The Meat Market: Holding Up A Mirror To Bangladeshi Society

The Meat Market - An Excerpt 

Jamila

When he heard the caged rooster crow from the next-door rooftop, Jamila’s son bellowed for his mother. ‘Amma,’ the noise sliced through the dawn air. Before Jamila’s belly wrenched in hunger, her heart skipped a beat for her son.

But Mofiz, nearly dead from fever for the last three days, didn’t stir.

Jamila thought he probably wasn’t dead. Although it would have been better if he were.

She stretched her neck out taut, leant forward lowering her head, and exhaled so hard that all the dust around her blew away. Then the air rang with a crash as if a small bomb had just exploded. The noise made the nearly dead Mofiz open his eyes; with a dejected gaze, he watched as Jamila exited the house like a tornado.

Jamila’s son also saw the tornado, because he had been watching his mother from the beginning.

When his mother left through the yard entrance like a storm, the cry ‘Amma’ emerged from the child’s throat. In the silent, solitary dawn, the cry followed Jamila for quite a long way.

Once she crossed Mansurabad, she was on the main road for Baitul Aman Housing Society; she ran along this road and that street, left the genteel environs of the housing society behind her, crossed the old alleys and byways of the old neighborhood and ran onto Ring Road at the corner of Adabor Market where she stopped. She stood there, panting and looking this way and that. But she could see nothing; her eyes were blank. All this running and jumping had made her hunger grow five times fiercer.

Jamila realised her insides were burning to ashes. She walked along the right side of Ring Road for a while and slipped into Tikkapara, the neighborhood to her left. After walking along the twisting, turning, rough street for a while, she saw a flourishing papaya tree, almost touching the wall of a house. It wasn’t too high; all the leaves were well within her reach. As soon as Jamila thrust her face close to it, a grim shout blasted through the window. ‘Hey, who’s there?’

Jamila turned her face away and began walking again. But she couldn’t decide which way to go. On either side of the curving street within the Tikkapara neighborhood, narrow alleyways struck off frequently even farther inwards. Those alleys seemed dangerous to her, so she kept to the main road. She had to stop after a little while because the road branched off in three different directions. She couldn’t decide which one to take, so she stood still for a while. Then, without thinking about it, she veered to the right and started walking again. 

After a few steps, she spotted a mosque on the right, surrounded by a belly-high wall. Within the compound, in the yard-like space, a goat’s throat was being slit open. When Jamila saw the blood spurting out, she closed her eyes and began to run.

She went along Thana Road, the street that ran past the southern boundary wall of Residential Model School and headed east, merging into Mirpur Road. Alongside the long wall to her left, various kinds of seedlings were for sale. Jamila glanced at the seedlings as she moved forward. The seedlings, with their varied looks and their varied natures, watched Jamila in silence. One of the men in charge of their safety-maintenance-sales said to the other, ‘Mamu, check out the size of those udders.’

Jamila’s ears burned. She walked fast, moving almost at a trot. The men and women who were headed towards Chandrima Garden in a bid to salvage their health slowed down, some even stopped, to swivel their necks to get a look at her. They too made obscene remarks about her, especially about the size of her mammaries. Jamila sped up as she listened to them. But she didn’t run; she was afraid that it might disturb the public peace on this calm morning, that it might worsen the law-and-order situation. 

She had to stop at the crossroads where Thana Road merged into Mirpur Road. Big buses, trucks, private cars and other automated vehicles were moving so densely, it was almost impossible to find a gap or a chance to cross the road. People who were bound for Chandrima Garden had also halted by the side of the road, waiting for the traffic lights to turn red. In a little while, the green light turned amber, and the amber turned red, but the cars and buses didn’t stop for a second; they kept going just as they had before.

This went on for a long time. Then the red light first turned amber, then green. When the cars still didn’t stop, a traffic policeman raised his baton, blew his whistle and shouted at the cars, cursing them. By then, the men and women waiting on the sidewalk had grown slightly rebellious and they began to cross the road, forcing the vehicles to stop. Jamila crossed Mirpur Road at a run and kept going straight, farther east. She stopped running when she crossed the road; she walked along the street that lay to the south of Gana Bhaban, the prime minister’s official residence, which was adjacent to Crescent Lake, and later joined up with Bijoy Sarani.

Every ten feet along the high, red wall of Gana Bhaban stood a uniformed sentry. Some of them stood resting their weight on their right leg, some on the left. None of them were using both legs to stand on. After guarding the prime minister all night long, their eyelids were droopy, their lips dry. Jamila watched them yawn prodigiously. The number, shape and weight of the men and women who were walking past the sentries on their way to Chandrima Garden were bigger than that of the men and women from Thana Road. Their eyes and their faces reflected their vulgar humour and curiosity about Jamila. They discussed her breasts while they walked. Jamila felt furious, but she was forgiving of these people. Because she knew that the filth of their minds was less monstrous than the cruelty of their actions.

Just before the path to the entrance to Chandrima Garden began, where the boundary wall of Gana Bhaban ended, a street branched off to the south. It merged onto the pathway that led to the western entrance to the National Parliament. At the entrance of that branched-off street, a bamboo barricade painted red and white had been erected. To the left of the barricade stood several uniformed sentries, some sitting, some standing; some carried batons, some had rifles slung across their backs; and each man had eyes that were swollen with gunk accrued in the corners.

As soon as Jamila raised a leg to climb over the barricade, a uniformed sentry yelled at her in a rough voice, ‘Hey, you slut, where do you think you’re going?’

‘Beat it!’ The sentries tried to get rid of her. She stared at the field; it was a sanctuary for grass; it grew there unimpeded. Even the ancestors of this grass had forgotten what the aggression of the sickle army felt like. 

She raised her leg again to climb past the barricade. The guards roared again, ‘Watch it!’ They pointed towards the Gana Bhaban across the street. ‘The Prime Minister is sleeping.’

Then they turned back to the field and stared diagonally across: ‘The great, holy parliament.’ One of the guards gazed at two red houses standing side by side in the western corner of the field and said, ‘The Shpeaker and the Deputy Shpeaker sirs are all asleep.’ 

Jamila told them, ‘I’ll just eat some grass quietly for an hour and leave.’

‘This slut talks too much!’

‘This slut talks back!’

‘Go on, get out right now!’

Thus, the three rifle- and baton-wielding members of the law enforcement agency verbally abused her. She bore it all; she had no choice. Her belly was burning with hunger. She told them she had been starving for three days because Mofiz was sick with fever and hadn’t fed her. She told them that if she was to live, she had to eat something straightaway. Let her be granted permission to eat grass for just one hour.

‘I beg you,’ she pleaded.

But her pleading made the members of the law enforcement agencies angrier. One of them raised his stick and rushed at her saying, ‘You’ve come this early in the day just to stir up some trouble. I’m going to give this whore a good one …’

Before he was done, another uniformed, stick-wielding man stepped forward and said, ‘Why all this “going to” business? Just give it to her.’ He brought his stick down between her horns.

Jamila’s skull clanged, a tremendous wail emerged from her throat and she lowered her head and jerked it up suddenly, and in the blink of an eye, the members of the law enforcement agencies saw the body of one of their colleagues gored by the tips of Jamila’s curved horns. When Jamila’s head dragged upwards from left to right, the men in uniform saw their colleague against the backdrop of a blue sky. Then, when he crashed back onto the ground, a grunt was expelled from his throat and they saw that his belly had ripped open and his intestines were spilling out through the gap created by ripped-off buttons.

As Jamila did an about face and began to flee, the rifle in the hands of a colleague of the gored sentry roared; two bullets hit Jamila, one in each of her ass cheeks. Still she ran, but then another bullet ripped through an artery in her right hind leg and she collapsed to the ground. She mooed, calling out to her son. 

Extracted with permission from The Meat Market: Ten Stories and a Novella by Mashiul Alam, and translated by Shabhnam Nadiya Published by Eka, an imprint of Westland Books.