The Kite and the Ant – First Part

Sutrapur, Old Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 2020

 

The first time I met Duronto he had just turned ten.

I will never forget that moment. Not because it left an indelible mark on my life – nothing exceptional; but because there are scenes that suddenly appear before our eyes, like epiphanies, where every element is in the right place.

As in a photograph that came out well.

Walking through the dusty streets of Sutrapur, in Old Dhaka, I walked along a wall of an indefinable ancient color until it opened into a passage from which, at the end, stood a ruined palace with walls painted as in the festival of Holi. Once upon a time it was certainly an elegant and dignified palace.

 

Crossing the threshold he appeared.

A little boy intent on flying a reluctant white paper kite with a tail with pink plumes.

He was wearing a yellow t-shirt, black sweatpants with a red stripe down the side and black sandals.

The skin the same color as the walls of the palace.

I entered the courtyard without him even sparing me a glance, caught up in his epic struggle against the wind: his angry gaze and the newly formed muscles of his arm twitching with each pull of the rope.

In front of him is the heavy ruin of an ancient building, apparently abandoned for centuries if it weren't for some colorful clothes hanging to dry on the balcony supported by wooden scaffolding.

At the edges of each side garbage.

I sat down on the dusty steps that led up to the dark door in the center of the main building.

I lit a cigarette.

After a couple of minutes the boy dropped the kite on the ground, ran a hand through his tuft of black hair and came to sit a step below me.

“Do you have a cigarette?” He asked me with a sidelong glance.

“No.” I replied.

He muttered some insult with his arms on his knees opened in a V, his toenails perfectly black at the tips like crescents of lunar eclipses.

“What is your name?”

“Duronto”, he told me with his voice always modulated in a challenging tone.

“Nice name.” I said looking at his jet black hair.

“Na! It sucks!” He responded by starting to move impatiently, swinging his legs.

“Why aren't you at school?”

“I don't feel like...”

“Hmmm… If you don't go to school you'll never go anywhere.”

He turned and jumped up, rubbing the red dirt off the back of his overalls.

“And where should I go!?” He exploded in sarcastic laughter.

I stood up too, looking at the night-dark door.

“Do they live here?”

“Sure! It looks like a ghost house but they live there! Think of it as a hostel: the male students who go to university sleep there.”

He always responded smiling.

“Hmmm…And you live here?”

“Yes! Do you want to see my 5 star hotel?”

He said going to retrieve the kite from the ground.

“It is far?” I asked, walking down two steps.

“Nah!! Back here: come! But be careful! Its beauty could put your eyes out!”

He exclaimed with a grin as he ducked into a small alley adjacent to the right corner of the hostel.

As I turned the corner I saw a row of small, low ocher houses on the left side of the compound and trees intertwining their roots with the bricks at the base of the hostel wall on the opposite side.

There was movement, with children dashing from side to side at the bottom of the little street. Duronto had stopped in front of the first hut, indicating the entrance with his right arm.

“This is my palace...” while with his left arm he pointed behind a tree: “...and this is my mother.”

I had to take a couple of steps to see that behind a gray trunk there was a woman bent over a gas stove, surrounded by iron pans and thalas* on whose surfaces red sauces flashed; in front of her a hut made of plastic advertising sheets and wooden logs pointed in a pyramid. I couldn't tell if she was sitting on a stone or not, her long black and white flowered shirt fell to the ground until it was red at the edge. Long hair tied in a ponytail behind her, the face tired and unfriendly.

She looked at us for a moment then went back to tinkering with the ladle in the red broth in which domes of boiled eggs emerged like wreckage after a shipwreck.

Being able to see inside the house was impossible: it was so dark that, even in broad daylight, no shape could be seen in the darkness.

The door was so low that Duronto could just fit in without bending down.

They were all like this, only the covering on the roofs changed which varied from the usual plastic advertising posters to sheets of metal, bus tyres, wood and black rubbish bags.

The child threw the kite inside without entering and ran towards the end of the dirt road. I followed him without the mother even sparing me a glance.

Other women, always on the same side, tinkered with fires, pots and intense smells of chilli and spices, each in their own corner of the improvised kitchen among the tree trunks; after all, those red brick shacks were barely enough to sleep or shelter from the rain.

 

I passed like a ghost until I came to a large gap in the walls that opened onto a large square enclosure in the middle of gray and green buildings.

Two football goals without a net from one end to the other and in the middle, among the dust, dozens of children running, screaming and kicking a dirty ball.

The clouds full of gray trudged across the sky like enormous tired pachyderms, dropping, out of pity, every now and then a few rays of sunshine onto the pitch.

I went and sat on a brick hill on the left side, watching those kids running like hell through clouds of red dust. At a certain point, as if from nowhere, an elderly man appeared with a long white jacket over a blue striped lungi and a black piece of cloth that wrapped him from his left shoulder to the right side, covering his chest and belly, the face cooked by sun and a white goatee beard that framed his chin.

He smiled looking at the children.

He crossed the edge of the playing field and, with his hands in the air intent on screwing in invisible light bulbs, began to crow happily, hopping from one foot to the other like a rooster.

“Keo mala keo toshbi gole

Tai to ki jaat bhinno bole

Jawa kingba ashar kale

Jater chinnho roy kishe...”*

 

“One calls it Mala and another Toshbi

Is that's the reason for religions to vary?

In the time of arrival or departure.

What signs of religion do you carry?”

 

He sang at the top of his lungs and smiled.

 

Some children stopped playing and took small stones and threw them at the man.

“Are Bandhari! Shut up you crazy old man!”

The old man covered his face while continuing to dance and sing, until an old woman with white, shaggy hair wrapped in a red three-piece suit with orange flowers came behind him.

She pulled the man by the jacket while she railed against the children.

“Go to school! May Manasa* bite your ears!”

The children burst out laughing and began singing in chorus as they following the ball:

“Megher kole rod heseche

Badol geche tuti

Ha.. ha..ha..ha..haaa...

Aj amader chuti o bhai aj amader chuti...”*

 

“The sun smiles behind the clouds

It's not raining anymore, what a joy!

Today is our holiday, oh brother, today is our holiday...”

 

Buriganga. Old Dhaka. Bangladesh, February 2020

 

It was a surreal scene and I couldn't decide whether the elderly couple or the ocher colored children with their voices in sync were funnier.

The sun hid itself again with the shadows of the clouds drawing the earth like alpana* in black and white.

After half an hour the children stopped playing football and one of them took a piece of lungi out of his pocket and twirled it in the air. Some of them squealed excitedly, others went and sat on the sidelines.

Duronto came towards me with sweat and dust on his cheeks and forehead.

“Let's go! I don't like playing kanamachi*: it's boring!”

I followed him amused and, partly, flattered at having been recruited as his companion for the morning.

“But who was that man?” I asked him.

“A crazy old man. He doesn't hurt anyone, he likes to sing and dance like a turkey.”

“Hmmm. And luckily he doesn't hurt anyone: you stoned him in the head!”

He turned around with a smile that could easily have also been a slap: “But did you hear what a voice he had!”

And he quickened the pace just as we walked in front of his mother. Nothing. She kept stirring the ladle in her broth.

We exited through the door in front of the old Khalangar men's dormitory.

“Where do we go?”

“Let's go to the river.”

The river of course was the Buriganga: the old Ganga.

The indolent muddy boa that had passed through Dhaka for centuries, faithful lover of merchants who unload goods from boats to supply Shyam Bazar, the warm and colorful heart of Old Dhaka.

We walked one behind the other, close to the walls of the shops to avoid the cars, the auto-rickshaws, the carts loaded with sacks pulled by Sisyphs stunned by betel.

“You can buy me bakarkhani* later.”

He told me without turning around as he elbowed aside the men with jute bags on their heads.

“Accha!”

The long staircase led down to the river bank. Some stray dogs were dozing with their muzzles smeared on the ground. It was difficult to guess whether those dogs or the carts that continually docked on the bank were older.

Duronto went and sat on a square stone, facing the river.

I remained standing behind him.

“Give me a cigarette.” He said, playing with his fingers to widen a hole in his tracksuit on the right knee.

“No.”

He mumbled incomprehensible words.

“Where are your parents from?”

“Bhairab. Why? Are you from the police?”

“Are you always so nice? And your father? I did not see it...”

“Me niether.” He responded by throwing pebbles towards the river. “He's always at work. I don't even know what he does for a living!”

“I don't believe it!” I said without much conviction.

“Who cares…” He replied with a slight break in the contemptuous tone of his voice.

We followed the profiles of the boats with the same color as the water and the bent bodies of the men who shuttled from the shore to the market behind us: they looked like ants with large grains of wheat on their legs.

“What job would you like to do when you grow up?”

“Nothing. Playing football. Becoming like Messi.”

“So you could buy a nice kitchen for your mother.” I replied smiling.

Duronto threw a pebble more violently at a dog sleeping on the shore, the dog jumped up with a yelp and lolled lazily towards the boats docked on the shore. Then he stood up and, with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his overalls, looked at me and exclaimed: “I'm going to look for a cigarette. See you around!”

And he ran up the stairs zigzagging.

 

I didn't even have time to take the first step which was already lost in the colorful anthill of vegetable sellers shouting and passing coins from hand to hand.

I went back to Khalangar.

I entered the dormitory. The transition from light to darkness in the internal hallway made one blind. I climbed the ladder that twisted at the sides with a progression towards dusty beams of light.

I began to glimpse the first students crossing the corridors, similar to ghosts.

I went out into a courtyard where dozens and dozens of shirts, trousers and lungi were spread out in the sun. Splash of water revealed the presence of improvised open-air showers. Looking out from the terrace you could see the red and gray streets of the street and all around the Himalayan chain of buildings and buildings and buildings.

The adzan rang out from the loudspeakers of the mosques, filling the sky with chants.

I hadn't had time to buy the bakarkhani in Duronto.

Maybe I would never see him again in my life.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED...

 

 

*Thala, circular soup plates.

*Lalon Shah.

*Manasa, the goddess of snakes, venerated by the nomadic tribe of snake charmers, to whom their folk music called jhapan is also dedicated.

*Rabindranath Tagore.

*Alpana, or alpona (Bengali: আলপনা) is a style of South Asian folk art, traditionally practiced by women, and consisting of colorful figures, patterns and symbols painted on floors and walls with rice flour-based paints, in religious occasions.

*Kamanachi, traditional game in which one of the participating children has own eyes blindfolded by a towel.

*Bakarkhani, crunchy dessert typical of Old Dhaka.

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