Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  I never faced something like this with NM. Despite spending hours together alone he never made any advances and soon we became very close friends. A true friend is one you can trust, who will be there by your side through the good times and the bad. While telling NM about the old days I told him about Chandana one day. As soon as he got to know that Chandana lived in Komilla he suggested we take his car and immediately drive there. MHI was there; he too joined in and the three of us set off for Komilla. A while ago NM had surprised me by turning up at Abakash with MHI. In fact, this was something he liked to do—surprise people. Since I was a bit like that too I loved his impromptu decision to drive to Komilla. If something struck my fancy I wished to do it immediately and not leave it aside for later; waiting and considering were not things I was good at. When we finally located Chandana’s house in Komilla I was faced with the realization that she was the docile daughter-in-law of the house, her head covered with her sari; she was also a mother to an infant. This was Chandana, my Chandana; she had been so close and yet she had seemed so far away that day, so much so that when I touched her I could not be sure if she felt it.

  ‘I had gone to Rangamati. I kept thinking about you. You remember we had planned to go? You had promised you would show me around. We were going to have so much fun. Do you remember?’ I could not be sure if Chandana remembered anything. When I suggested we go somewhere, anywhere, Mymensingh or Dhaka, she only laughed at what was clearly my madness. She did not laugh loudly though, neither did she talk loudly. There was an immense sense of control about her—she walked stealthily, spoke in whispers and talked mainly about her little rose garden in the attic. She had read MHI’s stories before; in fact she used to call herself Sajani after reading his story ‘O sajani’. But even he failed to inspire any excitement in Chandana; she only kept staring at him impassively, like someone standing before a complete stranger. I met MHI fairly often after that day. Soon a friendship developed and the passage from the formal pronouns of address to the informal ones was traversed with startling ease.

  My friends were increasing as much in literary circles as in the non-literary ones. In family planning, Dr Saidul Islam, who had nothing at all to do with literature, had already become a good friend. I was never too choosy about my friends. That did not mean I welcomed anyone I found standing at my door. There were many writers I rejected, even if not on our very first meeting then definitely by the second: Haroon Rasheed, for instance. He was a talented boy who I had known since the time when Senjuti was still being published. In fact I used to be quite an admirer of his poetry. We would keep in touch through letters and he had even come down to meet me once. You take quinine for malaria but what medicine can you take for quinine? He could have come to meet me a thousand times, but as a shy girl from the suburbs I did not have the courage to reciprocate. When Haroon returned again a few years later, R and I had parted ways and I was battling loneliness on a daily basis.

  His intentions were clear right off the bat—since I was alone there was no way I could turn away a handsome man such as him—and he seemed completely convinced by the reasonableness of his expectations. The more he looked at me with love in his gaze, the more I had to look away, towards the coconut tree laden with coconuts, the grille on the window, or the betel nut tree that had been struck by lightning the past monsoon. There was nothing I could say to Haroon. On the other hand I had much more to talk about when speaking to Farid Kabir, a poet who resembled an emaciated tree-dwelling ghost; I had met him through Haroon when the latter had brought him to Abakash. I faced the same uncomfortable situation with Haroon again while visiting his house in Dhaka. Despite my best efforts we could not sustain even the most cordial of relationships.

  Not that the people I eventually accepted as friends were the only ones suitable while the ones I turned away were not worthy. For instance, I could scarcely have imagined that my relationship with HH was going to end on such a sour note. The truth is, when you abruptly try to twist an existing relationship into something foreign, something alien, everything sort of gets upended in the process. I had known HH for a long time, having first met him to ask for a few of his poems for Senjuti. Whenever I had some free time to spare and I was bored sitting at home, I would go meet him at the Press Club. It would inevitably lead us to a restaurant and him ordering lunch for two instead of one. The two of us would sit in the crowded restaurant and eat and he would steadfastly refuse to allow me to chip in with the bill. However, if I took a gift for him in return he would coldly tell me he never accepted any gifts and that I should take it away and use it myself or give it to someone else. We mostly talked about my family. He would ask about Father, Mother, he would ask how my brothers were doing and my sister too, and so on. A bachelor, he lived alone and had worked for a newspaper. When that shut down he did not seek another job, instead choosing to mostly spend his days gambling. The latter he could do very well and he would win most of the time. I too had taken to gambling at one point of time but that had not lasted long.

  Every evening there used to be a gambling party at Parveen’s house—Parveen was the sister of Hasina, Dada’s wife, although people knew they were cousins. Many professional gamblers used to be there with wads of currency notes stuffed inside their pockets. Parveen and her gambler friends had taught me how to play flush. However, every time we played, after a small peek into a hopeful fortune, I would lose badly, all my money seemingly evaporating into thin air. Each time I would think that I was going to win and of course each time I lost, often so badly that I would not even have the money for a rickshaw to return home. Back home, to my utter consternation, I would have to ask family members for money. I would never have figured out that I was being successfully conned at these games because I was an amateur. Thankfully, Father had stepped in and at his behest my brother took me aside for a long lecture that succeeded in weaning me off the habit. Despite losing at gambling so many times I must admit that it had been very exciting. Money is transient, it comes and goes, but can it ever give such a rush? It cannot. For HH gambling was like a regular nine-to-five occupation. As someone who had forsaken domesticity it suited him perfectly. He could conveniently bypass social expectations or not let those expectations touch him in any way. That was perhaps why these qualities used to attract me so much. What if I could have been indifferent like him? I knew, however, that it was not something everyone could do.

  So even when I began receiving phone calls from Dhaka almost every day I did not have the faintest idea that he wished to be anything else to me other than the revered older brother I had always thought of him as. My suspicions were first aroused by a poem he wrote for me and a new nickname he gave me. Then, out of the blue, the man who was known to have never gone anywhere other than his own house and the Press Club—no social invitations, not even friends’ houses—came down to Mymensingh to celebrate my birthday on 25 August. Another time while I was in Dhaka he even overcame his hesitations and turned up at Chotda’s house to meet me. Whenever I sensed his emotional and love-struck gaze on me I would look away deliberately. The day he held my hands for the first time I tried discreetly snatching them away. He did not understand my reluctance, though, and kept trying to grab hold of my hands. I did not like it because I did not wish to see him in such a light. He seemed so peculiar when he suddenly began—

  Suddenly one day,

  If love comes to you and asks,

  Let us go then, you and I—

  Would you?

  The man speaking to me was not the HH I knew; the poet whose one poem in 1969 had inspired thousands of people to take to the streets in solidarity—

  To the ones who are young now, this is the finest time to rally,

  To the ones who are young now, this is the finest time to go to war.

  He was not the same HH whose indifference towards society, whose reflective and contemplative nature, had moved me so. Neither was he exactly that poet, the melancholy in whose poems used to permeate my being.

 
; I had never imagined HH as a possible lover. He was someone I revered, someone I was in awe of. If someone you worship wishes to climb down from their pedestal and roll in the same dirt as you that is bound to lead to heartache for both parties involved. My hesitant eyes would cloud over with darkness whenever they met his pleading gaze. The person inside me who had never imagined facing such a scenario would get angry, her voice would harden, cruelty toughening her natural kindness and making her inhuman and brutal. Then one day, the transformation finally achieved, I threw the innocent man out of my house.

  ‘HH bhai, you must leave. You must leave right now.’

  There had been pain in my voice that day, perhaps a bit of despair and a hint of hate too. He had walked out wiping his eyes. I had steadfastly refused to look at him leave, the unsentimental person within me struggling to remain impassive and unaffected by the unrequited love that had taught the man to acknowledge his self—

  Sometimes I desperately want everyone to know—I still am.

  Love rings in my head, and in my heart,

  Like a bee in a bonnet.

  I have to write to her:

  One of these days do come and tell me,

  How happy are you that I cry.

  I could never go and tell him. I could only read his poetry from a distance and sigh. I had never wished to hurt him, nor had I ever wished to fall in love with him.

  I have loved you and called you Tana.

  If you cannot love me,

  Raise your fangs and strike me with your venom.

  It had been a clever rhyme but I was never a venomous snake that wished to poison an innocent solitary person like HH. Irrespective of the person, if I have ever become friends with someone I have always been the one who would rather preserve a relationship than destroy it. However, my association with HH was beyond repair. He may have asked me to strike him with my venom if I could not love him but he had lashed out in anger as well—

  If you wish to go, go—

  I will be the path under your feet,

  Not to turn you back,

  But lead you to the icy flames.

  Or,

  I had handed you endless possibilities,

  But are you so extraordinary any more?

  Or is your pain cheap?

  Perhaps it is for the best, my devious darling,

  That you have cut these silken ties that bind us.

  His kind soul could not rest after abusing me so. So he had also mentioned how generous he could be—

  You turn me down and walk away

  With such savage grace—

  Have you hurt yourself?

  Chipped the pretty nail on your left foot?

  How terrible! Come sit a while,

  As I wipe your wounds with mercy,

  And salve them with my antiseptic kisses.

  After the remarkable success of his book Ekhon Jouban Jaar (The Young Ones) the wounded poet was about to publish his second book of poems, Je Joley Agun Jwole (Burning Water). The name of a proposed third book—although none of the poems for that collection had been written yet—he had told me in confidence: Kar Ki Noshto Korechilam (Had I Harmed Anyone)! Meanwhile, Achal Premer Podyo (Lyrics for a Hopeless Love) was published, illustrated by Dhruva Esh. I read the poems and was deeply saddened by the realization that he had been so hurt. Why did he have to fall in love like that? What need had there been to get hurt and to hurt in return? I knew that despite the impression of indifference he had cultivated around others, HH was a deeply committed man. None of the women he had loved had ever loved him back. He could never have the family he had always dreamt of. No one had been aware of the dreams he must have nurtured over the years. It was not always apparent but he was a neat and organized man. He would only wear well-ironed clothes, clean sandals, with a thick cloth jhola by his side containing pens, some paper and packets of cigarettes, all neatly arranged. My bag was never so organized. There is a tendency to assume a bearded man with a jhola is a poet, somewhat detached and a little scattered, but it is not always so. Some people like being hurt while some others like to make sacrifices. HH himself had once written, after parting ways with a woman he had loved, ‘After paying this price in pain, life has finally learnt that love is radiant in separation and pales when reciprocated.’ He hawked pain. Long before we ever met, like a true hawker, he had sung out:

  Do you want some pain?

  I have some of various shades, red, or blue—

  Pain of refusal and indifference,

  Pain of loving the wrong woman,

  Pain of public rallies of the wrong politicians,

  Or the pain of two jokers high on hydrogen.

  Do you want some pain?

  Who else is there to sell you the purest kind?

  There is none other like me, having lost it all,

  There is none other like me to get you the best!

  He loved in secrecy and those he loved never grasped his true intentions. In secrecy he sat alone with his loneliness, asking about his beloved. If she were to remain unresponsive he would declare with wounded pride:

  . . . if nothing else, forget me with care.

  Why should you care about my loss?

  Perhaps I have erred in falling in love,

  Perhaps I have erred in lying on withering flowers,

  And in broad daylight,

  Murdering my own solitude. Who cares?

  He loved his sister in Netrakona too but never visited her. She was in his blood, in every fibre of his being, like death and life cohabit side by side, camouflaged.

  ~

  While sacrifice, pain and separation were the sort of treasures the ascetic poet HH desired, I knew another poet for whom consumption was primary and life nothing but a great game. Life was a stage and he a mere player on it, performing every waking moment. Sometimes it was difficult to differentiate between when he was being his true self and when he was lying or acting. So I assumed everything was the truth, which is perhaps why he used to like me so much. His most famous work was Khelaram Khele Ja (Khelaram at Play) where he had deftly drawn the astonishing character of a conman called Babar Ali. Had I not spent a long time in his company I would never have understood that the character of Ali, universally reviled as a shameless scoundrel, was a reflection of its creator HSS himself.

  After my break-up with R, HSS had taken it upon himself, of his own volition, to mend my broken heart. One day he took me to Rangamati; I had never been there before. Sitting on the grass by the lake at the foot of the tall mountains HSS confessed to me how he too often felt terribly lonely. While speaking he would use such startlingly beautiful words that I could not help but be amazed. In comparison to him my vocabulary was light as a feather; even an insect could have done a decent translation of what I had to say, my sentences so fragile that often he would have to lean in closer just to discern what I was saying. Taking me to a colourful hotel somewhere in the middle of Rangamati he dipped his head closer and whispered to me, ‘We should just take one room, shouldn’t we?’

  If I had said ‘No, we shouldn’t’, perhaps it would have seemed I was suspicious of his motives, that I was making assumptions about his moral character. Since there was no question of asking questions, almost to convince him that I was not apprehensive of him, I answered in an impassive, indifferent voice, as if responding to a passing how-are-you, ‘Yes, of course we can.’

  ‘Tell me if you are having second thoughts. We can take two separate rooms.’

  I replied simply, ‘Why should I be having second thoughts? No, I’m not having second thoughts.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I suppressed all my doubts brutally, my face a mask of serenity. Simply because I was convinced that there was nothing that could tarnish the innocent and unsullied relationship we had, I answered, ‘Of course.’

  Placing his hands gently on my back HSS said, ‘This is one thing I like about you. You never say no to anything.’

  That was true, I never said no. A man wh
o was my father’s age, who could easily have been my father, my older brother, an older male relative or simply a friend—I did not think I had to say no to him especially. Why should I have said no? I was not a provincial and conservative person like others, nor was I bigoted, narrow-minded or completely implicated within the familial matrix! Another time HSS had taken me and Yasmin on a sojourn to the sal forests of Komilla and we had put up at the guest house of the forest department—Yasmin and I in one room and he in another. We had gotten up in the morning, had breakfast in the dining room of the guest house and gone out to roam the sal forests, before returning to Dhaka later. Throughout the trip it was HSS who had mostly spoken—about his childhood and youth, the poverty he had faced growing up, suffering from tuberculosis, Dr Anwara who had saved him in the TB hospital, their courtship and eventual marriage, their two children, his writings, besides the shameless and unscrupulous nature of people around him about which he had spoken without any hesitation.

  Whenever the talk veered towards literature he would enthusiastically ask me about my work. I had been extremely embarrassed by the attention, had almost curled up in mortification. I wrote poems purely out of my own fancy; I did not dare share my amateur efforts with someone as illustrious as HSS. Instead, I admired this man’s kindness, his generosity, the sense of stability he exuded. He had stayed abroad for long and had an upmarket life, with a house and a car in the upscale locality of Gulshan in Dhaka. He was a writer renowned all over the country, he travelled all over, was a huge scholar. He knew so much but was still so inquisitive that he was constantly looking to unearth new things; such was his lust for life. He had also been so warm and welcoming with me and Yasmin, two simple girls from the suburbs, that we were delighted and awkward at the same time. However, there was one thing that I could not fail to notice eventually. As large-hearted and hospitable as he was, despite the number of times we had welcomed him into our house in Mymensingh, not once did he invite us to his house in Dhaka. He preferred staying over at a place for the night only if it was far away from Dhaka. Not that I did not wish to visit faraway places. There were so many places in the country I was yet to visit, so many things I was yet to see, still so many new regions I had to explore. And it was not as if I was getting any younger.