Barkha tried her best to convince me to speak to her—it would help if people knew the truth, it would garner public support for me, and so on. While I was sure that I did not want to go against what Mr B had told me, it became a little awkward nevertheless because of the constant pressure I was being subjected to from the Jaipur crew. After a lot of requests, while I was still not ready for an interview, I agreed to speak to her just to make one statement: ‘I want to return to Kolkata.’
A BJP politician came to visit but no real conversation took place. On the other hand, Tara Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s granddaughter came to see me and we ended up having a long chat. She had brought a handwoven bag as a gift for me and though this was the first time we had met, she assured me that she would keep in touch. I had only known her brother, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Governor of West Bengal, socially, having read poetry to him once at Raj Bhavan. He had appreciated and praised it and we had later spoken when I had been put under house arrest. I remember him being very angry back then; he had asked me to alert the Centre about everything immediately. Back then, any talk of the Centre used to mean only one thing to me—Mr B. He had always been the person I would talk to, and share everything with. I had shared this too with him and he had assured me he would look into it.
On the very first day, CM Vasundhara Raje had declared that I could live in the Rajasthan House for as long as I wished to. The officers, too, had assured me of the same. Three days later, the same people informed me that I would have to check out of the Rajasthan House immediately as per the CM’s orders. I straightaway called Mr B’s men to alert them about the ultimatum. I may be worldly-wise but I have never been politically savvy. For my life I could not fathom why the men, who had thus far been so courteous to me, were now so angry that their voices had hardened and their behaviour towards me had become visibly insolent. I did, however, manage to understand that they were not happy with the fact that I had listened to the officers from Delhi and avoided speaking to the journalists. Their motivations were simple: in the worst of times, when even the media was completely willing to take my side, why was I hell-bent on alienating and upsetting them? If the media were to support me, no government or political party would be able to harm me, but if there was no support, then anyone could play any sort of political games with me. They wanted me to tell everyone how the CPI(M) had driven me out of Bengal, to reveal everything in order to garner public sympathy and support. They tried very hard to convince me that the people of India loved and supported me and that I should use the media to get close to them. Consequently, the implications at that point were simple: that I had been wrong and that I should have spoken to a chosen few journalists.
I never listened to them. The only person I consented to meet was Sheela Reddy from Outlook magazine, not for an interview but as a routine visit. I had written a series of articles for Outlook previously. She repeated the same thing to me, that as long as the media was by my side the government would not be able to do anything. However, what I could not come to terms with was the fact that despite having welcomed me as a guest, these people could ask me to leave so abruptly just because I had refused to give interviews. Perhaps there had been some other reason that I will never know.
Yet again, I was ushered out through the back gate in the dead of night. Another officer dressed in a burqa had already been escorted out through the front gate in full view of the media people to throw them off the scent of the real Taslima Nasrin. While the journalists set out in pursuit of the decoy, I was driven straight to the cantonment where I stayed for two days before being moved to another cantonment. Thus began my exile, my days of living incognito. I was provided with everything I might need—mobile phone, Internet, clothes, toiletries, whatever I wished to eat, furniture and television, and two government officers as my guards and companions. I had everything except for the one thing I craved for—the freedom to go somewhere on my own or to meet someone of my own accord. The officers would often express their sympathy, saying, ‘It is indeed horrible to have to live without freedom.’ I would silently let the words wash over me as they studied me, perhaps to fathom how I was holding up, if my skin had started to wrinkle, if my nerves were still throbbing, and if my muscles still had strength left.
My brother, meanwhile, had grown restless and agitated about returning home, and it became impossible to placate him any further. Would he be so unkind as to leave his own sister behind at such an hour of need? What if I died? Irrespective of what I said, no amount of reasoning or tearful pleading could change his mind. Perhaps he too had been preparing himself mentally to bid me farewell. With barely concealed relief, one fine day he went back to Dhaka via Kolkata, leaving me behind as price for his freedom. My struggles have always been mine alone.
Poems from a Safe House
1.
The truth makes some people furious. Henceforth, don’t speak the truth, Taslima. We are long past the age of Galileo, and yet, even in the twenty-first century, the truth can drive you to exile; sometimes, it can drive you out of your country. The State incarcerates you, punishes you, so don’t speak the truth.
Rather, tell a lie, say that the sun revolves around the earth, that the moon’s light is her own, that the mountains have been nailed into the heart of the earth. Say that the woman has been carved out of the man’s ribs, claim how some bone in her neck is perennially bent out of shape. Say how on Judgement Day the dead will rise from their graves and ashes and rotten bones, to wake up as freshly minted men and women to live out their eternities in heaven or hell. Lie, Taslima. Say that the numerous planets, satellites and solar systems are nothing but lies; that gravity is as much a lie as the journey to the moon was.
The lie will set you free, will give you back your land, your friends, your freedom—unfettered, you would be able to walk in the rain and the sun. No one will abandon you to be consumed by the darkness. Lie, Taslima. And live.
2.
What I had thought to be my city had never been mine. Rather, it belongs to the wily politicians, the dishonest businessmen, the smugglers of women, the pimps, the scoundrels. It belongs to the rapists. It’s a city that belongs to people who will not bat an eyelid when someone is murdered, raped or tortured; people who live behind masks, who can casually walk by starving people, who can cross over dead beggars on the pavement, who run at the slightest whiff of danger despite living in houses built on lies. It’s a city of people drunk on fantasies of this world and the next, a city of astrologers, con artists and opportunists.
This can never be my city, this city of thugs, liars, cheats and narrow-minded, selfish zealots. In their city, there are only a few of us left who think, who are rational, who protest; a few decent, honest people living in perpetual fear.
3.
Nowadays when I wake up at three in the morning, I no longer get annoyed. People say a restless night invariably spoils the day. But how does that even matter? As if my days and my nights have a reason for being! They laze about quietly instead, one snuggling into the other, nearly indistinguishable. When the boundaries between life and death become blurred, petty things like time and space hardly make sense. I would not be able to pry life apart from death now, nor would I be able to coax death away from life, even if I tried.
4.
I am stranded amidst soldiers with guns. They don’t know me, and they keep staring at the unarmed woman from time to time. They cannot fathom the reason for my being here. I may not have the dirt and the grime, the tattered clothes, the wild, unkempt hair, but they can still sense the shackles on my feet, the ones that keep me at bay. I can see this terrible awareness in their eyes, an awareness that their guns and boots inspire fear. It hurts them that I am not afraid, and I have no right to hurt them I suppose. Perhaps they will send word to their masters—that I am not afraid, that I am trying to break the chains. Surely the authorities will hang me. They will fix the date and throw me a feast of fish and prawns.
What if I tell them I don’t want to eat
! What if I don’t sigh even once at the gallows! What if I can be fearless even after they tighten the noose around my neck!
5.
For the past few years, I have been standing very close to death. I have been standing in stunned silence in front of my parents and some of my loved ones. After all this time, I have even lost the sense of whether I am dead or alive, the line separating the two having frayed to a fine silken strand. The ghastly mute creature that has inhabited my body these few years has outlived its last spring. So if I die tonight, do not say a word. Simply plant an epitaph under the night-flowering jasmine—my own epitaph, written over these years with so much care, with white ink on white paper.
6.
Has a poet ever been put under house arrest? Perhaps many political games have been played with poets. Perhaps they have been pelted with stones or set ablaze. But nowhere in the world has a poet ever been put under house arrest. Twenty-first-century India had first embraced the poet and then immediately cast her aside for the sake of religion and politics. She is innocent and yet under siege. She has forgotten what the sky looks like, what people look like. They have cast her into the shadows, promising never to return for her. It has been 155 days of not knowing whether there is anyone with a heart still alive in the world, of not knowing if this is life or death. The poet sits in the darkness wondering if someone will make up for her lost days and bring her back to life. At least reassure her, falsely if need be, that all those who had come before her had been poets too. Just so her darkness lightens a little.
7.
I had only wished to cure people of their blindness, purge the darkness, violence and intolerance from their hardened hearts, and fill them with love. My beloved India has punished me for my wish.
8.
How do I stop worrying in this state of exile? If you abruptly force a free spirit into a cage, can you really expect it to be calm? Will I ever be able to walk out of the cage, will I be able to go back to the hustle and bustle of humanity—these thoughts will not let me rest! People of light cannot survive for long in the shadows. My distress stings me like a wound; as long as the cage remains, the wound will remain too.
9.
Last night, a lizard, I do not know from where, fell on me as I slept and clambered up my arm, past my neck, and finally came to rest in my hair. There, content in the darkness, it sat and stared at another lizard for about two hours, after which it climbed back down by the ear to go and sit on my spine. The other one had been lying still the entire night a few inches below my right knee. Unable to move them I did what I usually do—lie still with my eyes shut, counting back from 100 again and again.
The bed that I have been sleeping on has gradually transformed into a pile of sundry rubbish—dirty clothes, unwashed plates, tea-stained magazines, filthy combs, stale puffed rice, medicine wrappers, inkless pens. Besides, a colony of big, black ants has taken over the bed recently, painstakingly building their new city.
They are taking over my life. They are so tiny and I feel that every passing day I am shrinking to their size. Surprisingly, not a single ant, despite roaming all over my body, has bitten me till date. I believe they think of me as one of their own! I feel safer in their tiny world than in this world of people.
10.
Days have passed since I have taken a shower. I have begun to stink and yet I just don’t feel the urge to bathe. A strange apathy has taken hold: what will be the use of bathing? Thrice a day, people arrive with food which I eat whether I want to or not. What if I didn’t have to! I would have told them not to bring me any more food.
Sometimes, before going to bed, I get afraid. What if I don’t wake up? I manage to fall asleep only to wake up again and again, unable to recognize the alien room. This exile is simply a bad dream and nothing else—that’s what I keep dreaming all day. I don’t sleep, lest I wake up and this dream breaks too.
The directive is unequivocal—move if you have to, but only within these four walls. The room forgotten, I sit silently in a corner stunned by the order, wondering when this vast earth became so very miserly.
Even jails have certain provisions for visits. I do not even have those. It is as if I do not even have the right to have a family or loved ones. Everyone silently ignores my daily pleas for jail privileges.
11.
If I wish to stay in this country, I must obey their dictums. I must be quiet and stay how they want to keep me; in a prison, alone. For how many years? No one knows for certain, and neither is it clear if I will ever have my life back.
But why is the room locked? Because there will be death and devastation if I step out.
I flinch. People will die because of me? They say yes. I tell them to let me go, to prove how wrong they are. People believe all these arrangements are for me, that the security is to keep me alive. It is perhaps a universal rule that some people always have to lose their way in the darkness for others to feel secure. My incarceration is making some people feel secure; it is making them feel extraordinarily safe.
Sometimes I feel the urge to find out who these people are. Are they from the streets or from the colourful town houses? Are they real people or just a catalogue of customs in human form? For whose safety do I challenge death every single day?
12.
I live in a safe house where I have no say about anything that I do not like. A safe house where I can get hurt but I cannot cry, where I have to lower my eyes always so that no one can see my pain, where my desires are brutally slaughtered every day at dawn and the remains have to be buried before nightfall.
My sighs tear through the silence of the safe house, the only sound in the vicinity. I live and sleep in fear, conversing with my shadow for as long as I stay awake. It seems as if a venomous snake slithers out from somewhere in the shadows and hisses at me. Writhing all over me, it asks me to leave, to go across the border and the mountains, away from human sight, for good. Friends, pray for me that I may safely leave this safe house one day. Pray that one day I am fortunate enough to live in an unsafe house.
13.
Please let me look at people for a while. Normal people on the streets, walking, laughing, taking a wrong turn, or in the fields, in the theatres, in a market—people in buses, trains and trams. People running, or people in love, who live in houses, who love, dream and think.
They have told me to live out my days feeding on the stray glimpses of the sun and the sky through the cracks in the windows. No human beings will be allowed. I must live without craving for life.
14.
Who can give you a country once your own country has rejected you? Aren’t all these nations similar, right down to their rulers? They will cause pain in equal measure, hurt with the same glee, be similarly elated by your misfortune. By whatever name you call them, you will still be able to perfectly recognize them in the dark—their whispers, screams, footsteps making them stand out. When you run with the wind, the wind will whisper their names to you. All rulers are after all the same, aren’t they?
You might try telling yourself that the rulers do not own the country, that it belongs to the people who know how to love, people like you who have made this land, who have etched its contours with their own hands. Where can you go if the rulers drive you out? Which country welcomes someone who has been driven out of another?
You are no one now, hardly even human. With nothing left to lose, now is the time when you can drag the world outside and demand they let you stand out in the open. The no man’s land beyond the frontiers, the one that no one cares for, let that be your nation henceforth.
15.
Since before I was born, India has been part of my history. A history of strife and hatred, a history that seeks to reach out to all unsure possibilities, while nursing the deep scars on its soul—a history of blood and death. India has given me language, culture and dreams. It can as easily rob me of my history, my self and my home.
Why should I let it tear me apart? India has given birth to saints too;
saints who have reached out to a helpless, tormented and banished soul such as me. Their reach is greater than the powers that be, over and above the confines of the nation and its borders, these hands lovingly shield me from all cruelty. I call them my home now.
16.
My nation has been savouring my pain for well over a decade. It has seen me in captivity in various other countries, has laughed at my misfortune, with millions of people cheering at my ruin. They were not like this earlier. They had a heart, they had humanity. Now the country is just a lifeless tableau of still rivers, cities and towns, a few stray trees, shops and houses. And, amidst the desolation, roam some almost-human creatures.
Once upon a time there was life, there was poetry. Now no one bats an eyelid when a poet is exiled, when a poet is dragged out in the middle of the night and lynched; instead, millions of people revel in the little carnival of death. My nation used to know how to love; now it has learnt to hate and to intimidate. It has taken up arms—guns, tanks and bombs—and forgotten how to sing.
Exile Page 11
