another subcontinent is proud to present our first fiction feature: "Killing the Water", short fiction by Mahmud Rahman. this feature is now live on our home site. we invite your thoughts and feedback on it here.

Hi Mahmud,

Very evocative story and quite unusual - I think this is one of the first stories I have read on this theme - humans in nature - that doesn't include hunters and he-men!

Particularly enjoyed the characters and the tiffs between the parents.
Could go on about all the terrific details - the mother's two years of medical college, the fish, the bhoot (incidentally didn't realize that word was common to hindi and bangla) Are there autobiographical parts too like in some of your other stories? It has a bit of that feel.

And a really apt title - did you start out with this one in mind? Because it's very hard to find one that works as well as this one once a story is done.

Thanks Mahmud and Arnab. I really enjoyed reading "Killing the Waters." Hope to read more nuggets from you.

HI Mahmud!

Been looking forward to this one a lot after browsing through your website a while back. Was worth the wait!

Rushina

Mahmud,

It feels very weird to be commenting on a semi-autobiographical story written by somebody i know, but i couldnt help share the joy i get from reading your work. it may be slightly biased, so i will be sure to throw in some criticism i'm sure i read it differently than other readers who havent been to your mymensingh road house or seen the new "happy rahman" plaza being built. although i havent seen anything of the pond you mention, i've seen some of what remained of the petrol pump and collection of antique cars after your father died. okay, shall now put on my "unaffected reader" hat and give my comments.

to begin with, i loved the way you use details in your work. you have a very good eye for it and i admire that in a writer. i thought there were some very amusing moments (dont know if these were from real life or not) when your mother gave snappy comebacks to your father and i liked the way you used the theme of water running through your early lives in that house. i really liked the bit about the father realising how water was the source of more death than life in bangladesh. very aptly put, i think. i wonder how that was teid to his passion for building boats. maybe it was an attempt to score a victory over the waves of the buriganga? (see? its impossible for me to take out the personal details of our friendship when i read your work.)

people's relationship with water in bangladesh is multilayered and very complex. you can trace it back through history to political clout, culture, geography and economics, outside of the obvious emotional aspects. its something that is almost tangible and forms a huge part of the rural social structure. so much of our lives is spent near water, so much of our lives depend on it, in a country with a thousand rivers, flowing through with life, salt, minerals and myths in its veins. the way we access water, the way we use it, the way we wish to use it, how much of it we have, how less of it we have, how water has impacted our land use and food supply -- and how we control our access to it -- these things pretty much make up the two thirds of our politics -- much like the saying that two thirds of our earth is covered by water. so yes, water is the source of life, death and the politics that lies between those two sheets in bangladesh.

heck, i first got to know you because you chose to argue about a river with me okay, now for some criticism: i thought the ending was a bit abrupt. the pond got polluted with run off from the garage and gradually the fish died. but you didnt say anything about how that changed your family or your lives emotionally.

phew. enough from me on this! congratulations on being featured on AS,
-shahpar

Well, I can't share Shahpar's personal recollections, but I definitely echo her praises for this story.

I loved the sense of place, the way the child and the family interact with the physical and iconic presence of water -- and with the low ground, and later with the higher ground that is literally "built up" with the extra money that comes as the entire area becomes more urban. I also loved the way the children were happy for the flow of water to sail boats and build bridges -- oblivious to the other cargo the streams were carrying.

And I also had a slightly similar feeling about the end. Actually, what I thought was: This is the beginning of a novel.

I hope it is!

cj

Thank you for reading my story and the comments you are contributing.

Though I am still exhausted and jetlagged from my recent travels to the subcontinent, I thought I’d say a few words about the story before the discussion congeals treating it as a piece of memoir. I know, it has the feel of memoir, and with Shahpar's comments (since she knows some of my family history) readers might start to believe it is mostly memoir. However, this story is very much a work of fiction. I freely mined the memories of childhood and used many events from life to build this story, but as one of my sisters first commented upon reading this story, “I don’t remember Mother saying any of these things.” Indeed, she didn’t, and while many of the events in the story did happen, the characters, especially the mother and father, are largely made up and I have freely played with time which did not work so orderly in life as it does in this story.

A small note on the origins of this story. I wrote the first draft as a creative response to a piece of literature. In a class on the “international novel” taught by a writer, we had been reading novels from a variety of writers many of whom I would not have come to on my own. The list included well-known authors such as Coetzee and Beckett, but there was also Juan Rulfo (“Pedro Paramo”), Clarice Lispector (“The Hour of the Star”), Alain Robbe-Grillet (“Jealousy”), and Milorad Pavic (“Dictionary of the Khazars”). “Killing the water” was inspired by a reading of Bruno Schulz’s “The Street of Crocodiles.” Schulz was a Jewish writer writing in 1930s Poland and he was murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. His book was based on his childhood home and the street on which he lived. Replying to a query about the book, he said, “To what genre does The Street of Crocodiles belong? How should it be classified? I consider it to be an autobiographical novel, not merely because it is written in the first person and one can recognize in it certain events and experiences from the author’s own childhood. It is an autobiography – or rather, a genealogy – of the spirit… since it reveals the spirit’s pedigree back to those depths where it merges with mythology, where it becomes lost in mythological ravings. I have always felt that the roots of the individual mind, if followed far enough down, would lose themselves in some mythic lair. This is the final depth beyond which one can no longer go.”

In writing my story, I attempted to mythologize a part of my early growing up, pieces of my childhood and the neighborhood I grew up in, a neighborhood now rapidly being erased from history. Beyond that, I do not know exactly why this particular story emerged. In the spring of 2001, my sister was dying, and cancer, death, and family knots were very much consuming me. The only solace I remember is the nearness of water – mostly the lake near which I live in downtown Oakland – and somehow out of that stew poured out this story. It came out surprisingly easy on one three-day weekend and the title also popped out of my head -- after the story was written. I consider that month, in fact, that entire spring, a time when I had my muse visit me frequently.

I really enjoyed the story; more so after re-reading it. My thoughts on the ending which Shahpar found abrupt.

I thought the "abruptness" of the ending was entirely appropriate and maybe even intentional. The killing of the water takes up very little space in the story; it seems to be another way of saying that it barely registered in the minds of the children that the pond was dying from the Petrol pump. It almost gave the reader a quick punch at the end!

The end neatly answers the question posed at the beginning:

"Standing on the pavement, I cough and rub my eyes. Soon they burn red. Pedestrians around me breathe through handkerchiefs, and a few even wear gas masks.

How did it come to this?"

Mahmud
Very interesting urban pollution story- I especially liked the ending- evocative and strongly written last paragraph- with the spirits disappearing too. Captures a certain encrouching desolation in the characters lives too which they might not have noticed yet.

I liked the story, but I liked the picture on the front page even more. Is that Dhaka of old?

Dear Mahmud,
thank you for sharing this story. it is everything everyone has already said, so I won't repeat it. You are a very talented writer.
One thing that surprised me was that you write of the period around partition without ever mentioning it! Very interesting way of handling it. Of course it plays no part in the story so it is quite natural.
Congratulations as well to AS for this venture into publishing fiction. hope to see more original stories.

mahmud,

thanks again for sharing this story with us, and also for clarifying the fiction/autobiographical relationship. one of the things i like about your story is your use of language--the rhythms of the sentences do a lot to set the mood. would you feel comfortable sharing a little about your writing process? do you revise a lot? i am also very impressed by how visual your writing is. i don't know if those unfamiliar with these geographies get this effect but i can "see" your settings very clearly from your writing.

arnab

Jai Malhar wrote:

Actually no. The photo is of a pond in the village of Keshranga in Chandpur district. The pond lies next to a brick house from 1934 that is currently in ruins. The story goes that my father, then working for the Calcutta police, built this house for his parents back in the village. I visited Keshranga for the first time in January 2002. It is the only photo of a pond from east Bengal that was in my collection.

But the pond and houses depicted in the photo could very well resemble a part of semi-urban, semi-rural Dhaka even as late as the early 1960s. And perhaps as the periphery of the city has moved outwards, there are still scenes like this on the outskirts of the city. Many of those tin-roofed houses would first give way to one or two or at most three story brick houses, but over the last ten or so years, those smaller brick houses, often with gardens or lawns next to them, are being replaced by 8,10,20 story buildings, some just apartment buildings while others are commercial at the bottom and residential in the higher floors. Most of the green space in family compounds are vanishing as Dhaka becomes a vertically rising city encased in concrete.

Dear Mahmud

Your writing is subtle and evocative.

I also got a lot of insight and pleasure from reading your post on the gestation of the story, how it came to you, the influence of Bruno Schulz's work upon this piece, and your own expiation of the hazy combination of memory, myth and feeling that combined to help bring Killing the Water to fruition. I found it very valuable. I look forward to reading more of your work.


regards



This post has been edited by zoobee: Jan 20 2005, 06:54 PM

Arnab wrote:

Ah, the question about writing process. Let me make an effort to answer.

When I first started to write stories, I started to use real-life events, either from my life or from those familiar to me, or simply observations I had made, as a starting point. I've lived long enough in diverse enough situations that I've accumulated a rather large storehouse of memories. Even before I started to journal and record things. This is something I do more religiously since I started to write fiction. In the beginning, I tended to stay more within the confines of what happened, playing only a little with memory and events. The first challenge was to find a way to release my imagination. I'm better at it now, having learned a few ways to strike out from charted territory to uncharted ones. The second challenge has been to confront structure, to find different ways of storytelling. When I read stories now or watch movies or see events unfold, I tend to look under the hood for the structures that writers use. The more you do it, the more it becomes second nature. I am now working with more complex, multistranded strories, though most of these are still very much 'in progress.'

In general, I enjoy revision and yes, I do tend to heavily revise my stories. I tend to try to get a first rough draft done of most of a story before I turn to revision. Sometimes I complete a full story but if something is rolling along and I haven't quite figured out how and where to end, I may very well begin to revise. That said, I must confess that this is not always the case. There have been a few stories that have been revised very little. "Killing the water" is one of those stories. If I have revised this story, it has largely been revision, minor tinkering, to get the rhythm of the language right. I habitually read aloud my stories to see if it sounds right. And I often keep finding little jarring edges that need to be corrected.

It pleases me to know that Arnab finds my writing very visual. Others have noted this, but I have always thought I had difficulty with descriptive details. This is also something that I keep working at. But of course one can be a visual writer without packing one's prose with layers of description. I tend to admire writers who can do much to dramatize scenes and settings with sparse prose. Ernest Gaines has been a major influence for me. It is true that I tend to visualize a scene in my head before putting it down on paper. It's not always clear to me that others are seeing the same scene. Arnab of course is somewhat familiar with the setting in this story, I'd be curious to know if others who are far removed from such settings also find the writing in this story as visual.

While I truly appreciate the story having been made available like this and thank you for it, I wasn't totally satisfied. The end was very abrupt indeed, it really jars. I'm not sure this jarring has anything to do with the separate shock of realising what killed the pond and its ecosystem.

It seems unrealistic that one fine day, "dozens of fish floating sideways" would be discovered just like that. Surely they would just die off gradually? I only ask because this depiction takes away any power in the story for me. If it does happen like that for real, I apologise and would have to reread the story then in that light. The suggestion of "streaks of oil in the water flowing underneath our bridge" suggests that the pollutant to blame was indeed this oil, which would have accumulated gradually.

There is a parallel with the Hindi movie Swades, in which the depiction of physics and engineering (dam, reservoir, turbine, electricity) in the second half is terrible: it almost overwhelms the sheer beauty of the first half of the film.

Leaving aside whether the ending satisfies or not -- I can actually see how this could be felt -- I wanted to address the question posed above.

On my recent visit to Dhaka, I stayed next to the Gulshan Baridhara lake and someone told me that there had been a day when thousands of fish suddenly showed up dead, floating sideways on the surface. And yet when I looked out at the lake each day, I could see a fishing boat go by, netting dozens of silvery fish and emptying the nets on the narrow deck. Meanwhile an article in the newspaper reported that this was the most polluted lake in the city, the source apparently being industrial waste and sewage drained out into the lake from the houses of some of the rich people who live next to the lake.

I searched the web and found a few other newspaper items confirming that indeed, while pollution may be gradually killing the lake, there have been several incidents in which fish, in their thousands, suddenly died. I am not knowledgable enough about water to know why this happens, but it is apparently related to asphyxiation caused by sudden loss of oxygen in the water, connected both to pollution and stagnation. Another reason water bodies in urban areas 'die' is they get cut off from the canals that used to once link them with the wider river system.

Here is one of the newspaper articles that reported on the sudden fish deaths in Gulshan lake.

Perhaps there are scientists on the forum who can better explain why this might happen.

This post has been edited by Mahmud: Feb 1 2005, 12:00 PM

Thanks, Mahmud, I appreciate your digging to locate similar cases. The report however suggests effluents from industries draining into the lake might possibly have been responsible: that wouldn't be too far-fetched a scenario. It would be interesting to see if something similar to the Petrol Pump oil-trickling scenario you were describing could actually have occurred and caused such death.

Mahmood,
Thanks so much for the wonderful story! It was also a rather visual experience for me. I have never been to Bangladesh, Maybe it is all those movies!
Karen

Enjoyed the story.

When you mentioned the car wash and the canal draining into the pond, I knew instantly that something bad was going to happen because of this, despite your attempts to provide a red herring (toy town, bridge over the canal, cemented roads, etc, which all by the way I liked a lot).

I found the father character very likable what with his enterprise and all. (Was his name Ashraf Ali? Why was it mentioned just once in the middle? Or, was Ashraf Ali somebody else like a servant?)

As others had mentioned, the ending did not satisfy. Perhaps there is no other way out but having begun to like the father character and the children's toy town, the death of a part of their paradise (due to an action taken up only to improve things was jarring.

VC
PS: I probably will write some more on what you had written about the writing process.

This post has been edited by VC1: Feb 24 2005, 05:49 PM

I found the ending of the story to be effective and satisfying. When it came, the pollution came like death. It was outside the control of the protagonists to do anything about it. I think the ending was perfect in conveying the shock and helplessness and made us regard the fragility of life and nature. I dont think this story could have ended any other way.




This post has been edited by zoobee: Feb 24 2005, 11:08 PM

Tum - tum - TUM!

a positive review in the hindu though the reviewer fails to talk about anything other than the historical/social context of the stories.

There have been two other reviews so far.

In the Telegraph from Kolkata.

In The Daily Star weekend magazine from Dhaka.

congratulations mahmud. i'll look out for the book in the bookstore.

i found a copy in the local bookstore. i liked the stories very much, especially kerosene and the guava story. even the slighter stories have a lot of charm.