I am alone. The protests have stopped and people have gone back to their lives. I am a child of this world, but I don’t have the right to go back to a life I desire, to a place I desire, to spend my life in the service of humanity. I am being constantly called from abroad, but I have been refusing all the generous offers. I do not wish to live elsewhere! Democracy, freedom of speech, free thought, human rights, health, equality, peace, security, reason, and life—they are ready to welcome me with all this and more! Here I have only poverty, pollution, corruption, terrorism, insecurity, captivity, torture, dogma and bigotry to look forward to. The only gifts certain here are discrimination, terror, uncertainty and, perhaps, death.
Where should I go? The world is telling me to leave and survive. It is telling me to choose compassion and accolades instead of wallowing in insults and contempt. I had chosen a life here but my dreams have lost to their politics.
13 March
It has nearly been seven months—four months of house arrest in Kolkata and three in Delhi. I was driven out of Kolkata and sent to Jaipur on 22 November and was driven out of Rajasthan the very next day to be brought to Delhi. I had initially thought the capital had taken me in out of compassion. When Mr B had told me about buying me clothes, books and other essentials, it had almost been like my father making the promises. What I had failed to understand then was why he was taking so much trouble on my account, especially since I had assumed I would be packed off to Kolkata immediately. Now I understand why he had gone through all that trouble. It has taken me nearly three months to understand his political games, though that is surely less time than anyone would have expected me to take. Besides, it’s not that I have understood it all by myself! Far more astute minds, used to seeing through political skulduggery, had recognized it long before I did. They had even warned me that everything was being orchestrated to coerce me into leaving.
They did not let Svensson stay with me, nor did they let us meet. The few meetings they did allow, it was with an ulterior motive. They had assumed that we were lovers, and Svensson, on seeing my condition, would surely convince me to go away with him. They could scarcely have expected that Svensson would do just the opposite. The second friend they allowed was Asesh Ghosh from Kolkata, that too because he had come with some things for me packed in a suitcase. Without the suitcase, I doubt he would have been allowed either; besides, I had already had to put in a request for the visit. I had to put in a request for Svensson too, both to the home ministry and Mr B, only for it to be rejected. Except these two men, the only other people I have been allowed to meet thus far have been their cronies. M.A. Baby had come on behalf of CPI(M), and Tapan Raychaudhuri had been sent twice by Mr B to convince me to leave India. It was not until the second time that I realized he was working for Mr B and not because of his love and concern for me. A man who I had always respected and looked up to, who had always been a vocal advocate of the freedom of speech besides regularly writing on the plight of oppressed artists, was working as an agent of the administration! Even an old friend like Enamul Kabir could seemingly turn over a new leaf overnight and advise me to leave at Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s behest. Some of these instances would have once been inconceivable, and yet they have come to pass and those closest to me have turned away without a second glance.
Why have I been kept in this house for three months? Why have I been stopped every time I have expressed a wish to go anywhere? Why have I not been allowed to meet anyone? All this has been done to punish me, to make me feel so unwelcome that one day, tired of the shackles, tired of having been barred from society, I would just give up. Even if my captivity has not really inconvenienced anyone else, why should I keep suffering this unjust punishment! They can obviously afford to keep me locked up like this indefinitely. Save a few of my friends here, no one would raise a hue and cry. As it is I am hardly ‘news’ any more, and the newspaper articles too are few and far between. No one cares where I am, so certain they are that the government has seen to my safety.
It is impossible to describe how secure one feels when one has to live in a government safe house. It’s a feeling you will not be able to make sense of unless you have been through it. When the State keeps you enveloped in a security bubble simply to force you to leave, such safety can be anything but conducive to one’s sanity. It’s a focused effort by the caring state to crush your spirit.
It is only now that I have begun to realize the true extent of these efforts, the repeated attempts to keep me in a sustained state of terror. Initially, the efforts had been directed at making me leave before the residence permit could come up for renewal. When the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had been on an official visit, his contingent had put in a proposal to hand over the Simone de Beauvoir Prize to me in India. The proposal had been immediately turned down with the official reason that the ceremony could not be held in India since I am not a citizen. It would either have to be held in Bangladesh or France. The French government had immediately complied and extended an invitation for me to travel to Paris, without ever realizing that the reason cited had been patently fabricated. Or perhaps they had understood, but their diplomatic relationship with India had been too important to jeopardize. Anyway, I had to publish a statement declaring that the prize distribution ceremony had already been held in Paris on 9 January, where my French publishers had accepted the award on my behalf and read out my speech. There was no need for me to go to Paris for the certificate of the award as it could easily be couriered to my Kolkata address. Could the government have been any more desperate?
14 March
Where am I? Honestly, if someone asks me where I have been, I would not be able to say. It would be the same answer if they ask how I have been. Sometimes I am even unsure of my very existence, unsure whether I am alive or dead, unable to touch or feel the person I am, the part of me that is hiding in some corner of my soul. Instead, I just lie there, like an inanimate object, or a corpse, in the same room, day in and day out. Death creeps in sometimes to come and sit with me, putting its arm around my shoulder. This did not start just the other day when I was driven out of Kolkata; this goes back to a decade-old conspiracy to slowly poison my life, to destroy the brave, resolute, dynamic, unyielding part of me that makes me who I am. I have also begun to realize that I cannot fight against the forces that be and expect to win. I am nothing but a lone voice and those who claim to stand beside me are never visible once the darkness descends.
So, I am left asking myself what I may have done to deserve this, to have been saddled with this life, where none of the decisions are my own. What have I done to deserve this life away from all human contact? What sins have I committed that society has punished me so? I had confessed only the truth, written what my convictions had told me to write. Have I not written on plain paper? Have I pelted a stone at someone or cut off someone’s head to write with their blood? Then why is what I have written a crime? Why am I being punished because I have different opinions from the others? There was a time when a person could be hanged for speaking against the king, and everyone else would come and watch the spectacle. Have I not been persecuted too for having spoken out of turn, have the people not seen my pain and humiliation too? Do they not realize how much hurt and loss of faith can make a person retract their own words? I have been cut, I have been crushed and I have bled, so much that I have cried out to them to remove whatever they wish to from my books. Would this save me from their politics, or from their faith and their cruelty? Perhaps not. Perhaps they will keep feeding on me till not even a single droplet of blood remains in my veins. I have been forced to disavow the truth and renounce the forbidden words. Words are harmless and the truth is incapable of defending itself. This explains why power reigns supreme everywhere and why the pen has always lost to the sword. How can I match up to them? I don’t even know how to lie!
The only thing I have is my love for humanity, my desire to see people evolve and thrive. Let there be love among everyone, let there be no s
ign of hate, this is what I have always desired. The way they wish to erase my words with hate, I wish to use love just like that to expunge hate. Probably, the world will come to a standstill if there is no hate, no oppression, no cruelty and no torture. Even if I must cease to be, the world cannot be allowed to stop. If something happens to me, it will hardly cause even a ripple in the great fabric of things. I had only hoped it would cause a ripple in my beloved West Bengal at least. Even that was not to be.
For a long time after leaving Bangladesh, I had felt like an orphan. After years of wandering down lonely roads, when I settled in Kolkata, I had but one desire—to live out the rest of my days surrounded by the sense of belonging that I feel in West Bengal. It is unthinkable that there is no place for me there, no place for a woman for whom the Bengali language and culture has been an intrinsic part of her soul.
I am a guest in this nation and so I have to hold my tongue. I have not come here to hurt anyone. Instead, I have come here to be hurt, repeatedly, just like I have always been hurt everywhere else. Even at the risk of offending you, I must tell you all that I have learnt here! I have learnt the definition of electoral politics. I have learnt that secularism in this country means siding with Muslim fundamentalists. I never wanted to believe any of this, so much so that I have tried shutting every new revelation out. Instead, I have often felt like talking my heart out to the creeping spectre of death that has cast its shadow over my exile. Right now, there is no one closer I can talk to.
Taking Bengal away from me is akin to snatching a baby from a mother’s embrace. This excruciating pain is no less than the feeling of devastation when I had lost my own mother. She had always hoped that one day I would return home. The day I moved to Kolkata, I thought I had at least managed to fulfil her dream partially. I can never tell her that I am still a refugee, that the people I had been banking on to be on my side have turned their backs on me. She would be devastated. So, I tell myself that I must have committed a grievous crime to have been punished with such an exile. Isn’t telling the truth a huge crime in itself in this day and age? The other people speaking the truth, are they being persecuted too? Or am I special because I am a woman? After all, is there anything easier than attacking women!
I know the people have not exiled me. Left to their own devices, I would never have been forced to leave Kolkata. Democracy, however, hardly runs on the will of the people. It is the rulers who decide whatever will be. I am an ordinary woman, who lives on her own terms and writes what her convictions dictate. I don’t lie, cheat or intend anyone any harm. I have never been consciously dishonest, nor have I ever been able to participate in political games. What I have been through, I don’t know who it has benefited but for me it has ushered in nothing but misfortune—my exile has only strengthened the fanatics.
Despite having spoken at length about humanism, human rights and women’s right in India, no political party, no human rights organization or women’s rights groups, nor any no social justice collective had spoken on my behalf after I was attacked. I don’t know this India. There have been a few dissenters who have stood by me—writers, journalists, intellectuals. Whether they have read my work or not, some have stood by me simply to provide aid in the struggle for the freedom of speech. However, the new face of India that has terrorized me is the inability to organize collective action for seeking justice and rights. At such instances, I have encountered only a deafening silence. Is this the new India or is this how India has always been? Since my girlhood, I have thought India to be a great nation. I wish to survive even more now simply because I hope to be able to see that great nation again. I pray my assailants wait. The day I realize India has again learnt to stand up for itself, learnt to stand up to dogma and blindness, I will summon them of my own accord. Even if I don’t live long, I know India will survive for thousands of years.
15 March
The ophthalmologist examined my eyes and confirmed retinopathy. It is apparently a result of unstable blood pressure, though right now there is no danger of losing an eye if the pressure can be kept under control. In this exile, how am I supposed to do that? I have not been allowed to speak directly to a doctor. The Bengali doctor I had found has been threatened so much that he no longer takes my calls. Everything around me seems strangely ghostly, as if I have been transported to a planet far away from earth. I have been kept a prisoner in the alien planet and I am so vastly different from the other inhabitants that I have been deemed highly dangerous. I do not believe my blood pressure will ever be under control considering the mental stress that is my life in this safe house.
I have come to a decision. Immediately, I have pulled out a sheet of paper and started jotting down the reasons why. I have written whatever has come to my mind so that even in the event of my death, the few people in the world who respect my writing will get to know why I have taken this decision.
I have to disentangle myself from this deathtrap. I used to call this a torture chamber but now I know that this is nothing but a slaughterhouse. The doctors had advised me a long stay in the hospital, for at least a fortnight, till my blood pressure became normal. But I had not been allowed to stay there. Instead of the doctors, the decision to move a sick patient from the CCU to the safe house had been taken by my captors. The day after the doctors proclaimed their advice, the news of my visit to the hospital came out in the newspapers and I was immediately forced to return to the safe house. Even my mobile phone was taken away from me.
No doctors were allowed to visit me, nor was I allowed to visit or speak to one. I asked for the doctor’s phone number countless times, but in vain. When, on visiting the hospital, I asked some of the doctors for their phone numbers, they confessed that they had been forbidden to share them with me. Whatever I wished to discuss regarding my health, I had to first tell my captors, who would pass the questions on to the doctor and bring the answers back accordingly. The doctors had identified stress as the primary reason for my irregular blood pressure and had advised me to try and not let stress affect me. Is it possible to live a stress-free life in this exile?
Besides affecting my eyesight, irregular blood pressure is causing the walls of my heart to harden. One fine day, all my primary organs will stop and I will die in this safe house. I have never had such health concerns before this exile! Before this ordeal began, never in a million years has my blood pressure been a cause for alarm.
On returning from the ophthalmologist, I let them know my decision—that at long last, I would be leaving India. I requested my captors to let me go back to Kolkata if not for an entire day then at least for a few hours, to get some of the important things that I had left behind. I also had to come to a decision about the empty house. As usual, my captors refused. What else could they have done? They had orders from above.
17 March
I am a tiny, insignificant being. How can I hope to compete with a behemoth like the State? Despite that, didn’t I keep them at bay for so long? Didn’t I try fighting valiantly for seven months? I am leaving because I don’t wish to die. My darling India, if I am alive, we will meet again for sure. We will meet no matter how much you try to suppress or silence me. No matter what you do to end me, I will always love you.
No, Not Here! Elsewhere! In Another Land!
In the end, I had to leave India. It was my decision entirely, though it’s not as if I had a choice at the end of the day. My blood pressure, constantly fluctuating, had taken to this macabre dance which was wreaking havoc on my system. It was not even dependent any longer on stress or anything like that. Blood pressure medicines were no longer working for me, and the doctors advised me to get my kidneys and eyes checked.
Whenever I got my blood pressure checked, it showed me startlingly odd things, so much so that it was becoming increasingly difficult to trust any of the reports. Someone else would probably have succumbed long ago to its ravages. Eventually, after about a year of trying to quash it, doctors from New York gave me frightening news—my blood pres
sure had reached such a state that no medicines would be effective on me any longer. It would fluctuate constantly, rise and fall at its own convenience, and I would have to live with that. There is this thing about blood; once it starts dancing, it hardly wishes to stop. My blood had learnt to dance because of the safe house and a potent alloy of wrong medication.
There were only two places in the world I could think of as home—my native house in Shantinagar, Dhaka, and my long-abandoned house in Kolkata. The Kolkata house had been a rented one but it was also something I had paid for myself, and all my important things were there. Ironically, I was not allowed to enter either house. Not just that, I would not be allowed entry into the respective cities either because I was a prohibited element. So, yet again, I recommenced my exile abroad. Whether this exile was for a short while or for good, I wasn’t sure. As always, I set sail despite being uncertain of how far I would manage to reach.
The Government of India bought me a one-way business class ticket to Sweden, from Delhi to Stockholm. Once upon a time, the Government of West Bengal too had bought me one-way tickets to Rajasthan, from Kolkata to Jaipur. The second farewell happened with much more pomp and show, somewhat like how a guest is plied with lots of good food or a man on death row is allowed one final wish before being taken to the gallows. On the day of my departure, having heard that friends would be allowed to visit, many of mine had flown in from Kolkata. Arrangements were made in a five-star hotel for their reception. The flight was scheduled for late at night, so a dinner was organized with everyone in attendance. A suite was book at the Taj Hotel for a couple of hours on the night I was scheduled to leave, with an open room service for us to order in anything we wished. Besides, the government even took care of the accommodation and other expenses of my guests. Were these gifts being showered on us because I had finally consented to leave? My captors had made all the arrangements despite my repeated protests that too much money was being spent unnecessarily and that my friends would take care of themselves. Of course, nobody listened to me, so immersed they were in celebrating a mission successfully accomplished!
Exile Page 27
