Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  Sharif sent a man named Gaznavi who took my letter to the Motijheel police station. A couple of days passed which eventually extended to a week, but I received no word from the police about security. I was effectively house-bound and stayed frozen in fear nearly the entire time. Everyone at home was told to never open the door to a stranger and the guards downstairs were instructed to always make sure to talk to me via the intercom before letting anyone come up. This was already an existing protocol but I requested them to be extra careful, without going into too many details about why I wanted security to be tightened. One good thing was that I had bought a car immediately after buying the house so I did not have to risk my life by taking rickshaws. Otherwise, on many an occasion, I had faced people shouting and running in pursuit after recognizing me while travelling by rickshaws.

  ‘See, there she goes, Taslima Nasrin!’

  ‘Catch that bitch! Catch that bitch!’

  ‘Get her!’

  ‘Drag her down from the rickshaw! Beat the shit out of her!’

  ‘See, there goes an atheist!’

  ‘The slut!’

  I was certain they would not have hesitated to drag me down from the rickshaw and rip me apart if they had managed to catch hold of me. Besides, it was not as if I could go on long drives in my car. I could not go to shops or fairs, nor attend any events, or go to the cinema, the theatre, the park or even a meeting; I could not venture out anywhere! Even before I could understand what was happening my movements had become restricted; I was effectively under house arrest. My poet friends did not invite me anywhere any more. Rather, they attended poetry events and then dropped by to tell me how great they had been. They attended special programmes organized for writers, or rallies held by artists and authors, and narrated to me all they had done there.

  Everyone was busy with festivals, seasonal fairs and music programmes. There were week-long cultural programmes but not one person was sad that I could not attend them. It was as if everyone had accepted my absence as a fundamental reality and if I was to ever tell them that I wished to go somewhere they would get startled and say, ‘What are you saying! Have you gone mad! Don’t go outside. You never know where danger lurks.’ So the only alternative was to stay at home like a good girl and let them have all the fun. Everything that was happening was meant for them and not for me. All I needed was security, not fun and festivities.

  Was it depressing for me to stay at home? At least I was alive and that was all that was important. Yes, that was important, but I doubt any of them had any idea how it felt to live the way I was living. They did visit me often, though, and I also went to their houses frequently and that was how we managed to meet. Whenever my friends came over they were visibly nervous; most were afraid of the Special Branch people keeping watch over me. Visiting me was akin to getting one’s name registered in the government books—they had to leave their names and addresses with the guards downstairs from whom the Special Branch officers received daily updates. Whenever my friends came we usually sat and chatted for hours and ate a lot of food, with the hours stretching from afternoon to evening and often late into the night. But everything happened indoors, not outside. The world outside was out of bounds for me almost entirely.

  I received word that the fundamentalists were joining forces. A call for an uprising had gone out from the mosques and madrasas, public meetings were being held and there were rumours that a massive protest rally was in the works. One afternoon I was alone at home with Minu; Yasmin and Milan were away and Mother was at Mymensingh. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. Through the spyhole I saw six men in fez caps standing outside. Unsure of their intentions I asked Minu not to open the door; instead I told her to ask them what they wanted.

  ‘Whom do you want to see?’ Minu shouted.

  ‘Open the door.’

  ‘First tell me what you want.’

  ‘Open the door first. You’ll see what we want.’

  I signalled to Minu to not open the door and tell them no one was home. Minu obeyed my orders but the men refused to go away. Instead they began kicking at the door, while one of them pressed the doorbell. For the next fifteen to twenty minutes the punishing blows on the door and the sound of the bell continued relentlessly. I was sitting inside, sweating profusely. The intercom was not working, the phone lines were dead and we were on the ninth floor so no one would have heard me even if I had shouted. We closed every possible bolt, went into my study and locked ourselves in. The men were trying to break the main door down. After that it was only the door to the study standing between them and me. Then five of them were going to hold me down, allowing the sixth to take out the chopper concealed under his kurta and behead me. I clutched at my throat in fear and my body began to go into shock from the terror. Soon my grip loosened, my hands fell away and my limp body curled up on the floor, with Minu—dark, gaunt, toothy, our maid and my own first cousin—sitting silently near my head. Neither of us could hear the other breathe and I was suddenly very drowsy . . .

  I woke up to a house full of people. Yasmin and Milan were back. I learnt from Minu that the men had continued their home invasion long after I had lost consciousness. How long? Nearly half an hour? An hour? I had no desire to know any further. I sent Milan to buy strong locks for the door and questioned the security guards downstairs as to why they had let six bearded men in caps come upstairs to the apartment. The guards informed me that the men had not told them where they were headed. They had said they were visiting someone in Building 2. This meant anyone could claim to want to meet Abdul Zalil or Mannan Tarafdar and come up to my floor instead. The guards were supposed to inform me via the intercom but, like it happened, it often did not work. I told the guards that if strangers wished to see me henceforth and if the intercom was not functional then instead of letting the person come up alone one of the guards had to come up with them. The one who looked like the leader of the guards informed me, ‘Madam, we don’t have so many extra people with us who can go up every time.’

  You still have time. Repent and become a true Mussulman again or convert and become a Hindu once and for all. Unless you choose one there will be consequences. Someone had left the chit in the letterbox. Besides such notes, there were also the anonymous letters full of threats. If you write even one line against religion any more, from that day your life will become hell. Harsh unrecognizable voices were making nasty telephone calls threatening to break my head, chop off my limbs, slice open my veins, gang rape me on the open road, decapitate me, so on and so forth. I could sense they were lying in wait somewhere very close by. An endless series of gifts had been bestowed on me and I did not know what to do with the largesse. In despair and in terrible danger, my senses outraged as well as disjointed, there was nothing for me to do but mope.

  When K arrived at such a juncture, instead of his face my eyes went straight towards the black bag he always carried under his arm. I took the bag from him and took out the black pistol I knew was in there. The coldness of the metal made a shiver run down my spine even though K never kept the gun loaded. That very instant I knew that I needed to procure a weapon for self-defence. Earlier Annada Shankar Roy had remarked in the papers, ‘The sort of danger Taslima is in, she should keep a pistol with her.’ When I had read it I had failed to fathom the weight of his words and laughed it off as a bizarre suggestion. This time, I kept K’s pistol with me, not because I wanted to kill someone but because I needed something I could use to defend myself. If someone came to attack me and I had the pistol at hand, it might possibly save my life. There were particularly bad days when nothing appeared certain and one had to depend solely on uncertainties and possibilities.

  The day I decided to keep K’s pistol with me I received a call from a journalist informing me that police officers from the Motijheel police station were on their way to my house to search the place, although he could not tell me why. Mother was petrified. ‘What are you going to do? Where will you move this thing now?’ She took the pistol
out from under the stacks of clothes in the cupboard and began running around looking for a hiding place, tucking it under the mattress one moment and running to the kitchen to hide it among the dishes the next. Exasperated, I spat out, ‘Ma, if they search the place, wherever you keep it they will drag it out. There’s no point hiding it.’ It seemed the police had finally found the excuse they had been looking for all along to come for me.

  Around the same time Dr Rashid, out for a stroll on a breezy afternoon, decided to drop by. I told him everything; we had to act fast and remove the pistol before the police got there. His dark face lost the smile that he had entered with, growing even darker and without even pausing to think I put the entire responsibility of getting rid of the pistol on Dr Rashid’s shoulders. I had no other choice and he did not hesitate in my time of need either. He paused for a moment to consider where he could hide the pistol—inside his shirt, in his trousers—and how he was going to carry it out of the complex. In the end, having come to the conclusion that hiding it would only draw more attention to it, he decided to simply carry the bag in his hand, like a bag of documents or money. In plain sight no one was going to suspect what he was carrying with him. Taking Milan along, Dr Rashid left at once, telling me not to open the door to the police immediately and to check their identity cards and appropriate search warrants first before letting them in. Walking unhurriedly and carrying on a casual conversation the two hailed a rickshaw—if they had taken my car instead and run into the police on their way out then that would have been the end of the charade.

  They had got off the rickshaw at Dhaka Medical only to be met with the sight of a throng of policemen, students and doctors in the crowded courtyard. For a moment they teetered on the edge of going ahead or turning back, before Dr Rashid decisively took the call of going ahead with the plan. They met another doctor on the way who informed them that there had been a fight among students and one student had been shot dead. Terrified, both of them could only croak out barely comprehensible words. With the police standing only a few feet away, the other doctor looked at the bag Rashid was carrying and asked with a wink, ‘What’s that? A bottle is it!’ Forcing a genial ‘Don’t be silly’ smile on his perspiring face Dr Rashid kept walking ahead like doctors usually walked beside their patients, heading straight to the operation theatre and the cupboard at the back. That night the police never turned up at my house. But I learnt a valuable lesson regarding how they could turn up just about any day and there was no way I could risk keeping an unlicensed firearm in the house. Despite all my anxieties and misgivings I returned the troublesome object to its rightful owner with alacrity and managed to breathe a sigh of relief.

  Ultimately the police had to provide me with security. The feather-light appeal I had submitted at the Motijheel police station had been tossed aside with the excuse that they required a court order for the same. For that I needed a lawyer to take up my case. There were two big lawyers fighting human rights cases in the country: Dr Kamal Hossain and Amirul Islam. Even though I was not acquainted with Dr Hossain personally I had recently met his daughter Sara Hossain. She had got in touch with me when two human rights advocates from abroad had come to Dhaka and expressed an interest in meeting me; Sara had arranged a meeting between us at Dr Hossain’s office in Motijheel.

  Sara was a barrister herself. Having earned her law degree from Oxford she was working as an assistant to her famous father. A stunningly beautiful girl, she always wore a white salwar kameez and was fit as a fiddle. She spoke in Bangla, but the way she deliberately used only Bangla words while speaking made it clear that she was more comfortable in English. She used Bangla for such English words for which the Bangla version was not too commonplace: judge, high court, lower court, justice, among others. If one had to translate all legal words into Bangla I was certain most people would not understand a word of what was being said. Many of the words she used struck my ears as distinctively odd. While talking to her it seemed to me I was that rickshaw-puller I had heard of who had told his passenger he did not know where the university was and when the person had directed him to the place he had turned around and said, ‘Oh, you wanted to come to the university! You should have just said that!’

  Sara was the one who finally registered a case against the fatwa. The court told us that to fight a case against the Sahaba Sainik Parisad I had to go to Sylhet; it could not be done from the courts in Dhaka. Since going to Sylhet was as good as impossible for me and because the court was not keen on doing anything in my absence, I had to risk an appearance at the lower courts in Dhaka. If the government had displayed even an iota of morals they would have lodged a case against the Sahaba Sainik Parisad immediately. But they remained silent, as if the Parisad had done nothing wrong and I deserved the fatwa because it was my fault.

  There were a crowd of people at the court, their eyes trained on me, and I could not help but wonder how so many people knew I was going to be attending. It seemed an invisible hand was at work that was keeping tabs on all my movements and I could not be sure about the motives of the many people who were there that day. Obviously we had to work fast. The magistrate presiding over the case gravely remarked, ‘If you write such things, is it any wonder that they declared a fatwa!’ Despite his obvious reluctance he had to instruct the police to post security at my place.

  We returned from the court and began our wait for the promised policemen but days passed without any sign of them. I did not know that the police could flout a direct court order. The security personnel were finally deployed from Motijheel police station on 14 October. Whether this was a consequence of the earlier court order or the harsh letter regarding my security sent to the Bangladesh government by Amnesty International that had been published in the newspapers the day before, I could not tell. Not just Amnesty International, most international human rights organizations had requested the government to make arrangements for my security, thirty-six writers and intellectuals of the country had issued a statement against the fatwa and a furious debate was on in the newspaper columns over the issue.

  Two large policemen were posted at the main gate of my house where they sat and mostly dozed. Despite their less than active presence everyone at home finally breathed a sigh of relief. Mother was especially kind towards the policemen, sending out tea for them at regular intervals. Two chairs were also placed in the corridor for them. Pavel Rahman, a portly photographer working for Associated Press, arrived one day to take photographs of the guarding policemen. Perhaps it was a lark for him but I failed to see the joke in all this; instead I could not help but be discomfited by the indolence on display on the part of the policemen. Our neighbours too had begun talking about how the police were making them uncomfortable and apprehensive about another imminent attack on the house. Yasmin spoke to one such outraged neighbour and told them they should then be happy that the police were there in case an attack actually did happen. No one really felt safe, though, and as soon as I stepped out of my apartment I could feel numerous eyes on me. If there was security posted at home then there were sleuths posted outside as well. Wherever I went they followed me, recording every single move I made for the government’s records.

  ~

  I could sense something bizarre was about to happen in the country, I could almost smell it brewing. Influential fundamentalist leaders were banding together and numerous meetings were being held on streets, highways and bylanes, all of them about one particular issue: Taslima Nasrin. Politicians were calling press conferences and public gatherings were being held all round. All of them wanted harsh punishment for me and they were summoning people from all strata of society to answer their call. War had already been declared against me in the various mosques and hundreds of students from the madrasas were poised to take to the streets with swords and shields. There were posters everywhere—Islam was in danger and the country was going to face devastation unless I was punished at once. Milan often went to the Shantinagar mosque for the Friday prayers and returned with t
he leaflets being distributed there. Not just in the mosques, such leaflets were being distributed among the people on the roads too. One day Milan handed me a leaflet about a protest rally, a huge demonstration that was in the works.

  Naara-e-Takbeer = Allahu Akbar

  An insult to Islam = The Muslim will not tolerate

  An insult to the Prophet = Shall not be, shall not be

  The BPJ’s tout = Taslima beware

  Rushdie’s accomplice = Taslima beware

  Down with Taslima = We want justice

  Atheist, Murtad, Traitor = Beware, beware

  We demand that the one who has rained terrible abuses on the holy Quran, Islam and the Prophet, the one who has hatched a wicked plot to undermine our continued harmony and freedom, the notorious murtad, traitor to Allah, enemy of the prophets, an accomplice of the vile Rushdie, a pawn of India’s right-wing communal party BJP, and a shame to all women

  MURTAD, SHAMELESS TASLIMA NASRIN

  ♦Arrest♦Strict Punishment♦Immediate Confiscation of All Offensive Writings

  Public Forum

  Location: Baitul Mokarram South Gate

  Date: 18 November 1993, Thursday

  Time: 2 pm

  Let us come together imbued with honest thoughts and love for the nation, our race and the Prophet in a protest march.

  A Supplication by:

  On behalf of all ulemas and mashaikhs

  (Saidul Hadis Maulana) Azizul Haque

  (Maulana Gazi) Ishhaq

  Saidul Hadis, Patia Madrasa, Chattagram

  (Maulana Mufti) Abdur Rahman

  Director General, Islamic Research Centre, Dhaka