The Owl

Artwork by Rafiq

Behind me my father is filing a report for the English-language news broadcast to the central radio station in Dhaka.

"B for bad," he shouts through the bad connection, "A for..for..apple, Y for yet..."

I know he is trying to spell out Bay of Bengal. The bay, across which Arab traders came in ancient times and which at times lent a briny, shrimpy tang to her night air, has dominated the news from here this past week. My father is an assistant news editor of Radio Pakistan. The ground floor of our house is his office, though it will cease operating once the construction of Chittagong's brand-new radio station is complete. We, my parents and I, live in the upstairs two rooms, with airy, sunlit verandahs fore and aft.

"S for salt, P for poisha, E for east...."

Speed. This too has been in the news.

The view from the back verandah is different. In the distance, a section of an upper-story wall of the spectacular mud house rearing up from the treetops like some giant Buddha statue has collapsed. Inside the room I can see drowned furniture floating in a pool of water: upturned cots, chairs, tables.

Trees have been stripped bare of leaves, branches webbed against the low skyline. The thatch roof of our neighbor's kitchen has been blown away. Mangoes litter their backyard. To my left is Majid's house, which, like ours, like most Chittagong middle-class homes, is a small and double-storied. Except ours is yellow. His is white. Both, like all brick buildings in the town, are peeling and streaked gray from the rain. The madhabi vine on their front verandah grille is in tatters.

The jackfruit tree in our backyard, too, looks forlorn, its fat fruit lying split at its feet.

After breakfast I lean over the railing at the back and see Majid standing on their front verandah with his father. I wave to him. He waves back. I tell my mother that I am going downstairs to our front yard.

"Don't go out into the street. Stay inside the gate," she warns me.

"All right," I reply, and then run downstairs, through my father's office and the tiny front hall with the maroon rexin sofa set, then skip down the steps to the gate. Outside its rain-rusted bars is the tea-colored rush of swollen gutters. Majid pokes his head over the dividing wall, eyes alight. We share a rickshaw to school in the mornings, bumping over pitted roads behind a tinkling bell, roads that narrowly dip and loop through gently curving hillsides so that riding a rickshaw on a sunny street you could look down to see an elephant dozing in the dappled sand of the roadside below.

"Ready?" he asks.

"Yes."

He clambers over the wall and says, "Let's go."

We open the gate, pick our way past the downed wires, then run across the empty road.

"Look," Majid exclaims on the other side, just as we are about to disappear into the lane between the pharmacy and the rickshaw repair shop. He had turned his head for a backward look. "It's Ram."

I turn my head too and see Ram waving to us from the second-story balcony of his parents' bedroom. His house is two doors down from us. Getting ready for school early in the morning, I hear his mother practicing her ragas.

"He wants to come too."

I hesitate. Ram is Hindu. But before I can say anything, quick as a hen scuttling across a yard, he disappears from the balcony, reappears at the side door of the eye clinic on the ground floor, fairly leaps down the stairs and runs over to us.

"Where are you two off to?"

"The mosque."

"Why?"

"You'll see. Come on."

We sprint up the sides of the lane, leaping weightlessly over outsize puddles, water sprites skimming on air, whooping, almost slipping and falling yet leaping again. Behind the shops we turn right and race up the steps leading to the low boundary wall enclosing the open courtyard of the mosque. Three arched entrances lead into the prayer room. The accordion-style door in the middle is listing from its broken hinges. Inside, we see bent figures are sweeping the floor clear of standing water. The imam of the mosque and a teenage boy are in front of us, wispy figures stooped in the act of cleaning the debris from the exposed courtyard. Wet, black tree stumps and branches, masses of twigs, dark glossy leaves, bearded fern. Long grass, bits of glass, a broken water jar. Crow feathers and bird droppings. Sprigs of berries, tiny orange ones that yield glue for our kites.

"What do you want?" The maulvi, still bent, looks at us. He is surprisingly young.

We stare at him, tongue-tied, panting. We hadn't expected to run into him, frowningly at work.

"We came to see the owl," I venture a reply.

A sudden light dawns in his eyes. "Oh, the owl," he exclaims, straightening up. Behind him the teenage boy too straightens up to look at us.

"Yes."

"Yes, it's alive," the maulana continues, fervently pressing both palms against his rail-thin chest. "Come in, you can see for yourselves."

And we do, flinging off our sandals before we enter the courtyard.

"No, no, keep your sandals on. There is broken glass here." He pretends not to notice our half-pants.

And so we put on back our sandals and walk behind his loose, airy, blue cotton kurta to the broken door. Beneath my feet, the sodden leaves feel surprisingly springy, like pigeon breast or human cheek. The maulvi comes to a halt beneath the center door and points upward. We follow the bony forefinger to the ledge above, shielded by the roof's overhang, where chunks of cement had long ago flaked off to form a sizable hole lined with rotted planks and straw. And sure enough there in that darkened, cool nook much like the prayer room below is the big owl, alive and unharmed, ruffled and immensely puffed-up, true, but undimmed, his huge claws securely dug into the termite-eaten, pinholed wood, the round yellow eyes in his funny, flat, cocked head regarding our upturned faces with its customary pop-eyed stare. We stare back, filling up with a wordless wonder.

After a while the imam clears his throat. "All night," he confesses meekly to us, "I worried about him."

"So did I," Majid pipes up smartly, "I thought he would fly away and never come back."

I had feared the worst, but now in the brilliant light of this day the owl's feathers are a clean orange-yellow, flecked with dark, mirroring the irises of its tawny eyes.

"Al hamdulillah," intones the maulvi. We look at him. Then, unexpectedly, he raises his palms in prayer. Reflexively, our hands shoot up too. Beside me Ram also lifts his hand, though I know he has never been inside a mosque, that his mother will have a fit if she finds out, that they clasp palms together and bow their heads in puja instead before a rose-petal-strewn altar of kohl-eyed gods and goddesses inside their home. But I say nothing. And as the imam closes his eyes and murmurs the words, I look behind him at the shallow downglide beyond the courtyard's perimeter planing out to a field where wet, flattened grass gleams on reddish mud, at the tin roofs glinting in the distance, and in the sunny, singing air between here and there my twelve-year-old senses feel a deep watery tilt, like the slow glassy heave of the Karnaphuli that flows by Chittagong.

Excerpted from short story entitled 'CYCLONE' in Six Seasons Review, combined issue Nos. 3 and 4, 2002, University Press Limited, Dhaka.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star