The Wings Over The City – The Story Of Shimu (Part One)

© Gael Turine

For everyone she was Shimu, but she also had another name.

She and Tushar had grown up together on a side street off Pablock Road in the Mirpur district of western Dhaka.

Their houses bordered and were separated by a red brick wall about two meters high and a little more. A tree overlooked the side of Tushar's house, whose foliage crossed the wall, shading part of Shimu's courtyard.

Since childhood, they had always played together in the dusty streets of the neighborhood and had attended Mirpur Cantonment Public School & College.

Shimu lived with her family: her father, Fakhrul, with a thick black beard and an ocher tip like the teeth worn by betel*, had always driven the rickshaw and when he was not at work he spent his time at the Mirpur Ceramic Factory Jame Mosque, close to home. Her mother, Ishrat, was a tiny woman who worked in one of the many textile industries in the area, along with two of Shimu's brothers.

“We dress them all in Europe!” Shariful liked to proudly repeat, her older brother. The other sister had already been married for years and lived on the other side of Dhaka and they hardly ever met.

 

Shimu was a dreamer. Since childhood.

For Tushar, his moments with her were the best of his childhood.

As soon as they could they took a rickshaw or a CNG* and went to Dhanmondi, not so much for the trendy shopping malls and restaurants, but because Shimu loved seeing Dhaka from above. She envied her classmates who lived on the upper floors of the neighborhood's gray buildings. Tushar knew this and tried to take her to bars or public places on the upper floors of the towers that sprouted like durian thorns in the busy streets of Dhanmondi.

 

 

Shimu stuck her nose and forehead to the glass and looked down, her eyes shining.

Unforgettable was 2009, the film by Giasuddin Selim, “Monpura”*, had just been released in cinemas. They had gone to watch it together, still in the first year of school.

Oh, Shimu was delighted. On their way back they stopped sitting on red bricks a few streets from home.

When actress Farhana Mili, on the song “Jao Pakhi Bolo Tare”, dreams of meeting her sweetheart and the camera gets up on the two of them in the boat on the river, like a dragonfly, Shimu almost had tears in her eyes.

“How nice it would be to be able to fly like a bird above, to see everything, all misery and dirt from afar.” She said with a blank stare.

“But why? What's so bad about the earth?” Tushar replied, rubbing his hand on the dusty earth at his feet.

“I would like to leave all this one day, I would like to fly far, to travel. I'm tired of all this traffic, this swarming of people who don't seem to be going anywhere and everywhere. Of this gray earth dotted with the red of spit betel. Wouldn't that be nice? Fly like in the movie? Above the blue and green water?”

Shimu said enthusiastically to Tushar who, suddenly, jumped up and began to move his hands like wings imitating the actor in the film, running in a circle around the girl.

“Jao pakhi bolo taar-e
she jeno bhole na mor-e
shukhe theko bhalo theko
mone rekho e amar-eeee....*”

“Come on!!! Enough! Stupid!”

She yelled at him smiling, while she followed him rolling her head.

Tushar stopped in front of her, with hands on his thighs and out of breath.

“Uff ... Well, if that's how you want from today I'll call you Pakhi*.”

“Pakhi ???” Shimu repeated a little confused.

“If you like to fly and be a bird better call yourself Pakhi, tick ache*?”

From that day Shimu was Pakhi, for Tushar.

 

Years went by.

Until the last year of school.

Every evening Tushar climbed like a lizard on the wall, to sit on the edge with his legs dangling to look Shimu wash her salwar kameez* in the copper tub.

“Pakhi!” He called her in a shrill voice.

She looked at him for a moment, shaking her head, and went back to scrape the bar of soap hard on the wet fabric, with a smile hidden by her long black hair.

It couldn't be said that she is a beautiful girl. There were those who looked at her at school, but she was rather shy, she talked more than anything else with her girlfriends and Tushar when they went out into the street, in front of the school's iron door, to eat something on a rush, among the myriad of voices and laughter.

 

 

She was skinny, but her face was oval amber in color, her eyes seemed to take half her face and the lips were soft and thick as papaya pulp. Her knuckles were a darker brown than the color of the skin but her nails looked almost pink.

Shimu had asked him, as a favor, not to call her Pakhi in front of others, at school, or in the family, she was afraid that someone might tease her or ask too much.

 

The days were repeated similarly, one after the other, among school, study, and family.

Her brother Shariful now argued every night with his father. The girl and her mother listened to them from the kitchen; he looked like he was about to become a trade unionist. Ishrat was very worried about this.

“We have no more rights! They milk us worse than cows and when the udders are dry like empty skins they throw us overboard!” He talked out loud and tested with his father.

“How many textile factories are there in Mirpur, abba*?

Each street has a dozen: there are more textile factories than schools! Better to send our children to sew than to try to have a better future, right?”

Her mother feared for the husband's heart. She looked out the hall door, her face worried.

“Son, calm down...” Shimu was behind her listening.

“Look ammu*!” He screamed pointing to her mother. “How can you not see? They took half of her life. For whom then? Not us, no! For Westerners who make themselves beautiful, they pose with designer clothes...,” said Shariful walking with his stomach out and his hands holding his shirt as if it were the edge of a jacket, “... ignoring that on the label is written MADE IN BANGLADESH! MADE IN MIRPUR! What if ammu was one of the thousand victims of the Rana Palace*? Then you'd agree with me, wouldn't you?!”

Shimu peered from the edge of the door; her mother had already approached the chair where her husband Fakhrul was sitting.

“Enough! Don't talk to your father like that! What is his fault?”

The woman screamed more with the grimace of her face than with the tone of the voice.

“Forget it! I'd better go out, at least tomorrow I'll be calm and ready for milking!” His brother said as he went out, slamming the door.

Those were the moments Shimu wanted to fly.

Then she would go out into the courtyard and from behind the wall she would call her friend in a low voice.

After ten minutes she saw Tushar's smiling face emerge over the brick wall.

“Take me away...” she told him smiling.

 

They took a CNG and wandered through the streets of Dhaka as the sun was already setting.

But those roads knew no time, no sun or moon. The continuous motion of people moving in every direction did not stop.

Shimu looked them between the green grates of the vehicle stuck in traffic, with the green-gold ulna of her dress covering her nose and mouth from the smog.

“But what do you think ants say when they collide against each other along their line?”

The girl asked to Tushar who sat next to her, pressed into the narrow space.

He looked at her with an expression between the dumbfounded and the one who falls from the clouds.

“Eh ...?”

She burst into laughter: “Nothing, nothing...”

Shimu was a careful observer, she did not miss anything.

They entered a building in Batighor.

Inside the ascending elevator she asked where he was taking her.

“In the library,” Tushar replied excitedly.

“You? In the library?” The girl exclaimed incredulously.

As soon as they entered, he took her by the hand and dragged her between the shelves full of books.

“Pakhi, Pakhi... You never trust me.”

They went out onto a small balcony and he made her look out on the left side. A girl was reading a book while sipping a drink, sitting on a small round iron table behind them.

When Shimu looked down she was seized with deep happiness. On a roof of a low building, men were having their meal, sitting at different tables or standing.

 

 

Shimu put her elbows on the edge of the terrace and with her chin on both hands observed for a long time the random movement of black dots on the surface of the gray tile.

She could have spent hours like that – it relaxed her.

She forgot about everything.

Tushar, in the same position as her, to the left, looked down and at the girl's face, trying to understand what she saw so special about those little human ants. He began humming in a low voice.

“Meghrer opor akash ore
nodir opar pakhir basha
mone bondhu boro aasha...*”

 

That was one of those moments apparently meaningless but then we remember with melancholy when age pushed us away from those distant days.

 

The last snort of their adolescence, before school was over, was the Falgun festival*, on February 14th.

Like all the young people and the people of Dhaka, that morning they also poured into the streets and parks of the city center, wearing orange and yellow dresses and painted cheeks.

Tushar and Shimu went to the park of Dhaka University, together with their schoolmates; not before moving on to Shabagh, the flower market adjacent to the university to buy flowers to put in the hair.

 

They laughed and played games of all kinds.

In the afternoon Shimu and her companions cheered on the boys who challenged each other in a long cricket match in the park of Suhrawardy Udyan, next to the campus.

The enthusiasm was as palpable as the rough dirt of earth that rose in the run of the boys.

It was the last Falgun they celebrated as teenagers.

 

Shimu wanted to continue to university but the money was not enough. She knew that both her father and mother were oozing the last drops of energy before pulling the oars into the boat.

It was not even her mother who asked but she herself told her that she would look for a job as a maid in some house. That she didn't have to worry.

This angered her brother even more, who had now joined the workers' union.

The girl reassured her mother that she was what she wanted, she didn't have to be sad.

For Tushar, there was no drama or the slightest doubt.

He knew well that he would work, most likely his father would be able to get him into the company that was building the metro rail, the elevated train that was everyone's hope to solve the terrible traffic problem, even if everyone – in his heart – knew that little would change.

Shimu was sure she wouldn't follow her mother and her brother to one of the dozen textile factories. She wanted to at least go up and not go underground, or her light would be out forever.

 

The evening before her first day on the job, after hanging the best red and green salwar kameez on a line in the yard, she walked over to the brick wall under the tree canopy.

She looked up at the stars and whispered.

“Tushar ...? Tushar ...?”

On the other side of the wall, after a while, his voice penetrated like wind through the bricks.

“Jao pakhi bolo taar-e
she jeno bhole na mor-e
shukhe theko bhalo theko
mone rekho e amar-eee.....”

 

Shimu grinned with tight lips.

“Stupid...”

“Bolo Pakhi*...” He told her.

The girl pressed her left cheek to the rough surface of the bricks, with the evening breeze making her black hair dance in front of the face, and with a tear streaking her skin, she whispered.

“Where are you taking me tonight...?”

 

TO BECONTINUED...

* Betel (Piper betle L.) is a plant belonging to the Piperaceae family. In many Asian countries, betel is chewed so that the alkaloids are slowly released. This bolus is made from thin slices of the betel nut, dusted with lime and wrapped in betel pepper leaves.
Lime hydroxide is added to allow a better “extraction” of the alkaloids during the chewing of the bolus; consumers of coca leaves do the same; spices such as cardamom or nutmeg are added to flavor the bole.
The mild narcotic effect, the spicy aromatic taste, is given by the pepper leaves with numbness of the tongue and dry mouth. Those who chew betel quid – together with lime hydroxide – have a widespread reddish or brown mouth and teeth due to the abundant tannins of lime, such as ac. Gallic.
Betel is the fourth most self-administered psychoactive substance in the world after caffeine, alcohol and tobacco and is the most commonly used in Asia. It is estimated that over 600 million people use betel quid around the world. (www.insostanza.it)

* CNGs are one of Dhaka's means of transport: motor tricycles on which an iron cage with a seat is mounted.

* “Monpura” was a blockbuster in Bangladesh, released in 2009, directed by Giasuddin Selim, whose main song “Jao Pakhi Bolo Tare”, composed by Arnob and performed by Krishnokoli, tells of the dialogue between two lovers through a bird used as a messenger.

* “Fly bird there,
ask him to never forget me
Be happy, be content,
please remember me.”

* Pakhi means bird.

* “Do you agree?”

* Feminine dress consisting of light trousers and a blouse with a veil called ulna that falls on the shoulders or hair.

*Father.

* Mother.

* Due to a structural failure on 24 April 2013, the Rana Palace, an eight-story commercial building collapsed in Savar, a sub-district of Dhaka, with 1,129 victims and about 2,515 injured extracted alive from the building. The building contained a bank, apartments, and other shops and clothing factories. As soon as the cracks were noticed, everything was closed and the apartments cleared, except the textile factories on the lower floors, indeed the workers (including many young boys and girls) were threatened with losing their jobs if they did not come to work the next morning, just when there was the collapse. It then emerged that clothing was produced in that factory for many famous American and European brands.

* “The sky flies over the cloud,
the bird's nest across the river
My heart is full of hope.”

* Pohela Falgun (Bengali: পহেলা ফাল্গুন Pôhela Falgun or পয়লা ফাল্গুন Pôela Falgun), also known as the first day of spring of the Bengali month Falgun, is a holiday celebrated in Bangladesh. The celebration began in 1991 thanks to the students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Dhaka. Falgun's first usually falls on February 13 of the Gregorian calendar.

* “Tell me, bird”

Italian version