Chaaler Pithey

Happiness is a steamed ground rice pithey,

Steaming softness of ground rice cakes embedded with

Broken bits of oozing cane jaggery.

Happiness is sold all around the winter smog petrified city,

On the pavement, in the parks, by the lake and river ghats and

By an alleyway near my basha,

Happiness is sold by a skinny, short man with twinkling watchful and mischievous eyes,

Like a hawk- never missing a potential customer, a missing payment, a pretty girl,

Like a puppy when calling out for customers and cracking or laughing at lewd jokes,

On cold December evenings, made doubly cold by exposure and starvation, the happiness vendor

Parks his wheelbarrow, rattling with a kerosene stove, by a dark side street in Banani, and he     

Sells happiness- 10 takas a pithey- to students, lovers,

Men returning from work,

Men looking for work,

Scoops out ground rice pitheys from a pot, sculpts them with his grimy fingers,

Impregnates the white softness with brittle jaggery and

Steams them on top of another metal pot bubbling with boiling water, 15 seconds

And a pithey is born, he sprinkles some coconut shavings and hands you the melted plastic plate.

You can ask for a tiny fork or spoon or you can tear at happiness with your fingers and wolf it down

Even as it burns your fingertips and mouth.

The side street is immersed in winter darkness, infused with firewood smoke and the

Smell of burning rubber,

To stay warm, cook and repel dengue carrying mosquitoes.

A flickering candle on the pithey wheelbarrow is the only light

On the street,

In the world.

Otherwise you can tell who is where by the glowing cigarette ends

Of sullen men who huddle around

In the middle of the street and eat pithey and smoke and talk

Of politics, the plunging stock market, ‘bajey’ bad women and cricket,

And you can navigate down the street by the mad optimism of students from private colleges,

Kicking at each other, learning how to smoke, falling in love, chalking out their plans.

Management school, join a MNC or manage a garments factory, go abroad to work and live and

Fuck many white girls and marry a ‘bhalo’ good girl chosen by their parents and

Achieve COMPLETE SUCCESS,

Mission accomplished.

And return in middle-age only to get richer and own and run several companies and some NGOs and

Retire and live the good life- they have it all chalked out and they believe that

Everything will work out fine, just fine.

 Sprinkled among the male pithey eaters are a few girls,

Either accompanied by a man or in twos or threes,

The girls eat and talk and laugh and occasionally slap away the sneaking hands of their boyfriends,

Trying to touch them in public to make it clear who belongs to whom,

The girls munch jaggery and slap away male hands,

Like waving away giant five-proboscis fitted mosquitoes

Some women even dare to glare back at the men who are drinking tea on the pavement and leering

And licking their lips and playing out rapes in their heads, planning acid attacks,

The women return their dirty looks but only if they are in small groups and are warmed up by

The sweet pithey and feeling invincible with so much happiness being dished out.

But rest assured, there will be no violence tonight except for the

Everyday violence of Dhaka life,

There will be only more plans hatched, more meaningless street talk,

More women courted and hated,

More lonely men who will come to the pithey wheelbarrow and

Will not be alone,

There will be more winter chill and smoke and complaints about the cold-wave and there will be

More happiness, sculpted out of rice powder and date jaggery and steamed till it’s formed and

Oozing, sprinkled with coconut and you have to eat it quickly even as it’s steaming

In case the happiness vendor

Forgets how to make them.

A Family

She looks eighty but could well be in her late fifties. Poverty and starvation have aged her, drained her, hollowed her out and left her in a crumpled, twisted shell of decaying bones and dead skin. She begs outside a sweetshop in Banani, next to the Kabaristan- the cemetery of the rich and powerful in Dhaka. She begs but she doesn’t accept any money, instead she points at the sickly sweet, syrup soaked sweetmeats- yellow, maroon, green- behind the cracked glass counter.

“Give me a paraa Bhai. I’ve forgotten what paraas taste like”

After solemnly receiving her paraa, she puts it away somewhere in the folds of her grey Sari and invites me to have a cup of tea at her grandsons’ tea stall at the end of a blind alley next to the graveyard. I’m thirsty after eating a Langchaa and groggy from the Friday morning dust suspended, winter sunlight- bathed, sparrow fluttering tranquillity, so I join the old lady for tea and listen to her complain about her family problems.

“They are beggars- all my sons-in-law are beggars and my daughters are whores. One son I had who was a golden boy, Insh Allah. He always came first in class. He always came first in everything he did. But he had gone to play cricket with his school friends and they got into a fight over the score and they killed him with the cricket bat. Such is my fate.”

I realised that she inhabited a world where time was immaterial and memories flew around her like dusty sparrows. Her son’s death may have happened half a century ago but for her it could’ve been yesterday. Her migration from the village to Dhaka, her life in the city, her misery, love, anger, laughter, tears, agony, pleasure- could’ve taken place a hundred years ago or perhaps she was anticipating them as things which would take place in the distant future. Time was meaningless for her and she was ageless.

Her two grandsons run the tea stall, which consists of a stove, a kettle, a can of condensed milk, a scraped clump of root ginger, glass cups, a flimsy tin counter loaded with glass jars filled with biscuits and stale sweet breads and dead flies. Two bamboo poles, embedded in dirt, stand on either side of the counter and a third pole hangs above from which bunches of ripe bananas dangle and a rusted mirror oscillates in a graveyard breeze. The grandsons hand me a cup of steaming Rong-Cha- black tea with ginger and after the grandmother has croaked various insults at them they reluctantly give her half a cup of milky tea as well.  

“Beggars. Whores and beggars, every one of them,” grandmother sighs and waves at the family ruckus raging on, on the street, next to the tea stall and a garbage dump.  

Several fully and partially disabled men in homemade wheelchairs are arguing fiercely with a girl- probably no older than fifteen- in a sequin glittering green dress. Several women in rag-like Saris have surrounded the girl and pull her by the hair to scream into her face. Naked potbellied toddlers run around the girl, dodge slaps from their screaming mothers and disabled fathers. The children try to protect the girl in the sequinned green dress. The children are both thrilled and amused at the mock violence of their mothers and slightly terrified at the silence of their fathers.

“My daughters and sons-in-laws”, grandmother explains and sips her tea. “And my grandchildren. That whore in the twinkling dress is my favourite granddaughter. Her parents and brothers dragged her into whoring and now they beat her because they have run out of tears.”

The brothers at the tea-stall don’t intervene in the family fight and they continue combing their oiled hair and trimmed moustaches, transfixed by their closely shaved, thin lipped faces in the mirror dangling from the bamboo pole. Other pedestrians, including a policeman, come and go, drink tea and smoke cigarettes. Nobody pays any attention to the screaming women, men in wheelchairs circling around in furious circles, dancing children and the girl in green, who is squatting on the street now- head shoved down between her legs to protect her hair and face, her black tresses rolling in the dust.

Then out of the blue a toddler in a pair of tattered shorts, runs out of the sweetshop to save his sister with a bucket of dirty water. He throws the water over his family, soaks everybody- there is more screaming and swearing, the women and children give chase, the boy throws away the bucket, slips into the graveyard through a break in the boundary wall and runs away. He is quite a sprinter and a clever kid. The girl in green disappears into one of the bamboo-tarpaulin shacks on the other side of the blind alley. Nobody seems interested in her anymore. The women have started arguing about the boy with the bucket, his mother is defending him. The children have slipped into the graveyard and given chase. The fathers angrily wheel themselves towards Banani mosque, where they will wait for the worshippers to come out after the Jumma Namaaz. The brothers continue selling tea, lighting cigarettes and combing their hair. The water splashes form a transient map on the dusty road; continents fast evaporating in the sun. 

“They won’t let me stay with them anymore,” grandmother complains and puts down her empty cup. “They say I eat too much. But I only eat this much”. She shows me a tiny amount with her right hand. “I can’t eat too much. I’m going to die in a few days time anyway, I’m sure of that. Still they won’t let me stay in my home, my home for the last...the last many years.” She gestures towards the shacks where her granddaughter is hiding.

“I told them I won’t eat from their beggars’ and whores’ earnings. I told them I will beg for sweets instead. I prefer sweets to rice anyway.”

An imported car slides out of a driveway and roars down the blind alley. One of the brothers jumps to his feet, scurries out of the stall to stop all traffic so that the car can turn into the main road. The car turns. The brother salutes the invisible backseat occupants, behind the black filmed windows.

“That’s all they are good for- these fools- licking boots. They know how to lick boots.” Grandmother snorts. “That Sahib in the car has just come back from Pakistan. He has two wives, very fat wives.” She puffs up her hollow cheeks to show me how fat.

“One day I saw him at the sweetshop and asked for a laddoo- just a small laddoo. He cursed me and threw a coin at my feet. The Haramzada. Acts as if I asked for the world. All I’m asking for is to die in my own home.”

I get up to leave but grandmother continues snatching at her memories and desires, fluttering around her like dust-bathed sparrows.

“I live in that shack for forty years. I sleep with my husband in that shack. I give birth to six children in that shack. All I’m asking for now is to die in that shack. Afterwards, they can bury me in the garbage dump for all I care, they can eat my carcass for all I care. I just want to die, surrounded by those whom I have lived for.”