K Anis Ahmed’s debut book of short stories, Good Night, Mr. Kissinger, opens in 1970, before the Bangladesh Liberation War and focuses on the ordinary daily lives of people and their desires, locating them within a dynamically changing postcolonial nation and its evolving history. The stories are concise and elegant, bringing into focus characters from various parts of society, all of whom look at the city of Dhaka in myriad different and interesting ways. As Simona Supekar put it, Anis Ahmed’s “characters are young and purple-haired; they ‘hop over to burger joints,’ play video games, watch porn, commit suicide, are atheists, read philosophy, operate wine cellars, participate in capitalism, and so on.” Many of these people also attempt to fulfil their desires and fail. Many of these people face events after which nothing remains the same. Their stories describe these tragedies and failures through intelligent, compelling prose without giving into sentimentality, as the readers bear witness.
Unlike most writers who in their reviews of this book have focused on the story from which the title of the book is derived, in this article I look at a common thread which seems to tenderly hold together some of the other stories in the book—the thread of loss and its inevitability. The protagonists in these stories are often incapable of resisting forces stronger than themselves and end up losing something immensely precious to them. The literary space holds these losses together, as it tries to capture through language moments of intense sorrow and fleeting happiness. The negotiations between restriction and desire keep the readers captive, suggesting that there is both a cultural and a universal aspect to loss. This is something that the narrator in the story “Losing Ayesha” understands very well at the premature age of seven. One day he sleeps for a long time and is not woken up on time by his family, and as a result, he misses playing with his closest friend, Raqib. He plays with Raqib every day and yet this one missed opportunity becomes intensely painful for him. At this point, the seven-year old goes through a realization which is almost Proustian in a sense, when he comes to terms with the fact that no one could give him back that particular afternoon just as no hour later could replace the hour that is gone. The elders are incapable of comprehending what he wants to explain to them. The narrator says:
“I railed at my mother and at Moti Mama until I broke down into inconsolable sobs. What’s gone is gone! Didn’t they understand? I kicked the ball with all the frustrated rage of my seven-year old body, and watched it fly out through the open living-room door into the barely visible lawn … I could suddenly see the fragility and the deception of our routines. They created a sense of recurrence where all that existed was a vanishing presence.”
The sense of loss here is of a very specific nature. What makes it specific is its irretrievability, its irrevocability. This is why the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus had exclaimed that one can never step into the same river twice. The boy understands that not even his mother can protect him against the passage of time, against the loss of opportunities. It is at this moment that he learns to recognize sorrow. The loss of this afternoon becomes symptomatic of far more profound sorrows that he and several other characters in the book would have to live through and struggle with in course of time.
The art of losing is hard to master
In most of these stories, the people surrounding the protagonists are not capable of understanding how devastating losing certain things is to them. As a result, there is a lack of empathy on their part, which is also beautifully captured through these stories. In the story, “The Poetry Audition”, a young boy called Jamshed desperately desires to become a poet, after taking into account many other options in life. In his love for poetry he even begins to see traces of Bengali poems in the works of Pound, Eliot, Auden, Mallarmé, Valéry, and Aragon, until his brother Bahram forces him to understand that most of the Bengali poets Jamshed was thinking of were born after the death of these European poets. However, when Jamshed tells his father about his passion and that he wishes to establish himself as a poet, his father vehemently opposes his decision. He is incapable of understanding that writing poetry can be treated as full time work. For him, both his sons need real jobs.
K Anis Ahmed | Photo: Syed Zakir Hossain Even though Jamshed tells him, “Devotion can’t be part-time,” his father refuses to listen. In order to solve this quandary, he invites to his house all the elderly relatives of the family to listen to his son’s poems and decide what should be the course of action. The chief guest would be Maulana Arakan Khan, a very learned man who knew extensively about both Eastern and Western poetry. In panic, the brothers decide that Jamshed should translate the poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud into Bengali and read them out in front of the esteemed audience. According to Bahram, they would not recognize the plagiarized poems, possibly because they belonged to an older generation. But we see that this plan completely backfires. The audience is much more orthodox than the brothers had perhaps anticipated. Anis Ahmed writes:
“The Mawlana arrived with his usual retinue of petty clerics—all of them robed and bearded like the Mawlana himself. But what in the Mawlana’s case gave a sense of nobility, suggested in his followers only meanness. The smell of the cheap attar, the black kohl on their eyelashes, everything was repulsive. Most of them had tinged their beards with mehendi. These reddened beards not only indicated their religiosity, but for the doubters they also served the purpose of a political barometer. The more the country tilted towards orthodoxy, the redder became the beards.”
These are clearly people who are very different from Jamshed and Bahram. Inevitably, there is a clash of tradition and modernity at this point. The Mawlana who deeply admires poems written by Omar Khayyam as well as the Romantics refuses to look at poetry produced by modernists as authentic poetry. At the same time, there is the question of what constitutes culture for different people. Hence, the Mawlana tells Jamshed:
“In your poems, there is so much passion, yet so little soul. Why, why does it ring so hollow? Is it because you shallowly imitate Western poets? Why do you write about despair and nihilism? Their history is not your history. What is all this talk of boredom and isolation? Why do you sing songs of lament—it is the century of their defeats, their mortal disasters. But you are misguided by your modern education”
Thus, in this story we see a conundrum, even an aporia that postcolonial nations often have to encounter and come to terms with i.e. the question of what should constitute culture. It is undeniable that the Mawlana has a strong argument and that it is necessary for the youth of the country to know their roots. He suggests that Jamshed should start his understanding of poetry through Firdausi and later move on to others. However, perhaps he refuses to take into account that for a postcolonial nation and its inheritors, it is quite impossible to go back to an un-hybridized past since culture is an ambivalent and contradictory zone, whose purity is often particularly difficult to maintain. And while his arguments have weight, he is at the same time crushing the hopes and dreams of a young boy. As a result, Jamshed is forced to give up on his passion and his desire, and it is decided that he would have to join the army. He could continue learning poetry but only if he followed the Mawlana’s choice. The ending leaves Jamshed sitting in a corner, dejected and defeated and his brother incapable of providing any consolation.
Both “Chameli” and “Losing Ayesha” are also stories of loss, but of a very different kind. They read like melancholy, half-forgotten memories of first love—poignant, fragmented and transitory. The readers can reconstruct the image of the two girls, Chameli and Ayesha through the narratives of their reminiscing lovers. In both situations, the narrators are aware that their love would not last. Galib knows that Chameli is Punjabi and even at his young age, he understands that this otherness would not let them be together for a long time. Even then, when his father tells him to not meet Chameli anymore, he feels numb and his own father becomes incomprehensible to him. He wonders: “Who was this man, and why was he talking to him? How had he never noticed what an uncomprehending brute he was? What did they have in common? The man was an alien. Why did he live in this house?” The differences between the two generations as well as the differences between the sensible, logical world of adults and that of children are laid bare. But there is nothing that Galib can do to change the future. But even when loss it predictable, there is a notion of irreducibility to it. Even when one expects it from the beginning of the story, it leaves the protagonists empty and shattered. Hence the narrator senses Ayesha gradually moving away from him through tiny agonizing moments but he can do nothing about it except wait for the upcoming separation. He asks himself, “Why prolong—let alone—deepen something that was, in any event, headed for dissolution?” but continues meeting Ayesha in spite of this. In the end, what remains is either “a mix of perfume and self-delusion” or an empty blue house which was once inhabited by someone special. Memory turns into a story, the real seems unreal but the ache continues to linger. What creates continuity amongst these pasts jostling with each other is the city of Dhaka.
Cities, visible and invisible
The city in this book is a multiplicity. We can hear, feel and get glimpses of a Dhaka that is not seen from a single perspective. Even within specific stories, various cities co-exist at the same time. One can remember what Italo Calvino had said in his Invisible Cities, while speaking of Maurilla:
“… sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.”
Thus in the story, “Elephant Road”, the Dhaka that Aninda inhabits is not the same as the Dhaka which the boy whom he encounters accidentally, is familiar with. After losing his job, a worried Aninda decides to go to his favourite restaurant at the far end of Elephant Road for one last time. However, while leaving, he comes across people running after a boy, trying to catch him. Without realizing what he is doing, Aninda sticks his foot out so that the boy trips and falls, resulting in his getting badly beaten up by the crowd and sent to the hospital by the police. Although Aninda later tries to apologize to this boy, he is never forgiven. Instead, as the boy pledges revenge against him, Aninda makes a hasty escape. Hence, there are two separate Elephant roads here: the Elephant road that Aninda passes and leaves behind eventually, finding refuge in his shop in the opposite direction at Old Town and the Elephant Road which remains dangerous for the boy, where he can face mob violence once again. These two cities had come into conversation fleetingly in the space of the story as Aninda briefly met, befriended and lost the boy.
Thus, the city of Dhaka is collectively being written by several characters in the book, from 1970s to contemporary times. This is why Grady Harp points out in his review of the book:
“Each of the stories is connected in threads to the city of Dhaka, the largest city in Bangladesh … Each story stands alone, though with a bit of detective work it becomes evident that the talented Anis Ahmed has woven a tapestry that looks at the city from many vantages and through many characters’ eyes, but the flavor of this city (whether in the midst of it, away from it or returning to it) is the constant.”
Forty Steps was shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize; The World in my Hands was published in 2013 Similarly, André Naffis-Sahely, while comparing Anis Ahmed’s portrayal of Dhaka to Manto’s Bombay and Joyce’s Dublin, agrees that Dhaka emerges as the chief subject in the book. It is not simply a backdrop. But there is also the lingering realization of constantly losing an older Dhaka, a Dhaka that was and a Dhaka that will never be the same again—a Dhaka that someone who leaves, can never return to. Therefore, the story “Chameli” not just shows us, through the eyes of a young boy, the loss of childhood love but also the loss of the city in which he was growing up. Towards the end, Galib wakes up because of the noise made by rolling tanks and booming mortars. Yahya Khan’s army has arrived. One can sense the imminent changes that Dhaka will go through within the next few months and eventually in the next few years. Galib’s family manages to escape but by the time they return to Dhaka, Galib has lost both his first love and the Dhaka he knew. In the same way, Andalib from the story “The Year of Return” reminisces about the Dhaka he knew once upon a time:
“There was nothing here at first: a four hundred-year-old mosque and paddy fields. Then my grandfather arrived after the Partition in his Jeep, with a double-barrel shotgun. The area was so pristine back then, you had to arrange your own protection. One by one came the others. The neighbourhood filled up with lovely one- or two-story houses with wide verandahs, coconut trees, and Krishnachuras lining the boundaries. Today most of the old houses are gone. Now and then, one spots a relic, abandoned by the original settlers of Dhanmondi, wedged between the towering new apartment blocks with their shiny steel and glass façades and ridiculous names—Millennium Housing, Phoenix Towers, Greenview Apartments. What green view? All the beautiful trees have been cut…”
But all these cities, the lost and the found, coexist together as they come alive in the stories. This is why in the story, “Ramkamal’s Gift”, the people of Dhaka decide that they would “write the great book of all time, the kind that had never been written before about Dhaka. It would ennoble this sweltering sewer of a city and in the process, rescue us all. Rescue us from historical and literary anonymity.” According to Superkar, this shows that literature is the work of a community and not of an individual author. As a result, even though the author Ramkamal who had promised to write the greatest novel ever written, disappears without a trace, the potential of the novel being written persists.
Conclusion
In his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life”, Baudelaire says that beauty has two aspects to it: a permanent, invariable element as well as a relative circumstantial element. He goes on to explain that modernity resides between these two i.e. the “ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is eternal and immutable.” Thus the artist has to become a constant spectator, always keenly observing even the most trivial of things with the curiosity of a child in order to portray the present of someone else. This is what Anis Ahmed also does in his book Good Night, Mr. Kissinger. He captures the ephemeral, the transient, the momentary as well as the permanence of a city, of a nation. It is not a book which talks about violence, oppression and resistance or about a postcolonial nation in a permanent state of crisis. The history of Dhaka is referred to at various points, but what gives the book a universal appeal is its depiction of everyday events and experiences—loss of loved ones, loss of affection, friendship, passion, even a job perhaps but also the recapturing of such losses through literature, thus surviving the destructive power of time.
Works cited
Anis Ahmed, Kazi. Good Night, Mr. Kissinger and Other Stories. The University Press Limited: 2012. Print.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life And Other Essays. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf.
Harp, Grady. ‘Bangladesh, We Hardly Knew You’. Literary Aficionado. 2013. Web.
Naffis-Sahely, André. ‘Dhaka Stories: K. Anis Ahmed’s Stringent Tales of Life in the Sprawling Capital of Bangladesh.’ The Nation. 2015. Web.
Superkar, Simona. Good Night, Mr. Kissinger. Los Angeles Review of Books. 2014. Web.
Puja Sen Majumdar is a PhD scholar in Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. She finished her Masters and Bachelors from Jadavpur University, Department of English.
