This Is the Way I Grew Up

Back then 

you had no idea condoms could have some secret uses. In your neighborhood, all of you boys know how to use them though. They are just fine clear balloons. Phokna. Raja brand. The cheapest and the most popular. Each square silver pack shines with the elegant image of a king’s bust. With an unmistakable crown. A king of spades. The silent kings on small pouches proudly hang in rows, in abundance, in every corner store and kiosk. Even at tea stalls. You just walk up to any and ask: One phokna, please. 25 paisa each. Four for a taka. The vendor mechanically tears one off and hands it to you. Like selling candies. Poor skinny street boys, or some with fat bellies full of worms, know where to get the free ones. They, you’ve seen, look for the littered ones often spotted by the open-air roadside dustbins. Unrolled and unpacked. Dirty but dry. The teat ends prominent like the extended stub of a watermelon. 

Used or fresh from the pouch, all of you kids know they make good balloons. Easy to blow (wide mouth), and they stretch super fantastically. Take twice the size of an oblong watermelon once blown. Impossibly transparent. Almost an elongated giant bubble. There are a variety of ways to play with them. Water balloon games, for instance. Inside, you can see the water crystal clear. Cool, na? The only annoying part maybe is the lubricant that sticks around your mouth when blowing. But who cares? Wipe it off just once with the back of your hand. 

But the real fun? Letting the balloons fly. Fill it with cooking gas straight from the single burner (your cousin shows you how). And ho and lo. It rises. Goes up and up. Up in the air. Your mother yells at you once in a while. Not for playing with these fine balloons, but for using the gas burner. Why? you wonder. You’re not playing with fire. Just gas. Many years later, in a lazy Athens afternoon, you look back and think how in an Old Dhaka neighborhood, the kids of your generation happily grew up on Raja.  

The outhouse 

overflowed almost every month. Four families. Two outhouses. Damp, dark, corners thick with cobwebs. Around twenty people used them. Day and night. It was no one’s responsibility to keep them clean. The lingering, overwhelming stench never left. The foul lunatic lived there. Unless there was rain with a pleasant blowing wind that would ease the air for a while. 

We lived in a rented home that looked off-grid. A townhome, technically, owned by a single owner. There was electricity. But no running water. No attached toilet (except for a washroom—a privilege we had, most neighbors hadn’t). In those days, in that part of Old Dhaka, in the 1980s, every family had a washroom and an outhouse. Separate from each other. Or the two together under one roof, divided by a half-wall. And no bathrooms had sinks. Those were only seen in hotels and restaurants.

To use the outhouse—the squat toilet, you had to carry your own bodna pot to wash yourself afterward. Toilet tissue? We heard about it. But what was the point of using it? You got to wash your butt anyway. We’re not whiteass. The first time I had to use toilet tissue was when I broke my arm. I was in 6^th grade. It was my left arm, so I had no other choice but to use my right arm to clean myself. Shame, shame! Right arm for eating. Left arm for… you know, to do that business.

Sometimes, when the dim, dawn-like yellow bulb burned out in the outhouse, no one cared to replace it for days. One neighbor expected the other to do it. The other waited for the other to do it. Thus, a week or so passed. Then to answer the call of nature, you’d find yourself carrying a bodna in one hand and clutching a candle and matchbox in the other. That was no big deal though. During prolonged and frequent power cuts we had to use candles anyway. And during the rains, you had to take an umbrella with you to get there. The worst and worst part was when the outhouse overflowed. Again, the same thing. One neighboring family would blame the other. Why don’t you take care of it? The landlord will pay. Thus, days would go by.  Using the outhouse in that condition was a nightmare. I’m talking real shit here, man. Let’s not talk about it. 

The Methor Man

came trailing his sewer tools. Long, split bamboo slats. He worked alone. In his undershirt and lungi tucked up. Those were not the days of gloves and protective coveralls. All the dirty work he did with his bare hands. The day he came all the sewer manholes along the walkway opened up. Came alive. Breathed. Abominable air swirled. It was a half-day’s work for him. The whole time, we kept our windows closed. We even avoided crossing his path while he worked. What if he accidentally brushed past us? He is a Methor Man. The shit cleaner. The untouchable. 100 taka, or a little over 100 with tips. That was all his wages. This was his side job though.  

He was a cycle rickshaw mechanic. A big box of tools by the roadside. Under the open sky. That was his shop. He also rented out bicycles. Five taka for half an hour. Ten for an hour. That was how I taught myself to ride. Me. Me alone. In the alleys of Narinda. No one helped me. No dad. No cousin. No friends. It took me a month maybe. I call this Methor Man my first bicycle dad. 

The Bua 

slept occasionally in your kitchen. The part-time maid worked at several houses. In yours she was paid only for carrying water. In a kolsi pot. From the roadside WASA tap to the earthen motka drum in your washroom. The Bua was a small thirtyish woman. Pockmarked face with a pearl nose stud, too large for her profile. Your mother allowed her to sleep free in the kitchen. It was no trouble for anyone though. She came late when everyone was in bed and left early when everyone was still in bed. Her bed was just a mat on the cement floor. Sometimes without a pillow. Sometimes your father grumbled. Poor woman, your mother would say. She does extra work for me.

One day you woke up to drink and holy moly. You’d never seen anything like this. The Bua. Dead to sleep in her bed. Supine. One leg stretched straight, the other loosely bent, knee dangling, forming a lopsided obtuse shape. Her thighs wide open, lady parts staring skyward. Her surreptitious sari, forgetting its duty to cover what it meant to, resting around her waist. You took the best, longest glance ever and then looked away. A first not-intentional glance is no sin, so says your religion. You were dying to look again. But you were a devout Muslim boy then, prayed five times, fasted and all. It was not the fear of hellfire though. A second stare-like glance would just be wrong, so ruled your moral mind. Even though at that age, you honestly didn’t mind fucking a rock. You didn’t mind carving the first letter of your desired girl’s name on your forearm. (Which you did one afternoon while your mother was asleep. With your geometry compass. Heating it in low flame of the chula burner. All for the girl who never cared to bat an eye at you.) 

Anyway, you let your moral mind win. You walked back to your room not turning your head. Not drinking a sip of water. Back to bed with a thirst deeper than before. A thirst that kept you awake the rest of the night. And many more uncountable nights. 

The old roadside WASA tap

stood on the main street. Our primary source of our water, just a minute’s walk from home. Every day, three times a day, the public tap came alive and died after two hours or so. During those hours, the water point got busy and noisy. Like the constant caw caw clamor of squabbling crows. An hour before the water ran, a quiet procession of kolsi pots, pails, and other containers would already be in line. Waiting. Once the water came, the containers stirred. Moved and moaned. Cling clang clattering echoed. And bickering and quarreling would break out. Suddenly. Something would always happen. Someone would always break the line. 

Every now and then, I’d find myself there among the water collectors. When our part-time Bua was late. Or on the days the maid was away visiting her family in the village. Sometimes Mother and I split the job. Carrying the kolsi, I’d meet her halfway, where she’d take it and hand me the empty one. Often I’d run into Mehedi’s sister or the girls with whom there was always the possibility things turning amoristic (but never did). They caught a glimpse of me and smiled a wry smile. I’d die in embarrassment cursing myself. For being a water runner. For being born into a humble family and having such fun.   

In our two-bed tin-shed rented home, in the washroom with no attached toilet, there was a tiny water reservoir. That wasn’t a reservoir really. Just a 3-foot-deep hollow connected to the municipal water main. It never got any water. No point of complaining about it. The water line must have been installed back in the 60s, when the country was another country. Tell you the truth, back home these things always need a revamp every ten years. As they say, unlike the rising population, the water level drops every year.

Then, almost every summer, at least a few times, even the roadside water source would go dry. The weathered blue WASA water truck, with a big logo of a droplet, would arrive. Grudgingly. To provide us with liquid life. But only after putting in request after request, begging after begging from the residents desperate for a bucket of water. In those water-stricken summer days, the residents turned desert nomads, searching for water here and there. Many would transport it by rickshaw from other neighborhoods, where some water points may not have dried up yet. “Bangladesh is a riverine country.” The statement would sound like a pure joke this time.  Not to mention the River Buriganga was barely an hour walk from home. Water is life. I read it in the school textbook many times. But only during those roaring dog days of summer did I truly grasp what it meant. How every ounce of water could be as precious as blood. I remembered the countless moments I’d seen when not a soul was at the roadside tap to collect water. Evening, especially. The lonely tap would go running and running and running. And the water would go to waste, go straight down the open drain. All because every public tap was an open tap. Open, yes. I’m talking about the Old Dhaka in the late eighties and the early nineties. Those were not the times of bottled water and high-rise apartments. Things were really different then.

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RAHAD ABIR is a writer from Bangladesh. His debut novel Bengal Hound won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction. He has an MFA in fiction from Boston University. He is the recipient of the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into French and Hindi. His short story, “Mr. Moti,” is featured in a secondary school English textbook in Bangladesh. He teaches at Georgia State University.

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