The Grass Catcher by Ian Wedde

Author:Ian Wedde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press

Mr Alam was boarding in our old house, in the room once occupied by my parents, and he went back to his family in Chittagong each Thursday night, returning to work on Sunday. He was moved by my fifty-nine-year-old’s retro-pilgrimage, and at the same time nervous, I realised later, of the house’s present secret. I saw him being harangued by the mill’s union rep outside the general manager’s offices, but he was making the man laugh and everybody greeted him affectionately as we did the rounds of the mill’s crumbling buildings. I imagine he was telling the union guy that I was a harmless sentimentalist who wanted to shed tears over his long-ago childhood.

He introduced me to some very old men who had known, or who claimed to remember, my father. My father was an energetic man who liked to talk to people. He walked fast. He was a kind man. He looked hard at people and scared them. He had two little boys, white-haired ones – they ran around all over the place like little goats, with no shirts on.

And since we were now completely legal as a result of the impressive upazila permission, Mr Alam and I obtained the fifth item, which was four Tk2 tickets to the Boroi Chari picnic tea garden between Chandraghona and the Kaptai dam. Here, listening to Bengali pop songs blasting out over the coloured plastic chairs and tables, we drank sweet tea, nibbled on even sweeter andosha, and then went out on the river in the same kind of beautifully curved double-ender sampan with a creaking scull-oar at the stern that had plied the huge brown river of my childhood.

‘This is your Karnaphuli,’ said Huron, and took a photo of me in the bow of the boat, with Mr Alam’s jug ear sticking in from the left. I have a look on my face halfway between sooky and bewildered, as if I’d like to ask Huron to pass the tissues again but can’t quite work out why, specifically, this time, I feel the way I do.

We went for a walk in the tea plantation across the river. Looking back, I could see the mill’s smoke rising into a humid sunset. We were going to give Mr Alam a lift back to his family in Chittagong, and I knew he was keen to go. But he didn’t rush me. He, Huron and Huron’s nephew stood on the river bank by the waiting sampan; I dithered for a while among the tea bushes. A bird was singing in the big shade trees above the plantation. It was a bulbul – I remembered its name partly because of a song Chick used to sing in Chandraghona when we were kids, one he’d learned in the Army: ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’.

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