Snails
It is 1971. Civil war has spread from the cities of East Pakistan into the countryside. Thirty miles south of the port city of Chittagong, a chill has settled over Manpur, where men and boys of different faiths gather after dusk in secret, segregated groups.
Ajoy, seventeen, sits with a Buddhist cabal in his cousin Tunu’s house. Tunu adds to the night’s rumors. The Hindus are getting it, he says. Muslims are taking furniture, radios, clothes. Suren Mitra, a Hindu businessman, has shot two looters and is trying to escape to India through the Bandarban hills.
“But listen,” another boy says. “The Muslims may not get him, but the Kukis in the Hill Tracts—”
He doesn’t finish. Everyone has heard about the naked Kukis. The talk trails off. Voices grow drowsy. In the stillness, they hear the distant boom of a Pakistani warship shelling the port of Chittagong.
At home, Ajoy’s mother kneels before a framed picture of the Buddha on the plastered mud wall of their bedroom. A candle flickers; shadows dance around the orange halo. She recites Pali sutras. Ajoy lights incense and kneels beside her.
His brother Bijan has not come home for two nights.
Bijan works as a clerk in the Telephone and Telegraph office in Chittagong. Each morning he walks to the Arakan highway to catch a bus; each evening he returns.
“Why wouldn’t he send a message?” his mother asks.
“Maybe he can’t,” Ajoy says. “The office is a high-security zone.”
“You mean surrounded by troops?” Her voice trembles.
Ajoy regrets his invention. To his mother, Pakistani soldiers are butchers. They unzip pedestrians and kill uncircumcised males.
“Go to sleep, Ma,” he says quickly. “If he doesn’t come tomorrow, I’ll ask Yusuf Malek.”
Yusuf Malek, who also works at the T&T office, helped Bijan get the job after their father died four years earlier. He owns two houses and returns to the village on weekends.
To Ajoy’s mother, Yusuf Malek and Karim Haq are the only good Muslims in Manpur. Karim Haq is a landless peasant who tills her rice paddies for half shares. During harvest, he carries bundles of paddy to her house and threshes them from morning to night. He has become almost family.
It was Karim Haq who brought the news of their father’s death. Bijan had just finished high school and the brothers had traveled to Cox’s Bazar, the long beach on the Bay of Bengal. They stayed at a hilltop temple, listening to the ocean at night and walking the shore each day.
Just beneath the wet sand lay masses of tiny snails—smooth whorls speckled red, purple, yellow, and blue.
“Cowries!” Bijan cried.
Ajoy shook his head. “Not cowries.”
“Well, they’re smooth. They have dots. They’re not your big drab tree snails.”
“You’re right,” Ajoy said. “They’re pretty.”
Ignoring Bijan’s calls to ride the waves, Ajoy spent hours picking them up, washing away the sand, and stuffing his pockets.
“There must be hundreds of thousands,” Bijan said.
“Millions.”
“Billions.”
Ajoy was wondering what came after billions when he noticed Karim Haq approaching across the sand. Karim looked so solemn that the brothers laughed. Without a word, Karim put his arms around them both and held them close. Before leaving, Ajoy emptied his pockets and threw the snails back into the sea.
Bijan has not come home for a week. Their mother begins to sleepwalk, groping along the enclosed porch at night and speaking to herself. The sight startles Ajoy. He has known her as a woman who suffers steadily, without display. Anicca, dukkha, anatta—impermanence, suffering, non-self—she has always said, chanting the words like a charm.
When his aunts wailed after his father’s cremation, sending crows up from the mango trees, she managed only an occasional whimper—the sound she made when complaining that his father had bought soft fish again, the kind that needed too much chili paste. As if even in dying, his father had burdened her with one more domestic irritation.
One night, Ajoy stops her hand as she tilts a glass of water over her head.
“It’s hot,” she says, waking. “Did he come home?”
“No, Ma.”
She sits on the floor and looks at him, her eyes swollen.
“O son,” she says quietly, “we’ll never see him again.”
Ajoy feels a roar rise in his head, but no words come—only a dull hum, like insects or an idling engine. He wonders what remains when even that goes silent.
He does not tell his mother what he learns four days later.
Yusuf Malek has returned to the village for the weekend. At dusk, Ajoy crosses the road that divides the Buddhist side of Manpur from the Muslim side and stands before Malek’s house. Chickens scratch in the yard. A young woman passing by draws her veil and slips inside.
Malek comes to the door—a man in his fifties, with a grizzled goatee and skullcap.
“Come in, my nephew,” he says, invoking the village convention that makes everyone kin.
“Mother is worried,” Ajoy says. “Did something happen at the office?”
Malek seats him on a cushion and calls for tea. He says nothing for a long moment. The silence tightens Ajoy’s chest.
“Inshallah,” Malek says finally, “no harm has come to him.”
“Chacha,” Ajoy says. “Where is he?”
Malek exhales. “There is confusion.”
He speaks slowly, cautiously. Security has tightened. Civil guards have been replaced by army units. Rumors spread faster than truth. He says Bengalis are brothers, that the freedom movement has invited chaos, that provocations come from many sides.
The words drift past Ajoy. He waits.
At last Malek says what matters. Someone in the office—someone loyal to the regime—reported Bijan as a Bangladesh supporter. The army took him for questioning and drove him toward the cantonment in the Jalalabad Hills.
Ajoy remembers riding a bus along the Kaptai Highway when someone pointed to the hills and said, That’s the cantonment. From the road it looked pastoral—fields of rye and rice shifting in the sun, the barracks hidden. One hill bore a black-and-white crescent above crossed swords. Now that image will not leave him: green fields, a brother’s blood; bright grain, a darkening face.
Malek stops speaking. Ajoy drinks his tea. It tastes thin. He rises, thanks Malek, and walks back across the road without knowing how his legs carry him.
That night he does not join the village meetings. In the days that follow, he wanders instead—from pond to pond, from field to field—avoiding his mother, avoiding speech. She spends long hours at the monastery now, speaking with the monk or kneeling in prayer.
The fields lie bare, broken into stubbled fissures. Ajoy longs for rain—an early monsoon, a steady downpour hammering the tin roof, filling the ponds with bubbles, drowning thought. He feels trapped inside his own stillness.
One afternoon he walks on the banks of Rauli Pond. Ants and beetles swarm unseen. Dragonflies skim the surface. A giant banyan broods at the northeastern edge, its leaves veined and shimmering.
Across the fields, a narrow triangle moves toward the village. As it nears, Ajoy sees Karim Haq beneath it, carrying bamboo balanced on a pole. He realizes how little he knows of the labor that sustains the village. He lets Karim pass without calling out.
That night Ajoy goes to Karim Haq’s hut. The darkness is thick with crickets. He cannot see his hands as he walks. Through a checkered bamboo door, he glimpses a kerosene lamp glowing in an empty room. Karim and his wife, Hena-bibi, are outside in the cooking area. Karim leans against the bamboo wall while Hena-bibi blows through a hollow tube to coax fire from the embers.
“Cooking again?” Ajoy asks.
They startle, then smile and offer him a wicker mat.
“No, bhai,” Hena-bibi says. “We already ate. But your brother here wants popcorn.”
“What brings you at this hour, bhaijan?” Karim asks.
The word—little brother—lands heavily. Ajoy feels suddenly unsure why he has come, why he has stepped into their small pocket of evening ease.
“How is aunt?” Hena-bibi asks gently.
Ajoy tells them what he has not told his mother, or his cousin, or anyone else. He speaks evenly, as if reciting facts.
Karim shakes his head. “Hai Allah.”
Hena-bibi says nothing.
“Why haven’t you told your mother?” Karim asks, disbelief edging his voice.
“I will tonight,” Ajoy says.
“Do you want me to come?” Karim asks.
“No,” Ajoy says quickly. “That wouldn’t be right.”
They sit in silence. Then Ajoy speaks again.
“Tell me, Karim-bhai—why do you Muslims do this?”
Karim looks at him. “Do what?”
“Loot villages. Inform on people. Help the army.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear from gossip,” Karim says.
“My brother is gone. That isn’t gossip.”
“That is the government,” Karim says. “What can people like us do? We try to live. We try to do good by everyone.”
Ajoy feels shame rise in him, sharp and hot.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should go.”
As he walks away, the darkness loosens slightly. Somewhere to the south, he hears machine-gun fire, distant but unmistakable. The shelling of Chittagong has stopped. The war is moving closer.
Ajoy goes to Rauli Pond. The water lies dark and still, holding a thin slice of moon. He removes his shorts and steps in. The night air touches his skin; the pond is warm, faintly sour with mud and lilies. He wades past the bamboo stakes set to prevent clandestine fishing, then pushes off and swims toward the center. The silhouette of the banyan shifts with his movement.
A waning half-moon hangs above him, the Buddhist hare only half visible. In one life, Gautama had been a hare and offered his body to a hungry stranger. For this sacrifice the gods placed his image on the moon.
His mother’s voice comes back to him, reciting: “O Ananda, untold are your births and deaths, like grains of sand stretching to the horizon.” He sees again the colored whorls beneath the sand at Cox’s Bazar—red, purple, yellow, blue—beyond counting. For a moment they seem like lives themselves: innumerable, bright, already broken.
Dread rises in him suddenly; it feels physical, as if the warm water has turned cold around his chest. His mother is wrong. Grief is not the worst thing. Life is—the long, senseless carrying of it. What else is there to do but lament? Lament the losses, the deaths, the war. Lament the pond and the fields of grain. Lament the dragonflies. Lament the snails on the shore.
Flashlights slash across the water.
“Bhaijan!” Karim calls. “You’ll catch a fever.”
“Ajoy!” Tunu shouts. “Come out.”
They gather on the bank, lamps and torches wavering in their hands. Shivering now, Ajoy comes out of the warm pond and climbs naked onto the dry earth.
Holy Crow
My mother often said that she wanted to die in Bodhgaya, where Gautama the Buddha had attained supreme enlightenment twenty-five centuries ago. Before I was born, she had also dreamt of a baby elephant clambering onto her lap. She had been struck, even while dreaming, by that sacred Buddhist symbol. So until I reached puberty and resisted her, she watched over me with the vigilance of the serpent queen sheltering prince Siddhartha from rain.
Then one Spring Day in 1971, from a hilltop in Ramu, I saw the massive columns of smoke that engulfed my mother’s house and the houses of surrounding villages. Dodging Pakistani soldiers in pursuit of Bengali youths, I went halfway back toward my village at dusk. An escaped man, whose umbrella looked like a gun from afar, flagged me to stop. “Don’t go back,” he shouted, waving his hands violently. “Ashes aren’t worth dying for!”
With a group of about fifty men and women, I made the two-week Lushai trek to India across a slow maze of bushes, trails, mountains, ferns, and fern-eating tribes, ending up in an internment camp in the mists of Mizoram. But the Mizo’s scowled at the Bengalis and there were rumors about night attacks in some other camps. So I decided to try Bodhgaya. “You know, Joy,” my mother had told me so many times, “there is no place for a Buddhist like Bodhgaya.”
I gave my Swiss watch to a Mizo merchant, who helped me secure a bus pass in that restricted territory. Then I boarded a westbound train that brought me, free, to the Gaya Junction in Bihar. From there, I met Sumana Bhante, that is the Venerable Dr. Sumana Mahathero, Abbot of the Ceylonese Monastery in Bodhgaya. His sahib students called him “Shoeman.” I called him “bhante” because that’s how I grew up calling men in yellow robes. Intensely missionary and authoritarian, he nevertheless made some use of my unfinished college education, saving me from being another of India’s holy crows.
Holy crows was Sumana Bhante’s name for the numerous drifters that perched expectant in India’s holy places for crumbs to be thrown at them. Regularly they poured in, in ticketless trainloads, onto the urine-soaked platforms of the Gaya Junction, dispersing to find any nearby dharamsala that might put them up for free.
Then there were the hordes of western youths, filling up all the guest houses of various monasteries. I was fascinated by them but resented what they tried to offer me—strained sympathy, discarded clothes. I immersed myself in Sumana Bhante’s campaign to raise money for a meditation hall, paying no attention to the tourists and visitors. Except for Hanna.
A blonde hazel-eyed German girl, Hanna had been staying for some time in the Ceylonese Monastery. Apparently unsullied by the Indian trinity of heat, grime, and dysentery, she moved in this dark brown country like a snowy apparition, strumming a guitar on still and stifling nights, while I lay awake in a room below hers, my mind filled with images of her soft skin until I sank into a dreamless sleep.
Hanna was necessary for my mental health, something to focus on during my scarce free time. Fully aware of the fantastic nature of my inner drama, I never spoke to her, but watched her often—walking round and round the two-thousand-year-old Mahabodhi temple, or among mango orchards along the dry Phalgu river. She was always alone.
After a month of this secret romance, Joel Greenberg of Manhattan arrived at the monastery. I was cooking potato and rice one evening when he barged into my room—smiling, bearded, and bleary-eyed behind a pair of high-powered glasses.
“D’you know about the big bowl of wonton soup they serve at the Tibetan Tent? It’s only fifty paisas.”
I didn’t, but was willing to try. I liked Joel, so free from the strain of wary sympathy, immediately.
“Why do so many Westerners come to India?” I asked him, sitting down on a bench inside a refugee tent beside the Tibetan monastery while gloomy Tibetans in drab clothing stared at us.
“Cheaper than therapy, J, even with airfare and all. Fun too. Better than spilling your guts, man, yackety-yak to a stranger with your eye on the clock.”
I didn’t understand much of what he said, but I knew his primary intention was not attaining enlightenment under the capable guidance of Sumana Bhante.
“Then there’s travel,” he said. “Tell me, isn’t it better to see all this historical stuff than spending your life in some Bangladeshi village?”
“I don’t like this place.”
“No? You must be homesick,” Joel remarked. “Are you homesick, J?” Joel called me J because he couldn’t pronounce my name, Joyonto Das.
“Well, of course I am,” I said testily.
“The idea, J, is not to get stuck in one place,” he said softly.
“You have seen many places?”
“Oh, I get around. I was in Pondicherry recently, you know, in South India. People from all over the planet go there to live in the Aurobindo ashram. Yeah, you’d like it much better there. If you want I can give you the name of the guy who runs the place . . . a very common Indian name . . . Shukla, I think, yes, Ravi Shukla, that’s it.”
After several evenings of wonton, I’d learned all about Joel. A tour guide on Ellis Island, an English instructor in Khorramshahr, Iran, he was also an aspiring writer in search of a subject matter, exploring places like Bogota or a kibbutz near Haifa. But the more he saw, the more puzzled he became about a possible subject. “Only a sense of humor, man,” he proclaimed seriously. “Only that keeps me going.”
A matter of diet brought Hanna into our wonton evenings. On full-moon days, Sumana Bhante instructed about fifteen people in standing meditation while I supervised the Bihari cook in the main kitchen, preparing dal, chapati, and cauliflower breaded with ground chickpea.
I carried plates full of food to the meditation hall where Joel, Hanna, and the Bhante stood among others, eyes closed. Sweat beads rolled down Joel’s temples and disappeared into his beard. Suddenly Hanna buckled at the knees and fell on the floor. Her skirts rolled up; she appeared unconscious. Joel jumped into action, trying to pull her up.
“Do your own meditation, Mr. Greenberg,” Sumana Bhante said sternly. Joel retreated to his corner.
“You can’t live on lentils and vegetables forever,” said Joel, as he ushered Hanna into the Tibetan tent that evening. I walked behind them, diverted by the faint aroma of herbs emanating from Hanna. She washed her hair with fragrant leaves and wore a necklace of sandalwood beads.
“This monk’s a bully, if you want my opinion,” Joel said.
“He’s quite a sweet man really, behind that mask of austerity, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, you may be right,” Joel said. “But look at the way he treats J here. J’s an educated guy facing some hard times, and Shuman treats him like a domestic servant. Right J?”
An embarrassed silence followed. I began to wonder if I should fall behind and sneak away. A tense insistence in Joel’s voice surprised me with its unpleasantness, as if he was trying to pick a fight with Hanna.
“I don’t see why you take lessons from Shuman,” she said.
“Oh I’m not here for his lessons. Anyway I’ll be moving on in a few days.”
Later that evening, I walked up to Hanna’s room.
“Joel didn’t mean to offend,” I said.
“How sweet of you to come up and speak for Joel! Really, that’s very sweet,” said Hanna, standing in the doorway, her cotton shirt rippling in the mild air.
I averted my eyes and blurted out,
“I’m glad you fell on the floor today.”
“Why so?”
“I . . . I . . . wanted to know you better.”
“Oh, but what’s there to know? I am rather ordinary,” she said placidly, declining to notice my embarrassment.
“Well you play beautiful music,” I said. “How long will you stay here?”
“I don’t know, maybe another month.”
“Would you go to Nalanda with me one day before you leave?” I asked, ignoring the coolness of her voice.
Nalanda was a two-hour train ride from Bodhgaya, the site of an ancient university in ruins and of some stupas on the nearby Vulture’s Peak. I didn’t expect Hanna to accept my invitation. But she surprised me.
“Okay, Joy-on-to, that’s your name, right?” she said with a faint smile. “Let’s make a date for Nalanda then. Ask Joel too.”
“Better take an umbrella, Joyonto. Don’t risk a sunstroke,” Sumana Bhante said, giving me permission to go to Nalanda for a day. Joel and Hanna took water bottles and sunglasses.
After a bus to the railway station, a slow local train, and two rickety rickshaws on cow-dung-bespattered brick roads, we reached the ruins around noon. The ancient walls shimmered under the intense sun. We hopped from one gulmore tree to another seeking shade.
I admired the old university—massive, still, and dead. Dead for centuries after the sword-wielding swarms of Bakhtiar Khilji cut off the shaven heads of deans and acolytes, making huge bonfires of the books and rare manuscripts.
Turning around, I saw that I was alone next to a belltower with stairs spiraling around post-Mauryan pillars that had female figures chiseled on them—full-breasted, heavy-thighed yakshis and apsaras, dreamy and eternally promising pleasure. I walked slowly up the forty steps until the stairway ended on a broken ledge. Below me were Hanna and Joel in a dormitory enclosure, his right arm around her waist. I was about to call when Joel tightened his grasp and kissed Hanna on the lips.
For the rest of the day, we visited the Shanti Stupa, a pagoda made by the Japanese on a mountaintop, some odd rock formations, and a wildlife sanctuary. Joel was full of questions. Around five we boarded the train back to Gaya.
From the train windows, we saw clouds gather and a rainstorm overtake the plains, the windswept rain jets exploding in the dust. At Gaya, the downpour continued and the buses stopped early. With my umbrella, I went out looking for a taxi in vain, wading through ankle-deep water. Joel and Hanna stood near the Stationmaster’s office, looking rather lost.
“Is nothing going to Bodhgaya?” I asked the stationmaster.
“You could probably get an autorickshaw from the courthouse gate, perfect for the three of you.”
The autorickshaw, after we found one, was not to be had for only the three of us. The driver decided to pack in as many as he could.
“But driver-ji, how can you fit in five people in a three-seater?” I looked at the two dripping heads eyeing us bashfully as we settled in, Joel and I on either side, Hanna in the middle. The two looked odd, vermillion and sandalwood paste dripping from their foreheads onto their cheeks.
“No sir, they sit not with you,” the driver said, with a most ingratiating smile.
The driver produced a plank from nowhere and placed it on his narrow seat. The two ends of the plank jutted out of the autorickshaw and wobbled in the air.
“Jeesus, they aren’t going to just hang outside, are they?” Joel asked.
“I think we will have an accident,” said Hanna.
Soon Joel and Hanna’s misgivings turned into wonder. Craning their torsos, the two held onto the autorickshaw frames, jerking along cheerfully. One even broke into a falsetto folk song, “Goinda wallah re, o vrij bala re . . .”
“What are they singing?” Joel asked.
“I’m tired, Joel, too tired to play the tour guide.”
“Boy, you’re grouchy.”
Soon Joel fell asleep, his head bobbing against the autorickshaw’s canvas. Hanna put an arm around his neck to cushion him from the metal frame.
“I didn’t know you and Joel were . . . intimate,” I said quietly
She pulled a handkerchief from her shirt pocket and wiped her face, suddenly wet with tears as well as rain. I looked at her shaking there in a flickering light. I felt an abrupt jolt of anger.
I was angry at Bodhgaya, a place of enlightenment, a place where my mother didn’t get to die, and a place for holy crows. I knew the time had come for me to move on again.
I returned late to my room and found a note from Sumana Bhante scolding me. Before dawn, I packed my clothes, books, refugee papers, and one hundred and eight rupees. The rain fell intermittently. I stayed wide awake deep into the night listening to Tibetan chants and gusts of wind. My agitation gave way to a certain peace. Then long before Hanna or Joel or Sumana Bhante would wake, I stepped out of the monastery gate to catch the connecting bus to Doon Express, which came before dawn from Calcutta on its northwestern journey.
At Gaya station, I bought a platform ticket to get inside, and when the sleep-filled train rolled in, I boarded a crowded third-class car smelling of stale sweat and peanut shells. My ticket-lessness might be condoned there, if backed up properly with refugee stories. There was even a small corner of a bench for me to sit on.
The steam engine hissed into action. I rolled along again, listening to the tracks, clatter clatter, in a gathering crescendo over millions of pebbles, over bridges and fields. In the dark, the palmyra looked clumpy and stunted, but I was glad to be moving again, alone, feeling the power of the night wind and the mystery of the continent moving all around me.
I’d go to Benares, I thought, and catch another train there to Delhi, or Bombay. Trains from all over India came to Benares. It was a great junction.
At Benares there were no people or trains, but endlessly snaking rail tracks on all sides. And my mother came out from behind a lamppost, sailing toward me. She had wings to fly with, and a youthful face.
“Oh Joy, Joy, I’m so glad you’re making a new start,” she cried.
Then, like the headlight of a train, she comet-tailed into the dark.
A nudge on my shoulder woke me. An unshaven man in his forties peered into my eyes. He offered me chai in an earthen cup.
“Arre’, wake up, Babuji, wake up. Whatever are you crying for?”
Dibakar Barua was born in Bangladesh and immigrated to the United States for graduate school. After earning his PhD, he built a career teaching English and creative writing at UCLA, Stony Brook University, and Golden West College. He is the author of the poetry collection The Womb of Memory (World Parade Books, 2008). Between Two Rivers is his debut book-length fiction manuscript; he is also completing a memoir. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Short Story International, Puerto del Sol, LA Fiction Anthology, Ibbetson Street, RipRap, and others.
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