The electricity is gone. Everyone is sitting in the courtyard—grandfather, father, and I. The rustle of palm leaves drifts through the air, along with the faint smell of mosquito coils from somewhere far off. Under the kerosene lamp, grandfather’s face is wrapped in deep shadows, eyes heavy with the fatigue of a thousand years.
Suddenly, he speaks, “Your father saw corpses of war; I saw corpses of hunger. The famine of 1943—it was a silent world war, just without guns or bombs. Yet, corpses fell by the thousands.”
I fall silent. Grandfather’s voice trembles with a pain that seems to rise from deep within.
“The British took away the rice for the sake of their war. Muslim League hoarders filled their granaries, and the markets had nothing. At home, bellies were full of people, but the cooking pots held only water. I saw my mother hide her tears. Along the roads, dogs fed on dead bodies, vultures gouged out eyes. Back then, the Padma River was a river of empty stomachs—the fish were weak from hunger, just like us. We’d cast our nets, and nothing would come up. Same river, same body—famine struck both man and fish alike.”
Father, who had been silently listening while lighting a cigarette, now smiles through the smoke and says, “You saw a river of hunger; I saw a river full of death. During the Liberation War, the Padma was a reservoir of corpses. By day, the military would line up blindfolded people and shoot them, dumping the bodies into the river. At night, the Razakars came—slitting throats in silence. Some were still alive, with clay pots tied to their feet, thrown in to sink. We kept long bamboo poles at the ghat, so we could push the floating bodies into deeper water. People would come to the shore searching for loved ones—‘A boy—tall, fair-skinned, curly hair—do you see him floating?’ ‘A girl—with a red ribbon in her hair—have you seen her?’ What could we say then?”
I don’t say anything, just stare into the eyes of grandfather and father. In those eyes, there’s no river water—only the accumulated bodies of war and famine.
Father speaks again, “No one dared to fish in that river. If you threw in a net, you wouldn’t catch fish—you’d pull up a corpse. The rotten stench made it impossible to hold the net. And yet, after the war—when hunger forced people to fish again—the Padma returned to us a bounty of hilsa. Shimmering hilsa, two or three kilos each. Flesh so red it looked like venison. But when we tried to eat it, it felt like we were chewing human flesh. We weren’t eating fish—it was as if the corpses had returned in another form. Hilsa normally feeds on weeds and plankton, but this hilsa had learned to feast on rot. The fish had grown fat feeding on human bodies.”
Grandfather had been quietly listening. Now he slowly opened his eyes. “Your Padma ate the bodies, ours ate the soul. One river—two times—two kinds of death. But they smelled the same, they carried the same silent cry in their waters.”
The wind seems to have stopped. Even the palm trees are still. I think to myself—this river is not just water, this river is our history, a line of sorrow stored within our very bodies.
Father says softly again, “Even so, after the war, after the struggle, the river gave something back to us. It gave us those terrifyingly beautiful hilsa—within which lived our past. With every bite, we tasted memory—and swallowed ourselves.”
Suddenly, I begin to doze off. In my half-sleep, I see my great-grandfather appear. He says, “Ah, they’ve killed Shashanka, and we came to the banks of the Padma—bleeding and wounded. People started arriving in droves. The chars (sandbanks) were filled with refugees. From here, small boats ferried people across. Many boats sank, and many were left behind. So many heads were blown off by gunfire. The Padma’s hilsa were overjoyed. I even saw one hilsa smiling with its teeth showing. That’s when I woke up.”
Everywhere around us, there is division; the world is preparing for war. Bombs are tearing through Europe, the Middle East is burning.
It seems like the Padma is once again ready to be happy.
Biswas 