TASLIMA NASRIN
SPLIT
A Life
Translated from the Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
1. By the Brahmaputra
2. Particulars
3. Lives
4. I Could Never Touch You
5. The Holy Carrot
6. Other Worlds
7. Thus We Are Swept Away
8. Without, Within
9. A Happy Life
10. Gollachhut
11. The One I Yearn for, Night and Day
12. Licit and Illicit
13. A Maelstrom
14. Suppression
15. Euphoria
16. Dialectics
17. Go as You Like
18. The Hour of the Headless
19. A Forbidden Scent
20. Shamelessness
21. Demon
22. Resignation
23. Fatwa
24. This and That
Notes
Follow Penguin
Copyright
By the Same Author
Lajja
French Lover
Exile
By the Brahmaputra
It was not long before the cholera outbreak, after ravaging the villages, spread to the cities. We began boiling our drinking water, and water purification pills started being distributed freely by hospitals and municipal offices. There were loudspeaker announcements explaining in detail how to dissolve the pills in water, door-to-door campaigns by municipal agents to distribute them—but nothing managed to stymie the onset of an epidemic. Homes piled up with cholera patients, the dead spilling out on to the streets. There were not enough beds in the hospitals; some patients had to be laid out on the floor with needles attached to bottles of cholera saline stuck in their hands. Doctors, nurses—none had a moment to lose. At Suryakanta Hospital I was terribly busy, running from one patient to the next with bottles of saline. The infected were streaming in like flotsam after the tide; what with the wards already overflowing most ended up on the crowded floor of the corridor. Despite the saline running day and night few patients actually recovered. Cots, for the dead to be carried away on, were heaped in front of the hospital. All the cemeteries and crematoria were crowded. Vultures were circling above.
I had my hands so full that the days were a blur. I usually got back home well past evening; occasionally in the afternoon if I was too tired. Father had spread bleaching powder in the gutters of our home, Abakash, while pills were crushed into the drinking water, the bathwater and even the water kept aside for washing clothes and doing dishes. As soon as I stepped into the house Mother took my apron away to be washed.
That afternoon, however, I could not take the apron off. Father informed me that I was to go out on a call. He would have gone but he had to instead attend to another seriously ailing patient. I had never attended a call before. I asked him for the address and he told me to look out for a white house on my left, three houses past the Metharpatty rail line on the Naumahal route. Yasmin’s friend Rehana’s house. I set off on my first call as a doctor with Yasmin in tow, a stethoscope in the pocket of my apron, besides a blood pressure monitor and a few life-saving injections.
At Rehana’s house they were expecting Father. But since I had gone in his stead, and since I too was a doctor, I was allowed to attend to the patient—Rehana’s younger brother. His eyes had sunk into hollows, his lips were dry as peeling paper, and I quickly examined him for signs of dehydration and advised the patient be admitted to a hospital at once. One of the uninfected brothers reminded me that the hospitals were so full that patients were being turned away. Seeing that no one in the family was keen on taking the boy to a hospital, I wrote a prescription for five bags of cholera saline, a saline set, butterfly needles and some medicines. Rehana immediately sent the healthy brother off with some money to make the arrangements.
The room we were in, one of the two small ones on the second floor, was in complete disarray. Rehana’s father was sitting on a chair, a look of utter bafflement on his face; her mother was standing by the door, her face pale, Barrister—the youngest of Rehana’s three brothers—in her lap. Barrister had already been through two bouts of diarrhoea and his sister was worried that he too had the disease. After the saline arrived I set everything up and showed them how to change the bags. Having advised them yet again to take both the uninfected brother and Barrister to a hospital I made my way down the stairs, Rehana close at my heels. Yasmin had gone ahead and hailed a rickshaw. The two had been close friends since school. Some girls are married off while they are still in school; Rehana had been one such girl. She had a daughter too, about a year and a half old, and she had had to drop everything in her own home to rush to her brothers’ aid. In fact, for two days she had been unable to visit her own daughter. Neither was it advisable to bring the child there. Almost at the foot of the stairs, Rehana extended the consultation fee towards me. Sixty taka, my first earnings from a call, I confessed gleefully to Yasmin as I got on to the rickshaw. Yasmin, her brows drawn together, stared at my overjoyed face for a long while with a stunned expression and then exclaimed, ‘You took money from Rehana?’
Still smiling, I replied, ‘Yes! I did. Should I not have? But she gave it to me! I attended to the patient, why shouldn’t I take the money?’
‘Rehana is my friend. Two of her brothers are suffering from cholera. How could you take money from her at such a time?’
When Rehana had extended the money towards me, perhaps out of a sheer lack of habit, I had stiffened a bit. Rehana was Yasmin’s friend, but I didn’t know her at all! If we were to go around the city we would have found a friend of mine or Yasmin, some friend of our brothers or some distant acquaintance of both my parents, in perhaps every other house. It would have been impossible to make a living as a doctor for much longer in that case! I was on a call, I had paid for my rickshaw, I had treated the patient, put in my labour, wasn’t I entitled to the fee then? All doctors were! I had toughened myself up with such arguments and taken the money from her in the end despite a dogged sense of discomfort, an instinctive lowering of the eyes and a coldness spreading in the heart. Yasmin remained silent the entire way back, her brows still drawn together. I asked her if she wanted sweets from Shri Krishna, or if she wanted to go watch a film, but she refused both. I had thought that at least everyone at home would be happy at my first earnings from a call, however, I could not spy any sign of happiness on any of their faces, least of all Father’s. ‘I don’t take money,’ he told me. ‘I consult them for free.’ Father used to consult many patients for free across the city; it did not mean I had to do the same.
The next day Father informed us that both Barrister and the healthy brother were down with cholera. All three patients had been shipped off to a hospital, leaving Rehana and her father to run around handling the entire situation. We could hardly believe the news he had for us the day after: ‘The three brothers have recovered and have been discharged. Rehana and her father are dead. They were rushed to the hospital urgently in the dead of night but nothing could be done. He died on the way; she died half an hour after reaching. While she had been taking care of her brothers she had begun to vomit. Since there would be no one to take care of the sick or take them to a hospital if she too was laid up, she hadn’t said a word to anyone. She hadn’t wanted anyone to get upset over her. That’s what the father had done too; he hadn’t wanted anyone to know. He had wished for his sons to get well first before taking care of himself.’
Rehana’s father had been the sole earning member of their household. He had been a man of principle, which explained why despite being a lawyer he had been unable to alleviate the poverty of his own home his entire life. Rehana had always tried to ch
ip in, somehow saving something or the other for them from her husband’s income. What was going to happen to them now? As everyone at Abakash gathered to discuss their future I sat stunned, Rehana’s fair round face transfixed in my thoughts, her anxious but lively face, pale and yet so charming. I kept asking myself the one question—why had I taken her money? What need did I have of the money?
Perhaps she had assumed I would refuse the money, seeing how I was her friend’s sister, how Father used to treat her family for free. Selfishly and inconsiderately I had taken the money with scant regard for the cholera-afflicted family and what they must have been going through. She must have been surprised and quite hurt. Why did I have to go and hurt a girl who was to die in only a couple of days? Why did I have to do that! She must have saved that 60 taka with a lot of effort. There is so much that I spend without reason, without ever keeping track of my finances. Would it have even mattered if I had refused to take money from a family in such dire straits? Would I have died? Gone hungry? No, I wouldn’t have. I didn’t really need the money. I had taken it because I had wanted to, because it had made me happy. I had taken it because I was a proud doctor. On a house call how could I justify being a doctor without taking a fee! That’s why I had taken it. Unable to forgive myself, I couldn’t bear to look at my own reflection in the mirror, so ugly it appeared, so replete with hate. Hate at my macabre, cruel hands that had taken that money. My disgrace made me fling accusations at myself—‘How could you take the money? Shame! Are you so greedy? Shame!’
Mother had never met Rehana but she went to their house with Yasmin nevertheless. I couldn’t go, I didn’t have the courage. Mother returned from their house, her eyes puffy and red from crying. Post the incident Yasmin became so terrified of water that she would shriek and run at the mere sight of it; she wouldn’t drink water even when thirsty, would refuse to take a shower even when the heat and the summer made it necessary. Irrespective of how hard I tried I couldn’t go back to the way things were before the incident either. My guilt had me ensconced in an intimate embrace, present with me wherever I went, sitting with me in pensive silence and showing no signs of freeing me from its clutches.
Soon enough, the cholera epidemic bid farewell to the city. The young Rehana, barely in her twenties, was no longer among us and nothing was ever going to bring her back. Neither would I ever get a chance of fixing my mistake. Days passed as they usually do but I found myself in a sort of a stupor. I had sent 200 taka with Mother to give to Rehana’s mother, but that had not managed to rid me of my self-loathing one bit. Rehana did not know what I had done, she would never know. I kept trying to tell myself that taking the money from her had been nothing but a nightmare. A scene kept replaying in my thoughts, taking place on the stairs of their house. Rehana offering me the money, and I, my hand on her shoulder, chiding her, ‘Have you gone crazy! Why will I take money? Keep it, it will come to some use.’ Rehana smiling, her eyes awash with tears. ‘Thank you, Nasrin aapa! You have been a saviour! You treated my brother. I will never be able to repay the debt I owe you.’ Yet more scenes soon joined the reel. Rehana playing ludo with her brothers, both of them healthy again; her daughter sitting beside them, watching them at play; the clouds of despair parting and Rehana’s fair, restless face awash with laughter, as well as her ebony eyes.
~
There was not much work at Suryakanta Hospital after the epidemic passed. I went to the Zilla Health Centre of Mymensingh to request a transfer to a new place. Nurul Haque, the director of the centre, opined, ‘Join family planning. There’s a post open for a doctor.’ I joined the family planning department simply to ensure a measure of preoccupation in my life. But this new office refused to let me into its closed little world. I wished to enter this world but an invisible sentinel kept me at bay. The thing was that I understood a 500 cc syringe as a 500 cc syringe, not as a 25 cc one; since I could not comprehend the subtle fix between a 5 and a 25, they never picked me for their team. Left on the sidelines I sat by myself or tried to find work on my own. And then finally it dawned on me that there was nothing for me to do there. There was no office for me, no separate table or chair, nor were there patients for me to cure. The clerks sat at their desks, behind piles of paper, pens and documents of various colours; the more I tried to fathom what those documents were and how the office ran, the more I began to feel like a colossal fool. I felt foolish because I realize I had no rights to know anything about the organization. I was asked to sit still, and keep doing simply that.
Gradually, I began to feel unnecessary. And I was unnecessary; the true masthead of the organization was the family planning officer, the tall, fair and stately Mujibar Rehman. Of course, he was not a doctor. Far from it, in fact, and yet the office was his fiefdom while my role was purely ornamental. There was one other doctor there besides me, the portly Saidul Islam. He was quite thick with Rehman and I would notice their sniggering and whispering. I also noticed that Saidul Islam’s function there wasn’t remotely as decorative as mine. A doctor from the office of the deputy director of family planning, he would only drop by at the centre on occasions. Otherwise he was always on the move on his motorcycle for shipments of medicines or for signatures.
The family planning office was on Kalibari Road—it comprised a large tin hut by the road, on the other side of which a flight of stairs led down to a low courtyard past the edge of the road. The square courtyard had three relatively smaller tin sheds in three corners. One of the sheds used to be empty and the other was used to stock medicines; the third shed was reserved for Ayesha Khatun. Among Khatun’s many duties was the charge of handing out condoms and contraceptive pills, and helping women put in or take out contraceptive coils, albeit discreetly behind a curtain. Ayesha Khatun and Mother had been in the same class when they were in school and when I came to be aware of this startling fact I could not help but compare the two—one was slogging away in the kitchen trying to keep the home fires burning while the other was dressing pretty and heading to work. Perhaps the latter had been the backbencher, the one who hung her head when asked the English word for gobar. While Idulwarah, always the good student, had quickly supplied the right answer, only to now be reduced to making fuel cakes out of cow dung for her clay oven. The large tin hut had been partitioned with a thick paper wall into two rooms, the smaller for Mujibar Rehman and the larger for four clerks, one of whom was Ambiya Begum, the accountant—starkly painted lips, a hint of pink rouge on her cheeks, wearing a spotless, crisp sari. Nearly every day, at least twice or thrice, Rehman would take the accountant to the storeroom to check the stock of medicines. Hours would pass but their stocktaking would not end. Unable to restrain myself I had inquired of the only other person there of my species—the other doctor, Saidul Islam—as to what was happening. ‘What is happening? Let’s see if you can guess what is happening,’ he had said, laughing. That has always been my biggest drawback, my lack of imagination. Expectedly, I failed to comprehend what exactly was happening. Other than checking stock so thoroughly the rest of Rehman’s hours at the office would be spent on lording over his subordinates and having furtive conversations with Ambiya in his private office. Both Rehman and Islam would come and go whenever they pleased while the clerks would dutifully sit at their desks from ten to five, regardless of whether they had anything to do or not. Since she had the boss’s attention Ambiya had more perks among the staff—she could go home much before five if she wanted.
After a few days I finally figured out what my job there was after all. If Ayesha Khatun faced any issues while putting in a coil, or if someone had had an adverse reaction to contraceptives for which she was unable to find a solution, I was to offer my services. Khatun was an experienced professional; in effect, she knew much more about these things than I did. And yet I was her boss, although I never did have too much faith in that word. Instead I gradually began to develop a rapport with the family planning officers employed by the centre—hundreds of agents spread over the neighbouring villages an
d district towns whose job, besides distributing condoms free of cost and encouraging people to consider permanent contraception, was to spread awareness regarding family planning through a door-to-door campaign in their designated localities. Many of these agents would often visit the office, to attend meetings or to procure more supplies, money, condoms, pills, etc. Some of them had basic school degrees and there were also a few college graduates. In fact, there was a hierarchy in place among the officers—some ranked lower than others. Most were women, though there were a handful of men in the job too. It didn’t escape my notice that the men, despite being of a lower rank, were perfectly adept at throwing their weight around. Like Rehman, for instance. Almost inevitably we ended up clashing over a homeless couple with children who I had given shelter to in the unused shed. Rehman wanted them out and I tried reasoning with him.
‘There is no harm if they stay here! This room isn’t being used, so what if they stay here?’
‘No, they can’t stay. They have to leave,’ he responded, an edge of steel in his voice.
‘Where will they go? They don’t have any place they can go to. What harm is there if they stay?’
‘Yes, there is. There is a lot of harm if they stay.’
Rehman could not explain to me what exactly would happen if they were to be allowed to stay. Suffice it to say I lost the argument because Rehman had more authority than I did—he was a man. While Mujibar Rehman and Saidul Islam, on account of being men and officers, continued to terrorize their colleagues and employees, I was pushed to the sidelines with the clerks and subordinates despite being of equal rank. Gradually, I began to feel less like an officer and more as one of the underpaid clerical staff at the centre, growing ever closer to them like their neighbour or maybe even a close first cousin. The agents would instinctively tell me about the minutest things in their lives and I would patiently listen. Because I was the youngest person in the office, whenever I entered a room colleagues twice or even thrice my age used to promptly stand up and greet me with a ‘Salaam-waleikum, madam’. I was so uncomfortable with it that I pleaded with them repeatedly to not do it. Even Ayesha Khatun, who was Mother’s age, was the same, and I remember telling her bluntly that I would stop entering the room if she stood up. An easy camaraderie, conversations, jokes—such things made me happy, and the more popular I grew with these people the more I fell out of favour with the powers that be. I was an officer and yet I was not one. The peon wanted to get his daughter admitted to a school. He didn’t have the money so I gave him some. Similarly I gave money to others in need, often wilfully forgetting the loan. I made arrangements for people who were not getting adequate treatment so they would get more care. Since there was no work for me to do, I went around trying to find work and doing things of my own accord. One such job was part of Saidul Islam’s itinerary—organizing sterilization camps with the agents of the family planning office in the remote villages and district towns. They would set up camp in a schoolroom of a village and the agents would muster people for ligations and vasectomies. I too began visiting these camps—by boat, rickshaw or bullock cart, and sometimes even on foot.
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