Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  ‘Why was he in hospital? What did he have?’

  ‘Nothing that serious. He had an ulcer. I went to see him the other day. He was being taken care of fairly well. Why will he die? There has to be a reason, isn’t it? A man who has recovered from an ulcer in a hospital and been discharged and sent home, how am I to believe he is dead? Is there anything more absurd than that? If he had been suffering from something serious I could have still considered the possibility.’

  We were headed towards Indira Road but I had no idea where R’s house was. I tried replaying that night in my head when he had brought me back to his house from Jhinaidaha, betting on my instinct to help me retrace my steps. I suddenly noticed a few men standing at the entrance to an alleyway, two of whom I knew, including Mainul Ehsan Saber. In an instant a storm rose within me, threatening to unsettle the very foundations of everything I believed in. Trembling, I felt my blood freezing in my veins and darkness descending all around me. Shutting my eyes and gritting my teeth to force myself to stop shivering, I asked Yasmin, ‘Why are R’s friends here? What’s happened? It’s true then?’

  Yasmin did not speak. As the rickshaw moved forward more people could be seen and many more familiar faces. ‘No, it can’t be true. Maybe he’s gotten more unwell.’ Desperate for some reassurance I grabbed Yasmin’s hands. ‘Tell me, please. That’s what it is, isn’t it?’ But there was nothing Yasmin could say. ‘Why are there so many people here today? Is there a poetry recital in this alley somewhere? Or have they come to see R? But why would so many people come?’ My voice rang out with suppressed anguish and Yasmin’s grasp on my hands tightened in a silent response. We stopped the rickshaw in front of a house that had a crowd of people standing at the gate. I walked past them and ran up the stairs to the first floor. The door was ajar and I could hear someone crying inside. Asim Saha was standing by the door. Barely had I finished my question—‘Asimda, what’s happened?’—than he burst into tears and howled, ‘Nasrin, R is no more.’

  ‘What nonsense!’

  My strength seemed to seep away from me like camphor in the wind. I could not keep standing, but leaning against the wall behind me was not helping either. Like a feather I fell, the world spinning around me like a top as everything went black. Except my own cries I could hear no other keening or groaning or distressed voice, not even Asim’s helpless weeping. I could not recognize the faces surrounding me. None of them seemed familiar, shadows floating in the water or perhaps ghostly silvery fish. I was a dead log that had sunk to the bottom and the fish were swimming around me silently. I was not sure how long I was out. Time seemed to have stopped around me; the clock was still ticking, the world was still turning, but in my own little world everything had come to a crashing halt. I could not feel myself within me any more. Rather, I felt absolutely nothing, not even when someone touched my arm or called out my name.

  A fish floated towards the dead log and seemed to take on the appearance of Labani as she reached for my arm. Her touch seemed to transport me instantly to a noisy fish market somewhere far away. I was standing there in the melee, sellers and customers shouting over prices amidst a pervasive stench of sweat and dirt, and strangely, in the middle of this chaos, R’s prone form was lying on the ground, peacefully asleep. None of the smell or the commotion was making any difference to him. R, my R, the love of my life, the one I yearned for night and day. R was asleep, lying on a striped white sheet spread out on the floor. I knew that sheet well; we had slept on it so many times, made love on it, let it envelop us in its warmth as we found release in each other’s embrace, the many nights when R had kissed me, held me tight in his arms and slept soundly on that sheet. And there he was, selfishly taking the entire thing for himself and not once asking me to lie down beside him.

  In a whisper, almost leaning in to his ear so only he could listen, I begged, ‘R, now isn’t the time to sleep. Get up. See, it’s me. Let’s go somewhere, just the two of us. There are too many people here. Let’s just slip away without telling anyone. Just like before when we used to escape crowds and go off on our own somewhere, desperately looking for some solitude. Get up. Even if you don’t want to go out, get up and read your poems to me, everything you have recently written. I will lie down with my head in your lap and listen. Come, dazzle everyone with a poem.’ No matter what I said R did not get up. The keening cry in the background suddenly turned into a voice. ‘What have you come to see? Who have you come to see? Come here! Come, stare at my son to your heart’s content. Didn’t you hurt him enough? So what have you come to see now?’

  I stood there like a stone beside the unmoving body, and the crudest words of the world were being etched on me—we have to remove the body. They were not calling R by his name any more! He was just a body now! I wanted to scream at R, tell him to open his eyes and see how Mohan Raidan was calling him a body now. Did he remember how Raidan had threatened to murder him? Now the man was relentlessly calling R a body! Why was R not getting angry? I could not tell who led me to a rickshaw. The rickshaw began following the truck carrying R away, bound for TSC and then Mithekhali for the burial.

  The stone finally began to melt. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He’d gone to brush his teeth in the morning. He fainted all of a sudden. It was a heart attack.’

  ‘What rubbish,’ I snapped at Yasmin and she stopped mid-sentence. A long while later, I asked her again, ‘Yasmin, R is truly dead, isn’t he?’

  Yasmin said nothing.

  ‘Tell me, Yasmin, please tell me he isn’t dead. Why should he have a heart attack? He didn’t have trouble with his heart. Tell me he isn’t dead. That he is just asleep.’

  Like before, Yasmin remained quiet.

  No, there was nothing wrong! Yasmin and I were simply taking a turn around Dhaka city. We were out together after a long time, like we used to go out back in the day. Nothing was happening at Indira Road, or anywhere else. I used to fall asleep on the rickshaw. Perhaps something like that had happened and I was dreaming! Buoyed by the sudden thought I pushed back the hood of the rickshaw. ‘Let’s go to Bailey Road and buy saris.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not!’

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘What home! We’re going out together. Let’s go.’

  ‘No, let’s go home, Bubu.’

  After some more time I directed the rickshaw to take us towards TSC. Yasmin pleaded, ‘Let’s not go there.’ I shouted at her to keep quiet but she refused to listen to me. Instead, wrapping her arms tightly around me she said in a teary voice, ‘Bubu, don’t be like this.’

  ‘Let’s go to TSC. R will be there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to go see R.’

  ‘Bubu, stop! None of them want you there. Don’t go to TSC.’

  ~

  I wanted to believe that R was not alive any more. I tried telling myself the same again and again, that he was gone and all that was left was his corpse. He was a corpse whose heart had stopped pumping blood, had stopped beating. Blood was not flowing to his body parts any more, not even to his lungs which had long fallen silent. R was not breathing. R was never going to wake up. R was never going to write poetry or read poetry on stage. He was never going to laugh again, or live his life like others were going to continue living theirs. I wanted to believe this but something would not let me. Whenever I tried telling myself that R was gone forever I felt a vast emptiness in my chest, like a carcass with a gaping ribcage left half-eaten by vultures and abandoned in the dump. There was nothing inside me except desolation and emptiness. When I tried breathing I could feel my lungs straining as if the last bit of air had been sucked out of the earth. The scavengers were circling around me, pecking at the empty sockets of my eyes and my cracked skull through which they could reach into my brain. The feeling of being fed upon spread though my body like a contagion so rapidly that I did not notice when I reached Shantibag, how I got upstairs or how I ended up alone in my room propped up against the wall. I did not real
ize how long I sat there until the spell was broken by a hand falling lightly on my shoulder. Waking up from a daze I looked up to find NM in front of me. The waves that had been looming in the horizon crashed upon the shore with a mighty roar and swept away the silence of the seaboard.

  It was impossible for me to stay in Dhaka. The city resembled a giant crematorium to me, devoid of life except for the smell of burning flesh permeating the air. Chotda came over, packed my things and took all of us, including his family, to Mymensingh. On the way as I stared out of the window of the car at the trees and farms speeding past, everything seemed the same as before—everything except R. He was not going to walk these roads any more or stop to smell a flower. He was never going to admire the river or sway to the beats of bhatiyali songs. Try as I might I could not accept he was never going to do these things again. I kept telling myself R was going to come back suddenly one day and claim, ‘I was at Mithekhali. I’ve just come back.’ Just like he used to. I was never a big believer in the supernatural but it gave me joy to think that R was going to come back, that he was going to laugh, write, think and love again.

  Mymensingh turned out to be an even bigger crematorium than Dhaka. I pulled out the old trunk from under the bed to rifle through my things. I wanted to feel R’s presence, wanted his touch at any cost. I did not want him to fade into memory. As I sat and read his old letters, our past seemed to appear right in front of me again, close enough for me to touch my memories, play with them, drown in them again, or tie them in a fishtail with my hair so they would stay with me at all times. But the moment someone would call, the visions would become shadowy and pale at once. Did that mean they were gone for good, those days of love, and everything was consigned to memory alone? Terribly alone all of a sudden, I could do nothing but sit by myself and think of what to do with this useless life. The love of my life, the man of my dreams, was gone. The man I had left but not left altogether, who I had got separated from but who I had never separated from me, was gone. His absence gave my grief a tenor that could not be contained by Abakash or the narrow confines of our locality. I bellowed and wept, uncaring of the many curious eyes trying to see past the black gates and find out what was happening inside. Father was at home, he had heard the news, but he remained largely unconcerned. Instead, he let me cry. Everyone in the house let me cry to my heart’s content.

  ~

  Even though I eventually returned to Dhaka, the city remained shrouded in death and impossible to live in. I visited Asim Saha and his grieving wife Anjana hugged me in condolence. We were all looking for shoulders to cry on and friends to share our devastating grief with. So we sat and talked about our lonely apathetic world where R did not live any more. Our loss could not be expressed in words and all our tears and each of our sighs were for him. If he was around us, all I wanted to tell him was that none of us were able to accept his death. A person who had never believed in religion was bid farewell with every possible funeral rite mentioned in Islam. At least if that could have been prevented! But neither did I know a spell that could bring R back, nor could I keep religion away from him after his demise. Instead, all I could do was simply sit and let it all happen, my helplessness and incapacity reminding me repeatedly how stupid I was.

  SHA, editor of the literature pages of Ajker Kagaj, asked me to write an article on R for the journal. Of course no article could even begin to approximate the pain of his loss; for that I would have had to tear out my heart and show it to people. Who was I going to show it to? There was no one and so I hid my grief deep within me, saving it only for myself. Since R was gone, there was no point in talking about it to anyone else.

  Meanwhile, Ishaq Khan, a friend of R, was writing about me and abusing me in public, holding me responsible for R’s death. Khan alleged I had killed him, though he failed to clarify exactly how. His accusations hurt me deeply, especially because I had known the man for a long time, since he used to visit R when we were still married. Khan used to have trouble making ends meet and R, always the generous man, would help him out occasionally. Every time we met I had welcomed him with the utmost warmth. Khan was a writer of short stories. Since his stories never made him any money, he was trying to make up for it by writing gossip after R was no more. The newspapers and journals too were always eager to print new gossip about me so Khan had no trouble getting his stuff published. The readers, I was convinced, were reading the columns, making clucking noises about R’s miserable fate and generously calling me names like slut, whore and witch. Another one of R’s friends snidely told me one day, ‘Ishaq’s gone crazy because R’s not here any more to supply him with free alcohol.’ There was a mad race to make profit off R’s untimely demise. A poet called Saifullah Mahmud Dulal approached me for the letters R had written to me to publish them in a collection, an offer I refused outright. This was the same Dulal who had flung raw hatred at me from the truck while carrying R’s body away.

  I did what I felt was the most important thing to do at that point of time. I started the process of finally getting R’s collected works published. R had always wanted it but no one had been willing to do it while he was alive. Is that why he died? So his work would get published? All his work was compiled in a single volume and published by Vidyaprakash; the second time Khoka was not as unwilling as he had been before. The collection was edited by Asim Saha and the proceeds from the royalties were arranged to be sent to R’s siblings. My responsibility was to proofread the manuscript, but as I sat at home poring over his writings, being printed at the Ityadi press, all I could see in them was R. It was as if he was sitting beside me the entire time, listening to me reading his poems over and over again, every word, every syllable. While working through the night whenever I fell into an exhausted sleep on top of those piles of paper spread across the floor, he was there in my dreams and we held hands, walked and spoke about poetry.

  Asim Saha and a few others established the R Committee to organize a fair in his memory. Books and many small-scale handicrafts were sold in the fair which took up the responsibility of celebrating the life and times of the remarkable poet who had passed away at a tragically young age. Many renowned poets and writers who attend the fair now, where they heave many deep sighs and say a great many things about R, could perhaps have gotten him a job in Dhaka when he had needed it most. It was not as if he did not approach enough people for a job! The song ‘Bhalo achi, bhalo theko’ was used in a teleplay and instantly became immensely popular. If R had been alive it would have delighted him no end. Would anyone have wanted to use the song if he had been alive? There was no way one could say that for sure. As he had asked, I wrote my letters to the sky every day whether they reached him or not.

  Licit and Illicit

  I asked Mother to get all my things from Armanitola, things that had been taken to Abakash, to Shantibag. I especially asked her to get all my books kept in the bookshelf in the living room and the shelf too. Mother arranged for everything to be transported in a truck from Mymensingh to Dhaka. It was fairly late by the time the truck reached Shantibag and after everything was brought up I realized the bookshelf was missing.

  Mother, sweating profusely, had nearly doubled over with fatigue. I barked at her, ‘Why haven’t you gotten the bookshelf?’

  ‘I asked so many times. Your father refused to let it go.’

  The shelf may not have been mine but I was his daughter. Had it been too much for me to expect that he would let me have it for my new house? Mother started crying. ‘What could I have done? I asked him a dozen times. He refused to give it.’

  ‘Why didn’t he? The bookshelf had my books. What does he plan to do with the empty shelf, display air in it? All the books are here. Does anyone read at Abakash? Is he planning to eat the shelf?’

  Wiping the sweat off her brow Mother replied, ‘I asked him to give it to you. I told him you wanted to keep books in it. He made a face and said he’d gotten it made and that if you wanted one you should buy one.’

  Her words ma
de my blood boil in my veins. ‘He didn’t give it, so why didn’t you take it anyway? Since you had everything put on the truck why didn’t you have that put too? Where am I supposed to keep all these books now? The bookshelf was the most important! What kind of father cannot part with a bookshelf for his own daughter!’ My anger with Father had found the closest possible outlet—Mother. Stung by my attack, Mother withdrew to the shadows of the balcony and cried. I could never stand anyone crying!

  Since I could not afford fancy things—a new bed with a soft sponge mattress and attached side-tables on either side, writing tables, chairs, wooden sofas—I bought a cane sofa, a dining table with four chairs, a small wooden cupboard for my clothes and a cabinet for storing plates and dishes, intending to do up the place in my own way. Everything I did alone, spending hours trying to locate good but inexpensive things, getting the new things put on a van, accompanying the movers on a rickshaw and getting things taken up to the flat, deciding on how to arrange everything down to the smallest detail. Not a single person helped me with money or assistance. The shelf was going to lie empty in Abakash anyway, so I had asked for it to keep the books strewn about the floor. But Father did not wish to part with it. He was an expert in destroying my life but did not have the time to spare a glance when I was trying to make one for myself. I was fine with his indifference. He did not need to get involved in anything pertaining to my life and I only hoped he would no longer interfere in it either. My life was going to run according to my wishes, I did not need my relations any more. They could need me, but I hoped to never need them for anything.

  Nevertheless, concerns about the functioning of my new life occupied all my thoughts. The old bed Mother had brought from Abakash was put in the other room for relatives or guests to use. The carpet was spread out on the living room floor while the pots and pans were dispatched to the kitchen. Mother had brought Lily’s older sister Kulsum to Shantibag with her, whom she proceeded to train in every aspect of running the house—cleaning, manning the kitchen, cooking, keeping everything in place.