The Fog Clears Like an Afterlife
BY MUNIRA TABASSUM AHMED
Amma talks about her father more often when we’re here.
In the car, standstill Dhaka traffic, she recalls one of his sayings; this proposition that there’s an invisible string that God will lightly tug on to guide us. Sometimes I struggle to believe in massive divine intervention; the answer that I’ve always had for this is that the universe is an intervention on nothingness. Everything is some sign of the divine, just as everything is an intervention. But today I yield to my grandfather’s belief. The light tug of the divine, the reflex that moves your hand from the hot stove before you process the flame.
I have found that I like the idea of things falling from heaven—Woolf says “the spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven”, I think of Portia saying that mercy “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath”. ‘The place beneath’ always struck me; everything I have ever loved is brushed aside. I overhear someone on the street saying that in heaven you forget about this world instantly, the way you forget the hunger of day’s fast after a few bites at sunset. I’m not good at forgetting about the world, perhaps I don’t need to be yet, but I really do love it all so dearly. I love the lightning that splits the sky in two when it strikes and the rain that brings the dust back down to the ground and food dropping from an open palm to a stray dog.
In Bangladesh, I have enjoyed observing; that is the role I will always appreciate. I love to listen. I don’t interject too often. And I hear my mother, my grandmother, all their family and mine. When they are here, they think about my grandfather. With all the love he had for Bangladesh, he remains like a ghost or a lamp in this country. Everyone says he would have come back if he lived long enough. My grandmother tells them that he wanted to live in Bangladesh, and, honestly, he tried to die here too. He took a flight between rounds of chemotherapy, hoping to be buried in Kulaura, but he didn’t die. His grave is all Australian now.
Everyone is my grandmother’s age, their griefs are compounding and it is true that it never diminishes—life grows around it or over it. Faith is an answer, and at their age, there is a completeness and sincerity to their belief. I believe easily in God, but that ease comes with an expectation that God is the abstract, the force, like a perfect circle with truly infinite angles. We have never seen that theoretically perfect circle, but I see it in the iris and the cross section of a stem and the sun—the same places I see God—as the refractions of something greater. Al-Baatin and Az-Zaahir. Faith seems to exist differently here. It seems more alive, more human. The adhan for me has been reduced to a notification on my phone, but here, I hear it five times a day through the windows. Not some prerecorded pristine thing, no, it is human and unique, slightly Bangladeshi pronunciation of the Arabic and all. Faith is constant and we are all living in it. My grandmother and aunt can say with certainty that their husbands and parents are waiting for them in the afterlife, can say with certainty what happens next even when I stutter and hesitate.
My grandmother tells me that, as my grandfather died, the nurse rushed her in and said “if there’s anything you want to say, please say it now, he can still hear”. My grandmother ran in and couldn’t think of what to say, but certainly, the silence was an answer itself. How do you condense a lifetime into a final phrase? My grandmother mentions that in the final week of my grandfather’s life, the nurse told her that “we are just waiting”. She told the whole story in Bangla, but that one phrase remained, in the same English that the nurse used. My grandmother is an intelligent woman. She knows that is how language, or the memory of language, functions.
My grandmother’s hearing aids sit like kidney beans or embryos or hippocampi on the wooden desk; next to her glasses and a half-popped blister pack of Panadol Osteo. I take down all my jewellery, placing the imitation gold haphazardly on the desk as well. My mother calls us both ‘amma’. My grandmother doesn’t hear that well, so she turns around when her daughter says the word, even if it’s directed to me. There’s a slight difference in the tone each time; I can’t pinpoint it, but I am good at recognising who she’s talking to. There’s always this strange pang when I turn and realise she was talking to my grandmother instead. My grandmother asks if an ambulance siren, blaring outside the apartment, is the adhan.
When my grandmother prays, she only raises her hands midway into the air when she mouths allahu akbar—amma speculates that it’s because the prayer set she usually uses would lift off if she tried to raise her hands further. It’s one of those situations where we structure our actions around something so firmly that we persist in our ways even after that thing is no longer around. We see it in grief and memory and small habits so innocuous we forget their origins.
My grandfather is always here. I don’t think a day goes by that my mother and grandmother don’t mention him. My grandmother tells me, in whispers, ‘your mother is so much like her father’. Amma, separately, tells me that she always feels she is exactly the same as her dad. Jane Hirshfield says “Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried. / As pain after it’s ended stays in the body: / A woman moves her hands oddly / because her grandfather passed through / a place he never spoke of.” My memories of Kulaura are few and far between, but my grandfather did speak of this country. Like a preacher could spend their morning talking about the trees and the oceans without ever mentioning God by name, my family speaks of lights and smoke and bright green buildings. There’s a recording on my laptop, taken from my mother’s old phone, where I, with my far younger eleven-year-old voice, ask my grandfather for the story of his life. His voice was shot from the chemotherapy and the mild smoking habit he picked up after being diagnosed with lung cancer (he felt it was unfair to get lung cancer without having smoked enough), but he recalled his old school and old friends and old country in the new country he knew he would die in. He spoke about physics.
There is a hadith which says that “if the Day of Resurrection were established upon one of you, and in his hand is a sapling, then he should plant it.” I come to the conclusion that this is why you give the final phrase or the final silence to the dying man, this is why you let those neurons fire even when they will fail soon. The action is the point—no matter if it is remembered or if it comes to any grand conclusion.
I had a bout of tinnitus early in the trip and it resumes intermittently, though the sound of the city continues in my other ear.
My mother and grandmother cough and frown and hold one another in the same way. They don’t laugh the same way, no, I realised that when we visited my grandmother’s sister. The sisters share their laugh so precisely it feels absurd. When we leave, they hug tightly; I am unsure where my grandmother ends and her sister begins, and their voices seem to whisper the same dhikr.
My mother and grandmother both speak standard Bangla and they seem to feel at ease when speaking Syhleti around Sylhetis. I speak my slightly stunted Bangla down the street and speak English wherever it’s understood. Amma is perfectly fluent in all our dialects. When my grandmother wants to make a point, she repeats it in English; when I want to make a point, I repeat it in Bangla. When I fell ill, my grandmother said “how are you feeling?” in English, I responded in Bangla. There is care in the translations between us. I think I communicate more through actions. My grandmother coughs like a gunshot and I bring her a bottle of water, I hand her the walking stick discreetly when she stands up.
My grandmother buys Quran books with Bangla translations and pronunciations so she can teach her youngest grandchildren, my cousins. The Arabic of our God gets sieved through Bangla in her mind, the way it is sieved through English in mine.
Amma speaks louder than me, so she can talk to my grandmother more easily. This problem with volume seems to come up in my life more often than I would like. I sat an exam last year where I pretended to be a doctor and had to ask mock-patients questions about their health. One of these women presented with an ear infection, and logically, I knew that I should increase my volume, but some strange, horrible knot in my throat forbade me from that. I recall a time, when I was six or seven, when I thought about how my father’s mother had died a few years prior, and perhaps I realised what that truly meant for the first time. It was an absurd scene, really; I was in the backseat of our family hatchback in the Westfield shopping centre carpark, and I just started crying. I couldn’t explain it at all, and I remember, so distinctly, my parents saying to one another that I must be hungry and frustrated. The unnameable thing has always been the object of my preoccupation. I have built up all this language to avoid that. Sometimes my silences persist.
There are lots of characters in the stories I write who linger in doorways and hesitate before they knock and maybe don’t enter at all. I seem to be endlessly fascinated with the language of action, the language of the unspoken, everything we cannot see and every act of love unnoticed, like the natural worship of living. Though I struggle to verbalise it, I want to listen to the people I love speaking without any apprehensions—I recall a line in Charli XCX’s ‘Talk talk’ where she says “Talk to me in your own made-up language / Doesn’t matter if I understand it”.
I have found that I don’t mind the traffic in Bangladesh too much. I’m sure I would be annoyed if I lived here, but for now, I love to people-watch, or road-watch, or chicken-watch the fine warped cages wavering down the highway. But at one point, we were on the sixth hour of a journey that was meant to be four hours, with another six hours to go. We were being guided by a thin Kulauran driver with paan-stained teeth who had been driving for twenty-four hours straight. After Maghrib, the roads became dark. What I remember most is the fog: inescapably white and opaque, we weren’t able to see a single thing before us. A car would be reduced to two faint dots of headlights and a truck was six, a motorbike would have one light, darting and weaving. As though the driver was walking through his house with his eyes closed, feeling for the table and the couch in familiar places, he traced the turns in the meandering road from Dhaka to Kulaura. My grandmother, that morning, had been so desperate to pray Tahajjud that she felt her way through the dark, almost-familiar apartment to her prayer chair. There were a few people walking on the road to Kulaura, silhouetted by fog and the high beam headlights of trucks driving on the wrong side of the road. The three of us fell asleep at different points in the drive—once in a while, the driver was speaking and I, in my dazed state, wondered if he was speaking to us or himself. The fog made everything indistinguishable—my grandmother couldn’t recall the road leading into the house my grandfather grew up in. We, uncertainly, pulled into a long dirt patch, my grandmother said “oh, this might not be it”, but stopped mid-sentence when she saw her relatives standing outside. We were meant to arrive by midday, but they had waited until midnight for us. I don’t have any clear visions of the afterlife but I have vignetted that scene in my mind. Sometimes I worry I focus too much on the world, but I love the world for its people; that is the common thread between now and soon. The afterlife may be the clearing, the people who you haven’t seen in decades suddenly standing before you, breathing and warm.
In my grandfather’s childhood home, a small framed photograph of him hangs high on the bedroom wall. He looks to be around forty years old. On Victory Day, we visit the schools that my grandfather set up. The high school, named after his father, consists of two large buildings surrounding a playing field. The new building has been painted white and light pink, the older building is white with a brown and green tin roof. There is a cow in the distance. The girls’ cricket team plays a short match, their jerseys have my grandmother’s name on the back. The students perform songs, dances, poems, skits.
My grandfather set up a stipend for girls to attend the school when he saw they were being kept home. Now, the girls seem to be outperforming everyone. I obsess over the idea of fate at times, but it seems so clear—all of us or none of us could have been educated and all of us or none of us could have been sequestered to an entirely domestic life. It seems impossible that a small stipend can so drastically change the trajectory of that fate. I have all these grand desires to be talented and accomplished; I become an anxious wreck when I realise that I can’t know everything in the world and I forget that it is sheer luck which has given me the option to desire these things at all.
My grandmother gives a small speech about my grandfather—how this was always his dream. In the principal’s office, there’s a framed photo of my grandfather, this time without glasses, high on the wall beside the trophies that the girls’ cricket team has won. In ‘Fathers, 2006’ Taysir Batniji constructs a series of photographic portraits around the framed pictures of late founders hanging in Palestinian workplaces. Standing beneath the portrait creates this “in-between space”, as described by Batniji, between the private shrine and the public place. In this moment, the memory is simultaneously shared across the school, and entirely my own. I seldom imagine my grandfather like this somber portrait though; he was always smiling when he was alive. We visit the primary school that carries his name, the Shahadath Ali Public School. Closed for the holidays, the building is surrounded by low-lying crop fields, with a bridge leading into the school, bright murals painted onto the walls, and tall gates all around. The days here are short. At sunset, I see a water buffalo and play badminton.
I often think back to the opening of Surah Al-Infitar, which contains a vision of judgement day; when the sky is torn apart, and the stars fall away, when the seas burst forth, and the graves are laid open, each soul will know what it has done and what it has left undone. My grandfather has done and done and done. We visit a relative who still says that my grandfather taught him everything he knows about computers. One of my grandfather’s employees came to visit my grandmother and speak about the old days. A man in the shop tells us that he attended the Shahadath Ali Public School. One of my grandfather’s friends, shortly after his death, was desperate to see my uncle because he looked like my grandfather from a certain angle. This seems to be the afterlife, and it is so full of love.
My grandmother sorts through the crockery that she collected with my grandfather all around the world—her whole life is laid out here. She says “sentimental” in English even when the rest of the sentence is in Bangla.
People say Shahadath Ali was the kind of person where, upon hearing his laugh from the other room, you’d begin to laugh just for the joy of it. He would talk to people in the elevator for what seemed like no reason at all, but there was always a reason—that fleeting warmth, that closeness, a tangent off a circle and that brief knowing. He was orphaned at a young age, so he became good at speaking to anyone and everyone. I see that in Amma: with an unimaginable ease, she keeps asking everyone—every friend and rickshaw driver and fruit-seller—what they think of the government, what they think of the future of this country after the uprising. I always wince at the question, but most people seem to have a similar answer; they want the best for Bangladesh and are simultaneously doubtful and hopeful. My grandfather specialised in nuclear physics. He told me all about systems analysis and computer programming in the 70s. He explained what he did and I could feel that I entirely understood it, even with my silly eleven-year-old brain.
As we board the departing flight from Bangladesh, my grandmother says she knows her insistence on worship may seem excessive at times, but then she begins a story about how she and my grandfather went on Hajj two decades ago and prayed for my mother to have a child after so many years of trying. I was born a year later. My grandmother tells me that this was the moment her faith became most firm; that this is one of the reasons she can continue to believe so strongly in God. I think about all the small miracles I have noted in my life, all the light tugs of the divine; I think about the miracle of living itself. In Sydney, we pass by the Rookwood Necropolis and my grandmother says that her younger daughter is resting here. She died as an infant from a congenital heart condition. Her name rhymes with my mother’s. I gifted my grandmother a digital tasbih a few months ago, fitted with a counter that mimics the beads under one’s thumb. She has reached sixty thousand, and she tells me that this is an underestimation because, once, my five-year-old cousin accidentally reset it. In the car, mid-conversation, before sleep and in the morning, there is no moment of silence or absence where she is not thinking about God. She tells me that she is always praying for me, all her grandchildren, her daughters, both living and dead, her sons, her husband, her parents. I find an afterlife in her prayers. My understanding of faith can only exist in her shadow.
My grandmother returns to her own house. I return to my mother’s. We unpack the carry-on luggage. I sleep in my own bed and dream of fog.
