1.

The first time Mafiz ran along Kendua’s main road, it didn’t catch the eye of anyone in the village. There could be many reasons for this. For starters, Mafiz was running on a public road. Any of the villagers could run on a public road if they wanted. No one should be bothered by that. Second, it happened in their village, Kendua, beside the Sundarbans mangrove forests, with the Karatia River flowing alongside. At the junction of these three stood the newly constructed Kendua Nuclear Power Plant, towards which enormous trucks roared, carrying uranium and mixed oxide fuel past the village. This often led to traffic jams on the narrow road leading to the village market. Once these colossal trucks came to a stop, no one behind them was easily visible. Maybe this was why none of the villagers spotted Mafiz running. He was behind those trucks. But it’s possible the primary reason Mafiz wasn’t noticed was that a new supershop was opening in the market the very same day. With the establishment of the power plant next to the village, on the back of financial incentives from Russia, the presence of foreigners had increased. It was for their benefit that new shops were being opened, one after another, in the Kendua market. This particular supershop was unusual in that the name on its billboard was written in Russian. From the young to the old, everyone gaped at the new shop with its blinding lights, its shelves packed with goods. They were wondering whether they would be allowed inside. So, none of them noticed Mafiz running. 

The people of Kendua were already overwhelmed in different ways. Even just a short while ago, in this village nestled close to the Sundarbans, the day would begin with the crowing of cocks cleaving the eastern sky, while the end of a brimming workday was announced by the brightening glow of fireflies in the bamboo groves. But now, the floodlights installed at the power plant made it difficult to tell day from night. Just recently, the only modern technology to entertain the village was the 14-inch colour TV set in the house of the village Chairman, Zakir. When evening fell, the chairman would turn on the TV and open the windows of his front room, whereupon hordes of villagers would gather in his yard. And then, exactly as the clock hands turned to eight o’clock, the windows would be shuttered from the inside. The villagers would rise slowly to their feet and wend their way home. But now almost everyone in the village brandished a six-inch smartphone. Everyone was immersed in these devices, like addicts, paying a price for it. For instance, it was a regular habit for the villagers, when they felt a sudden pressure in the belly while walking around outdoors, to squat behind a large roadside tree, to take a shit. The other day, on his way back from the market, old Abul Chacha had done just that, to empty his stomach. Right then, the face of a white demon floated out of a bush. Invoking Gazi Pir, Bonbibi, Ma Mansa and all other holy deities that he could recall, the old chacha slung his lungi over his shoulder, leapt to his feet and raced towards the main road. The demon followed the baffled chacha out of the bushes, his face still glowing white from the mobile phone in his hand. In addition to technology-induced befuddlement, the youngsters had also swapped their loose half-sleeved shirts and lungis for three-quarter-length pants and T-shirts bearing Marilyn Monroe’s face. Instead of fish-and-rice, they were buying burgers and hot dogs from convenience stores. After the nuclear power plant was established with the help of the Russkis, nothing stayed the same in the village of Kendua. Compared to all that, Mafiz suddenly taking up running was an insignificant development. 

Adding insult to injury, thanks to the power plant, the entire country’s gaze was now on this undeveloped village beside the Sundarbans. And so, in a bid to improve the quality of life for Kendua’s relatively backward community, several NGOs had arrived with banners flaunting slogans like ‘It’s Your Life; We Undertake to Make it Better’ and were at each other’s throats to administer various social programmes. In the end, one survived. Its education wing now ran a literacy project with children in the morning and the elderly in the evening. Meanwhile its medical wing was busy poking everyone in the bottom with injections and distributing some sorts of pills and balloons in packets. The paramedic girl who handed out the balloons to men, whether young or old, without batting an eye, said that they should fix the balloon on the tips of their peckers before sex: this would prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. More than the men, it was the elderly women of the village who were annoyed by her brazen behaviour. They, in turn, handed out the balloons, as generously, to the naked village children with amulets around their waists. The children inflated the condoms and made actual balloons out of them. The balloons drifted over the heads of the date palm trees. When a salt-laden southern breeze blew in from the sea and shoved aside the lady paramedic, she gazed wistfully at the flying condoms. Then she busied herself chatting on WhatsApp with her boyfriend, whom she had left behind in the city. 

Although the power plant floodlights, the flashlights from mobile phones and the educational programmes started by the NGO had sufficiently illuminated the lives of the inhabitants of Kendua, nevertheless, a group of missionaries in faraway Europe sensed the depths of hidden darkness in their souls. Their hearts bursting with love for these illiterate, helpless brown people, the missionary team rushed to Kendua. They began to preach the words of Jesus to these humans who had grown up in the lap of the Sundarbans. In truth, the hearts of the Kendua youth were already pretty polluted by the munificence of the long mobile phones equipped with the internet. They were absorbed in the practice of their newly learned online nationalist racism. Bangladesh cannot defeat their next-door neighbour in cricket, almost never. These young men from the rural reaches, blind fans of the Bangladesh Cricket Team, suddenly discovered that even if they couldn’t win on the field, cursing India out in the comment section of the livestream channels could tickle the Bangali nationalist bone a fair bit. So, one time, while cursing India, a boy from Kendua got hammered in the comments by the Indian supporters and got scared. The Indians threatened to come to Bangladesh and give it to him good. Terrified, he decided that he would seek shelter at the feet of Jesus Christ. He didn’t know how much succour Christ would provide in terms of his spiritual development. But if he took shelter under the robes of the white missionaries, nobody would come to bother him—this was his belief.  

2.

This being the collective situation in Kendua, why did Mafiz suddenly begin running? His body was like beaten iron, with not an ounce of fat. Nor had he informed anyone of a secret dream of representing the country at the Olympics. Why, then? 

Mafiz hadn’t exactly been born in this area. He had drifted to Kendua as a very small child and taken refuge here. Neither the identity of his parents nor his family history could be determined. Knowing full well that he had no one to support him, he had survived, from childhood onwards, on the strength of his physical work. Mafiz had always been the first to volunteer to help anyone else in the village. If he happened to hear that the roof of someone’s hut had weathered away, he repaired it of his own accord with tin or straw. When the village headman fancied a new pond, it was Mafiz who had leapt to the task with a spade, not expecting payment. Repairing roads or the dam on the Karatia that flowed past the village, ploughing the fields, sowing seeds, reaping the harvest, picking ripe or green coconuts, fishing, teaming up with the mowals to gather honey from the Sundarbans—he did all of these things, free of charge. All he sought in return was two square meals a day. Sometimes he’d set off in a handcrafted canoe on the Karatia. He would drift along the river into the sea. He would return at day’s end with one or two gigantic fish from the ocean’s depths. He had neither a fishing net nor the money to buy, weave or even borrow one, and yet somehow or other he would bring back enormous fish which he appeared to have caught with nothing but his bare hands—this was a matter of great wonder to everyone. The old women of the village claimed that Mafiz was truly the son of Bonbibi. 

He had married Nasiman recently, just a few years ago. After losing her mother in childhood, Nasiman had grown up in her stepmother’s household. When she hit puberty, she lost her father too, who was killed by a tiger while gathering honey in the forest. After that, Nasiman’s stepmother got rid of her soon as she could, by marrying her off. Anyway, during the wedding, the air over the village was redolent with the fragrance of Amon rice. No one could tell with certainty whether the sweet smell of the ripening grain had caused a flutter in the hearts of the young couple. But the way the villagers saw it, the head-in-the-clouds Mafiz and the orphaned Nasiman were a match made in heaven. Afterwards, they spent their days dealing with the same scarcities as all the other couples in the village. 

3.

Alongside child education, senior education, vaccination and birth-control programmes, the NGO operating in Kendua took up another, different kind of mission. It tried to make the women in the village self-reliant by teaching them handicrafts. The NGO not only taught them how to sew clothes, make baskets and mats and utensils but also gave them small loans for buying raw material. They bought their raw materials, crafted their products and sold them at the marketplace. The small profit they made from their sales they ploughed back into their business enterprises. 

Nasiman joined their ranks. 

She was engaged primarily in sewing. She wasn’t the most skilful in her group. There were many others who were more proficient. But Nasiman attracted the teachers’ attention for a different reason. They observed that she always tried to tell a story with her needlework, so that any quilt she embroidered turned into a fairy-tale world. Which was how it came about that the NGO began giving her special incentives, and her fame spread beyond the village. As the pressure of her work grew, the time Nasiman and Mafiz had together began to shrink. 

In one sense, this pleased Mafiz. While he was busy the entire day doing this or that task outside the house, his wife used to have a lonely existence at home, after all. Now his wife had the opportunity to keep herself busy with her own thing.  But then an anxiety darkened his heart, and Mafiz couldn’t entirely sweep it aside: he no longer had his wife to himself. The number of people coming and going, to and from their little nest, increased greatly. In particular, Zaman Sir, the chief executive of the NGO, came by almost every day to enquire after Nasiman’s work. Earlier he used to come with the paramedic lady in tow, but of late he had begun frequenting their house all by himself. All told, Mafiz didn’t care for what was going on, but he couldn’t work out exactly what he should complain about.  

One day he noted with surprise a mobile phone in Nasiman’s hand. Apparently, the NGO had given it to her. Mafiz didn’t have a detailed sense of what a smartphone was. When Nasiman explained to him that the device enabled conversations across a distance, he concluded that perhaps it could be used to contact the dead. The instrument had arrived from the land of White people (actually the components had been manufactured in China and the phone assembled in Hong Kong) to this shrine of Gazi Pir, Bonbibi and Ma Mansa. Given these two factors, communicating with the dead through this device didn’t seem an impossibility. But when Nasiman explained to him that the device could only be used to contact living people, not the dead, Mafiz was astonished yet again. His wife had no other relative besides him, so who would she talk to across distances? When he posed this question to Nasiman, in a roundabout way, she showed her husband some recent selfies to which she had applied filters. Mr. Zaman was visible behind her in one of them. But Mafiz didn’t say anything. Seeing his wife’s enhanced beauty in the photographs caused a twinge of pain in his chest. He hadn’t realised his wife’s intrinsic beauty all this while, but the device had sensed it. He had no words to express his regret for this. Mafiz tried to embrace his wife passionately, but Nasiman didn’t show much enthusiasm. 

After this, the time that Mafiz spent with Nasiman diminished even further. On most days, he returned home to find his wife embroidering with deep concentration. And if he happened to wake up in the middle of the night, he discovered her talking into the device. 

Has this wife of mine gone mad? Why is she speaking to this machine all by herself, wondered Mafiz. 

4.

That his relationship with Nasiman had no spark was something Mafiz learnt for the first time from Zaman Sir, the chief executive of the NGO.  

Mafiz was planting trees with 60 other hired hands on the bank of the Karatia that day. This tree-planting program had been arranged at the instigation of the NGO. There was a dense forest of sundari trees here earlier. But about a month ago, the ancient trees, spread across a hundred bighas of land, had been felled by a hundred labourers. The reason for clearing the forest was that the power plant required more land. Mafiz had been called on that occasion too, but he hadn’t agreed. These ancient sundari trees were the abode of Gazi Pir, Bonbibi and Ma Mansa. He couldn’t bring himself to participate in the treachery of decimating their dwellings, having grown up in their laps. Somehow, news of the trees being cut reached the capital city and made the environmentalists speak up. The leftist student organisations launched a blockade. Newspapers, magazines and TV channels began reporting on the incident. The government was forced to sit up and take notice. As a result, an initiative was undertaken to replant the same area with seeds, under the aegis of the local administration. The irony was that the NGO that had managed the felling of the trees was now given the responsibility to sow them afresh. This time Mafiz didn’t need to be invited; he showed up on his own to plant trees. Yet he could not fathom why the ancient trees had been felled in the first place nor why the same species was now being replanted. Without doubt, the world was an intricately complicated place. 

While Mafiz was planting the trees, he saw Zaman Sir standing at a distance, supervising the operations. Mafiz recalled instantly that Nasiman always spoke of him with great respect. So, after some hesitation, he decided that he would choose this man to talk to about the coolness that had entered his relationship with Nasiman. He was a learned man; he had come from the city; he ran such a large organisation. Perhaps he would be able to offer some advice and point out to Mafiz where he was going wrong. 

When Mafiz walked up to him, Zaman looked as if he had just seen a ghost. He tried to brush Mafiz off, but when Mafiz stuck to him like a leech, he gave up and listened to the story, his eyes trained on the sky. Then he gave a succinct reply. 

‘You’re not getting along with your wife anymore, Mafiz. There’s no spark in the relationship.’ 

Although Mafiz could tell he wasn’t getting along with his wife, he didn’t know why. No spark, Zaman Sir had said. So, what was this spark? 

In the midst of planting trees, Mafiz asked the labourer working next to him, ‘What’s this thing called spark?’ 

‘Electricity stuff. You get it at the electric shop.’ 

After his work was done for the day, Mafiz rushed to the electrician Tariqul’s workshop in Kendua market. Tariqul was absorbed in repairing a radio set. Mafiz interrupted his work to ask what a spark was. 

Tariqul was an electrical engineer with a diploma from the Khulna Polytechnic Institute. After getting his degree, he had spent two years unemployed in the district town of Khulna, in the hope of getting a government job. To pay for his expenses during that time, he had to tutor SSC students in physics and chemistry. When no government job came his way despite all his efforts, he gave up and returned to Kendua to set up an electronics shop. 

He was startled when Mafiz showed up to throw a question at him which related to his long-abandoned studies. The part of him that used to be a private tutor came to life. ‘A spark is an overflow of electrons,’ he said briefly. Then, cleaning his soot-covered hands at the tap and wiping them dry, he pulled out a small whiteboard and marker from a corner of the workshop. He drew the diagram of an atom to try and explain the topic. The concept that the balance between the positively charged protons and the negatively charged electrons keeps an atom electrically neutral was beyond Mafiz’s grasp. All he understood from the diagram was that if the relationship between him and his wife were to be symbolically compared to an atom, his wife was the positively charged proton, and he was the negatively charged electron. And the lack of balance between them was caused by the deficit in his own electrical charge. He would have to compensate for this deficit. He would have to build electrical power by running. 

‘But it won’t do to run at any old speed.’ Mafiz looked worried. ‘You said I have to run at the speed of light. How can a human run as fast as light?’ 

Tariqul provided a simple solution to Mafiz’s complex problem. He reassured Mafiz and explained that even if an electrical current travelled at the speed of light, the tiny individual electron moved at a relatively lower speed. If Mafiz tried hard enough, who knew, he might be able to attain the speed of the minuscule electron. 

The matter no longer appeared complicated to Mafiz. He felt that the distance that had sprung up between him and Nasiman, because of the lack of a spark, was one he could bridge by running. 

Mafiz started running. He ran to the right and to the left, forward and backward, along every axis of the three-dimensional world. Mafiz ran through a crowd of people busy in the fields. Mafiz ran across silent, solitary meadows. Along the edge of the river. Mafiz ran in the morning, in the afternoon, at night. In winter, in summer, in the rains. Mafiz raced against the wind. Mafiz raced against sound. 

Mafiz even raced against light. 

5.

And so, the seasons went by. The year turned full circle. More shops with Russian signboards opened in the village. The number of trucks with nuclear fuel increased, standing on the road connecting Khulna to Satkhira. Slow, continuous change was not visible to the inhabitants of Kendua; everything seemed normal. But while old Kalimuddi was scraping his teeth with a twig on the bank of the Karatia at dawn one day, the river swallowed a chunk of the bank, which led to commotion all over the village. The riverbank crumbling was unprecedented in Kendua.  The Karatia was a fast-flowing river with a strong current, but because the roots of the sundari trees had a firm grip on the soil, it had never dared take a bite out of the land. Now, with the trees lining the riverbanks cut down to make space for the power plant, the river sank its fangs into the soil for the very first time. The villagers stirred at once. News of the crumbling riverbank was sent at once to the officer in charge of the subdistrict, but the boys and men of the village did not sit back, waiting for government intervention. They volunteered to haul large sacks of sand to the river’s edge, to build a dam. 

But this wasn’t enough to deal with the problem. On the contrary, innumerable other problems began to crash like waves on their lives. One morning the residents of Kendua woke up to discover the colour of the river had changed suddenly. The water flowing in the Karatia was blood red. They were unable to estimate how many days’ worth of chemical waste from the power plant had accrued to get the river into such a state. Even as they were speculating how to solve this crisis, they observed with horror that a stream of dead fish, small and large, was floating down the scarlet current. In the same way that the helpless inhabitants of Kendua had surrendered to their own fate, the fish were floating from an unknown source to an unidentified destination: who knew where! The nuclear power plant stood nearby, solid and unmoving, its chimneys belching out black, grey and red smoke, which had changed the familiar colours of the sky quite a while ago. The change was significant but too slow for the villagers to have noticed on a daily basis. Today, when the hues of the sky and the river were frighteningly unalike, everyone gazed in trepidation at the small sundari saplings on the riverbank. Shimmering in gusts of wind, these young trees seemed to them to be symbols of hope and resilience. 

The day the carcasses of a pair of dead cobras were found draped around the neck of Ma Mansa’s idol in the Hindu quarter, even as blood-red tears made a miraculous appearance in the eyes of the idol, all the Hindu villagers broke down sobbing in apprehension of imminent danger. The flowers, fruits and vegetables grown in the fields around the village gradually became dull, lifeless, bland. An excess of arsenic in the water in the coastal areas of Satkhira had already made it flow yellow. Now the water drawn up by the pumps sunk deep into the soil also began to taste bitter. One by one, all the villagers were able to identify the source of the problem, but with all these gigantic fuel tankers constantly entering and exiting the compound of the grand project located within iron walls, and with ever-newer supershops springing up, with signboards in foreign languages with complex inflections, with the influx of both NGO workers and missionaries rising, with starving villagers who had been unable to secure two meals a day now seen eating stale leftover burgers, people were too scared to point fingers. So, the villagers kept their hands tucked firmly in their pockets. 

6.

Soon, an entirely different kind of day dawned for the residents of Kendua. The muezzin was waiting for the cock to crow before he could give the call for the Fajr azaan on that day, but the cock was never heard. Those who were accustomed to going to the mosque at daybreak to pray woke up at their usual hour out of sheer habit, lying in a daze on their beds, waiting for the cry of the rooster and the morning call to prayer. But instead of the expected notes of the azaan, what came to their ears from the southern part of the village was a terrifying sound like an unknown animal groaning, imprisoned deep beneath the earth. It was coming from the place where the Karatia and parts of the village had intermingled. The villagers could not determine whether the sound was made by a stormy wind or an aggrieved ocean or rumbling clouds or the weeping of nature and imperilled life-forces. But their uncertainty did not hold the sound at bay. It assaulted their senses at intervals, freezing their souls with fear. 

A little later that morning, when a murky grey light emanated from the sky, the villagers had a chance to look around and realise it had rained all night. Even in the morning, the rain hadn’t let up. The intensity of the night-long downpour had submerged their courtyards. Their fields were flooded, and the ponds were level with the land around. Braving the blustery winds, needles of rain and constant lightning and thunder overhead, the inhabitants of Kendua held on to one another like a line of ants and trudged through ankle-deep water towards the Karatia, to survey the state of the river. Sometimes they lost their footing and smashed the heads of Ma Mansa’s brood of young snakes; at other times they cut their feet on snails huddled together in search of dry land. Slipping and sliding, they arrived finally on the bank of the Karatia. 

Only to be stunned into silence. 

What had happened to the river they knew so well? Where was the river and where, its banks? Where did the river end and the sea begin? It was all indistinguishable. Maddened and indulged by the storm racing in from the sea, the river was raging. Bonbibi seemed to have personally taken on the responsibility of cleansing the Karatia, which had turned viscous with nuclear waste. The pitch-black clouds in the sky were reflected in the water, which had risen up in places to form large whirlpools. Enormous waves kept crashing on the bank. The water level was at least a metre higher than normal. 

‘If it keeps raining like this, all our land and houses and ponds and fish will be swept away…’ screamed someone. The rest didn’t talk, staring with terrified eyes at the river intent on cruel revenge.  

Everyone gathered at short notice in the front yard of the chairman, Zakir. The water had yet to reach his place which was located on the highest spot in the village. 

Silence reigned. No one had anything to say with which to start the meeting. Suddenly a stricken cry drifted in on the wind, ‘The dam has broken…’ 

Hafizaddi, the Imam of the village mosque who had moved here from Noakhali, began to wail. ‘I don’t know how to swim; I don’t want to drown to death…’ 

’Forget about your fear of death,’ screamed an angry Setab, the oldest resident of the village. Pointing to Chairman Zakir, he said, ‘You, son, you tell us what to do now.’ 

‘All the young men will go to repair the dam.’ Drawing a deep breath, the chairman, the village leader to whom everyone turned to in times of crisis, began to speak. ‘Those who are old like Setab Chacha will take the women and children to the school building. And those who are our age will first take the livestock, chickens and ducks to higher ground and then help to repair the dam.’ 

Even when Zakir had finished speaking, everyone sat there in silence. Nobody wanted to get up. The battle against nature seemed an unequal one to them. They felt this punishment was no more than they deserved. Meanwhile the floodwater had reached the edge of Chairman Zakir’s front yard. The water was pitch-black. One by one, the villagers began to regurgitate the specific fears that lay in the depths of their hearts. Some had a pregnant cow; others had newly born calves. Some owned nothing but a few hens and ducks, their only source of earnings—they were frantic about the danger of losing them to the flood. Those who were a little more affluent were afraid that their fishponds and the part of the river where they farmed fish in enclosures would all be swept away by the torrents, that they would lose millions. And those who had nothing to call their own cried in fear of having even their houses destroyed by this monstrous water. 

‘All you young men, get going now!’ The hubbub stopped when ​​Chairman Zakir screamed his instructions.  

Suddenly there was a splashing sound. Mafiz appeared in the courtyard. There was a slope where he stood, where quite a bit of water had accumulated. It reached almost to his knees. Above, an overcast, cloud-covered sky, and knife-like black water below. Amidst these, the man they knew well appeared abnormally tall and lithe, as though he wasn’t just one human but one person astride another’s shoulders.       

‘Don’t be afraid; the water has come as far as it can inside the village. It won’t go any further.’ 

Everyone looked at Mafiz with a mixture of surprise and annoyance. 

‘Why won’t it?’ Setab snarled. ‘Will the water listen to you, you idiot?’ 

‘I’ll run,’ said Mafiz with a smile. ‘You’ll see for yourself, the water won’t enter.’ 

The people gathered in the chairman’s courtyard exchanged glances. What the hell was this coolie babbling about?’ 

‘You, get out, you son of a drudge.’ ​​Chairman Zakir lost his cool and lashed out. ‘Our lives are in danger, and he comes here to stand around and joke?’ 

‘How can you say I’m joking in this moment of crisis facing the village?’ Mafiz looked crestfallen from a distance. ‘The thing is, there was no spark in my relationship with my wife. So, I’ve been running all this time to create a spark. I was lacking in electrical charge; that’s not my wife’s fault.’ 

A sandal flew through the air in Mafiz’s general direction and landed somewhere. The man who had thrown it at Mafiz hadn’t been able to aim properly because of the lack of light. 

‘Because there’s no charge in my body, I’ve been running all this while to attain the speed of electrical charge. You see, the electricity that flows through wires moves very fast. But each of the small electrons, which together make up an electrical current, runs much slower, you know. That’s the speed at which I’ve been trying to run.’ 

The black water of the flood swirled around Mafiz. But he didn’t look remotely worried. 

‘There’s no spark in my relationship with my wife, so I’ve been running. Now you can see for yourself, there are sparks when I run. But I no longer have a wife at home.’ 

Mafiz’s voice was hoarse now, a little nasal too. 

‘Why don’t you have a wife at home?’ Chairman Zakir seemed bewildered. ‘Where’s Nasiman?’ 

‘I’ve been running since the early hours of the morning. Then the flood came. You see, I have no problem with water. In fact, the water creates more sparks in my body. Look…’ 

Mafiz held out his hands, and the villagers observed with consternation that blue lines of electricity seemed to be streaking across his palms and over his veins. 

‘When I was running, I realised that the flood was getting worse, and I remembered Nasiman. So I raced home.’ 

The villagers couldn’t tell if what they were seeing was right. Mafiz’s eyes had turned blue too, and blue currents of electricity pulsed through the veins and arteries of his entire skeletal frame. 

‘I had barely reached my porch when I saw Nasiman leave through the back door on a speedboat.’ After a pause, he added, ‘It was the NGO’s speedboat.’ 

Was Mafiz cursing someone now as he looked up the sky? The people of Kendua couldn’t tell.  His personal grief and the villagers’ collective grief seemed to converge at this point. 

‘What business does Nasiman have on a speedboat, tell me. Did she need to take shelter with someone else? I can tear my heart out, scorch it in flame and give it to her, and I wouldn’t have been able to save her from this little bit of water? I can even run on water now. You tell me, would she have drowned?’ 

In these adverse circumstances no one disbelieved him.  

‘Never mind.’ Mafiz rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands for some time. ‘Go back home, all of you. Get the water out of your courtyards. When the storm stops and the sun comes out, everything will dry on its own. The water will come no further in the village.’ 

With this, Mafiz wheeled around and ran off in the direction of the Karatia. When, after the deluge, I arrived with relief supplies to this flood-wrecked coastal village in the southern part of this unfortunate country, the person who told me this story about Mafiz said it had seemed to him that a demon, who had come out of the pages of mythology, had raced away across the water and disappeared right in front of their eyes. 

What took place after Mafiz vanished from view that day is still passed around by word of mouth in Kendua and neighbouring villages. Some of it is believable; some not. But the inhabitants of the region believe even the parts that are not fit to be believed because believing is what they do. Despite the paucity of wealth and luxuries, these hardworking poor people on the coast did not suffer from a lack of peace. It was politicians who imported disquiet into their lives. When they asserted that no matter how disastrous the nuclear power plant might prove for local biodiversity, it was necessary for the country and for the people, the villagers in Kendua believed and accepted it. When the NGO workers disrupted their natural rhythms of existence, these simple people didn’t rise in protest. They believed the honey-tongued city folks. Where the tales of Bonbibi, Ma Mansa, Gazi Pir had illuminated their hearts and taught them to see the universe in a grain of sand, in a village where religious harmony had existed for eons, the missionaries introduced the poisoned plumes of communalism for the first time. The foreigners cancelled out and humiliated their folk religions with debate and theories. The people of Kendua hadn’t complained even then. They had allowed those missionaries into their own yards, like trusted friends. A few had even converted. 

One or two young men from the village went to the banks of the terrifyingly flooded Karatia to see what Mafiz was actually up to but returned to tell the others they hadn’t seen anyone there. What they had seen instead was a blue flash, like a streak of lightning, circling the riverbank and the northern limits of the village at such high speed that the floodwater couldn’t break through the ring and invade Kendua any further. They went back to the spot repeatedly and saw the same sight till midnight. 

Day rolled into night. Near the end of the night, the stormy winds died down and disappeared gradually. In the bright sunlight of the next morning, they discovered Mafiz’s dead body among the sundari saplings planted along the riverbanks. The receding floodwater could have swept the body into the river and then the sea, but the sundari saplings had wrapped themselves around Mafiz in the same way that a mother wraps herself around her baby on a frigid wintry night to provide warmth. 

Eventually the floodwater receded completely. The huge chimneys of the Kendua Nuclear Power Plant on the banks of the Karatia resumed spewing their black smoke into the air. Although there was no trace of Nasiman, NGO head Zaman returned to the village. Bible-study circles were set up in the village. The village’s married, middle-aged men developed a curious habit of running.  

2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist