The year is 1974. After the liberation war in Bangladesh, the country is gripped with famine and food shortage. Nasir Uddin is a professor at the engineering university in Bangladesh, who returned to Bangladesh after earning a PhD in Canada, hot with young blood for its independence from Pakistan. But now he cannot financially support his family in Bangladesh. After liberation, when Sheikh Mujib was released from his imprisonment in Pakistan and returned to Bangladesh in triumph, the people of Bangladesh were ready to die for him. If Sheikh Mujib, the father of the nation, had asked them to jump off a cliff, they would have done that. Together, they, beggars and farmers, rickshaw-pullers and day laborers, would build Sonar Bangla, their Golden Bengal. But that was not to be. So Nasir Uddin wandered from his home again.
Nasir Uddin had brought home savings from Canada, but after the Bangladesh liberation war those funds were exhausted quickly. In spite of HIS WIFE Rahela’s contributions from her PhD fellowship at Dhaka University, they had run into debt. Instead of helping his father financially, Nasir Uddin became the recipient of rations from his village home.
The country had sunk into an unbearable situation. Illegal arms poured in. Powerful people looted the country and gunned down the people on the street. People starved or rummaged in garbage heaps, fighting with the crows for food. A full-blown famine. In the tea estates of Sylhet, the laborers starved and died that year. Several teachers at the engineering university left for jobs and better lives abroad, in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Nasir Uddin struggled to keep his family alive.
Late one night, Rahela and Nasir Uddin lay beside the sleeping forms of their two children and decided that they needed to leave their homeland again. The law and order situation was uncertain. Their financial situation was even worse.
Nasir Uddin and his family decided to go to Iraq, the an oil rich-country in the 1970s offering foreigners lucrative positions at the universities and refineries. Nasir Uddin was offered a teaching position at Mosul University. Once out of Bangladesh, Rahela and Nasir Uddin found that the world was full of baby food. They could buy all the things they needed. Nobody was stocking anything in a dark corner. Before Iraq, they had a stopover in Kuwait, where the shops overflowed with merchandise. Nasir Uddin and Rahela could not help staring all around them. The airline from Kuwait served them incredible delicacies. The food just kept coming–dainty sandwiches, a meal of chicken and rice, ice cream for dessert, then another snack just a few hours later.
“Others in the world are not starving like us,” Rahela said. “They are served more than they need.”
They stopped overnight again in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. They had arrived in Iraq in the middle of the bitter winter. Ali was six weeks old, bundled up in a red woolen suit that had Rahela had knit herself, covered by a sky-blue woolen blanket given to him by his aunt. It was so cold that Rahela hid him under her own shawl, afraid of losing him. While Kuwait had seemed to overflow with wealth, Baghdad was different. It was contented, sufficiently fed, but nothing was wasted.
Mina, who was four that year, carried in her arms a large baby doll Nasir Uddin had brought her back from a study tour in Tokyo. At the Baghdad airport Mina sat next to an Arab woman and struck up a conversation about her doll. Although Mina did not understand any Arabic, the woman seemed to be saying the doll was beautiful, and Mina was flattered and babbling back. Nasir Uddin told Mina to get ready to board. They started walking toward the gate. As Nasir Uddin struggled with their bags and papers, and Rahela struggled to keep up with Nasir Uddin, they noticed that Mina was not behind them.
Nasir Uddin’s heart stopped beating. They were in a foreign country. They did not know the language or the place. How would he find her? Children were lost every day in Dhaka, kidnapped, never to be found. He expected at every moment that his children would be swallowed up by some invisible force.
“When did you last see her?” he asked Rahela.
“The doll!” Rahela said, “she must have left the doll behind and gone back for it.”
Nasir Uddin retraced his steps to the seating area where they had met the Arab woman and found Mina sitting on a chair, clutching her doll and crying.
In Mosul, all the recently arrived foreigners were accommodated at the best hotel. But the hotel was not centrally heated. Nasir Uddin closed the doors and windows of their room and lit a kerosene heater. The room filled with smoke but did not heat up. There were patches of dampness and chill. Ali, became ill within days. One night, he ran a high fever. His body became cold. He struggled for breath. Nasir Uddin did not know anything about the medical facilities available in Mosul. Ali’s condition was so bad that he did not dare to take him out in the unknown city, looking for a doctor or hospital. Rahela and Nasir Uddin watched Ali all night, washing his head with damp cloths. Mina slept fitfully, turning over frequently, as the lights were on all night.
Ali had trouble breathing. He appeared to have a lung infection. As morning approached and the sky lightened outside, his whole body began to turn blue. The color drained from his body as he was being slowly choked. Nasir Uddin buried his head in his hands. He had fled his country to save his son, but his son was dying in front of his eyes.
In the morning there was a weak sun in the sky, and by some miracle, Ali was still alive. Nasir Uddin left Rahela in the hotel with the children and rode the bus to the university to ask for help. He ran to a senior colleague named Dr. Saadi and asked him what he should do. His son was dying. Dr. Saadi said he knew a private physician practicing near the hotel. They hired a taxi and went straight to the doctor’s chamber. The doctor was kind enough to visit Ali immediately in the hotel. He gave Ali an injection and a liquid medicine to be taken at intervals.
That day, Ali started to improve. His color came back. He stared at his parents with open eyes and appeared to laugh. For the first time, they discovered that he was a beautiful baby: large eyes lined with feminine lashes and a head of thick black hair.
Wherever Nasir Uddin had worked in his life, he had stirred trouble, but in Iraq, he decided not to open his mouth or challenge anything he disliked because he needed to earn money to feed his family. For the first time in his life, he resolved to be a rule-follower because he was afraid for his family. Despite his efforts to be level-headed, Nasir Uddin soon ran into trouble at the university. A student leader complained to the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering that Nasir Uddin “did not teach from the book.” Dr. Saadi, who was the head of the department, called Nasir Uddin to his office.
“What is the explanation for this?” he asked.
“The student leader is correct,” Nasir Uddin said. “I don’t teach materials directly from the book. I present things in my own way. I think the best way to resolve this issue is to ask the class directly how they feel about my ways of teaching.”
Dr. Saadi was kind enough to act according to his wishes. When Dr. Saadi approached the students, they informed him that Nasir Uddin told them stories and jokes and that he gave funny examples of concepts in the book.
“They say they like your teaching, Doctoor Nasir,” Dr. Saadi said to him when they met next in Dr. Saadi’s office. “They say they remember the material better through the stories.” Dr. Saadi’s face opened for the first time in a half-amused smile.
Nasir Uddin escaped trouble that time. He came to know later that the complaint had been instigated by the former teacher of the course who did not like the idea of his course being given to Nasir Uddin. He had spied on Nasir Uddin through the student leader and instigated the student to approach Dr. Saadi. But Nasir Uddin did not know yet that his entire time in Iraq would be a repeated test of his resolve to be a rule-follower.
Within a few days, Nasir Uddin barely escaped punishment again. He used to leave the grade register open on his office desk. Dr. Saadi called Nasir Uddin into his office one day, closed the door, and asked, “Doctoor Nasir, do you keep records of student grades in a bound register?”
“Yes,” Nasir Uddin replied.
“And do you keep the register on your desk?”
“Yes,” Nasir Uddin replied again.
“So if a student changes his marks, what do you do?” Nasir Uddin became aware of a horrible possibility. He replied slowly that he would simply disregard the changed marks.
“How would you know which marks have been changed?”
Nasir Uddin stood still for a moment. Fortunately, he maintained a back-up copy of the marks at home to check his arithmetic operations. He promised Dr. Saadi that he would check the register and report to him. When Nasir Uddin compared the two sheets, he realized that indeed, two students had raised their marks in the register he left in the office. He went back to Dr. Saadi the next day and reported his findings.
“Meet me again in the evening,” Dr. Saadi said. Nasir Uddin left Dr. Saadi’s office sure that he was going to lose his job and be sent back to Bangladesh. When they met as scheduled in the evening, Dr. Saadi said, “I am satisfied with the report, but I am not happy with the way you manage your office affairs. You don’t even lock your desk drawer.”
Nasir Uddin could only express his regrets and count his blessings.
Nasir Uddin had arrived in Mosul in the middle of the second term of the year. He spent most of the remainder of the academic year trying to understand things. Most of the teachers were from Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Eastern Europe, and the Indian subcontinent. About twenty percent of the teachers were Iraqi. The teachers took Arabic lessons together, went on sightseeing picnics and rented cottages on tops of mountains, held dinner parties, and watched movies on the big screen at the Cultural Center sitting on the cool dark lawn. They went to one another’s religious ceremonies, Eid-il-Fitr and Diwali, and all kinds of cultural and national celebrations – holi, the Bengali new year. Rahela staged drama productions involving all the children. The two most popular games were Scrabble and cards, both ideally suited to a large number of players. Sometimes, large groups of people gathered at someone’s house on the weekend to play and ended up staying overnight to continue a fifth or sixth game, letting the children sleep on the floor sprawled out on Syrian mats. So strong was the fervor of Scrabble that Nasir Uddin’s Iraqi neighbor next door wanted a game as well. The mother was then having her fifteenth baby. She sent her eldest son over, and Rahela and the son sat through an entire day cutting pieces of cardboard to make the Scrabble board and letters of the English alphabet. Scrabble became the metaphor for their life in Iraq, a life far away from home and all of life’s goals, the endless hours spent in an idle pastime.
Nasir Uddin and Rahela had chosen a house in Zahoor, about twenty miles away from the university. It was a two-story house with many rooms upstairs and downstairs, a big lawn at the front, and a large vegetable garden at the back. On the ground floor were the kitchen, drawing room, dining room, and guestrooms. Each room was large like a public hall. On the second floor the bedrooms stood in one line. The other half of the floor space was an open roof. There were many roofs, one leading to another through multiple staircases. All the boundary walls were covered with rose trees, which were always full of roses, especially during the spring. In the spring, Mina helped him to clip the roses and make bouquets for all their aunties. The driveway was covered by a grapevine. There were a number of orange and grapefruit trees and in the front a plum tree, a hybrid orange-lemon tree, and a tree full of safarjal. The safarjal was a fleshy fruit like the guava with a big seed in the middle. It was best for making jams and pickles. Nasir Uddin had never seen this fruit anywhere else in the world. It was so sour that it was impossible to swallow and yet delicious in its bountiful flesh, a bitter-sweet fruit. The fruits also, plump and fleshy, became a metaphor of their life abroad in a wealthy country, warm and fleshy, bountiful.
There were so many fruits that Nasir Uddin’s family had trouble disposing of them. Rahela made jam jars and sent gifts to their friends. The house was so suitable for raising kids and the rent so reasonable that they overlooked all the inconveniences. It was far from the city. People complained about how far they had to drive to visit. Nasir Uddin and his family had to drive for a long time to get anywhere. The birds fed on the grapes above the car and left their droppings on the roof of the car. Nasir Uddin spent an hour every day cleaning the car. But still, they liked the house very much. In that house, their second son and youngest child Hassan was born. And Hassan became the last metaphor for their life in Iraq.
The day Hassan was born, Ali was one year, six months, and twenty-six days old. But this small seniority gave Ali a tremendous power over Hassan. When they were boys, Hassan never accepted anything in the world unless it was confirmed by his Bhaiya. This continued as they grew; if Nasir Uddin told Hassan, ‘the sun is a star’, Hassan immediately replied that he would ask Bhaiya about it. He never came to Nasir Uddin to learn anything. He always went to his older brother, his Bhaiya.
Nasir Uddin was happy at last that he had created a secure environment for his children. They had all the fruits they could eat and all the space to play in. Ali grew fatter by the day, a beautiful baby whom the Iraqis stopped on the street to kiss and pinch. The family spent their afternoons in the garden, planting vegetables, eating watermelon, and playing Ludo sitting on lawn chairs. The children played with the neighborhood kids. Almost every evening, Nasir Uddin’s family went out to the nearby mountains or the riverbank of the Tigris. There, his two sons collected pebbles of all colors and filled all the pockets they could find in their clothes. For the following few days, these pebbles were their most valuable assets in the world and could not be lost under any circumstances.
The Mosul summers were three and a half months long and hot, but the houses were cooled inside by desert coolers. During the day, Nasir Uddin’s three children sat in the shade by the duct of a water cooler, eating juicy watermelon. The sound of the water cooler was like time slowed down, frozen to a single moment, defying everything that would come after, and everything that happened before, sweet despite the bitterness surrounding it: the coming icy winter, and worse.
One evening, a few days after Hassan had turned five, they went to the city and bought Hassan a pair of new shoes. They bought whole roast chicken from the spitfires on the street and the dry bread khubz and olive pickles–the children’s favorite meal. They took the picnic down to the bank of the Tigris river to pass the evening by the cool atmosphere of the river. Iraq was a desert country and the air was dry no matter how hot the sun. The dry air evaporated the river water at a high rate, making the surrounding air cool and pleasant. They parked their car on the bank, took the food out of the car and proceeded down the hill towards the bank. But the children ran ahead of them and reached the waters in a rush. Nasir Uddin’s heart stopped: he thought that Hassan was going to dive into the river and drown.
He shouted at the top of his voice, “Stop!” He went mad with panic. Hassan stopped one step short of the waters of the Tigris. “Why?” he asked. “Will the water get dirty from my shoes?”
The university opened a school for the children of all the foreigners. The school was called Al-Mustansariya, which means simply “school” in Arabic. Even though the university had solved the problem of schooling, it remained a problem for Nasir Uddin. When the school opened, his daughter Mina was five. She could not speak Arabic yet. The school bus stopped only at the university campus. Nasir Uddin’s house was too far away. He lit the kerosene heater, then woke Mina in the dark. She made straight for the heater, dancing up and down to keep warm as he dressed her. In the kitchen, he made her gulp down a glass of milk and a sandwich of Samn bread (a loaf in the shape of a fish) with syrup. Rahela and the boys were still asleep when they left the house in the cold. He dropped Mina at a crowded public bus stop as the sky lightened overhead. He had to leave immediately to catch his early morning class. Again, in the evening, he picked her up from the bus stop long after the school bus had dropped her off. She stood alone on a dark street. She could survive the ordeal only by having faith in the strangers around her. Every time Nasir Uddin came to pick her up, he was sure that he would not find her there.
Over time, Dr. Saadi became Nasir Uddin’s close friend. Whatever subject Dr. Saadi taught, Nasir Uddin solved the problems at the end of the chapter for him. Solving problems was Nasir Uddin’s greatest pleasure, Dr. Saadi just provided him an excuse to do so. His load was light and he had no administrative duties. In return, Dr. Saadi obtained for Nasir Uddin’s family food items that were in shortage in the market. He arranged the medical services for Nasir Uddin’s children, and took care of all the official work for his family.
At the beginning of Nasir Uddin’s stay in Iraq, consumer items were in short supply, especially food items. People had money but there was not much to buy. Food, like eggs, chicken, lamb, beef, tomatoes, onion, and potatoes, had to be imported. The government imported these items and distributed them through designated shops. Whenever an item became available for sale, there was a long line outside the shop. When Nasir Uddin and Rahela saw a line forming, they quickly joined the queue in anticipation of something good. If they found a desired food item being sold, they bought as much as they were allowed and then distributed it among friends.
With time, large department stores opened up and became surfeited with cartons of fleshy dates, juicy watermelons, whole chickens, ducks, and goats sold live. Lego games and children’s books, washing machines, hair curlers, color TV sets, two-in-one stereos, and electric gadgets of every kind. Education was free through university for all. The Roma and Bedouins wore gold around their throats and dangling from their ears. Old men sat on the street and drank sweet tea from tiny glasses. Most of all, in sharp contrast to Nasir Uddin’s own country, Iraq felt like the safest place in the world. Nobody ever stole anything, nothing was in shortage, and there was no crime. It was the best place to raise his children.
Nasir Uddin and his family visited Kerbala, Najaf, Kufa, Kut, and Babylon, the Shat-el-Arab, Furat, and the Tigris. Nineva, Soleimania, Kirkuk, and Doha. Nasir Uddin thought, what other country has so much history and culture? Even though he had come to Iraq to earn money and he had never thought to become sentimental again about a place, he was moved. Every time he looked at a ruin, a mosque, the burial ground of a prophet, Adam’s tree, the hanging gardens of Babylon, he remembered again the splendor of this country. It had become poor, and now it was becoming rich again through oil, feeding so many foreigners, giving foreigners jobs in its oil refineries, roads and highways, the universities. In Kerbala, they saw the battlefields where the legendary Ali, Hassan, and Hossein had fought. They visited their graves. Who would have thought that the prophets Ali and Hassan struggled for water during that battle? There was plenty of water everywhere. They joked that there was plenty for the present-day Ali and Hassan. The taps flowed freely as they washed to offer prayers at the shrine of the prophets. But in the ruins of Ninevah, they found nothing. They wandered through the palace that was empty except for glass cases that explained that the artifacts had been looted and carried away to British museums. The wind blew hard and Mina wandered through the doorways, perhaps playing her pretend games, imagining a queen, her dressing table and makeup.
They traveled across Iraq, waking with the bluish-purple skies of the morning, driving through stretches of field where lambs grazed, Bedouin tents in the distance. The children ate their meals sitting in the car. The front and back seats could be flattened, making beds for the kids. There was a sunroof through which the children could look out, standing on their toes, gazing at the clash of colors in the dawn sky as they set off for a long journey. Their car made a comfortable home when they were outside their home.
For the first six months the family traveled by bus. Whenever Nasir Uddin and his family rode the bus, he never had to pay the fare. When he put his hand in his pocket, the bus driver informed him that someone had paid the fare already.
“But who?” he asked, looking around. The bus driver shrugged his shoulders. This happened again and again. The same thing happened at the stationary shop at the university. The shopkeeper informed Nasir Uddin, “No need, the pencil has already been paid for.” Nasir Uddin guessed that his students paid for him. That one of them was always there, wherever he went. That his students had instructed every shopkeeper in the city not to accept any payment from him. He could not avoid Arab hospitality even when he was on the road. Often on long road trips Nasir Uddin and his family would stop at a village home to use the toilet. They could never come out of a home without being fed and honored like guests. When it was becoming cumbersome to travel on buses with three children, Nasir Uddin thought that for the safety and convenience of his children, he needed to buy a car. But the car, Nasir Uddin should already have known from his experience with cars in Canada, was not to secure the safety Nasir Uddin now so badly wanted for his family. Cars were vulnerable to road accidents just as the homes of his village were open to the entry of snakes.
Another Bangladeshi teacher Shah also had to buy a car, and he accompanied Nasir Uddin. They had the option of going either to Syria or Kuwait. Cars were very costly in Iraq because of the heavy import duty but there were duty-free markets in both Damascus and Kuwait. Foreigners could purchase a car in another country as long as they did not sell the car in Iraq. If they bought their cars outside the country, the foreigners had to take their cars with them when leaving the country. Kuwait was nearer, so Nasir Uddin and Dr. Shah decided to aim for Kuwait through Baghdad and Basra. They had to go to Baghdad for visas. They reached Baghdad by an air-conditioned taxi. They were told by the Kuwaiti Consulate in Baghdad that they needed a special letter from the Bangladeshi ambassador to get the visa. But the Bangladeshi Ambassador had gone home to Bangladesh for a visit. Nasir Uddin and Dr. Shah heard that there was another Kuwaiti Consulate in Basra, so they thought they would try their luck in Basra instead. They had common friends in Basra with whom they could stay. They took the bus from Baghdad to Basra.
In Basra, to get to the Kuwait embassy, Nasir Uddin and Shah were told to keep going until they hit the water, the Arabian Sea. When Nasir Uddin first saw the Shat-el-Arab, he realized that all along he had been afraid Iraq would swallow one of his children, but now the opposite was happening. He swallowed up the Shat-el-Arab, the vastness of its blue waters, its peace, its freedom, and for a brief moment, he felt that this was his new home. But he shook off the feeling, because the war in Bangladesh and the corruption that followed had taught him the price of romanticizing. In Basra, the news was even more daunting. The Kuwaiti consulate in Basra did not issue visas. Nasir Uddin was furious. Visas had always seemed like senseless bureaucracy to him.
“What idiots have put up national boundaries,” he said, “when normal people don’t think in terms of borders?”
They returned to Mosul with bitter hearts. After some time, they decided to try again to buy a car in Damascus. On the way, they passed through Turkey and Aleppo. They bought two Peugeots in the free market of Syria, one for Dr. Shah and one for Nasir Uddin. Nasir Uddin’s looked better. Its body was shining, and it was the latest model. The engine seemed in good condition. Nasir Uddin and Shah started their return journey from Damascus in the evening in their new cars.
They reached the Syrian border check post just a few miles outside Damascus. They expected the Iraqi border check post to come up soon. They drove a long way, expecting it at any moment, but there were no road signs in sight. They even thought that they had passed it. They were thinking that perhaps they should drive back and look for it. When it was almost dawn and the skies were a mixture of all the different colors, the Iraqi check post jumped up in front of them. They were amazed that the borders of two neighboring countries were so far apart. What did it mean? What were the vast lands in between, what name could be given to them? They had not seen any other car on the way. They had traveled through miles and miles of empty land in the dark, a vast empty space between national borders. They had to wait a long time at the Iraqi border to get the cars registered. While they waited, Nasir Uddin felt still in-between borders, his mind floating somewhere undesignated, belonging neither to this country, nor that.
Nasir Uddin returned to Mosul in the evening. After parking his car in the driveway under the grapevines, he turned on the veranda lights and examined the car thoroughly. He had had an accident on the way to Mosul. It was raining and another car had smashed into the Peugeot in the slippery blackness of the night, cracking the windshield. He had driven the rest of the way with the cracked windshield, shivering in the cold.
What he found out was not palatable. There was a great deal wrong with the car apart from what had been damaged in the accident. While his car had appeared to be the best at first, it was actually in very bad shape. The bottom was corroded to the extent that there were holes under the floor carpeting. The next morning, Nasir Uddin drove his car to a garage and asked for an estimate to replace the bottom of the body. The quote he was given was almost fifty percent of the car price. He was shocked. He didn’t know what to do. At that time, Iraq was fast becoming a rich country. Labor was scarce and expensive. The joke in the foreigners’ community was that if you took a broken thing to a mechanic for repairs, he would invariably tell you to throw it away and get a new one: “Hadha jittu, bio wahid jadid”. If you happened to take your wife to a doctor for treatment, the doctor would advise you to get a new one instead of spending money on the old one.
Nasir Uddin remembered that Dr. Saadi’s house was under construction. There were construction materials all over his driveway, steel wire nets and cement among them. When Nasir Uddin had asked him what proportion of sand and cement he used in the mortar, Dr. Saadi had said that he was using as much cement as possible. Nasir Uddin had asked him why he did not use the recommended ratio.
“Cement is very cheap, sand is costly,” Dr. Saadi replied.
“How’s that possible?” Nasir Uddin asked. Dr. Saadi explained that cement was manufactured in government factories and supplied to construction sites by government transport at very low cost. But one had to gather the sand oneself from the bottom of the Tigris river. One had to hire local labor to do so, and that was very costly.
Taking all this information to mind, Nasir Uddin now devised a plan to repair his car without using any labor. He went to the office and requested Dr. Saadi to give him some wire-net, cement, and sand. Dr. Saadi readily made a gift of the materials to him free of cost. Nasir Uddin drove his car to Dr. Saadi’s house with a toolbox rattling in the backseat. He took out the seats and floor carpeting of the car, cleaned the corrosion as much as he could, painted the cleaned surface with a red oxide coating, and spread two layers of steel net on the bottom like wall to wall carpeting. He applied a sand-cement mortar to the wire net, making it almost a quarter inch thick. He left his car at Dr. Saadi’s house and Dr. Saadi gave him a lift home.
The next evening, he accompanied Dr. Saadi to his house after classes, fixed the car seats and carpeting back in place in his car, and drove away. He drove the car for eight years without trouble, up and down all of Iraq. When he was leaving, the war had started, so he couldn’t drive it across the border as he had planned. He had to donate it to the junkyard. But before that, the car had left a mark on his life.
The first incident occurred not a few months after he bought the car. Nasir Uddin was teaching an laboratory class in the applied mechanics laboratory. As usual, his voice was impassioned and he was completely lost in the subject he was teaching. An outsider entered the room and stood near the entrance speaking to the two instructors who helped Nasir Uddin in the mechanical engineering lab. The two lab assistants were Mr. Helal from Armenia and Mr. Burhan from Turkey.
It was obvious to Nasir Uddin that the stranger who had entered his lab was neither a student nor a staff member of the university. He did not belong in Nasir Uddin’s class. Soon he saw that the stranger was coming towards him, accompanied by Mr. Helal. Nasir Uddin thought to himself, this man must have a very good reason to be here. The man reached Nasir Uddin and collapsed at his feet in front of the entire class, clasping Nasir Uddin’s ankles in his hands and resting his face on Nasir Uddin’s shoes. He was repeatedly saying something in Arabic, of which Nasir Uddin understood only one word, “Sir.”
Nasir Uddin asked Mr. Helal, “What is this man saying?”
Mr. Helal replied that he said, “Please Sir, forgive me.” Nasir Uddin was even more perplexed and alarmed.
He said to Mr. Helal, “Take him to your office and find out why he came here. Ask him to wait for me until I finish with the class. I shall come to your office then and meet with him.” Mr. Helal grasped the man and physically carried him away to his office.
When Nasir Uddin met Mr. Helal and the stranger after class, the man repeated his earlier behavior. Nasir Uddin was feeling very embarrassed and wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible.
He asked Mr. Helal, “Why is the man embarrassing me like this? Why is he here?”
“The police have confiscated his truck,” Mr. Helal said. “They won’t release the truck unless they get a certificate from you that you have been fully compensated for the damage to your car.”
“I com…?” It dawned on Nasir Uddin that indeed he had lodged a complaint with the police a long time ago. A truck had hit his car from behind and sped away. He had pulled to the side of the road and checked the damage. One of the backlights was broken and a corner was dented badly. He was determined not to let the perpetrator get away and had immediately driven to a police station. He could not give the police officer any particulars of the truck or its driver, only a general description was the best he could manage. He never thought anything would come of the business. But the Iraqi police had found the man.
“His family will starve,” said Mr. Helal. “He is a poor man.”
Was Mr. Helal angry? Nasir Uddin felt angry himself. Now he had landed himself in a bigger mess. Not only could the driver not pay him for the damages, but Nasir Uddin had put the man’s job and family in danger. Nasir Uddin drove the truck driver to the police station in his car. He had to promise the police never to complain again at all if he withdrew his accusation against the truck driver. After many formalities, the truck was released. Nasir Uddin parted from the truck driver, happy that they had disentangled themselves from their ill-fated collision.
But Nasir Uddin could not keep his promise to the police. He had to seek them out again. The winters in Mosul were bitter and cold. There was no central heating system in the buildings. People warmed themselves standing by gas or kerosene heaters, their backs pressed against the burners, and many times the children or grown-ups caught fire to their pants or singed their hair. The most horrible thing about the winter was that it rained all the time. The car windshield often frosted and had to be taken care of with buckets of hot water. But this was time consuming and Nasir Uddin was always running short of time in the morning. His first winter, Nasir Uddin faced a completely frosted windshield one morning. He decided that he did not have time to clean it. He calculated that the university was one quarter of a kilometer to the east and about fifteen kilometer to the south.
“If I could manage to drive the quarter mile east against the glare of the refracted sun,” he thought, “I could safely drive the distance to the south.” He climbed in his car and inched down the road, rolling down the side window and keeping an eye out to try to see ahead. He drove carefully, but he was completely blind. When it was time to take a turn in the southward direction, he checked that the main street was empty. But as soon as he turned onto the street, he ran into a police car from the side. He didn’t know where it had appeared from. Nasir Uddin and the policeman both climbed out and inspected the two cars. There was hardly any damage to the police car as Nasir Uddin had been driving at a low speed, but both of the Peugeot’s headlights were broken. Nasir Uddin tried to tell the police officer that he had a class in the morning.
“Please give me your address so that I can meet you and settle the issue of the accident after class,” Nasir Uddin said. It was difficult to communicate all this in Arabic.
The police officer did not agree with his proposal. He made a hand signal for Nasir Uddin to follow him. Nasir Uddin did not dare to disobey him. By this time the windshield was clear, and Nasir Uddin followed him without any trouble. As soon as they reached the station, the officer said something to another man who took Nasir Uddin into an empty room and without speaking a word to him, locked him up. Nasir Uddin had no idea what was going on. There were always horror stories in the foreigners’ community, such as the story of the Indian in Kuwait who had been locked up after an accident on the way to see his pregnant wife in hospital. While he was in jail, his two children whom he had left at home died without food and his wife died in childbirth.
Nasir Uddin was locked up in the room all day without food or water or any means of communication. In the evening, the door opened and another officer entered the room to interrogate him. The officer spoke English fluently. When he learned that Nasir Uddin was a teacher at Mosul University, he immediately released Nasir Uddin, apologizing, and asked him to settle the accounts of the accident at his leisure.
“You are a teacher,” the second police officer said. “Forgive me, my partner did not understand because of language problems. You are here to teach us.” He embraced Nasir Uddin, giving back as much warmth as the other officer had taken away from him.
Nasir Uddin went home shaken and resolved never to drive a car with a frosted windshield. During the long hours he had been imprisoned, he had thought only of how he needed to be careful about his actions and stay alive so that he could continue to support his family.
Nasir Uddin’s students were perplexed with his behavior as a teacher. He had always been careless about his dress. He was the most ill-dressed person at Mosul University. He secretly had a very low opinion of the well-dressed man. He used to think that well-dressed people had no worth inside and so they wore nice clothes to show off their superficial exterior. Every other teacher at the university wore a tie, but he never wore one.
One day in Nasir Uddin’s second-year class on thermodynamics, the students brought him a paper box in colorful wrapping. They opened the box themselves and showed him the twelve ties inside.
“It is a gift for you,” they said. “You are liked by all of us.” They also explained that “every other teacher wears a tie to the class, we would like you also to come to your classes wearing a tie.”
Nasir Uddin felt very insulted but tried not to show them. He told them that he liked a gift if it was given with affection and love. He told them that he was very pleased. “But you can only change my philosophy on ties by argument, not by giving me ties,” he said. “So I will take one tie from the box to accept your love.”
Then he went on to say, in case they didn’t know, “I have many ties. But I shall wear one to class only if you can prove to me that wearing a tie will improve anything. Otherwise not. I would rather tell you a story, if you would like to hear it. If you hear it, you will never ask me to wear a tie again.”
Nasir Uddin told them the story of Sheikh Saadi, a renowned philosopher from Iran. One day, Saadi was invited by the Shah of Iran to dine with him. But when Saadi reached the palace, he was denied entry because he was dressed in rags. Saadi went to the market and bought expensive clothes. Then he went back to the palace gates to keep his appointment with the Shah. When the food was served, Saadi did not eat any himself, but he stuffed all the delicacies in the pockets of his clothes.
The Shah was astonished. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Saadi replied, “Your Highness, I was not allowed to enter the palace without these clothes. Only these clothes allowed me access. So I am feeding the ones for which all this honor and bounty is intended.”
Nasir Uddin said to the students, “Let me be your teacher without a tie. Don’t dress me up like a Sheikh Saadi.”
Nasir Uddin’s Egyptian colleague informed him one day that his students referred to him as Ustad Tamata (Tomato Teacher). He asked Nasir Uddin if he knew why he was thus addressed. Nasir Uddin felt very insulted.
In the next class, Nasir Uddin asked the students, “Have I been nicknamed Ustaad Tamata by you or not?” They told him yes, indeed, they had given him this nickname. Nasir Uddin was furious.
He said, “How did I earn it?”
They explained, “The tomato is a vegetable that goes with every curry in Iraq, and you are a teacher who teaches us every subject.” Nasir Uddin calmed down and felt very happy. He taught all the extra subjects, taking on any extra courses, because he loved teaching and he loved his students. He had also partaken of tomato curry, dipping bread in it, sitting on a mat at an Iraqi neighbor or colleague’s house. Sometimes a friend would send kubeh stuffed with tomatoes or dolma cooked in the aroma of rice and tomatoes cocooned in grape leaves. A student’s mother would arrive with klecha, date sweets, or pastry covered with sugar dust. So in spite of himself, Nasir Uddin had fallen in love with his teaching at Mosul University, the people he met, and the food he ate.
The dust of the desert never settles. Just as Iraq grew from a poor country of Bedouin mud huts and snot-nosed children on donkeys to a land of bounty, hope, and happiness, soon that moment shifted also. Summer had come upon Nasir Uddin’s family and the air was hot and heavy. The skies grew thick with rumors. The Shat-el-Arab was in dispute. The Baath party became more and more hard-lined.
Dr. Saadi lost his job to Mr. Helal, one much junior to him and not half as talented because the Baath party desired it. Trouble with Iran. All that is history now. Food was scarce again, and Rahela stood in long lines without knowing what she was expecting at the end of the line. Nasir Uddin’s family moved to a flat in Babultop, in the city, close to the crowds and markets. His children were cramped for space, caught in the anxiety of the grown-ups. The markets thickened with soldiers from the popular army. Nasir Uddin’s students started going off to war.
“Don’t you think this is a mistake?” He asked his students. “Even if Iraq defeats Iran and occupies it, what will happen in the end?”
“Don’t worry,” they assured him. “The war will be over in a day.”
Nasir Uddin went to collect his three children from school. The warning sirens had started, and it was no longer safe to let them ride the bus. An American child used to ride the same bus to the school, he was gone now. All the Americans and most Europeans had pulled out. Only the unfortunate citizens of the Indian subcontinent remained.
“I am fed up,” Nasir Uddin declared to Dr. Shah, who had come to fetch his son also. “I want to go home.”
Several coups had taken place in Bangladesh in the interim period: Sheikh Mujib had been assassinated long ago, and now President Zia, the latest in a long line of leaders, had also been killed. Eight years had passed since they had arrived in Iraq.
The first bombs fell in Mosul, shutting down the airport. It was no longer safe to drive a car across the border, as Nasir Uddin had planned so long ago. Even Baghdad airport was bombed. The only way to leave was to take a bus across to Kuwait and board a PIA flight from there. Most of Nasir Uddin’s colleagues had left already, or were scrambling to get out, and the university and the city were deserted of the foreigners who had made their fortunes in Iraq.
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Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel The Children of This Madness and the short story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, January 2025). Her short stories have been published in Granta, Third Coast, Chicago Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, where she received the Cambor Fellowship and the Inprint / Michener prize in Fiction.
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