Non-Fiction
Lunch*
artwork by amina
"Lunch" called out the umpire as he delicately tipped one bail from on top of the wickets to the ground. The batsmen walked off the field with the fielding team and the two umpires following them. Farid slowly brought up the rear. He had dropped a catch. Posted on the leg side boundary, he had been distracted by the Rakkhi Bahini truck going by on the main road, its top half visible above the boundary wall encircling the field. He could see faces beneath peaked caps sitting inside the truck looking curiously at the cricketers. Some among the hardened faces had looked fresh from the village, too young to be in battles and gunfights. When the ball had come towards him, falling from a long way above, he had still been thinking of them, and had started off late. Amid shouts of "catch it", "catch it", the ball had grazed his fingers before hitting the ground. As he picked it up he had glanced again at the road. The truck was gone. November 1973. The university's interdepartmental cricket tournament was in its mid-season. Today's scheduled match between Farid's department and Geography had been cancelled. A student of Geography had accidentally drowned while on a class river trip. Farid's team had arrived at the university sports ground to learn that there would be no cricket. They had milled around for a while, unsure of what to do, disappointed. Then the captain of Farid's team had spotted Momin, Economics' vice-captain, among the early spectators and had proposed an impromptu match. Momin had immediately taken up the idea, assembling a team from the already sizeable crowd who had turned up to watch the match. The assistant sports director, a trim man with a small moustache, had obligingly agreed to the use of the field. As luck would have it for him, History's pace bowler Shaheen had been there too, and Momin had gleefully inducted him. Shaheen, snapped up by Wanderers for the season's league matches at the outer stadium, had been fearsome in the departmental matches so far. "All right, boys, see you all in whites in half an hour," Momin had told his makeshift team, clapping his hard hands. It was a perfect day for cricket, bright and cool. The lingering fog that had blurred the sun floating above the coconut palms at the far edge of the field had mostly burnt off. A number of students from Farid's department had seated themselves at the front of the left pavilion. Farid loved best the pre-match warm-up, the raillery and the jokes, the practice catches, rummaging through the battered black tin trunk of village households with its treasure load of cricket bats, gloves, pads, stumps and cricket balls. "If I win the toss I'm going to take fielding. The pitch's still damp, Shaheen will seam," Farid's captain had said before walking out for the coin toss. A coin had whirled through the air. Farid's captain had turned towards his teammates and flashed them the V sign. Toss won! Fielding! She had not been there initially among the cluster of classmates. A sandal strap had torn, Sultana had informed him when he had asked, and she had gone back home to change sandals. The stands had filled up rapidly as the 8:20 and 9:20 classes ended and disgorged their inmates, who had made a beeline for the cricket field. On the topmost row a few sleeping beggars were stretched out. He had spotted her later, seated amidst her friends aflame in her yellow sari with the thin green stripes. Here in the gallery away from the pitch, the crowd's chatter was loud. Paan-cigarette-wallahs had stationed themselves at the edge of the field, and the peanut vendors and muri sellers were doing a brisk business. A few street children ran among them, savouring the excitement. Farid climbed the several steps up to her. A mass of curly hair, sharp cheekbones, eyes that danced all over the place and a loose 'Santiniketan' style of wearing a sari that she copied from her elder cousin studying music over there. The two Bengals intimately knotted in ways impossible to untie! She looked at him and smiled. "You could have walked around barefoot," he said as he sat down beside her. "Yes, I could have." "Did you see me miss the catch?" "Yes." Then she laughed, "Well, we all saw you looking the other way." "Shala'r Rakkhi Bahini, had to come just then." Kalpana sitting beside her laughed too. He looked over to where the two of his classmates were unloading brown paper bags and a crate of Coca-Cola bottles from a rickshaw. Burgers from the shop at Shahbagh for lunch. "What do you think of this?" she asked, extending a foot encased in a green-and-gold sandal. "Very nice." "Bought them last week." A dazzling light lay upon the deserted pitch and a light breeze tickled the ragged fringes of the palm leaves. Over the boundary wall the noontime traffic was a car or bus aslant at the roundabout. "Farid," called out his captain, ballpoint and paper in his hands, "I'm putting you down at number four in the batting order." "Okay." He glanced again at the paper bags. Burgers meant lentil patties inside small crusty buns, the whole thing so dry that only generous swigs of the warm Coke enabled one to swallow them. "I don't feel like eating a burger," he said. "We can go over to Tuli's," she said. "There's always food at her place." Tuli was her aunt, her father's sister. "All the way to Mogh Bazar?" "I've got the car. We'll be back before they start play again," she said, her eyes dancing and shimmering. Beauty, he felt, was the most mysterious thing in the universe. It had no reason to be, yet there it was, incandescent, casually erupting out of nowhere, and equally casually dying in a squalid lane somewhere. "Come on, let's go." She stood up, impatient now. A house amid the winding lanes of Mogh Bazar. Where, just two weeks back, enclosed by green wooden latticework, with dusk falling among the entwined madhabi, she had grasped him by the upper arms and kissed him. Eyes closed, her lips parted. Rickshaw bells had tinkled in the street outside the front yard. He had felt her shapely body slowly go liquid, acquire a surprisingly lush, humid weight to it. And later when she had opened her eyes, there had been a strange, heavy-lidded light in them. They went down the steps and walked up to his captain. "We're going to go have lunch somewhere else," he said. "Why? We got lunch for everybody," the captain replied, looking at her. "That's not it," she said, dimpling at him, "We just want to have lunch somewhere else." "Oh, okay. But we start at 2:00 sharp. Don't be late." "We'll be here." The Rakkhi Bahini seemed to have sprung out of nowhere. There was trouble in the air, unrest in the streets: Shootings, 'hijackings', assassinations of MPs, reports of smuggling and quick money being made. Huge political rallies and processions. Leaflets and guns. The extremists, they said, had declared war in the countryside. The state's answer was the Rakkhi Bahini. There were stories of midnight knocks and rivers running red, of hunting down political dissidents. At the university the ruling party student leaders sprawled on chairs in the union office rooms, shouting and ordering endless cups of tea. As monsoon rains clawed at classroom windows, demonstrations and counter-demonstrations raged through the corridors and nobody could hear a thing of the class lectures. On the streets surrounding the campus, trucks armed with hard faces rolled through the slush. At that watchful, steady speed. They got out of the car at the small wooden gate. The driver drove off to park in the side alley. She pushed open the gate and they stepped inside into a large front yard. "Let's go by the side door," she said, stepping on to the redbrick path lined with pink-and-white periwinkles. That looked as if they never died. At the side of the house she thumped with an open palm on the old, green, double-paneled door secured from the inside by a cross-bar, then shouted for the servant boy, "Kalam, Kalam." Footsteps sounded inside and the door opened. Kalam was a sturdy, cheerful-looking teenager. "Kiray," she said cheerily to him as they stepped inside the guestroom, "is Tuli home?" "No, she's gone to the bank." The house was actually her father's, who had given it to his only sister. In June of 1971 the aunt's husband had been picked up from this house by the Pakistan army and had never returned. "Can you give us a quick lunch?" "There's plenty of chicken from last night. Just have to put the rice on the stove." "Quick then, set it. We have to be back." She and Kalam disappeared inside through the other door, amid her volley of rapid-fire instructions. A plainly furnished room with hairline cracks on the red cement floor like rivers emptying into the sea. A rough bed covered with a thin mattress, a clothes rack, a worn jute mat on the floor in the corner with a harmonium and some tattered songbooks. Farid took off his shoes and walked over to the bed, the floor cool under his bare feet. It was through the side door that the army had entered, through that front yard that the army had taken her aunt's husband. Farid stretched out, sighing, on the hard bed on which had been laid a fresh coarse-weave bed sheet and looked up at the small square of blue framed by the window set high on the wall. Fielding was a hard thing to do, with its alternating pulses of alertness and relaxation, the swing of the bat and the sudden hot sprint, the odd tumble on the uneven ground, the fear of dropping a vital catch or letting the ball through your hands. The war had ended, but men were still dying and disappearing, no promise was ever true, certainly no promise of human freedom…she came back into the room and tossed off her sandals, green as the window shutters and the door. "The rice will be done soon." "All right." She came over and lay down beside him. "Have you locked the door?" he asked. "No, you do it." "But it's on your side of the bed." "So…" "Ohhhh!" Farid theatrically groaned out aloud as he raised himself on the bed. Laughing, she pulled him down to her. He nuzzled his nose deep into the curly mass of her hair, clasping a breast in his hand. She made a soft yielding sound, then pushed him away, rose in a shower of loose yellow, went to the door and locked it. She came back, sat by the side of the bed, looked down at him and slowly unbuttoned his shirt. Sweetly damp patches had formed on the thin cotton of her underarms. She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. "The chicken," she whispered, her breath warm in his ear, "is very spicy. You think you can handle it?" "No problem..." They came back to the cricket ground just in time, driving through empty noontime roads. The umpires were walking out on the field. The bails were placed back on top of the stumps. Kalpana gave them a knowing glance as they seated themselves among the other classmates. Though she had taken care to smooth out the creases in her sari after the kissing and tussling, there was no erasing an indolent, blinking vulnerability in her eyes, a heightened colour in her face. The batsmen walked out, to much clapping, whistles and catcalls from the crowd. Farid's captain was the opening bat. Shaheen waited patiently at the top of his mark, tossing the shiny red ball from hand to hand. The captain cast a look around at the field--keeper and three slips standing way back, a packed offside field--and then settled into his stance, feet wide apart. The umpire dropped his upraised arm and Shaheen began his run, jerky strides that belied the speed with which he could bowl, the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt coming loose as his arm whipped down to release the ball. The first delivery was a snorter, just short of a length that zipped past the outstretched bat through to the keeper. The slips jumped up and raised their hands, but did not appeal. "Ooooooh!!!!….." rose the accompanying cry from the crowd. Shaheen at the end of his follow-through made a show of glaring at the batsman before turning to walk back to his mark. There was a slight swagger to the way he began to roll up his shirtsleeve again. Farid took out the single stick of cigarette he had bought from the vendor as he had entered the field. He lit it with matches borrowed from Javed sitting in front of him. The system beat you in the end. He took a deep drag of the cigarette. No matter what you did, there was no escaping it. It got you in the end. Any day you could vanish and never come back. He blew out the cigarette smoke and watched it whirl away in the bright air. 118 runs to win. Zero on the scoreboard. He leaned back against the steps and studiously focused on the figures arrayed on the cricket field. The match had resumed. In right earnest.
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