The Sad Backdrop

BONDAGE

The first part of the Imdadul Haq Milan’s Two Novellas Bondage is narrated by Lalan, who came to Germany from Bangladesh, and would often wait for the letters from home, where, apart from his family, he had left behind his girlfriend, who was waiting for him to come back so as to get married. Every day, he came to the room from work exhausted, both from working and having to climb six flights to his room. And Muneem, a close friend of Lalan, though complained about everything of their poor living conditions and had things to say how the people from the Third World countries changed after coming to a developed country like Germany, especially his own countrymen, thought Germany was a heavenly place to earn and relish.

Imagine a life: haunted by alarm clocks; always in a rush to catch the bus that leaves on schedule; the movement in life is so limited that you even remember the steps and minutes it takes to reach one place from other—this is common among the immigrant workers, and here the everyday truth of Lalan. Always living under the anxiety of being sacked by the employer or removed by landlord, mostly the immigrants from the Third-World countries have to make themselves accustomed to working like a clock and tirelessly; wary of order of the things to be taken care of.

Then one Friday, when Lalan and Muneem go out for coffee at McDonald's, they come across another Bangladeshi man named Wahid, who hadn’t managed to eat rice for months and looked frail. Later, both of them go to Muneem's room to booze, after finding other options of enjoying off-putting, only to get Lalan blitzed¹. Soon after, Lalan receives the awaited letters from home and his girlfriend, and is burdened and disappointed by the fact—he hasn’t let anyone in the family know, in what draining settings he has to work to earn—that the family is demanding even more without bothering to care about his happiness or how he feels. Nevertheless, Lalan gets another job for making up the amount² asked by the family back home, only adding more rush and fatigue to his life, and when his co-worker goes absent... this finally forces him to seek medical attention and take long needed break from work.

1.       “… When I drink I become aware of myself, I realize I am who I am. The rest of the time, I feel like a stranger. I find it difficult to accept that the young man named Lalan, who toils eight hours every day in a foreign land, is me.”

2.       Money was nothing but a trap for enslavement that each day was turning me a stranger to myself. I’d no idea when, if at all, I’d be able to earn my release from the trap.

In Bondage, we get a clear picture of immigrant workers who are stricken with unhappiness and longing for home and have nothing else to talk about except work, fatigue and money. Meanwhile, they are getting adapted to the people, rules, custom, language and way of life in Germany, though most of them are having hard time keeping up with all of those. There are workers: those who are unemployed and living on the dole; those who have earned work permit and in the meantime are processing their application for political asylum—Lalan is one of them; those who are reapplying to the limit even after their application is rejected thus lengthening their stay. In fact, most of them are not genuine political asylum seekers but economic refugees/migrants.

Immigrants like Lalan and Muneem have been closely observing the changes happened over time to their image among the natives and are afraid of the growing social unrest between the surging migrants and natives. They are already facing unhappy Germans who hate their presence—those encounters have to be born helplessly³ by the immigrant workers and thus try  to avoid it—and who now know well the stories told for backing political asylum applications are all fabricated and thus Lalan and Muneem know that their stay will terminate in future. Toiling Lalan, who feels like smoking when he is angry and curse the money for which he has to be away from home, doesn’t want to stay in Germany any more.

3.       “What’s the point of feeling bad? We’ve to stay here, don’t we? What’s there for us back home? We won’t even get a job that pays four hundred takas.” “At least, we’ll have freedom there. Isn’t that enough to live by?” “You can’t fill your belly with freedom, can you?”

Some struggling to settle, some unsatisfied with their savings and some missing their dearest, their ways and oddities sometimes prove rowdy to the locals and landlords, and the only thing that keeps them occupied, even though for a short time, is the company of their own countrymen amidst the discomfort with the ways they have to follow. And therefore they spend time chattering about everything they are unsatisfied with during weekends, before happily accepting the same throughout the weekdays in their grim and dim existence.

Bondage is an exceptional novel, based upon author's own experience in Germany, dealing mostly with the human side of economic migrants’ problem and Lalan is a strong character who represents all immigrant workers, who face and suffer boredom, disappointments, quandary, hopelessness, estrangement, bouts of silences and also those baffled by the extravagance of their families back home at their expense and also young men in the Third-World country like Bangladesh looking for better life elsewhere in developed countries.

EXILE

In Exile, the main character Abdullah has trouble holding onto a job for long, particularly manual jobs, and has already taken many jobs in the four years of his stay in Germany, without success on any of them, and has even slept on the bus-stand bench in his worst days. Frau Mann, an elderly lady of the employment bureau, is whom Abdullah seeks every time after he is laid-off, and in any case she tries her best to get him a job like always. Abdullah shares a room—one he was provided to dwell while in the job for a construction firm, but which also sacked him within two months—with five Punjabi Pakistanis, with whom he cannot speak in his mother tongue, and he is out of job from last three months, living on the unemployment dole. He cannot manage to live elsewhere, having unstable job and meager income. Meanwhile, Abdullah has picked up German language very well and thinks that he can impress the Germans with it. He finds it hard to befriend other Bangladeshis and keep his miseries to himself¹, and it is even more difficult for him to cope with the attitude, mockery and alienation from the fellow roommates and landlord, and rather feels dispirited and threatened to live among them, taking care not to offend anyone, though he pays for the room too.

1.       Sometimes it seems everything has been for the best. At least my family has not had to suffer the ignominy of seeing the man who once taught at a college trudging miles in the snow to look for a labourer’s or cleaner’s work, being thrown out of his job every now and then, and living furtively like an animal that scarcely dared to breathe. I would rather have taken my own life than made them go through it.

Abdullah was a teacher back at home and had no big dreams except to live an ordinary life with his wife and two daughters. He was progressing quite well in his job and was loved among the students until embezzlement conspiracy forced him to flee from Bangladesh, where imprisonment awaited him in his return, and in the meantime his original plan to bring his family to Germany is never realized, opening a chasm in his relation to the family to whom he has feeble chance of meeting again.

Abdullah fabricates a political lie so that he can get a job and place to stay and meanwhile convinces² the manager of the hotel that he is a genuine runaway who is seeking asylum in Germany, backing his story by political history of his country. As the story progresses, he takes job as a Hausmann in a hotel but finally decides to go back home to face whatever the consequences might be, when something terrible happens to him again.

2.       The Germans were used to taking people at their face value, though these days they, too, had learned to be skeptical of immigrants from the ‘third world,’ each of whom came with their own particular tale of woe in order to get political asylum. The Germans saw them lying, fighting and stealing even after getting work, and had veered somewhat to the opinion that immigrants were not to be trusted.

Exile, like Bondage deals with the similar problem of immigrant workers, however this touches even more personal story of an individual in detail. Abdullah too, like Lalan, doesn’t want to remain away from his family, but he is ensnared with his self-inflicted exile in Germany to save himself from losing freedom at Bangladesh, however, he doesn’t happen to realize it in Germany with constant anguish and subtle melancholy stifling and occupying his thoughts, which in turn never allows him to work for more than few days or months. Combined, the two novellas draw a harrowing image of the economic migrants and those migrating with their personal causes, from Bangladesh, who regardless of everything want to return to their country if ever.

The book is part of Library of Bangladesh series.

Author: Imdadul Haq Milan

Translator: Saugata Ghosh
Editor: Arunava Sinha

Publisher: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Page Count: 144pp

Price: $11

Author Photo Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imdadul_Haq_Milon_-_Kolkata_2015-10-10_4866.JPG

Review Copy Courtesy: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)