My kitchen was unlike the one at Abakash—one had to stand while cooking and there was no old earthen oven like the one back in Mymensingh but a smaller modern one that ran on gas. There was no courtyard either where the leftover food could be thrown to the ducks, chickens and crows or where water dripping from washed dishes could be drained on a tree root somewhere. Instead, garbage had to be put in plastic bags or buckets and taken to the garbage dump outside at regular intervals. I was occupied with setting up the house and had scant time for the kitchen, which was mostly left to Mother and Kulsum to manage. They lovingly served me food and while I ate Mother would stand beside me ready to serve me more. She was always at hand, finding me things I required.
Time and again she would go off to Mymensingh to bring back rice, pulses, oil and onions from the kitchen in Abakash without my knowledge. I usually did all my grocery and vegetable shopping from the Shantibag market and took Milan with me whenever there was other work outside. Milan had moved out of his sister’s house to come and stay with me. Father had spoken to a friend and arranged for a job for Milan that the latter joined despite the fact that his heart was in Mymensingh where Yasmin was staying and preparing for her master’s examination. So he would eagerly wait for the weekend and usually never return home on Thursdays, directly going to Mymensingh instead. On holidays Yasmin too would visit Dhaka for the day. While Mother kept shuttling between Dhaka and Mymensingh I never went back, busy as I was with work, writing and my new life.
One fine day I received a call at the hospital. It was MM calling to tell me that in a few hours he was leaving for America for good and wanted to meet me one last time. He gave me his address and I took a baby taxi from the hospital to go meet him. I found MM drunk out of his mind and unable to even keep his eyes open long enough, a series of swollen love-bites on his neck. I had never asked him about his relationship with the rich woman and neither did I ask him any questions that day. Nonetheless, he informed me that it was she who was sending him to America. He spoke about R, told me how he had gone to the TSC grounds to pay his last respects, touched R’s lifeless form and cried, begging for R’s forgiveness again and again.
Perhaps there was a kind side to the cruel MM as well, although I could never figure out who exactly was the actual person, which is perhaps why he was never too dear to me. Even on that day I had resolved to leave immediately after saying my goodbyes and would have done so too, had he not tried to put a wrench in my plans by shutting the door abruptly and trying to drag me to his bed to rape me! While my body harboured no desire for MM any more, to him sex was simply a fun game like many other things in his life. For me our relationship was not important because of our personal history and the mess therein; the thing of importance was Bichinta. The journal was doing very well but that too had become a game for MM, like castles he had made in the sand—he was ready to step over his own creation and leave without a backward glance.
It was possible the person financing Bichinta was not willing to put any more money into it or MM himself had grown tired of running it. It was also possible that he wished for greener pastures and was willing to let go of Bichinta and even the country in order to answer such a call. This was exactly how talent was being smuggled out of Bangladesh; doctors, engineers, physicists and mathematicians from Bangladesh were perfectly willing to travel to foreign shores and even work as dishwashers in the kitchens there. The dollars they earned in exchange at the end of the week or the month was a significant amount in our currency. MM, once the editor of a popular weekly journal in Bangladesh, did not take up a dishwasher’s job in the US; he chose to become a cabbie instead. We spoke twice after his departure. He called me to discuss how to go about formally dissolving our relationship, a union that had been mostly on paper to begin with. I had completely forgotten about it, so when I signed the divorce papers I remained as impassive as I had been while signing the papers at the registrar’s office the first time. He sent a messenger to get my signature on the relevant documents and it was the same person who made all the arrangements to send the documents to MM in the US.
There is one thing I have always noticed about all my relationships. None of them, no matter what the nature of the relationship, has ever ended from my side. I have never been able to stay angry with someone for long and sooner or later the ice has melted and I have looked for a semblance of normalcy. I don’t hate anyone and I have always tried to see things from the other’s perspective, especially when the person concerned made a mistake. It was the same even when I was the one who had made the mistake. In the case of someone who I was aware wished me malice, I simply removed myself from their orbit rather than let things get bitter. In many ways I learnt to be like this from Mother who was quick to forgive a person’s mistakes too. I always detested this aspect of her nature although quite ironically I unknowingly inculcated the same trait in myself.
When MM had called saying he wished to meet I was well aware that I did not feel anything for him any more. We were never going to be together again but he used to be a friend and, even if for a brief spell, had given me a lot of joy and comfort. So I had gone to wish him well. It was always like this, I could never wish for bad things even for my enemies. Even after Father had tried to destroy my life I could not wish him any misfortune. He had taken Mother for granted their entire life, hurt her repeatedly but she too never wished him anything but good things. She would get anxious at the slightest sign of illness and start fussing over him. That she loved him might have been a reason for her anxiety, but even without love things were not altogether different where Mother was concerned. Geeta and Hasina never considered her family, always armed with an unkind jibe or an insult they could throw at her, but Mother was ready to put her life on the line for them too.
She had given a cow to Abdus Salam to take care of. One day he came and informed her that the animal was lost. Even if she was curious as to why no other cows from their house were lost, nevertheless whenever Salam came to the house she would welcome him with lots of warmth and food. She would get angry with Lily’s mother one moment, then give her own sari to the woman to wear the very next. Or she would lose her temper and slap Lily or Kulsum, only to forget everything in a few hours and go out to buy them new dresses or new shoes. There was not an ounce of resolve in her character, whatever little was there was extremely fragile. My resolve too was similarly brittle. Was it because we were both lonely? Perhaps. A firm resolve only suited someone who had physical or financial influence, or at least a roof over their heads.
I met and spoke to NM again, the same man who had once done everything in his power to cause me grief and because of whom I was asked to vacate the house at Armanitola. I had even heard of his role in the gossip printed about me in Sugandha and how it had reached Father. When he turned up at my house in Shantibag I never turned him away. NM had wished to destroy my desire to live on my own. His schemes had worked as well as he could have hoped, but despite all his machinations he had failed in his objective and had failed to crush my spirit. He would come to the Shantibag house to see for himself how I had recovered and flourished and every time I could tell he was burning with envy within. Other weekly journals were constantly approaching me for columns but NM did not ask me to write for Bhorer Kagaj, so afraid was he that I would become even more famous. Not that I was sorry about not being able to write for his newspaper, swamped as I already was with commitments for so many columns in so many different journals.
Nevertheless, it was NM’s own fault or perhaps his bad luck that things did not eventually unfold as he had intended. One day his services at Bhorer Kagaj were terminated. Undaunted by the setback he started on his own once more, this time not with a journal but an entire news agency. He also had a gala wedding in which he married a girl from Chattagram, a young girl with a BA degree. It was obvious that much careful thought had gone into the marriage and he had managed to locate a girl with all the qualities of a dutiful, obedient wife who would cook, clean, take care of
his parents and his siblings, and still have the time to follow his every command.
Even after marrying someone so perfect he still came to my house and he still made passes at me. I did not turn down his offer of a physical relationship, my lonely body thrilled at the prospect of someone else’s touch and warmth. My desires refused to be ignored any longer, the compromises I had made with myself finally demanding recompense. These renewed longings were my own, not someone else’s. I turned them over in my hand, threaded them through my fingers and said to myself, ‘This body is mine and I alone have the right to take any decisions about it.’ Perhaps if I had known how to take care of my desires on my own in some other way the routine I developed with NM once or twice a month would never have happened. It happened because I let it happen. Like the thousand other irrational rules driving society, rules that I repeatedly flouted, I defied the unreasonable demand that my body would become dirty or impure if I let a man touch me.
It did not take much for a woman to become fallen or impure. Men have deemed chastity to be a woman’s greatest wealth since time immemorial. These rules are fundamentally patriarchal and women are systematically taught that they must guard this wealth at all costs—their virginity before their marriage and chastity after. Marriage is essentially a social ploy geared towards transforming a woman’s body and her desires into a man’s private property and most women are trapped in this web of deceit.
On the first page of Nirbashito Bahire Ontore I had written, ‘I have broken my shackles, I have brought push to shove at last.’ Could I really break all my shackles? Or was there only a secret desire to break them and nothing more? When I spoke about breaking shackles I did not want it to just remain talk, I wanted to live it with my own life. This fight against society had started early when I had taken off the burqa at a young age. I had flouted unwritten social dictums, like the one where a woman was supposed to keep the hood of the rickshaw pulled over her head like a quasi-veil. In a crowded town like Mymensingh I had gone on rickshaw rides with the hood rolled back. People stared, said things, and I let them. I had done those things because I wanted to and because I had failed to find any logical explanation for the rules I was asked to follow. A woman was only supposed to marry the man her parents chose for her. She was not supposed to fall in love. She was always supposed to listen to what her husband told her to do. She was not supposed to talk to other men, chat with them or get close to them. None of these dictums I adhered to because I wished to follow my own rules. Only the customs that made sense to me I adopted. The rest, meant to attack the very essence of my being and eradicate all that gave me autonomy, I simply cast aside. It was not within me to live by making a series of compromises with the irrational and the oppressive. I had learnt the hard way that such a life was not meant for me.
It did not take long for me to understand that while our sexual relationship was quite convenient for NM, it was doing absolutely nothing for me. I found no satisfaction in these trysts since I had no love left for NM at all. Once upon a time when I used to like him I used to like his touch too. Those feelings had died a natural death and sex with him was becoming nothing but a painful chore. Even without love there had to be a measure of affection for bodies to react pleasurably to each other. A new resolve took hold of me—to refuse to endure physical pain in the name of intimacy.
In all this there was one thing in particular which was firmly trying to sync with my beliefs—the need to respect my own needs in things that mattered. My body was my own to command and no one else had the right to dictate its course of action. Whatever I chose to do with myself, whether to wade into the mud or rise above everyone else, it was going to happen because I had decided so and not because someone else wanted me to. Because I had slept with more than one man in my life and that was no longer a secret, many men looked at me with a calculative gleam in their eyes as if my body was easy to acquire and all they had to do was lean in a bit. When they realized eventually that I was not as easy as they had made me out to be, their calculative eyes would slowly widen with outrage. I had to navigate more filth and overcome more adversities than most other women around me, under the greedy watchful eyes of men, their tongues hanging out and features swine-like. For them women were objects meant for consumption and this belief was the cornerstone of their existence. I was an alien creature because I had been with many men, because I was single and did not have a family or children, and because my life was unnatural and not at all like that of their aunts, mothers and wives. So they felt no shame in winking suggestively, touching me without my consent, or falling all over me. Not for one moment could they entertain the thought that even men could be viewed as merely objects of consumption by women, that women could want men just as fiercely, and that without rape there was no way any of them could ever have me without my explicit consent.
~
One day CS turned up quite unexpectedly at my house. There had been many upheavals in her life. She had focused on her studies after the breakdown of her relationship with M and her efforts had borne fruit; she got into PG.24 She was staying at the PG hostel in Dhaka and preparing for her FCPS. M was thankfully out of the picture, but there was someone new in her life. This new man, Haroon, fair, short, a quintessential good student, was studying in PG too. Not exactly a younger man but definitely younger than her; it was not as if they had known each other for long.
In fact, after only a couple of conversations she brought the boy over to my flat in Shantibag. After whispering to each other and cuddling on the sofa for a while she led him straight to my bedroom. Later, she told me Haroon was good in bed too, perhaps not as good as M but good enough for her. Their visits, because of how conveniently available my house was to them, became increasingly frequent. All this was happening in front of Milan. Milan had been witness to CS’s torrid relationship with his brother M and had often warned her against putting too much faith in the latter’s promises. However, CS had been so obsessed with the man back then that no amount of warnings made any difference to her whatsoever. She was initially quite awkward about conducting her relationship with Haroon in front of Milan but it did not take her long to shake that feeling off. Besides, neither Milan nor I wished to remind CS of her past experience and neither was she interested in remembering it.
Busy as she was with her new life, a new obsession soon reared its ugly head—her concern about Haroon’s personal life. Haroon had told her his relationship with his wife was not in a good space at all. So CS would wonder why the two of them were out strolling in the park. Why did he lie to her about leaving the hostel at night frequently to visit his wife? All this was robbing CS of sleep and sending her sixth sense into overdrive regarding Haroon’s movements. Why did he visit his wife so often? Was he then in love with his wife? But Haroon had given her his word that he had not had any physical or emotional relationship with his spouse for nearly two years and the only one he wanted was CS! The wife stayed with her parents and Haroon had told CS he only visited them infrequently to see his child. CS could not shake off the feeling that it was all a lie and his primary objective behind visiting his in-laws’ was to sleep with his wife. It was a familiar zone—CS’s anxieties about a man, her tears and the suspicions eating into her brain like a thousand deadly bugs. I was convinced that her relationship with Haroon too was not meant to last long. She insisted on falling in love with men who were married with children. As it is even bachelors were barely reliable and here she was trying to make a faithful man out of someone who was already married, that too by force!
‘Where’s Humayun?’
‘Don’t even talk about him. Just hearing his name makes my skin crawl.’
Humayun lived in Rajshahi and Ananda was with him. CS’s mother had left for Rajshahi too. Explaining everything to me as briefly as possible, CS’s attention turned back to Haroon. Did he not love her? There was no way I could say for sure and staring at my blank face CS broke down in tears.
‘What should I do? Did he lie to m
e when he said he loved me?’
‘How can I tell you if Haroon loves you or not? Wouldn’t you know better?’
‘I thought he does but it seems he’s lied to me.’
‘If that is so, why are you still with him?’
‘Because I can’t stay away! I decided to forget him so many times but I have failed each time I’ve tried.’
‘You’ve tried?’
‘Yes, I have. I have tried concentrating on my studies. But each time I simply sit and stare at an open book and think about Haroon.’
‘Married people are tricky. Why don’t you try meeting someone who’s not married?’
‘Which boy my age or thereabouts do you think is still unmarried?’
‘Let it be. How does it matter where Haroon goes, what he has to say, if he is lying or not? Why waste your time thinking about these things?’
‘I shouldn’t?’
‘No.’
‘So it’s only sex?’
‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘But being touched when there is no love does nothing for my body.’
Our eyes met and I gravely said, ‘Do you love Haroon?’
CS nodded. She really did love the man. If she were not in love with him why did it hurt her so much whenever he returned to his wife!
I could not help but feel sorry for CS, especially because I had no assurances to provide her. She was not enthusiastic about a physical relationship without love. But there was no one for us to love! We wanted love, we wanted to love in return, but every time we ended up getting deceived by men. The desire to love was eternal and the heart refused to bar its gates despite the repeated hurt. Love was another trap in which men sought to entrap women, in shackles that looked and felt different but served the same purpose: enslavement. I was not seeing anyone, so I might not have related to CS right then, but being single had also provided me an immense sense of freedom. A life without love might lack in variety but it still brought immense relief in its wake. And right then all I wanted was some relief.
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