Revenge Read Free Page B

suddenly, I recalled a man I’d seen, lurking at the periphery of the terrace as my friends and I chatted before a concert. I remembered his wonderfully evocative voice—he’d made an excuse to say hello. With his crisp, starched panjabi and pyjama, he didn’t look at all like one of those boys who walked about, rumpled and careless, with the gaze of a poet, a sling bag over his shoulder. Rather, he looked like someone sent from the Ministry of Culture to report back about the quality of the concert. I remembered that Arzu had persuaded me to sing, and when I took up the song, I’d seen the man take note. Soon he barged into our midst and demanded I sing more, encouraging Arzu, Subhash, Chandana, and Nadira to join in.

    “Where did you turn up from, sir, that you dare ask me to sing?” I asked. And the boy—perhaps I should say the young man—gave me a beatific smile. He remained by my side even when we went inside for the music. When the soiree ended late in the evening, he was still with me.
    “Your singing was a whole lot better than anyone else’s,” he said, not too quietly. Chandana poked me with her elbow as he disappeared.
    “So why’s that jerk after you?”
    As we walked along the avenue, looking for a tonga, a white Toyota pulled up beside us. “Where are you heading?” It was the young man with the starched clothes and evocative voice. “Let me give you a ride.”
    “Not necessary,” I said. “We’ll get a tonga.”
    “You won’t find one. The entire fleet is stationed near the arena waiting for the football match to let out.” Still, I tried to get rid of him, insisting we were bound for an old part of town.
    “I’m heading there too,” he insisted. “I live there too.”
    And so, in spite of my reluctance, we got into his Toyota. Actually Subhash forced my hand, only too pleased to get a lift. Haroon talked to him most of the way, about the plague of mosquitoes in Dhaka, the impossible traffic in the old city. Then, as we got out, he said, without specifying when, that he’d be honored to hear me sing again.
    But I couldn’t imagine that anyone would ring me up after such a brief acquaintance. No doubt it was not so easy to locate a phone number, even given the address. But I didn’t ask how he’d found me.

    I cut the first call short. “I’m busy,” I said. But he called the very next day, and the day after that.
    “What’s up?” I asked.
    “Are you annoyed?”
    To tell the truth, I wasn’t feeling too comfortable about carrying on a conversation with a man I hardly knew, and my experience had always been that I could easily cut off such chatter after an initial exchange of pleasantries. But what was typical didn’t seem to work with Haroon. He just kept talking, and about everything under the sun. Anything, it seemed, to keep me on the phone. He was an engineer, he told me, and had started his own business—manufacturing generators—in Savar. He had an office in Motijheel, but he lived in the Dhanmundi section of town with his parents and siblings. He drew a picture of a happy family.
    “You owe me a song,” he said.
    “I beg your pardon!”
    “Didn’t I see you home the other night?”
    “So you’re demanding the fare I would otherwise have given the tonga driver?” Haroon’s laughter rang loudly in my ears. “It was you who insisted on seeing us home!” I reminded him. “And I told you that I would only accept your offer if you required nothing in return, remember?”
    But he would not be deterred. He kept calling, kept asking me to sing for him. He wouldn’t accept the notion, for instance, that I sang only for myself, and after a while, exhausted at the intensity of his appeals, I was persuaded first to sing, and then to talk for hours on the telephone. But also, I had become curious.

    It wasn’t long before he began to ask me to sing this song or that. Tagore’s I lend my ears or Far, far away . And then one day, he begged me to sing, My heart