The Half Life of Gems Moonsharin Ahmed A Thesis in The Department of English Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts (English) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada August 2014 © Moonsharin Ahmed, 2014 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Moonsharin Ahmed Entitled: The Half Life of Gems and submitted in partial requirement for the degree of Masters of Arts (English) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respects to originality and quality Signed by the final examining committee: Stephanie Bolster Chair Terence Brynes Examiner Mikhail Iossel Examiner Josip Novakovich Supervisor Approved by: Jill Didur Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director Andre Roy Dean of Faculty August 25, 2014 Date ii Abstract The Half Life of Gems follows two cousins in the Haidar family, Nadim and Abrar, during their summer visit to their ancestral home in Ujjalpur, Bangladesh. Abrar Haidar is the son of Zohair Haidar, a successful RMG (Ready Made Garments) manufacturer. Abrar is struggling to find the courage to tell his father he doesn’t want to run the family business. Moreover, he hopes to marry Sadaf, but he is clueless about her feelings towards him. It doesn’t help that Sadaf’s father dislikes Abrar, and is critical of the exploitative nature of the garments industry. Abrar’s cousin Warda holds him responsible for ruining the Pan Art Competition at school, and greatly affects his summer holiday. Soon he realizes a man is stalking him, and he learns that his father had history with Qazi, an infamous war criminal. Meanwhile, Nadim Haidar plots revenge against Abrar due to past grudges. Nadim aspires to be a detective and the story of a robbery during the Bangladesh Liberation War inspires him. One night as Nadim lays in wait for Abrar, Nadim spies on a servant named Shakil hiding something in the forest surrounding their house. He becomes obsessed with trying to solve the mystery. Abrar gets involved against his will and realizes the situation is more sinister than it seems. He is torn between confronting and protecting his father as he delves deeper into the past. iii Table of Contents Chapter 1……………………1 Chapter 2……………………39 Chapter 3……………………106 Chapter 4……………………150 Chapter 5……………………206 Chapter 6 ………………….. 233 Chapter 7……………………273 iv Chapter 1 It has to be done, he thought. With his eyes shut he tried to regain the boundaries of his body. An ant or a termite crawled on his leg, around three centimetres away from the place where he imagined his ankle was. It has to be done. The thought javelined through his nervous system. A second later the alarm clock went off. Stretching, he shook off the last shackles of sleep. He stared at the fluorescent hands of the clock. The darkness was dense as clouds, and adjusting his eyes took some time. An insect scuttled across the roof of the mosquito net. He dangled a foot out of bed and searched for his sandals with his toes. Snatching the clock, which he kept next to his pillow, he sprang out of bed. A pair of wings fluttered away from his sandals as he slipped them on. A moth, he guessed. Endless hours of power outages meant there wasn’t sufficient light for the moths in the house. River sounds owned the night. The river meandered northeast, beyond the forest that sprawled towards the north. He was in his paternal grandparents’ house, at the edge of the town. To compose himself he breathed in time with the river’s rhythm, until a cicada’s song cut through the air. He rubbed his birth mark. It was oval, below the thumb of his right hand. Other scars, which were his trophies from old fights, had more interesting shapes and histories. But it was the birthmark he rubbed at tough moments. Tick tock, he thought. Father was getting older, and he should give him sufficient time to absorb the shock. He lit the stub of a candle that was waxed onto the chest of drawers. In the far corner a blue sheet billowed over a medley of furniture that was too old fashioned to be 1 used. There was a bed, wardrobes, suitcases and decades old chairs stacked on top of each other. But the furniture was made of quality mahogany and teak, so his relatives kept it. Suddenly, the room felt too crowded. Generally, he enjoyed having a room to himself – most of his relatives were sharing. Cool it, kid, he told himself. He opened the top drawer and pulled a out white shirt. This summer he had brought all his white clothes with him from his house in Dhaka. He smiled to himself. Wearing white was a newly acquired compulsion, and it was related to Her. A vision of her tracing her fingers on a misty window flitted across his mind. It was an old memory, and bleached because he kept replaying it. The writing on the glass was important, and not being able to remember it bugged him like a paper cut, mild but persistent. Of course there are greater causes for concern, said the mocking voice in his head. Stop, he told it. For the past few weeks he had been waking up before dawn feeling courageous, ready to tell his father. Then thoughts of her would whirl around his head, until his heart beat as though it had taken a shot of epinephrine. Then he would start doubting he ever felt courageous. It was an indulgence he couldn’t afford now. His fingers lingered on the third button of his shirt; it was loose. He put the button in the pocket and pulled off the shirt. Mother and all three of his sisters were in Dubai, visiting his two-month-old nephew. One of his aunts would have to stitch the button back on. It irked him now that he had never learned any dull, domestic skills, because soon he would be flying off to attend university. Exhilarating as the idea of living alone in a new city was, he prevented himself from pursuing it. A golden moth with brown speckled wings hovered around the candle. 2 He reached into the drawer again. The next white shirt was from the rejected lots of shirts sewed in Father’s garment factory. The brand designer had wanted pockets on the left, but someone in one of the production lines had misheard the instructions. Fifty shirts had been produced with the pockets on the right side before someone noticed the mistake. These complications would become his career challenges if he took over the Haidar industries. He slammed the drawer shut. Shoved between piles of magazines was his jar containing miswak, a neem tree twig. After softening the bristles of the miswak by sprinkling water on them, he brushed his teeth with it. Then he brushed his beard and his thick hair until the comb scraped his scalp. The flame was about to go out as the wax that had piled up on one side started caving in. He salvaged it. Molten wax singed his thumb as he molded it into a pyramid. The moth sat on his birthmark. He had heard somewhere that a moth’s wing will dissolve in a person’s mouth. Now wasn’t that something, he thought. To cease existing in a matter of moments. His pulse quickened. I have eternity to look forward to. He nudged at the moth and it hopped onto an interior decor magazine. He wondered why the moth wasn’t flying towards the glowing alarm clock, and then realized he had set the alarm half an hour earlier than usual. Strange, he thought. He was sure he had set the alarm right last night. Father would wake up around dawn and finish urgent work. Dawn was still three quarters of an hour away. Trying to go back to sleep would be pointless, not that sleep came easily to him. It was the last third of the night. The time when Allah sees which worshipper sacrificed sleep to seek Allah’s pleasure. Allah is closer to me than my jugular vein, he reminded himself. 3 He asked Allah to help him to find the best way to tell his father that he, Abrar Haidar, the only son and heir of Zohair Haidar, had no intention of running the family business. He had been accepted into the engineering faculty at a university in Georgia. But Father was under the impression that he would pursue a major in Business and a minor in Physics. His father was an RMG, a ‘Ready Made Garments’ manufacturer who took orders to sew outfits from international clothing brands. The RMG sector was one of the most important and profitable industries in Bangladesh. After the death of Abrar’s grandfather, Father had started off as an importer and exporter of frozen foods and then branched out to the garments industry. After years of trial and error, and a point of near starvation, Father finally owned four factories and enjoyed great wealth and success. He expected nothing less from Abrar than outshining him. Abrar rolled up his sleeves. His muscles were as rigid as a rock. To Abrar the factories were no more than glorified tailoring shops, where the owner didn’t have the job satisfaction of designing and cutting fabrics with their own hands, if such a skill was satisfying at all. As an owner, his responsibilities would include securing clients in a highly competitive market and haggling for a profit margin of five cents per shirt. He would have to scour Hong Kong and Shanghai for textiles that met the specific requirements of the buyers, draw up letters of credit over the colours, sizes and styles of outfits, and safely get the freight on board a cargo ship. He found these pursuits mind-numbingly boring. Worse, meeting production deadlines and paying wages at times when the factories were running on loss brought the threat of bankruptcy ever closer. The challenge might be worth it if he was in complete control, but success depended on the 4 sweat of thousands of workers. Forgive me and my family, Allah, thought Abrar. It was too early in the morning to think of the real reason he loathed the business. The only problem with the industry that captured Abrar’s interest was the power outages. Locally known as load shedding, electricity would be cut for hours at a stretch. Workers simply waited in the heat for the power to return. Although it was expensive, Father had fitted powerful electrical generators in the factories, so that production could resume without too much delay. Abrar often fantasized about finding a way to supply uninterrupted electricity to every corner of the country. Gas and coal could sustain the country for the next century. There were three billion tons of coal in the Northwestern regions, but it had to be extracted by open pit mining, which ruined farmlands and farmers, and released lung damaging debris into the atmosphere. Despite all the hazards, nuclear power was the most efficient way of generating electricity. Abrar slammed the drawer. It thoroughly irked him that India and Pakistan were nuclear powers, and Bangladesh wasn’t. That won’t do anyways, he thought, pushing further thoughts aside. Although he considered renewable energy resources something akin to fluff talk, he often found himself thinking of generating hydroelectricity during floods (somehow cars and huts being washed away, and chicken, cows and goats drowning were missing from his fantasies). Solar power also appealed to him, but he didn’t think it was reliable on a grand scale. In hybrid cars though… he thought with a familiar tingling in his stomach. Abrar was certain he could design solar powered cars. All he needed was to learn more theory. They will teach all the cool stuff in the fourth year of university, he thought. The first few years would be all about electronics and gears. He laced his fingers together 5 and stretched, the tips reached the ceiling. As far as he knew, students could build jet engines, artificial limbs and amphibious robots by the time they reached their Masters degree. He craved the nervous and euphoric moment before his future inventions would be switched on. Would algorithms flash before my eyes? he wondered. Excitement exploded in the pit of his stomach. There was so much he wanted to invent. Ahem, his inner voice intruded. Father will scoff, and say I am an overgrown boy who wants bigger toys. He spun on the balls of his feet and untied the ropes that hung the mosquito net. Or not, he thought. Perhaps he was giving Father too little credit. Although Zohair Haidar was strict, he was known for his benevolence. The mosquito net was cuboidal. Abrar knew people who rolled the mesh on the sides and piled it on the top of the net, and left it strung up all day. It was a habit he found irksome. Spaces had to be somewhat measurable for him to find them beautiful, and a floating net just sliced across the column of air that reached up from the bed to the ceiling. He stuffed it under the mattress. After spitting on his fingers, he pinched the wick of the candle and extinguished the flame. A dimly lit lantern illuminated the corridor outside his room. Brass pots holding plants glinted in the light. Purple tovara leaves darkened as Abrar’s shadow fell over them. He was on the third floor of the house, which contained several bedrooms. Abrar sped past the slumbering people. There was a washroom at the end of the corridor. He did wudu, ablutions that were necessary before prayers. He washed his face, hands and feet, and let the cool water drench his beard. The living room, which was in the central section of the house, was spacious, and he decided to pray the voluntary prayers there. Kid’s toys were scattered all around. A jolt of annoyance shot through him as he 6