We love to celebrate and champion the wonderful writers who are part of our WBB family. This post is one of a series where we’ll share these writers’ latest work and catch up with their news.
A Good Mother
An extract from Shahriar’s short story published in Bridges not Borders
We spent the morning at the Maharani’s courtyard, watching the humans return our children. It was an arduous wait and I only had Aala to keep me company, who claimed her boisterous spirit would do well to keep me calm. ‘You want one of these children so badly, my friend,’ she said. ‘I cannot have you losing all your senses there in front of the gate.’
‘I would not be the worst one out here,’ I told her.
Our children were finally back. Brought over from their squalid tents in the old city by the humans. Of course I wanted one for myself! As they approached the Mahal’s gates, we could clearly see their skin mellowing, the city’s new air already leaving a mark on their bodies. But they were of the same old rakkosh stock like us. They sported the lined beads of irritation, the blotches and boils of the desert. They were unmistakably from Grett, home that was no longer so anymore. Once a stronghold of us rakkoshes, Grett now lay under human occupation.
Aala had little interest in them. She preferred enjoying the meagre cakes the caterers brought instead of running out to the front like us to witness the young rakkoshes, freed from captivity, reach their new home. The low thrums of their feet ended nervously as the Maharani’s guards ceremoniously caged them in one after the other. They were still not used to Copalkundla’s creamy afternoon light and had covered their faces with their hands upon contact with the guards, lying crouched on the marl and rejecting the smell of these leaves, the warm, crumbling dust beneath us, perhaps the entirety of this place that they had found themselves subject to so suddenly.
Copalkundla, this city we had built in exile, had been a shock for our kind. After ages of living sparsely under Grett’s red sun, the lush surrounding jungles of the new city brought us lives of opulence a rakkosh never thought capable of having. The pleasures imprisoned us – a paradise in exchange of a slowing down.
With the children safely handed over, the Maharani gifted us a brief glimpse of herself from the balcony. The other ladies made much of her Highness’s newfound zeal of parading around her pocket fan, its blades inked with a crude rendering of Grett’s map. A present, perhaps, from an old King passing by.
‘Where do you think the children will be housed?’ Aala asked one of the other ladies.
‘They stay in the dungeons,’ I said, ‘That’s what happened last time, I had heard from a trusted source.’ My source was Fallal, a distant cousin of the Maharani, who was popular in court, as he was at my parties. A debonair rakkosh, he had attracted the eyes of many a young woman, including Aala’s, though she would refuse to admit it.
Aala said, ‘Perhaps I desire one, too!’
‘You wouldn’t know how to raise yourself,’ I said.
She remained quiet. A certain sense of envy was at play here, and I suppose I would have to take mine into account as well if I were to be offered a child – again, as all the ladies at the Maharani’s court would all take care to add. My mother, were she alive, would have been a formidable asset, but one couldn’t be wholly dependent on their mother. Those days were over, she would have said herself. Even in Grett they were long gone.
Our lives in Grett were dominated by the humans west of our lands. The Nawab who ruled there was a constant nuisance. Our realm, an expanse of orange sand with a few pockets of life parcelled out throughout, was the only obstacle in his way of accumulating the lush tracts of land beyond. I remember as a child how often we would enact the Nawab’s apparently foreseeable defeat at our hands during our playtime. He was the principal enemy in the stories of valour we fashioned. In my mother’s presence, though, I could never personally indulge in any national fantasy. We were often traveling together, the two of us. Her job entailed we visit various areas of Grett and administer the birth of our young.
‘Oh you shouldn’t worry,’ Aala assured me. ‘The Maharani sees you positively. And no one would deny the respect your mother commands still after her passing.’
My mother’s dutiful service to highborn rakkoshes had cemented our place among them. We were barely of their calibre on our own. It was Ma, with her incomparable expertise in obstetrics, who let our foray into nobility be a permanent fixture. She would have me along to wherever there were bellies in need of cutting. I carried her sack of instruments, dragging it behind me with all the strength I could squeeze out of my body.
At their homes, seated beside the mother, who lay flat on her back on the floor, I would hand Ma the bag of chalk. I would watch her take a handful of simmering powder and spread it across the pregnant rakkosh’s stomach in clean, straight lines. A thin sword, curving at its tip, would slash open our subject’s treasures in such quick succession I often had trouble containing the babies gushing out. The river of blood sometimes brought dozens out together.
It was my job to count heads while Ma sewed the belly shut with fresh wire. We often returned the next day to see which ones the mother had eaten and which she had decided to raise.
I was raised. Ma never let me forget. Till her last day on these plains, she would holler, ‘You were raised!’
Of course, my mother’s statements were invaluable in ways the children only realise after their use long expires. ‘Some mothers are greedy,’ she would say, pointing at those who ate all their children after giving birth. She frowned at their kind, no matter how highborn they were. ‘Don’t mix with them,’ she would tell me. ‘When the Maharani learns of their indiscretions, they will be barred from entering the Mahal.’
But Ma discouraged eating none. ‘It is unnatural. I can never understand it, giving birth to only spare them all! Surely, this is a sign of disrespect,’ she said. ‘A good mother only eats half her children.’
Read the rest of Shahriar’s story in Bridges not Borders: An Anthology of South Asian Writing which can be purchased here.
Shahriar Shaams has been writing stories his whole life. He was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he continues to live. He has been writing for newspapers and magazines in Bangladesh since his teenage years. For the last year he has been at work on a novel tentatively titled Chamcha, which he had been grateful enough to work on with the poet and writer Sumana Ray, as part of the programme. The Write Beyond Border was a great opportunity to meet fellow writers and understand and learn more about the writing world. Classes, especially those catering toward querying agents and on researching for one’s novel, were substantially helpful. Shahriar plans to write a great many number of novels and nonfiction work. Apart from writing, he loves to watch boxing and talk about music.
You can connect with Shahriar on Instagram @shahriar.shaams and Twitter/X @shahriarshaams
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