‘No, Sir.’

Tahirul’s expression of feigned bashfulness made everyone smile. His spontaneous smile spread to all of them.

‘So that’s just as well. Do you need anything?’

‘No, Sir, I’ve brought whatever I need.’

five

Maulana Tahirul began his role as the new imam of the Sadnahati mosque without any hassle. He was happy. But as soon as he entered the room assigned for the Imam Saheb, he felt depressed. What’s this! Was this a room or a pigeon coop? How would he be able to live in such a tiny room? He was in the habit of reading, but where would he keep his books! Imam Tahirul wondered, this was such a large and old mosque. Why were they so miserly when it came to the imam, then?

Within a week the new Imam Saheb figured out what Sadnahati was like. He was a scholarly man. He believed that he had to adjust according to the environment and the circumstances. Like how the creatures in the tundra or polar regions adapted and survived; in the same way, starving maulanas had to learn the art and science of using various weapons in order to survive. He had already found out what the failing of the previous imam had been. Maulana Tahirul conceded that he was quite a good scholar. Apparently, the previous imam used to inject so much irony and sarcasm in his speech whenever he spoke that it directly hurt the committee members. They weren’t able to tolerate that any longer. That’s why he was sacked on the grounds of walking around the hamlet at dawn. Maulana Tahirul felt great sympathy for him. He thought to himself, where was the need to provoke the committee? After all, it’s only wise to be in the good books of those who give you the job and provide you the means to survive. Had Allah not given him that sense? He repented inwardly, after all it was Allah who was the Lord of Sustenance.

That’s why Tahirul considered the job in the Sadnahati mosque to be valuable. Just as he had gained the affection and respect of the people during this week, a nazrana, or tribute, was also slipped into his hands during handshakes. And so, he had to grit his teeth and stick on. He chatted with some of the ordinary musulli. He tried to understand the mind and mentality of the people of Sadnahati. It was such a large village, with so many people; after all, religious faith could not continue to flow in a single channel for ages. He kept apprising himself about the new Waqtiya mosque that had come up in Dokkhin Sheikhpara. The Tablighi Jamaat frequented that hamlet. He had also recently spotted some youths pasting posters of the ‘Jamaat-e-Islami Hind’. Were they Sadnahati boys? He didn’t think so. He had heard that it was from here that people set out on the Tablighi Jamaat’s chilla – the forty-day-long tour to exhort people to join their prayers. They returned with stoic detachment. The radiance of great serenity was visible on their faces.

Among the musulli, Abdul Chacha was a simple and straightforward man. In the course of a conversation, it was him that Tahirul asked, ‘Chacha, how is the Jumma gathering in the new mosque?’

Abdul Chacha was pleased at Imam Saheb’s query. He replied enthusiastically, ‘Not much, Hujur. About ten households here are with the Tabligh. I see that it’s outsiders who are much more in number. I can’t figure out, Hujur, whether the mosque is the house of Allah or their house! Is it correct to sleep and cook in the mosque? That’s why we don’t let them enter this mosque.’

‘Hmm.’

Abdul Chacha continued, ‘Haven’t you seen the poster in the mosque? It’s written that the Tablighi Jamaat are forbidden from entering here.’

Maulana Tahirul turned grave upon hearing him. Yes, he, too, had seen the writing on the wall. He began to wonder: a public, divisionary spat had come to roost in Sadnahati. He wouldn’t let himself be trapped by the dissension. Unity among the Muslim ummah was much needed today.

After conducting the Zuhr prayer at midday, Imam Saheb waited for lunch. Each household had to feed the Imam Saheb in turn. Who knows which household’s turn it was today. His stomach seemed to be writhing in hunger. His room was right beside the mosque. And it was hot. He was lying down after having switched on the fan, which now whirled swiftly over his head. Someone was calling out to him from outside, ‘Are you there, Babaji?’

Opening the door, he saw a stranger standing there. As soon as the stranger saw him, he raised his hands to his forehead in namaskar. He realized the man was Hindu. He had a bottle of water in his hand, and a length of thick, black string. Grinning widely, he said, ‘Baba, please bless these, my cow has been having watery stools for the last three days. I would have come in the morning itself, but I didn’t get the time.’

Imam Saheb’s rage shot through the roof. Here he was dying of hunger, and now this man had come to get water blessed! For a cow’s watery stools! Controlling himself, he said, ‘But I don’t do blessings on water and strings. It’s better if you go somewhere else.’

The man gaped in astonishment, as if he had never heard something so surprising in his life. He replied, ‘Why? I’ve been coming to the moulovi of this mosque for the last twenty years! All of them did the blessing.’

After that, he kept on pleading humbly. Left with no other option, Imam Saheb made seven knots on the string and blew on it, and into the bottle as well. The man, who was almost prancing in joy, now forcefully pressed a fifty-rupee note into his hand. He took the money and just gazed blankly at the man. Heaving a deep sigh, he entered the room and lay down once again. As he lay there, he plunged into the unfathomable realm of reflection. Just as there were religious thoughts in the reflection, there was also the terror of the coming Day of Judgement; similarly, thoughts about the present, too, seemed to devour him.

Tahirul belonged to a remote village deep in the interior of faraway Hingalganj, in the Sundarbans. His widowed Ma and his siblings were all there. Yet he had no attachment towards his birthplace. Having lived in the city environment ever since his childhood, he had become urban in mind and body. When he went every now and then to his village house, it almost left him gasping for breath. The same old hut with earthen walls and a thatched roof that Tahirul had been seeing from time immemorial, and the dense darkness that set in as soon as dusk descended, made Tahirul feel suffocated. It was his heart’s desire to buy a tiny piece of land adjoining the city in Howrah district itself and become a permanent resident there. How happy and well-off the people of Sadnahati were!

Maulana Tahirul Islam, the imam of the Sadnahati mosque, used to think that he was a man who was cursed by fate. He had observed that ever since his childhood, whenever he desired something avidly, even if that seemed to be reaching him, it finally eluded him. Each time he had taught his heart the lesson of being patient. Whenever he was in such a crisis, his lips repeatedly muttered, ‘Innallahe Mayassberin! Indeed, Allah is with the patient.’

The jagirdari system was prevalent in the village where he had attended school as a child. Usually, the arrangements for feeding the talbe-ilm, or the students of the madrasa, were made by the families of the madrasa committee in question. They were responsible for raising them together with their own children. Feeding and clothing an additional person was not so difficult. It was usually in quite affluent households that the students found a place. But when it came to Tahirul, it was in the household of the poorest man, Musa Chacha, that he found shelter. He had to do various kinds of jobs there. He had to wander around carrying their infant child in the crook of his arm for hours on end. His ears had got used to the baby’s whimpering whines. But he had to do it, or else Chachi’s face swelled up in rage.

After Tahirul grew up and graduated from the Aliya Madrasa, he took the Madrasa Service Commission examination. He passed the written test, but failed in the oral exam. He taught in a few khareji madrasas, that is, those run by the community, and in their primary, or maktab section, but that neither satisfied him nor brought him any money. Although he too required money just like everybody else. An imam who possessed the capabilities could never earn a decent salary that truly befitted the post. They faced a lot of problems. Various kinds of organizations of imams had been established in the state, but he could not become a member of a single one. When he reflected upon the state of Muslim society from time to time, he was dumbfounded. If an imam blew into a glass of water, hundred rupees would be stuffed into his hand. But if he appealed to the committee to increase his salary by a hundred rupees, he could lose his job. That is why Tahirul had never thought about becoming an imam. But, after all, no one knew where and to whom Allah had assigned a job.

Tahirul regarded the village of Sadnahati as kind to him. After his graduation, it was as imam in this village that he got a salary for the first time. It was a mosque with a large attendance. There was also the custom of mosafa, or shaking hands with the imam at the end of the prayers. Through that mosafa, he was handed ten–twenty–fifty rupees after the Friday Jumma.

It was mostly Pirponthi folk in Sadnahati. This custom of giving money while shaking hands was not to be found in the mosques aligned with alternative beliefs. So in that regard, Sadnahati was definitely financially beneficial to him. This practice had helped to allay his anxieties to some extent. Was it people’s love? Or was it some other feeling that was at work here? Did they seek blessings? If money was offered to the imam, he would be pleased, and because he was pleased, he would pray to Allah for them. If that prayer was then proven to have been granted, why was that limited only to Friday? Did Allah, the Lord of the Universe, turn his face away from him on other days?

Every Thursday, all these believers in Islam rushed to a Pir’s majar in the village next to theirs. There, too, after supplicating and praying at the grave, they offered a nazrana. By doing so, they expected their affairs to be met with success. Because Allah’s walis, or saints, did not die; they were alive. Their prayers, too, were granted in the court of the Lord of the Universe. He couldn’t hurt people for their peculiar beliefs. Although such beliefs were contrary to the religion of Islam, and it was Tahirul’s responsibility to protect that religion. An imam’s fundamental goal was to establish tawhid, the oneness of Allah. Tahirul knew that too. It was as if his stream of thoughts began to swirl now. And in the ensuing whirlpool, Tahirul was left baffled. On the one hand was the blind desire for a salary and a place to live, and on the other was his profound devotion to Islam. As an imam, he had to be firm in relation to his character and strength of mind, and be of a deeply knowledgeable mien in speech. If he had to be recognized in society, he had to have a sound personality.

Tahirul had observed that whenever he put into practice his objective of increasing his Islamic scholarship, it was met with a decline in his earthly desires. It occurred to him that, after all, life was momentary; how long did the alluring traps of life last? However, if one had to live in the world with dignity, the need for adequate resources could not be denied. ‘Rabbana aatina fidduniya hasana afil akherati hasana’ – he prayed for the well-being of the world and its afterlife. After all, all Muslims prayed thus all the time.

Tahirul had experienced from his childhood that the well-being of everyone in the world was impossible without resources. His classmate Shah Alam was now a reputed speaker in religious events and gatherings. He had bought a car in which he moved around. How many people knew that Shah Alam had been a much weaker student than Tahirul? God had granted him a sweet voice and eloquence. And it was by using those gifts as capital that he had become famous. Tahirul had heard his elaborate and exaggerated narration many times over. And hearing that, he had sometimes laughed and sometimes exploded in rage. Shah Alam didn’t care at all about the Holy Koran and the Hadiths; he merely engaged in digressionary talk delivered in a sparkling manner through voice modulation. But Tahirul was still surprised. After all, the common folk were crazy about hearing Shah Alam speak. Tahirul continued to believe that if a person had earnings in his fate, that would come in one way or another, just like there was always a cause for a person’s death. He could not sneer at Shah Alam’s earnings.

Tahirul had planned to own a piece of land and settle down in Howrah district itself. He could surely expect this little bit as part of the world’s well-being. That required money. So many people had used others’ ignorance, fear of the afterlife, and superstitions like weapons and managed to transform their fortunes. They had earned huge amounts of money. Would Tahirul be able to do that? Never. But if he wanted to use his religious feelings and gravitas for the purpose of earning, would that be terribly wrong? After all, he possessed nothing else. The madrasas did not teach anything creative; all his life he had learnt religious explanations, shariat law, and wrung dry the strictures of the Holy Koran and the Hadiths. It was by employing this learning that he was Imam of Sadnahati today; he kept trying to rationalize using his gifts a bit differently.

six

Monglahaat, in Howrah, was witness to the rise and fall of the economic fortunes of the predominantly Muslim villages adjoining the city of Howrah. It was in step with this weekly market that the rural community across all these regions was transforming over and over in the whirlpool of time. Just as Monglahaat carried with it the insomniac screeches of small businesses and the failure of their inhuman toil, it also was witness to the bragging of big-time ostagars. The sons of the family that even a generation ago had been the biggest ostagar, for whom many people worked, whose factories hummed all day, now worked for others. And on the opposite end, one saw the sudden change in the fortunes of someone who, until even a few days ago, stitched for others, an ordinary labouring man. One would find that it was that very person who was now the big ostagar of the region, immensely wealthy. And it was the wealthy who always led the way in society, irrespective of whether he was ignorant or wise. This constant orbiting of resources did not permit any family to remain permanent industrial proprietors. Consequently, there was an acute paucity of the middle class in society. That’s why there were no movements there, and no revolutions. The stagnant society seemed to lack consciousness. Most of the people were poor; or else, carried on living lower-middle-class lives. They had no lofty aspirations. Rather, they grasped religion – not education – for strength. The religion where illusory beliefs and false thinking lay hiding. And so, they were unable to distinguish between what was true and what was false. It was not Islam, but rather another identity that they donned. An identity of factionalism.

Nazir Ali’s situation was exactly that. Even the frugal comforts of a lower-middle-class existence had all flowed away, relegating him and his family to the pit of poverty. Their share of the old, wooden-beamed ancestral house made of bricks cruelly mocked their helplessness. Nazir worked for Iqbal Ostagar. He was a skilled worker. But he could not make ends meet. Come the end of the week, he was always short of money. From Thursday to Monday, the tailoring household witnessed endless quarrels and hassles; there was no love and affection. The weekly wages were collected from the employer on Tuesday, and among poor tailoring households, some witnessed tempestuous brawls, even as the new bride in some other household dolled up a bit in front of the mirror and applied surma on her eyes. There was a soft sweetness in her delighted talk.

Nazir’s wife Reshma was terribly loudmouthed and of a jealous nature. That jealousy was only in regard to her sisters-in-law. Her mother-in-law was still alive; she lived with Nazir’s youngest brother’s family. The three brothers had to pay five hundred rupees each at the end of the week for their mother. That money, which was meant for their mother’s food and medical expenses, landed up in the youngest brother’s hands. Reshma objected to that fiercely. After all, the youngest brother did not have to spend fifteen hundred rupees a week on an old woman! Besides, who could say whether they too paid their share regularly every week! It was true that Nazir’s mother didn’t live with him, but compared to the other two brothers, Nazir earned less! Reshma was always in a state of perturbation.

Meanwhile, there were dues of ten thousand rupees at the goldsmith’s shop. She had to pay at least two thousand rupees this week. Or else she would lose face. Reshma had thought that she would definitely get the two thousand rupees from Nazir. After all, there had been plenty of work this week. But Nazir had made it clear to her that it was not possible. That’s why there was a heated quarrel between them on Tuesday night.

‘Ma has other sons and daughters-in-law too. Do they pay for her every week? Did you ever find out about that?’

‘I don’t need to find out about all that. I’ll just carry out my responsibility, and that’s all. Do I have to tell you about what they do?’

‘Then tell me who you’ll tell! Do you have any other woman? Am I no one in the family? You care only about your Ma. But does she ever even enquire about you? It’s as if only your brothers’ sons are her grandchildren. Have you ever seen her being affectionate with my Nilufa? Meanwhile, I’m struggling with this household of four people. Listen, you have to give me two thousand rupees. I’m telling you for the last time!’

‘Yes, yes, so let me do just that! Two thousand to you, five hundred to brother, and then shall I sit and suck bananas all week? Don’t I have to pay the dues at Dilu’s grocery shop?’

‘You go ahead and pay whoever you want. I’m not bothered about that. I need the money.’

‘Sure, why would you bother! Do you think I’m made of steel? If you had to battle with a machine all week, you’d understand!’

‘What are you a man for? Someone who can’t bring a smile to the faces of his wife and children, who can’t give them what they want! And he talks about ability! He’s supposed to be a man!’ Reshma said that with stinging pungency, and made such a contemptuous face that Nazir Ali was driven to fury. The mention of ability was like the sudden stab of a dagger on his breast. He turned numb with rage. He clenched his jaws, and as he gnashed his teeth, an obscene profanity sought to emit his lips. He suddenly remembered Imam Saheb’s sermon on Friday, and at once bit his tongue. He gulped down the profanity – his rage as well. Imam Saheb had said: ‘Anger is forbidden, it is haram. When you are angry you should leave the place and go away.’

Nazir ran out of the room. Reshma didn’t stop him, he couldn’t be brought back now. He was terribly touchy. Reshma knew the man would simply go to his employer’s compound and lie down there. And he’d also come back late at night. Nazir’s house was close to the garment factory, just across the road. Reshma too felt depressed all of a sudden. After all, it was only for the good of the family that she told him off, the man didn’t seem to get that.

Nazir was simple and guileless, but Reshma was not like that. She had many a complication inside her, she was of a crooked nature. Nonetheless, she loved her husband a lot. She stayed up for a long while. But Nazir didn’t return. She grew anxious. She slowly walked out of the house. There was not a soul on the road. It was desolate in these wee hours. As soon as she approached the factory, she was taken aback. Nazir had sat down to work even at this time of night. Reshma could hear the roaring sound of the sewing machine from afar. That sound shot through the road and knocked at Reshma’s ears, at her conscience too. She then began weeping in solitude. Oh no! She had humiliated the man a bit too much. Reshma proceeded to console him, disregarding the darkness of night, as if on a love tryst, as if Radha was running to her Krishna.

If one heard the tailoring couple’s conversation the following night, who would suspect that there had been numerous quarrels between them?

‘Remove the mosquito net, dear, it’s so hot. I’m thinking of installing an AC in the room. Ha ha ha!’

Reshma moved the sleeping child from her bosom and quietly laid it down beside Nazir; she then stood up. As she untied the strings of the mosquito net, she replied, ‘When I hear you sometimes, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. For the sake of two thousand rupees, you left home and went to sleep in the factory last night, and now you’re dreaming of an AC?’

‘What’s wrong with dreaming? Just you see, we’ll also be well-off folk one day. Like Maruf.’

Reshma turned absent-minded as she untied the mosquito net. It was the matter of the dues to the goldsmith that was foremost in her mind. Her younger sister-in-law was defeating her time and again. Apparently, she had ordered another necklace this time.

‘What happened? Why are you standing silently? Aren’t you coming to bed?’

Nazir grabbed the hand of the standing Reshma and pulled her. Her petite figure fell into Nazir’s bosom with a single tug. She was skittish. She whispered, ‘Hey, not now, let me go! I’m telling you, let me go! I think Nilufa’s awake.’

‘No, she’s not; come closer! I’ll get a necklace made for you now, just you see! Let the work for the coming Pujas get done…’