Sitakunda, the beach where the big ships come to die. Rashed has been cutting iron there for nine years. Nine years with the torch in his hand and his feet in the black mud.

That Saturday was a holiday, and on Saturdays nobody works. But the foreman had called the night before. Come in, he said, half a day, double pay. And they went. Everyone goes, when they call you on a Saturday. Double pay at the end of the month is the rice, it is the mother's medicine, it is the little sister's school fees. Rashed and his brother, Jamal, who is twenty-two and has been putting money on the table at home for three years, and puts it there proudly, like someone who has learned a grown man's thing.

They were to clean a tank, down in the engine room of a ship that had once carried gas. The foreman had said it's fine, it's been cleared, there's no gas left. He had even written it down, on a sheet of paper, with his signature at the bottom. Paper is paper. Down below, iron is iron.

Jamal went down first. The ladder was short, six rungs of welded iron. Below it was dark and there was a smell. A smell like rotten eggs. Then the smell goes away. And when it goes away that is the worst of it, but Rashed learned this later, at the hospital, from a doctor who explained it to him slowly, with his hands.

From above, Rashed could hear the rag against the wall. Then he couldn't hear it anymore. He called his brother's name. Then again. Then again. He put his head inside the hatch and saw only the dark and Jamal's back sitting against the wall, still, like someone who has settled there to rest a moment.

Then Rashed did the thing a man does without deciding it, which is not courage and is not anything, he tied the rope around his waist the way you buckle your belt in the morning, and he put his foot on the ladder, and the foreman was shouting from above wait, don't go down, wait for the firemen, and the firemen were in Kumira, and Kumira on a Saturday with the traffic is a good forty minutes, and Jamal was down there now, his back against the wall and his hands on the floor.

Rashed went down. Three rungs. Four. On the fifth his legs came undone. His arms came undone. His head went light and then heavy. He felt the rope pull, up there, the others' hands on the rim. He felt them hauling him up the way you haul a bucket out of a well.

Then the sun. Then the vomit on the sand. Then the voices, many of them, all at once, and not one of them saying anything you could understand.

Five went down after him, to get Jamal and to get the other two who had gone down before and had not come back. They all went down for the same reason. A man doesn't come up, and you go down. It is the only rule there is, on the beach. It isn't written on any sheet of paper, it has no signature at the bottom.

In the end there were nine. Nine who never came back up. The fire truck arrived when they were already laid out in a row on the sand, covered, under the noon sun that at Sitakunda at noon splits your head open.

The foreman was still holding his sheet of paper, the one with the signature, the one that said there was no gas left. He held it and did not look at it. At a certain point he folded it in four and put it in his pocket. Nobody said anything to him. What do you say to him. The paper is in a pocket now and the nine are on the sand.

Jamal was seventh in the row. Rashed knew him by his hands. He had known his brother's hands for twenty-two years. They were the same hands from when they were children and shared an apple, the same apple, one bite him and one bite the other, and in the evening their mother would ask who had eaten more and neither of them would say.

The wife of one of the others came running from the village, barefoot, her sari coming open. She was calling a name, one name only, calling it the way you call someone who only has to wake up, the way you call someone in for supper. Nobody answered her. She went on calling him. She went on.

Rashed called nothing. He stayed sitting on the sand with the rope still tied around his waist, and he wouldn't take it off, and someone said to him Rashed the rope, take the rope off, and he wouldn't take it off.

Jamal's sandals had stayed up top, near the hatch, because you go down into the tank barefoot. He had left them there, side by side, toes pointing at the ladder, the way you leave your shoes when you think you'll put them back on in a minute.

Rashed took them. He held them in his hands the whole way to the hospital in Chattogram, in the back of the truck, among the people. He held them against his chest with both arms. When a nurse tried to move them so he could lie down, he said no. That was all he said. No.

He gave them to nobody.