Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  When NM figured I could leave him without batting an eyelid he tried clinging to me like a leech. When he realized I had no interest in putting up with his suspicious nature any longer all he could do was explode with rage. And when he understood that I did not care about his anger any more, always the adept organizer, he set himself to planning how best to humiliate me.

  ~

  I had taken a house on rent in Armanitola, very close to Mitford Hospital. One day there was a sudden knock on my door. It was NM. He should not have known where I was but he had always been like a hawk, able to scent his prey. He was banging on the door so loudly that people in the locality were beginning to gather. At the end of my tether I went out and told him in no uncertain terms that there was no way I was letting him inside the house. I did not want to let him in because I did not want to hear him insult R. After a while, realizing his ploy was not going to work, NM left quietly. What I did not know was that by then he had already concocted two new plans: the first to force me out of the house, and the second to get married again, this time for real.

  A Happy Life

  I was posted at the blood bank at Mitford Hospital. Many poor people used to come to the bank to sell blood. Rather than the doctors it was the laboratory technicians who were more aware of how to extract blood and how to label and store the bags in the freezer. From eight in the morning till two in the afternoon, except for signing a few documents, I had nothing to do but sit around. Soon I grew tired of being utterly jobless. The obstetrics and paediatrics ward was right beside the blood bank and throughout the day the doctors there could be seen constantly running about, so busy that it seemed they barely had time to exhale. Seeing them I would desperately wish for a similar schedule, to be able to work day and night. One day I wrote an application to the head of the gynaecology department, Dr Bayesh Bhuiyan: ‘I wish to work in the gynaecology department. I would be grateful if you would consider taking me on.’ To my utter delight, Dr Bhuiyan readily agreed to consider my request.

  My new house was in Armanitola, quite close to the hospital. Mujibur Rahman Khoka, the owner of Vidyaprakash, had helped me in getting it on rent. My books of poetry were doing fantastic business for Khoka’s publishing house and he was constantly providing me with inspiration to keep writing. During the jobless hours at the blood bank I would often visit his office in Banglabazar to inquire about how my books were doing. On one such occasion I had asked him to help me find a place, having exhausted myself trying to look for one on my own, scrambling to wherever I noticed a ‘To let’ sign. Almost on all such occasions after the initial general conversation the landlord would invariably ask me: ‘How many of you will be staying?’

  ‘It’s only me.’

  ‘Of course, but where is the man who’ll be staying?’

  ‘There is no man. I will be staying alone.’

  The landlord would be unable to suppress his outrage. ‘How can a woman live alone anywhere? Don’t you have a husband?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We don’t take in single women.’

  The doors would then shut on my face with a loud bang. I did not give up hope despite this happening over and over again. When Khoka agreed to help, both of us set out together to look for a place. Every house we went to, since Khoka was there with me, the landlord routinely turned to him to ask him how many people were going to be staying. He usually answered, ‘She is the tenant. She’s a doctor working in Mitford.’

  ‘Doesn’t she have a husband?’

  Khoka would meekly reply, ‘No, she does not. She has just been transferred to Mitford and it’ll be best if she gets a place near the hospital. Don’t worry about rent. Since she’s a doctor you can surely imagine that she would have no trouble meeting the monthly rent.’

  To give him his due credit Khoka did try to convince these people to the best of his ability. Nonetheless, irrespective of how pleading a tone he used it amounted to very little in the end. No one was willing to give their place out to a single woman. We did manage to find some unassuming and cordial landlords who did not shut the door on our faces immediately or bluntly say, ‘Go away. We won’t rent to you.’ Even when these people agreed to Khoka’s earnest pleas it usually came with a caveat: the girl had to bring her father or brother along. In simpler terms, as sad as it was that a woman did not have a husband in order to rent a house, some male relative or the other had to live with her. Although none of them could explain why a single woman was not a suitable candidate for a tenant, they did make it clear that I had to bring a guardian along and they refused to even entertain the possibility that as an adult I could be considered my own guardian.

  I informed Khoka quite unequivocally that it would not be possible for me to make anyone uproot their life to come stay with me, be it my father, brothers or uncles. The only person I could think of was Mother. I could have asked her, but then that was neither here nor there. Mother was not a man and the landlords were adamant that I needed one of those. We did try to inquire if anyone was willing to rent out their place to a female doctor living with her mother but came up empty-handed on that front too. Tired and harangued from searching we were on the cusp of giving up hope when we chanced upon the Armanitola house. Khoka had to sit for a two-hour interview with the landlord where he put his most docile face forward to finally emerge unscathed from the ordeal with flying colours and a seal of approval for two women to rent the house.

  The owner of the enormous battleship of a house was an uneducated man who had made a ton of money from iron. With that enormous wealth he had done what most men with enormous wealth usually do—he had kept a beard, worn a fez and married four times in the name of Allah. Three of the wives were kept in three different houses while he lived on the first floor of the Armanitola house with the fourth. The rent was 3000 taka; by then my salary had crawled its way up to 2500. Despite the discrepancy I agreed to take the apartment on the fourth floor of the building—all of two rooms and a long balcony. Positively trembling with joy and anticipation at finally being able to live on my own without being at someone else’s mercy, I was determined to live my life on my own terms.

  I went about making the place habitable for the time being, buying a cheap bed, some cheap mattresses, a steel almirah and a few necessary utensils. I also brought Mother and Lily over from Mymensingh to stay with me. I could tell how happy Mother was over the prospect of a house of one’s own and a measure of independence. No sooner did she reach the apartment than she set Lily to the task of cooking and cleaning and setting everything in order, while wandering off to the balcony to stand and stare outside—the boys playing football in the Armanitola grounds, the cars and buses on the road, and the sky. Soon I bought curtains for the windows and a large red carpet with red-and-green diamond motifs that I bought after a tense stand-off over discounts. I also got a couple of matching cushions since I had no money to buy sofas, tables or chairs. Not that I was terribly unhappy that I could not purchase a sofa; it was my first attempt at building my own life and though I wanted to make it as pretty as possible with the nicest things in the world, most such things were too expensive for me to even look at. I was prepared to simply look away and search for cheaper things that were just as pretty. Is there any way to describe the sheer elation of being able to buy something with one’s own money and bringing it back to one’s own home, even if it’s something quite inexpensive? The month the carpet was bought there was nothing else I could buy, but even waiting till the next month for money was suffused with a feeling of joy.

  Since my salary was not enough to meet the rent I had to depend on the columns I wrote for extra cash. I wrote for the weekly Purbabhash, bimonthly Ananya, and even for Khabarer Kagaj and Ajker Kagaj after they parted ways with NM. Another collection of poetry was brought out by Vidyaprakash, Atale Antareen (Deep Within). Though this one did just as well as the previous ones I could never ask Khoka for my royalties; I was too embarrassed to bring up the topic of money. Besides, Khoka had been instrumental
in helping me begin an independent life. He had assisted me in getting around when required—to the market to buy groceries or to buy furniture and utensils—and even helped me get the best deals. Often when I was too broke to afford anything more than rice and dal he would drop off some chicken or something. Towards the end of the month when finances were in dire straits Mother would simply go off to Mymensingh to stock up on rice, groceries and vegetables from Abakash. I was poor, but I was very happy because I could not remember another time in my life when I had actually dealt with poverty and lived on a budget; neither could I remember a time when I had been as happy. Khoka was always there, like a brother and a friend, to lend a helping hand. Mother was there with her boundless love, and Lily too was there, happy at last to have gotten away from being driven like a slave in Abakash. The house ran on a tight budget but love we had a surfeit of.

  In the hospital I had a full schedule in the gynaecology department which was always teeming with patients. The energy reminded me of back when I used to be an intern in the gynaecology department at Mymensingh Hospital. There was so much work that I barely had time to breathe. I was doing deliveries, performing episiotomies, treating eclampsia, removing retained placentas, doing forceps deliveries, or running off to the OT to do a caesarean while putting on my gloves and mask at lightning speed. The longest part of the day, however, was spent in the outdoor ward treating the hundreds of patients arriving in a steady stream. Sometimes, after all this through the day, there would be a night shift to run. In the little free time left after everything I wrote my columns, without which I would not have been able to eat, let alone pay the entire rent.

  Meanwhile, I found out that many of the young interns of the hospital were my fans for some unfathomable reason and we all came to be on rather friendly terms despite the age gap between us. Everyone knew who I was, I did not have to introduce myself to anyone. Of course the flip side to this was the unfortunate tendency to overlook my work and assume that I was more focused on poetry than on being a doctor. For instance, I would be writing a prescription and someone would see that from a distance and assume I was writing a column. Other doctors my age, having passed their FCPS, or at least having passed the first part, were all working as registrars or clinical assistants. Others like me, working as medical officers in various departments, were also planning to quickly appear for the exam. I was the only one without any such plans. To me there was nothing to be gained from poring over tomes of information which often took years to process. There were so many people around me who had been trying to crack the exam for ten years, diligently sitting for it year after year and failing every time. Those with rich fathers usually skipped the FCPS exam and flew off to London to return with an FRCS degree. That the latter was a simpler degree to get than the FCPS of Bangladesh was a well-known fact, no matter how incredible it might sound.

  Possibly this was one of the primary reasons why I decided to forgo the FCPS exam, even though many of my colleagues at Mitford were working and studying simultaneously. Many of them asked me if I was going to sit for the exam and appeared quite shocked when I informed them that I did not wish to. If they could have, they probably would have asked me what I was doing in the hospital in the first place if I did not wish to get ahead in life. Or perhaps they silently congratulated themselves over the knowledge that I was soon going to learn my lesson—I was going to get transferred to a far-off village somewhere and be replaced by a young doctor with an FCPS degree or on track to getting one.

  The would-be FCPS doctors had their heads in their books all the time, even at the cost of their duties in the department, while the other doctors like me were working like interns. I did not mind the work, but nothing was more hurtful than when people alleged that I was indifferent to my profession just because I was known as a poet. If not anyone else Professor Rashida Begum used to point it out to me repeatedly that I was an indifferent doctor. She had disapproved of me from the very first day when I had reached the department two minutes too late; for the rest of our time together those two minutes were etched into her memory. Besides, she was usually irritable by nature. Of the three branches in gynaecology, she used to be a professor in the third and quite expectedly there was nothing going for her except her temper tantrums. Handling patients was an ordeal for her and lest someone notice she was floundering she would try to cover it up by screaming at others. There was a two-fold purpose to this—everyone would get to hear her voice and, she hoped, everyone would learn to respect her, just like they respected the head of the department, Professor Bhuiyan.

  Bhuiyan was a wonderful person. He did not have to shout at anyone, his work spoke for itself. Every time we ran into each other he would ask me how I was doing and I would say something evasive to try and get away as fast as possible. As it is I was a tad embarrassed that I had no interest in completing my postgraduation; most of the other doctors usually surrounding him were either postgraduates or on the verge of finishing their degrees. It was perhaps this awkwardness that was instrumental in renewing my interest in finishing my own degree. Hearing that I was contemplating further studies Mother could not hide her excitement. ‘Take Allah’s name and just start. I know your father will be happy too.’ Bhuiyan, despite being the head of the department, was always extra gracious towards me, more because of my writing than my skills as a doctor. He was a regular reader of my columns and often told me about the ones he had particularly liked. I was uncomfortable whenever my writing career came up for discussion at work but there was nothing I could do to avoid it altogether. I was a doctor first and foremost; like any other doctor in the hospital I did not wish for anything to take away from that.

  Mother was especially proud of me and I could sense her joy when I left for work in the morning with my apron and stethoscope. She fed me with her own hands and was always bustling about attending to whatever I needed. I had saved up a bit of money and one day I bought a small red refrigerator from the Stadium Market. She would clean the thing twice a day with the pleat of her sari and not let Lily anywhere near it, afraid she might put a scratch somewhere. She would bring me cold water from the fridge after a hot and maddening working day and keep a lot of cooked food in it so I could eat good food without having to run to the market every other day.

  Our happy family was doing quite well by itself in sickness and in health. The interns would come over often and we would have raucous evenings replete with food and medical humour. Everyone expressed their appreciation for the life I had built for myself. Initially we would all sit on the carpet and eat. As more guests started coming over I bought a small table and two chairs for the kitchen. A small television and a simple cassette player too joined the roster. Whenever I asked Mother if there was anything else she wanted, she would immediately shake her head and say no. She did not want me to waste money. In fact, she would have preferred it if the table and the chairs had been brought from Abakash. She would argue that a daughter had as much right to a father’s property but my own father was hardly doing anything to help.

  No, Father did not help me while I was settling down, but that did not diminish my love for him in any way. I could only go home on holidays, only to see him, and I remember buying a shirt and a pair of shoes for him off the Baitul Mukarram sidewalk before my visit. I did not want his help; rather I wanted to be the one helping him. I had so many wishes although I did not possess adequate resources to fulfil all of them immediately. Desperate to change my financial circumstances I put up a signboard at the main gate one day, with the words ‘Dr Taslima Nasrin, MBBS’ and my visiting hours, among other things. My salary, the consultation fees from the patients coming to see me at home and the paltry earnings from the columns—everything was carefully tallied and kept in the steel almirah. Father’s shirt, shoes and things like that were outside the purview of this budget and rightly so. I had to live frugally for that extra bit of expense, but it was all worth it in the end.

  Relatives from Mymensingh, whenever they were in Dhaka
for work, would stay over at my place. Chotku visited and had to sleep on the carpet; it was only a minor inconvenience when compared to the love between us. He confessed that he had never felt the ease and warmth that he had found in my house at anyone else’s, be it Boromama’s, my eldest maternal uncle, or Fakrul mama’s, Jhunu khala’s or even Chotda’s for that matter. He assured me that despite the lack of material comfort in my house there was a lot of freedom there—freedom to sing out loud, to be and do what one wished to, and to generally feel at home.

  Fortunately I was not spending all my time shuttling between Mitford and my various columns. I was also often attending literary meets and events. Zachariah Swapan of Mymensingh, a foster brother to Yasmin, organized a cultural programme at Bangladesh University of Engineering where I was invited to a debate—my first time attending an event in the capacity of a judge. I did my best to put on my most sombre and judge-like bearing to rise to the occasion. MF invited me to his NGO, Ubinig. Ubinig used to get handsome grants from the US, quite ironic considering MF used to be a prominent socialist back in the day. I had heard his musical programme at TSC;22 he wrote, composed and sang his own songs. Playing the harmonium himself he would regale the audience with his songs, of which I fondly remember ‘Sattaratari jacchi bari’ (I have to hurry home). A leftist all his life, he gave up music and published a volume of poetry. And they were such beautiful poems! I remember how deeply moved I had been after reading his poems the first time.

  Thus, when MF invited me I did not hesitate. Reaching his office I was greeted at the door by a gaunt woman named Farida Akhtar who seemed to have just gotten out of bed. She sat me down and went inside to give him word of my arrival. It took him some time to appear; he too seemed to have just gotten out of bed and wrapped clothes around himself. Tea and biscuits were called for and we talked, by which I mean he talked. He talked about his poems and explained to me the meanings of a few Arabic words I had not understood. Before I could ask him why he had used such incomprehensible Arabic words in poetry he furnished an outrageous reason: ‘Our Bengali is Islamic Bengali and in West Bengal they use Hindu Bengali. Our culture is Islamic too, so we should use a lot of Arabic and Urdu words in our Bengali.’