Haroon and his father attacked Hasan the second he brought the girl into the parlor, setting upon him with their fists, pushing him to the floor. The young girl herself began to howl in fear and horror at the bloody mess her husband had become. What had happened? Words soon tumbled out through a deluge of tears. She had left her military father’s house to come away with Hasan, who’d kept her hidden for six months. And then she howled some more. “We are leaving the country,” Hasan blubbered, welts and bruises rising on his cheeks, blood dribbling from his nose. “I cannot live here.”
Habib was quite the opposite. He had no aspiration to travel. He relished the idea of living in one’s own country and carrying on like a lord. Nor did he show any sign of falling in love or preparing to marry. Such traditions, he declared often, were futile in the extreme and bothersome. Strutting through the house, he sang with abandon, strumming the guitar that hung from his neck. He was in love with music, he proclaimed. “Life is short,” he’d say in response to any criticism. “One may as well sing or dance!” And sing he did, no matter how his parents worried.
But now Amma seemed more disturbed about the destiny of her only daughter’s hapless husband Anis, whose problems she confided in me because she thought I might broach the subject to my husband. But Haroon knew only too well the misfortunes of all his siblings. Night after night, he would sit, lost in thought, smoking one cigarette after another.
“Why do you worry so,” I once asked.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
I had never been successful in convincing Haroon that I was quite capable of coping with the problems that afflicted his family, although I tried reminding him, with added emphasis, that I had been a student of physics. I may cook, but I am better educated than Rosuni, I would say. One night, sensing he would be receptive, I approached Haroon about Anis, and he listened. “Perhaps I could bring him into my firm,” he said. “We’re collaborating with the Koreans, and I need a new man.”
As for Habib and Hasan, I also obediently raised that issue. “It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll send them abroad to earn a living!” But he did not consider me capable of real discussion. There were hours of meetings in the drawing room—he and his parents, brows furrowed, considering the fates of his ne’er-do-well brothers—but I was invited only as the bou, gracefully sweeping in and out serving tea and biscuits.
Why, I wondered, had Amma been so eager for my assistance with Dolon’s husband? Did she imagine that Haroon, caught up in his marriage, had no time to spare for his family, that her only access to her oldest son was through his new wife? And why was her most passionate concern for me that I cook when I showed all the signs of being pregnant with her grandchild? Yes, there was the custom of the bou of the house preparing certain foods, but wasn’t it also the custom that the daughter-in-law reproduce?
I pulled myself from bed and entered the kitchen. Garlic, onion, raw fish, and turmeric, smells I’d always loved, suddenly intensifying my nausea. Rosuni had already cut up the fish and onion and measured out the garlic, and Sakhina, the second maid, was grinding the spices into a paste. I steadied myself and set about placing the pan on the fire, throwing in the onions and garlic, turning the chillies and spices. Why, I asked myself, does this family pant for my cooking when in a sane world I could barely qualify as Rosuni’s assistant? Was it because my hands were fairer than hers? Because I had gold bracelets while Rosuni wore bangles of glass? Or was it that my knowledge of the great formulas of physics gave me a gift for refining the flavors of Bengali cuisine?
When he got back from work that day, Haroon behaved as if he had no memory of my morning agony. Sitting down for supper, he chattered on about his new Korean colleague, how the gentleman could not speak English, and had conversed with Haroon for an hour in his own language, which Haroon, of course, could not speak and for which he had no respect. He’d arrange for a translator, he said, and then sat down in front of the television to watch Mumazzudin Ahmad, who had cast himself in the role of an absentminded teacher. Haroon laughed and laughed. I would have laughed too, but my head was throbbing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My stomach again.”
“Of course,” he said, barely looking up. “You must go and lie down if you feel unsteady.”
When he came to bed, I was still awake, and soon he was loosening my sari. I sighed deeply as he began to make love to me. How could a man who was so indifferent to his wife’s discomfort be such a sensitive lover? Afterward, Haroon lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings as he always had, as he had in the early days of our marriage when our love was still new. “You see, I’m no longer tired,” he said, his entire frame loosened and calm. But I was hardly calm and I’d had no pleasure in spite of the precision of his touch. Haroon had simply used my body to relieve his fatigue.
When I returned from the bathroom, Haroon had stopped smoking. He was lying with his back turned. I lay down beside him. Perhaps now he would listen to me, but when I moved closer to him, the sound of his snoring greeted my ears.
2
As Haroon brushed his teeth, I vomited. To my surprise he reached for me, and steadying me from behind, gave me some water to drink. Such comfort, I thought, closing my eyes and letting my head rest against his shoulder. Quickly he helped me to our bed, and as soon as I lay down, fetched a couple of Pepto-Bismol tablets. “Here,” he said, jabbing them at me. “Swallow them now.”
“Will I stop vomiting?”
“Of course.” And then he went into the bathroom, only to return minutes later, wrapped in a towel. I watched as he dressed, knotted his tie and touched cologne to his neck.
“I’m not feeling better,” I said. “I feel strange.”
“How?” Now he was slipping into his shoes.
“I’m pregnant.”
At first he didn’t answer and then he said, “What rot!” and turned toward the door. In a second he was gone and I was alone with the burning sensation in my stomach, making trips into the bathroom where only moments ago he had showered. How had the charming boy I’d met at the academy musicale become such a cruel insensitive man? How could an accomplished and intelligent man of twenty-two deny that morning nausea was a sign of pregnancy? I remembered our first phone call barely two years before.
“Remember me?” a young man’s voice had asked.
“Not really,” I replied.
“We talked once in the park . . . ”
“Possible, I guess,” I answered. “I’ve talked to so many men, I can’t remember them all. What’s your name?” I admit I was harsh, but I’d often been harassed by strange phone calls—we all were, my friends and I, in those days.
“What’s the point of giving you my name?” he said. “There are scores of Haroons in the world. You must know at least ten!”
I tried to recall him, but I could think of only one Haroon, a distant cousin. This Haroon would not get off the phone, even after I insisted I knew no one by that name.
And then, suddenly, I recalled a man I’d seen, lurking at the periphery of the terrace as my friends and I chatted before a concert. I remembered his wonderfully evocative voice—he’d made an excuse to say hello. With his crisp, starched panjabi and pyjama, he didn’t look at all like one of those boys who walked about, rumpled and careless, with the gaze of a poet, a sling bag over his shoulder. Rather, he looked like someone sent from the Ministry of Culture to report back about the quality of the concert. I remembered that Arzu had persuaded me to sing, and when I took up the song, I’d seen the man take note. Soon he barged into our midst and demanded I sing more, encouraging Arzu, Subhash, Chandana, and Nadira to join in.
“Where did you turn up from, sir, that you dare ask me to sing?” I asked. And the boy—perhaps I should say the young man—gave me a beatific smile. He remained by my side even when we went inside for the music. When the soiree ended late in the evening, he was still with me.
“Your singing was a whole lot better than any
one else’s,” he said, not too quietly. Chandana poked me with her elbow as he disappeared.
“So why’s that jerk after you?”
As we walked along the avenue, looking for a tonga, a white Toyota pulled up beside us. “Where are you heading?” It was the young man with the starched clothes and evocative voice. “Let me give you a ride.”
“Not necessary,” I said. “We’ll get a tonga.”
“You won’t find one. The entire fleet is stationed near the arena waiting for the football match to let out.” Still, I tried to get rid of him, insisting we were bound for an old part of town.
“I’m heading there too,” he insisted. “I live there too.”
And so, in spite of my reluctance, we got into his Toyota. Actually Subhash forced my hand, only too pleased to get a lift. Haroon talked to him most of the way, about the plague of mosquitoes in Dhaka, the impossible traffic in the old city. Then, as we got out, he said, without specifying when, that he’d be honored to hear me sing again.
But I couldn’t imagine that anyone would ring me up after such a brief acquaintance. No doubt it was not so easy to locate a phone number, even given the address. But I didn’t ask how he’d found me.
I cut the first call short. “I’m busy,” I said. But he called the very next day, and the day after that.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Are you annoyed?”
To tell the truth, I wasn’t feeling too comfortable about carrying on a conversation with a man I hardly knew, and my experience had always been that I could easily cut off such chatter after an initial exchange of pleasantries. But what was typical didn’t seem to work with Haroon. He just kept talking, and about everything under the sun. Anything, it seemed, to keep me on the phone. He was an engineer, he told me, and had started his own business—manufacturing generators—in Savar. He had an office in Motijheel, but he lived in the Dhanmundi section of town with his parents and siblings. He drew a picture of a happy family.
“You owe me a song,” he said.
“I beg your pardon!”
“Didn’t I see you home the other night?”
“So you’re demanding the fare I would otherwise have given the tonga driver?” Haroon’s laughter rang loudly in my ears. “It was you who insisted on seeing us home!” I reminded him. “And I told you that I would only accept your offer if you required nothing in return, remember?”
But he would not be deterred. He kept calling, kept asking me to sing for him. He wouldn’t accept the notion, for instance, that I sang only for myself, and after a while, exhausted at the intensity of his appeals, I was persuaded first to sing, and then to talk for hours on the telephone. But also, I had become curious.
It wasn’t long before he began to ask me to sing this song or that. Tagore’s I lend my ears or Far, far away. And then one day, he begged me to sing, My heart refuses to calm down . . . The message was so obvious, I couldn’t help teasing him.
“What has affected your heart all of a sudden?” I asked, and Haroon sighed deeply.
“My grief that you are so cruel that you will never understand me.” He laughed. “Can’t you see that a storm is gathering!” he exclaimed, and asked me to sing, “On such a stormy night, you’ll come to me.” I stopped after a couple of lines.
“Do you take me for a courtesan? I must sing to please you?”
Now it was Haroon’s turn to sing. He wasn’t good at it, but he tried, only to get me to sing again, staying on the phone for hours as I sang and sang, then noisily applauding before he exclaimed, sighing, “There’s such magic in your voice.”
The first three months of our acquaintance took place on the telephone. Our intimacy seemed to soothe both of us. I began to wonder if I was imagining it all, this attraction that seemed so sudden and unexplained. And then one day when we were on the phone, Haroon’s tone of voice abruptly changed.
“I don’t feel happy going on like this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to be closer to you . . . ”
“Whatever for?”
“For nothing else but to get my heart’s fill of you.”
“Do you mean you are not happy with only talk and singing?”
“It’s not the same as sitting face-to-face.”
So we met on the university grounds, and he took me to his office. I was most happy to find a vase of fresh flowers on the table. He spread the flowers on my lap, pinned some in my hair, and cried, “My darling, these roses are meant only for you!” I sat silent, watching Haroon fuss with snacks. “Will you have tea?” “7UP?” “A chicken bun?” I was gazing at his beautiful eyes, at the smile that lit up the corners of his mouth.
Now, of course, we no longer sing, and Haroon looks at me sharply if I begin even to hum a tune, and there is never time for roses. But in those days, he had no compunction about missing work and coming to meet me after my physics class in Curzon Hall. Time and again, I’d come out of class to find a good-looking man with a beautiful smile waiting for me, dark glasses keeping his dancing eyes from my gaze. I wanted everyone to celebrate my good fortune. I was not only a brilliant student and an effective leader in student politics, but I excelled in love as well! And Haroon couldn’t have been more solicitous of my achievements and obligations, standing by as I posted slogans and gossiped with friends over tea at the canteen. Afterward, he’d sit me next to him in his car and drive me around the campus, a cigarette dangling elegantly from his lips.
Every so often that spring we drove a great distance, over the bridge of Buriganga, and settled ourselves on the banks of the Dhaleshwari River. Like me, Haroon loved seclusion, and those days alone were our great pleasures—hours of contentment I grew to rely on. One day, as usual, we drove to the river, and after we’d settled at our customary place, Haroon looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognize. I waited as he overcame what seemed like dismay and began to speak. I was not, he told me, the first woman to whom he had given his love. Anguish, like a thin string, tightened around my heart.
And so he’d sat beside the same river in quiet intimacy with another girl, had gazed into the eyes of another and declared his love! Of course I believed I was the first woman who had captured his heart, and, pouting to keep from weeping, I declared, as if it could change what he had just told me, that he was indeed my first and only love.
“Did you come here with her?” My eyes were tearing, but I fixed them on the passing boats to keep my composure.
“Many times.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“She was . . . ”
I fell silent, and then managed another question. “Did you love her very much?”
“Ah, yes!”
“More than you love me?”
Haroon took my hands and gave them a warm squeeze. “Silly girl, are you angry? I was talking about an old relationship. I loved her once. I don’t anymore. I love you now.”
What Haroon was saying was not in the least outrageous. I could have fallen in love with someone only to move away from him, and I could then have found another man and come to believe he was the right person for me. Shipra had been in love with someone else before she met Dipu. The relationship had lasted only two years because the boy was an alcoholic. Then she met and fell in love with Dipu and married him. Things can happen that way, I reassured myself.
“Do you think about her?”
“No,” Haroon said.
“Do you mean to say that you never think of her? How is that possible? Do you not feel the pain of loss?” Haroon laughed.
“I don’t feel anything.” Looking straight into his eyes, I tried to determine if he was telling me the truth.
“How can you forget someone you’ve loved?” I asked impatiently.
“Why not? It’s entirely possible.”
“Then you will forget me one day?”
“Why are you comparing yourself to her? You’re different.”
“How? How are we different? She’s a woman t
oo. You’ve loved both of us.”
“You don’t compare . . . ”
“Why not?”
“She wasn’t nice . . . ”
I can’t remember if I felt happy at the knowledge that she wasn’t a nice girl and reassured that I certainly was. Now it’s clear to me that I shouldn’t have felt smug for being praised, but that is exactly how I did feel. Now I’ve learned that a person who summarily dismisses a former attachment can, given the chance, turn his back on any love. “It was highly improper of you to speak of her that way,” I told him much later.
“Judge for yourself,” Haroon said. “How could I marry someone who cares only about cars, money, and jewelry and has no time for music?”
“But people differ in taste and inclination. That doesn’t give you the right to defame her. I have no sympathy for your generator business, but I don’t criticize you, do I?”
Haroon said nothing, and we never finished the conversation.
But now we are in Haroon’s office and I am looking at a bouquet of roses and dusk is descending and we are in love. The place is deserted and everybody is gone and my apprehensions are soon drowned in a rush of love. Haroon kisses me for the first time that day, digging his tongue deep into my mouth, my lips swelling as if stung by a bee. And now he is doubling up with laughter at the sight.
“You look funny, not yourself at all!” he is saying while I try to hide my mouth behind my hand, which he keeps removing to get a glimpse of my swollen lips.
“What are you looking at?”
“Your soft, pure, virgin lips! They are so untouched, they puff up with the first kiss!”
Haroon’s eyes were shining with happiness—that I was inexperienced and that he was the first man to touch me thrilled him, but getting home with reddened, swollen lips was unpleasant. I was so nervous I confined myself to the darkness of my bedroom to avoid a barrage of questions. I made all kinds of excuses: I’d eaten already, I had work to do. Sleepless and seized with hunger, I tossed and turned, and the next morning went to Haroon’s office as soon as he called. We lunched at Superstar and spent the entire day together. He held me close, as if he were afraid of losing me. And he wanted me, was bent on taking me, an uninitiated girl. It was on that day that part of me first suspected that Haroon couldn’t possibly really love me, that I was simply a conquest, that as we sat on the banks of the Dhaleshwari and he proposed marriage, his smile was the smile of a man who had found himself an innocent girl to take as a bride.
Revenge Page 2
