The Dreaming Machine dedicates this story to its translator, Ashraf-ul Alam Shikder, who unfortunately died on February 12, 2024. The author, Kazi Rafi, reports how great Ashraf’s dedication was to his craft and the fondness he had for Kazi’s stories.
Cover art by Hans van der Ham, The Fall of the Flesh.
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On a Saturday in Boishakh, after the storm passed at about nine pm, Khair has just returned home from the regular market in the suburbs and thrown down a bag with beef, while looking at his wife with eyes full of suspicion and anger. This anger in his eyes is more explicitly reflected in Khair’s saturated body than in the rain water that has fallen on him.
The woman embracing whom renders the darkness of the night charming, the woman who boils his blood with the fire of strong passion and the craving for a union with whom did not let him feel how nine years of married life has passed in between – how could such a woman cheat on him? Khair’s head is ablaze with rage, thinking that some other man is also familiar with the body of his wife. This look from her husband with umbrage in it made Nahala Neena feel annoyed.
A forceful north-western storm has flooded their house with rain water. The broken branches of trees have made their way into their courtyard. Having cleaned the entire house and cooked dinner with mud and a wet body, Neena was just preparing to have some food having taken a bath.
Irritated by Khair’s gaze, she says in a slightly angry tone, “Why are you glancing at me like that? Is the storm my fault?”
“You have a cut scar on your back. How come Arien knows this?”
Neena feels startled having heard the name ‘Arien’ uttered by someone after nine long years. Khair pronounced the name ‘Arien’ as if he had just talked to him. Each and every blood cell in her heart started revolting like the riding waves on a stormy ocean. A storm bigger than the one just felt seems to be wriggling inside her heart. She is about to choke. Looking straight in her clueless face and amazed eyes, Khair asks, “Aren’t you ashamed of secretly dating someone four years younger than you?”
At the time of his death, Arien was five years older than Neena. Neena could not understand what she would say. Today again she is held in that tight, heartrending anguish of that spring-night embrace. In a flashback she returns to the night she ran away from her wedding to meet Arien. Neena remembers the night her chest was soaked with the fast-flowing blood from Arien’s crushed head. That night when three masked thugs hit Arien on his head, causing him to lose consciousness, dragged him off her lap and brutally murdered him. After her wedding, hiding it from everyone, she overcame her grief, and several days at dawn she secretly visited Arien’s grave leaving roses in there.
Controlling the impossible ups and downs of the fishbone stuck inside her throat, all Neena could say was, “You…? Arien…?” Neena could utter nothing more.
She is now hovering in the air, transported nine years back on the wings of that one spring evening filled with the smell of mango buds. With the help of two of her friends, Anuva and Neha, and Affan, a classmate, she ran away from her wedding to meet Arien. She had asked Arien to wait in the bookstore facing the back of his house. Still in her bridal gown, Neena enters the room next to the shop and after a few minutes she called Arien inside the room while taking off all of her bridal cloths.
“Come here, please. Come with your eyes closed.”
In the suburbs of such villages, electricity remains almost elusive at night. Arien entered and saw Neena sitting in front of the dressing table. Now she was wearing nothing but a petticoat. Desperate to unhook her bra, Neena said, “Please give me a hand to unhook it. We will run away just wearing salwar and kameez. Hurry up; they’ll come here as soon as they realize I have run away.”
Embarrassed, Arien obeyed and really closed his eyes. For fun, her friends had flattened those bra hooks so tight that it seemed it was done with pliers so that the groom could not open it easily at night. It seemed they could not be unhooked without tearing the fabric. With his eyes closed, he said, “Let it just stay unhooked …”
Nahla and Anuva kept a taxi waiting outside, leaving Neena’s baggage in there too. She took out the veil from the trolley bag they had pulled in and held it in front of her breast in such a careless way indicating that even without it, nothing unchaste would happen. “No, I wish not to keep anything I received for my wedding day. Please help me …, you can unhook the bra as soon as you open your eyes” she said.
But opening his eyes, Arien was surprised to see that the edges of the hooks were indeed well sewn flat with parachute yarn. Upon hearing this information, Neena said, “Now I can guess what Basanti design had actually been doing with her craftsmanship for so long …”
What a peculiar kind of protest! Has this ever happened in any other part of the world that a young woman is so desperate not to accept a marriage, that she rejects anything even distantly related to it? One may decide one’s destiny while caught in a whim. Although this unhooking could be done later, Neena at this point is persisting to finish the work here and now. Arien is not asking any more questions, as he is plunging into an ecstasy.
Because of his repeated failed attempts to unhook her bra, Arien eventually had to open his eyes. He felt as if the candle-lit rays seemed to reflect the pink glow from Neena’s brownish skin. The world is so mysterious; once he opened his eyes, Arien couldn’t believe at first that this is the capricious and vivacious Neena he knows. Arien now becomes much more frightened than modest about having to touch Neena’s youthful limbs, which are full of boisterousness, freshness, and carrying the spring-like scent of mango buds. As if just by touching them, he may cause her to disappear into the air. His forearms were trembling like the flickering light of a candle.
And then, after Neena’s entreaties, he gently touched that fairy back, to be sure of her being there before he put his hand on her bra hook. No, this is really his Neena. Neena Nahla! Arien put his full force into pulling open the hook of that gorgeous, red bra, yet it failed to unhook.
“Tear it off, then …”
Just at that very moment the candlelight trembled as if an inauspicious element from outside agitated the frequency of the wind indoors. Neena thought she heard some sounds from outside coming their way. Annoyed she said, “Oh god! Why are you taking so long? Hurry up, please. We have to go to Basantapur to my friend’s aunt’s house first. And then, from there …”
Neena’s braid of hair fell off at that very moment, drowning the skin on the back in an ocean of thick black hair, with a few patches peeking out, in the reddish glow of the candlelight. As if behind Neena’s hair there were the warmth of a cloudy thunderous afternoon during the rainy season of Bengal. The expanse of a magical moonlight hidden inside her skin seemed to provide him with a glimpse of his future life and caused Arien to sink in the midst of her fragrance.
Perhaps this is the day he dreamed of that had driven him to earn the top marks at his university so he could then settle down in this small town. Observing Neena so closely, so intimately, is the fruition of all the desires of his whole life. Arien whispers, “Oh, God is great!”
Just a little further down the busy highway, underneath the coolness of the mango-blackberry yard on an almost dry river, there is a house with a bookstore next to it. He decides to take his father’s teaching profession as his own. Then he thinks of a life together with Neena, facing together all its turns, the ups-and-downs that mark the mystery of life and love, in the spring rain and in the dusk full of dreams. He would take her closer to his heart and whisper in the ears of the woman of his dreams a story from the pages of one of his favorite books. In the climax of the story, their eyes would become wet with tears and their hearts moist.
For the first time in his life, watching the secrets of Neena’s unbounded beauty unfold, Arien was drowned in remote dreams, with visions of all the strange feelings and illusory fantasies, and so he was delayed in doing the real work. As Neena shouts to alert him, he rushed out and took a knife from the next room, and before cutting to divide the hook from the bra strip, he said, “Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid today, even if we were to die now …”
Just as Arien placed the knife under the hook-strip, the door came crashing down noisily, broken by someone from outside. At that very moment, Neena turned around and her skin, which up to then had been playing with the soft light of the candle, was cut and blood splashed out.
The masked men penetrated the room, shattered Arien’s head into pieces and left. Neena was left speechless, watching Arien’s head on her lap, and the dying Arien hallucinates that a number of colorful butterflies are trying to enter them transported by a gorgeous red colored wave, fragrant with roses. The blowing spring wind carries fragrance from all the flowers and buds of nature, and becomes liquefied in the well-known aroma inside the house to become Neena’s scent as her cut is inundated by the river.
2
What charms were bestowed by the creator on the blue gaze emanating from the black gems that were Neena’s eyes as she grew up, and the minds of the youth of these environs became as restless as the spring breeze? Neena became a tall, slim, weightless girl, like the fury of a rainy spring, speedy as a river, dashing and daring, and full of attitude. Yet nobody knows what makes her grow silent as soon as she sets eyes on Arien, nor do they know what makes her timid.
Neena believes that Arien’s father, the professor, has caused all the trouble by naming his son after a Greek poet. Poetry is not merely the lingo of his cool and mysterious eyes. It bespeaks the conundrum of the poetic story. His sharp sight was taken by her at first when they started to exchange books and share reviews, and after a few days, Neena too fell in love with the tremendously talented boy.
The day Arien was going to Dhaka for university admission, Neena entered his house by the river behind the bookshop and said, “I will be waiting for you here, sitting by the river.”
“That means you will thoroughly forget me.”
“Impossible!”
“Watching the reflection of yourself on the river you will become so fascinated by your own beauty as the Greek God Narcissus and you will never remember me again. But it will make me think that a flower named Neena, not the Narcissus flower, is waiting by the river.”
Neena smiled while Arien spoke. Every time she smiles, a strange dimple, resembling a little wave, appears on her left cheek. She said, “I’ll surely not be looking for me in the river, I’ll be looking for you.”
That was the first time they talked to each other so intimately and open-heartedly. Before leaving, offering a rose in Neena’s hand, Arien said, “Your response and concern are just like you … very sharp … and simultaneously beautiful.”
A few days before Arien graduated from the university, Neena told her parents about their fondness for each other, but not only was her plea rejected, her father even claimed that Arien’s father was an “atheist”, and was angry at his daughter’s audacity and decided to marry her off. However, Neena’s mother too liked Arien and said, “They are Muslims. Arien is such a good student. When will a boy as handsome as him show up in this city?”
“Shut up. It would be better to kill my daughter before she marries such a stupid boy, and make me the father-in-law of a soul named ‘Arien`.”
Neena asks Arien to return home. The desperate girl knows what she has to do.
3
Six months after that murder, Khair returned after completing his BBA in London. One day, after their marriage, Khair returned home at night with a bouquet of tuberoses mixed with roses, and offered it to Neena saying, “To the prettiest lady in the world, more beautiful than this rose.”
The next morning, he noticed that there were still tuberoses in the bouquet but not a single rose. He did not enquire with Neena.
Once his counselor, an astrologer, said: “So you want the girl madly! Okay, to keep her loving you, give her a bouquet of tuberoses mixed with roses from time to time; however, do not forget a task – never ask her anything about the blood color. Hide in Subgram pretending you are studying in London … okay, don’t get caught and don’t have me caught either, Sir.”
Those roses may look like Arien’s blood to Neena! But Khair has to buy them. Since he got Neena on the advice of his counselor, the astrologer, he wants to hold Neena on his advice. So he did not ask Neena about the incident, he brought a similar bouquet of flowers for a few more days and, again, he noticed surprisingly that only the roses disappeared but not the tuberoses.
Then during spring, one afternoon on the second Thursday of the month, he returns home again with a bouquet of tuberoses mixed with roses, and after dinner, he pretends to be asleep but is awake all night long. At dawn he sees something in the dark: the shadow of a female figure like Neena disappearing into the darkness after picking all the roses from the bouquet. He reaches out his hand to search for Neena on the other side of the bed but she is not here.
He furtively follows the shadow that resembles Neena. The shadow came out of the house and walked by the bank of the river, stopping by Arien’s grave. Khair could not hear anything from a distance. Laying the flowers on the grave she said, “Arien! The king of astrologers, swearing on the name of God, said one day these red roses would reveal the masked devils. I will wait for the time as long as I live. My love, I love you so much …”
The astrologer was experienced in watching both love and murder, and now he is investing his experiences to gain from both ends: i.e., the lover and her living, but mentally, disordered husband. He has found a way of profiting from both of them by deceit. This experience has also received great publicity, and provided a tip for everyone who came to him.
Although he was hiding behind a gigantic century-old tree, Khair felt like he was hanging on a tree holding onto a branch full of leaves. He descended the tree very carefully. Then he kept staring at Arien’s grave on the river bank. What a surprise, no one is there!
He could not understand when and where the woman was absorbed in that light. The dawn is almost blossoming into morning. Upon his return home, he found Neena sleeping comfortably in her place. Seeing this scene made him dizzy. That very morning he decided to solve the matter sitting in the professor’s bookstore. Why does the professor’s son calmly leave the bookstore and return after a while with medicine and ointment? And when he comes back, there is a little blood on the ring finger of his right hand!
From that day on Khair started going to the shops in the township on different pretexts and became used to observing Arien attentively. Arien was the same as he was nine years back, his appearance, shape, body height, and weight – nothing has changed. Even his hair is exactly the same: neither shorter nor longer. Observing him here one day the astrologer enjoins Khair not to wander around. But he was in search of miracles and could not free himself from the temptation to know why the ancient aroma of thousand years hidden in those books in Arien’s book-store is mixed with the blood-soaked soil, glimpses the bouquet of Neena’s body, the smell of her hair and skin.
Khair gets to know that the boy goes inside the house now and then to take care of his beloved lady. And what he wants to understand even more is how, even after taking care of a sick girl for the past nine years, the man can keep such a quiet, pleasant smile on his face, despite soaking a finger in blood every time. What epic is he reading that never comes to an end? Today he must discover the name of this treatise. Yes, he must know everything.
There was a secluded alley to the north of the market. Khair went to Bablu’s tea shop at the end of the lane and had a cup of tea. Then he walks gently to the right of the main road and to the bookstore in front of the house on the river side. Arien smiled sweetly as he saw Khair. Khair saw the man still absorbed in the pages of the book he was reading with unfailing attention. How can one so deeply absorbed looking at oneself? In fact, at first, Khair had assumed that Arien was looking at the river and smiling at his own reflection on the water rather than focusing on the pages of the book he was reading.While studying, Khair had lodged at his teacher’s house. That day he clearly heard through a curtain a beautiful girl saying to Arien that she would look at the river water and wait for him!
Now he can remember, once in class, a teacher reading out the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus. It looks like the boy, a reflection of him. Today, he suddenly remembered that his teacher, a man with a profound knowledge of Greek civilization and literature, had named his child after a Greek poet. And he also remembered that he lodged at his teacher’s home when he was studying. Notwithstanding many endeavors, he cannot recall the name of his teacher’s son. Even though it is a forgotten chapter, Khair feels as if Arien sat there having stolen the eyes, face and age of his teacher’s son. Does the boy, exactly nine years younger than him, secretly detect a photograph of a girl inside a book? Who is that girl? No, there is still blood on the tip of his ring finger. Before he could say anything, the boy hurried to the inner room with the ointment as always, “Maybe blood is oozing from her back in the meantime. Please sit here. I’ll be back in a second. “
Undoubtedly the man is crazy. Khair thinks out loud as if an eagle just laid eggs in his eyeballs and flew away. There is brutality and doubt in those eyes. ‘If a girl has been bleeding from her wound for years, how does she survive? Why didn’t he take her to the doctor? And many more questions, no, he won’t let Arien keep silent today! Dude, so, you’ve learned a lot about hypocrisy from the astrologer Saiful! And now, when the young chap returned to the bookstore from inside the house next to it, he asked, “What is the name of the lady you have been caring for so many years?”
Smiles departed from Arien’s face. He dropped the book down. Khair watches as the boy’s eyes metamorphosed into the eyes of a fierce tiger. It looks as though he sprouted carnivorous teeth inside his hard jaw, just like shiny, sharp swords. Khair starts trembling and fear spreas up to the sky, dissolves into the air, and reaches the top of big trees, starting a typhoon. And it seems that it is from such intoxicating storm, that the North western front starts.
But the storm broke out of Arien’s eyes; it shakes with ripples of mad waves inside. Then Khair is crushed as he sees a scene in Arien’s eye as though he were looking at the scene in the mirror. He saw a female figure running towards Arien’s grave in the midst of a dark storm.
In a blaze of intense lightning, a mango-bud scented green universe along the banks of a river came to life. The sari is falling down from her body covering hundreds of meters of river shore, including its sandy-banks. But the constant lightning that overwhelms everything seems to be desperate to clarify a scene. Is it because so many thunder-lightning strikes so often the roses in the hands of the female figure?
Khair knew that even trees burn when struck by lightning. But, here in no way it hurts the woman except for the blood cells trickling out from the flowers in her hand with each thunderbolt. Each and every bolt of lightning makes the girl’s cry much more prominent. Looking more intently at the woman, he leans very close into Arien’s eyes.
“What a surprise!” Khair immediately uttered in a muffled voice, “Neena!”
“Neena Nahla?” This time he could clearly hear Arien’s voice, “Yes, my Neena. I am the custodian of the bloodshed from her body. Nowhere else is Neena living, except in this blood scented room of mine.”
Khair starts walking. He thinks of running away but instead turns around and buys beef at the market. The lure of eating beef draws the attention of his worldly senses as much as does Neena, which is not less like the blood dripping from roses in this thunderbolt.
4
Khair said furiously, “Arien himself told me all these. Just now on the way back home, I heard all about the mystery of the rose and of the blood flowing from your back.”
Just as she heard those words, a strong thunderbolt rumbled nearby; it seemed like the north-western storm of Bengal would fire another thunderbolt on Neena’s body. The terrifying, flawless sound of thunderbolts that thundered from the sky and from the heavens to earth was roaming around the world. It climbs up from the lower end of Neena’s body to her head splashing together all the blood of her body from the heart to every cell, to the nervous system. Her lips trembled in pain, finding nine years of life ruined in the hands of the enemy. Neena’s eyes generate as much current as that generated by lightning, which now seems to burn him. Today, after nine years, she remembers the bag she took with her when she ran away on her wedding day.
After nine long years Neena remembered that in one of the pockets of the travel bag that she had taken to escape on the day of her wedding, she had carefully hidden the red bra touched by Arien as well as the bloodstained knife!
She kept it carefully hidden for nine long years. She heard a voice in the cold rainy air, “Nowhere else is Neena living, but in this blood and rose scented room of mine.”
Kazi Rafi a post graduate in English literature is a prominent fiction and dexterous short story writer in Bangladesh (B-1975). He has eleven novels and six volumes of stories to his credit.
His first novel Blurred Dream of Sassandra was awarded with HSBC-Kali O Kolom Award-2010 which is one of the most prestigious awards in Bangladesh and Bangla literature. He received three more awards including ‘Nirnay Gold Medal-2013’ for the outstanding performance in the era of Novel and Short Stories.
Ashraf-ul Alam Shikder (born February 28, 1964 died February 12, 2024) worked full-time as a translator and writer and also created designs for the web, print, and television commercials. The Dhaka Company Herbs & Health employed him in his home office.
