Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  Sharif’s admissions rang with the resentment of anyone who has ever been dispossessed. Sitting on the balcony of the Kyd Street guest house I sat gazing at nocturnal Calcutta, a sleeping city about to stretch itself out of slumber with the first light of dawn. Such a beautiful city, such warm people, such life in every nook and corner, and I loved it dearly. But one fact could not help but cast a pall over my happy thoughts about Calcutta—that in most parts of the city Hindus and Muslims did not cohabit in the same locality. There were specific Muslim-only areas and Hindu householders usually refused to rent to Muslim tenants.

  Such rules did not exist in Bangladesh and there were no restrictions as to who could be allowed to live where. Anyone had the right to live anywhere and there were high-rises in Dhaka with Hindus on the first floor, Muslims on the second, Buddhists on the third, Christians on the fourth and no one raising objections to such an arrangement. Hindus in Bangladesh were not unaware of Muslim festivals and rituals, neither were the Muslims ignorant of the plethora of events over the twelve months of the Hindu almanac. This was because they were neighbours. In Calcutta, although most Muslims knew about Hindu religious events, most Hindus were hardly aware of the Islamic calendar. There was a question one often had to face in Calcutta: Are you a Muslim or a Bengali? As if being Muslim precluded any chances of being Bengali, and as if being Bengali automatically meant being Hindu.

  Of course there were many non-Bengali Muslims in the city but that did not necessarily mean Bengali Muslims were any less in number. It was a noticeable trend especially among the uneducated stratum of the Hindu populace to assume that being Muslim meant being non-Bengali, a classic symptom of segregation. Those who frequently travelled to Bangladesh, Bengali Hindus who had met Bengali Muslims, did not always make this mistake. There was no end to the resentment that most Bengali Muslims harboured and it was not difficult to understand the reasons behind their grouses. There were a thousand problems associated with living as a minority; the Hindu minority in Bangladesh faced no less persecution. In fact, if I were to make a comparison, the Muslims in West Bengal had fared better than the Hindus in Bangladesh. The Left Front government had been in power in West Bengal for a long time and they had made efforts towards the development of their Muslim minorities. There was no state-sponsored oppression of the Muslims in West Bengal, while in Bangladesh the state itself treated the minorities as second-class citizens and no measures were taken for their protection.

  Bangladesh could have perhaps become a nation shorn of all communal divisions and politics. There were Hindus and Muslims living side by side everywhere within its borders who did not know how to discriminate against the other, or how to torment and kill the other. Being neighbours taught one to relate to the other, to learn that there could be no separate schools, colleges and universities for Hindus and Muslims, that Hindus and Muslims could get married or be friends simply because they were both Bengali, because they spoke the same language and were part of the same cultural fabric. The culture of the non-Bengali Muslims had not infiltrated the social milieu of the Bengali Muslims.

  Besides, in the case of most Bengali Muslims, their forefathers had been lower-caste Hindus, and those left behind in Bangladesh after the partition were not the landowning rich but their poor erstwhile tenants. Subjects always get along better with each other than kings do, and most Hindus in Bangladesh were either very poor or principled citizens who did not believe in the Hindu–Muslim divide. Despite so many reasons for coexistence, time and again Muslims in Bangladesh were known to attack, loot and rape their Hindu neighbours. And there was only one thing to blame for it. A serpent had emerged from the darkness, the venomous serpent called prejudice whose ilk had tried to establish the rule of Pakistan during the Liberation War and whose forefathers had been responsible for the partition. One such serpent was enough to drive back a hundred men. How many of them were there? Not too many for sure, yet. But their ranks were swelling with every passing day and I could almost hear their collective hissing growing louder in the air.

  I had not witnessed the partition of India so there was no reason that the pain of the cataclysmic event should find a permanent home in my heart. It still did and I nurtured deep within me an old agony of a country torn apart by something as fundamentally deceitful as religion. The feeling intensified whenever I saw the Bengalis of West Bengal, many of whom had been refugees who had had to abandon home and hearth in East Bengal and build an entirely new life from scratch on this side of the border. Many had crossed over in 1947 and never gone back, and the only things that remained with them were the memories of ponds full of fish, barns overflowing with paddy and orchards laden with mango and jackfruit stretching till the horizon. Living in the congested urban slums of Calcutta, people piled upon more people, these memories were obviously sweet respite.

  But how many of them spared even a thought for the ones who had not come to this side, be it because of poverty or because of their principles? How many of them wondered how the others were doing? The responsibility to think lay with the new citizens of a new Bangladesh. Not just thinking, there was a lot to accomplish too. Right after my first trip to India, still bursting with emotions, I had written a poem about the treachery of the partition, the cruelty of borders marked with barbed wires and how the two Bengals were essentially completely alike. India was partitioned in the name of religion—a two-part nation called Pakistan was created for the Muslims—but could the Muslims really live together in one country in the end? The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 revealed once and for all that the partition had been a huge mistake.

  The moment my poems were published the snakes had branded me a traitor. Articles maligning me too were frequent features in the journals that acted as mouthpieces of religious fundamentalists. I often did manage to read some of these, as often as I did not. It scarcely mattered to me who was writing what because I was determined to keep writing what I felt like. I was going to write with unabashed ease about the pain inside me, the despair, as well as the dreams. Secretly in my heart I nursed visions of a united Bharat, or at least a united Bengal.

  In Calcutta I visited friends and acquaintances to give them the gifts I had bought for them. I loved giving gifts to people. When someone like Subhash Mukhopadhyay behaved like a child at the sight of the kurta I had bought him it gave me immense joy. This habit of giving gifts was something I had inherited from Mother. No matter how much I disliked some of her oddities, there was something about sharing blood that ensured parts of her were there in me in some way or the other. Mother loved giving away her things to others and found a lot of joy in the act. As it was she did not have too many things—no money of her own, or jewellery, or saris—but as far back as I could remember my already impoverished mother never hesitated to give away even the little that she did have, and her unseemly generosity never failed to annoy me.

  Suppose I was to buy her a sari; she would wear it happily for two days and then on the third I would find the same sari on Gada’s mother. Mother, having taken pity on the poor beggar woman in tattered rags, had given it away to her! Yasmin too had developed the same habit but neither she nor I could quite match up to how Mother used to selflessly give things away without a second thought. Dada and Chotda were more like Father, obsessed with keeping meticulous accounts of even the smallest expenses. In fact, they were often worse than him. At least Father used to treat his poor patients for free, primarily because to him being able to cure someone was an achievement in itself and he never refrained from writing out prescriptions for someone in need whether he got his visitation fees or not. Both the rich and the poor of the city were his patients.

  But more recently the crowd of people in front of his chamber had begun to thin and mostly comprised poor patients who came from far and wide and waited on the porch outside the chamber, their feet up on the chairs arranged there, the leather of which had worn out from use. After the influx of various specialists into Mymensingh most rich patients prefer
red to take their ailments elsewhere. While some did still visit an older experienced doctor like Father, they did so only if the specialists failed to help. Experience mattered a lot and Father could tell if someone had tuberculosis even without taking out an X-ray. Even after his job at the medical college and the line of patients outside his chamber till midnight on most days, Father still flipped through his medical books whenever he had some time to spare. The night before a big class he studied and prepared till two or three in the morning.

  His busy life never failed to amaze me and the fact that I had adopted this tenet in my life—working and staying busy instead of lazing about brought me a lot of happiness too—was all because of him. It is indeed surprising how much of our parents’ habits we imbibe, only for these to be manifested in us quite unconsciously over time. Much of the time I could not even understand my own character. I was a shy girl once, used to hiding at the sight of strangers, and here I was perfectly at home with new people I was meeting every day; even though I was never garrulous, talking came easy to me. There was a chasm of difference between the old me and the new me. The number of people I knew in Calcutta had increased and I was fond of the city just as I was fond of Dhaka. I had met renowned artists and authors in Calcutta but I was more at home with the normal people I had come across in the city, especially if it was someone kind and sensitive.

  The guileless smile on Indranath Majumdar’s face made him seem like someone very dear to me. He had another bookshop, also called Subarnarekha, on College Street, and what a perfectly wonderful and scattered man he was! It took me a long time to find his shop and when I did chance upon it I discovered it to be so small, especially with the old books stuffed inside from wall to wall, that there was barely any place to stand. Indranath sold old books and published some new books too; but not just any, the books had to be worth it. For him his ideals mattered much more than commerce and if he were to get hold of a good book which others were not willing to place their bets upon, he would publish it regardless of whether it had prospects or not. The afternoon I went to visit him he took me out, the harsh sun beating down upon us relentlessly. ‘You have been eating at great places, no doubt. Come, let me take you to some place absolutely wonderful.’ He took me to an Odiya picehotel where we had fish and rice served on banana leaves. It hardly cost us anything but the sense of contentment from that humble food was not something I had experienced even in some of the finest restaurants I had been to.

  There was no dearth of events in Calcutta. Rabindra Sadan, Sisir Manch, Kala Mandir, the Academy—something was always happening somewhere. There was a poetry recital at Rabindra Sadan one day and Soumitra Mitra pushed me and Altaf Hossain up on stage to participate in the recital alongside local poets. I had read poetry on stage in Calcutta previously so the awkwardness was decidedly less this time around. However, it was the first time for Altaf, and the shy man could barely modulate his voice and neither could he keep his hands still while reciting.

  Poets from Bangladesh were usually met with a warm welcome in West Bengal. People with Muslim names, coming from another country and speaking in Bengali, reading poems in Bengali—perhaps it was a source of immense amusement to most people. Perhaps there were a few instances of pity too, which earned a few extra slaps of encouragement on our backs along with cries of ‘go on, it’s going great’. Some were always excited by anything related to Bangladesh, ready to roll in its water and dirt if they could. Driven by their ardour they would claim there was nothing of value in West Bengal and everything good lay in Bangladesh. For most people, though, bangals were dainty, partly human, simple-minded, warm and welcoming people who loved to spend money and were more often than not reckless, lazy, partial to food and comfort, well-off and mostly half-witted.

  Mitra introduced me to many poets and reciters in the event. I managed to have a quick conversation with a talented poet like Joy Goswami. A gaunt, skeletal man, nearly a hermit, Goswami had been writing wonderful poetry for quite a while. Truly, talent did not reside in the physical body, its domain was the mind. If the mind itself was barren it did not matter how much water and compost one put in, it would not yield even a fraction of Joy’s poetic flair. Not everyone was meant to be a poet; if it was meant to be only then was it going to happen. If someone had talent it scarcely mattered whether they were fat or thin—a corpulent man like Sunil Gangopadhyay could come across as attractive and a man like Joy did not appear as emaciated as he truly was, all because of their gifts. No matter how much the latter lamented about his urinary troubles, Joy appeared healthiest among the hundred other people surrounding him.

  Despite being a ghoti through and through, Soumitra Mitra managed to make enough time for the bangals to show us around. Honestly, without him it would have been impossible for us to travel around Calcutta so freely. Even if he was not with us all the time he made sure that we knew where to go. The only way to truly know a city is to walk alone, lose one’s way and then find it again, and not by peering out of the rolled-up windows of a car. I loved walking in the crowd, exploring old narrow lanes to witness the lives of people there, watching people bathing at the street pumps, sipping tea from earthenware cups in roadside tea stalls, walking through College Street in search of books, and buying saris from the pavements off Gariahat.

  There was so much to do in Calcutta that I realized the time I had left would never be enough to do everything I wished to do. Besides the Basanta Utsab and sightseeing around Calcutta I had a few important tasks to complete. First and foremost I had to get a copy of Laal Kaalo to Sripantha as Bilal Chowdhury had asked me to. I headed towards the offices of Anandabazar Patrika on Prafulla Sarkar Street with Raka and Altaf and a two-point agenda: hand over the book to Sripantha and give a copy of Nirbachito Kolam to Shankar Lal Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya worked for the magazine Sananda and we had met when he was in Dhaka. Besides, we had met a couple of times in Calcutta too.

  Sitting on the terrace of the newspaper office he told me numerous things about literature, much of which I could not comprehend. But there was one thing I did understand. He was quite well read in Western literature and a very erudite man. Interestingly, there were more such educated and intellectual people that I came across in Calcutta than in Dhaka. Bengali Hindus were always all for education, leagues ahead of Bengali Muslims. The latter had always taken pride in their refusal to learn the language of the non-believers while the former had never harboured such hang-ups, so the difference was hardly an inexplicable one.

  We asked a passer-by in the corridor the way to Sripantha’s office and I could not help feel a surge of trepidation while pushing open the door to his room—learned people usually sat inside these air-conditioned rooms with grave expressions on their faces and I did not wish to barge in and disrupt something important. There were three people inside the room: a small man with a round face and two other younger men. All three were writing.

  ‘Is there someone called Sripantha here?’

  The middle-aged round-faced man stopped writing and looked up. ‘That would be me.’

  ‘I’ve come from Dhaka. Bilal Chowdhury has sent a book for you.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘Laal Kaalo.’

  ‘Laal Kaalo?’

  He took the book from my hand and asked me to sit. I had assumed he was simply going to take the book with an ‘Okay, thank you’ and say goodbye but not only did he not do that, he asked Raka and Altaf to sit too. As he flipped through the book and glanced at the pictures his face broke into a smile; it was obvious he liked what he saw. ‘There hasn’t been a single reprint of Laal Kaalo from Calcutta. It’s finally happened from Bangladesh. I will write about this in Kolkatar Korcha.’ He was in charge of the supplement and also wrote editorials for the main edition of Anandabazar frequently. He was in the process of training the talented Anirban Chattopadhyay and Goutam Roy, the two younger men in the room, into hardened journalists like him. We made our introductions—my name, where I was from, what I did—and Raka
and Altaf were introduced too. Milk tea arrived and sipping on it Sripantha told us he was from Mymensingh too and had crossed over to this side during the partition.

  ‘Where in Mymensingh?’ I failed to hide the note of excitement in my question.

  ‘Dhobauda.’

  They had left Dhobauda and never gone back, much like the millions of others who had migrated to India from East Bengal during the partition and never found their way back. He told us he wished to return once to see how everything was, but like most people had never managed to find the right time. Many of those who had immigrated to West Bengal as refugees harboured a soft spot for people from Bangladesh and Sripantha was no different. As we were about to leave he suddenly asked me, ‘Do you write too?’

  As usual my ears went red at the question. I did write obviously, but it did not seem right to me to make too much out of that, especially in front of a scholarly person such as him. Realizing I was not going to respond, Altaf intervened. ‘Of course she does! She’s become quite famous in Bangladesh!’