Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  ‘This is nothing too serious! Go see a venereologist. You will get the best treatment there. I am not a specialist in venereal diseases.’

  ‘What are you saying! You’re a doctor and you’re saying you can’t treat me!’

  ‘You need a specialist for what ails you, Karim bhai.’

  ‘Oh no, you are so dear to me, almost like a relative. How can I say such things to an unfamiliar doctor?’

  ‘Why can’t you? A disease is a disease!’

  ‘No, a doctor can’t help me.’

  ‘But I’m a doctor. Why did you tell me then?’

  Cackling with glee, he replied, ‘I know what medicine I need.’ When I steadfastly refused to ask any further questions he ventured to share the information regardless: ‘I need a young girl.’

  ‘Well, there’s Kiran and Kumud, your daughters. Both are young.’

  He immediately stuck out his tongue in shame. ‘They are my children. I want a young girl for myself.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s what you mean!’

  Unfortunately there had been nothing else for me to do but pretend that I did not understand what he was trying to tell me. I could not have thrown a shoe at him; he was a family friend after all. But I had been adamant about not giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he had managed to get his indecent point across. If he had figured it out, it would have probably provided him with his much-needed sexual satisfaction immediately. Besides, I had also wished to convince him that I respected him despite his indiscretions and that I could never imagine he would make such an offer to me. My sole hope had been that he would take the hint and never try to broach the topic ever again.

  The very same Abdul Karim was at Abakash shouting the house down about how I was a bad woman—I had taken a man on vacation and done unsayable things with his money, women of weak character like me were easily available to any man, and so on. Mother barked at him to stop. ‘What nonsense! If she’s borrowed money from you, she’s going to return it. If not today, she’ll return it tomorrow. How dare you say such things because of that?’ That shut him up finally. Hasina had been standing at the door all this while. She had not uttered a word of protest while the scene had been unfolding, perhaps secretly delighted that such things were being said about me. It would have been silly of her to ignore such an immensely entertaining moment.

  By the time Yasmin arrived with Milan, Karim had left. Taking her with me I gathered all my remaining jewellery and took it to the jeweller’s. The jeweller offered me half the fair price but even that came to just 20,000 taka. Yasmin borrowed another 5000 from Milan and I handed over the sum to Hasina to return to her brother-in-law Karim immediately. The debt, however, failed to evoke any sign of relief in Hasina. To me it seemed she would have been happier had I suffered under its weight for some more time.

  I escaped from Mymensingh, in search of a place where I would be able to, at the very least, breathe freely. In Dhaka Geeta’s misbehaviour went on unabated. She would not let me into the house and if she did, she would not ask me to stay. She would also deliberately restrain Suhrid from coming anywhere near me. She was a different person during the good times and another when things were going south and I could not even begin to understand the number of ways in which she was capable of insulting someone. So I went to NM with my broken heart. He had not an ounce of her meanness, selfishness and malice. Besides, he was forever trying to prove to me irrefutably that he was intelligent, that he was not a bigot, that he believed in equity between men and women and that he was a firm proponent of progressive politics, free thought and religious tolerance. He was constantly trying to do or say things that would convince me he was a kind, transparent, lively and easy-going man, so that I too would get attracted to him, although despite his best efforts I could never think of him that way. Even the day my long-abandoned, unloved and numb body woke up to his touch I remained impassive to any feelings of love for NM. That very afternoon he told me: ‘Let’s get married.’ The way he said it, it was as if he could have been saying something regular—let’s have tea, let’s go to the fair, let’s go for a stroll. Although the words failed to surprise me, I did agree to his proposal because I knew he was my friend and the only person in the world who would never wish for any harm to come to me. NM was not a cage to me; he was rather like a force of freedom in a stuffy world full of cruelty and abuse.

  That afternoon, out in a rickshaw near Dhanmandi, NM had us stop in front of a small shack by the road. The board hanging at the entrance revealed it was the office of the notary public. There was a spectral old man sitting in the dark and dank room whom NM asked about the formalities required for us to get married. Two signatures apiece and some money was all that was needed. All the formalities were completed in five minutes and that night we returned to NM’s house in Iskaton and slept together for the very first time. Did we have to sign a document to be able to sleep together? I was never one to place too much importance on signatures. I used to sign documents in the office whenever they asked me to. I was an insignificant person so I could never understand how my signature was of any special value. We still signed the documents given by the notary public because it mattered to NM. It was a compromise we reached for the sake of his moral compunctions about us sleeping together.

  In the end we ended up spending, if not the entire night, at least half the night in NM’s house, surrounded by his parents, siblings and their spouses. It was NM’s house and he had the right to do as he pleased. He was the one who used to look after his family and pay the rent; in other words he was the master of the house and no one had any say in any decision he took. His friends used to visit his house often, to eat, party and stay over. In fact, even I had once spent the night there and he had given up his bedroom for me to use. This time it was different though; a signature had authorized my presence even if it did not make much of a difference to me personally. NM remained the same friend he already was and our way of addressing each other remained informal.

  Meanwhile, the DD of Mymensingh—the one with the shades, the paan-stained teeth and the roving eye—finally succeeded in getting his complaints against me across to the authorities. Consequently, I was transferred to Chauddagram and in one fell swoop the health department sought to deal me a killing blow. Oddly enough I was not terribly unhappy with the course that things had taken. I had been wishing to get away from it all for the longest time—from Abakash and the toxic atmosphere of the family planning department that had no antidote. Mother was upset and started crying the moment she heard about the transfer. Nevertheless, blessed with a transferable job, there was no way I could have avoided the shift. After joining the health centre at Chauddagram I began commuting to work from NM’s house in Komilla. NM would go stay the night there too before heading back to Dhaka early in the morning.

  NM was not out of surprises though. One fine day he suddenly handed me a piece of paper—it was another transfer letter. Within two weeks of joining Chauddagram he had managed to get another transfer for me. I was to join as a medical officer in the blood bank of Salimullah Medical College and Mitford Hospital in Dhaka. I could not believe my eyes. So this was what influence could do! Left to my own devices I would never have managed to get a posting somewhere that good. There were only two medical college hospitals in Dhaka and the popular opinion was that the only way to get work in such places was to exploit the authority of influential uncles. None of my uncles were from such prominent circles so I would have to be satisfied with Chauddagram and its ilk. Who would have known that the editor of a weekly literary journal could work his influence not just at the newspaper offices but in the Ministry of Health too!

  However, despite this one surprise magnificent enough to trump all the other ones NM had sprung on me, our relationship, defined as it was by a couple of signatures, barely lasted two months. NM wanted to host a grand reception to tell everyone about our marriage in the presence of all his friends and acquaintances. Sadly, that was never meant to be. One day, agai
n while on my way to Dhanmandi in a rickshaw, I suddenly got off at the notary’s. I slipped him some money and signed another document, this one the opposite of the one I had signed with NM. Whether the signature remained on a document or not it scarcely mattered to me, I remained the way I was. I had neither gained nor lost anything. When I had signed the document the first time I had been unaffected, it was just the same the second time around. To me a signature meant very little when compared to a friendship; if the friendship was no longer the way it used to be then there was nothing a signature could do to change things.

  It did not take me long after the first signature to finally see NM’s true nature—his narrow-minded, rancorous, mean and jealous self. And the more I saw this new NM the more ashamed I was to realize that I had considered him my closest friend. Having acquired me he became obsessed with trying to control me. For instance, I would wish to go to Mymensingh but that idea would be shot down immediately.

  ‘No, you don’t need to go now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you don’t need to go now.’

  ‘Then when do I need to go?’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I’ll tell you.’

  I was expected to wait for him to tell me when I could go to Mymensingh. I was also expected to wait for him to take me wherever I wanted to go.

  While earlier he had always been concerned with what made me happy, after signing the papers it became apparent that his happiness lay in confining me within a cage. When I refused to be caged he raved and railed against me, the vein on his forehead angry and throbbing. Previously he would let me drive his car on occasion; after our marriage I was banned from ever sitting in the driver’s seat. Hitherto he had been extremely keen on publishing my articles every week; soon that interest waned entirely. Gradually, I was becoming a puppet for him to play with as he pleased. If I wanted a pen he would get me ten but he would not let me go and get one by myself. He wanted to be the one to fulfil all my desires, leaving me with nothing to do on my own. He did not want me to be proud of myself, he reserved all of that pride for himself. He wanted all my duties, wanted to fulfil them for me while I was not allowed to have any say.

  As his desire to be the one who was superior in every aspect grew more desperate, he began belittling all my achievements, the same accomplishments he had been instrumental in fostering. The self-deprecating man I had known, always saying things like ‘I don’t know anything, I have no clue, I’m an idiot’, changed so much that he would not hesitate to claim that he was wiser, more erudite and more talented than almost everyone else. Neither would he stop boasting about his generosity. I soon became convinced that the NM I had known was a mask the real man had put on to win me over. Masks can be tricky things; they tend to slip off sooner or later. He had managed to coax and cajole me into his grasp. Once that happens, when a woman comes under a man’s control, no man wants to let her get ahead of him. At the end of the day, NM was a man after all.

  ~

  NM was exceedingly proud of his father and he often mentioned how his father used to be a member of Parliament for East Pakistan. I did not believe he had any reason to be proud of the fact. His father had not only been a leader of the Muslim League19 in Devidar, a sub-unit of Komilla, during the Liberation War, the man had also been a leading figure of both the Razakar20 and the Shanti Committee.21 NM never suffered from any remorse due to his father’s past and I never heard him accept the unkind truth that his father had been wrong. Such was his obsessive love for his father that he would make me check the man’s blood pressure for no reason at all. Even after assuring him repeatedly that there was nothing to worry about, he would make me check again the very next day and then again the next. Surprised, I would ask him, ‘Why?’ ‘No reason,’ he would reply simply. There was no reason to check someone’s blood pressure every single day when the person had no related complaints. His father was hale and hearty and neither did he have fluctuating blood pressure. Just because he loved his father did not mean I had to share his unreasonable anxieties. So I would refuse and NM would fly into a rage. His fingers used to tremble and when he was angry his entire person would be racked with tremors, his eyes threatening to pop out of their sockets.

  Irrespective of how NM was, everyone else in his family was very nice. His mother was a stunningly beautiful woman living with a hideously unattractive husband. Nevertheless, as long as I stayed in that house, this unattractive man was always sweet to me. In fact each and every person in the house was nothing but warm and affectionate. If only that had been enough! Everyone was easily taken in by NM’s humility but I knew he had a strong core of arrogance in him too. And this arrogance was not just limited to himself, it extended to his father as well. Gradually I grew to question his political positions. Before taking on the responsibility of Khabarer Kagaj he used to work for Inquilab, an out-and-out conservative magazine whose editor-publisher Maulana Mannan had been a well-known Razakar. Inquilab was vocal against those in favour of freedom and was playing a huge role in the systematic propagation of Islam in the country. Although NM had very little to say about the magazine itself, he could not hide his glowing admiration for their set-up, their style and their printing press. In fact, Khabarer Kagaj was printed in the highly modernized printing press of Inquilab, which I even visited with him on one occasion. By then the country had already split in two—the fundamentalists and those opposing them.

  As the editor of Khabarer Kagaj, even though he was closely associated with many who were directly involved in fighting fanaticism, NM never chose a clear side for himself. He had walked away from the darkness of Inquilab and discovered a world of light, but despite holding a university degree in journalism NM never wrote a single editorial for either Khabarer Kagaj or Ajker Kagaj. He usually got it written by one of the minor journalists who were always around him. Neither did he ever conduct an interview or write an article about a political or social leader, or even a poet or a writer. This was not part of his field of expertise; his skill lay in business. Kazi Sahid Ahmed liked him and had appointed him the editor of Khabarer Kagaj. In exchange NM had successfully coaxed many renowned writers to write for the magazine which had resulted in increased sales as well as unprecedented popularity for the journal. NM might have infiltrated the literary world from outside but he deserved many accolades for his achievements—it could not have been easy as an outsider to successfully break into this world and create such an impact.

  An incident, or an accident, happened soon after NM and I started sleeping together, something that had never happened with R—I became pregnant. I could feel something different in my body and in my heart, the discernible presence of someone other than me. All of a sudden I could barely recognize myself, these startling changes occurring within me making me quake; a maelstrom of fear, shame and happiness, and dreams, threatened to sweep me off my feet. NM was always adept at springing surprises but his reaction to this unexpected news was markedly different from anything he had tried before.

  ‘Let’s go to the clinic.’

  ‘Why the clinic?’

  ‘To get an abortion.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘You have to get an abortion.’

  ‘Why do I have to get an abortion?’

  ‘We can’t have kids now! We can think about these things later.’

  Refusing to pay heed to any of my objections he dragged me to a clinic in Gulshan and forced me to get an abortion. I understood quite well why he needed me to do this. He was convinced that the sperm that had made the baby was not his own, I had procured it from somewhere else. I could feel nothing but pity for him and the corrosive jealousy that had forced him to take the life of his own child and which was threatening to destroy me too. Where was I going, who was I talking to, who had given me what gifts on my birthday, why—he was so suspicious about everything that it was slowly turning him into an animal. The animal was in turn stalking me. I felt sorry for NM. He
was so far gone in this downward spiral that he failed to grasp the only truth in all of this: that he was the only one with whom I had a physical and emotional relationship. Assuming that I was trying to fool him, he had fooled me to try and teach me a lesson. It did not take long for me to push NM out of my heart entirely.

  The repercussions of his overconfidence were soon felt in the offices of Khabarer Kagaj. NM had misused a blank cheque issued by Kazi Sahid Ahmed and when this information came to light Kazi summarily dismissed NM from his services and took over the editorial duties himself. Earlier NM would not stop singing praises of the man but after his dismissal Kazi became the worst person in the world. Angry at having been deposed from his position of luxury and authority NM’s quest for vengeance manifested in slander and gossip. NM was nothing if not intelligent. After cementing the popularity of Khabarer Kagaj he had branched off and started the newspaper Ajker Kagaj and made that the second most popular newspaper in the country almost overnight. Doubtless he was smart. However, more often than not, his smartness was tempered with an edge of villainy. He was not the sort who could be restrained easily.

  Instead of going into a depressed state over losing his job he soon gathered his resources and launched another newspaper, Bhorer Kagaj, coaxing many writers of Ajker Kagaj to break rank and join him. Soon Bhorer Kagaj too began to grow popular. When he realized that I was not going to fall for his self-aggrandizing, his rancour grew manyfold. All his politeness, his civility and the many other masks crumbled, leaving behind the true face for all to see—all fiery eyes, gnashing teeth and raging screams. He was no longer concerned if his behaviour was going to hurt me or make me angry. He began approaching my friends and acquaintances to grumble about how much he had done for me and how little I had done for him in return. The endgame was simple—to prove how a faithful, perfect and wonderful boy like him had been cruelly wronged by someone like me and to establish what an indecent, uncaring and insensitive woman I was.