Black Ice

By Mahmudul Haque

Abdul Khaleq teaches at a rural college nearing collapse in newly independent Bangladesh. When a writer friend asks him to chronicle his childhood, Abdul retreats to an enchanting world in the suburbs of Calcutta. He remembers the girl who spoke to fish and birds, the girl he first loved. He also recalls the stream of visitors who came to his parents' door in those days, some bearing want, some malice, and others, generosity and wisdom. He plummets into despondency when memories return him to a time when Hindu-Muslim tensions in undivided Bengal eclipsed his innocence. Abdul's nostalgia enrages his wife Rekha who resents his lack of ambition and aloofness. Prodded by the village physician Doctor Narhari, the couple embark on a boat ride that forces them to confront their discord and desires, and plumb the roots of Abdul's alienation. Published first in 1977,  Mahmudul Haque's cult novel, Black Ice, probes with utmost sensitivity the invisible scars bequeathed to the inheritors of the losses of Partition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Release date: Feb 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9789350295021

Mahmudul Haque

Mahmudul Haque was one of Bangladesh's premier prose stylists, the author of ten novels and numerous stories. He spent his childhood in Barasat outside Kolkata and his later years in Dhaka.

Book preview

One

Back in those days, I had a habit of sucking my thumb. Sometimes on the ghat by the pond, sometimes on the veranda steps, sometimes sitting alone on the window sill, I would just sit and suck my thumb. It wasn’t so much that I savoured the salty taste of my skin; as much as I remember, I had no sense yet whether something was likeable or not. When I heard that the world is round, my head throbbed and ears sizzled. That notion befuddled me no end. It made me wonder where we were then – on the bottom or top of the orange. Shouldn’t the people towards the bottom fall off willy-nilly?

Once, Pachu, Shadhukhan’s son, gifted me a chain of glass bangles that belonged to his sister Jhumi. He had pilfered it from her doll box. I kept that chain hidden away thinking that such a beautiful thing could not possibly belong to too many people.

Jhumi often roamed around in our orchard. If I came across her face-to-face, I wanted to flee. I could not look her in the eye and speak; my heart pounded in fear. The day Jhumi asked me ‘Hey, did Pachu give you something?’, I froze in my tracks. Later I discovered that she had asked just as a matter of course; Jhumi didn’t know I was involved. Let that be. That a chain of glass bangles is a cheap trinket I would learn much, much later.That’s the sort of age I was back then.

It is true that no one at home liked this thumb-sucking business of mine, especially my mother. I endured a lot of teasing about it. ‘This nitwit is such a burden to me,’ Ma would say as she jerked my thumb out of my mouth. When she flared up, she said, ‘I’m sure this naughty boy will annoy me forever. Didn’t this numbskull pester me day and night even when he was in my belly!’

Quite likely neither claim was off the mark. I may have been something of a dolt. If a nokuldana¹ fell out of the paper bag, I’d pick it up from the dirt and pop it in my mouth. Puti too was an object of wonder to me. She was the girl with red alta dye on her feet who planted herself on our pond’s ghat with a clutter of bronze and brass plates and pans. Using a brush made of twigs, she would scrub away at the metal utensils crooning the song, ‘He hangs a watch chain from his pocket and dandies about town’. It seemed like her cleaning would never end. While at the pond, she would be called at least two or three times. ‘Puti? O Puti? Did the girl die or something?’

Each time the shout rang out, she replied, ‘Coming, Ma.’

There was an overgrown fish in the pond, a rui or katla; the carp seemed as ancient as the trees and stones. Somehow it knew exactly when Puti arrived on the ghat. Aft er splashing about a few times in the middle of the pond, it would dive down, come to the edge of the steps, and float up to the surface. Puti might then be eating the burnt cream she scraped from the pot with an oyster shell. ‘Just wait, one day I’ll beat this piggishness out of you! How greedy can you be!’ She would start talking to the fish. ‘Why are you so gluttonous? Every day you pester me. Pester, pester, pester.’

I would ask, ‘Does it understand what you say?’

‘O Ma, why won’t it? Even I understand what he says. Those bubbles you see him make – that’s how he speaks. Do you know what he says? He says, O Puti, what a wonderful girl you are! You will win a gorgeous husband. Like a prince with a crown on his head. You shall sleep on a bed of gold, a thousand slaves will massage your legs and feet… Now please, oh please, let me get a taste of that burnt cream!’

‘Do you really understand everything he says?’

‘Why, you think I’m making it up? So many blessings he gives me each day. And why won’t he, who doesn’t like eating cream?’

Puti talked to trees and shrubs; that too I saw with my own eyes. She would turn over a pot of water at the base of an akand tree and say, ‘Brother tree, I’m pouring water on your roots, make sure I get a very good husband, otherwise things will turn out really badly; not a single branch of yours will remain intact.’

It was routine for Puti to quietly empty a pot on a shimul tree’s roots too. She would tell me, ‘What would you know about what comes from what, or what happens because of something else? Over there in Kathal or Degonga, a cobbler discovered a jar of gold muhars at the base of a shimul. Did that just happen by chance? No! It happened because he worshipped that tree. So much jewellery will be required at the wedding. Sometimes I have a dream, there’s a huge iron safe beneath the earth under the tree, and a lazy python sleeps inside it guarding the treasure.’

One day I said, ‘Puti, will you feed me some cream?’

Her face darkened. ‘My boy, how awfully greedy you are! You must be spying on me all the time. Can’t you hold back your greed a bit? You are so low-born. I’ve been trying to figure out why my belly hurts for no reason all the time. Now I know.’

Later, however, she softened a bit.

‘All right then, I’ll let you have some burnt cream one day. But what will you give me in return?’

‘What can I give you? You tell me.’

‘Your folks have a leaf-shaped brass dispenser for kohl. Can you manage that?’

‘Of course I can.’

‘But you can’t breathe a word about it to anyone. See, when I have a son, I’ll have to smudge a little kohl on his forehead to protect him from the evil eye. And how much is that trifling thing worth anyway? If you can pull it off, I’ll even make sure the fish becomes your friend.’

In exchange for the brass dispenser, I was lucky enough a few times to get some burnt cream scraped from the pot, but I wasn’t able to make friends with the fish. I could never understand even a smidgen of what the fish said. Nor could I make out if the fish actually said anything at all.

In other words, I was a sodding dolt. An idiot and a blockhead. Indeed, my head was misshapen and rather large. When my older sister Rani Bubu rapped me on the head and said, ‘In the morning you’ll see that your head has sprouted two horns – ,’ my limbs froze in terror and I started to bawl.

When Puti heard that I pricked my foot on a thorn, she asked, ‘Were you able to get it all out?’

‘I think so.’

‘Just see what happens if you didn’t!’ She scraped her tongue with her teeth and said, ‘In the end, it will come out by itself, bursting right through your eyeball. Then you will really suffer.’

My arms and legs nearly fell off in fright.

To reassure me, she said, ‘No reason to be afraid. There’s a mantra to get rid of a thorn. First tell me what you’ll give me.’

There was a small mortar at home for pounding medicine; it was made of marble and shaped like a boat. On the sly I slipped it into Puti’s hand. She was ecstatic. And that’s how I saved my eye from the travelling splinter.

I would sit on the sparkling steps of my veranda and watch the road while sucking my thumb. Many scenes etched themselves into my memory. I recall the huge trees, some houses, an assortment of people streaming by. For instance, the dalpuriburo.² He would arrange lentil flat cakes on a bed of banana leaves inside a wicker basket and walk along the wide roads shouting ‘Dalpur-hi, dalpur-hi’ every aft ernoon. The old man’s legs were quite a sight. They looked like a pair of bows; it seemed as if he would twist and fall any minute. He coiled a bright-red gamchha³ on his head. I heard the man was from the Pod caste, and sometime in the past he was supposed to have gone around as a dacoit with stilts under his feet.

I also memorized the face of the shonpapriwallah. He came calling right in the middle of the day, balancing on his shoulder two tin boxes hanging from the ends of a pole. He dressed himself up to attract attention, wearing a long silk tunic down to his knees, with gold embroidery at the waist and collar. He wore an earring in one ear. Tresses of curly hair hung down to his shoulder. We didn’t often see men who looked like that. He sold both shonpapri and mihidana sweets.

There was also the kulfimalaiwallah, the chinebadam-wallah, and the lalmithaiwallah. On a bamboo tray the man carried red sweets that resembled a wicker bowl, a hand fan, and a kulo, a winnowing fan. With one hand he carried that tray, and in his other hand he held a mango branch with bright red sweets shaped like mangoes and lychees playing hide and seek through the leaves. That was the lalmithaiwallah.

The chinebadamwallah’s basket of peanuts was also very eye-catching. Decorated with marigolds or hibiscus, it looked like a wedding basket coming all decked up from the groom’s house.

Somewhere nearby, the gora soldiers had their camp. Every now and then, huge flat-nosed trucks roared by, driven by Negroes.

We got our ears twisted if we dared step out towards the road. We were told that if they found little boys and girls looking at them, the Negroes would bite and crunch them up. The open trucks they drove, people had named hudmogari.

On one side of our house, there was an old jhau tree. Cube-like black knots had burst through the entire trunk. There were holes inside the knots packed with wood dust resembling semolina flour. Vultures sometimes perched on the topmost branches of that tree. Once, all of a sudden, two white soldiers parked their Jeep on the roadside and opened fire. All our doors and windows clattered shut immediately. Redfaces, redfaces! We were half dead of fright.

When we emerged from our homes we saw that the redfaces had vanished, and beside the road, Rajani Bhendari’s son Panu was using his hands and feet to describe something to a throng of people gathered around him. The crowd was large and we could barely see Panu from our raised veranda.

All by himself Panu had courageously stepped up to the shahebs to let them know, ‘Bhulchar, bhulchar.’ That was the first time I came across a person who could speak complicated English with the shahebs. In an instant Panu became a hero. Hit by the bullets, a vulture had fallen to the ground, a chunk of flesh blown out of its breast. Even with that wound, it lived for about a week; if we came close, it flapped its wings and managed to hobble a few yards away from us. It found cover behind a pile of dry leaves. The vulture died in a lot of pain. Towards the end it cried in such a voice that it sounded human.

Panu would strike up an exotic song that sounded like ‘Hailecha hailecha, haile haile hailecha’. It was something he cooked up from the songs he heard the soldiers sing as they marched by at dawn. Whenever he saw us, he started