Two Novellas by Shahidul Zahir

Book Review

Title: Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas

Author: Shahidul Zahir

Translated by: V Ramaswamy & Shahroza Nahrin

Publisher: Harper Collins India, 2022

Pages: 192

“One day in 1985, the sandal on the foot of Abdul Mojid … lost conformity with circumstances and went phot and snapped.” That is how Zahir’s stirring novella, Life and Political Reality, the first of the two in this collection, begins. The sandal strap has a reason to snap. Abul Khayer had just broadcast his thanksgiving note to the people of Bangladesh. Abul Khayer had emerged as a leader of the people.

Abul Khayer and his father, Moulana Bodu, were the traitors to the people 14 years ago when East Pakistan was fighting its War of Independence with West Pakistan. Moulana Bodu was betraying his own people to the supporters of Pakistan. The novel begins with the ominous sightings of human body parts in the homes of people. These were the pieces of human bodies that Moulana Bodu was throwing to the crows, bodies of people he had got killed as enemies of the nation. One such piece that falls in the rice pot of Jomir Byapari is a man’s penis. Byapari gifts the penis at Moulana’s house. Moulana’s young daughter thinks it is a leech. But Lotifa, Moulana’s second and young wife, knows better. “it’s a Muslim’s,” she asserts. Maulana is not quite chuffed with his young wife’s holding in her palm the penis of another man and also identifying it as belonging to a Muslim. His sleep is disturbed until “he woke Lotifa up and divorced her right there by uttering ‘talaq’ thrice.”

The plot of the novella keeps jumping between two years: 1971 when the Liberation War took place and 1985 when Moulana Bodu and his son were reinstated as popular leaders. The traitors of the people have now become the people’s leaders! Do people forget their pains so quickly? “People needed to forget a lot of things as time went by, because reality often loomed large,” the novella tells us towards the end.

The protagonist, Abdul Mojid, cannot forget it all so easily, however. When his sandal strap snaps on page one, what really snaps is a heartstring or two. His elder sister, Momena, with whom Moulana Bodu had a personal grudge, was brutalized by the army. A thirteen-year-old boy, Alaudin who had dared to make fun of Moulana, was the first victim of the army. “The day Moulana Bodu and Captain Imran first discovered one another, Alauddin’s lifeless body was found in the mohalla, face upwards, after it landed up on the lane in front of his house.”

Moulana Bodu has too much blood on his hands. The blood of his own people. He had to leave his place when his real face became clear to the people. Yet it is he who will emerge 14 years later as a popular leader of the people in the same place. The bloodlust will continue, Mojid realizes. There is no escape from bloodlust. That is the simple political reality.

The second novella, Abu Ibrahim’s Death, is relatively simpler and less bleak. Abu is in government service. He has managed to retain his integrity despite life’s problems and challenges. He loves his little children. His wife is rather corpulent and a little out of tune with him but he gets on with her.

Abu is not exactly a practical kind of person. There is some idealism within him that shows itself occasionally. It is not charity that the poor deserve but “instituting the rights,” he knows. There is a leftist revolutionary lurking in Abu’s gentle soul.

Abu is not quite sure of what he wants in life. When his old love, Helen, makes an appearance in his life once again, he is tempted to forge a deeper bond with her than is healthy for a family man. But he is not sure again what exactly it is that he is looking for from Helen.

He needs a house of his own. He needs money. He compromises with his integrity when a businessman offers him a bribe. That compromise turns out to be too costly. “Everybody can be purchased,” the businessman tells Abu. Soon Abu Ibrahim arrives at the sad realization of his fall from the heights of idealism and declares in a “somewhat delirious yet calm and quiet voice”: “I am a bastard!”

Shahidul Zahir’s stories take us to the depths of certain painful realities of life. Who controls these realities really? Who pulls the strings? Who decides that a man’s penis will make its appearance in a woman’s rice pot? Who decides that the woman will be divorced for that? Can you retain your integrity or sanity in such a world? The book raises some disturbing and profound questions.

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