“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 anyone 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 too. 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.
But I had no reason to object, I told myself. He came to see me every day, and took me to his friend’s house in Gulshan almost every evening. We wanted privacy, which came to us after chatting with Shafik over tea, Haroon stealing a kiss every time his friend’s back was turned. We walked meadows and forests, and saw the sights, often in the company of our friends, and whenever we neared Savar, Haroon made a dash to his office.
But he never took me to his family’s home. He didn’t want them to feel I was someone they already knew, he said. He would surprise them by introducing me as his bride. We couldn’t manage for long just visiting friends, so we sought seclusion at my family’s house in Wari. But that was no better. My parents were there, my sister burst in whenever she wanted, her little girl climbing onto Haroon’s lap. The dog never took to Haroon, howling whenever he appeared, and geese and hens wandered freely through the living room as my beloved sat helpless amid the chaos. He wanted privacy, and clearly, I could not provide it.
“You seem to enjoy being bored to death,” he said.
“What do you find exciting?”
“A kiss, a cuddle, the soft feel of your breasts.”
My body trembled. I was young and easily excited, ready to fall headlong in love. I liked all of Haroon, my misgivings overcome by the power of new desire. I shivered at the brush of his arms as he drove me around, keeping his right hand on the wheel and not letting go of my hand even once, not even when he shifted gears. How I wished I could prolong the momentary rush of holding hands! I felt so inadequate as Haroon fell over me, hungry as a tiger mauling a doe, delving deep into my body.
We continued in much the same way through the spring, both of us believing ourselves ready for marriage, neither of us with another candidate in mind, but it took a shove from the outside to bring us to the actual ceremony. In the weeks after graduation, I was hardly idle. Though I had graduated I was still active in student politics. “Is there any need for you to be so involved?” Haroon asked one day.
“What do you mean?”
“Your party will never win,” he declared, “no matter what your effort.”
“I have my ideals,” I retorted. “I don’t need to abandon them, even though Shibir is bound to win.”
“Honestly,” he said, “women aren’t of much use.”
“What do you mean?” I was startled.
“I mean, women are fit for singing but not much else.”
“But you yourself are fond of singing!”
Haroon did not elaborate and unfortunately I did not draw him out. Perhaps if I had, his present behavior would
not have come as such a surprise. Perhaps I might not have married him. But passion had taken hold.
We had little time to ourselves, and often, to be alone together, we stayed out late at night.
Seeing all this, my father called to me one evening, and, with a brittle sharpness in his voice, declared, “Either marry Haroon or stop seeing him!” I was completely taken by surprise. “I don’t want to find that boy hanging about my house and the two of you spending all that time together without a betrothal,” he said. “It’s not proper.”