Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  ‘Really?’

  Sripantha looked at me and grinned; I could not look up and meet his eyes in embarrassment. ‘Do you have a book with you now?’

  ‘Book?’

  ‘Yes, do you have one of your own books with you now?’

  There was a copy of Nirbachito Kolam in my bag for Shankar Lal Bhattacharya. Uncertainly, I took the book out and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hands and said, ‘Leave this with me.’

  ‘I had gotten this for Shankar Lal Bhattacharya,’ I said meekly.

  ‘Shankar of Sananda, right? Get one for him later.’

  He called a photographer and told the man, ‘Take a photograph of her. She’s from Bangladesh; I want to write a note about her book in Korcha.’ I posed for the photograph just as I was—wearing a plain tussar sari, white but not quite, with tiny threadwork red and black flowers, a red bindi on my forehead and a forlorn smile on my face. There was going to be an article about my book in Kolkatar Korcha along with my photograph! Let alone express joy I could barely react for the shock. For authors of Bangladesh, Desh and Anandabazar were always distant dreams and if someone’s poem was to ever find its way to the pages of Desh it was considered such a matter of pride that it took them years to live it down. And here I was a puny new writer!

  If only that had been all! There was a bigger shock waiting for me a few days after returning to Dhaka. I was back to my usual schedule: my duties at Mitford, a few regular columns in four or five journals during my free time, and occasionally being driven by publishers to get back to working on new novels. One fine day I received a letter from Anandabazar Patrika telling me I was being awarded the Ananda Puraskar of 1992 for Nirbachito Kolam by the Desh–Anandabazar team! For a moment I could not believe my eyes and I had to read the letter repeatedly to confirm whether or not it had been sent to me by some clerical error. My name was on the envelope, though, and there was slim chance that it was an error. Although there were limits to how much one could dream, my dreams had never even dared to aim so high!

  I was struck dumb by the news, unable to scream out in joy for the world to hear, my heart pumping too erratically. The Ananda Puraskar was the biggest literary award in Bengal, the most renowned and prestigious, and no one in Bangladesh had ever won it before. I was someone who had started just the other day, an amateur who wrote poetry because she fancied it and wrote columns when she needed to, and I had been considered for the award! Was this even possible? Was it even credible? Unable to decide what I should do, I paced a little, sat down, got up again and went to stand in front of the mirror to take a long look at myself to ascertain if the person I was seeing was indeed me. I wanted to go to the bathroom and I felt dizzy.

  Breaking out of the spell all of a sudden I ran to Milan, who was the only person at home, and in between gasps delivered the fantastic news. ‘Milan, I have won the Ananda Puraskar.’ Milan did not know exactly what that was, but after I explained to him that this was not a local essay competition or literary circle award but a big deal in the literary world, his astonishment had to be seen to be believed. Despite being my younger sister’s husband he was more like a younger brother to me than anything else. I told him to get ready at once, the letter still clutched in my fist, and he quickly changed into a pair of pants.

  Our first stop was Khoka’s house. After much calling and hollering from outside when Khoka emerged from within his house I informed him excitedly, ‘Khoka bhai, I have been awarded the Ananda Puraskar.’ Strangely enough, he smiled a wan smile in response and for my life I could not comprehend the reason behind his less-than-enthusiastic reception of the news. He was the one who had always been the happiest at my success, so why was he not happy about this too? Why was his smile so pale, so devoid of life? Was he apprehensive that I was becoming too big for my boots, that the higher I climbed the more unreachable I was going to become for him? I could not keep thinking why and his tepid reaction to the news put a momentary dampener on my mood.

  I was not willing to wait till the day after to inform Bilal Chowdhury, even though it was already fairly late. We somehow managed to locate his house and the sight of us at his gate gave him quite the surprise as he tried to fathom the reason behind such a sudden and late visit.

  ‘Bilal bhai, I have been awarded the Ananda Puraskar. I just received the letter. I still can’t believe it, it feels strange.’ I handed the letter over to him and his elation at the news was immediately evident. He sent word to his wife at once to bring us some sweets to celebrate the happy news. I too was finally relieved to have shared my happiness with someone who understood. Truly, certain joys are too heavy for one to carry their burden alone.

  ‘Do I deserve such a huge honour, Bilal bhai?’

  ‘Of course! You are writing so well! Of course you deserve it! They have not given you the award just like that. The Ananda Puraskar is a dream for every Bengali author. It’s the Nobel Prize of Bangla.’ As much grief as Khoka’s indifference had caused, Bilal Chowdhury’s excitement managed to dispel the gloom finally. Nonetheless, sleep was hard to come by after we returned home that night. I lay awake till late thinking: If only R was alive! He would have been so proud of me. Once, after reading one of my columns for Purbabhash R had written a letter which had also been printed in the correspondence section of the journal. In it he had confessed that whatever had happened between the two us the responsibility of most of it was his, and that I should forgive him and spare the male of the species from my vengeful vendetta. If only R had known that I had not written anything out of anger or because I wanted to wage war against all men. I was only fighting the corrosive customs we adhered to in the name of society, customs that sought to make women into slaves, into commodities, into sex objects, that sought to rob a woman of her dignity as a human being—my war was against all such society-, state- and religion-sponsored injustices.

  I cried when I wrote, not for me but for someone like Sufia Khatun who was raped and buried alive, Farida whose face was scalded in the acid thrown by a jilted lover, Sakhina Bano whose husband had broken her hands and feet and then divorced her because her father was unable to pay enough dowry during their wedding, Sharifa Khatun who was hacked to death because she had given birth to a daughter, Kandi Nurjahan who was stoned because she had dared to talk to a man, and Phoolmati who was burnt alive because she had dared to fall in love. I had a good life, I had a good job as a doctor in a leading hospital in the city, I was self-sufficient and could take my own decisions, and I could afford to live my life as I wished. But how many girls were as lucky as I was! So I could never forget that I was just like them, the Sufia Khatuns, the Noorjahans and the Sakhina Banos of the world, and what had happened to each of them could have easily happened to me too.

  The invitation to go and receive the prize in Calcutta was quite unlike what had been the case for my previous few visits. Tickets for both ways, my stay at Calcutta, everything was the responsibility of Anandabazar. Around that time, while I was floating in a haze of bliss, a feeling of intense self-importance coursing through my veins, something terrible about two particular columns in the book came to my attention and swiftly burst the bubble. While referring to the Vedas, despite having all the copies of the Vedas at my disposal, I had reproduced a few lines from the book Prachin Bharat o Baidik Samaj (Ancient India and Society in the Time of the Vedas) by Sukumari Bhattacharya, renowned scholar of the Vedas. In a daze I had taken sentence after sentence, the book had influenced me too much for me to be able to extricate my own arguments from Bhattacharya’s and present them separately. I could have taken the translations of the passages of the Vedas from her work but why did I have to lift entire arguments? I had stolen them because her arguments matched mine in their entirety; so beautifully on point were her explanations that had I not read even a single line of the Vedas my fairly simplistic explanations would have still matched hers. She had said before me most of what I wanted to say on the matter.

  Thus, even after the two columns had b
een published, the doubt and the guilt surrounding them had not diminished, like how a single speck of dirt spoils an entire bowl of cream. On first receiving news of the award I did not immediately remember this shameful old incident, but when I finally did my humiliation and remorse would not allow me to live it down. Unable to look at myself, full of self-loathing, I went to the telephone office that very night to make an urgent call to Calcutta. I called Nikhil Sarkar and told him that my book was not fit to receive the prize because of the two offending columns wherein a large chunk had been lifted off Sukumari Bhattacharya’s work.

  If after my confession he had told me he was going to inform the committee and make sure they changed their decision I would have perhaps felt slightly lighter. Instead, it did not seem he was perturbed by the news in any way. I knew that many people stole stuff from other writers. HSS had himself acknowledged that the first piece he had ever written had been stolen from someone else, punctuation and all. But this was not my first piece! It was written after I had made quite a name for myself with my columns. When I could not forgive myself, how could I expect others to forgive me for such a grievous infraction!

  Awards were supposed to make people happy but in my case it was about to cause me further embarrassment. Nikhil Sarkar’s lack of an appropriate reaction to my confession added an extra dimension to my existing feeling of shame—that of fear. Did I then have to go and accept the award? How was I supposed to face people, how was I supposed to defend myself? My conscience would not let me rest in peace and kept asking me the same question over and over—who was I, a writer of what calibre, that I deserved such a prestigious honour? The previous winners were all renowned authors and well-known scholarly individuals, and there I was, unmatched in knowledge and talent, a droplet of water or a speck of nothing in comparison.

  Even if they wished to award someone from Bangladesh, how was I even a contender over and above so many others? There were many renowned novelists, remarkable poets, comparing whose work to mine would have been tantamount to travesty. Shaukat Osman, Rashid Karim, HSS, Hasan Azizul Haque, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Selina Hossain, Rahat Khan, Bashir Al Helal—I was nothing compared to such stalwarts. Shamsur Rahman, Al Mahmud, Mahadev Saha, Nirmalendu Goon, Rafiq Azad, Abu Zafar Obaidullah—any of them were better poets than me on any given day. Then why had I been selected?

  I was convinced that the committee had either gone mad or they did not have clear ideas about the litterateurs of Bangladesh, the only two reasons that could explain their nomination of me. Besides, the committee too comprised many renowned individuals. Essayists and columnists like Zillur Rahman Siddiqui, Anisuzzaman, Sirajul Islam Chowdhury, Rafiqul Islam and AZ had failed to win the award and I was supposed to believe I had trumped them all? Thus far I had mostly written about things that had struck my fancy, a few columns in a few newspapers and journals like so many wrote all the time, and I knew many people from the literary world personally—all this did not automatically imply that I had become a writer too. I had never even dared to dream as such! Many celebrated authors in Calcutta too were yet to receive such an award and I was supposed to walk up to the stage with all of them in attendance and accept the honour?

  The declaration of the Ananda Puraskar only served to drive home the point that I was insignificant and undeserving of it, a writer of too little worth and too much of an outsider. It was true that I wrote about women’s rights but it was not as if I was writing something radically new that others before me had not already written or were not writing about. I had not renounced anything, I had not suffered, I had not marched through the streets in protest or formed organizations like others had to serve battered women, nor formed NGOs, set up schools or staked everything precious to me for the betterment of women. I had done nothing. I had not even managed to cast aside the everyday abuse and violence against our domestic helps that is socialized in us from an early age, the heinous habit of a slap in rebuke, or a blow on the back to teach a firm lesson. I had once twisted the arm of Sufi’s one-and-a-half-year-old daughter when Sufi had been away because she used to constantly cry and nag and then smirk in response. My hands were filthy with my own sins and they did not deserve to hold such an award. The ethical concerns that had influenced me thus far, how many of them had I truly managed to inculcate in my own life? Socialist doctrines excited me but that had never spilled over into implementing said principles in my everyday life. Despite being aware that nearly 80 per cent of the population lived under unspeakable conditions I had never compromised with my luxuries. Despite knowing that thousands of people were going to sleep on the roads and pavements my bed had not gotten any less soft. I had not stopped eating three square meals a day even though millions went hungry every day. My preoccupation with socialist ideals was simply middle-class romanticism and I could not help but reflect with disgust that everything I had written about women thus far had been to earn money or fame! I was as hideous a writer as I was a human being.

  When I set off for Calcutta I was completely aware of all this and more. I had replied to Anandabazar accepting the award almost immediately after receiving the news, not that I could not have done anything about that later. If I had wanted to I could have easily told them I was not deserving of the Puraskar and I was not going to accept it. Why did I not have the audacity required to turn down an award when there were so many things I had done in life because of my audacity? Was it because I was greedy? No matter how much I tried telling myself that was not the case, the stench of a hidden undercurrent of greed in my actions refused to leave me be. Beneath my shame and my fear a very intimate greed had burrowed into my soul. I was running like a felon towards a grievous mistake that was about to be made, my eyes and ears were desperately trying to shut out the raging current I was standing at the edge of and there was no way I could pull myself back.

  Powerless and helpless, I took a deep breath, hoping to dislodge the greed from my heart. I wrote obscene words, I wrote about sex, I was an insignificant writer who knew nothing about writing, I was nothing, I was nothing . . . I was tired of hearing these things over and over again, tired of suffering disrespect and abuse and making my relatives suffer in turn. If I had earned a spot to stand my own ground and hold my head high, a head I had been forced to hang in shame time and again to shield myself from reproach and ridicule, if I had found a way to show them, they who had repeatedly attacked and disrespected me, that I too was deserving of respect, how could I let such an opportunity go! A woman has to ensure that the ground beneath her feet is a little firmer than that of a man’s; she has to prove her mettle a little more just to be allowed to stand in the queue with a man. I wished to infuse my identity as a woman with pride—pride that was going to shield me from someone trying to shove me aside or throw me out or make fun of me out in the world, and in literary circles, a world which still belonged to men mostly, it was going to make sure that I finally belonged. I tried but was unable to vanquish my greed.

  A beautiful hotel room had been booked for me in Calcutta. I met Badal Basu of Ananda Publishers and he told me they were going to publish Nirbachito Kolam. How was I going to live down so much largesse, so many rewards! Badal Basu resembled a black mountain and one look at his unsmiling serious face was enough to make one’s throat go dry! With the characteristic hard expression on his face he instructed me in a hard voice to sign a series of documents regarding the publication. I was hardly used to so much paperwork. Back in Dhaka there was nothing written down in publishing, all dealings were usually informal and verbal, and the exact share of the royalties between the author and the publisher was never mentioned anywhere.

  I barely glanced at the figure mentioned as I signed the entire lot. Everything was formal in Calcutta and there were a hundred rules attached to things. My book was going to be published by the biggest publication house of Bengali literature and that was enough; money was not even a factor in such circumstances. The Ananda Puraskar had a cash prize of Rs 50,000, which had been increased to Rs 1 la
kh just that year. I had to sign a few more documents for that too and those were brought to me by Subir Mitra of Anandabazar Patrika. I was going to be handed a cheque of Rs 1 lakh, a sum I had never seen together ever before. And yet I could not fixate on the money at all, too small as it was when compared to the honour I was being bestowed.

  Just as I finished the last signature, news arrived that Satyajit Ray had passed away. Badal Basu had to leave at once and I remained seated in his office numbed by the sudden shocking news. I was addicted to watching films and of all the films I had seen in my life Ray’s had been my favourite. Just Pather Panchali I had seen nearly fifteen times and there was no chance that I was going to grow tired of it any time soon. Every time I saw the film I cried for Durga, sighed for Apu, and my heart would break into pieces for Indir Thakrun. Many poets and writers from Dhaka used to visit Calcutta to meet Ray; I had never had the courage or nerve to go up to someone famous and make my own introductions. So the only time I managed to see Ray with my own eyes was when he was laid out on a bed of flowers in front of Nandan. He was never going to make another film, he was never going to look into the camera again, he was never going to sketch or write again. There was nothing more fearsome in the world than death. What did life measure up to if the end was always meant to be so inevitable and abrupt? The Ananda Puraskar ceremony was pushed back by a day to mourn the passing of the great film-maker.

  The award ceremony had been organized in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel. A stage had been decorated with jasmine, on the black swathes of cloth hanging from the wall a huge quill had been drawn as if with jasmine too. I had never seen such a beautifully done-up stage before. The entire room was heady with the fragrance of jasmine as the invited guests filed in and found their seats. The room was packed to the rafters with the wise and the intellectual, renowned authors, poets and artists.

  Every year there were three recipients, but this time it was only the two of us: me and the writer Bimal Kar. The editor and publisher of Anandabazar, Aveek Sarkar, Sagarmoy Ghosh, the editor of Desh, and the poet Nirendranath Chakraborty were on one side of the stage while Kar and I were on the other side. I could barely manage to look past my consternation at the audience and those on stage. I had to make a speech afterwards and I clutched a torn piece of paper in my fist, wet with sweat and containing the mostly scratched out lines I had tried to piece together the night before. The big people on stage were speaking and as we scaled the roster it seemed my pounding heart was going to leap out of my chest. What if my knees began shaking once I was in front of the mike? What if my voice shook or I fainted? When my turn came I went up to the mike and unrolled the crumpled piece of paper to read out my speech, right down to the ‘Namaskar’. In trying to quell the tremble in my voice I could barely avoid mistakes in pronunciation, and the words kept jostling with each other as I desperately focused on steadying my wobbly knees. I read my speech as if I was addressing the dwellers of Paradise on the Pul-e-Siraat under the orders of Allah.