We did not have friends in high places who we could approach for help in times of need. In the entire extended family the only person with some degree of fame and affluence was Father. If there was anyone after that, it was me. Having managed to get jobs for both Motaleb and Manju through K and Khusro respectively, my status within the family was suddenly elevated to Father’s level. I visited Abakash with K but not once did Father inquire about who he was or why we were together. Evidently I was beyond such questions. Was it solely because I was self-reliant? That could not be the only reason because I had been self-reliant back in Armanitola too. Then was it because I was more responsible? Because I had assumed responsibility of Yasmin and Milan, at the very least ensured a roof over their heads and food on the table? Or was it because I was older? But I was not that old, I was not even thirty. So was this changed attitude because I was financially better off than before? Or because it made no sense trying to talk me out of things since I did not care about people’s opinions? Or perhaps because I was famous! But I had been famous back then too when Father had torn down my happy life and dragged me back to Mymensingh by the throat to lock me up. Perhaps it was because I was more famous! Whatever the reason, it nonetheless made me happy that there was no one to forbid me from doing what I pleased. For the first time in my life I could truly taste independence.
Friends, well-wishers, poets and authors—someone or the other was always at home and raucous addas would happen where everything, from literature to culture and politics to society, was up for discussion. There would be frequent rounds of tea and during lunch or dinner-time food would be laid out on the table for each person to serve themselves at their own convenience. Even in welcoming and taking care of guests I was following in Mother’s footsteps. Sunil Gangopadhyay came to see me from Calcutta. Sarat and Bijoya Mukhopadhyay, on their trip to Dhaka, dropped by as well. So serene and safe was the place I had gradually made for myself that I could welcome anyone to my home and any of my friends could stay over for a couple of days. I had done up my home, my world and my life in exactly the way I had wanted it. My friends were much more precious to me than my relatives and whatever leisure I had was exclusively reserved for them.
Badal Basu, the dark mountain of a man whom I had never seen smiling, visited me from Ananda with the newly published Noshto Meyer Noshto Godyo. If one made the effort to get to know Basu it quickly became apparent that he did not lack a sense of humour at all. He could smile too and it was a pleasant sight when he did. All the humour was lost, however, when I opened the book and immediately began to notice a plethora of horrifying mistakes. ‘What is this? Was this not proofread properly?’ Flipping through the book for a closer inspection Basu’s face betrayed his despair. ‘This is a catastrophe! It was not proofread at all.’
‘Then stop selling them immediately!’
I did not think twice before asking someone as forbidding as Badal Basu to stop the sale of the 5000 copies already printed. Instead of being delighted at the sight of a freshly printed new volume, the book only made me feel depressed. Basu suggested, ‘Since it’s been printed already let these be. We can correct all the mistakes in the second edition.’ But the readers who were going to buy the book were being cheated; they were not going to get to read even a single correct sentence! They were going to assume that I had deliberately written all that nonsense! A formidable publication house such as Ananda failed to make amends for a mistake they had made and refused to recall the book despite my request. Publication houses in Bangladesh were far less influential than Ananda Publishers but I was sure that if I had asked one of them to hold back a book that had not been proofread properly they would have honoured my request. The fracas with Ananda left me in despair for a long time.
But then how long can one wallow in misery? There is no end to regrets, wretchedness, anguish, pain and misfortunes in life. Despite all that one has to deliberately make an effort to move past regrets and launch into new endeavours. I was well aware that I had to keep my spine straight against the quagmire of gossip, harassment, cruelty and jealousy around me, or risk losing my footing and falling and shattering to bits. There were people perpetually ready to wreak havoc in my life; fame had as many downsides as it had perks. As for the perks I no longer had to go to the newspaper offices to submit my articles, the offices usually had people who came by to pick them up from me. Whatever I wrote, however I wrote it, was published. Publishers dutifully left my share of the profits at home and the sums of money I had never even imagined in my life became like spare change for me.
However, the downsides too were considerable. The most intrusive, of course, was the undue interest in my personal life. Since I had been married more than once it was assumed I had slept with numerous men too and the list of my purported husbands had names which I had never heard in my life. I was shameless and of low moral character. Since I was well acquainted with Sunil he had ‘managed’ the Ananda Puraskar for me (Sunil Gangopadhyay used to be on the committee that decided the Ananda Puraskar and from the information I had he was the only one who had been opposed to the award being conferred on me). I was anti-men and anti-Islam. I was a RAW agent. What I wrote was not literature but pure pornography, and so on and so forth. As my friends increased in number, so did my enemies.
Despite the growing number of enemies a plethora of people still came to see me! Girls of various ages came to tell me about their problems—some did not like the husbands they had been married off to, some husbands were having affairs or had the habit of beating their wives up, some women had been divorced summarily by their husbands, or their fathers were not allowing them to study, or their husbands were not letting them work, or their bosses were making passes at them. Things most of these women could not confess to someone else I noticed they could easily say to me and it seemed to lift a stone off their hearts.
A short novel of mine called Niyantran (Control) was published, about a young girl, Sheela, of about sixteen or seventeen who falls in love with a handsome boy. However, the boy does not love her back. One day he takes advantage of her naive love and, using the ruse of an invitation, lures her to an abandoned house where he rapes her along with his friends. Such a tragic and heart-rending story was immediately deemed offensive by people. Apparently it was not fit to be read or even touched, and because I had given a visceral description of the brutal rape it was so obscene as to be almost pornographic. It was fine as long as things like this were happening in society but writing about such incidents was not acceptable. It immediately caused scandal and I was threatened with excommunication and social ridicule.
Of course, the ridicule was a foregone conclusion, and while I was being spat at in public, one afternoon I received a visit from a stranger who wished to talk to me about the book. She had read it more than once and had even made her daughters read it. Imagine my surprise on hearing that she had made her adolescent daughters read the book, a book that was so dirty that one had to wash one’s hands after touching it, whose words were so vile that it nauseated people! The woman told me that the book was a must-read for all women and also informed me that she believed her daughters were going to be far more careful henceforth so that no one could succeed in luring them anywhere. She thanked me profusely for writing such a book and also earnestly requested me to continue the way I was writing. One tattered piece of praise washed away the ignominy of the hundred people rebuking me outside.
~
What had been the real reason behind transferring me from Dhaka? Many suspected that it was my writing. A few government officials did not like what I was writing. In the BNP’s own newspaper, Dainik Dinkal, articles criticizing me, beautifully garnished with perfectly imaginary details, appeared regularly, accusing me of overreaching and speaking nonsense under the influence of hedonism and debauchery. So the smartest thing to do had been to move me from one place to somewhere far away where I would be too busy trying to save myself and fending off snakes to give any thought to writing.
&n
bsp; I wrote an application to the health department, signed by the health secretary, Manjurul Karim, stating that it would be impossible for me to work in a remote village in Jamalpur and requesting an immediate transfer, if not to Dhaka, then at least to a nearer hospital. Manjurul Karim was a poet too, under the nom-de-plume Imran Noor, and he had perhaps signed my application precisely for that reason. As per Noor’s advice Nirmalendu Goon took me to meet Sheikh Hasina, hoping something could be done. Even though I was not sure, Goon was certain Sheikh Hasina would be able to overturn my transfer. Sheikh Hasina and Goon went back a long way, right back to when they used to be classmates in Dhaka University; Goon had probably even written a few love poems back in the day dedicated to her, just as he had written ‘Beauty Queen’ for Purabi Basu.
I had been to Sheikh Hasina’s residence on Minto Road on two previous occasions, the first time for the grand iftar she had hosted when Goon had also introduced me to her. Then I had met her at 32 Dhanmandi for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s birthday celebrations. That had been my first time at 32 and Sheikh Hasina was there welcoming all the guests. It was a devastating moment to stand at the exact spot on the stairs where Sheikh Mujib had been riddled with the assassin’s bullets on that horrific day of 15 August 1975 when sixteen members of his family were also murdered. Sheikh Hasina and her sister Rehana had thankfully been away from the country that day, or else they would have been similarly killed.
Around the time of our second meeting Sheikh Mujib’s murderers were all free citizens and were at complete liberty to go wherever they pleased. In fact they had formed the Freedom Party and its student wing Yuva Command, and were terrorizing the country just like the Jamaat-e-Islami. For many of us Sheikh Hasina represented the ideals that Sheikh Mujib had stood for, a ray of hope that allowed us to dream even when beset with darkness.
I met Sheikh Hasina only one other time at Minto Road when she had called a few poets over for lunch: Shamsur Rahman, Sunil Gangopadhyay, HSS, Bilal Chowdhury and me. Sheikh Hasina had spoken at length about her husband, a neat description of what a downright rascal he was, and how Wazed Mian was always calling Khaleda Zia at the slightest pretext to have racy conversations with her. Not once had she gotten into any serious discussions about politics or literature and after lunch, while we sat and listened, she had spoken mostly about her home and her family.
I had simply sat and watched her talk, nothing she was saying the least bit impressive to me. I was not a member of the Awami League so I did not have League-tinted glasses on when it came to her. After returning from Hajj she had put on a black scarf to cover her hair, taking care to ensure that not a single wisp was visible. There was nothing more obscene and dirty than a woman’s hair, hence the desperation to hide it, and I had been truly angry with her for making these compromises. That day Sheikh Hasina had not uttered a single word about religion, though; that she usually reserved for the outside audience. Despite that I remained acutely aware that progressive individuals of the country all had high hopes for her; that she was finally going to deliver us from the clutches of the fundamentalists and the outright communal, the enemies of independence.
As soon as Sheikh Hasina came and sat down, Goon began. ‘They have transferred Taslima. Please do something to bring her back to Dhaka.’
‘But I am no longer in power. If I had been I could have done something. Now I don’t think anything is possible.’
‘Still, if you can do anything! The Khaleda Zia administration is after her. They are not giving her a passport. Plus, the transfer to such a place . . . they are doing this because they don’t like her writing.’
‘That even I don’t like.’ There was a hint of disdain in the tone.
My eyes met Goon’s and he responded in a meek tone, ‘Why? Why don’t you like it?’
‘She writes without knowing anything about religion. Men and women have equal rights in Islam, women have more honour in Islam—she keeps denying these things.’
Sheikh Hasina was the leader of the opposition and was usually very busy all day. After our stipulated time she left citing her busy schedule, or perhaps it was due to some other reason. Before leaving she instructed a League member to handle my request, who in turn noted down where I used to work and where I had been transferred to. No one at Minto Road seemed interested in ‘handling’ my problem.
~
I kept visiting the health department every day for fresh news about my transfer. MA, a doctor and leader of the Bangladesh Medical Association who had been entrusted with the authority of deciding which doctor stayed in Dhaka and who had to leave, bore a striking resemblance to a fierce bandit. The way the man looked at me made me certain that he knew who I was and was familiar with my work too, although I had no way of knowing what he thought about it. The afternoon he was supposed to finalize the list he asked me to visit him and I turned up as instructed without questioning even once if the meeting was at all required. He was alone in his room and he showed the list to me. There was a vacant post at Dhaka Medical College and he was considering recommending me for it.
He was sitting in his chair and I was standing beside it. The beginnings of a blush of delight seeped away and I could feel my face turn ashen in fright when he got up from the chair and slowly began advancing towards me, telling me my posting there depended solely on him. I kept walking backwards till my back hit the wall. He had managed to get me into a corner and it did not take an ingenious mind to guess what his intentions were. He wanted to take advantage of his empty office and have his way with me by enticing me with a good posting. By then fear had frozen my insides and I could barely restrain myself from spitting at the loathsome man’s face. But what would that have achieved? He would have gotten his way somehow in the end. He was four times my size and there was no way I was going to win in a physical struggle. There was only one way left for me to save myself from a grisly fate, to get away from him somehow. Thankfully the door was near that corner. Leaving the angry man wrathfully gnashing his teeth I sidled out and escaped. I ran down the corridor, ran downstairs and out into the road and somehow managed to make my way to a rickshaw. Gradually my beating heart settled but the hurt and tears would not go away. I did not care if I had lost a chance of working near Dhaka. Neither did I care about a good posting any more.
I was the queen of sexuality, I wanted independence for the vagina—there was no dearth of such publicity around my name. This probably made many think that I was easy. Even if they did not believe so at least they were confident that if they managed to corner a woman somewhere they could get away with anything. After the incident, dread settled within me like numerous tiny tormenting ticks constantly pricking me; I was perennially anxious about the dense and unforgiving forest I was surely going to get reassigned to.
And then one day a transfer order arrived for the marooned doctor on a raft hewn out of wonder and setting her adrift on a sea of joy—the letter declared that she had been posted to Dhaka Medical College!
The Hour of the Headless
6 December 1992, around noon. In the operation theatre of Dhaka Medical College I was in the middle of putting a patient under, but my mind was racing. Since morning I had been trying to hand over my duties to someone in the department and leave, but it was past noon and all my efforts had come up in vain. I was new to the college and not very close to anyone yet. Since the first day at work the schedule had been unchanging and relentless—reaching on the dot, heading straight for the OT, administering anaesthesia to one patient after another, and then waking them up. The days blurred into the afternoons and the afternoons limped to the evenings, but my duties hardly showed any signs of letting up. Even if I were to start work exactly on time it was next to impossible to finish on the hour too; in fact, on most days we were not sure when the duty hours would end.
There were regular patients, as well as sudden ones, emergency patients and near-fatal cases that required immediate surgery. There was also no chance of getting off at two after beginning at eight
in the morning, since on most days duty hours stretched till the evening and even the night. I barely had time to breathe unlike back at Mitford where not many operations used to happen and things were far less hectic. Dhaka Medical was in the heart of the city and there was no concept of off-time there. Besides, I was even more conscious of my job because I was aware that not all doctors had the good fortune of being posted there.
I had to be careful about reaching sharp at eight in the morning, even if there was no guarantee that I would get to leave sharp at five. And since I was also a ‘known’ face I had to be more alert than the other doctors; as it is the number of enemies I had rivalled that of my friends. Since the first day I had been extra careful to avoid getting typecast as a writer who had to be a negligent doctor, like it had happened before. In order to prove my diligence I had to work twice or thrice as hard than the others. I knew that if my colleagues did not care about timings there would not be any talk against them but if I were to attempt something similar then I was never going to hear the end of it. These experiences I had had back at Mitford and I decided to be extra careful while working at Dhaka Medical.
On this particular day I simply had to break the rules, and my heart was about to burst out of my chest. But who was I going to ask? Who was I going to approach for permission? My earnest imploring eyes failed to have any impact on the stone-faced doctor present. I glanced at my watch from time to time but that hardly mattered because the moment one patient was done there was someone new to take their place. Having spoken to the doctor with the diploma in anaesthesiology, the one with the bushy moustache and thick black curly hair, I had felt that despite being part of the league of hard-faced doctors his heart was not as implacable.
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