Under the Rules & Regulations of the Apartment Owners’ Association of the Sandhyatara Apartment Complex (in the Eskaton locality in Dhaka), pet animals were prohibited. No one had violated the prohibition so far; there had never been a pet dog or cat in any of the two-hundred-and-eight apartments in the four buildings of the complex.
But a puppy arrived in Apartment 1102, on the eleventh floor of Building C, about a month back. The five-year-old daughter of Jamil Ahmed, the owner and occupant of the apartment, had brought it from Hathirjheel and made it her pet.
No. After all, a five-year-old infant girl could not have picked up a puppy from the roadside, walked a distance of a quarter mile, and brought it home; that had actually been done by her mother. Mother and daughter had gone for a stroll to Hathirjheel one evening. Seeing a sweet, cuddly puppy sitting all alone by the roadside, the girl had at once squatted beside it and taken it into her arms. The puppy wagged its tail as it received her affection. Observing the scene, it occurred to Mrs Jamil that her daughter was not going to let go of the puppy. Nonetheless, she said to the girl, ‘Put it down, Ma, if its mother comes, it’ll bite you.’ But the girl retorted, ‘No! I’m taking it!’, and she held him so tightly against her bosom that the lady felt utterly unnerved. After she looked this way and that and saw that the puppy’s mother was nowhere around, she took the puppy into her own arms and ran home as if she were a thief.
That puppy now howled all night in Apartment 1102. Actually, it wasn’t a howl so much as a whine, and that was quite piercing. The residents of the other apartments on that floor complained that they could not sleep at night. Those who lived on the tenth and twelfth floors said that they too were in a dire state. For that matter, the residents of the adjacent Building D too complained that the piercing cries of the puppy in the silence of the dead of night echoed frightfully and disrupted their sleep.
There was another problem as well, and that was even more grave: a dog was considered an unclean creature …
However, despite the complaints of so many people, it wasn’t possible on the part of the Executive Committee of the Apartment Owners’ Association to take any action towards improving the situation; its leading members were sitting in a meeting for the third time – just to find a solution to this problem. They had invited Jamil Ahmed for the very first meeting, but he did not attend, and got away by phoning and saying that he was busy with an urgent matter, etcetera; he made the same excuse and absented himself from the second meeting too; however, he attended the meeting today, and had initially smiled amiably and tried to make light of the matter, but when he observed that his amiableness had inwardly annoyed everyone, he said that he was unable to do anything about the puppy; this problem could be solved only if the Committee could persuade his little girl to give up her attachment to the puppy.
Hearing that, the Committee members thought this was simply a strategy to avoid doing anything. The General Secretary, Anwar Hossain, stared at Jamil saheb’s face and asked him angrily, ‘How can you say something like that? How can we persuade your daughter? Isn’t that your and Bhabi’s responsibility?’
‘We tried a lot to convince the girl. We spared no effort. But nothing came of all that.’ Jamil saheb explained.
‘None of us are able to sleep at night because of an infant’s whim. What does your conscience say about that?’ That was Treasurer Khalilur Rahman’s angry query, he was the owner and occupant of Apartment 1101. It was his residence that the cries of the puppy assailed with maximum volume.
‘Why do you bring conscience into this?’ Jamil Ahmed asked, his voice conveying sadness. After that he added a quibble. ‘Bhai, our sleep too is disturbed. After all, the puppy lives in our house. When it barks and howls it does that in our place, isn’t it? We shut all the windows of the drawing room at night so that the sound does not go out.’
‘Then what’s the solution?’ Lutfor Rahman, the President of the Committee, now asked. He lived just below the apartment with the puppy, in Apartment 1002. His complaint was that his family’s sleep too was disrupted. And it was not just the cries of the puppy; besides this nuisance, his family members were exasperated from long before by the torment of many strange sounds emanating night and day from the floor of the apartment above theirs.
‘So the problem is that the puppy howls at night, right? We are trying to see to it that it does not howl,’ Jamil said.
‘No, that’s not the only problem. The point is that the Rules & Regulations of the Association prohibit the keeping of pet dogs and cats. After all, everyone has to abide by the rules.’ The Treasurer Khalilur Rahman’s demand sounded quite loud to Jamil Ahmed’s ears.
Jamil asked, ‘Can you tell me who inserted this clause in the Rules & Regulations? Why is there such a rule? What’s its purpose?’
‘It’s been ten years since the formation of the Association, and none of these questions ever came up. So why is it arising now?’ Khalilur Rahman replied impatiently.
‘They never came up all these days because the need to do that never arose. It’s coming up now because you are making a trivial matter into a serious problem …’ But before Jamil could finish, Khalil angrily retorted, ‘A trivial matter? After disrupting the sleep of so many families, you say it’s a trivial matter?’
Jamil said, ‘I am not denying that people’s sleep is disturbed. I apologize for that. Let me repeat my apology. All I’m saying is that my sleep too is being disturbed, as is my wife’s. But what can we do? We are simply unable to explain anything to the little girl. You people should try to understand that I am in a helpless situation.’
‘Jamil bhai, let me give you a very simple proposal,’ Abdul Quader, the Vice President, said. He lived on the fifth floor. The puppy’s cries did not reach there, or even if it pierced the silence of the dead of night, it was so faint that it could not disrupt the sleep of his family members. He said to Jamil, ‘Tell your driver to stuff the puppy in a jute bag and drop it at the end of the lakefront in Hathirjheel. That will be the end of the matter.’
Jamil stared at Abdul Quader with a look of astonishment. He did not say anything.
Abdul Quader smiled, and then addressing everyone, he said, ‘What do you say, bhai, didn’t you all play the game of stuffing puppies and kittens into sacks as children?’
‘Oh, we did so much of that! Yes, this is the best idea. Jamil saheb, just do that. Tell your driver tomorrow itself.’ Lutfor Rahman, the President, advised him.
‘I can’t do that.’ Jamil responded. ‘I can’t see any way out other than persuading my daughter. Please give me a few more days.’
‘What do you need time for? Will you be able to persuade your daughter? Or will you invent a vaccination to make the puppy stop howling? We can’t have any of that. There can’t be any pet dogs or cats in this complex. That’s clearly stated in the Rules & Regulations. And that’s it.’
After his nearest neighbor Khalilur Rahman said that, Jamil Ahmed stood up. ‘Enough of your Rules & Regulations! I’m off.’ And as he said that, he left the meeting and walked away briskly.
***
Khalilul Rahman was in a foul mood after that. He was bad-tempered by nature; he had been suffering from insomnia from the time he was a student, and now he had high blood pressure and diabetes. After returning home from the meeting, he began picking on everyone for no reason. Everyone promptly went to bed after being scolded, but he himself was unable to sleep. He sent his wife to his daughter’s room and lay down at 11.30 pm, and soon after that the unbearable howling of the wretched puppy commenced. Khalilur Rahman had taken a Dormicum tablet at 12.30 am. However, his doctor had advised him not to take this medicine. And if had to take it, he should do that when he was in bed, because he was supposed to fall asleep immediately after taking the medicine. Khalil saheb had learnt through internet search that this medicine, which had the generic name of midazolam, was used to make patients unconscious at the time of surgery. So, he took this only on the days when he sensed in advance that there was no way he would fall asleep, but badly needed to sleep. It was almost 1 am, when he muttered, ‘the wretched creature doesn’t stop howling! It’s going to go on and on until dawn!’
He badly needed to sleep tonight because he had an extremely important meeting in his office at ten in the morning.
But the Dormicum tablet was of no avail. Khalil saheb could not sleep, and he didn’t think he would be able to sleep either. He was simply not able to calm down, and besides, the puppy in the adjacent apartment kept on howling. It stopped for a while after crying continuously for a long time, and then it began whining piercingly, as if someone was poking it.
Khalil saheb shut all the windows of his bedroom and turned on the air conditioner despite the February cold. He could not figure out how the sound of the “wretched creature’s” howls could still be heard. His cot was close to the window on the south side, he moved the curtain and looked through the window glass at the drawing room window of the adjacent apartment: the curtains were drawn, one could not make out whether the window was open or shut. It was surely open, Khalilur Rahman thought, or else how would the sound come? Although Jamil saheb had lied so assuredly at the meeting: ‘We shut all the windows…’
‘What a fucking liar the bastard is!’
Muttering away to himself, Khalilur Rahman picked up his mobile phone from beside the pillow and called Jamil Ahmed’s number. The phone rang, but no one received the call at the other end. He got even more angry; he got down from the bed, went to the drawing room and dialed the number of Apartment 1102 on the intercom; the phone rang on the other side but no one received the call. Khalilur Rahman now began trembling in rage, he realized that blood had rushed to his head, and he got scared thinking about what his blood pressure might have shot up to. He placed his right hand gently on the left side of his chest, walked slowly to the cot and sat at one end, and then he lay down gently.
As he lay on his back, he thought he could feel a constriction in his chest and that he was going to cease breathing. Fearing for his life, he sat up hurriedly and began breathing hard; his heart was thudding inside his chest. That made him even more scared. He screamed out his wife’s name, but alas, he realized that his scream could not penetrate through all the barriers of the closed room; the lady was senseless in deep slumber by then.
‘I’m dying from the torments of that wretched puppy and she’s sleeping to her heart’s content!’ Rahman said, gnashing his teeth, and carried on speaking loudly, ‘There’s nothing called sympathy! How can a woman be so stone-hearted …and sleep like a rock … O Allah, help me!’
The puppy in the adjacent apartment whined so piercingly just then that it occurred to Khalilur Rahman that it was him that the wretched creature had targeted as it raised the volume of its cries. He picked up his mobile phone and dialed Jamil Ahmed’s number once again; the phone rang but the devilish fellow on the other side did not receive the call.
It suddenly occurred to Khalilur Rahman that he would suffer a heart attack this very night, that he would die, and from tomorrow the puppy in the adjacent apartment would no longer howl all night; because this was how the Creator had ordained his death; a stray puppy from the lakefront in Hathirjheel had been sent to the eleventh floor through the hands of the woman in the adjacent apartment so that he would die in this way.
As Khalilur Rahman continued thinking along these lines, the thudding of his heart slowed down. The howls of the puppy next door no longer wafted to him; except for the mild sound of the air conditioner in the closed room, which one’s ears never caught unless one paid attention to it, there seemed to be no other sound in the world. He felt reassured thinking that the puppy next door had finally fallen asleep, and so his eyelids grew heavy and he wanted to think that he would not die today because he no longer found it difficult to breathe, and he didn’t feel any constriction in his chest.
After a while, he fell asleep.
He was woken up at 9.30 in the morning by the unbearable cries of the wretched creature next door. An important meeting in his office would begin at exactly 10 am, and so without a bath or shave, he hurriedly ate two slices of toast and a fried egg and left home in a flustered state. He remembered the puppy as soon as he sat in his car, and at once he began smarting in anger. He suddenly called out the driver’s name in such a manner that the poor man was startled. When he responded, ‘Yes sir’, his voice trembled.
‘Rashid!’ Khalilur Rahman cried out again.
The driver did not start the car, and once again he said in a tone of anticipation, ‘Yes sir.’
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘No sir, did you forget something at home?’
‘Aare, hurry up! I have a meeting at ten.’
The driver started the car. Khalilur Rahman asked him, ‘Doesn’t the daughter of Jamil saheb from next door come down with their maidservant and the puppy to play in the evening?’
‘Yes, they do come down, sir.’
‘Run over it when you get a chance!’
‘Eh?’ Abdur Rashid, the driver, said with a start.
‘Run over the puppy. It’s ruined my life!’
The driver was silent.
‘Do you hear me, Rashid?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Did you hear what I said? Don’t spare it when you get the chance.’
‘Yes sir.’
Rashid agreed verbally, but he said to himself inwardly, ‘How can one do something like that?’
***
But the incident took place that very evening. Children had come down to play, and the puppy was joyously wagging its tail and running around with them; Abdur Rashid had just left to bring Khalil saheb back from his office when the puppy came running and went under the front left wheel; Rashid slammed the brakes with a blood-curdling screech but by then the puppy was finished.
Jamil saheb’s little girl let out a piercing scream and began to weep, but their adolescent maidservant screamed out even louder; the screams of the two of them veritably rocked the four multistoried buildings of Sandhyatara Apartment Complex; the watchmen, caretakers and security guards of the four buildings raced from wherever they were towards the spot with the terrible dread that some stupid, reckless, drunk driver had run over a saheb’s child.
As soon as the utterly dazed Rashid got out of the car, Jamil saheb’s adolescent maidservant pounced upon him with her ten fingers bared like the claws of some ferocious animal, and just then the mobile phone in Rashid’s pocket began ringing.
But he didn’t get the chance to attend to the call. As he tried to protect his face from the attack of the adolescent maidservant’s ferocious claws, he himself turned ferocious: when he began slapping the adolescent girl indiscriminately, the watchmen and caretakers cried out, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ They seized him, held him by his arms and legs and took him away.
The mobile phone in his pocket kept ringing through everything. He took the phone out of his pocket. It was his wife calling. Gnashing his teeth, he exclaimed, ‘Did she have to call right now!’ He then received the call and heard her saying, ‘Do you remember what I asked you to get?’
‘Yes, I remember’, Rashid said and disconnected the call. But he had a strange feeling immediately after that. He broke through the cordon of the watchmen and caretakers, got into the car, started the engine and quickly left. Going past the main gate of the apartment complex, the car reached the main road and as soon as it turned right, it grazed the left side of a rickshaw with a passenger, which was coming from the opposite direction; the female passenger on the rickshaw screamed out in fear, the rickshaw-puller jumped down, cursed, ‘son of a whore,’ and went to hit Rashid.
Rashid realized that there was a deep gash on the body of his sir’s Toyota Premio vehicle, and that he would be hauled up badly for it; he did not stop; he raced ahead at full speed.
The driver Abdur Rashid had no clue when the sun set and the haze of dusk descended, why the street lights hadn’t come on, why the lights in the shops on the two sides were so yellowish and lifeless, and why he had a strange feeling inside his chest. He remembered that he had once come down with jaundice, and he had suffered for three whole months; everything had seemed yellowish to him then …
‘So have I fallen sick again?’ He muttered to himself. The phone in his pocket rang. He took out the phone and saw that his wife was calling him again.
‘Why did you disconnect then?’
‘I’m driving the car. I’ll talk to you later.’
‘Listen, get two, not one.’
‘Okay, okay. Disconnect now.’
Rashid ascended with the car to the lakefront in Hathirjheel. He turned left then right, and as he continued straight towards the west, he suddenly spotted on the right side, on the pavement of the lakefront, a massive dog amid the ghostly haze near the base of an unlit street lamp; it was standing on its hind legs, exactly like a human. Its eyes were looking this way and that, as if it was searching for someone; its huge ears dangled at its shoulders.
Rashid could not believe his own eyes. He held the steering wheel with his left hand, rubbed his eyes properly with his right hand, and looked fearfully: but there was no one next to the lamp post, nothing at all.
‘What just happened!’ He muttered. ‘O Lord Allah, what did I see!’
***
As soon as Rashid got out to open the door of the vehicle, Khalilur Rahman asked him, ‘Why are you so late today?’
Rashid opened and held one of the rear doors, and said, ‘Get in, sir, I’ll tell you.’
Khalil saheb got in. Rashid turned around, sat on the driver’s seat and was about to start the car, when he halted. As he turned his neck and tried to look obliquely at Khalil saheb, he said, ‘I did the job, sir.’
‘What happened?’
‘I ran over the puppy.’
‘Excellent! When?’
‘Just now. I did the job and came here. That’s why I’m late.’
‘Quiet! No more talk about this. There was an accident, that’s all.’
‘Yes sir, it can be called an accident.’
‘Not called an accident. It was indeed an accident. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll say whatever needs to be said.’
‘But sir, there’s a commotion now. The watchman was going to tie me up, he wanted to thrash me. I ran away and came here.’
‘You did well. Now keep quiet.’
‘But sir, the gentleman in the apartment with the puppy happens to be a journalist, he won’t create a problem, will he?’
‘Aare, what problem can he create?’
‘Right sir, what can he do? After all, no human died!’
After Rashid said that, he realized that trying to console himself in this way was futile. In a voice full of unease, he said, ‘I’m not at peace, sir. There’s a strange feeling inside my chest.’
Khalilur laughed loudly, and said, ‘You’re a donkey!’
‘Sir, the problem is not that Jamil sir will ask for justice, and I will be punished … What punishment can they give me? It was only a puppy that died, after all no one’s child was killed …!’
‘Then what’s the problem? What’s on your mind?’
‘There’s nothing on my mind, sir; I know it’s a trivial matter; but still, I have a strange kind of feeling.’
‘You’re a goat! A puppy died and you’re in such a state? What would you have done if a human died?’
Rashid was silent.
‘I’ll be able to sleep in peace at night after a long time.’ Khalil saheb said cheerfully. ‘How did you manage to do the job? How did you get the chance?’
Rashid was unable to say anything, actually he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t do the “job” intentionally. But he remembered that he had told his sir just a moment back, ‘‘I did the job, sir.’
‘What happened?’
A question now awakened in his mind, ‘Why did I say that? Did I actually run over it intentionally? Could I have saved the puppy if I wanted to?’
He got annoyed with himself as he ruminated on the matter.
***
When Rashid went up to the eleventh floor to give the keys after garaging the car, he encountered something bizarre: it was as if the corridor was a living entity, which thought that a murderous criminal had arrived there; it seemed as if the walls on the two sides were rushing towards him in rage to press and flatten him completely.
‘How can this be!’ Rashid thought to himself. He wanted to extricate himself from the feeling that had overwhelmed him. But he wasn’t able to. It occurred to him that the corridor had by now become narrower than usual. He stretched out his arms in order to touch the walls on the two sides, and he was amazed to see that the tips of all the fingers on both his hands were touching the walls on the two sides. He tried to remember whether he had ever tried to touch both these walls before, and he remembered that he had indeed tried to do that but had not been able to – the walls had been far away from his hands.
That meant that the corridors had become narrower; but was that possible in God’s world?
‘It’s just not possible,’ he said aloud with a shrug. After that, he advanced and pressed the switch of the bell beside the door of his sir’s apartment. The door opened after a little while, the adolescent maidservant silently extended her hand, and as soon as Rashid put the car key into her palm, the girl’s two large eyes flashed like thunderbolts into Rashid’s two small eyes, and then she banged the door shut in his face. Rashid was astonished: the adolescent girl had never glared at him angrily like this before, or ever shut the door in his face without saying a word, as if she were slapping him. Rashid pondered, the girl had surely heard about the puppy getting run over; but she ought to have been happy about that, because like everyone else in her boss’s household, she too had been unable to sleep thanks to the puppy’s cries. The appropriate response should have been the exact opposite: she could have cheerfully said, ‘Shabash, Rashid bhai! You did the job!’
But why did the girl glare so fierily at him? Rashid had never encountered such a terrifying angry look from a girl of her age. As he turned around and walked towards the lift, he looked at the walls on the two sides; at once that bizarre, frightening feeling returned: the walls on the two sides, the floor below his feet, and the ceiling above his head … the corridor comprising all those seemed to be a living entity, they were sizing him up in icy silence. He advanced briskly towards the lift; when he reached the door, he saw the lift there; when the door opened, it suddenly occurred to him that it was like a predatory animal waiting for him with a gaping maw, which would swallow him up as soon as it spotted him. He felt stunned, he had no clue what he would do. But the very next moment, ‘Rubbish!’ he exclaimed, shrugged, dismissed the ominous feeling as irrelevant, and entered the lift; as soon as he pressed the button for the ground floor, the doors shut like tongs; when the lift began descending, his knees folded up as if sprained and then he stood up straight, but he felt dizzy, and he thought the inside of his chest felt completely empty; as if not even a drop of air remained. He tried to take a deep breath, but he couldn’t fill his lungs; he thought that the inside of the lift had suddenly turned airless. The lift was descending speedily, and the life of Rashid, whose lungs were empty, was flying away. He shut his eyes and kept inhaling again and again; the lift descended and descended and descended and descended and suddenly stopped with a lurch, and his mouth emitted a mild sound, like a hiccup. As soon as the door of the lift opened, he spilled out as if an invisible force had shoved and felled him, and he sighed in relief at having survived.
‘Hey, what happened?’ Rashid was startled by the voice of the security guard Aziz. His voice rang out automatically, ‘What’s happened where?’
Ziz furrowed his brow, and said, ‘Why are you looking like this?’
‘Looking like what?’ Rashid said, in a tone not of enquiry but repudiation, and denying Aziz the chance of saying any more, he walked away briskly and began unlocking the chain on his bicycle. The azan for the night-time prayer sounded on the mic of the Jame Masjid in nearby Nurnagar, and in the ruckus of the Allahu Akbar that blared almost at once from the mics of all the nearby and distant mosques, Rashid’s heart began pounding. Nevertheless, when he bent down and tried to open the lock on the chain with which he had tied his bicycle to a railing, the key snapped and the broken portion remained inside the lock. ‘Fucking hell!’ he said exasperatedly, stood up, kicked the rear wheel of the bicycle and hurt his foot. Limping a bit, he crossed the open terrace of the apartment complex and halted at the outer gate; he observed the unmoving traffic jam on the road, everything looked dull in the lifeless light of the streetlamps. He turned to the left and began walking towards his residence in Madhubag, in the Mogbazar locality, where his nine-months pregnant wife was waiting eagerly for a pair of pomegranates. But he did not remember what his wife had told him; his wife had phoned him not once but twice regarding buying pomegranates, and she had asked him to buy not one but two pomegranates, but he did not remember any of all that; as he wound his way and adopted various methods and drills to get through the ghostly, perilous, sick and ominous crowds, limping and stumbling, he muttered to himself, ‘I’ve fallen sick again!’
His mobile phone rang then, and he heard his wife’s eager voice, ‘Where are you? Did you buy the pomegranates?’
Rashid said to himself inwardly, ‘She did well to call. Or else I would have forgotten it altogether.’ He replied, ‘I just finished my duty, I’m on my way.’
‘Come quickly!’ His wife’s lively, soulful voice transmitted affection to his ears; and just then, a gentle, cool breeze lapped his face and what had so far been a smoky, stuffy, suffocating atmosphere became somewhat tolerable. Rashid walked briskly and then began running towards the Mogbazar intersection; the sight of piles of fruits of various hues arranged in layers floated before his eyes. He remembered that in a few days a child would come and light up his house, his first child. Nasima finally had a baby in her womb five long years after his marriage. All of a sudden, an apprehension arose in Rashid’s mind: what if pomegranates were not available at the Mogbazar intersection? No, he had to buy two pomegranates today. If it wasn’t available at the Mogbazar intersection, he would go to Kawran Bazar and buy it.
Rashid suddenly noticed a large moon hanging on the eastern sky in the gap between two tall buildings.
***
Nasima was delighted when she received the two pomegranates, her demeanor was as if they were not something to eat but some valuable ornaments to be put inside a display cabinet. Rashid had fulfilled her desire; she couldn’t contain her joy at the fact that he had spent three-hundred-and-fifty taka and bought two pomegranates for her. She seemed to be dancing around with her huge belly.
But soon after that she thought that Rashid’s face looked unusually grimy; there was perspiration on his brow despite it being a wintry night, and there was a kind of piercing look in his eyes, as if he was in a rage, or exasperated.
‘What’s happened to you?’ Nasima asked.
‘Where?’ Rashid wanted to avoid the matter.
‘Are you angry with me/’
‘Why should I be angry?’
‘Because you had to spend so much money and buy pomegranates?’
‘Hey crazy girl! I’m not angry. I’m happy that I could get it.’
‘Then what’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing’s wrong. Won’t you serve me dinner?’
‘Come, I’ll serve it.’
Rashid vomited when he sat down to eat; his whole body was bathed in perspiration. Nasima began to weep. Rashid consoled her, and said that nothing was wrong with him; he had an attack of gas, it would be all right. He felt some relief after vomiting, and after that he drank two glasses of water in succession. Nasima peeled the pomegranates and gave him some to eat; Rashid laughed, and said, ‘Why are you giving it to me? You’re the one who should be eating pomegranates.’ Nasima said, ‘When you eat it, it’s as good as me eating it.’ Rashid asked her, ‘Why do you love me so much?’ Nasima replied, ‘Don’t you love me?’
Rashid then asked her, ‘If we have a son, do you know what I’ll name him?’
Nasima asked, ‘What?’
Rashid said, ‘Mister Pomegranate.’
Nasima laughed loudly.
The large moon had by now emerged in the sky in Madhubag; gazing at that sky through the window, Nasima and Rashid could see that the murky sky around the moon was steadily clearing, one or two stars had appeared.
Rashid said to Nasima, ‘O Bou, I have a strange feeling inside my chest.’
Nasima was startled; she asked in fright, ‘Like what?’
Rashid replied in a helpless and weary tone, ‘I can’t describe it, but it’s a strange feeling.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘No. There’s a feeling of heaviness. A constriction.’
‘Come, let’s go to the hospital.’
‘Let it be for now. We’ll think about that tomorrow.’
***
It was dawn in Madhubag. The wispy shroud of mist, like a film of cream over milk, gradually evaporated before sunrise. The glow of the pleasant mist-wrapped light entered Rashid and Nasima’s room.
Rashid was woken up at the end of a long night full of dreams and nightmares by a strange sound near his ear. He opened his eyes and saw a tiny puppy at Nasima’s bosom making a faint whining sound, and Nasima, with one of her nipples in the puppy’s mouth, had her eyes shut in boundless satisfaction; her huge, mountain-like belly had vanished.
Rashid’s eyes shut again in a state of deep tranquility.
Translator’s Bio
V. Ramaswamy is a literary and nonfiction translator of voices from the margins. The writers he has translated include Subimal Misra, Manoranjan Byapari, Adhir Biswas, Swati Guha, Shahidul Zahir, Mashiul Alam, Shahaduz Zaman and Ismail Darbesh, among others. His translation of Mohammad Nazim Uddin’s Tagore Never Ate Here was published in July 2025. He is a recipient of the Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in Creative Writing and Translation, the New Indian Foundation Translation Fellowship, and the PEN Presents award.
Image derived from a Photo by Backiyaraj Shanmugam on Unsplash
