The Halfways, page 1
NILOPAR UDDIN was born in Shropshire to Sylheti parents who, like the fictional family in The Halfways, owned and ran an Indian restaurant in Wales. Every summer her family would travel for their holidays to Bangladesh to visit extended family, and this affection for the country has continued into adulthood.
Nilopar has had a successful career as a financial services lawyer practising in both London and New York, a city that she fell in love with. She now lives in London with her husband and two daughters. She has an MA in Creative Writing from City University where she first started working on The Halfways.
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2022
Copyright © Nilopar Uddin 2022
Nilopar Uddin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © July 2022 ISBN: 9780008478728
Version 2021-06-13
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008478704
Author’s Note
I have chosen not to translate every Sylheti word and expression with equivalents in English, particularly where the meaning is adequately suggested by the context. The Glossary at the back has been compiled to assist the reader with a translation of a small selection of words where I hope it will be helpful to further the reader’s understanding. In compiling this Glossary, I have transliterated the Sylheti phonetically into English and would like to note that these translations may not be a faithful representation but rather, they are underpinned by my experience of the language. Where verses from the Quran are referred to in this novel, I would also like to note that a literal translation of the words of the Quran is accepted by most Muslims to be impossible and that therefore the phrases used herein are explanatory translations.
A Sylheti’s matri basha or mother tongue is not the standard Bangla they are formally taught to read and write at school, but Sylheti, which remains unrecognised as a language and is often referred to as a dialect of the standard Bangla. In the author’s experience, speakers of Sylheti can be subjected to linguistic discrimination. Sylheti is principally spoken in the Sylhet Division in north-east Bangladesh and parts of India such as Assam and Manipur. It is also spoken by members of the diaspora around the world, including in England, where it is erroneously identified as ‘Bangla’ or ‘Bengali’. Sylheti was written in a unique script called Siloti Nagri but this historical script appears to have fallen out of usage in the mid- to late twentieth century. It is experiencing a revival today.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Author’s Note
Part I
The Humble Murta and the Graceful Pond Dancer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
What Shamsur Saw Beneath the Tamarind Tree
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Once When They Fought
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Once During a Red-eye in the Bosom of the Cockpit
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Boy Deprived of a Braggable History
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
The Inauspiciousness of a Rainy Wedding
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Once a Teacher’s Pet
Chapter 25
Lost in Low Cloud
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
One Summer Holiday
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
What Elias Saw Beneath the Tamarind Tree
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Permission Acknowledgement
About the Publisher
For Ahmed
This land offered me
only dubious joys.
Where else could I go?
I found a broken boat
and spent my life
bailing out the water.
FAKIR LALAN SHAH TRANSLATED BY DEBEN BHATTACHARYA
Part I
The Humble Murta and the Graceful Pond Dancer
Every few years, when his memory of his mother begins to fray, Elias makes his way to Sylhet as though on a pilgrimage to a place some part of her can be found. The mother he had known had always been fond of the brief summers she had spent there. She had believed herself attached to the place where the heart of her ancestry beat through the land. So, Elias makes the journey.
One year, on his way to his ancestral village, he takes a detour. He hires a nauka, a country boat, at a particularly solitary ghat of the Shari river. He holds the sides as the boatman manoeuvres them away from the river cliffs out towards the marshy fringes where, he has been informed, local villagers source shital bethi from the clusters of murta shrubs. He is curious to see what a murta plant looks like, a curiosity kindled by a thought his mother had shared with his aunt in one of her emails.
The boatman slows the nauka as they near the murtas curving around the shore. The plant that catches Elias’s attention stands slightly apart from its brethren. Though this murta is taller and wider than the others, its languid leaves droop tragically into the water.
‘They make the mats from the leaves?’ he asks the boatman, thinking of the array of beautiful nokshi shital baskets and mats and trays adorning his grandmother’s house in the Beacons.
The boatman shakes his head, and not a single well-oiled hair moves. ‘Na, ba! Here, look!’ The man drops the oar, grabs the nearest murta and pulls aside the leaves to reveal several wide stems that they are attached to. ‘Ey, ta! Bucho? This is used for the mat – and the fans and the baskets. Everything!’
As the heat of the sun hammers down on his head, Elias rummages in his rucksack for his mother’s old hand fan. The boat rocks from side to side with a sleepy softness as the boatman tries to keep it still. Elias finds the fan and shows it to the man, who nods without understanding what’s being told to him. About the beauty of metamorphosis. About how the lime green plant has been sliced and dyed and deftly woven into this hand fan with its fading carmine border and its white shapla centre. How this comes from that. How this is, in essence, still that. Words his mother had written, words that have recently stirred in him a longing to be reunited with her.
Elias motions to the man to steer the boat back to shore. As the oar strokes softly through the water, the boatman begins to sing a bhatiyali, his voice travelling out over the horizon in search of the sun god. Elias suddenly reaches out to the last of the murta and pulls a leaf free as the boat passes by. He holds it to his nose – inhales the beloved old world that it carries in its fragrance, and in the cool of its touch. The feel of the murta appeases an ancient craving in Elias, a craving for stories. All the women who have mothered him have grappled with this greed, without fully grasping how each story has helped light his path: each bit of history a beam in a flood of darkness, revealing to him something of life’s circularity, of its inherent wisdom and simplicity. Their stories are the bones of his being.
He arrives that evening at Nirashapur, his grandfather’s ancestral village, the bruising sky quickening his footsteps towards the dots of turquoise blue glimpsed above the bamboo forest, the precious hand fan now in his rucksack, and the wilting leaf of the murta coiled in his pocket. The heat coaxed out by the darkness rises from the ground and blankets his legs. The shadows of the bamboo canes crisscross his path, as the Neel Bari, the Blue House, comes into view and the lights from the neighbouring doorways grow wide, and faces peer out.
A
‘It is me,’ Elias replies. The bamboo forest is alive with the sounds of crickets and frogs, the ghats, the breeze ruffling the leaves, and these sounds crowd in on him. ‘It is me, Elias. Elias Suleiman Islam.’
The faces trickle out, mostly old but a few young. The people appear before him like ghosts from the darkness. They touch his face, rub his arms, run their fingers through his ponytail. He thinks he recognises his Nanabhai’s fingers, and his high brow, and he sees Nani’s shock of wavy hair on a young girl no more than five. Nani who had lived out the last years of her life in this village: long gone, but still lingering.
‘Kitha re bhai?’ his beloved Mustafa cries, stumbling across the courtyard to him. Mustafa’s hair is a tuft of feathers, easily displaced by Elias’s breath. Elias’s shirt grows damp from the old man’s tears, and he laughs as Mustafa, always so dramatic, says, over and over again, ‘I never dreamed I would see you again! Never dreamed!’
Dream, Elias thinks – as they sit him on the old veranda and Mustafa hands him water – for Elias does not dream. Sleep is a darkness that swallows him and spits him out at the crack of dawn. All those stories he has collected rattle around, useless in his head, while he sleeps.
But that night, Elias dreams.
As the night deepens, and the sounds of the forest become a soothing percussion, Elias feels his supper of doodh bhat lying heavy in his stomach, tugging him towards sleep. He dreams of the murta and the shapla flowers, metamorphosed into long-limbed women. He thinks of the houris, and wonders if he has died – has somehow bypassed the summing up of deeds and misdeeds and ended up in Jannah. But then a banshee-scream tilts the world upside down, and suddenly the Bay of Bengal is a funnel, sucking in the murta and his shrieking shaplas along with the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna. Elias watches in terror as the destructive force of the roaring tidal wave turns the Golden Bengal into a watery hell. He glimpses carcasses just visible beneath the surface, and leans forward, because the bodies are human, the faces on those bodies are recognisable, and he leans forward again, this time too far and then he is falling into the furious water, screaming until his lungs burst, before he wakes with a jolt.
And then for some moments in the quiet darkness, he feels that old fear of being on the brink of losing them all, and of losing his mother all over again.
1
On the last day of August, death could be observed everywhere in Nasrin’s back garden.
She had stepped out onto the patio shortly after dropping Elias at his tennis lesson to find the colour wiped from her once beautiful refuge. They had only been away for four days – a last-minute trip to Istanbul, insisted upon by Richard – and she had even flouted the hosepipe ban on the morning of their departure (incurring the frowning disapproval of her neighbour, Mrs Humphreys). But the watering had been futile, Nasrin thought now, surveying the parched grass. The torrid heat had decimated her father’s beloved rose bushes and her mother’s rhododendrons. Only the marigolds emerged unscathed and Nasrin was moved by the plant’s stubborn adaptability – they had been painstakingly transported from Sylhet to her small garden in Barnsbury, and even after such turbulent displacement and this recent heatwave, the diasporic genda continued to flourish.
Glancing up to the darkened windows of Mrs Humphreys’s house, Nasrin sifted a fistful of dry, dusty soil through her fingers. Family lore had it that she had loved stuffing mud into her mouth as a toddler – ‘mineral deficiency!’ her father used to say, but it was more than that. Once, after a nasty fall in Nirashapur, instead of crying for help, Nasrin had lain there, surprised at how soothing the warmth of the sun-baked ground beneath her could be. As the sweet particles of dust tickled her nose and the bustle of Shabebarath took place behind her, she felt the urge to burrow deeper, to press herself further into the earth’s embrace. There had been no tears when her mother finally found her, bleeding from a deep cut to her ankle, the thirsty soil drinking her up.
Nasrin stood up and reached decisively for the hosepipe.
The gushing water bought movement back to the leaves and stems. In the plum tree, a thrush twittered happily and Nasrin, elated by the sudden poetry of it, directed the hosepipe up towards the branches. Just as quickly, she brought it down, ashamed of her wastefulness.
The peal of the doorbell cut through the air. Frowning, Nasrin switched off the tap and dropped the hosepipe. The doorbell rang again.
‘Coming, coming!’ she called, running through the hallway.
Mrs Humphreys stood primly on Nasrin’s doorstep, smiling at her from beneath a straw hat.
‘Hello?’ Nasrin blinked. Surely, she hadn’t been caught with the hosepipe again?
‘Naz!’ The smile on her neighbour’s face faded, and Mrs Humphreys’s eyes darted from Nasrin’s face to her gardening gloves. ‘I am sorry to interrupt your gardening!’
‘I was just … pruning the rose bushes. I don’t usually, but my dad …’
‘Oh, but those roses. La Tosca are very difficult to keep so late into the summer. Your father has good taste, though.’ Her smile returned. ‘How is he? Richard mentioned he’s home now?’
‘Yes, but not well enough to come visit and prune my roses,’ Nasrin said.
‘That can wait, I think.’ Mrs Humphreys turned and nodded at her husband, who waited out on the street. ‘I just wanted to check, Naz, whether you cooked something today … I mean something different?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Well,’ Mrs Humphreys said, laughing self-consciously, ‘I don’t usually mind the cooking smells. I mean what can you do? But today … It’s just those lovely spices you use, they do have a rather strong smell that lingers. Perhaps you forgot to use the extractor fan?’
Nasrin frowned. ‘I always use the extractor fan,’ she said tightly.
Mrs Humphreys nodded. ‘It comes into the house, you see, and nothing will eradicate it.’
‘The fan just blows the odour outside anyway,’ Nasrin said, feeling heat rise through her. ‘It won’t help remove odours “lingering” in your kitchen!’
Mrs Humphreys ignored the curtness in Nasrin’s voice and nodded again, this time more eagerly. ‘Oh, heavens, yes, of course, you’re right, Naz. Of course you are. You know what might be an idea?’ She leaned towards Nasrin as though the thought had only just occurred to her. ‘Perhaps, when you’re cooking, you know, the more special dishes, you could call me before you’re about to start? And I can close all my windows beforehand?’
Nasrin stared at her. ‘Call you before I cook?’
‘Not always,’ Mrs Humphreys said, with a voice thick with reproach, that blamed Nasrin for being unreasonable. ‘It’s so much more complicated in the summer – when the windows are always open. I was just telling William, I can’t remember the last time it was this hot even in August! It’s all this global warming! Well!’ Mrs Humphreys smiled, patted Nasrin’s gloved hand and stepped off the threshold. ‘Say hello to Richard, Naz! He must be so busy at work, we barely see him! Bye, Naz!’
Nasrin watched the woman walk away, clicking the gate firmly shut behind her.
‘And it’s Nasrin to you,’ she muttered. The Humphreyses, long-time residents of the square, had taken an instant liking to Richard when the Wilsons had bought number 34 over five years ago. ‘My cousin’s married to a Kiwi,’ Suzanna Humphreys had told them upon hearing Richard’s accent, and though Nasrin rolled her eyes, Richard had barely batted an eyelid, lapping up the older woman’s attentions and ignoring the mistake. On weekends, as Nasrin tended her little garden, Suzanna and Richard discussed the Sunday Times and exchanged neighbourhood gossip over the garden fence and though the two were now on first-name terms, Nasrin continued to address her neighbours as Mr and Mrs Humphreys and found it condescending and overfamiliar that her neighbour addressed her as Naz.
She closed the door and sniffed the air. She supposed the dal she had cooked that morning did smell stronger than the grilled meat or fish dishes which made up most of their weekly suppers, and she had added a pinch of hing, even though she hated the dung stink – but she had used a chef’s candle that promised to obliterate cooking odours and had even lit an expensive pair of tuberose-scented pair as well.
