The New Nation - Internet Edition

Munir Muztaba Ali

I.

When the Writer all of a sudden disappeared from our small town of Roseville on a rainy evening in the month of May not too long ago, failing to show up at a party thrown by a protégé of his, the young man became worried about his well-being and we all searched for him frantically, looking high and low, hoping and praying all the while that his disappearance turn out to be a spurious hoax. Oh, yes, we searched every nook and cranny of our small town, beginning with his home and the homes that he usually frequented and ending with places that no gentlemen should ever be at, but we found no trace of him, nor any trace of his posh and pricey automobile. We even contacted the FBI, for he was once briefly stopped by them on the suspicion of terrorism, because of him carrying a Muslim name and shouldering an unusually large sack of flaxen fabric to carry his writing stuff, but we had no luck with them either. We then turned to the local police for help, called his friends and relatives far and near, put up posters at all important sites of the town, handed out leaflets to our good citizens, and ran newspaper ads offering reward money, but all to no avail-the Writer appeared to have vanished for good without a trace, and the community appeared to have lost its soul.

II.

The Writer was a good man, an aged and well-respected man in our small community of Bangladeshi expatriates at Roseville in Louisiana, a state with big lakes, long bridges, and countless bayous in the American south. He was a big government officer in Bangladesh, a secretary or something, but once in America, he least wanted to be identified by that bureaucratic title any longer; the only thing he held on to from his tenure in that government position was a handsome pension and his safari. He donned on safaris of every imaginable color; the apparel suited him well and had indeed an ambience of sophistication, and that's the only thing he wanted from his previous profession to go on- he wanted to look sophisticated. Other than that, he liked his new title, a title not given by an unscrupulous bureaucracy, but a title he chose himself and wore it proudly as a badge of honor. He was a full time writer and a part time professor; at least that's how he labeled himself. What he wrote was a matter left up to the literary critics to appraise, but we ordinary Bangali Rosevilleans, realizing how ardently and proudly he regarded his title of a writer, with much more exuberance than he would regard his proper name, preferred to call him writer, Lekhok to be exact in his and our mother tongue, of course appealing to his fervor and felicity.

A writer is usually seen, at least in our own community, accompanying with some sort of peculiarity, with certain measure of eccentricity, but not our Writer, not at least in the way others are. The fact that the Writer put on safaris of every imaginable color didn't mean that it divulged his eccentricity because it didn't; the Writer's eccentricity, if there was any, didn't find resonance in what he did and didn't wear-his safaris were fashionably tailored and well-coordinated with his dress pants and shoes, and he never wore long hair or beard, like the ones who find no fine distinction between a writer and a baul; in fact, his hair was well-trimmed and his beard well-shaven. He was, in reality, a fashion freak in the sanest sense of the term 'fashion'. His overall bearing with habits and practices seemed gentlemanly also, with no vestiges of peculiarity that ordinary people tend to associate with a writer; he didn't curse, swear, or profess his disdain for the intelligence design of our creation.

But in one thing, however, his behavior seemed a little odd, but then again, to some people, it never was considered odd. What's odd to some is ordinary to others, after all, but the fact of the matter is, his disdain for people hobnobbed with divorce in any form or fashion was profound. You didn't have to be divorced or a divorcee to provoke his distaste for you, you might be remotely related to a person who had defiled the sanctity of marriage, but still you couldn't escape his repugnance for being somehow related to this awful guy. The ax of his wrath, however, fell upon him who had violated the sanctity of marriage by exploiting the religious approbation of talak. In the Writer's mind, the former husband was the real culprit in any divorce. A man divorces because he gets jaded being with the same old wife for too long, or he finds another woman better fitted to put out the fire of his passion, or simply he doesn't want her in his life any more, but a wife divorces, if she does in any rare cases, because she finds herself hopelessly entrapped in a loveless marriage, where getting out of it is the only salvation, like the first cut of the surgeon's knife ensuring a better health and a new life. The Writer would explain this way, and most of us would readily agree.

To the Writer, such a violation of the sanctity of marriage was a severe offense, an ate', a rash and imprudent behavior, and the offender must pay the price with some kind of nemesis or retribution. The retribution always began with the offender's excommunication from our small community. Thousands of miles away from home with no kith and kin in a country where we're surrounded by people whose cultures and customs we know very little, whose tongue we can seldom imitate, whose religious faiths we can never follow, whose morals and ethics we feel sorely inadequate, having to go on without being able to talk to another individual from home was indeed a severe punishment, and the Writer found it to be a fitting one for the transgressor of sacred vow of marriage whose social circle should begin at home with his wife. If a man doesn't understand the value of this primary social unit, he shouldn't be a part of a broader society, he would say, and most of us would say "amen".

III.

Some of those transgressors had somehow been able to creep back into our small social fold, but not before they already had paid a hefty price. Masrur, for example, (I'll call him Masrur because, for one reason, his real name isn't Masrur) was isolated completely from Roseville's Bangali community for nearly ten years with an injunction from the Writer that he better not be contacted in any form or fashion-phoned, seen, visited, or invited to any ensemble, big or small, group or individual. If any one had any soft spot left for Masrur, he wouldn't have dared bend, break, or bounce around the Writer's edict; after all, as is said before, the Writer was well-respected and listened to. Those of us who became a Rosevillean even after this divorce had occurred were whispered, sometimes by the Writer himself and sometimes by one of his trusted henchmen, that the very utterance of the name Masrur was a taboo. As a result, we've never seen him until recently, but we've heard rumors that a student or two, who refused to yield to the old order, had saved Masrur from social depravation or, worse yet, from a social death by seeing him secretly, in the underground railroad or in the grapevine, so to speak. It's now widely believed that they're the ones, coupled with the passage of time as time heals the wounds, who were instrumental in helping him rehabilitate, to a great stretch, in our community.

One other transgressor was Shahriar (not exactly Shahriar, I should mind you of the truth), who was, in fact, an ally of the Writer in pronouncing punishment for Masrur, but to the Writer, any one involved in matters relating to divorce isn't, can never-ever be, an ally. Shahriar was not the actual transgressor of the sanctity of this marriage; his wife was past childbearing age and he himself was of the age when other thoughts, thoughts like what lies beyond this mundane world, take precedence. He spent much of his time counting the prayer beads, yet he was accused of aiding and abetting to the heinous act carried out by his son who wasn't even a Rosevillean; many of us didn't even know where he and his wife who was disgraced by this heinous act actually homesteaded. But that didn't dissuade the Writer from doling out due punishment against Shahriar and many of us from agreeing with it.

The Writer and we, together, campaigned, lobbied, conned, and cajoled others to stay asunder from him, having him knocked out from our small social order at Roseville, and we relished the outcome with maddening mirth and frenzy. But, like Masrur, he himself was able to redeem his former social status after many years of retribution, but that didn't mean we lost our faith in the Writer or we found him less candid than he had always been. It was as if we found forgiveness in our hearts to let bygone be bygone and move forward with everyone, the sinner and the sinned alike, though the Writer remained an uncompromising non-participant in that effort.

IV.

We had no idea how the Writer was caught with the dancing bug for writing, seemingly elevating himself from a bureaucrat to a writer, but he indeed had a ravening appetite for writing. He wrote voraciously and managed to have what he wrote reach those of us who were willing to read. We read them all; some of us read out of respect for the Writer, others read because they loved reading, but we all learned something from his writing. Much of his writing was instructional-how to be a good citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, how to raise kids having them steer clear of the western cultural decay, whom to associate with and whom not to, where to go and where not to, things of this nature. He was kind of a modern day Dr. Lutfar Rahman, a Benjamin Franklin, a Khana, or a Poor Richard. Words of wisdom and ideas of erudition flowed fluidly from his pen and flourished in print in the umpteen pages of our expatriate newspapers. A horde of subjects were subsumed in his writing, except one-he never penned anything on divorce. And that made many of us wonder why a writer whose tenor of thoughts was so consumed by the havoc of divorce could stay asunder from committing a line about it on paper. The fact that a writer who had touched on every imaginable issue of importance would choose not to scrawl a word on the subject that mattered so much to him was an enigma that we failed to grasp. So one day, a few of us summoned up enough chutzpah to ask him why his writing didn't embrace the issue of divorce.

The Writer felt so ill-at-ease responding to our query that an aura of melancholia seemed to have engulfed him, but what we gleaned from what he had divulged was this: He hated divorce because God hates divorce, and he believed that in the eye of God, marriage is an unbreakable covenant, bonding a man and his wife as one flesh as long as they live. Satan, on the other hand, hates marriage and loves divorce. Anyone loving marriage and hating divorce is doing God's bidding, and anyone having anything to do with divorce is doing the Satan's bidding, whose only purpose in existence is to turn love into hate, romance into rancor, and candor into deceit. Our existence as civilized human beings is at stake if divorce is to infiltrate drip by drip in our culture because marriage is the very foundation, the building block, of our civilization, and hence, he who destroys marriage destroys the civilization. He blamed men for any ill consequences of divorce because it's the man who often takes divorce as a stepping stone to a better woman, and hence, a better life. All his problems a man reposes on his wife and thinks that a new wife will solve all the old problems. No efforts are made on his part to work out the differences and no times are given by him for love to take roots, grow, and flourish. Unlike a woman, a man does care less in subscribing to the notion of a marital endurance and growth through adaptability, flexibility, genuine love, and compassion; rather, he thinks that's the woman's job, he said. All these fine words he never could scrawl on a piece of paper because every time he made efforts to do so, an emotion of an admixture of sadness and anger so overpowered him that he felt an strange seizure of uneasiness and lost his train of thoughts to commit them on paper.

V.

A few of us looked at this deep-seated conviction of the Writer about divorce with awe and bewilderment, but most of us, especially our women, saw a god-sent angel in him who made it a mission to protect those who couldn't protect themselves and punish those who preyed on their gullible and vulnerable wives. Again, what's appalling to some may prove appealing to others; that's how most things are, but when the Writer vanished from our small community at Roseville, we put our awe-stricken feelings aside and came out together to find him, some out of love and respect, and others out of kindness and compassion. Even Masrur and Shahriar also tagged along with us to look for the Writer. When the police, after a week of searches, eventually decided to pry open his house, looking for clues, we all were there to help the police, Masrur and Shahriar seemed more so than the remainder of us. They rifled through the house turning inside out-removed the books from the bookshelves, threw the mattresses from the bed, opened every drawer in the house, unlocked every suitcase that was locked and combed through every document that it contained. Then all of sudden, holding an open diary in his hand with an old photo glued at the top of the page, Masrur exclaimed in joy, at the top of his voice, "I got it, I got it!" Shahriar ran toward him. "What is it, what is it?" he asked. "It's a confession, it's a confession!" Masrur yelled, basking in a mysterious glow as if he found the golden deer that he had been looking for all his life. "Read it, read it", I said, hoping to find a clue to the whereabouts of the Writer. Masrur read with a frenzied mirth what he saw in a journal entry just beneath the black and white old photo of a young lady. "Roshni Darlin'", he took a pause, eyeing around to make sure we were listening, "I never knew that a simple (that's what I thought at the time) divorce would take such a toll on you. You loved me so much that my final separation from you must have pained you to the extent that it spilled over the edge of your forbearance and you couldn't take it any longer, so you buried your pain by taking your own life. I felt accursed and discerned what an awful thing this divorce was. Since that fateful day in May, I've been trying to atone for my sin by standing against divorce and commencing to perform my yearly jearat, the prayer service, at your gravesite, but the pangs of remorse I bear and the rueful tears I shed might not be enough to wash away my sin. Please forgive me, honey; now you've the key to my redemption." It was the same month of May of the year and we could have searched one more place, the gravesite, but it must have been far away from Roseville, we presumed.

After a few moments of head-scratching reflecting upon our new discovery, as the three of us were leaving with an epiphany of the Writer's immersion in the fray of divorce, a posh and pricey car with an airport parking tag still embellishing the corner of the front windshield pulled over in the driveway past the police cars, parked on the shoulder of the entrance, and the Writer emerged out of it with an apparent look of bewilderment. Although a little travel strained with his safari crumpled in the wear and tear of a long arduous journey, he seemed otherwise to be perfectly alright. With no further inquiries, we exchanged our hurried greetings and hopped into Masrur's car to speed away, leaving the cops to take care of the mess that we had left behind. With no design of our own, we somehow succumbed to a state of complete reticence, having no confab whatsoever among ourselves, producing sort of an unbearably spooky silence in the air, and to break that eerie silence, Shahriar muttered a stanza from Khalil Gibran's poem:

Leave me, my blamer,

For the sake of the love

Which unites your soul with

That of your beloved one;

For the sake of that which

Joins spirit with mother's

Affection, and ties your

Heart with filial love. Go,

And leave me to my own

Weeping Heart.

(Munir Muztaba Ali is an associate professor of English at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. His work of fiction appeared in Slow Trains and New Age. He edits Sangam, an online literary magazine.)