I went to see Salim with Saif after a very long time yesterday. I had known him for nearly two years. We met at the lower court premises of old Dhaka, stumbled somewhat on each other while concerned, engrossed, and buried perhaps in our own thoughts. We met again awhile at a tea stall on the opposite side of the court and stroked up a conversation. Soon we befriended one another and began to share the high and the lows of our life. He had come to the court premises of puran Dhaka to meet his detained relative. The man was brought to the Metropolitan Magistrates’ court for a regular bail petition. I went there to appear before court no-7 where a hearing was due regarding our land in Mirpur. Three years ago it fell foul to the local miscreants. My father had filed a case and I was making regular hearing appearances after his death.
As days went by my friendship with Salim grew stronger and stronger. I went to his place very often. He owned a dimly-attired food court in Mohammadpur near the Geneva Camp. The inexpensive foods attracted large number of customers ranging from the tiny tots with their moms and dads to old folks with their grandchildren to newly wed with a low income. Students were the biggest admirer of Salim’s Kebab Ghar. For Salim each day was of greater satisfaction as customers thronged in his dingy yet piously maintained food court. The customers regarded him as honest and a man of integrity. He would never compromise their expectations.
The word “honesty” did lay deeply embedded in Salim’s heart. “Honesty is not something that the big businesses care about; making more profit; money, money, money and more money, that seem to be the strategy there. It looks as if they are caught in the treacherous web of profit and gain, unlike me who runs business with a small capital”, he declared narcissistically whenever he spoke of himself. He was more than happy with his humble business. He acknowledged his freedom from the snares of the multinational commercial banks and shut his door against everything corrugated and corrupt. Whenever he was in a happy mood he would declare, “You are still a young man and your job will soon get you to the top”, though he knew little about me.
Whenever he was depressed he made grave comments on his existence, “You know what? Life is filthy for men like us. Police rounds up small vendors like us on the slightest of pretext”. But the thing that gave him the creeps was the haunted memory of severe beating after refusing to pay the local goons two years ago. “They are, in my eyes, the worst of all troublemakers. They do no favor but the cops at times are somewhat generous. They display strange acts of generosity even when it seems unlikely they would”, he told.
“Generosity” is akin to pity, pitying the helpless and hapless, living at the margins of our society. Showing pity to the wretched has been a tradition for mankind. "Pity”ing is taken for granted as a manifestation of religiosity, a way of throwing at the pitied renewed, revamped, carrots of exploitation. Jaminders delivered pity to their subjects as did the imperial British by bestowing Khan Bahadur, Nawab Bahadur to a handful of bullocks and by amputating the fingers of farmers and imposing high taxes on the poor villagers.
Salim often discussed family matters and history with me. I made an obtuse reconstruction of the bits and pieces of the stories about him and his family from that.
History made Salim’s family to bow to the powerful and fate played strange game with them. Every generation of his family, it seemed had its own share of being pitied or grabbing the basket of pity with insult and disgrace heaped over side by side. Pitied by the politicians, Salim’s father and his uncle had migrated from Bihar during 1947. The mongrels and weasels at the helm decided to offer the poor nothing but accept the fate of being incarcerated, killed, raped or at best, become a refugee while they wrangled over power in the newly divided countries.
Salim used to say, “The new country hardly promised my father and uncle anything, but somehow they welcomed their new home with new hopes. They thought they might succeed if they worked hard. But soon dreams were shattered. Poor people shared the same fate of learning the hardest way”.
He heard from his mother how ravaged the family was after the partition. Years went by, they kept on struggling, Salim was born and then came the turbulent months of 1971.
The carnage that started on the 26th of March once again changed the life of Salim’s parents and his relatives. His uncle, five or six years older than his father now wore a fez, prayed fervently five times a day and went on hunting the Bengalis at night whom he accused of not being Muslim enough. He and his fellowmen staged ruthless and carefully orchestrated plundering in and around Dhaka city. The city also faced the wrath of the marauding Pakistani army. Bodies littered the streets as more and more people were murdered. Unfed beggars roamed the alleyways like ghosts, dogs barked tirelessly at night, people were sometimes seen fleeing the almost desolate city while machine guns rumbled and mortar shells brightened the dark sky above the city.
It seemed history with its own cosmic motives bestowed them the role of victimizing the Bengali people. Pity during those years fled. Salim’s people, perhaps, committed a grave mistake by putting their faith on the Pakistani army. As they wallowed in destroying lives and livelihood of Bengalis they forgot how these brown-skinned people embraced them as brothers and sisters just years ago in the eventful year of partition. Sadly, they were avenging that brotherly “embrace” with plunder and murder. New hardships began for Salim’s family as the war ended. Pitying (it was again the brown-skinned people of Bengal) led them to live in the ghettos while their allies left them to rot, breaking the promise of saving them.
Herein lay the mystery of life when pity and betrayal become strange bedfellows.
Saif was trying to convince me of his accounts regarding Salim’s death.
“He was betrayed, betrayed by the man he trusted a lot. But the locals were saying that the policemen might have nabbed him as part of their drive again temporary shops in and around Mohammadpur area. But I’m sure that it is Ratan’s work. He is an ex-employee of Salim’s food court.”
“I got the ominous news at the dead of the night. My mobile rang and a wailing Karim, Salim’s elder brother informed me of Salim’s murder. I broke into tears as Karim kept on crying frantically at the other end of the cell phone”.
At Salim’s funeral I heard more regarding Salim’s murder. Many blamed the police of the murder. Others claimed it was Ratan’s work. I met Salim’s mother but lost words to console her. While returning home from Mohammadpur that night many questions lingered in my mind.
I thought Pity had fled when the murderers were killing Salim. Betrayal of Ratan might be a reason for his demise. I wondered why betrayal cost humanity does so much. After much pondering I concluded that history is nothing but a heap of betrayals. Once I was affected tremendously by the legendary tale of Mir Jafar’s betrayal. To the elders of my house nothing was more potent a metaphor for the word betrayal than the name Mir Jafar. “Betrayal did cost us Plassey”, they kept on telling. The word “betrayal”, I reflected connected Salim’s demise with each and every tragic history of humanity.
As I lay in my bed last night, I was happy to be able to see Salim again. Only this time, his jovial welcomes were missing. Later in my dreams a sad face kept gaping at me with his eyes pleading to stop a murderer.
.
