or perhaps reveal a secret map from somewhere beneath the skin of his chest. 

Bakul had no experience of being beaten, so he had no idea whatsoever of how to defend or save himself. He was gradually losing consciousness, but before passing out, all he could think was that the white kurta-pyjama-clad man would definitely come and salvage him from this wreck. So with that same complacent air of ‘it will be managed’, he blissfully passed over into unconsciousness. 

The white-clad saviour, however, did not come. 

On regaining sense, Bakul could see that a further subordinate of the subordinate Paki soldier under whose charge he was assigned was trying to pull him by the legs in a bid to dispose him off. Bakul had been holed up in a school building by a river, and to his pleasant surprise, there were also a couple of country boats tied at the banks of the river. Bakul Farazi had then come to think that perhaps all schools in Bangladesh were located on such riversides. Somehow managing to hold between his arms the broken ribs and displaced bones of his chest, Bakul staggered out of the building, escorted by the sub-subordinate. It was almost evening, and the Paki soldier’s countenance was writ large with a mix of irritation and tiredness. Presumably, the harshness of the tone with which he had been instructed by his senior to dispose off a tottering guy like Bakul had not gone down well with this man. The sight of Bakul’s pale face against the lingering shadows of the evening was only adding to his tiredness; he thought he might as well take the victim to the riverside and drop him in the water after some dalliance. 

On reaching the riverfront, he asked Bakul, “What can I do with you now?” 

Bakul placidly replied, “The man in white will come and deliver me.” As he spoke, his wristwatch seemed to sway to the tune of his words, the radium from the dial spreading an iridescent glow. 

The sub-subordinate found this interesting. The watch, he thought, was a nice one. He took it off from Bakul’s wrist and put it on himself. Then he hit Bakul with renewed severity and threw off his inert body into the river. 

Much more than his ‘kill’, the novelty of the watch had engrossed the sub-subordinate. So he did not care to notice the pair of dark arms that darted out from one of the boats and lifted Bakul’s sinking body by the head to safety and then held on to him closely in the hiding of the stern. They clung on this way until the long shadow of the soldier, who was absolutely taken in by the marvellousness of the watch, had advanced to safe removes towards the school building.  

P.S.  When the siege of Sylhet fell in December, the sub-subordinate was stationed at Chunarughat. Some six or seven of them, including his superior, had decided to escape to Agartala and surrender to the Indian forces in order to save their own lives. On the journey however, they were almost waylaid by a group of youth, presumably Muktijodhyas, who were ecstatic in their celebrations. In a bid to save themselves, the Pakistani senior led his men to take cover in the forests beside the highway. It would be about 8 pm then, the sting of mosquitoes being more unbearable than the winter chill. The sub-subordinate busied himself with warding off mosquitoes, taking care not to get discovered. 

But one of the young men, Badrul, suddenly spotted a flicker of light constantly moving in the bushes. He was basically a coward and always cautious in his movements. Presently, he was in the company of friends, but fear never left him. He recalled that on this very stretch of the highway, a truck had overturned less than a year ago, leading to the death of three coolies. Oh my my! Overtaken with fear, Badrul held with a firm grasp the hand of Intaj. 

Intaj was in no way chicken-hearted like Badrul. He perused the light and realized that it was mellow and had a roundish shape. He took it as a warning signal, and the word soon spread among everyone in the group. Raising their sticks and with a resounding war-cry, the young men jumped into the bushes to apprehend the source of the light. Their cries alerted the platoon of coolies who had huddled nearby for their evening drink, and they also joined in. 

About after an hour, the local Muktijoddhya commander Aziz bhai was informed. He arrived at the sight of the Pakistanis beaten out of their bones, lying scattered along the road as a horrendous sight. Intaj was flaunting a radium dial watch on his wrist; thankfully, their sticks had not landed on it. 

Intaj Ali and Bakul had never met. In fact, the chances of two such complete strangers ever meeting in life is perhaps a slender 1:1000000.