When Babu Bangladesh! was published in 2019, it was already too late to celebrate the brilliance of Numair Atif Chaudhury. His untimely death in 2018 robbed the world of what could have been one of the most luminous literary voices from Bangladesh, and maybe even all of South Asia.
In an expansive narrative, Babu Bangladesh! opened up a portal that not only allowed the reader to revisit the tumultuous past of Bangladesh but also get a glimpse of its future while holding up the challenges of the present. The novel is quite unlike any that have emerged from Bangladesh – it is massive, polyphonic, and humane.
Choudhury is liberal in mixing genres and timelines in the novel, whose story stretches out in every direction to emulate the vastness of Bangladesh’s bloody but proud history in a span of a few hundred pages. This is a work of an indomitable writer – his intelligence and farsightedness burst through on every page, and you are aware of being in the company of a literary work of fantastic magnitude.
I had reluctantly accepted that there wouldn’t be another book by Choudhury, but a pleasant surprise lay in a posthumous collection of eleven of Choudhury’s short stories in Taxi Wallah and Other Stories. While Babu Bangladesh! was a sizeable read at 400 pages, Taxi Wallah and Other Stories neatly displays Choudhury’s brand of writing in 132 short pages.
Humans of Dhaka
The collection starts off with “Taxi Wallah”, where the eponymous character slickly gets a foreign visitor to ride in his cab despite lacking the services that the fare promises. In this short journey through the city, Choudhury shows us, through the eyes of the taxi-driver, the many Dhakas that make the city.
In “Rabia”, we meet a a house staff member who works for a wealthy family in Dhaka – though sure of her ways and hardened by years, Rabia cannot help but be taken aback when class difference creeps up in the cherished camaraderie between her and the employer’s daughter. In the third story in the collection, “The Truth”, Russell and Bilquis take us on an LSD trip where we are introduced to the complications of identity, nationalities, cultures, and even bigotry against the backdrop of longheld prejudices.
My favourite in the collection, “Different Eyes”, is a brutal account of the desperate roads that the poorest are forced to take. Cheated by the bureaucracy and low birth, Abdul, an impecunious farmer, has to resort to the unthinkable to pay back his debt. Choudhury critiques Bangladeshi men who uphold patriarchy in the name of tradition and culture in “Thief”, the fifth story.
Yet another favourite from the collection is “Crumble”. The imagery here is one of the finest I have come across in short fiction. Shahed is one of the many brick-breakers in Dhaka who work under the sweltering sun, producing raw materials for expensive real estate. Although the work is long and arduous, the men are at the mercy of the foreman who decides if the day’s work is worth the pay or not.
As Shahed worries about his poor health getting in the way of his livelihood, the birth of his son ignites a strange zeal within him when even the most resilient man would give up. It is the Liberation War of 1971, and comrades have been taken prisoners by West Pakistan, and as they await their fates, the prisoners in “Black” watch their lives (quite literally) being drained out of them. The indignities of war are gut-wrenching and we are left to wonder about the futility of such violence.
Chokra and Munmun in “Chokra” are street children — discarded by society, it makes us glad that they aren’t our children and more so that we aren’t the Chokras and Munmuns of the world. Ever wondered why the truth makes us so deeply uncomfortable?
When a nameless blind beggar is interviewed in “Sense”, he recollects truths from history and nature that have been brushed aside since long to serve parochial agendas. As the truths close in on the interviewer, he hurriedly calls the whole thing off in the fear of discovering something that he might not have an appetite for.
“Asking Why” is written as a monologue where a mother laments the death of her child. Her anger has calcified over time yet she’s relentless in her pursuit of an answer as she tries to make sense of what it takes for women to be treated with dignity. The final story in the collection, “On the Way” weaves together romance and inequities of the underbelly of Dhaka where gendered violence and class wars are a way of life. Though terribly distressing, Choudhury gives us hope that love finds its way even when all feels lost.
On the margins
In Taxi Wallah and Other Stories, Dhaka is the muse. Choudhury takes us to the bylanes that are hidden from the orchestrated glamour of the capital to show us that the real Bangladesh resides in the bones of those whom the city has rejected. He reminds me of Manto writing about Bombay – in the sense that they both bring us stories of those who we think of as dispensable and unworthy of our time.
To me, when authors write critically of their motherland or evoke the desperation of the downtrodden, they do so for the incredible love for their people. Rather than just a critique, the storytelling becomes a medium of service where the average urban dweller is shaken by the shoulder so that they sit up and take notice of those who silently keep their beloved city running.
Taxi Wallah and Other Stories resonates with the genius that was so mighty in Choudhury’s debut novel, and despite his short life and a small body of work, he will be remembered as one of Bangladesh’s foremost young writers.
Taxi Wallah and Other Stories, Numair Atif Choudhury, HarperCollins India.