Killing The Water -Part II

artwork by sabyasachi hazra

During these trips, the Jeep's radiator would inevitably leak and my older brother Imtiaz was sent off, pail in hand, to the river or canal by the side of the road to fetch water to prevent the engine from overheating. Every hour on the hour. This gave my mother an opportunity to remind us, "See, what did I tell you? Water is the source of life, even in modern machines."

And it was to water we were dragged when we visited the shrines. She bought dozens of bottles of 'blessed water' on each of our journeys. The bottles would have to last until our next expedition. Each of the shrines was near a large pond. The mazaar of Shah Jalal in the northern city of Sylhet was right on the edge of a tank stocked with thousands of gojaar fish. The tomb of Bayazid Bostami near the port of Chittagong overlooked a pond teeming with small and huge turtles, some more than a hundred years old. And the shrine of Khan Jahan Ali in Bagerhat, near the Sunderban forests, was just up the road from a tank containing crocodiles. In each place, pilgrims bought fish or meat from vendors and fed them to the animals. This, we learned, added to the blessings you received from just visiting the holy places.

There was a story attached to each of these ponds. The saints, when they were still alive, had all been insulted or attacked by evil men. With their magical powers, they had turned the evildoers into fish, turtles, or crocodiles. They could have utterly destroyed them, we were told, but the holy men were merciful and they had set up places of pilgrimage where travelers would gather and feed those unfortunate souls into eternity.

Each time we returned home, I wondered, could it be that some human souls were trapped inside the fish we were eating from our own pond? For some days I would lose my appetite and joined my father in declining the taste of fish. My mother chose to remain silent about the wisdom of eating fish. Instead she treated me to a small drink of blessed water. I expected some sweet, heavenly taste, like the ambrosia I had read about in school, but it simply tasted like stale water.

There was plenty of sweetness around the house. A line of fruit trees girded the edge of the pond. My favorite was the guava. Its trunk slanted, this was the easiest tree to climb. Some of the branches leaned out over the water. Plucking a juicy, ripe guava from one of those branches was tricky because you were in danger of falling into the pond. I left such risky jobs to my older brothers.

The palmyra palm was a towering hulk and its big fan-like leaves stood guard, like a sentinel, over the pond. If the guava tree was hospitable to young boys eager to climb and pick fruit, the palmyra was said to be home to the bhoot. Nearly every ghost story told in Bengal has a spirit living in a palmyra tree.

"But why do the ghosts prefer this tree?" I asked.

"That's the way it has always been."

"But there are no branches where one can comfortably sit. Don't the ghosts get tired of holding on to the trunk or leaves?"

"Spirits have no weight. They can sit perched on a mere leaf."

"But why not a mango tree? Or a jackfruit? There's so much more leafy cover, and they could even feast on delicious fruit."

"Ghosts don't need to eat."

"Then why should we be afraid of them? They won't eat us. Will they?"

No answer ever satisfied me. Perhaps the clue lay in the kolshis that I saw hanging from palmyra trees in the villages. The earthen jars collected the sweet sap; later the sap became tari. We never had toddy in the house, but we all knew what drinking it did to you. All you had to do was listen to Yusuf Bepari who lived behind us. When you saw him under the influence -- roaring in the streets, cursing or abusing his wife and children -- you could easily believe that evil spirits from the palmyra tree had grabbed hold of him.

Our first house -- the cottage where I was born -- was a small distance from the haunted tree. But that would change. Mymensingh Road was to be enlarged again. More of my father's land was taken, and more cash flowed into his pockets. My mother now campaigned for a brick house. It was built with its back wall skirting the trees on the edge of the pond and, as luck would have it, the bedroom my sister Meeta and I shared was built right underneath the palmyra tree's leaves. At night we could hear a swoosh-swoosh rustle coming from the roof. The roof was one of our favorite playgrounds during the day. Meeta and I played hopscotch up there. But you could never persuade us to go up there at night. We knew darkness was the time when the bhoot emerged.

With the brick building came a Murphy radio. This was magic. But where did the talking voices and music come from? Imtiaz explained that there were little men and women inside the wooden cabinet. Once, armed with a screwdriver, I tried to see the little people. All I got was my knuckles rapped with a ruler. It was simpler to accept my brother's words. After all, if the palmyra tree could house spirits and I had visited places where humans had been transformed into fish or turtles, why couldn't little people live inside the radio?

The brick house was always in a state of construction. At first there was no drawing room or indoor bathroom. The firewood and fish businesses proved insufficient to sustain the new wants of the family. My father launched a new venture, opening a Burmah-Shell petrol pump, complete with service station and car wash. He decided that the drainage from the car wash would best be handled by digging a small channel, about eight inches deep and a foot wide, running the length of our property all the way into the pond.

This creek, which came to life each day when cars were being washed, became a source of infinite joy to my brother Saadi and me. It was like having our very own river. Dhaka sat on the Buriganga (the old Ganga), so we called our river the Picchiganga (the tiny Ganga). Now we no longer had to wait until the rains to float our paper boats. We could do it year round. We even built a boat out of tin cans and equipped it with its own little steam engine. Then a whole town went up on the banks of the river, with buildings made of wooden blocks and roads laid down with cement. Our proudest accomplishment was a concrete bridge over the river. Now we could not only float our boats on the water, we could also roll our toy cars and trucks through our very own town.

One afternoon Saadi and I discovered dozens of fish floating sideways on the pond. When we informed the adults, everyone was alarmed and perplexed.

"What can it be?"

"Did someone throw poison into the water?"

"Did they catch a disease?"

"Somebody must have placed a curse," my mother concluded. She poured all her bottles of blessed water into the pond. The next day she asked my father to dump a few pounds of potassium permanganate. The water quickly turned purple, then settled into a state of greenish scum.

If my father suspected anything, he never acknowledged it. Saadi and I were still busy playing with our little make-believe town. The streaks of oil in the water flowing underneath our bridge were worthy of no special notice. Besides, we were tired of eating fish. We didn't mind the disappearance of our pond's fish from our meals.

There used to be a time when birds flocked to the pond: storks, herons, and kingfishers. Now the birds never returned. A foul smell soon overwhelmed the surface of the water.

Then the palmyra tree appeared to die. Its carcass stayed up but the leaves became hard and brittle. The swoosh-swoosh sound vanished from our rooftop. The spirits must have deserted as well.

Mahmud Rahman is a Bangladeshi writer living in Oakland, California.