Story by Kizzy Tahnin: Translated from Bangla by Rajib Mahmud
Across from Sultan’s building lived a married couple and an ostrich — a real one, striding through the rooms with a proprietary grace. Had they kept her as a pet? Sultan never saw a cage, though. If the bird were kept against her will, she would have cried, wouldn’t she?
Do ostriches cry?
He called Zarif, his younger sister’s son, an O-level candidate who already acts like a PhD scholar.
“Hey, listen, tell me something—do ostriches cry?”
“Hmm… os..trich,” Zarif stretched out the syllables,
“Wait—why do you want to know?”
“Just look it up, will you?”
“Yeah, they do cry. Apparently, their cry sounds like a lion roaring.”
“Says who?”
“Google.”
“I see.”
“Mamu[1], why don’t you visit us sometime?”
“You’re all the way out in Uttara—the other side of the city. That’s a whole trek.”
Sultan stood at the only window in his room and looked out. This was his daily routine—with countless hours to spare and nothing much to do.
Here in West Meradia, the northeast part of Khilgaon, a bustling conurbation of Dhaka, narrow
streets were crammed with apartment blocks. They sprouted like mushrooms, their rooftops jostling for a sliver of the sky. Sultan’s three-story building stood oddly out of place here, like a heron on slender stilts, yet stubbornly riveted to the ground, as if a single, tapering flick would send it winging across the sky.
The real estate agents hounded him day in, day out, promising brand-new flats and money. Sultan knew a day would come when he must give in. But for now, he was more than content with his own little private corner.
From his father, Sultan had inherited not only the house but also an electronics repair shop and a nearby pharmacy.
His one sister, Zarif’s mother, lived in Uttara, while the other lived in Dubai. Both their parents were long dead—the mother during Sultan’s college days and the father eight years later. Since their father’s death, his ties with his sisters had frayed to occasional phone calls and customary Eid visits. The two sisters, however, stayed in touch through a Messenger group, leaving Sultan out of the loop.
Sultan lived mostly off the digital grid. He didn’t have a smartphone, but an old Nokia—cameraless and stubbornly unsmart—and it suited him just fine.
On rare trips to the fish market, Sultan never haggled. While carefully inspecting the fish’s crimson gills and prodding their bellies to check freshness, he invariably ran into neighbours amid the wet tang of scales and chatter.
Scraps of domestic tidbits like aching joints, sons’ school admissions, and daughters’ marriage prospects were traded as casually as vegetables gliding across the communal scale.
At Sultan’s end, it never goes past the threshold of the first greeting: “So, how have you been, brother?”
Pity flickers in their eyes, sometimes curiosity, sometimes both.
“You’re just wasting away, brother!” one of them would call out, leaning in. “You’re not eating right, are you? And what kind of decent meal can a servant cook, anyway?”
Sultan kept quiet.
He took care of his physical needs himself. Twice a month, he visited Nipa and Shanta for brief, transactional intimacy. During those ‘happy times,’ they asked about his health. Sultan felt a sudden rush of warmth—enough to mistake for love, or something like it. It evaporated quickly as pristine bank notes changed hands, and the routine clicked back into place.
Sultan’s was the east-facing top floor, with the city’s chaos buzzing beneath him. He barely left his bedroom except for meals. Standing on the narrow strip of a balcony, he would watch the sun climb above rooftops and sink back into the tangle of wires and water tanks—every day.
The rest of the building was rented out. Strings of overlapping voices billowed from the lower floors—bursts of laughter, domestic clamour, clattering pots, and the usual everyday scuffles. Aziz Molla ran a printing-and-binding business on the top two floors. Downstairs, a local lad named Montu looked after the two storefronts.
Sultan felt deeply grateful to his father. At forty-eight, he never had to work a day. Not even while his father was alive, all he did was collect rent and exchange pleasantries with tenants. And his bachelor’s degree gathered dust in some forgotten corner of his flat. Comfort became his effortless inheritance, and that very thought made his eyelids heavy.
Across the street stood a five-story building. The fourth floor had remained vacant until a young couple with a small child moved in. They were like just another family in the community. A damp, grey dishcloth—stiffened to a rag from repeated washings—hung from the kitchen window. Soap suds clouded the bathroom window. At night, the child woke and cried for milk—tcha, tcha, tcha, shattering the hush of the night all at once. And, right on cue, the mother’s automatic, reassuring voice was heard: “No, no, no cry, no cry, my baby…” The crying stopped, and the silence returned.
These domestic patches went on like clockwork just as the azaan[2] rose from the mosques, blending into each other in chorus. Oddities had no place here. Yet Sultan’s gaze ventured into the hairline fractures—those tiny cracks that went unnoticed in the diurnal drone of everyday domesticity.
Years ago, in the dead of night, he heard sudden cries of agitation — a woman’s voice, thick with tears and desperation, and a man’s, brimming with stifled frustration.
“Kill me. Please, just kill me.”
The man’s voice answered, “I want to die, too. Let’s die together. Where’s the poison? Where is the damn poison?”
Nothing happened. The next morning, a brand-new day arrived. And nobody spoke of the night before. The laundry flapped white and clean; children played cricket with plastic bats. In the evenings, the neighbours saw fairy lights and knew a wedding was on—the floating scent of pulao in the air might also have meant a birthday party was underway.
Sultan’s everyday watch followed with the precision of clocking in for a corporate shift. His trained eyes surveyed the households around him without needing a second glance. One day, during one of these brief moments, he spotted the ostrich. It was standing on the third floor across the street.
The flat’s narrow, grilled balcony door stood ajar. He could see right inside. The bird sat on the threshold—her long neck craned as if gauging the distance between the two worlds. Then, with a sudden swish of feathers, she vanished into the room.
An ostrich in a city apartment! In twelve hundred square feet packed with turmeric-stained rags, brooms wedged into balcony grills, boal fish curry simmering on weekends, and the biting, herbaceous scent of coriander right off the stove—and an ostrich!
The thought stuck with Sultan all day. Earlier, Zarif had told him that ostriches’ cries sounded like a lion’s roar. But nothing like a lion’s roar came from the flat across the street.
Sultan kept it to himself. For one thing, he was quite certain that the bird never belonged there. Besides, it felt quite improper—brazenly intrusive—to speak of the creature. Gossip quickly grows legs in such a watchful neighbourhood, so it was always wise to be silent.
Sultan collected things—odds and ends, toys, cassette players, speakers, cricket balls, shuttlecocks, postage stamps—a glorious jumble. He stacked and labelled each one in a corner of his room, the pile sometimes resembling a miniature museum. In a yellowing, worn-out notebook, he kept a carefully columned inventory. Cataloguing the items filled his time with a breath of quiet.
Back in college, he especially prized the yo-yos he won in a Coca-Cola promotion. Back then, the more yo-yos one had, the more bragging rights they earned. To this day, he had never met anyone from his time who still had a yo-yo from those days. He did.
In the afternoons, as the city grew somnolent, Sultan sat cross-legged on the floor. He held each item up to the light, wiped it, and rearranged it. He tried to remember the day it entered his life, then checked his inventory to confirm.
One afternoon, he uncovered an old trunk hidden beneath a shawl. Inside, he found a pair of broken binoculars buried under a stack of postcards. He held them up hesitantly, feeling torn between the urge to sneak a peek into his neighbour’s private life and the quiet dread of being spotted. He finally wiped the binoculars clean and set them aside. The ostrich winked out of his mind, only to reappear a day later. After lunch, Sultan sat on the balcony, chewing betel leaf, its bittersweet taste lingering. He leaned over the railing, glanced across the street—and there she was, half her body jutting awkwardly from the bedroom.
The ceilings over there were quite low. The ostrich stooped—broad-bellied and comically diminished—as if downsizing itself to fit a standard human habitat.
Montu brought tea out to the balcony. He looked toward the ostrich and remarked, “Have you seen this, bhaiya[3]? What madness!”
“Yes,” Sultan said.
“And no one said anything?”
“Hmm!”
“How disgusting! Just look at the thing!!”
“What is disgusting there! Get out of here!”
During his teens, Sultan once visited his grandfather’s village and saw an ostrich behind a wire fence at the edge of a dusty field. The creature had huge unblinking eyes, bulging with wonder. He took an immediate liking to the bird. Then he returned every day to watch it peck at the red earth.
One morning, as he was casually looking through the window of the opposite flat, he spotted the small child at once, scrambling atop the ostrich’s shoulder. The child kept wobbling and giggling, tugging at the bird’s long neck with her tiny fists. In reply, the ostrich let out a low, throaty gurgle that sounded like a chuckle. For a fleeting moment, Sultan was quite convinced that he saw the creature smile.
He asked Montu for a sketchbook, some pencils, and paintbrushes, too. As a child, he had loved to draw. He sat down with a pad of paper, his tongue sticking out at the corner of his mouth in deep concentration. He was never good at drawing. Geometry and biology diagrams always eluded him, so he scraped through his matriculation exams with a second division. Later, in college, he chose the humanities.
Drawing began filling his time, eventually becoming a quiet habit—one without promise or reward.
Landscapes were his forte. Open fields, far-off skies, trees scattered helter-skelter along wild dirt roads sketched themselves out effortlessly in his sketchbook. Years of diligent practice had taught him how to draw with persistent precision. Each completed sketch drew a soft exhale from him, letting him breathe in clean air and hold it for a moment. He hadn’t opened his sketchbook in years. That day, he sat down with it, a box of colours, and freshly sharpened pencils.
On the first page, he wrote: Ostrich. If these turned out even halfway decent, he wanted them up at the Khilgaon Art Center. He was one of their regular sponsors. The committee would surely not hesitate to indulge a valuable patron. The pages soon filled with expedited spontaneity or a feverish one: the bird behind balcony grilles, the bird sprawled across the floor, the bird bisected by window frames, the bird with the child on her back—their bodies locked in impossible proportions. He could never get to see her whole, so he had to capture her in pieces. Working with memory and guesswork, he eventually invented what he could not see: the sharp line of a wing, the inarticulate glint in her eye.
Time elapsed. Sultan sketched a plane that soars across a flat grey sky. Down below, an ostrich, locked in a cage, strained to lift her head—a child clinging to her back. Their eyes sparkled, and laughter spilled out in bright, tinkling bursts.
Ideas swarmed his head. He wanted to keep going, but returning to the drawing after an awfully long break brought a throbbing headache. Pain pulsed behind his eyes. A faint nausea followed. Zarif’s birthday arrived. The boy wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Mamu, please come. Ammu will cook biryani.”
Sultan attended the party. He slipped five thousand takas[4] into an envelope for Zarif. As he sat at the table with the other guests, his headache swelled into a searing thud, like a persistent drumbeat. Behind his eyes, a repressive grip held fast and refused to let go. It happened amid the wafting aroma of cardamom and rice and the loud clatter of dishes. His sister hugged him tight at once. She broke into a sob and refused to let him leave. Zarif wrapped his arms around his uncle and looked up at him helplessly.
The next day, they took him to a doctor. Routine tests and a CT scan—nothing showed up. Then they took him to Uttara Eye Hospital. He saw Dr. Sarfuddin, a renowned eye specialist. After examining his eyes, the specialist took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.
“Mr. Sultan, do you even know the condition of your eyesight?”
“Not really,” he replied.
“You have had considerable impairment of your eyesight. Never had it checked before, have you?”
“Hm,” Sultan murmured.
“Didn’t anybody prescribe you glasses?”
“I had a pair once,” he admitted.
“And where are they now?”
“I don’t wear them.”
“You don’t wear them!”
The doctor paused. “Your distance vision is nearly minus four in the right eye—slightly better in the left. You’re also farsighted, so you’ll need bifocals.”
“Oh, I see,” Sultan said quietly.
“How do you manage your day-to-day life? Frankly, this should have made things rather difficult for you.”
“I don’t go out much.”
“You must wear glasses. No alternative, okay? Come back in two months.”
Along with the corrective lenses, the doctor also prescribed eye drops. Zarif and his mother immediately ordered a trendy pair of blue-framed glasses. Sultan’s headache subsided for now.
A few days later, Montu brought tea to the balcony. “Bhaiya, had you seen her recent state? Why were people still quiet about her?”
“Who?” he asked.
“Who else—the one you draw all the time!” Montu snickered and slipped away.
Sultan turned toward the flat across the street. Afternoon sunbeams streamed into his room. Far away, through the heat shimmered, fruit vendors called out. Dust specks hung still in the air, and vendors’ calls rose and faded. Sultan pushed his glasses farther up his nose.
His heart beat fast. Across the street, an old woman stood at the edge of a balcony. She was bent low, without a blouse. A worn-out sari barely covered her bare arms. Her posture looked halfway broken, as if folded in on itself. Was Montu referring to her? Her neck looked far too long, stretched forward—far from her body. The child clung to her back, his tiny arms locked around her neck.
The proportions were incredibly wrong.
Sultan pulled off his glasses.
It was the ostrich.
He shoved the glasses back on. The stooped, long-necked, aging woman returned. Off—the ostrich. On—the woman. He repeated the process, but the results were the same.
Sultan sprinted inside for his sketchbook. When he returned, he stared at the exhausted woman through the new lenses’ sharp focus. He rifled through his sketch pages, one after another.
He remembered his mother. Back then, no matter how hard he tried, he could never close the sides of a triangle or a quadrilateral. A gap always gaped open. His mother would console him. “My dear,” she would say, “You are not meant for tight corners or for boxing things in.”
Sultan looked down at his drawings. His mother would never know he still couldn’t join the corners. In his sketchbook, the ostrich’s outstretched wings came loose from her body—the head and neck tilted in opposite directions, clueless about which was which. The airplane he sketched broke apart midair. Even the dots of the child’s face drifted apart. Nothing connected. Not the triangles. The quadrilaterals, neither. The simplest lines were no exception.
The new glasses sat heavily on his nose. Would he ever get used to them? Sultan wondered.
The sky outside darkened quickly. The air already carried the metallic tang of coming rain.
On the balcony across the street, someone was gathering clothes. It was the woman, the ostrich—the ostrich woman.
[1] Maternal uncle, mother’s brother
[2] Traditional Islamic call to prayer
[3] brother
[4] Bangladeshi currency
Rajib Mahmud (official name: Mohammad Mahmudul Haque) is a translator and fiction writer based in Toronto, Canada, and a former Assistant Professor of English at BRAC University, Dhaka. His translations have appeared in The Antonym, The Prachya Review, and The Book of Dhaka: A City in Short Fiction.
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