From being a witness to a bloody war that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 to being a Third World migrant in the United States, Mahmud Rahman has had first-hand experience of what is called “the effects of war, migration and displacement.”
This is why he is successful in weaving all those experiences together in the beautiful and illuminating set of stories for his debut collection.
Killing The Water starts off on an auspicious note. The opening story, “City Shoes in the Village”, is set in undivided India of the 1930s and tells the story of Altaf who returns to his impoverished village in eastern Bengal to see his family after living in Calcutta for many years.
Altaf is remorseful for shying away from his duties as an eldest son, and the author portrays his guilt-stricken conscience and dilemma with lucidity.
The best story is “Kerosene”. Set against the backdrop of the 1971 war and told from a Bangladeshi nationalist's point of view, it exposes the chilling horrors of war and shows how even a non-violent and mild-mannered society can lose its sanity during great socio-political upheaval.
In the first paragraph, women and small children, all post-Partition refugees from India, are burnt alive by a Bengali mob.
This scene is a powerful reminder of the fact that equations between two social groups change drastically with time and circumstances.
Background
In the post-Partition euphoria of 1947, the Bengalis of East Pakistan had welcomed Urdu-speaking Muslim migrants from Bihar and U.P. as their religious brethren. But in the late 1960s, Bengali nationalism reared its head demanding a separate country for Bengalis, owing to wrong-headed political policies of West Pakistan.
In those difficult times, non-Bengali Muslims were at the receiving end, as they were perceived to be culturally closer to West Pakistan and hence its natural ally. In this changed situation, the binding factor was not Islam but Bengali language and culture.
Elsewhere there are more stories that deserve to be mentioned here. “Orangeline” is a subtle depiction of the scourge of racism in the U.S. In “Blue Mondays at the Gearshift Lounge”, a former soldier from Bangladesh tries to build a life in the U.S. while grappling with disturbing memories from his past.
In “Yuralda”, a beautiful love story unfolds in a laundromat in Rhode Island as a Sri Lankan man woos a Dominican girl, the eponymous protagonist. In all these stories Rahman succeeds in fleshing out the characters from disparate backgrounds.
The collection suffers on two counts. First, the author is unable to evoke a sense of history in some stories. The reader fails to see what is different about the time periods in which the stories are set. For example, the opening story, though well told, does not take the reader to India in the 1930s.
Also, a couple of stories like “Smoke Signals” and “Man in the Middle” do not come out well, and are nothing to be written home about.
Despite these shortcomings, there is freshness in Rahman's voice and his stories leave an impact.
This is a collection well worth a reader's time.
Killing the Water;Mahmud Rahman, Penguin, Rs. 250.
