My Girlhood Read online

  TASLIMA NASRIN

  MY GIRLHOOD

  Translated from the Bengali by

  Maharghya Chakraborty

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  1. The War

  2. Birth, Aqiqah, etc.

  3. Growing Up

  4. Mother

  5. Serpent

  6. Pirbari 1

  7. Faith

  8. Customs

  9. Pirbari

  10. The Favourite

  11. Love

  12. The Return 1

  13. Periods

  14. Phoolbahari

  15. Poetry

  16. Mubaswera Lay There, White . . .

  17. The Return 2

  18. A Nest of Termites

  19. After the War

  Glossary

  Notes

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  To my mother, Begum Edul Wara

  The War

  1.

  War was afoot.1 There were rumours spreading from one neighbourhood to another, like wildfire, bringing people out on to the courtyards, the fields and the crossroads. Shock was written all over their faces, their eyes bulging wide, and the tremors moving restlessly across their faces, painting their noses, the insides of their mouths, their cheeks, their ears, their heads. Everyone was alert. Scores of people were running helter-skelter, dragging after them their children, their bundles, their belongings. They were running away, escaping the city in favour of the provinces, heading away from Mymensingh to Phoolpur, Dhobauda, Nandail. Houses and courtyards, shops and businesses, the school, the Amarabati Drama Centre, everything was abandoned as people crossed the river and the paddy fields, traversed the unending plains, to go hide in the forests. Even those who were never the first to leave their homes were beset with a terror that drove them to feverishly begin packing their belongings. Vultures were flying in with the smell of carrion on their beaks and one could hear distant gunshots whenever the pigeons flapped their wings restlessly. In a bid to run for cover people set out on foot, on trains, on boats, leaving behind their homes, the small plants in their yards, the familiar pew, kitchen utensils, the odd black cat, everything.

  One evening, two three-wheeled machine-run cars turned up at our house to take us to the village of Madarinagar, south of Panchrukhi market. Barely had we left the city and crossed the Brahmaputra by ferry to reach Shambhuganj when six young men with gamchas tied around their waists ambushed us on the road. Clutching Mother with both my arms I saw in horror that all six were carrying guns on their shoulders. That was perhaps when I first realized what war was, a time when you could waylay someone suddenly on the road and slaughter them. One of the six, a sharp shiny moustache adorning his upper lip, peered into one of the cars and spoke. ‘Where are you going abandoning the city? If all of you go away who are we going to fight with? Go back home.’

  Mother flipped aside the veil of her burka and, with a slight hint of pleading tempering her simmering anger, snapped back: ‘What are you saying? The car ahead of us has gone through. My sons are in it. Let us pass.’

  It failed to soften the stiff black moustache. He tapped his gun on the ground and began to yell, warning us against advancing even a fraction further. Forced to retreat, we had no choice but to get back to the ferry, when the middle-aged driver, having struck a match to his beedi, remarked, ‘They are Bengali. They are our people. Not like them, these men don’t wear kurtas. There’s nothing to fear.’

  My nine-year-old heart was beating in a steady nervous beat as if the six guns had been fired at me all at once. Accompanied by the steady prayers of the two women in black burkas I was wedged between and the mechanical whirring sound of the car, we started on our way back past Jubilee Ghat and Golpukur. There were no other sounds except the beating of my heart, the whirring of the machine and the ceaseless prayers on my either side. The rest of the city had wrapped the dark night around itself, turned down the lights and gone off to sleep.

  That very night Father sent us off again, this time to the west instead of the east, to Begunbari instead of Madarinagar. My sister Yasmin and Chotku2 spent the journey sleeping, with Mother too dozing from time to time. This left only my grandmother and I awake alongside the blue plastic basket held firmly in her grasp.

  ‘What’s inside this, Nani?’

  ‘Cheera, muri, some jaggery,’ was the rather cold reply.

  The house shaded by a grove of plantains that our beedi-addict driver finally took us to belonged to the in-laws’ of Runu khala, Mother’s younger sister and my aunt. A horde of people spilled out of the house and the shades around the yard were raised for everyone gathered to get a good glimpse of us.

  Us, the relations from the city . . .

  ‘Go throw the bucket into the well . . .’

  ‘Put some rice on the boil . . .’

  ‘Get some paan . . .’

  ‘Make the bed for them . . .’

  ‘Get them a fan . . .’

  At night we huddled into the makeshift bed, the relations from the city, the dead-to-the-world Chotku with his leg flung over mine, which I was left unable to move lest I get kneed in the stomach by Yasmin. Flattened between the two I whined about my bolster without which I could never sleep.

  Incensed by her spoilt daughter’s complaints as she tried to fan her prickly-heat-speckled feet, Mother growled under her breath, ‘You don’t need it! Just sleep!’

  The scolding managed to shut me up. Nani was huddled in one corner of the bed, her black-bordered saree protecting her face, her head, her basket and the food and the jaggery inside. A small lamp burning near the threshold was throwing the shadows into sharp relief on the tin wall, it seemed a demon with many hands and feet was dancing and making a shushing noise. Dipping my head between my knees in fright I cried out:

  ‘Mother, I’m scared.’

  No sound from her. She was sleeping like a log just as Chotku.

  ‘Nani, Nani can you hear me . . .’

  Not a peep from her either.

  My introduction to the spectral world had happened via Sharaf mama, one of Mother’s younger brothers and my maternal uncles. One night he had returned home out of breath and told us how he had been waylaid by a white-clad petni, a marsh witch, by the pond. She had apparently thrown her glamour at him; he had dropped everything and made a run for it. Shivering, he had hastily slid inside the covers that night, as did I, and we spent the night hiding like snails. The same thing had happened again the day after. While returning through the bamboo grove Sharaf mama had been stopped by a mamdo, a male ghost that had asked him to tarry a little there in its atypical nasal twang. Sharaf mama had made a run for it again and on reaching home he had taken an ice-cold shower to calm his nerves. These incidents, however, resulted in a noticeable surge in Sharaf mama’s popularity within the household. Felu mama, Tutu mama, me, all of us would gather around him till late into the night. Hasem mamas’s wife Parul, our mami, would be there beside us fanning him incessantly while he waited for Nani to bring her traumatized-by-sprits son a plate of steaming rice and catfish curry, with a pinch of salt on the side.

  Kana mama used to be a great fisherman and the size of his catches too used to be immense. But he could never return home with an entire fish. One night he was on his way back home when he noticed a cat following him. The fish he had caught that day was slung over his shoulder and he was walking back. As he neared his home he felt as if the weight on his shoulder had become considerably lesser than before. He turned around to discover half the fish had been eaten and the cat too was nowhere to be seen. It had not been a cat of course. It had been a fish-eating ghost that had appeared as a cat to get to the fish. Sharaf mama would eat and regale us with such tales of Kana mama’s exploits.


  Fear, as a result, had sort of crept under my skin, so much so that I would not even venture out to the bamboo grove behind our own house, not even in stark daylight, let alone after dark. As soon as it would get dark, I would be indoors, unwilling to even go out to the bathroom to answer nature’s urgent calls. If it ever got too much to bear someone had to show the way with a big kerosene lamp so I could run out, check carefully if the coast was clear, do my business and then run back in promptly.

  I was around seven and a half or eight when we shifted from Nani’s place to our house in Amlapara. Father had asked both his sons to suggest possible names for the new house. Dada, my eldest brother, came up with ‘Abakash’ while Chotda, the one younger to him, wanted ‘Blue Heaven’. Although I was not asked, I declared I wanted it to be called ‘Rajanigandha’. Dada’s name stuck, was etched in marble and put up on the wall by the big black gate. It was a huge house with ornate pillars and tall doorways. Looking up at the ceiling it would seem as if one was gazing at the sky, one with green crossbeams and iron plates neatly arranged at ninety degrees, a rail waiting for a train to chug on it. Outside, winding stairs starting from the base of a bael tree led to a roof with a set of ornate railings around it from where one could see the entire locality spread out around us. The field beyond the house had a row of coconut and betel-nut trees along its edge. Our courtyard itself was lined with trees ranging from mangoes, jackfruits, guavas and custard apples to baels, pomegranates and Ceylon olives. Giddy with delight my two older brothers, my sister Yasmin and I would run around the house playing gollachut. It sort of drove out from our minds the memory of yet another house, my Nani’s, tucked away barely a couple of miles away in a hole-in-the-wall lane. A modest dwelling, a pond full of tiny fish, a spot to wash the dishes where we used to press holes into the ground with our fingers to play with marbles, the dirty ashen rags we used to clean the glass chimneys of kerosene lamps before lighting them every evening, the cool reed mats we used to sit on with our mamas in the evenings while swaying back and forth as we recited ‘Amader Chhoto Nodi’,3 fresh date juice tapped from the trees at dawn, my Nani’s steamed rice cakes, everything that we left behind. The only thing I got to carry along to the new house was my fear of ghosts, which was not ready to abandon my side even at our temporary shelter in Begunbari.

  Sharaf mama used to say the spectral always return to their realm at the end of the night. When I awoke in the morning the phantom with the five legs and feet was gone. The sun had found its way through tiny holes in the tin walls and the room was fairly warm. Mother, Nani and Runu khala’s mother-in-law had pulled out seats in the courtyard and were chatting away. I had never really gone away from the city before, unless one considered the train journey from Mymensingh to Dhaka as a child to visit my Boromama, Mother’s eldest brother, at his house at the edge of a vast meadow of red earth that stretched right up to the horizon. All I wanted to do was fly around the sky as a kite and play tag with the girls in the clouds. While standing in the yard brushing my teeth with ash, the thought crossed my mind that war was perhaps not a bad thing after all. The schools had suddenly shut and I had been spending my days playing with my dolls on the roof of Abakash. We only had to rush downstairs whenever planes passed overhead, when Mother would stuff cotton into our ears and make us duck for cover under the bed while she sat praying nearby. Later a shelter had been dug in the field where we would take refuge in case bombs fell. It was only after the hospital was bombed that Father packed us all into the two cars, Dada, Chotda, Sharaf mama, Felu mama, Tutu mama in the one which was allowed to pass to Madarinagar and us in the other one. Father himself decided to stay back at Abakash, having come to an agreement that if things went further south he too was going to lock up and leave for safety.

  Rinsing the ash in my mouth with water from the well I took a deep breath, the air around me heady with the smell of lemons. Father wasn’t there, there was no one to stare me down with fiery red eyes, no one to scold me at every turn or slap me around at the slightest pretext. To me there could be no better news. So elated was I that I could dance like the wind on the village roads and under the listless shade of the forest. Whichever direction I turned there were broad beans growing and I could hardly wait to roast and eat some and invite the farmers to share with me.

  ‘Chotku, let’s go to the shop. Let’s buy tamarind.’

  Chotku did not require much persuasion. I was salivating at the prospect of tamarind and it did not take long for us to slip under the fence by the banana tree that partially hid the courtyard and find our way down the narrow strip of earth that separated two paddy fields, determinedly walking towards the main road, with me in the front and Chotku bringing up the rear. We would have reached too had it not been for Hasu, that scarecrow! A short dhoti wrapped around his waist and twirling a dead branch, the hefty boy declared:

  ‘Chotku can go, you can’t. You’re a girl. Girls shouldn’t be going to the shops.’

  ‘Why not? I go all the time!’ I pursed my lips attempting to disregard the village bumpkin.

  ‘That’s in the city. This isn’t the city. It’s the village. Here women stay indoors, they don’t go out.’

  The scarecrow had begun to advance, his eyes like tiny rats with their snout out scouting for grub. I had always read about the bucolic, verdant and pastoral village in books, had always wanted to see one. Here I was finally in one such place but I was not being allowed to dance in the fields, or lose my way and chance upon a young shepherd playing his flute in some shaded bough by some stream or lake deep in the forest somewhere. No, instead, my morning met with rat-eyes, that too of a person in whose house I was a guest. Dejection clogging my throat, I sidled up to Mother back in the courtyard. She was wearing a pale saree, some of which covered her head, the hair she had left untied. I grabbed hold of the edge of the folds slung over her shoulder and, beginning to twirl the piece around my finger, let the sorrow spill over in earnest. ‘He won’t let me go to the shop?’

  She didn’t answer. Turning her face around towards me by her chin I insisted.

  ‘That Hasu, he won’t let me go buy tamarind.’

  Snatching her face away Mother replied in huff. ‘No tamarind. Too much sour makes the blood turn to water.’

  This had always been her one argument against tamarind. Just so she wouldn’t find out I used to hide on the stairs leading up to the roof of Abakash with tiny globules of tamarind that I would proceed to smear in salt and nibble on bit by bit with my thumb, all the while making a slurpy tcha-tcha sound in my mouth. I would only be done once my tongue was white, my teeth were sour and my blood was perhaps entirely water. I would be deathly scared of cutting myself anywhere for fear of getting caught. What if, instead of blood, water gushed out? Obviously whenever I did manage to cut myself, on snail shells or bits of glass or rose thorns or the odd piece of brick, it was blood that came out. And Mother would dress the wound with Dettol and wrap a rag around it while I half smiled about my blood having not turned to water yet.

  There were too many people in the house at Begunbari. All the girls were named after fruits—Dalim (pomegranate), Peyara (guava), Angoor (grape), Kamala (orange)—while the boys were all Hasu, Kasu, Basu or Rasu. Rasu was my aunt’s husband, my second khalu. He used to live in the city and none of us knew in which village he had gone into hiding after the panic about the war spread. His mother, Runu khala’s mother-in-law, had a mouth full of paan at all times, her cheeks swollen, often some red juice trickling past the corner of her lips, the tips of her fingers white from the lime. Using a still non-white finger to scoop a tiny morsel of lime into the already bulging cheeks, she leaned in towards Nani and whispered, ‘Who knows where Rasu is! Who knows if he’s even alive! They are saying the Punjabis are wiping out entire cities.’

  My grandmother’s tiny frame resembled a small cloth bundle huddled over the small seat. The white bundle with the black border did not respond to the news. There was another bundle inside this one, the blue plastic one wi
th the food and the jaggery. Her eyes too remained transfixed like tiny jewels as she stared away unseeing at a distance. It was as if she could see her second son again, my Hasem mama, knocking on the door of their house at the dead of night. As soon as she threw open the door the rumbling of the passing train drowned out whatever Hasem mama was trying to say. ‘Ma, I’m going.’

  ‘Why are you calling me so late in the night? What’s happened?’ She turned up the wick of the lamp as she stepped down on to the steps.

  ‘I’m going.’

  He had begun to walk towards the pond. She began to run after him. ‘Where are you going so late in the night? Stop!’

  Without turning around Hasem mama replied, ‘I’m going to war. I’ll only be back once the country is independent.’

  ‘Hasem, wait!’ Nani kept calling after her errant boy until he was no longer visible past the darkness. She stood still. Her heart was beating, the heart whose warmth had kept the tiny Hasem alive back when he had born during the famine of the ’50s. Parul mami, Hasem mama’s wife, stood with one foot on the threshold and the other on the step beyond, weeping. People used to say she looked like a fairy and that night in the dark Nani could swear she saw Parul mami glow in the moonlight. She was indeed the moon and Nani did not know where to hide such a moon any more. Their six-month-old daughter was sleeping inside! What sense did it make, this abandonment?

  Nani did not know where to turn in the darkness, where to look for Hasem mama. She had not just seen war, she had seen the War when the Japanese had bombed the country, but even back then the family had not been torn apart. So she left her tin house at dawn, dropped Parul mami off at her parents’ house and came to Abakash to her daughter’s house, with her four other sons and the blue plastic basket, to seek advice. Father instead suggested that the city was no longer safe and that we should all move to the villages. The move had separated her from her three sons, leaving only the infant Chotku, the one younger than even her grand-daughter, near her. As Runu khala’s mother-in-law sat weeping over the whereabouts of her missing Rasu, my tiny bundle of a grandmother could only sit silently by her side, her back to the sun. She knew her son had gone to war but she could hardly say anything. Did anyone ever return from war?