‘Rebel poet’ Kazi Nazrul Islam’s short stories can now be read in a newly translated volume

On the bank of the river Arial Khan in the district of Faridpur, there stood a small hamlet called Mohanpur. Most of the villagers were Muslim farmers. On the edge of the village, at a distance from them, lived a few Kayastha families. They kept apart as if to save themselves from the impurity of the Muslim touch.

Just as the black tassel on the Turkish fez wishes to live amicably with the holy tuft of hair worn by Hindu brahmins but never receives any respect from them, the attempts of the Muslims in the village to make friends with the Kayasthas were always rebuffed, for the latter looked suspiciously at them as if they were scared of the approach of evil spirits.

Among the Muslims of the village, Chunnu Byapari was a man of influence. He was a headman, but that did not stop him from toiling hard on his land. He was helped by his three wives and seven sons. Only he knew what stood in his way of attaining sunnat by taking one more wife. The village folk of course would gossip among themselves that his third missus was a shrew with a dreadful temper, and that it was because of her menacing verbal armoury that the prospective fourth wife could not make it into the Byapari household. This upset Chunnu Byapari terribly. He would often grumble to his friends, “This is what you call – Khoda proposes but man disposes! Indeed, Allah Miyan has commanded you to take four wives, hasn’t He! But what can you do when fate conspires against you!” Stopping for a moment and swallowing, he would say, “Marrying that evil woman was my undoing!” And then he would hastily add, “Now, don’t you go and tell her all this. That deadly little bitch would raise a ruckus and make my life hell.”

It is the third offspring of this third wife, Allah-Rakha, who is the hero of our story. And like the heroes of stories, he was a dreadful daredevil of a boy. He was of course known in the village by the soft sobriquet “Keshranjan babu”. This name was given to him by a girl in the village, Chan Bhanu, that is, Chand Bhanu. More on this later.

When Chunnu Byapari’s third wife was blessed with a son after giving birth to two daughters, the wary mother christened him “Allah-Rakha” (one who is protected by Allah). At least the mother, if not anybody else, was relieved of her worries by entrusting Allah with the responsibility of protecting the child from untimely demise. Allah perhaps had a good hearty laugh that day. He had transported many such Allah-Rakhas to graveyards, but in this case, He seemed to have cracked a joke by keeping him alive indeed! He said to Himself, “Wait, I’ll make sure he lives on, but the rest of you will burn alive!”

I have no idea if he would die later, but in these twenty years, the village folk have had the misfortune of seeing him alive and kicking. Exasperated with the eagerness with which he gave them ample proof of his existence, they would say – the rascal had better been a mamdo-ghost than Allah-Rakha. Even ghosts couldn’t be this devilish.

The Muslims would refer to him as “son of Iblish” and the Kayasthas, “the new moon monster!” His father would call him “son of a bitch”, and the doting mother “Aflatoon” – the charming master maverick!

It should be mentioned here that our Allah-Rakha grew into as modern a cad as one could be by reading books. He would not exactly live like a farmer’s son. Putting on a clean dhoti, shirt and shoes and neatly parting his long hair, he would loaf around on the village paths chewing paan, smoking cigarettes and devising ingenious plans of playing mischief upon people. However, in spite of having long crossed the ‘frontier’ of adolescence and attaining manhood, he never did any harm to women. His targets were mostly old people; fruits and crops in fields and around homesteads; the topmost branches of trees and the highest points of thatched roofs; and bamboo groves, tamarind and palm trees and so on during night-time.

He didn’t contribute much to his father’s farming activities except by beating the oxen for no reason or by letting the oxen loose, which made people swear at his father. He went to look after the crop twice in his life – once he set fire to the ripened paddy, and the other time he harvested the crop only to leave it on somebody else’s land. Never again did his father ask for his assistance.

When his mother stopped shelling out money to meet the expenses of his foppishness, and his father, when asked for the same, chose to settle the accounts with an entirely different coin by giving him quite a few lashes on his back with the cattle truncheon, he neither cried or fled from home, nor did he complain to anybody.

That night Chunnu Byapari’s house caught fire. Allah-Rakha lit his cigarette in that fire and said, blowing out smoke in a quite unperturbed manner, that he didn’t have the money to buy a matchbox that day; and it was sheer good luck that their house had caught fire and he could light his cigarette for free.

When his father was beating him black and blue, he stood quiet and still and said that he had set fire to the house only to warm up his body which ached terribly because of the thrashing he had received in the morning. If the fresh night-flogging caused him much body ache again, he would have no other choice but to set fire to somebody else’s house in the neighbourhood to ease that ache.

This simple submission dried up all the smacking energy that still remained in his father’s arms. He kept striking his head violently at his son’s feet and saying repeatedly, “I implore you, you filthy rogue, you son of a bitch, please don’t do that one thing! We all will go to jail if you do!”

Finally, an agreement was reached that night through the mediation of the village people to the effect that his father would keep bearing the cost of Allah-Rakha’s dandyism, at least for the sake of the village’s safety. Allah-Rakha declared with due solemnity, “I am my baap’s son, what I say I never fail to do!”

Everybody laughed, and the father whose son he was broke into tears of anger and distress. Kicking his son to the ground he shouted at the top of his voice, “Listen to what the son of a bitch says! The son of a bitch says, like baap like son! I piss in your baap’s mouth!” This time even Allah-Rakha couldn’t help but laugh!

Now let me introduce Chan Bhanu, the girl who named him “Keshranjan babu”. She was the daughter of Narad Ali Sheikh, of the same village. Now the name Narad Ali was not meant to signify Hindu-Muslim unity, for he had been named way before the surge of the Non-Cooperation Movement. The movement was a mere toddler of the height of his knee; I choose not to say, “the left knee”, for that would be exaggeratingly diminutive.

Chan Bhanu was almost a slightly modified and enlarged version of her mother! She was a chatterbox, would scamper around like a hare on village paths and fields, and fearing her, the waters of the river Arial

Khan would flow swiftly away.

She had crossed fourteen, but the mother refused to discuss her marriage even if the father would try to broach the subject. How will we survive in a joyless hell when Chan leaves, said she. If Narad Ali persisted, his wife just snubbed him, “Don’t be a pest, my daughter won’t marry till her Hanif arrives – like he did for Joigun Bibi in the kissa!”

The prince-charming “Hanif” did not take long to arrive for the Joigun Bibi of Mohanpur, Chan Bhanu; and he was none other than our Allah-Rakha.

One fine morning while reading the punthi of Sonabhan, it occurred to Allah-Rakha that it was Chan Bhanu who was the Sonabhan Bibi of the story and he himself was Gaji Hanif, for there was no girl more beautiful than Chan Bhanu in the whole village. He continued reading while contemplating Hanif’s triumphal march towards the conquest of Sonabhan –

When the Bibi heard Hanif’s arrival sound,
She gorged on a breakfast of around eighty maund!
With a thousand-maund shield and the courage of a lac,
On twelve horses together, she roared, “I’ll break your back!”

Baap re! This lady is Hanif’s nemesis! She crams a breakfast of eighty maunds and rides twelve horses together! Will Chan Bhanu do anything like that? Allah-Rakha was totally flabbergasted. Hanif initially kept losing, but he won the jackpot at the end of it all, didn’t he! Let there be whatever there is to be!

Excerpted with permission from ‘The King of the Djinns’, translated from the Bengali by Saurav Dasthakur from The Collected Short Stories of Kazi Nazrul Islam, edited by Syed Manzoorul Islam and Kaustav Chakraborty, Orient Black Swan.

Corrections and clarifications: This is not the first time that Kazi Nazrul Islam’s stories have been translated into English. The headline of this article has been modified accordingly.