Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  ‘Yes, this is what political Islam is all about. I too believe that the people who use religion for politics know very well how effective it is in keeping people stupid and docile. It is highly unlikely that people who use religion for their own benefit believe in it themselves.’

  ‘Even if we assume they do believe, it should be noted that ultimately they are adhering to the tenets of Islam. In Islam the world is divided into two: Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the land of the Muslims and the land of the non-believing others. The sacred duty of Muslims is to invade the Dar al-Harb and convert the people to Islam by whatever means necessary. So the ultimate target is to transform the entire world into Dar al-Islam. Then whatever the Bangladeshi Muslims are doing is perfectly according to the principles of Islam. Islam condones such acts.’

  ‘That’s not exclusive to Islam. Even Christians had the same principles. Just see where they started and how far they have spread!’

  ‘True. Most monotheistic faiths have a horrifying history. But Rahman bhai, why even now? Why are we being subjected to acts of cruelty that can only be termed medieval even at the fag end of the twentieth century?’

  ‘Because we still haven’t managed to become human.’

  ‘But the Christians no longer rabidly pursue a policy of slaughtering the other. Why have the Muslims held on to it?’

  ‘Because most Muslim nations are yet to embrace secularism, like most Christian nations have.’

  ‘But there were movements on that front too. Consider the pan-Arabism movement for that matter. It was a secular movement. Almost everyone concerned from the Arab countries were Muslims.’

  ‘The derailing of the secular movement in the Arab countries is squarely the responsibility of a few evil Arab leaders, although even they are puppets of imperial powers. None of the imperial powers could tolerate a big movement in any of their colonies, especially the ones that directly challenged their power and authority.’

  ‘But, Rahman bhai, the pan-Arabism movement came into being after the colonial powers had left.’

  At this juncture, Dr Rashid intervened. ‘How far did the imperialist go? Somehow or the other their greed for oil made sure they stayed in the Middle East in some form or the other. Who controls the oil reserves? It was always the British, before the Americans replaced them. Did the leaders of pan-nationalism fight any less to nationalize the oil reserves?’

  ‘Fundamentalist movements like the Islamic Brotherhood grew out of a rebellion against such imperialist forces. They too have a role in destroying any chance at a secular uprising,’ I added.

  ‘The Arab leaders could not unite because they were busy fighting each other. Nasser of Egypt had wanted to unite all the Arab countries but the other nationalists rejected the idea. If the Arab countries had united, could an American or British have dared to try and put a puppet in power and pull all the strings from the shadows?’ Dr Rashid was agitated and gulped down the cold tea in front of him.

  ‘This growing tide of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, is it because of the Israel–Palestine issue? Or is it because of the Berlin Wall? The Wall has fallen, the irreligious Soviet Union has fallen too. Does that imply ideals of secularism have fallen too? Hence, awake and arise religion! O great Islam . . .’

  Chowdhury interrupted and said, ‘The history of the subcontinent is different, here fundamentalism has been strengthened primarily by state complicity.’

  I agreed with him. ‘Of course. But fundamentalism is contagious. It spreads from one place to another . . .’

  ‘These Jamaatis in Bangladesh are pandering to . . .’ Shamsur Rahman had angrily just begun when his words were interrupted by a sudden knock on the door. His unfinished sentence hanging in mid-air, Rahman turned to look at the door as Dr Rashid got up to answer. All our senses had zoomed in on the door. Everyone was aware that it was not a good idea for a stranger to casually walk into my house. Every Friday there were meetings in the mosque where people were abusing me and protest marches were held demanding the noose for me. Such was the time that any devout Muslim could barge into my house any time and murder me. Was it someone like that? Or else why was Dr Rashid hesitating to let them in and guarding the door as he spoke to the strangers beyond the threshold? After talking to the unseen guests a while longer he turned, leaving the door ajar, and said, ‘Four boys from Shani’s akhada are here to see you.’

  ‘Who are they? What do they want?’

  ‘You won’t know them. One of them is Shankar Ray.’

  Goon immediately said, ‘Don’t let them in. Close the door. They could just have assumed Hindu names and come here with ulterior motives.’ After a pause, he laughed and said, ‘But then you can’t trust the Hindus either, can you?’

  Dr Rashid went back to the door, softly spoke to the men outside again and then turned back to me and said, ‘They are perfectly harmless simple men. They have just come to pay their respects. They will go away after that.’

  More out of curiosity to know who they were and why they were at my house, or perhaps also out of a sense of security that there were many people present who would rescue me if something untoward happened, I replied, ‘Fine, ask them to come in.’

  Four young men entered the room, all of them within twenty to twenty-five years of age, in simple clothes and sandals. They took off their sandals near the door, looked around the room once and then lowered their hands towards my feet. I jerked my feet away and stood up. Even before I could say anything the boy called Shankar stood in front of me with folded hands and said, ‘Didi, you are like a goddess to us. We feel blessed to meet you. We’ve looked everywhere for you. We wish to touch your feet once.’ But I moved my feet away again when he tried the second time. Shankar pointed to the two other boys and said, ‘These are my cousins’, and then pointing to the third man in a red shirt, he said, ‘He is a friend. We are all in college, didi.’ When he tried lowering his head for the third time I said, ‘No, you don’t have to touch my feet. I don’t like these things. Tell me what you want to say.’

  ‘Didi, we have read your book Lajja. No one has ever spoken on behalf of us like this before. Didi, what you have done, if only you knew how great . . . you have written what has always been in our hearts.’

  ‘See, it’s not a Hindu–Muslim thing at all. As a human being I have written about the pain of other human beings around me. Everyone you see here, all of them are writers and they have all spoken out against social injustices.’

  ‘Didi, the Jamaatis have destroyed the house of my cousins. And my friend here, Samiran, they murdered one of his brothers.’ Before I could stop them the four boys fell to their knees, wrapped their arms around my legs and began to weep. I was in a fix. I could not pull them up and neither could I move my legs. I could only stand there helplessly in discomfort. After a while they wiped their tears, said their goodbyes and left. No sooner were they gone than Goon remarked in a deep voice, his words slow and deliberate, ‘Taslima’s Lajja has done more harm than good to the Hindus of Bangladesh.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I was staring in astonishment at Goon’s expressionless face and I saw the others were as flabbergasted. ‘What kind of harm?’ I could not suppress the curiosity in my tone.

  Goon continued slowly. ‘You have managed to quench the fire that was burning in their hearts all this while. The outrage they had nursed all this while, which could have made it possible for them to do something drastic, has now abated a lot. Now they feel that there are people to speak on their behalf, that they are not alone. If the strong keep speaking up for the weak, the latter forget to fight their own battles. They don’t start the fires that they have always wanted to.’

  With his words ringing in the air we sat with our empty teacups for a long time in the throes of the desolate silence that had descended around us.

  ~

  I did not stay at the Shantibag house for too long after this. The landlord had started looking at me strangely. He read the namaz five times a day and was a
subscriber of Inquilab. He also went to the mosque every Friday for the Jumu’ah prayers. There, after the namaz was read, the imam delivered the khutbah (sermon), which was mostly his own version of gheebat (backbiting or slander). Milan used to often go to the mosque near Shantibag on Fridays, for the namaz as well as the imam’s abusive tirades. ‘There is a blight called Taslima in this country, my brothers, and this Taslima is against Islam; despite being a Muslim herself she is hell-bent on harming other Muslims. This sinner has taken a bribe from the Hindus to write a book. If you haven’t read the book you have done a good thing, a thing to be proud of. In this book she has alleged that Muslims are the worst, that they have slaughtered Hindus and washed the streets with rivers of blood. She is a disgrace to all women. She is encouraging women to sleep with random men and leave their husbands. This woman doesn’t believe in religion, she says Allah doesn’t exist, and dares to claim that Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam, Allah’s beloved prophet, was a lustful and wicked man. Shame! My brothers, you must demand that all her books, not just this one, be incinerated or banned. You must demand that she be hanged. If this sinner is hanged this country will be saved and Islam will be saved too.’

  After the sermon they prayed to Allah with their hands raised towards heaven to save Bangladesh and Islam by giving me the death penalty. On some days even leaflets were distributed to that end. My landlord was a witness to all of this. He was a witness to the protest marches against his tenant, or at least he read about them in Inquilab. In fact, even I was held up by these marches twice. On one occasion I could take a detour in time, but on another the rickshaw had to stop to let the massive procession pass, with men in fez caps walking past me and demanding my head. Without a headscarf and with only an apron over my salwar kurta there was nothing for me to hide my face with either. Terrified, I had to pretend to cover my face and nose against the swirling dust and stare fixedly at the foot rest of the rickshaw, as if like any good, docile woman I wished to avoid eye contact with a man. I did not have a shadow of doubt that if even one person in the procession managed to recognize me, my flesh and blood and bones would be found littered all over the street. After the procession had passed and the rickshaw had gone a little ahead I asked the rickshaw-puller, ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘It’s a demonstration against Taslima.’

  ‘As in?’

  ‘As in they want her to be hanged.’

  ‘Why? What has she done?’

  ‘She has demolished a mosque.’

  ‘Which mosque? Do you know?’

  ‘Babri Masjid.’

  ‘How did one woman manage to demolish an entire mosque?’

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘Where did you hear this?’

  ‘We hear things. Delwar Hossain Sayeedi’s cassettes play everywhere. And there are these processions too.’

  ‘Do you want her to be hanged too?’

  ‘Yes, of course, why wouldn’t I! Since everyone does, I do too.’

  I got off in front of my house in Shantibag and paid the man for the trip. It was fortunate that I had long removed the signboard with my name from the gate.

  The day I was held up by the demonstration Chotda dropped by with a friend. It was lovely to see him. He never came to my house and I too had stopped visiting because I could no longer continue to face Geeta’s misbehaviour and witness the unspeakable tortures she put Suhrid through. His friend Shafeeq worked in the airlines like him and he had come with a request. He wanted me to write about the air hostesses that worked in these planes, about how they were usually fired as soon as they were thirty-five, how they were deprived of the mandatory nine-month maternity leave guaranteed to them and in some cases even deprived of their pensions.

  During our conversation when I found out that Shafeeq was a car trader who imported cars from Japan and sold them in Bangladesh I suddenly burst out, ‘I want to buy a car! Today!’

  ‘If you want Shafeeq can give you a good discount. But you have to put down an advance.’ It was decided that I was going to give Shafeeq an advance that very day and the car would be delivered to me in two weeks. I gave him 50,000 taka in cash, the remaining three lakh to be paid after delivery. It was the money that Salim, the owner of Kakali Publishers, had left the day before as an advance for the book I was supposed to write for him, a book I had yet to think about, let alone write. Shafeeq left with the money. I knew that without a car moving around in public was never going to be safe for me; so it was a foregone choice. I did manage to write that column about the air hostesses too and it was published in the magazine Jai Jai Din. But I never got my hands on that car and neither did I ever see that money again.

  Every time I stepped out of the house it was at the risk of death. But there was no way I could stay at home either. Discontent was brewing both outside and inside the house. I could sense that the landlord had decided he could no longer let me live in his house. His pinched eyebrows and repeated and deliberate attempts at pretending to not notice me was enough to convince me that he was no longer interested in being on good terms with me. I understood the anxiety. Any day the angry agitators might have found their way to the house, doused the building in petrol and let it go up in flames. It was a risk he was trying to avoid and I felt that day and night, so much so that it made me squirm in worry.

  I was petrified that the landlord was suddenly going to throw me out one day and I would have nowhere to go. I had no shelter, no security and no guarantees, and no other house owner was going to rent a place to me. My name was dangerous; it made civilized people recoil in fear. Those girls in schools and colleges who spoke dismissively with the boys, who walked with their heads held high and without a care in the world, the shameless and daring ones, they were teased and dubbed ‘Taslima’. Even before I could sense what was happening my name had become a symbol of sin, shame, decadence, greed and depravity in society.

  So the day I noticed the ten-storey apartment of Eastern Housing under construction at the Shantinagar crossing, just past the Shantibag main road and Malibag, that very day I decided to buy my own place. I went to the offices of Eastern Housing in Motijheel at once without even stopping to check the place or consult anyone. I asked for the rates and was told that one apartment on the ninth floor of the first building was ready for residents. And just like that I bought my own place. I had to take a loan from the bank that the people at Eastern Housing helped me with and the rest had to be paid off in instalments.

  Since I was buying the place, the owners did not care who I was going to be living with or if I had a husband or not. They were not concerned with what I did or if there were demonstrations being held against me. All they wanted to know was whether I had the money to buy the house; since I did have the money they could not care less about my husbandless life, my writing, the slander and accusation against me, my banned book, or the protests demanding my hanging. Besides, there was nothing else left for me to do. I had initially intended to deposit the money I had received from my publishers in the bank and use the monthly interest to run my home; my salary from the hospital was hardly enough. Tossing all these careful calculations aside I pooled in all the money I had to buy the place for a total price of 27 lakh taka, of which I gave them twelve lakhs in cash as advance. The longer the duration of the bank loan, the more the amount of interest I had to bear.

  On hearing I was buying the house my publishers immediately made arrangements for some more advance royalty. Kakali Prakashani sent me 3 lakh taka and Minu of Pearl Publications sent 5 lakh taka more. It did not take me long to pay off the bank loan. I asked Father for a loan of 1 lakh taka too and he did not turn me away; he was always enthusiastic about buying property. As soon as I got the papers of the house I called a loading van to transport all my things from Shantibag to Shantinagar. It was a sad moment, leaving the Shantibag house. There were so many memories scattered here and there, all over the place. Eventually I let out the sigh I had held back and walked out from the black gates
for the very last time.

  ~

  Meanwhile, the controversy over Lajja was refusing to die down even after months had passed. Especially in West Bengal, where Lajja had landed squarely in the middle of a contentious political arena, the debate raged on. The left parties labelled it a bad book and even a staunchly leftist film-maker like Mrinal Sen gave a statement to the effect that Lajja should be called a pile of putrefying garbage instead of a book. On the other hand, right-wing Hindus were celebrating it almost like a holy book.

  The scene in India was actually the complete reverse of how it was in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the left-liberal secular intellectuals, except Badruddin Umar, were all of the opinion that it was a valuable book. But in India people of similar political and ethical dispositions were calling Lajja garbage. Only a handful of people from West Bengal, despite being inclined towards the left, were speaking on behalf of the book. All I could do was sit back and watch in amazement as the book was cleverly turned into a pawn of political games. The only good thing in all this was that I was far away from it all.

  One fine day, Baharuddin from the Bengali daily Aajkaal turned up at my place. Gone were his ingratiating manner and the beguiling smile. Instead, his sharp eyes lacerated me in a way that made me feel as if Golam Azam’s progeny had just walked out of the Baitul Mukarram to come and stand in front of me. Aajkaal was a left-wing newspaper. They had been very appreciative of me after the Ananda Puraskar, especially perhaps because I was Muslim. So when they realized that the same Muslim girl had written a book in which she had said not-so-nice things about Muslims, Aajkaal felt deeply slighted.