The Wait

Srideep Mukherjee

Original: Syed Manzoorul Islam

Translation: 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.

4

Bakul did get better with time but was rendered unfit for any much physical exertion. He graduated with B. Com and managed an employment as a banker; he further completed M.Com while in service. Eventually, he rose to become AGM at the bank. But for a daydreamer, a person to whom fact sheets and autumnal butterflies were all the same, what would it matter even if he were the AGM! His accounts never squared despite all efforts, nor perhaps were they meant to; rather, his signatures on irreconciled documents made it difficult for Bakul to retain his job.

Bakul’s marriage to Lopa was decided upon by the respective families, and I too was a wedding guest. To my utter surprise, with all the customary suit-tie gifts given to the groom, there was a radium wristwatch too! Bakul had handed over the watch to his mother as compensation for the one he had lost earlier. Begum Munshi had, however, returned it to him, saying, “You better keep it, but make sure you don’t lose it again”.

True, what use was a watch to her any longer! Altab Munshi was now gone; were he alive, she could perhaps have kept it for his use. For one thing, towards the end of his days, Altab Munshi had begun to come across as the most important person in her life.

Lopa was a very amiable person. She was the quiet sort, full of humility, and always had a smile hanging on her face; it was as if Bakul Farazi’s ever-companionable nature elicited such a smile from whoever was in close proximity with him. To my mind, of course, if not to the rest of the world, that was precisely the estimation of Bakul. All the more reason, therefore, for me to develop a natural liking for Lopa.

Our meetings, however, were few and far between. Unless he was on a transfer posting, Bakul seldom left Sylhet. On the other hand, places like Sunamganj or Barlekha or Kulaura – where his work took Bakul, were never on the orbits of my peregrination. It was in Sylhet that he finally settled as the AGM of the bank, as I’ve said earlier. And it was here that he lost his job.

His call came soon after, and I still do not know what made Bakul to reach out to me the first thing. But there was some deep urge in his tone that I could not turn down, so I had to travel to meet him. Freud’s patients, I’ve read, would lie down on a couch and unabashedly reveal their innermost minds to him; similarly, Bakul lay spread-eagled on a cane sofa and began blabbering to me the details of his man in white. They hadn’t a penny at home. It was time to buy school textbooks for his daughter Samina, and Lopa was constantly after him. Bakul, however, had the same relaxed attitude, his response being, “Don’t worry, you’ll get them tomorrow itself”.

He had spent a sleepless night, not out of worry but in waiting for that elusive knock on the door, the arrival of his man in white who would surely come and say, “Hey, look, I’ve got Samina’s books, and here’s some extra money too, for managing other expenses”. Lopa’s daily routine was to drop Samina at school, en-route to the institution where she herself was a teacher. Some time back, when Bakul had still not lost his job, she had been waylaid by miscreants who had snatched her bag and also the slender gold chain she wore on her neck. After getting back home, Lopa had boxed herself in her room all day, and when Bakul returned in the evening, she entreated him to initiate some action. “Please report them to the police; I am in veritable fear of further attacks from them”, she had said to Bakul.

As always, Bakul had placidly responded, “All will be done”.

That night, Bakul sat up in his bed and stayed engrossed in a waking dream wherein the man in white arrived at his doorsteps with the miscreant guys gripped tightly by their collar bones. In his dream, not only were Lopa’s belongings returned intact; the man in white had also brought a heavy necklace for her as a kind of double compensation! The roughed-up guys were now falling at Bakul’s feet and begging forgiveness, with solemn promises that such an act would never again be repeated.

Bakul was visualizing the scene with his eyes shut, even as it was germinating in his mind. A certain tautness was taking over his entire body, a rush of adrenaline piercing through his veins that were on the verge of rupturing any moment. From within the deep recesses of his mind, a voice of wish fulfilment seemed to be screeching with wild abandon … “Let the moment turn real, here and now”! But the ‘now’ never came, in fact, it never does. The hour had worn out, and eventually the night too …

The next morning, as Bakul dragged his tired limbs to work, the same lumpens affronted him and wished gleefully, commenting, “Hope you’re keeping well, Sir?”.

Bakul finally came round to tell me, “I now realize nobody’s gonna come to salvage. There’s no man in white anywhere. It’s all been a manifestation of my naivete and foolishness”.

On returning from Sylhet, I had asked Dr Mahmudur Rahman about this. In my understanding, Bakul’s case could be explained by Freudian analysis. But Dr Mahmud’s explanation was even more complicated; he mentioned schizophrenia or something like that. I was left even more frustrated, for as I had fathomed, a Freudian prognosis could still have shown a way out of the malady.

A few months later, I took the initiative to fix an appointment for Lopa with Dr Mahmudur. She arrived in Dhaka and put up at her brother’s place in the Manipuri enclave of the city. Lopa informed me of her arrival over the telephone and requested me to meet her once before she went to meet the counsellor.

It was difficult for me to recognize her at first sight. In the few months since we’d last met, Lopa seemed to have weathered many a storm that had left her a completely changed person, at least to outwardly view. Handing out to me a bowl of well garnished puffed rice, Lopa went on with her side of the ‘story’. As I listened on, I increasingly came to feel that if there’s anyone who’s been martyred in life, it must be Lopa alone. I had a fair idea that Bakul Farazi was an absent-minded man who was always lost in daydreams and that he was indolent by nature and a lazy lump at that. In her own words, Lopa could still have tolerated all of these, but she was at her wit’s end with his fixation on the man in white. Things had come to such a pass that Bakul seemed to have relegated all his duties to that elusive man in white. They were now running into debts, the family was going for a toss, there weren’t any savings in the bank, and they were reduced to a laughing stock for all-around – all because of his weirdly placed hopes on that man in white.

“Haven’t you explained to Bakul the utter absurdity of his thoughts underlying the idea of this absurd man?”, I asked Lopa. She cast a bewildered look at me as if she was seeing just another Bakul in front of her. “Can you explain this to him in a way that he will be convinced?”, she shot back at me.

I arranged for Bakul to be brought to Dhaka. He did come and also met Dr Mahmud with Lopa. Mahmud, in turn, accompanied him to a renowned psychiatrist. I was hopeful that Bakul’s problem would be resolved. My belief stemmed from the knowledge that Applied Psychology was quite a modern discipline, and there were quite many experts in the field. I wanted to believe that someone or the other among these stalwarts would definitely find a way out for Bakul.

But Mahmud informed me one day that the case was complicated.

“Complicated as in …?”, I asked.

“Quite complicated. Your friend’s treatment will take a pretty long time”, he said. I started at the mention of the very word ‘treatment’. For all I knew, it was the sick who needed treatment. Did that mean Bakul was sick? Was he mentally ill? Goodness!

5 

There finally came a day when Lopa left Bakul’s home with Samina in tow. This was after her elder brother Ahsanul Kabir, a director in the Excise Department, had pronounced “Enough is enough”. Lopa too had begun to feel the same. In fact, it was beyond any human endurance. She had called me to say so, her exact words were, “You have done a lot for us, and I am grateful for that. But it is not really possible for me to continue any longer. I hope you will forgive me”.

I could say nothing. I knew her problems. She has a life of her own, the daughter too is growing up. She’s patiently endured a lifetime of waiting in hope of a normal conjugal life with a man whose entire existence revolves around hopes of the arrival of an elusive man in white kurta-pyjamas. It was the only significant happening of his life, of the world and of the epoch as well; and so Bakul could spend all his days and nights staring at the doors, and nothing else under the sun really mattered to him. Lopa in turn has had to sacrifice all her dreams of happiness, repress all her desires, and put paid to all her aspirations of a normal life – none of which were unattainable, given their ways and means. Somewhere, these thoughts left a deep void in my mind; and notwithstanding what others might feel or say, I could only register my silent support for Lopa’s decision of walking out.

All the same, something needs to be done for Bakul. Maybe I could at least try and get an alternative employment for him.

So, one afternoon, I shot a call to my friend Mansur Ahmed Choudhury, who was now the Director of Impact Foundation. Mansoor had lost eyesight in his childhood, but I can say without any qualms that today he is the one amongst us with the most clarity of vision!

Like the resplendent rays of the sun, Mansoor emanated hope and said, “It will be done”.

Somewhere, these words seemed so very known to me!

6a

While I go on narrating the eventual turn of happenings, I must confess that this isn’t the real me; it is more of the omniscient narrator with whom my personal similarities are kind of coincidental. So it comes to this that the sights colours and smells that shall now be described are beyond my individual capacity to narrate faithfully, and I must concede my inability to represent any of these in any extent of verisimilitude in my life! That is without doubt the forte of the all-knowing storyteller, to whose auspices I must submit my personal self and become just another reader like you, an intent one at that.

It is almost the same as Lopa had said, “Goodbye, Manzoor bhai”.

6b

Mansur had, in the meanwhile, informed Bakul that he would be able to offer a good position at his NGO. Not unsurprisingly, Bakul had in turn told Mansur that he wasn’t really worried about getting an employment, and that someone was almost at his doorsteps with an offer of appointment; in fact the best possible offer that could ever be.

Mansur understandably complained with me for not having informed him earlier that Bakul had already managed a job.

I was compelled to say it all to Mansur.

7

For quite some days now, Bakul has been all by himself, confined in his room. The sofa in the living room was metamorphosed into his seat of permanent waiting. The room is all haywire and in disarray, with stained teacups and unwashed food plates littered all over the place, the stench of leftovers hanging heavy in the air. With the curtains drawn, the room is in perpetual darkness, while cockroaches seem to having a free run everywhere. A putrid odour that is somewhat of a mix of several kinds of staleness hangs heavy in Bakul’s room, and the stench of cheap cigarettes only adds to it.

Spectrelike, Bakul sits staring at the door all day with unwavering eyes, a glimpse of him would frighten any onlooker. Dr Mahmud would perhaps call it Advanced Schizophrenia Syndrome, or some such difficult name. But to you and I, for all our naive understanding, Bakul’s eerie vision seemed that of a possessed. One was sure to feel that if eyesight had the power to pierce, the fire that burnt in Bakul’s eyes would definitely have ripped apart the wooden door by now!

He sat there with all his nerves taut and stretched almost to the point of imminent rupture, a typhoon raging as it where inside the muscles of his chest, his hands gripping empty cigarette packs with all the force they could muster, so much so that they seemed like rolled up shreds of paper.  It seemed as if his brains were getting hammered to pieces, and an intense cry that was throttled somewhere in his throat was wanting to burst forth into screams of “Now, here and now, it must be now”!

Bakul had decided that if his elusive man in white did not turn up that morning, he would step out of doors, armed with a knife. He would go on a kill, slaughtering all and sundry that he could lay his hands on. “How much longer do you think you can go on hoodwinking me?”, he seemed to be saying, as if he were challenging the man in white with an ultimatum. It must be today or never again.

There was a knock on the door. A mild, hesitant knock it was – typically the kind that one could expect of a man who has been served an ultimatum and stands in mortal dread of being pierced to death by the sharp blade of a knife. Bakul revived from his trance as if a flash of electric current had run through his body, every strand of hair on his body standing up erect. He too had heard the knocking but just could not believe his own ears. He tried to listen for more sounds of knocking if that came through. Now. Here and now.

The knocking was louder this time, and more determined at that. It was definitely a call to open the door.

At one leap, Bakul sprang up from the sofa and reached the door. His hands were shivering, his whole body literally trembling. With those shivering arms, he unlatched the door. On second thoughts, as if apprehensive that if he let the door completely ajar, the man in white might just fade into oblivion; he carefully opened it but half.

Bakul looked up and cast a full long glance at the one who had arrived. Before him finally stood his elusive individual; the one who had so long held the keys to his fortune as it were.

Bakul clasped his guest even as he muttered, “Why did you take so long to come?”.

Lopa came in through the open door, shutting it behind her as she entered. The room was dark and stuffy, rather nauseating in the absence of any ventilation. Had it been like other times, she would immediately get going with drawing back the curtains and opening the windows, switch on the fan and clean up the room. But today was very different. She held up Bakul’s face between her palms and planted a light kiss, then went on to arrange his dishevelled locks of hair with her own hands, and even kissed him on his head. She could barely remember when it was that she had last kissed his hair the way she did now.

Bakul too had not seen such teary eyed softness on Lopa’s countenance in a long, long time.

He had a feeling that Lopa’s hands were laden with all that he had desired for and wanted to have all his life; and that she was suffusing him with all of those through his eyes, his hair, his veins and every pore of his body in a way that ensured they reached into the innermost core of Bakul’s being. His arms wrapped the elusive being of his dreams, whom he now wanted to embrace to his heart’s content. Lopa could only see a new dawn awaiting her in that radium-studded watch that still adorned Bakul’s wrist.

“And what of that dawn that awaits our beckoning outside the window?” she asked.

Bakul replied unperturbed, “That dawn is even more patient than me. It can wait for some more time”.