As she spread it over Dharala’s breast, heaving and restless, each fold of the meshed fibre courted a brisk movement of Fatima’s limbs. For maximum catch. The cast net yielded more readily to her commands now. The river had become just as adept at catching her secrets. There was only so much you could hide over a three-year relationship.

Taming the net hadn’t been easy for Fatima. In those initial months, after the truck crushed Masud’s hand, her rickety frame could barely grab the massive net without skidding into the river’s swampy edge. For almost a year, between hospital visits and the battle to ensure Masud didn’t sleep on an empty stomach, Fatima had experienced little luck honing her fishing skills. With a bed-ridden Masud, the couple lived almost entirely on the greens that Fatima foraged during her failed fishing expeditions. Rafiq brought them geri-gugli and chuno maachh every now and then, for which he refused even a hint of payment. Periwinkles and small fish weren’t items he would sell to Masud, a neighbour and his fishing partner, until only recently. Masud’s unforeseen disability saw Rafiq and Tarannum turn into the parents Masud and Fatima had lost a few years ago.

Fatima dragged the net out of the river’s bosom. With her feet submerged in Dharala’s anchoring grip, she shuddered as the memory of the days after Masud’s accident came rushing back to her. Days that had felt chilly even in the burning joishthho heat. She had barely recovered from the loss of the child in her womb when the truck hit Masud. Her unborn child still jolted her out of sleep at night. Clumps of sweat embossed her face every time she struggled to imagine what the baby’s face would look like if it were born. She would find herself gagging and in need of a sip of water to be able to breathe again.

She would be a day person, Fatima had decided over these three years. Nights were never kind to her. Night, the skinny ghost, an owl’s hoot. It echoed with the sound of whispering laughter and then of footsteps, making the darkness even more viscous. It carried the trapping scent of hasnuhana floating from somewhere nearby. And of the memory of hands rubbing her shoulder and grabbing at her breasts before she could make sense of it all … Nights were irreconcilable for Fatima, like the slick of fish oil that refused to be washed off. She never said a word to him, but Masud smelled the fear on her skin. He forbade her from going out after sunset.

For months that added up to almost a year, Fatima could barely replace a fraction of Masud’s income – by planting paddy on other people’s farms during the sowing season and then winnowing it for well-off families, selling a handful of eggs from the two chickens she reared, and cleaning the houses of neighbours for weddings and Eid celebrations. That and the generosity of Rafiq and Tarannum helped them survive, even if it meant Fatima had to practically give up rice herself and eat jowar flour boiled in water and mixed with some greens instead. The scent of steaming rice, which she now cooked exclusively for Masud, made her crave it more than ever before. She trained herself to restrain this instinct by rolling the end of her sari into a ball and covering her nose the moment the rice grains began bubbling in the water.

On some days, before returning home from the odd jobs she’d taken up, Fatima sauntered off, tired and heavy, to Rafiq’s house for a break. And for a mission. Tarannum was teaching her how to use a cast net. They worked with a net that Rafiq had discarded after it wore out in more than a few places. Tarannum showed Fatima how the best results were achieved by knowing when to let go and when to rein it in. You had to allow the rope to slip through your hand so the net could smoothly hit the bottom, and then as soon as it did, you needed to get a good grip on the rope and pull it right back up, lest the catch escaped. Seeing Fatima’s interest, Tarannum mended the net bit by bit and the two women began fishing, at first in the pond adjoining their house and then in Dharala. That’s when Fatima began sharing her secrets with the river. On most days, they got a decent enough catch of assorted fish. The women would split the haul, but not before releasing the small fish they caught into the river.

It seemed funny to Fatima how she and Tarannum had become fishing partners, the same way Masud and Rafiq had once been. The previous Eid, Rafiq had combined three decades’ worth of his savings with a particularly large remittance from his older son, a construction worker in Dubai, to buy a second-hand boat. For Masud, who was many river lengths away from getting his own boat, Rafiq’s new acquisition came as a blessing. He no longer had to pay rent for using another man’s boat, and Fatima and he began enjoying more fish-and-rice days.

Masud planned to combine a few months’ savings to put up a new roof. The constant leakage during the monsoons made Fatima ill every year. Now that she was expecting, he couldn’t let his baby arrive under a dripping roof.

Good fortune has a special allergy for poor people, Fatima would infer soon. The truck got Masud’s right – his dominant – hand and the money saved for the roof went towards his treatment. Then, Fatima lost the child.

‘Who gave you the fish?’ Fatima didn’t miss the hiss in Masud’s voice.

‘Tarannum apu. They’re having guests today, she had some extra,’ Fatima said, hastening to change. A second more and Masud would definitely spot the streak of mud lining the base of her sari. He would spot the river on her.

‘Hmm,’ Masud said and turned over in bed. Lately, even the smallest of pricks bristled him.

Fatima knew. She understood. Masud had hoped that once he got a little better, he would look for a job at an office as a peon or a caretaker. He was even open to the idea of working at night if the job required that. But since the amputation, he’d had one complication after the other, practically robbing him of any chance of being employed. Fatima knew Masud didn’t like her stepping out of the house. They had both expected it to be temporary until he gained enough strength to be on his own again. Now that it became almost a necessity, he reacted to the humiliation of eating off his wife’s earnings by snapping at her, mostly for no reason at all. Fatima kept dialogue with him to a minimum, more for her own sanity than out of compassion for him.

Only Dharala understood Fatima’s pain truly and didn’t just pretend to. Each time she picked out fish from the net – some for keeping, many more to release – she silently bared to the river the wounds she carried, old and fresh. The old abrasions had a way of festering and taking up a permanent place – as if they were new organs – inside her. The child she’d carried for five months in her belly, yet couldn’t bring out with a beating heart, made for the biggest of these pain organs. Dharala helped dissolve her tears many times as Fatima couldn’t help weeping while recounting that story in her head. She didn’t cry when recalling the story of the men who had touched her strangely in the evening that made her boycott nights, but her face went red. Dharala remained a patient witness to all her outpourings.

There were newer wounds, the daily ones: the words of her employers, reminding her where she belonged – in a house with a leaky roof – and the gaze of men, old and young in the houses she cleaned. Dharala understood that for a woman like Fatima, day and night were not really all that different. The clear light of day brought no additional security cover. In the past few weeks, the gestures of an elderly man she’d grown up calling Uncle had made her throw up a few times. As a member of a powerful political party, Akhtarul Hossain enjoyed liberties – like touching a woman working under him whenever and wherever he pleased – which ordinary men didn’t. His very sight nauseated Fatima now.

She wanted a break from this life. If only Masud gained a bit of strength in his bones …

Whenever she caught fish with Tarannum, Fatima kept a bowl of the cooked fish curry for Tarek, Rafiq’s younger son. Fatima loved the boy as if he were born of her womb and called him Bajaan, just like Tarannum did. Now that he was in high school, Tarek started accompanying his father on his fishing trips across the Jamuna River.

One evening, when Fatima had only returned from work and stood on the porch sprinkling water on it, Rafiq, Tarannum, and Tarek showed up. This visit alarmed her; who knew if someone had complained about her? Fatima had never been known for her looks; she was short, and one of her eyes was smaller than the other, adding – what most saw as – a comical dimension to her face. When she got pregnant, she prayed to Allah to make the baby look like Masud.

Fatima knew that a woman without a husband by her side, even if she were ugly, was a steak of meat for hungry eyes. She could sense those eyes from a mile these days; it was an antenna a woman like her – poor and out there – couldn’t do without.

And so, her neighbours’ visit that late summer evening frightened her. More than the possibility of an actual scandal, she panicked in anticipation of Masud’s reaction to such a rumour. The stories the mind spins, Fatima would think later. When, over sips of water, Rafiq broke the news they brought, Fatima caught herself wiping the sweat beads she hadn’t noticed form over her brows.

The father of one of Tarek’s school friends worked as a contractor’s assistant in Rangpur city, and they had landed a project to build a hospital in their village. This sounded like exciting news, especially as it would be the first hospital Chondonpat would have, but Fatima couldn’t understand the urgency with which Rafiq shared the news with Masud and her. She was getting late cooking dinner and got up to go into the kitchen when Tarannum tugged at her sari’s edge and motioned for her to stay.

The construction company wanted someone to cook home-style food for its core crew, and Tarannum wanted Fatima to hear about it before anyone else did. The offer came as a trial for a week – if the company liked the cook’s work, they would sign her up with a contract. The position was reserved for a woman.

The idea made Fatima nervous – she had neither the training nor the confidence to cook meals for fifty men on a daily basis for months on end. The most she had cooked for before at one time was for a dozen people and, that too, with the help of others. Tarannum assured her that she could do it. All she had to do to get started was to draw up the menu for a week and provide the company folks with a list of ingredients. Tarek volunteered to write down the list.

‘And I’m there to help you, too,’ Tarannum said.

She was. Tarannum stood by Fatima throughout the seven-month journey – from convincing Masud to help her prepare masalas and condiments to accompanying her to recover her dues from the company manager. These ‘missions’ didn’t really yield much, but they let Fatima know that Tarannum was family.

The construction company left Chondonpat as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving the hospital unfinished and Fatima’s wages almost entirely unpaid. In place of the 6,000 taka the contract had promised her, she got only 500 taka in total by the end of the project. The manager would either be busy in meetings or absent most of the time, and on the rare occasion he met Fatima, he sighed while releasing curls of smoke off his cigarette. He consistently lamented the paucity of funds even as he promised to pay Fatima – with a resolute knock of his finger on the table before him – ‘every single taka’ due to her.

Fatima chuckled as she mimicked, for the millionth time, the man’s theatrical manner of speaking to Tarannum during one of their fishing expeditions. These were no longer secrets – one of the fringe benefits that came off the hospital project. The prospect of freshly caught fish for the workers’ meals had, in a way, sealed the deal for Fatima.

Never again, she promised herself. Never again would she cook for groups of men. The company’s treatment of her turned her off the very idea of communal cooking. ‘When you are poor,’ she told Dharala, ‘it was easy to insult and cheat you. When you are a woman on top of being poor, the scope for those humiliations multiplied dawsh gun’ (ten times). Occasionally, Masud accompanied her, too, for the fishing, taking a break from running the tea stall he’d started outside the hospital site when Fatima worked there. With some effort and improvisation, he’d learned to manage it on his own, and even after the construction was abandoned, the stall brought him customers – mostly groups of students who came to the village on field studies. More than she did for the income, which wasn’t a lot, Fatima thanked Allah for keeping Masud busy. It meant a Masud with fewer frowns, and it allowed her a little more freedom to pick her own jobs. Their combined income still didn’t add up to pay for fixing the roof, but as the elders said, ‘Shukher chey shwosti bhalo’ (Peace of mind was more precious than happiness).

When the monsoon arrived, torrential rains washed the trees greener, made paddy fields bulge into mini rivers, saw birds take non-stop showers in flight, and plastered the underside of people’s footwear with mud. Fatima thought of the dead foetus that could have been her child. During the rains, she saw how Dharala’s breast billowed like hers did during her lunar cycles every month and gasped. But did the river know loss too in the way she did, unshakeable and bone-seeping? Perhaps she did, Fatima concluded, going by the riverbank’s erosion every time the rains flooded Dharala. The thought oddly comforted Fatima, and she immediately felt guilty for finding solace in the river’s loss.

*

Two months after the hospital people left, a group of students came to the village. As Fatima would learn from Masud, they seemed to be different from the batches of students who usually visited Chondonpat. Most student groups came only for the day, were accompanied by teachers, and left in the evening. This group seemed to be on its own, and they planned to stay on in the village for some time. They had asked Masud about places where they could buy cooked food. He didn’t know of any such place but had invited them over for lunch at his tea stall the next day.

‘Maybe you could cook them a simple daal bhaat meal?’ he said to Fatima.

The idea aggravated her, but she kept quiet.

‘Only for a day,’ Masud said. ‘We aren’t running a charity.’

‘How many are there?’ Fatima asked, not caring to sound polite.

Masud hadn’t counted but guessed there were at least about a dozen boys. They had found accommodation at the local mosque – thanks to a letter from their principal at the Rangpur Government College. They still needed to make their own food arrangements.

That afternoon, when she accompanied Masud to his stall with the food she had cooked, Fatima discovered she didn’t really mind feeding a group of boys. The young men had come to Chondonpat to explore the possibility of setting up a mobile library for kids. They were also going to perform some short plays as part of their college’s street theatre project to build awareness of the need for education and reading.

After that first day of complimentary lunch with leftovers for their dinner, the students insisted on paying Fatima on a daily basis if she didn’t mind cooking for them. The college had provided them with a food allowance, so payment was guaranteed. Fatima resisted the suggestion. The bad taste from the hospital episode still lingered on her tongue. In the end, the boys’ genuine lack of food options made her agree. The fact that Tarek joined them as one of the five village boys they recruited for their theatre group gave her some assurance.

Fatima brought a daily meal of rice, lentils, fried vegetable, and fish curry to the stall. Tarannum had lent them some saucepans and serving spoons. Leaves from the banana tree in their yard made for the students’ plates.

Within days, Masud and Fatima bonded with the group so well that everyone around them noticed it – some with comments, many more with sniggers. At any hint of a caustic remark, the majority of which unfailingly came for Fatima, the boys responded with retorts she found both funny and clever. It did feel like an odd family of sorts to Fatima – this daily cooking and laughing and sharing of stories. She tried to resist feeling this way too.

The boys called them Chacha and Chachi, and on their seventh day in the village, they came up with a plan for Fatima – expanding Masud’s tea stall to a roadside food stall, complete with a daily menu. They had heard about the hospital episode and suggested the new stall could help make up for it.

Fatima wasn’t sure. She didn’t have the stamina to withstand more failures. When they couldn’t convince her, the boys turned to Masud. It helped that Nafis, who Masud considered particularly bright as he’d written all the three plays they had performed so far, led the delegation.

Fatima had seen the boys’ influence on Masud’s mood during this past week. He wasn’t as dour and nearly as quiet as he used to be. He chatted with the boys like an overgrown teenager and even gave them the occasional scolding, guardian-like.

‘I think we should give the food stall a try. What’s the harm?’ he said to Fatima in bed that night.

‘Hmm,’ she said, letting her arm slide over his torso.

The boys named the newly launched food stall Chacha–Chachir Bhaater Dokaan (Uncle–Aunty’s Rice Kitchen) after consulting Masud. They painted the name in red on a wooden board and hung it supported by two bamboo poles. Fatima stayed aloof from the song and dance of it, focusing instead on the cooking. Within a week, the stall had a flurry of customers. An Instagram page the students set up, with photos of the dishes of the day – climbing perch swimming in a pool of spiced oil, hot split pea soup tempered with onion and cumin, crispy fried potato matchsticks, coconut fritters – invited a few visitors from even outside Chondonpat coming to the village to check out the stall and the couple running it. Nafis handled all the social media promotion, while Tarek helped Masud with the accounts.

At the end of the fifteenth day of their visit, their last in the village, Nafis gave his cell phone to Masud and Fatima and asked them to keep it as a gift from him. In response to their fierce objection, he reminded them about the lunch he and his friends had on the first day, free of cost.

‘You gave free food to sixteen boys, Chachi. Sixteen. Remember, there’s no such thing as free lunch.’ Scrolling through the Instagram feed for their ‘hotel’, he showed them the number of comments they were receiving and the number of likes on their posts.

‘Besides, we need to stay in touch,’ Nafis continued, gently wedging the phone into Masud’s palm.

When he explained the meanings of ‘traffic’ and ‘likes’, Masud couldn’t stop laughing. And he couldn’t stop scrolling.

*

The morning after the boys left, everything that had happened in the past two weeks seemed unreal to Masud. The reality lay in front of him – a vandalized stall, its new board broken into two and thrashed to the ground, the bamboo scaffolding levelled in tow. When she saw Masud coming home with a loaded jute sack clanging with the noise of pots and pans, Fatima froze. Hadn’t she feared exactly this? With people like Akhtarul Hossain and his minions in their midst, how long could happiness stick around an ill-starred couple?

Masud closed the stall and Fatima resumed her rounds of the affluent houses, foraging greens and periodically fishing.

When more than a week had passed, with clouds of exhaustion and Masud’s black mood overwhelming her yet again, an afternoon knock on the door startled Fatima. She recoiled; Masud was at the stall, and she’d returned home early from her jobs as she felt a fever coming over her.

Fatima didn’t move. Caving in with fatigue, she could feel fear sinking into her bones. The knocking continued. Only when she heard Masud’s voice did she get up. Masud wasn’t alone. As she took in the faces of Tarek and Nafis, Fatima felt her fever receding. She had heard about how one could be reborn to a loved one after death. Could these two boys have been her own in a past life, Fatima wondered.

*

A year later, as they fished in Dharala, Fatima laughed to herself even as Masud kept asking her what was so funny. Everything – this whole life, Fatima thought, without answering him. Life was funny and strange. And mysterious, Fatima concluded, as she played the events of the past year in her head. She lost a child, and her husband his good arm. A group of boys randomly appeared in their village and relished her cooking; they helped her set up a food stall out of nowhere. And then, it was razed to the ground. The boys spread the word, got media houses to cover the vandalizing, and solicited funds from the public, many of whom were already patronizing Chacha–Chachir Bhaater Dokaan. Enough money poured in for Masud and Fatima to build a permanent structure – small but still permanent – to run their food business. A young lawyer came forward with pro-bono assistance. In close to a year since they started, Masud and Fatima had been able to hire two additional hands – a sous chef and a cleaner.

*

When they put up the new signboard on their shop, which remained unnamed for months, Masud had the painter write on it: Fatimar Machh-Bhaater Dokaan. Then, looking at it, he asked the painter to erase Dokaan from the name. Fatima had protested with blushing rage, only to give in to Masud’s adamancy with resigned delight.

‘Why only Fatima’s Fish and Rice?’ she asked. ‘Why no dokaan at the end of it?’

‘Everyone knows who Chondonpat’s Fatima is. No need to add an extra word.’

*

Fatima pulled the rope with a gentle force to draw the net towards her bosom. Masud tip-toed towards her, the reed basket for saving the catch clutched in his left – now good – hand.