Leaving 26

Moving house is like juggling.

How many small things there are – power plug adaptors, free-range pencils and pens, the movie poster, those decorative wooden fish that sat unnoticed for five years in the hallway… Moving house is no small feat.

Amongst it all was the Bangladeshi flag that spends the bulk of each year in the cupboard. I bought it from one of those sellers who are once again wandering the streets with flags of increasing proportions dangling in line from a long pole. It’s December and each December my flag has been in the habit of hanging itself in front of the living room in anticipation of Victory Day.

I fixed last September for the task of moving from Dhanmondi 26 to a smaller place better suited to a new job that would see me often out of Dhaka. How many things there were to arrange – locate new flat, negotiate, give notice, find transport, locate packing boxes and pack them. It’s like juggling, fitting all those extra concerns into one’s life.

Then again, sometimes living in Bangladesh feels like juggling too.

find flat, negotiate, arrange truck, pack, arrange new truck, unpack...

The truck hired for the first of October decided it wished to arrive a little too close to midnight – overbooked – everybody moves on the first. It was a nuisance but I realised that waiting for the hopefully more reliable yellow baby-truck hurriedly arranged for the second was a blessing. It meant one final evening in 26.

Temporarily relieved of moving duties I decided to take a walk and incidentally I found a whole lot of other things that belonged to that address – memories. The grocer insisted I stop for a chat and that an invitation to the new place was essential. The tea shop across the street, in the spot where Abdul’s tea shop used to be, wouldn’t charge from gratitude that about a year earlier I’d offered him a Grameen-style micro-credit loan to start out.

The shopkeeper beside him is Abdul’s brother, recently returned to 26 and now occupying Farook’s old spot. Both of them used to give credit including cash advances when I first moved to Dhaka and there was an end of month salary squeeze.

Those tea shops remind me of the BDR mutiny.

Like many others, I was coming home from work amid rumours of shooting on the streets. Nobody knew what was going on. I failed in my first attempt to reach 26 by rickshaw because someone suddenly started running down the street near work, which caused hundreds of others to do the same. I jumped off the rickshaw and ran into a nearby market to hide – from exactly what I didn’t know. The whole city was jittery.

A few hours later I cautiously tried again, opting for the narrow back streets of Lalmatia. 26 was spookily empty when I arrived and yet, as a sign that the world was not quite at an end, Abdul and Farook were both there ready to serve tea. “There’s shooting going on and you’re open?” I said.

I called my friend Situ in Hatiya to tell him something was going on in Dhaka. “Go inside and lock the door!” he said firmly. I remember looking down at the cup in my hand, “Okay, but first I’ll finish my tea.”

There were numerous other events of course – the Shahbagh Movement which stands out for being peaceful, the Hefazat rally – events that had little impact on 26 as such – unlike the uncountable number of hartals that are forced upon all Bangladeshis. During one of them, a friend had to jump out of the window of a burning bus on nearby Satmasjid Road, and along with many others he ran into 26, where he stopped to knock at my front gate. Not knowing him the doorman didn’t open it. Fortunately the danger had passed. I heard about it later.

On another day I was going to the office, then in Gulshan, and the CNG I’d hired made it barely fifty metres before a group of men stopped the vehicle and started to smash its windows and tear the back cover. The young driver was as terrified as I was – I jumped out (fortunately the lock was on the passenger side) and considered involving myself in a scuffle to protect the driver – but I had my laptop with me and anyway, the driver managed to flee in his half-destroyed vehicle. It was later I heard there was a CNG strike going on. I was lucky there’d been no fire.

But of course the bulk of memories from 26 are not these. In the meantime it’s where my Bengali Amma spent a week recuperating after a minor operation – and she used to talk about her childhood in Bogra and how things were way back when. I’ll never forget the look on villager Siddique Bhai’s face either, when we found him with his wife and adult son in a crammed hotel in Farm Gate – in Dhaka to start chemotherapy – and we took them home and they saw for the first time where they would be staying. He was so thrilled at the sight of what was for them a little luxury that he said his pain was gone!

There were others too. One night I counted five patients and nine guests, all Hatiyalas, with a range of conditions from a broken hand to diabetes, with the extras sleeping on mats in the living room.

It was at 26 that Situ cooked chingri shrimp for my Australian parents before we all left for Hatiya, that afternoon when my Dad went momentarily missing on a rickshaw. It was at 26 where Dad put his elderly bones to the test to jive with the energetic kids of my cleaner – who from then on call him Dada.

It was also to 26 that the whole Bangladeshi family came when Situ suffered a brain aneurysm, underwent brain surgery and nearly died. His wife Lovely ran the household while his brothers and I decided what to do for his treatment.

Of one hundred with his condition it is not an exaggeration to say that only one will make a full recovery – most don’t survive – and in part it was because of 26 that Situ was the one. And later, well on his way to recovery, he finally had the courage to verbalise what we had both been thinking – “I am aliving,” he said one day, in his creative English, in the 26 living room.

Situ's wife Lovely helps him take his blood pressure in 26 living room.

Come to think of it, even the mosque committee stayed with me while they visited Dhaka’s Hatiyala business community in the hope of finding funds for the village mosque extension. It was Ramadan and we used to share the iftari they’d arrange each evening, although I wasn’t fasting.

It’s funny how in Bangladesh life goes on through the various crises and mostly unsavoury political tremors. Even in the memories both personal and political parts are there. It’s a bit like juggling.

Now I am in the new flat, starting with new memories and the Bangladeshi flag is in the cupboard.

I haven’t been able to bring it out this year – not because its usual hanging spot is kilometres away but because, with people being burnt alive in buses and having their skulls blown open by bombs, it seems insensitive.

Those sacrifices of 1971 for an independent, free nation: in these most recent days, it’s not always easy to understand what it was for. Perhaps I’ll give 16 December a miss this year. Maybe the flag can come out when Bangladeshis have a political environment that points to a better future, one that is sufficiently mature to truly honour the memory of those great sacrifices.

Sharing iftari with the village mosque committee and Bangladeshi family.

This article published in Star Magazine, here: Leaving 26

The Living Stone of Middle Shilua

The stone's growth maybe centred on its unusual folds and creases pushing outwards.

In making sense of the physical world there is, surely, an over-reliance on the eyes. Ears too can play a role; hearing is not less of a primary sense than sight. Besides, sometimes if we pay sufficient heed to the things we hear our lives are simply more enjoyable. I’m thinking of those wonderful words, “I did not see it but I heard…”

Middle Shilua in Pathan Nagar Union of Chhagalnaiya Upazila in Feni District is in many respects a nondescript village. It features the typical pond-and-paddy landscape; there are small stores along the main road for groceries, tea and gossip; it can surprise nobody that adhan’s melody rings forth five times a day from the village mosque. All is as it should be in Middle Shilua, except for the presence of a large, conspicuous stone.

Seven elephants could not lift the stone, I heard.

Under normal circumstances even a stone, no matter what its size, might not be more than a triviality. But the Village Flute was drawn to Middle Shilua because it heard a remarkable thing: that the stone in Middle Shilua is one that grows.

Twenty-eight-year-old Shekawat Hossein lives in the village. His house pond, beside a smaller side road, borders the small yard enclosed by a low brick wall in which the stone is situated. It’s easy to find him for a chat.

“I did not see it but I heard,” says Shekawat, “that people once tried to lift that stone with the help of seven elephants but it would not budge.” While he has not personally observed the stone growing, he remarks that it is not easy to take notice of such a thing when one sees the rock on a daily basis. It’s certainly true that those with children or houseplants might be the last to register the incremental growth of offspring or plant.

Shekawat is heard to say that it is those who leave Middle Shilua and return after a number of years who can best attest to the stone’s enlargement, which may involve the rock’s unusual folds and creases gradually pushing outwards.

A stone that lives and grows has understandably been a village talking point for many generations. Indeed, over the years the stone has successfully established for itself a tin roof shelter and a donation tin with a sign of dubious origin that instructs every visitor to leave money before departing the area. The stone has even influenced the village’s name – in Feni’s brand of Bangla, shil means stone.

Gazi Habibullah heard it is a miracle stone.

“I heard it is a miracle stone,” says elderly shopkeeper Gazi Habibullah. “I heard it holds the power for helping others and that beneath the stone lie the riches of seven kings.” The problem is, he continues, that nobody can lift the stone to retrieve the wealth – not even those seven elephants. It is only the rightful owner of the riches that will be able to lift the stone, he heard, an owner who will be born of no mortal father.

Undoubtedly the Middle Shilua stone is a curious one. There are many places where stones belong: on mountaintops, along desert ridges, in the asteroid belt beyond Mars and even under the ocean. But like most of Bangladesh the land about Middle Shilua is the creation of great rivers that have refined and deposited particle of sand and earth to make the alluvial soils. It really isn’t a proper place for a large stone, whether or not of the living kind.

From his Dada, his uncle, Habibullah heard that the rock came at first, quite mysteriously, out of the mud in the very spot where it sits today. He heard that from its first appearance the rock gradually grew – and with his hands Habibullah demonstrates how protruding areas that were once the size of a tennis ball are now grapefruit size.

I heard meanwhile, from Habibullah, that the current tin-roof shelter is the second of its kind – it needed to be rebuilt when the stone grew too large for the first. Even today the stone protrudes beyond the roofline – could this be evidence of growth?

Habibullah recalls the stone’s yard was first demarcated during the British period, and from the generation before his he heard there was once a sign on which was written “If anyone destroys this stone’s character or site they will be held accountable in accordance with the law.”

Shekawat’s father, Mohiuddin Chowdhury Milon, says that during the British and Pakistani periods many upper level government servants including the Subdivision Officer would visit the stone. He was heard to say that as a child these official visitors used to encourage him to study and give a few rupees in ad hoc pocket money.

The stone sits in its own walled yard, under a shelter.

Mohiuddin heard the stone was constructed by the Mogh and from when he was a child until not so long ago he observed that many Hindus made puja worship there. Alternatively, it is to be heard there was once a Buddha statue in front of the stone because the Buddhists of Tripura believed the site sacred.

Village account says there is the outline of a human foot with five toes to be seen on one side of the stone while the footprint of an elephant adorns another. These features are not straightforward to see but are easy enough to be heard of.

So it was that, armed with curiosity and a few photographs, I made my way at a later date to another place where rocks might belong – the Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka. There, I heard from Dr. Niru Shamsunnahar, expert in the history of terracotta in Bangladesh and helpful Deputy Keeper of the Public Education Department that it might be worthwhile to consult the Bangladesh District Gazetteer for Noakhali, of which Feni was a part in 1977 when the book was written, for further information about the stone.

Similarly I heard from Afroza Khan Mita, the Assistant Director of the Department of Archaeology, that the Shilua site was a protected archaeological site in Bangladesh and that more information could be found in A.K.M. Zakaria’s 1984 book Bangladesher Pratnasampad, Bangladesh’s Artefacts.

In these two books it states that at Middle Shilua there is a broken protima, a religious image that is thought to have been colossal in size and is extremely old, dating from the second century BCE. On the pedestal were once inscribed some writings in an obscure language and underneath the stone may be the ruins of a temple, which might only be verified upon excavation.

The stone may be a broken 'protima'.

Interestingly, in neither book did it mention that the Shilua stone was growing. Nor was it specified that the stone wasn’t growing. In neither book did it mention the seven elephants or positively negate the possibility of finding seven kings’ wealth underneath. Perhaps the researchers for those books hadn’t heard these things – maybe they never spoke to Habibullah’s Dada.

In the Gazetteer there was, however, a photograph of the rock from the early 1970s and it was certainly of interest to see that in light of the photos I took in recent days.

And yet it might be a mistake to base an understanding of the rock of Middle Shilua on an over-reliance on the eyes. No, being neither villager nor archaeologist I hesitate to state definitively how the two photographs compared in terms of the rock’s size – or comment on whether or not it is a living stone – not least because sometimes life is simply more enjoyable if we pay sufficient heed to the things we’ve heard.

Shekawat Hossein says it's not easy to notice the stone growing when you see it every day.

 

The stone of Middle Shilua. Has it outgrown its shelter?

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: The Living Stone of Middle Shilua