Lajja (3 page)

Suronjon longed for a cup of tea. He left his bed and went to the bathroom. If only he could manage to drink some tea before he washed his face! He could not feel Maya’s presence anywhere in the house. Had she actually left? Suronjon brushed his teeth, taking a long time over it. The house felt heavy, almost stupefied, like it was waiting for an imminent death. It felt like thunder would soon strike the house, and everyone was waiting to die. Thirsting for tea, Suronjon entered Sudhamoy’s room. He sat on the bed, with his legs tucked comfortably beneath him.

‘Where’s Maya?’ he asked but no one answered.

Kironmoyee was sitting by the window but she wasted no words and went towards the kitchen. Sudhamoy, who had been staring dumbly at the roof beams, turned on his side and closed his eyes. No one seemed particularly keen to tell him anything about Maya. He was aware that he was not taking on the responsibilities required of him. He should have taken everyone in the family to hide somewhere but he had not done that. Perhaps he did not feel like doing it. Suronjon had heard that Maya was seeing a young Muslim man called Jahangir. She was probably ‘dating’ him at every opportunity. Anyway, there was not much point thinking about it since she had already left home. Whenever riots broke out, it was fashionable amongst Muslims to check on how the Hindus were doing. Jahangir, too, would surely do these fashionable things. And Maya would feel grateful. And maybe after feeling continuously grateful she might end up marrying Jahangir! The young man was two academic years ahead of Maya. Suronjon doubted whether the man would ultimately marry Maya. His own life had shown him how he and Parveen had not got married though they had been on the brink of doing so.

‘Please become a Muslim,’ Parveen had said.

‘There’s no point in changing my religion,’ Suronjon had replied. ‘Let each of us stick to our own faith.’

Parveen’s family had not agreed to the proposal of each of them continuing with their own faith. They had married Parveen off to a Muslim businessman. After some weeping and howling, she had agreed to the marriage.

Suronjon stared sadly at their strip of a balcony. It was a rented property, there was no courtyard and certainly no patch of land where they could feel the earth and walk and run. Kironmoyee came into the room with a cup of tea. He took the cup of tea from his mother and chatted like nothing very much had happened.

‘It’s December already but not very cold yet,’ he said. ‘When we were kids we used to drink
khejurer ras
around this time.’

‘We live in a rented house now,’ sighed Kironmoyee. ‘Where will you get the sap of the date palm? We sold our house, with all its lovely trees and plants, those that we had planted ourselves, for practically next to nothing.’

As he sipped his tea, Suronjon remembered the man who would climb the tall date palm to fetch the khejurer ras that had collected in the pots tied on top, as Maya and he stood trembling, below. In the cold weather, clouds of steam would escape when they opened their mouths to speak. The playing fields, the garden with its mango,
jaam
, guava and jackfruit trees, betel nut and coconut palms—where did they go?

‘This is the home of your forefathers,’ Sudhamoy would say. ‘Never leave it and go anywhere else.’

Ultimately, Sudhamoy Datta had been forced to sell his house. Maya, all of six years old, had got lost while she was returning home from school. She could not be found anywhere in the city. She was not with any of their relatives, or other acquaintances. That was indeed a time of great stress. Suronjon guessed that a bunch of boys, with knives in their pockets, who used to hang around the gate of Edward School, had grabbed Maya. She came home after two days. She came alone and could not say who had taken her and where she had been. She behaved unnaturally for two months after that incident. She would repeatedly start in her sleep. She felt scared of people. Some nights people would rain bricks at their house; there were anonymous letters threatening to abduct Maya and telling the Dattas that they had better cough up money if they wanted to carry on living. Sudhamoy went to the local police station to make a complaint. The policemen at the thana took down his name and address in their register, and that was all. Often, some boys would saunter into their property and strip their trees of fruit, stamp all over their vegetable garden and tear flowers from the plants. Nobody could tell those boys anything. He tried discussing the issue with some of his neighbours but it did not help.

‘We can’t possibly do anything,’ they said.

Things carried on in that fashion and nothing changed for the better. Suronjon and some friends tried to tackle the situation. It may have been possible to get a handle on things but Sudhamoy decided to take a transfer away from Mymensingh. He made up his mind to sell his home. The other reason why he wanted to sell the house was that it had been under litigation for a long time. Shaukat Ali, who lived next door, had forged papers and was trying to claim the property. Sudhamoy was irritated and very tired of visiting courts trying to fend such people off. Suronjon was not in favour of their house being sold. He was then a robust young man, a college student who had just won a student election. He could easily have roughed up those young hooligans. However, Sudhamoy was terribly eager to sell the house. He wanted to go away to Dhaka. He said that his practice too was not flourishing in Mymensingh. He waited at his chamber in Swadeshi Bazar every afternoon but there were hardly any patients. A few Hindu patients came but they were so poor that he did not feel like charging them a fee. Sensing Sudhamoy’s agitation, Suronjon did not try to persuade his father to stay on. Yet, even now, he had not forgotten their large house on two bighas of land. Sudhamoy finally sold their house, worth 1 million takas, to Roisuddin sahib for a mere 200,000.

‘Get ready,’ he said to Kironmoyee after the sale. ‘Pack everything.’

Kironmoyee had flung herself on the ground and cried. Suronjon found it hard to believe that they were actually leaving their home behind. He did not want to go away, leaving the home that was his from the day that he was born, the playing fields of his childhood, the Brahmaputra River, and his friends. And Maya, who was the prime reason why they were leaving, did not want to go away either.

‘I won’t leave Sufiya behind,’ she declared, tossing her head.

Sufiya was a school friend and lived nearby. They sat in the courtyard every afternoon and played with dolls and pots and pans. They were close.

Sudhamoy was not to be swayed though he had the strongest ties to their roots. ‘Life is short,’ Sudhamoy had said. ‘I want a carefree life with my children.’

Is a carefree life possible? Suronjon now knew that it was not possible. Sudhamoy came to Dhaka to breathe freely; however, it was in Dhaka, the capital of a free country, that he had to stop wearing a dhoti
and don pyjamas. Suronjon understood his father’s pain, the hurt that he never expressed in words, though his sighs reverberated through the walls of the house. There was but one wall separating them, and they tried to climb over it. Neither Sudhamoy nor Suronjon could manage it.

Suronjon was absorbed in staring at the sunlight in the veranda. Suddenly, he was brought to life by sounds of a procession going by. As the procession neared, Suronjon tried to hear what they were saying. Sudhamoy and Kironmoyee too listened carefully. Suronjon saw his mother pull the windows shut. However, as the procession came close to their house, they could hear the slogans clearly.

Pick up Hindus

One or two

And snack on them

Won’t you?

Suronjon saw Sudhamoy tremble. Kironmoyee stood still with her back to the closed windows. Suronjon remembered that they had heard the same slogan in 1990. If they found Suronjon somewhere close by just now, they would gobble him up. And who were they? They were youngsters of the neighbourhood! They were people like Jobbaar, Romjan, Alamgir, Kobir and Abedin. They were his friends, almost like younger brothers, people he talked with every morning and afternoon. They discussed problems affecting their neighbourhood; very often they worked together to solve problems. And on this lovely winter morning of 7 December, they were going to snack on Suronjon!

After reaching Dhaka, Sudhamoy rented a house in Tanti Bazar. His cousin Asit Ronjon lived there. It was he who helped Sudhamoy find a small house.

‘Sudhamoy, you are the son of a wealthy father. Can you possibly stay in a rented house?’

‘Why not? Aren’t other people doing it?’

‘Yes, they are,’ said Asit Ronjon, ‘but you’ve never ever known want. Why did you sell your own home? Maya is a tiny thing. It’s not like she’s a young woman. Surely nothing terrible would’ve happened. Of course, we’ve sent our Utpol to Calcutta. He was not able to go to college. The young men of the neighbourhood used to say that they would grab hold of him. I was frightened and I sent him away. He’s now with his mother’s brother in Tiljala. A grown-up daughter brings great anxiety, Dada.’

Sudhamoy could not disregard what Asit Ronjon said. Of course, there was anxiety. He wanted to believe that even Muslims experience anxiety when they have grown-up daughters. A group of young men had pushed one of Sudhamoy’s students on the road and pulled her sari off. The young woman was not Hindu—in fact, she was Muslim. The young men were also Muslim. So what did that mean? Sudhamoy consoled himself with the thought that it was not about Hindus and Muslims but about the strong torturing the weak whenever possible. Women are weak and so strong men torment them. Asit Ronjon had sent both his daughters to Calcutta. He earned good money from his gold shop in Islampur. He also owned an old two-storey house which he had not even bothered to repair. He was planning to build a new house but did not seem very interested in the matter.

‘Don’t spend any money, Dada,’ he told Sudhamoy. ‘Save. If you can, send away the money you got from the sale of your house. My relatives there will organize some land for you.’

‘There?’ asked Sudhamoy.

‘Yes, Calcutta,’ said Asit Ronjon in a stage whisper. ‘I’ve bought land there too.’

‘You’re going to make money here,’ shouted Sudhamoy, ‘and spend it in another country. You’re a traitor!’

Asit Ronjon was always surprised when Sudhamoy said these things. He thought that it was unusual to hear a Hindu have such views. In fact, all Hindus felt that they should not spend too much money here but save as much as possible. After all, one could not predict what turn life would take. They could be all rooted here and then suddenly people could decide to uproot them. It wouldn’t be entirely unexpected, would it?

Sudhamoy often wondered why he had come away from Mymensingh. Why had his ties to his home not kept him back? Yes, there had been trouble because of Maya. People could have problems, surely? Both the communities—Hindus and Muslims—could be troubled by abductions. Sudhamoy asked himself whether he had felt insecure in his own home. In his bed, in the cramped rooms and veranda of the house in Tanti Bazar, Sudhamoy wondered why had he left his family home to live in an unfamiliar place. Was he in hiding? Why was it that he felt like a refugee in his own home and land? Had he suspected that he might lose the case against Shaukat sahib and his forged documents? Imagine losing a case to prove the ownership of your own home! Was it not better to leave with one’s reputation still intact? Sudhamoy had seen one of his older cousins lose his house in the Akur Takur locality of Tangail. A land-clerk neighbour wanted to grab a considerable amount of Sudhamoy’s cousin’s land. The case was in the court and after a five-year delay the court took the clerk’s side. Tarapodo Ghoshal finally snapped his ties with his own country and went to India. Had Sudhamoy too wondered whether Shaukat sahib’s case would take the path that Tarapodo’s had, and therefore sold off the home of his father and grandfather? Perhaps that was it. However, it was also a fact that Sudhamoy had lost much of his earlier social standing. The number of his friends and acquaintances had dwindled. Hindu families were leaving at the slightest chance. Many people had died. Every few days, Sudhamoy would be part of a funeral procession, with a bier of a friend, relative or acquaintance on his shoulders, chanting ‘
Hori bol bolo hori
’
.
The people who were still alive lived in utter despair. They felt that there was no value to their lives. Whenever he spoke with them, Sudhamoy found that he was scared too—it was as if a giant would come very soon, in the dead of the night, and crush them all. Everyone talked of their dream country—India—and conspired to cross the border.

‘When war broke out in the country,’ Sudhamoy would often say while talking to them, ‘you fled to India like emasculated men. Once the country was liberated you came back like heroes. And now, whenever there is a spot of trouble, you say you’ll go away to India. A cowardly bunch, that’s what you are.’

Gradually, Jotin Debnath, Tushar Kar, Khogesh Kiran—all of them—distanced themselves from Sudhamoy. They were not open to speaking about their thoughts. Sudhamoy was very lonely in his own city. It was becoming fairly apparent that there was a growing distance also with his friends such as Shakur, Faisal, Majid and Gaffar. When he visited them, he was often greeted with comments like:

‘Do sit for a bit in the drawing room, Sudhamoy, and I’ll come back after namaz.’

‘Oh, you’re here today! But we have a milad at home!’

The left-wingers were ageing and taking to religion and that made Sudhamoy feel very lonely. He felt anguished by the lack of reason, logic and ethics in his own city and so he wished to escape, not from his country but from the city of his dreams. He
did not want all his dreams swallowed up in the shark-like jaws of a brooding, blue death.

In the early days, Suronjon would shout and scream in anger because they had had to leave their home to live in a pigeonhole. Finally, he got used to it. He joined the university, made new friends, and began to like many things in Dhaka. He was drawn into the city’s political life as well. Suronjon was sought after at meetings and demonstrations. Kironmoyee had objected to moving, and she continued to object. At night she wept as she wondered whether the frame that she had made for the beans to climb was still there. She often said that no one had guavas as large as theirs and wondered how the coconut palms were and if the new owners remembered to put saltwater at the roots. Not just Kironmoyee but Sudhamoy too felt great pain.

Sudhamoy had hoped that his transfer to Dhaka would help him follow up on what was happening about his promotion. He visited the ministry and often had to wait in the room of a lowly clerk.

‘Do you think something will happen with the file, dear man?’ he would ask.

It was difficult to get a clear answer to such a question.

‘Yes, yes,’ they would say and Sudhamoy would have to leave, without a proper answer.

‘Doctor,’ someone would say, ‘can you please prescribe something for my daughter’s dysentery?’

‘I’ve had an ache in the left side of my chest for a few days—can you give me something good for it?’

In such situations, Sudhamoy would unlock his briefcase, and write a prescription in a neat script on the prescription pad that carried his name and address.

‘Will my work get done, Forid sahib?’ he would ask.

‘Do we have any say in such matters?’ Forid sahib would answer, grinning broadly.

Sudhamoy’s juniors got their promotions. His file had been buried under the files of Dr Korimuddin and Dr Yakub Mollah, but they soon began working as associate professors. Sudhamoy kept walking to and from the ministry.

‘Not today, come tomorrow, please. Your file will go to the secretary . . . Not tomorrow, come the day after, please. We have a meeting today . . . The minister is out of the country. Please come back after a month.’

After listening to these kinds of excuses several times, Sudhamoy finally figured out that he was not going to get his promotion. After running around for nearly two years, it became evident to him that some of his colleagues, even though they weren’t competent, had outstripped him. His juniors had become associate professors and were lording it over him. He was nearing retirement and was actually entitled to be an associate professor. It’s not as though he was greedy, it was his by right. Finally, Sudhamoy Datta retired as an assistant professor.

His colleague Madhob Chondro Pal whispered in his ear as he placed a garland of marigolds around Sudhamoy’s neck, as they bade him farewell, ‘In a country of Muslims, we should not expect too many opportunities for ourselves. Even what we’re getting now is a favour.’

And then he laughed loudly! Madhob too was working as an assistant professor. His name too had come up for promotion a few times and though many others got through, Madhob always faced obstacles. And then Madhob Chondro had other things going against him. He had been to the Soviet Union! Later, Sudhamoy realized that Madhob Chondro wasn’t far off the mark. There was nothing in the laws of Bangladesh that prevented Hindus from being appointed or promoted to senior positions in the administration, police or army. However, there were no secretaries or additional secretaries in any ministry from the Hindu community. There were three joint secretaries and a handful of deputy secretaries. Sudhamoy believed that those few joint secretaries and deputy secretaries certainly could not hope to go up the ladder. There were merely six Hindu deputy commissioners (DCs) in the entire country. There was just a single Hindu judge in the High Court. There were probably several Hindus in the lower rungs of the police but how many Hindus were there at the superintendent level? Sudhamoy thought to himself that he had not become an associate professor simply because his name was Sudhamoy Datta. If only he had been Muhammad Ali or Salimullah Chowdhury! Even in trade and business, very rarely did a Hindu institution get a licence if there was no Muslim partner involved. And then Hindus never got loans from government-controlled banks or from industrial development organizations to set up businesses.

It was in Tanti Bazar that Sudhamoy Datta again created an appropriate atmosphere where he could continue living. He still felt a strong attachment to his land, even after leaving the city of his birth. ‘Is it only Mymensingh that is my land? All of Bangladesh is my country,’ he always said.

‘We released fish into the ponds, grew vegetables and our children ate the fruit from our trees—that life seems like a dream,’ Kironmoyee sighed. ‘Nowadays, we’re barely able to pay our rent every month.’

‘You did get quite a bit of money after selling the house and on your retirement,’ Kironmoyee often said, as the night deepened. ‘Let’s go away to Calcutta. We do have a fair number of relatives there.’

‘It’s not like our relatives will even give us a meal,’ Sudhamoy would respond. ‘You may look forward to staying with them but they are likely to turn their faces away when they see you. They’ll probably ask where you’re staying and offer you some tea and nibbles.’

‘Why should we depend on others when we have our own money?’

‘I won’t go. If all of you want to go, do go. I have left my family home but does that mean that I’ll now leave my country?’ Sudhamoy would shout back.

They went from Tanti Bazar to Armanitola and were there for six years. Sudhamoy Datta had now been living in Tikatuli for seven years. In the meanwhile, he had developed heart disease. He was supposed to hold a clinic in a pharmacy in Gopibag every afternoon but he did not go there regularly. He had patients coming home. There was a table set up in his drawing room for him to attend to patients. There was a bed too, on one side. And on another side there was a cane sofa. He also had a bookshelf laden with books. Books on medicine, literature, society and politics stood side by side. Sudhamoy spent most of his time in that room. On most evenings, Nishith babu came, announcing his arrival by the flip-flop of his sandals on the floor. They would be joined by Akhtarujjaman, Shahidul Islam and Horipodo. They passed time discussing the politics of their country. Kironmoyee would bring them tea. She would usually make tea without sugar because most of them were elderly. Sudhamoy too was getting on in years.

Sudhamoy sat up suddenly as he heard the sounds of the procession. Suronjon clenched his jaws and Kironmoyee’s soft, dovelike bosom fluttered rapidly. They were frightened and angry. Was Sudhamoy not the least bit anxious? Should he not be angry too?