Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

The small crowd of townsfolk, the driver, and the assistant were walking onto the bridge. I joined the boy, my new friend, and we moved with the group onto the tracks and toward the river. As we walked along the tracks, the train driver periodically peered over the handrails and shone a flashlight down the side of the bridge, while his assistant brought a hammer down hard onto the rails. The bridge reverberated sounds that seemed to come from the iron upper framework, not from the deep underbelly of girders and I-beams. We reached a third of the way across when one of the townsmen called out the point where the girder had fallen away. A discussion followed, most of which I did not catch. On the other side of the river, there was a coil of flickering lights, where the bridge landed on the riverbank. I asked a man standing at the edge of the crowd whether the train would stop there. There was another town at that end, he explained, and, because it had a telephone, the train driver stopped there to collect messages.

I told the boy, in my awkward Sylheti, that I would carry on walking across the bridge to the other side of the river and catch the train there.

It would be nice to walk with you, he said. But I have to go back to my parents. Where is your family?

In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath , or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath , which was current in India in the time of the British Raj.

Do you have any brothers?

I suppose now this seems like a curious question, but at the time, it did not. Friendship is one of life’s mysteries.

No, I replied.

The boy smiled and set off for the train.

Could you keep an eye on my bag? I asked.

Of course. Don’t worry.

I walked farther onto the bridge, the first town receding behind me, into an unlit region between two hives of human activity. Beneath me, the swollen river thrashed about in the dark, throwing up white arcs of reflected moonlight. Deep from within it there seemed to rise a growl.

I wasn’t far from my ultimate destination. The plan was that I would be met at the station by another uncle, my father’s brother.

At the other side of the river, I came upon a second hub of human life, a few shacks and stallholders. Kerosene lanterns left a shuddering glow on surfaces. I smelled the sting of mustard oil and heard its crackle.

The stallholder was frying a mixture of onions and chickpeas with some spices, and the smell was, as Brits would say, terrific. I had eaten nothing more all day than the mango the boy had given me. I gestured to the old man behind the stall that I would like some of what he was cooking. He took my money and wrapped up a portion in a small cone of newspaper. Across the bridge, the train blew its whistle and I could hear the intermittent chug of the pistons heaving the wheels. All the smells, sights, and sounds, from the pan in front of me, from the train across the water, from the river’s moan, from the string of glowing lanterns, from the solitary moon — all claims on the senses came to me as one, as if merged into the entire night.

The snack was delicious and I asked for four more: another for me and three for the boy and his parents.

If I close my eyes, I can hear the sounds again: the groan, the creak and snap of girders buckling, the high-pitched whistle of wires flying, the crash of a carriage hitting the tower, of another hitting the pier at the base, and then the sound of water, not a splash but as if the growling torrent had leaped up and crunched the falling carriage in its teeth. Halfway along the bridge was a splay of girders, their edges picked out by the moonlight. The river had taken the train, separating the carriages into prongs in the water.

The townspeople on both sides rushed to assist, launching their skinny boats into the river. I climbed down to the riverside, almost losing my foothold in the mud and loose earth. It seemed to take forever, and by the time I reached the riverbank, bodies and all sorts of articles were already visible in the gray waves under the light of the moon.

I wanted to help and clambered onto a boat with two others. But everyone must have known that the passengers had had little chance against the enormous impact.

Of course I waited for my new friend and his parents, but I never saw them again. Perhaps they survived, perhaps they were rescued by another boat and taken ashore, but they had been sitting in the front carriage, as I had been, and that carriage would have taken blows from the front and behind, between river and train.

Zafar poured us both some more champagne.

We drank silently.

You never told me about all this, I said to my friend.

Should I have? he replied. There’s a lot we haven’t talked about, isn’t there?

I know that I looked down when he said this. I know that I reached for the stem of the glass, lifted it, and drank. Was that shame?

Did you get home that night? I asked him. It was home you were going to, wasn’t it?

My friend, you know me well enough to know that I couldn’t possibly use the word home without couching it in so many caveats as to make it useless. I was going back to my father’s village, the family homestead, the place where I had lived as an infant, the place where I believe I was born.

After the train crash, I spent a few hours trying to help, but I was an outsider, a small boy from Bilaath, who didn’t know how to steer a boat, who couldn’t pull a body out of water. When I began to feel I was getting in the way, I stepped back from it all. The townspeople were incredible; they’d quickly taken control of the situation and seemed to know exactly what to do, as if their collective consciousness preserved the means to meet such adversity.

I started walking along the railway track toward Kulaura station, where I was supposed to meet my uncle, my father’s brother. I did of course look for the rumored telephone, but when I found it, a man was busy trying to get through to Sylhet city to inform the authorities of the disaster, and my own needs seemed to me petty. My bag was gone, of course. I had nothing other than a wad of cash in my pocket, a penknife, passport, notebook, and a pencil.

I pushed what I had seen out of my mind because it was so big and I did not know how to think about it. The pure night was rolling in, and though it would not be cold, I knew that I would be afraid of the dark.

The clouds had now dispersed, revealing the blue night that kept the stars apart. There were so many stars. City dwellers see this rarely, on vacations when their senses are addled by many new things at once. They cannot dream of the clear darkness, how the stars emerge only when everything else in the world is held at bay.

I remember it all so well, but I also know that I cannot recall the memory with the character of perception I had then, the way we see things as children. I saw the moon in its near-fullness and understood that though we call it moonlight, it is, after all, only sunlight and that we’re always living in the glare of one star, reflected or not. Don’t they say that even the oil in the ground is just the compressed energy of the sun?

Two people can see the same thing differently — that is obvious — but the notion that the same person can see the same thing utterly differently, something about it unsettles me, leaving a vacancy between me and those days, like an empty chair between two people.

An hour or so later, I came to a level crossing, a patch of crumbling tarmac. In the distance, on a ribbon of mauve hemming a hill against the edge of the sky, I saw a light moving at the pace of a star. It grew brighter before dividing in two. The car was a white Land Rover, which, I would learn, was in the service of the UN, much like the Land Cruisers and Pajeros so ubiquitous among aid organizations in the third world today. As it drew near, I waved it down and, after explaining my predicament to the driver and offering to pay him something, I jumped in. He’d take me to the village, which involved a considerable detour, he explained, and his employers would not be happy if they knew. I understood what he was saying.