I have a hole for a mouth.
When people stare at me I often see a look of disgust, if not horror, in their eyes. Sometimes they display pity. Obviously, it is not something that one can easily ignore, but I have learnt not to think much about it. I was born that way: with my lips, front half of my jaws and tongue missing. The rest of my body is well-formed.
Naturally, I don’t have the gift of speech but I more than make up for it by telling myself stories. Come to think of it, I have been very lucky in my life. I rarely forget anything. If people really knew me they would say: look, there goes the elephant’s memory. When I see a thing, even for the briefest moment, its details never escape me. Years later, I can see every speck of its colours as vividly as when I first laid my eyes on it. I have a similar way with sounds and smells. And once they are all caught in the web of my mind they provide me with the threads with which I can spin the stories. Who wouldn’t feel lucky with such spidery gifts? Sometimes my stories are so long that before I know it I’m flowing down a river, carried down its long meanders through numerous tributaries until, finally, I am offered up to the sea.
My name is Kamal. In Arabic, it means the beautiful, the perfect one. Abbas Mia, the teacher in whose homestead I grew up, gave me that name. I was only two years old when I came to live with his family. If I had a name before that time, no one remembered it, but it never bothered me. I was happy being called Kamal, because I knew that the teacher had put in a great deal of thought and care when he named me. I like to believe that he named me with love.
It pains me to say so, but the truth is that in Abbas Mia’s household, my status was uncertain: I was neither an adopted son nor a servant. In the beginning, both the teacher and his wife, Ata Banu, had wanted to adopt me. You see, they were a childless couple in their late thirties, which is considered quite old in our part of the world. Certainly, no one ever heard of a woman bearing a child at that great age. When I came along they thought I was always meant to be theirs.
I was told that I’d been left alone in the market on the darkest night of the month. Despite my elephant’s memory, I don’t recall that part of my life. Perhaps I was asleep when my parents left me under the banyan in the middle of the market, where the vendors – opening their stalls in the morning – found me. No one dared to touch me: they looked at the hole in my face and decided that I was a bad omen out to bring ruin to the village. People speculated who my birth parents were and why I’d been left in the market. Obviously, they found the second part easy to answer. Who’d want a deformed child like this, who could only be a burden on his family? Allah, have mercy on those poor parents. As for the nature of my parentage ideas were limited by what was imaginable in our part of the world.
Some speculated that I was born into a poor Hindu family – perhaps an untouchable. Yes, yes, he looks like he is from the stock of latrine cleaners. No, he has the caste of hide cleaners written all over his face. Maybe, for all we know, his father is a blacksmith. Others thought that my parents were Muslim aristocrats who couldn’t bear the shame of having me – or that I could only have come from a Muslim, landless peasant family; maybe even the abominable product of a liaison between a Hindu and a Muslim, or a Christian and a Hindu. No, he has the air of a Buddhist. We bet, said a few, he is a tribal – perhaps a Garo or a Chantal. You know, the people whose women take many husbands and rule their men folks. Whatever, he’s hideous – a strange one for sure.
Apparently, as the day wore on, more and more villagers gathered around me, sat down cross-legged with their hookahs, watching me out of the corners of their eyes, but they didn’t know what to do with me until the teacher arrived. When he brought me home, people talked behind his back: that foolish teacher doesn’t know what a mess he’s getting into. He must be desperate to take this ugly thing home. Oh, well, if you have a barren wife, what else can you do?
I suppose I would have been adopted if Ata Banu hadn’t become pregnant with Moni Banu within a year of my arrival. I have, though, never resented Moni Banu’s birth. In fact, she was the nicest thing that could have happened to me. She called me – when in front of other people – Kamal, but when we were alone – ever since her father had explained the meaning of my name – she called me Beautiful One. It might sound as though she was addressing a girl, but I loved it.
I did many household chores but I was not treated exactly like a servant. I tended to their cows, worked on their land, but I was not paid like a day labourer. I’m not complaining. I was very fortunate to be living in the teacher’s homestead. Indeed, I consider myself one of the luckiest people alive.
When we were growing up, Moni Banu was the little one to me, hanging around me as if I could protect her from any danger that life might throw at her thin small frame and dark bright eyes. It was just as much a shock to her as it was to me when she became a woman.
Even before Moni Banu was thirteen her mother had decided that she shouldn’t roam around with me any more.
“She thinks she’s a boy,” Ata Banu let out in one of her dramatic shrieks when she saw her entering the inner courtyard one afternoon, after a disappearance of some hours from the homestead. “What have I done to deserve such a curse?” At that moment Moni Banu paused by the lime tree, her face hidden behind the corner of her sari; then she searched for my eyes to exchange a conspiratorial wink before slinking away.
As it happened, a few days after her thirteenth birthday, the largest annual country fair in the swampland was taking place – always a time of happiness for Moni Banu and me. Since we were little, we’d always gone there with the teacher. I’m not sure from what age it had become my job, but after the fair, I’d carry home on my head the sack containing the purchases. These would be things like date-palm sweets, rice cereal and cooking utensils. At the fair, I was allowed to go around with Moni Banu to help her spend her money and show her the sights. She was fond of clay dolls and sweets. I know people saw me as the little servant boy taking care of his master’s daughter. They weren’t wholly wrong, but Moni Banu never treated me that way. Sometimes she gave me half of her spending money, shared her sweets and held my hand – especially when the tiger came into the circus ring. “Beautiful One, look at the teeth,” she’d say. “I’m scared.”
She’d hide under my shawl and take tentative peeks at the tiger. On the way home at night her father would carry her on his shoulders, but if I fell behind she’d call out, “Where are you, Kamal? Bring the lantern closer.”
From the time I was about ten and she eight, we were allowed to go ahead on our own. Side by side, but always running, we reached the fair. We thought it would go on like this forever, but Ata Banu had other ideas. For her, thirteen was already too old for a girl to be seen beyond the inner courtyard, let alone flaunting her face at the fair.
“Look at the girl, she has no shame,” Ata Banu would scream. “Doesn’t she know she’s becoming a woman?”
Moni Banu would do things like kick the brass pitcher, spilling water on the dry clay yard, and storm off to her hut to sulk.
So that year I set off on my own, in the soft morning sun with two ducks and a sack of mustard that the teacher wanted me to sell. He wasn’t able to come that year as he was away in town on school business. I was feeling sad about leaving Moni Banu behind, though coming to understand that it had to happen sooner or later. But I’d only just rounded the bamboo grove, and was about to climb down to the path on the swamp-plains when she came running.
“Wait for me, Beautiful One! How come you’re going to the fair without me?” I stopped and smiled with my eyes.
It didn’t take long to sell the ducks and the mustard. From the proceeds, the teacher wanted me to buy – apart from the usual datepalm sweets and rice cereal – a mortar and pestle and a spade from the blacksmith. Moni Banu had other ideas. She dragged me along to the snake-gypsy’s stalls. While I waited impatiently to make my purchases, she skipped from stall to stall and tried on bracelets, earrings and studs for her nose. She was taking so long that I pretended I was going ahead without her, hoping that she would fall for my bluff and follow me. For twenty minutes, I made my way through a narrow passage dense with crowds, past pottery stalls, then weavers’ stalls, pausing every so often to check if she was following. But there was no sign of her giving in, so I traced my way back. She was still there, looking at the trinkets in the same self-indulgent way as before. I was about to attract her attention and show my displeasure when she turned to face me with a smile. Her wrists were covered with glass bracelets; from her ears dangled two long beaded earrings; on her nose stood a stud with a red stone.
“How do they look, Beautiful One?”
Not wishing to encourage her, I looked away. She extended her arms towards me, jingling the glass bracelets. She cocked her head and held my gaze with her large, dark eyes. I knew that the teacher would be cross with me, but what else could I do but give in? When I paid for her purchases, I realised there wouldn’t be enough money to buy everything the teacher had asked for. I suppose I could just about have got away with not purchasing the date palm sweets and rice cereal. It would be harder to explain why I hadn’t bought the mortar and the pestle – the old one needed replacing urgently – and I wasn’t to come home, the teacher had insisted, without the spade.
Excerpted with permission from Song of Our Swampland, Manzu Islam, Speaking Tiger Books.
