What does extreme wealth and extreme poverty living together mean?

Our hearse moved on and reached the cemetery. We all scrambled down and saw that every part of the graveyard was busy with people digging graves. Adults, young, men, women... graves are wonderful levellers. As the shadows of the limos fell on the sun kissed reddish earth, we too began to dig and sing dirges as we carved holes to bury the dead as the limousines stood silently waiting to carry more. Death is always good business.

Have you ever held a dead child? A child dead, stiff, strangely cold, unable to cry or plead for the air that gets less and less till the lungs can breathe no more? I have. Once, twice, thrice, four... Like the numbers on a roulette wheel of death they go on and on. I remember their emaciated faces, shrunk of life and full of diseases and hunger, lips swollen from sarcoma or just the terrible instinct to stay alive.

I have ridden hearses carrying tiny coffins to cemeteries running out of space. In one such time in Uganda, as we sat huddled against the dead and the living, I was struck by the car that was running the 'body mail' as it was called and realised that it was a Mercedes Benz.
We had to stop for a driver to pee on the road. Through the window I saw a few women huddled over rusty sewing machines, weaving magnificent crochet on the dresses.

* * * * * *
"HAVE you heard that they had opened a Mercedes Benz shop in the city?"

The friend was excited. He was a high rolling businessman. I don't know if he has an MB but I know the measure of his joy. He can ride a cut price Mercedes free from the rigors of taxes.

"It will be for the really rich, the wealth creators."

The man has made money making invisible deals.

"I once had a friend who had an MB but he only drove it in his neighbourhood."

"An MB is a brahmin.. It can't run on namashudraroads like where you live."

Such a great joke.

* * * * * *
THE floods had been bad in 1998. So bad that when we reached the village in Jamalpur where they were running a gruel feeding programme it was my lunchtime. My ailing body shakes and shivers unless regularly fed and it's a bother on long journeys. We had gone on request to see that NGO effort.

They stood there silently as our hired car stopped and we walked out to see the faces that never seemed to end.

"Adults are eating once in two days. They are doing this for the last one-month. Children are starving too because now our supply has totally run out. We are also leaving this place in a month."

Before I could fully understand what was on a woman broke free from the crowd and ran towards us. Then she held up a child and shoved it towards me.

"Take him, take him, take him." She was pleading and thrusting, pushing the child towards my obvious arms of deliverance.

The NGO workers came forward and dragged the woman away obviously embarrassed that the senior journalist from Dhaka was put into trouble by a hungry villager.

"Very sorry Sir. Mad woman Sir. Completely mad, Sir. She won't let go of the child. You see the child is dead. Dead since this morning. But she won't let anyone bury him."

* * * * * *
HOW much does a family eat? Depends on the family. Many eat within control but most have to control hunger. While some of us control how much we eat, most don't have to control. They just don't have enough to eat.

In the Kishoreganj haor area, a man will walk through a swamp trying to catch a fish that he can take home for others to be eaten. Most days he will not catch anything by using his makeshift net. Most days he will not eat anything when the water swarms around him like a deadly snake.

Most days he will believe tomorrow will be better. Some days the truth will hit him hard.

Most days he will not long for death because he is afraid that life after death for a man like him is full of even more hunger.

We can't even describe his life and its language, so far from the dreams of a limousine.

* * * * * *
THEY had crossed over from India past the Kasbah border. There were five in team and despite the signal from the Razakar, bought with one taka bribe, were caught unawares. The Pakistani truck surprised them. They ran back and then jumped to the ground without even thinking but the army had started to return fire. But one of them didn't hide. From a very close distance, he started firing at them without taking cover.

The Pak army men were surprised and took shelter behind the trucks. And then they opened up again with their fine automatics. Suleman was shot and he crumbled to the ground. By that time the other Muktis had recovered and started to fire. For some reason, for the rains had come down in a fury and the boys were carrying automatics and one never knew how many Indian soldiers were in such parties who were much better fighters than the Mukti irregulars, they decided to go away. When the Muktis recovered his body there was more blood and pulp than flesh.

They carried his body back, resting in a mosque on the way, terrified that they were carrying a corpse and not a wounded fighter till they reached a makeshift hospital. They left him there and returned back without asking how he was.

He was not to be shaheed. He was cursed.

* * * * * *
HE would travel in what he called his "limousine". It was one of those self-propelled cars that paraplegics run on Dhaka streets. He would go around looking, dark, unshaved, ugly, unwashed and angry. Children I hear would be scared when they saw him. He liked that.

They had tried to repair him but failed and even East German doctors couldn't pump life into his bullet-ridden limbs. He didn't like that. He became bitter. He was abusive. For a long time he was stuck in his rehab centre. Finally, they threw him out and some kind NGOwallah gave him shelter. And they also gave him this car.

If he found me, he would harass me for cigarettes. "You are a coward, I am brave. Give me smokes." With his enormously powerful hands he would grab my shirt and bring his face near to mine.

"Push me and let me ride like a king while I smoke."

Suleman the Magnificent monarch riding down the streets of the capital, a land he had helped sire. When he saw the dead and the dying he wondered why there were so many cars and so many unfed people around him. Later, it just amused him. Aren't we all laughing?

Like it's a namashudra joke told by my friend.

Last year Suleman died, his body like a bunch of crumpled rotten bananas.

THE young child -- almost ten -- looked small in her tiny shrivelled body. She told me that she came to the Karwan Bazaar centre to cook a meal and watch some telly and disappear into the night.

"We children sleep together in one bed because at night they come to take children away."

" Why do they take children? What are you talking about?"

" They take children at night and kill them. They have killed two of my friends."

I really didn't believe the story but I keep hearing more and more about these disappearing street kids, who are free game for some strange forces. Others have too.

They live on 30 takas a day if they are not on drugs. That's 900 per month, 10,800 per year, 108,000 per decade, 108,0000 for 100 years of a street kid's life and you wouldn't still be able to buy one of those fancy cars.

* * * * * *
SEMIOTICS is a study of signs and symbols. You 'read' meanings in various events and images. Like Umberto Eco has analysed that consumerist obsession with "More'. More is better, not quality, not good.

Now suppose we did an analysis of Dhaka and said that this city has just experienced a closure of a factory sending thousands of workers home and children away from school because it was losing money. But we have collected enough rich to buy the swankiest car.

Loan defaulters are allowed to go free and be nominated by political parties without having any trouble and everyone get together and have fun when more than half of the people are unfed.

We can afford to buy such fancy cars in a country where the Finance Ministry don says that we are too poor to afford medical services?

What do we read from the presence of the rich and powerful who are obviously endorsing the presence of extreme conspicuous consumption while children are born brain damaged because their mothers are too malnourished when they were growing in the belly?

What does the semiotics of hunger and sleek limousines living together say?

* * * * * *
OUR hearse moved on and reached the cemetery. We all scrambled down and saw that every part of the graveyard was busy with people digging graves. Adults, young, men, women... graves are wonderful levellers. As the shadows of the limos fell on the sun kissed reddish earth, we too began to dig and sing dirges as we carved holes to bury the dead as the limousines stood silently waiting to carry more.

Death is always good business.

Picture Credit: Prothom Alo, Ittefaq, Ajker Kagoj, Ihtiasham Kabir