KILLING THE WATER (continued)
When the rains came and the water lapped at the floor of his house, my father looked longingly at the road out front. At least two feet above his compound, it remained dry. As did the houses of his wealthy neighbors. His own land would have to be raised, but where was the money for such a project? He ran a small business, transporting and selling firewood with his Jeep, supplementing this income by keeping his own cows and chickens and growing vegetables. There was no surplus to buy new soil.
Development came to his aid. When the government ordered the expansion of Mymensingh Road, it took some of my father's land and gave him cash in compensation. With that money, he hired an army of day laborers who toiled for months, digging a huge pond at the back of our property. The earth they dug up raised the surrounding land above the flood level. The cottage was taken apart and reassembled on the elevated land. All this happened before I was born. The way my father told the story, he made it sound like this undertaking had only been second to the Emperor Shahjahan's campaign to build the Taj Mahal. We believed it.
The pond was stocked with fish, and a new enterprise - farming and selling fish - was added to the trading in firewood. Water, if it wasn't the source of life, certainly became a new source of cash. The pond so teemed with fish that you could hold your hand in the water with a bit of dough and puthi mach would flock to your grasp. This I saw with my own eyes.
Once a week, Ali Ashraf dragged the pond with a giant net. At least four or five different kinds and sizes of fish, gleaming silver in the sunlight, would be unlucky enough to get snagged. Most of the catch he sold in the market. The rest we ate at home. My mother was fond of saying, "Fish is brain food. Eat some more, it will make you intelligent. Then you can be an engineer or a doctor."
For some reason unknown to us, my father refused to eat fish. Perhaps he had eaten too much during his childhood. He may have been won over to the taste of beef and chicken during his years in Calcutta. Or maybe he was already too intelligent and didn't need the additional boost. We could believe that.
Despite my mother's belief in science, she seemed to have a special hunger for blessings. Once the weather cooled down, she cajoled my father to take us on road trips to far-flung shrines. Even though he was skeptical of these pilgrimages, my father didn't need much convincing. He enjoyed the opportunity to see how far his Jeep would go before breaking down. And when it did, he relished the chance to fiddle around with the engine and show his agility in getting us back on the road.
During these trips, the Jeep's radiator would inevitably leak and my older brother Imtiaz was sent off, pail in hand, to the river or canal by the side of the road to fetch water to prevent the engine from overheating. Every hour on the hour. This gave my mother an opportunity to remind us, "See, what did I tell you? Water is the source of life, even in modern machines."
And it was to water we were dragged when we visited the shrines. She bought dozens of bottles of 'blessed water' on each of our journeys. The bottles would have to last until our next expedition. Each of the shrines was near a large pond. The mazaar of Shah Jalal in the northern city of Sylhet was right on the edge of a tank stocked with thousands of gojaar fish. The tomb of Bayazid Bostami near the port of Chittagong overlooked a pond teeming with small and huge turtles, some more than a hundred years old. And the shrine of Khan Jahan Ali in Bagerhat, near the Shundorbon forests, was just up the road from a tank containing crocodiles. In each place, pilgrims bought fish or meat from vendors and fed them to the animals. This, we learned, added to the blessings you received from just visiting the holy places.
There was a story attached to each of these ponds. The saints, when they were still alive, had all been insulted or attacked by evil men. With their magical powers, they had turned the evildoers into fish, turtles, or crocodiles. They could have utterly destroyed them, we were told, but the holy men were merciful and they had set up places of pilgrimage where travelers would gather and feed those unfortunate souls into eternity.
Each time we returned home, I wondered, could it be that some human souls were trapped inside the fish we were eating from our own pond? For some days I would lose my appetite and joined my father in declining the taste of fish. My mother chose to remain silent about the wisdom of eating fish. Instead she treated me to a small drink of blessed water. I expected some sweet, heavenly taste, like the ambrosia I had read about in school, but it simply tasted like stale water.
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