THE PATENT GUY
Image license acquired via Creative Commons. Edited.
Mirza was a brilliant scientist. While pursuing his PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, he had made an important discovery in his field and published a paper with his supervisor that had been cited no less than fifteen thousand times and earned him a patent.
Among his classmates from his alma mater, the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), he was a legend, the guy who had made it. At forty, Mirza was head of his division at a multinational engineering company in Houston, with fifty engineers working under him. His salary was half a million dollars. He lived in a one-point-two-million-dollar home in The Woodlands, built on a two-acre lot that backed onto woods. The whole property was meticulously landscaped, with trimmed edges, stone patios, trellises, a circular gravel driveway long enough to park ten cars, and a rose garden tended by gardeners. The house itself was massive, with six bedrooms, two staircases, and three garages, and filled with guests the year around.
In person, Mirza was as spectacular as his many public images, published on websites and in glossy magazine articles about him, a smooth, rich complexion, a head full of black hair, pink lips and even, white teeth. At six feet one inch, he towered above all his friends. Only the people in his inner circle, the Bangladeshi engineers who lived in Houston whom Mirza and his wife Sumona considered their friends, knew about a darker side to his character. In casual conversation among friends, Mirza tended to shout and curse. He got angry if anyone contradicted him, especially on a point of science, no matter how small the point of difference. His peers who had not been so successful and had resigned themselves to mid-level jobs simply to earn money to support their families, felt the sting of his sharp tongue especially. The thriving, handsome, rosy Mirza reminded them of all the gall of their disappointments.
On that particular day in December, Mirza and Sumona had invited about ten families, their close friends belonging to an elite group who had nicknamed themselves the double “BUETicians”, meaning that both husband and wife of each family had graduated from their prestigious alma mater in Bangladesh. They often referred to themselves as the cream of the cream, as only a small, select group of students got admitted to BUET out of the tens of thousands of people who passed their higher secondary exams all over the country.
For the occasion, Sumona had catered food from a famous restaurant in Houston, choosing their most expensive menu items. The housekeeper and gardeners had been preparing the house and grounds for a week. On the day of the party, Sumona retained two servers to help her. Everything in her house shone with an extra brilliance, including Sumona, decked out in a peacock blue silk sari and gold earrings that Mirza had bought her for their sixteenth wedding anniversary.
Mirza and the other men were lounging in the massive living room, a thirty feet long, split-level hall with a baby grand piano and glass-fronted showcase placed on the upper level and a set of white leather sectionals arranged on a sunken lower level around an expensive white carpet. A flatscreen TV of the newest model was mounted on a wall, and directional lights flooded the room. Mirza sat in a relaxed posture on one of the white armchairs, his arms draped over the arms of the chair, dressed in an expensive, brand-name silk shirt that Sumona had bought him, with the sleeves rolled up a little, laughing frankly as his friends congratulated him on his latest project, which he had just told them about.
One of his friends, Javed, started to talk about a pair of engineers in Bangladesh who had built a cheap, low-tech device to clean polluted water using very mundane science. According to Javed, this pair were giving away their technology for free in all the villages and urban slums in Bangladesh.
“You see, the villagers were suffering from diarrhea because of unclean water on the one hand and arsenic poisoning from deep wells on the other. Already, lots of villagers are using this device and getting relief. Everybody is praising their invention!” Javed said excitedly.
He spoke in a long-winded, rambling way. His friends often had trouble understanding him. He was a disorderly person, with dirty fingernails and receding hair, with flecks of dandruff visible on his scalp. He had had to change jobs five times in the past ten years, not out of choice but because he had been laid off. Several times, he had had to ask for help from his friends, Mirza among them, for a loan or for employment. Now he was speaking in a high, nasal voice that annoyed Mirza.
“What stupid, mundane science are you talking about? How can they ever hope to scale up their project?” Mirza challenged Javed with flashing eyes. He was still sitting in a relaxed posture, with his legs apart, and he had not raised his voice, but something in his tone hurt Javed’s ego.
“Listen! They are helping their country!” Javed cried out in a high, childish voice. “That’s what’s important. They stayed in Bangladesh, and now they are doing something that is meaningful for Bangladesh. Our country gave us practically a free education. And what are we doing with that education, just working for money?”
“Speak for yourself,” Mirza said, smiling coolly, showing his perfect white teeth. “You may have self-doubt about what you have accomplished. I’m doing very well for myself.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Javed cried with frustration, shaking his head. “I’m not talking about whether you are successful or not,” he continued in the same shouting voice. “You can be as successful as you want. You can achieve personal excellence working for a private multinational company. But–so what? All your achievements are individual at best. They are only for yourself, to boast about, and then what? Nothing you do extends beyond yourself! Our friends who stayed behind in Bangladesh do things for their country, to make their country proud!”
Javed’s eyes were red and puffy, and he looked a little mad, as if, their friends would gossip later, as if he were a little jealous of Mirza and trying to show him up.
“Javed,” another friend who had also got his first job through Mirza cut in gently. “What are you doing for Bangladesh? You’re living in Houston and working for a private company just like the rest of us.”
“I’m not talking about myself!” Javed cried, shutting his eyes in frustration. “I mean, what I am trying to say is, all our friends in Bangladesh, anyone who stayed back, each one of them is doing a far better job of giving back to their country.”
“If you feel that way,” Mirza said, still smiling, “why don’t you go back?”
“This isn’t about me,” Javed muttered, squirming and looking away. “I’m a failure. I admit it. I’m just talking about your idea of achievement. All of you sitting here who think you are so successful.”
“Mirza is a genius!” another man piped up loyally. “He has a patent in his name! He, of all people, has made Bangladesh proud!”
“Ha!” Javed scoffed, rubbing his unshaved chin. He went on in a nasal, spiteful tone. “What will come of all his achievements? No one carries his achievements to his grave!”
Mirza stopped smiling. He stood up abruptly, walked to the thermostat, and turned down the temperature by a few degrees Fahrenheit. “I’ll go check on the food,” he said, exiting the massive, bright living room.
The shameless Javed stayed for dinner even after this altercation, although some of his friends avoided talking further with him. Later, the friends remarked that, as rude as Javed had been, it was weird that Mirza, ordinarily so loud and so forceful, had gone so quiet. Some argued that it was Mirza’s coolness that betrayed how unnerved he had been by Javed’s mad speech about the meaninglessness of all his achievements.
Only six months later, Mirza called his intimate friends one by one to give them the bad news. “Friend, I have just been diagnosed with brain tumor. Yes, cancer. It’s very aggressive. The doctors said I have hardly six months to live.”
Mirza’s illness was as elegant and as precise as the rest of his life. Within six months, he died quietly at a hospital. He left behind a brilliant and beautiful wife, Sumona, who was doing well professionally as a civil engineer and two sons away at college, one at Berkeley and one at Stanford.
The children flew back for the funeral, which Sumona called “a memorial”. A select group of close friends was invited, all respectable, high achieving people like themselves. Sumona called some of Mirza’s closest friends, asking them to speak a few words about him, and told them exactly what to say. No sad words and no downers, she commanded. Just a memorial at Mirza’s house celebrating his life and all that he had achieved. She even emailed them each a script, listing all the accolades they should mention in their speeches.
The memorial turned out to be another big party, just like the parties Mirza and Sumona used to throw for their friends when Mirza had been alive. For the occasion, Sumona got a new haircut, in layers that cascaded down her shoulders, and ordered a matted silk sari in a peacock blue shade, Mirza’s favorite color, from an online shop. She looked dazzling in a gold choker at her slender, long neck and the big gold earrings that Mirza had gifted her at their last wedding anniversary, just over a year ago.
Many of the friends gathered had been frequent visitors at their house during the past six months while Mirza had been sick, smuggling him his favorite white milk chocolate and butter cookies, all the things that Sumona and his doctors had forbidden him to eat. On several occasions, Mirza had sneaked out of the house, lying to Sumona that he was going for a grocery run, and driven fifty minutes to Javed’s house in Sugarland, to smoke a cigarette, a habit he had given up a long time ago at Sumona’s advice during his rise to brilliance but missed terribly during his illness. The two friends would step out onto Javed’s messy backyard and stand in the tall grass under the sun or the moon or a dark sky, smoking and chatting about their university days.
Sumona started the ceremony by playing a long reel of Mirza, showing him as a young student at the engineering university in Bangladesh, then at his PhD graduation, and other shots in which he was accepting an award or another. During the video, a voiceover recorded by Mirza and Sumona’s eldest son, the one at Berkeley, related all his life’s achievements in a rich, deep timbre–being accepted to BUET, as the cream of the cream, earning a full scholarship to pursue his PhD at the preeminent University of Texas in Austin, his academic papers, and the patent in his name.
All of Mirza’s friends, decked out in dark suits, sat before the projector screen with teary eyes, deeply moved by the emotional combination of sound and image. Then it was their turn to speak. One friend stood up and talked about Mirza’s groundbreaking paper in detail, as he had been directed by Sumona, explaining the science on a Powerpoint presentation. Another friend talked about the patent in Mirza’s name. A classmate read aloud from his own article in memoriam published in a Bangladeshi newspaper about the great Mirza, the pride of their nation, who had put Bangladesh on the map! Finally, Javed took the stage. In a deeply emotional voice, Javed talked about how Mirza had helped him, and countless others, in their careers, but especially him, Javed. When he was at his lowest point, when he had just graduated from his master’s program and was unable to find a job in America, it was Mirza who had given him a job and brought him to Houston, Javed revealed to his friends, his eyes brimming with tears. His speech was the most emotional, the most heartfelt, and the most moving of them all. Later, the friends would agree that the awful argument at Mirza’s party last December had been just that, a heated, intellectual argument between two friends. Neither had meant anything by it. Javed had not meant it at all as a personal attack against Mirza, and Mirza, of course, had not taken his words to heart.
After the speeches, Mirza’s friends and family drove in a procession of cars to the Forest Lawn cemetery in the south of the city. They huddled together in their shawls and caps on the cold Houston winter day as two workers sitting in their tractors dug up a deep grave, pulling away the mud and piling it in heaps around the grave with their machinery. Four of Mirza’s friends, including Javed, lifted his wood coffin on their shoulders and descended into the earth, trembling under the burden of his weight. After lowering Mirza’s body into the soil, they climbed out of the hole, pulling up one another by grasping hands.
Sumona stepped away from the pavilion where the rest of the party had been gathered and approached the freshly dug grave where her husband had been lowered, flanked by her two sons. She had covered her head loosely with the edge of her blue sari. Her shoulders were adorned with a Pashmina shawl, a gift from Mirza from one of his business trips. Whether from the cold weather or from a deeper emotion, Sumona shivered slightly, jerking her chin in the air. Then, unzipping her large leather purse, she pulled out a tube of paper tied up with a red ribbon and dropped it into the freshly dug grave. It fell to the bottom with a soft thud.
“What is that?” Javed asked curiously, turning his head.
“A laminated copy of his patent,” Sumona said. “He asked for it to be buried with him.”
She moved back to the pavilion, accompanied by her sons. The two workers sitting in the digger placed a pre-cast concrete lid on top of the hole. Then the friends began to throw clumps of earth on top of his grave, crying softly. After a few minutes, the four men who had lowered the coffin rejoined the party at the pavilion. Together, they watched quietly as the small digger moved back and forth, picking up clumps of earth and dropping them into the hole, neatly shaping the grave. Mirza’s friends stared at the earth that would seep into the coffin, surrounding Mirza’s body, the body that would rot as it was eaten by insects and bacteria and become one with the earth, all except for the plastic patent certificate, which would remain forever as a testament to the greatness of the man buried there.
Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13 Books), and the short-story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, forthcoming spring 2025). Her fiction is featured in or forthcoming from Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta, Third Coast, and numerous 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 is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College.