F I C T I O N Dipika opened the folder. “I hear you people raise orphans. Here, take Mala. By the time you get this, she will be an orphan. Her father was Mohit Biswas. When he came out of jail after serving five years, he was going to help me take care of Mala. But he did not survive a single day of freedom. That very night, he was taken away in a white pickup and killed in crossfire. You can read it in Friday’s newspapers. I cannot go on taking care of Mala. I am too exhausted. I can no longer carry on. Here, take her. By the time you read this, I will have become food for the fishes in the Buriganga.” Dipika said, “The handwriting’s quite good, and the language literate. She must have been an educated woman.” “Why say ‘have been’ so quickly? There are no reports of corpses in the river. Nothing in the morning papers. Nothing from the police. But one Mohit Biswas was indeed a victim of crossfire last week. You can see the Prothom Alo report in the folder.” Dipika read from the newspaper clipping. The Dhaka West unit of the Mongoose Force announced that the vicious terrorist Mohit Biswas, also known as Blackie Biswas, was killed last night in a crossfire. An MF squad had picked up Blackie for questioning at noon, shortly after he was released from Central Jail after completing a 5-year sentence for armed robbery. He was wanted for questioning in several unsolved murder cases. He agreed to take the MF squad to the secret place where he had stored his cache of weapons. When the MF arrived, Blackie’s comrades, who had been waiting, opened fire on the security force, and Mohit Biswas was killed in the crossfire. The other miscreants managed to escape. The MF squad retrieved a one-shooter gun, one bottle of Phensydil, and three bullets. “The usual,” Dipika said. “Did you expect something more colorful?”
Mahmud Rahman was born in Dhaka and came of age during the upsurge of the late sixties that led to the creation of Bangladesh. During the 1971 war, he was a refugee in Calcutta. In his adult life, he has lived mostly in the U.S. A resident of California today, he writes fiction, essays, and translates Bangla fiction into English. He is the author of Killing the Water: Stories and the translator of Bangladeshi novelist Mahmudul Haque’s Black Ice. His first novel The Fiction Factory, set in contemporary Bangladesh and centered around themes of violence, image making, and propaganda, is seeking publication.
118
WEBER
THE CONTEMPORARY WEST
FALL 2016