This Innocent Corner Read online

  This Innocent Corner

  This Innocent Corner

  a novel by

  Peggy Herring

  OOLICHAN BOOKS

  FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

  2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Peggy Herring ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine or broadcast on radio or television; or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYRIGHT, 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Herring, Peggy, 1961-

  This innocent corner / Peggy Herring.

  ISBN 978-0-88982-268-9

  I. Title.

  PS8615.E7685T55 2010 C813’.6 C2010-906086-5

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council through the BC Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, for our publishing activities.

  Published by

  Oolichan Books

  P.O. Box 2278

  Fernie, British Columbia

  Canada V0B 1M0

  www.oolichan.com

  Printed in Canada on 100% post consumer recycled FSC-certified paper.

  Cover photo by Shehzad Noorani.

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/81504640@N00/

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  For

  Michael and Devin

  There is sound of fury on the land and in the water,

  The innocent corner of the earth that I love

  Has suddenly awakened.

  —From “Durmor” by Sukanto Bhottacharya

  Contents

  Prologue

  1970

  2001

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Prologue

  Hasan Chowdhury hasn’t changed. Even after thirty years, even from behind the lights that glare on stage at the Shilpakala Academy, I recognize his bearish body. He lurches into the cavernous auditorium and stops halfway up the aisle. Though the proceedings have already begun, he pauses and surveys the stage and the rows of sour-smelling plush chairs as though they are his territory. Then he sits right in front, behind the row of VIPs. I remember him entering the dining room every morning with the same posture, throwing himself into the chair beside his father and peeling a steaming roti off the stack prepared by Shafiq and Kamala. He’d scoop up the bhaji, his hands like paws, and wash everything down with cups of cha.

  His hair is still shoulder-length, and the grey looks incongruous. He’s given up on the beard and the bushy side burns, thank god, but not the John Lennon glasses. The wire rims balance on the tip of his nose just as they did when we were at Dhaka University, another nod to the rebel he was then. Perhaps he loves that boy. More likely, he’s just another lost man in his fifties clinging to the illusion of his golden youth.

  I suppose I ought to try to be more generous seeing as it’s his country I’m visiting and, after all, it has been thirty years. But I still find it hard to be considerate when it comes to Hasan.

  I don’t think he would have recognized me if I wasn’t up on stage, my name on the silk banner suspended behind me, if I hadn’t just been introduced by a woman in an olive saree printed with a dun pattern that reminds me of dried, bent earthworms. Though Hasan is nearly my age, time hasn’t been as generous with my body. I’ve withered. My hair is completely grey and I’ve cropped it. He’d remember wispy hair the colour of apple scab, tied in a simple ponytail. I remember the ends incessantly loosening and curling themselves into corkscrews in the drenched heat. My smile sags now and I look unhappy most of the time, although that is not altogether true. And I have acquired a stomach, gifted by my baby, a droopy belly that I long ago stopped trying to conceal.

  In front of the scratchy-sounding microphone, I wait for recognition from Hasan, but nothing. He looks right through me just as he did so many years ago whenever I asked what he thought was another ridiculous question. Questions like: why shouldn’t Luna be able to choose her own friends? Why are Shaheed and Ruby avoiding me now? Why is the only suitable response to hatred and intolerance simply more hatred and intolerance? Hasan thought most of what I said was worthy of utter contempt, and though he’s done and said almost nothing today, his mere presence and the attitude he carries set in motion an overwhelming and very familiar sense of injury.

  The end of the applause leaves an expectation thick as the air before a monsoon rain. The woman in the olive saree has a tight, anxious smile on her face. Like a strange insect, she bobs her head and flutters her hands. A panoply of bangles on her wrists tinkle frantically. Begin, begin, she signals.

  “Asalaam aliekum,” I say. “Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me back to your country.”

  The crowd grows quiet.

  “It’s been about thirty years since I had the privilege to live in Dhaka –” My thin voice slips into the corners of the hollow auditorium and dissolves.

  “Ektu jore! Louder!” Someone calls from the back. The woman in the olive saree gestures to a scruffy sound technician who wipes his palms on his shirttail, leaving behind two perfect, black handprints. He squats before a dusty, antiquated PA system just in front of the stage and turns some dials.

  Hasan crosses his arms. I start again.

  “It’s been just over thirty years since I had the privilege to live in Dhaka – as an exchange student at Dhaka University –”

  Paragraphs typed then deleted, notes scribbled on paper bags, grocery lists, napkins and even once on the border of a street map while I tried to find the passport office in Victoria. I don’t know where anything is in that city because I rarely go there. Why should I bother? I have everything I need, and it’s been that way ever since I escaped to my bucolic little island in Georgia Strait.

  It’s taken weeks to write this speech, most of it trying to remember what I’d written thirty years ago, the rest trying to understand why the Bangla-American Women’s Friendship Society would find it interesting enough to invite me to speak. Transcribed onto a computer at the cyber cafe, rehearsed a hundred times in front of my bathroom mirror, and still, it’s like I’m speaking in slow motion. Vertiginous spaces open between my words.

  “Even though times were troubling and you were at the beginning of a struggle for your independence, you were always warm and kind.” The sound improves but my voice remains insubstantial. I lean into the microphone and sigh. My exhaled breath comes like the roar of a jet. Everyone jumps.

  “Sorry.” I step back and clear my throat. “What I learned here encompassed so much more than what I was studying in class, which was, of course, your language, Bangla. At the TSC – the teacher-student centre – the library, the canteen, in many homes, I had the chance to listen and ask questions. Unfortunately, I was forced to leave early in the conflict when the American government called back its citizens. I departed with much sorrow not knowing what would happen to the close friends I left behind.”

  “Liar!”

  Hasan. Now he looks at me – for the second time in thirty years.

  The woman in the olive saree sits up. The audience divides as though choreographed, half looking to see who’s spoken, the other half looking at me for reaction. But there is no going back.


  “I watched you from afar. But there were no details in the news of the people I knew and how they were faring in the face of civil war, rationing, curfews and apparent unrelenting attacks. For months, I lived from newspaper to newspaper, from TV broadcast to TV broadcast, always looking for the names of the brave people I left behind.”

  “Coward!” Hasan is on his feet now. So is the woman in the olive saree.

  “She is a guest from abroad. Kindly offer your hospitality. There will be a time for questions after.” Her voice is lost beneath the growing murmurs of the audience.

  “She’s a collaborator!” People around Hasan stand. One man grabs Hasan’s arm, shouts and pulls him toward the aisle. Two women in the VIP row wave their hands, flicking the tips of their bejeweled fingers as though to brush away houseflies.

  “Listen to me!” Hasan is in the aisle. Others shout at him, at one another, all in Bangla now, and mine is so rusty from disuse, I can only guess what they are saying.

  “Ask her what she thinks of the Biharis! Ask her how much money she gave them! Hard currency which they used to arm themselves to kill our brothers and rape our sisters!”

  Hasan is dragged across the floor toward the auditorium doors. The sleeve of his red, homespun kurta tears as he resists. I remember well the passion of the Bangladeshis when it comes to discussing their independence, when it comes to offering at least the appearance of courtesy to a bideshi – a foreigner, when it comes to leaping headfirst into any sort of rousing scuffle. The woman in the olive saree nudges me away from the podium and takes the microphone.

  “Sit down!” she shouts. There is a screech of feedback. The technician fumbles with the dials.

  “Let her go to The Hague and be tried alongside Nixon and Kissinger and James Farland!” Hasan raises his arm. He points his finger as though it is a weapon.

  “Remove that man from this meeting! Take your seats! Order!”

  But her commands are absurd. There is anything but order in this auditorium. Chaos rules much as it had across the whole country thirty years ago. Some would say it was Sheikh Mujib and others would say no, Yahya Khan held the reins, or the Indian or Chinese or American governments, but it seems to me no one had control. And probably no one really has since, because that’s what politics is all about, the illusion of control, although I couldn’t say for sure what it is like today in Bangladesh. Moreover I’ve long since stopped investing much thought or emotion into politics.

  The chaos grows in ridiculous proportions. Arms flail, fists clench, faces twist with hostility. The whole audience is drawn into it. And while Graham might have found humour here, I don’t. Large, unruly crowds unsettle me.

  I sit down and wait, but it is only for a moment, as another of the organizers taps my shoulder.

  “Come, Apa.” She calls me big sister, then leads me off the stage, down some steps until we reach a cramped dressing room.

  We listen to the ruckus outside. Each of us smiles, remembers our manners, pretends nothing is happening. The girl offers me a biscuit. It tastes of coconut and cooking oil. She watches me brush the crumbs from my shirt. We both stare at the random pattern they leave in the lush crimson carpet.

  She is the first to break the pretense.

  “We are Bangladeshis. We are too much serious about our Liberation War,” she says. I find her age hard to guess but am certain she was not even born when the war began. “Don’t mind.”

  I don’t. I mean, I do, I feel embarrassed, all those memories of that time thrown up in my face, and no opportunity to defend myself. Hasan’s accusations are not true, not exactly, and anyway, if he has something to say, he should do it privately, at a time and place in which I would have a chance to explain, and find out what happened to Luna after I left, and Razzak, what happened to poor Shafiq, and, of course, Amma. Because I don’t know what happened to any of them, and that’s why I cannot say definitively that Hasan’s accusations are complete lies.

  In love, in war, truth is rubber that can be pulled and stretched into an infinite number of shapes.

  But I do not mind the fact that the Bangladeshis still take their war seriously. They have to. In the same way that a person has to take seriously the shape of her hand, especially once she has lost her arm.

  The girl whispers. “Mrs. Robin, you give money to the Biharis?”

  “Please – just call me Robin. What is your name?”

  “My name Falguni.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two years.” I was right. Maybe her father was a freedom fighter. Maybe her mother cooked meals or knit socks and sweaters and sent them to the front. “The Biharis they killed many Bangladeshis, do you know? You must not give them money.”

  “I didn’t.” This is true, but it sounds defensive. I am unable to explain and again, wish my Bangla would return so I could tell Falguni what I could not say to Hasan and the crowd.

  However, it is as though I have not spoken, as though Hasan’s accusation has metamorphosed into fact. “But Apa, they were the collaborators.”

  Collaborator. That word again. Hasan has baptized me and I have been reborn as one of them.

  But I’m not a collaborator. I did what I did from my convictions, after a lot of thought, and because Luna was the closest thing I ever had to a sister. I would have done anything she asked. Even though I believe in very little now, if I betrayed Hasan’s family back then, I did so because I had faith in love.

  But this, today, is not what I had intended, and if I had thought this might happen, I never would have accepted the invitation to come back.

  All I want now is to go home.

  “What do we do, Falguni?”

  “What you want do?” Outside, there are still rumblings, although the voices are more distinguishable. Perhaps the crowd is dispersing.

  I shrug. “Go back to the hotel?”

  “Wait. I ask.” Falguni leaves.

  I am alone, faced with a plate of oily biscuits, a chair, the far off sounds of arguments, and a raft of memories.

  Not really alone though. Never alone as long as I am afflicted with memory.

  I bite into a second biscuit. Again, sweet coconut crumbles in my mouth.

  1970

  “You start with this. We use the chilis, you know. Maybe you don’t like the chilis?” Mrs. Chowdhury loaded my plate with white rice, a single slice of fried eggplant and some tomato salad, and sat back in her chair, satisfied.

  It was nine-thirty. I was exhausted by jet lag, but famished and determined to stay awake for my first dinner with the Chowdhury clan, my host family in Dhaka for the next year. Serving bowls and platters, laid out moments ago by the servants, Shafiq and Kamala, steamed impossibly in the heat of July. Aromas drifted in the air. Coriander and cumin, a waft of mustard, and I could smell cinnamon, cloves, and something reminiscent of smelly feet.

  “Of course she doesn’t like chilis,” Hasan said. “No foreigner does.” He took a raw chili pepper, green, waxy and the size of my baby finger from a serving platter and bit into it. He chewed deliberately and waited for my reaction.

  “I’ll try,” I said. “I want to. Please.”

  Wary but curious, I really did want to sample. However, Hasan’s unexpected pronouncement gave me a better reason for being enthusiastic about a vegetable I barely recognized. On behalf of all foreigners, I wanted to prove him wrong.

  Mrs. Chowdhury offered me a second slice of eggplant. I took a chili, too, and set it on the rim of my plate.

  Once Mr. Chowdhury began to eat, so did the rest of the family. They plunged their hands into their food. I expected this: right hand only, never the left. Hasan, to the right of his father, rounded his shoulders, bowed his head and shoveled in the food with accompanying garrumphs, an eating technique that would turn the stomach of the most thick-skinned diner. For that, I was not prepared.

 
I poked the tomato salad, pulpy and slippery. I decided to start with the eggplant. I picked up a whole slice. It wilted. A greasy piece detached itself from the charred skin and slid onto my lap.

  Hasan guffawed. How he managed to observe anything with his face buried in curry was a mystery.

  “I will not tolerate rudeness at the table,” Mrs. Chowdhury said. “Use a fork, Robin dear. I am.” Lady-like, she wiped her fingertips, which I noticed were barely smeared with food, and lifted her fork.

  I decided to follow her lead, but for this meal only. I would practice in private. I would show Hasan.

  I brushed the eggplant from my lap, then, with a fork, tackled what was left on my plate.

  The meal was rich and oily, and spicy beyond anything I had ever eaten back home in Lansing, Michigan. It was spicier even than the legendary chili con carne, slapped together and served up every Sunday night in winter by my father, with whom, just hours ago, I’d shared an easy farewell at an airport on the other side of the world. My eyes watered. My nose ran. But I would not give Hasan the satisfaction of seeing my discomfort.

  “I have a question now for our newest exchange student,” said Mr. Chowdhury. He rested his wrists on the edge of the table, and wiggled his fingers as though drying freshly polished nails.

  “You ought to let our guest relax on her first evening with us,” Mrs. Chowdhury said, “instead of peppering her with your questions.” She turned to face me. “He is too curious. He nearly drove away our last student with his endless queries.”

  Their daughter, Luna, sitting at his side, giggled. She was in the middle of serving him big spoons of rice and vegetables.

  “My endless queries, as you say, nourish our exchange students as well as ourselves. It is a mutually beneficially relationship,” Mr. Chowdhury countered.

  “I would be happy to answer questions,” I said, “especially if I can help. I’m very thankful to be able to stay with you this year.”