The little girl on the third floor of the teacher’s building on Dhaka University campus was sure something was wrong. “Amma!” she cried, her thin nose quivering and her white eyes flashing. “There is all this shouting! May I go see from the verandah?”
The family was sitting down to dinner, and her mother Mrs. Anwar did not take well to any excuse to leave the dinner table. “It makes God angry if you leave your food unfinished, remember?” she said.
Just then, they heard commotion at the gates, the sound of tires screeching, gates closing, and gun shots.
The next day, Mrs. Anwar from the third floor flat visited Mrs. Chowdhury on the second floor to discuss the robbery.
“Bhabi, it’s surprising,” Mrs. Chowdhury said, “we live in the same building, and I didn’t hear a thing!”
“I thought I heard someone yelling, but our TV is so loud, Bhabi, I thought it was my imagination,” Mrs. Anwar said.
“Bhabi, shouldn’t we go visit them?” said Mrs. Chowdhury.
Mrs. Anwar and Mrs. Chowdhury visited the family on the ground floor. They were dressed identically in Georgette saris, the ends of their saris drawn respectably around their shoulders, their narrow braids running down their backs, the picture of domesticity and modesty. The respected physicist Dr. Kamal’s family consisted of his two daughters aged five and two, and his newlywed wife, the second Mrs. Kamal. Dr. Kamal had been in his middle forties at the time of his first marriage. The first Mrs. Kamal had been a child bride, a mere wisp of waist and snaking braids, so beautiful and yet so absent, that she could have been almost a figment of the imagination. But who can tell in life? His young first wife soon died in childbirth much before her time, leaving him behind aged and lonely, his sole possessions two miniature copies of his ephemeral bride to remind him of the pleasure that had once been his!
The new Mrs. Kamal sat in a red sari on the low bamboo sofa modeled in the latest issue of Sanonda while her servant served raw tea with ginger, and toasted biscuits. They heard the entire story from Mrs. Kamal. The dacoits had rung the bell and the servant girl, idiot that she was, had just opened the door and let them in!
Mrs. Anwar and Mrs. Chowdhury tut-tutted in simultaneous sympathy and horror. “So dangerous to have these dimwits inside the house,” they echoed.
The dacoits had then rushed to the living room and picked up the baby. One of them held her to his chest, a gun to her head, and demanded the family lead them to the gold. The five-year-old was screaming. Dr. Kamal was screaming, and the servant girl and the woman who cooked for them had joined in an ululating echo. In the commotion, Mrs. Kamal had the presence of mind to slip into her bedroom with the telephone. She locked herself in the bedroom and made the call, screaming both into the receiver and out the window simultaneously, “Dacoit! Dacoit!”
The guards at the gate had come rushing into the building then, surprising the dacoits, who dropped the baby outside the front door and charged the gates in their getaway cars.
“The baby?” cried Mrs. Anwar and Mrs. Chowdhury together.
“Yes,” said the bridal Mrs. Kamal, blushing red from the alta around her naked feet to the red glass bangles tinkling at her wrists and the red lipstick lining her mouth. “Didn’t you know? They were taking her with them, as a shield.”
The three women softened their toasted biscuits in rattling teacups and rolled the mush gently on their tongues as they considered the subtle delicacies of the breaking news. They touched on the bad luck that the dacoits had gotten away, the fact that they must have come to the house looking precisely for wedding jewelry, knowing that Dr. Kamal had just gotten married, and the slim chance that the stupid police would ever get on the case and find them out. They pulled and stretched in many directions, circling and searching for the juice of the story. At last, they settled on the pivotal point, the most newsworthy element. They all agreed that the family had been saved from a great tragedy – losing little Munna.
“Bhabi, you’re so brave to take such a chance with the children out there,” cried Mrs. Chowdhury. “I would have never dared such a courageous act.”
In the afternoon, the children came out to play in the little strip of grass in front of the stained campus buildings. Dr. Kamal’s five-year-old told the Chowdhurys’ girl from the third floor that her stepmother was a coward! Mrs. Kamal had locked herself in and tried to save herself only, at the cost of the rest of the family, leaving Dr. Kamal and the two children at the mercy of the robbers!
The servants of Dr. Kamal’s house were out of favor that day. They were told to feed themselves on three-day-old ruti and nothing else.
They worked wordlessly throughout the day, cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner, washing and wringing clothes on the floor of the bathroom, and wiping the whole flat with a wet cloth from a bucket of soap and water, but as they let the starch out of the pot of rice for dinner, the two servants leaned into each other and whispered, “What a stupid thing to do! Why did she need to shout? So what if the dacoits had run away with the gold? She should have just kept quiet for Munna’s life.”
They considered this together, and then said in more doubtful tones, “Who knows. Perhaps the dacoit had always planned to carry Munna away in their car. Perhaps her dead body would’ve turned up the next day, floated up in Dhanmondi lake.”
“All possibilities,” they agreed, shaking their heads gravely.
On the third floor that night, sitting down to dinner, Mrs. Anwar poised her forefinger in the air and served up a thought-provoking question to her husband.
“It was very brave of Mrs. Kamal to lock herself in that room and scream for help. No doubt very smart also. But have you considered, if those children had been her own, she would have never dared to take such a risk on their lives. How could she leave a small baby outside and lock herself in the room? Oh, that poor motherless baby.”
Later at night, Dr. Kamal and his wife lay in bed, grasping at each other like drowning bodies in a sea of sheets, their limbs encircled in loops like seaweed. Ensconced inside this lovers’ embrace, ear to mouth to ear, they buried their mutual secret. As the dacoit had stood outside the door of the master bedroom, a blank white triangle over his face, a wide-eyed Munna taped to his chest, a gun angled precisely at the child’s temple, Dr. Kamal had surveyed the room in one wild glance and realized that out of all the property in his home, out of all his worldly possessions, out of everything he loved and lived for, there was one thing he could not bear to be without. He could not imagine going through life again without the honey of Mrs. Kamal’s thighs caressing his own. He made up his mind then.
“Nobody move!” cried the dacoits, their faces covered in cloth, nonetheless visible, the square shapes of their heads, the swarthy skins of their foreheads, the sweat dripping from their black eyes, their desperate temples pulsating, “Or the child dies.”
In response, Dr. Kamal had pushed Mrs. Kamal roughly through the bedroom door and slammed it shut on her. Then he faced the ensemble in front of him, his children and the shadows of death, and prepared for the worst.
Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13 Books, Fall 2023) and the short-story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, Press 53, Allium, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, Arkansas Review, Valley Voices, Bridge Eight, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship. She was a staff writer for the Daily Star newspaper and senior editor of Feminist Economics. She is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston. Thank you very much for reading.