Free Spiral Road by Adib Khan Page B

group of international environmentalists.
    Zia takes a string of sandalwood prayer beads from the top drawer of his desk and leads me out to a balcony. Reluctantly I sit on one of the cushioned chairs and look out across the expanse of vacant land I had seen as wedrove in. I’d much rather be exploring the books in the study.
    There’s something surreal about the pre-dusk light. The sky appears combustible. A fragile quietness broods over the city and the sun hangs low, like a luminescent fruit on a sagging branch.
    Zia scans the salmon-pink horizon with a pair of binoculars.
    ‘I wasn’t happy about the house being sold,’ I say stonily, unable to be silent. It’s a thorny issue I’ve wanted to raise with him ever since he sent me the documents.
    There was a flurry of phone calls from Zia when I didn’t sign the papers and send them back quickly. They lay in the bottom drawer of my bedside table for nearly four weeks. I brought out the documents every evening, looked at them without rereading the details. I felt threatened, as though I was being asked to give permission for my selfhood to lose its lynchpin and disintegrate into functionless pieces. Any naivety of idealism left in me had been in the assumption that our family home in Dhanmondi would remain untouched and in our possession, even as we aged and the rest of Dhaka succumbed to the insatiable greed of urban spread.
    Then, when I finally scribbled my name across the bottom of the pages, I’d felt a cold, helpless anger—at our collective inadequacy to prevent the sell-out of our past. And I was miserable and unforgiving of my own part in the betrayal.
    That was five years ago. Now I wonder how Zia perceives me. Dull and withdrawn? Predictably egocentric in the adoption of a lifestyle that I can never convincingly call my own? An accomplice in a crime?
    ‘There wasn’t a choice,’ Zia says tonelessly. ‘You know that Abba’s last business venture was a disaster.’ Our father had sunk everything into a steamship company that went bankrupt within a year. ‘There was no other way we could’ve paid off the debts.’
    ‘But why did he invest so heavily in the company? Did you caution him against it?’
    ‘Has he ever taken anyone’s advice?’
    ‘What did he have to say about losing all that money?’
    ‘He seemed strangely unaffected by it. He said something about having had greater disappointments in his life.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘He didn’t say.’
    In my mind I walk along the side of the narrow street in Dhanmondi. I can recall every building, and most of the neighbours, in minute detail. Ours was the oldest and the ugliest residence, built on a large block of land. It was a double-storeyed house, lime-washed outside and scarred by furry growths of algae.
    ‘Is the owner living in the house?’ I’ve already made up my mind about visiting the suburb.
    ‘I don’t know. There’s no reason to be in contact with him. I haven’t passed that way since the day the house was sold.’
    We talk about the disposal of the family’s other properties around the city and what can be done with the land and the remains of the ancestral house in Manikpur, abandoned and ruined as it is.
    ‘What’s the trouble with Uncle Musa?’ I ask.
    Zia looks disgusted. ‘He wants to marry again.’
    ‘But he’s almost ninety!’
    ‘And the girl he has in mind is no more than seventeen!’
    ‘Have you tried to talk him out of it?’
    Zia says he’s made several trips to the village. Unable to reason with the old man on the last visit, Zia lost his temper. There was, it seems, an exchange of acrimonious words. Secrets, wrongdoings and accusations of moral shoddiness had spilled into the open. The old man claimed that he had only been married thrice and it was his privilege, under Islamic laws, to marry once more. Zia confesses now that he stormed off after Uncle Musa ordered him out of the house, forbidding him to return if he didn’t change his ways and