“I’ll marry when I’m ready,” I said.
“When will that be?”
“Maybe in six months.” Haroon and I had talked about waiting six months, but now my father was shouting. “What difference will another six months make?”
I didn’t want to argue. Mama had warned me not to aggravate Baba’s poor health. “Heaven knows what will happen if he gets too worked up,” she muttered. “The poor man almost had a stroke waiting for Nupur to marry.”
And so, a few days later, I announced to Haroon that I was ready to get married. He was totally unprepared. Some weeks before he had scolded me for putting off our engagement. “Time and time again, you give one excuse or another,” he’d said. That was when we’d decided on the six-month wait.That day he had wanted to take me straight to his house in Dhanmundi whether I was ready or not. Now he wanted to know what my hurry was.
“It’s Baba,” I said. “He doesn’t want us so close without marriage.”
I understood what really lay behind Baba’s concern,
but I couldn’t tell Haroon. My only sister Nupur had had a love affair with a well-to-do young man named Akram, who came and went whenever he chose. He’d endeared himself to us all, becoming one of the family. We waited and waited for him to propose to Nupur, even planned the menu for the wedding, Akram butting in, “Just meat won’t do, we must have fish and fried brinjals as well.” He’d enjoyed those dishes at his friend Sanjib’s wedding.
“Why not have stuffed taki fish, crushed dry fish, prawn malai curry, hilsa with mustard and fish fry. Why not have all of that to go with the rice?” he asked.
But Akram never married Nupur. He left her after five years of courtship, and Baba was so hurt he regarded any suitor with suspicion. One day, he was certain, Haroon too would disappear, and again he’d be left with a daughter out in the cold.
My family was not rich, but we were by no means poor. Baba had sent both his daughters to university and taken care of our desires. At first Nupur decided to remain a spinster, but when she changed her mind, Baba found Dulal, a fine man with a fine job, and they married. Nupur had excelled as a student of Bengali literature, but now she was an accountant—the irony of it all! Within a year, they produced a daughter who drove everyone mad, but they were happy.
I wondered what made Baba insist I marry Haroon right away. I’d received several marriage proposals he had turned aside, but now he was in a hurry. Had he lost faith in my ability to attract a proper husband? What if I didn’t want to marry Haroon? Baba’s sudden declaration hurt my feelings.
Why didn’t he see me as an attractive and intelligent woman any man would desire?
In any case, within two weeks, Haroon and I married with little ado. There were no arguments over fried brinjals, we just gathered a few friends and that was that. I showed Baba that I was a proper woman, and that Haroon was no mere fling, which brought me some satisfaction.
Life changed abruptly when I entered Haroon’s house. His parents objected immediately to my calling him by name, insisting that I call him by the old-fashioned honorific. I had a hard time switching, but Haroon was on their side. “Just don’t address me by name when they’re around.” So I stopped calling him Haroon in front of the family. After that first surrender, I noticed quickly that even when we were alone, I was unsure of his attention. ‘Are you listening?” I’d say.
No longer did he take me out to visit his friends or roam the city. We came together only with his family. With my head covered, I followed my husband into the houses of his relatives, showing due respect to elders. At my parents’ house, I had rarely been required to touch anyone’s feet in reverence, but Haroon insisted I change my ways, and solemnly, I did exactly that.
Now he slammed into the room, breaking my reverie. I told him the pills had not worked and that I was still sick to my stomach.
“How can that be?” he said.
“I have told you what I think,” I said.
“And what is that?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Impossible,” he said, “and just because you think you are—”
“Why do you say it’s impossible? Take me to the doctor. Let him decide!”
“You make a fuss over nothing,” he said, “running to the doctor at the slightest excuse!” And then he marched into the dining room and ate in silence, watching television.
Alone in the dark, I stood at the open window, the dingy night sky throwing murky shadows into the room as I listened to my breathing, keeping my eyes wide open.
3
I
t was becoming Haroon’s habit to depart for work without breakfast, leaving his tiffin box lying on the counter, and so I wasn’t surprised the next morning when he rushed out the door, hardly pausing to respond when I asked if he planned, again, to lunch with a colleague. I was becoming adept at preparing breakfast for the family and gathering the washing for Rosuni. This particular morning I also dusted the living room furniture and, when I finished, found myself again looking out the window and up at the blue sky. There was no end to the free time I had in this house, even with all the cooking and arranging that was my duty as the oldest daughter-in-law. But none of what I did added up to work—Rosuni took care of the heavy cleaning and once in a while Amma would even pitch in. I was superfluous, it seemed.
Standing there at the window, I wondered what on earth I was going to do with myself. I had never been the kind of girl to sit at home, and my inactivity burned like the sting of a poisonous ant. As a child I had the run of our house. My sister Nupur was a docile daughter, but I was a tomboy with
no patience. When I was little, Ma once took us to see a fortune-teller. Nupur sat there calmly and listened to the woman’s utterances, but I fled to the courtyard, climbed a mango tree and loaded the end of my sari with fruit. This hardly surprised my mother as at home I was apt to play with the boys in the neighborhood, slipping and falling, tearing my clothes on a thorn. I had remained contrary and impulsive and any challenging tree still invited me to climb.
Nupur had visited me a few days earlier. It was easy for her to stop by since she worked in the Dhanmundi branch of the Sonali Bank, just a stone’s throw from her house on Green Road and a few blocks from mine. “Why don’t you come and see me?” she said as our visit came to an end. I explained that such a visit was not possible, that I was not permitted to go out alone, that I would have to wait until Haroon was free and willing to drive me. Nupur was stunned. How was it that her wild sister had become a cowering wife, a docile woman who would never disobey her husband. “Not only that,” I told her, “my husband, my lord and master, is seldom home before nightfall.”
“So how do you pass your days?” Nupur blurted, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“Time goes by,” I said, purposely avoiding the truth, which was that my hours were as stagnant as the pools left after a monsoon.
Nupur was a couple of years older than me, all the more precious a friend because she’d almost died of typhoid when she was ten. My parents had been sick with worry. “You’d worry even more if your sick child were a son,” our family doctor had said one day in my presence. Young as
I was, his remark startled me. It had never occurred to me that a mother and father might love a son more than a daughter.
To be fair, Baba never complained about having only girls. If people expressed pity, he proudly pointed to me and said, “This one is my son . . . she’ll do everything a boy would.” I took my father’s pride in me as permission to do what a son might—run to the pharmacy to pick up mediciine or to the market for fruit, run faster than the boys, run interference for my beautiful older sister. Once a boy named Basu wouldn’t stop whistling at Nupur, and so I went to his house in the company of my gang of boys, collared him, scattered his books and papers, gave him a few hard blows, and disappeared from the streets for a few days. After that Basu didn’t bother Nupur again.
For a few years we were a team, seven boys and two girls. We played marbles, spun tops, flew kites, and played cricket, football, and badminton on the grounds of the house at Wari. Because I ran the fastest, I was the leader of the pack; no one could catch up with me, not even the boys who were a couple of years older. In school, I was always in the first five in my class, something that thrilled Baba who’d come home with a packet of
sandesh
, my favorite pastry, whenever I did well on an exam. “I don’t need a son,” he’d exclaim, “this girl will become a judge or barrister one day and protect the family honor.” Even though I had chosen physics, hardly preparation for a legal career, Baba did not object. “It’s an excellent subject,” he remarked. I had two opinions about that. I had learned how to place a skillet on the fire so it remained steady and how to adjust the heat so rice would
cook, but I had also learned why it cooked! How could anyone say physics was useless!
Baba, naturally, had a university degree, but Ma had been married off at fifteen without even finishing school. And though neighbors expressed their sympathy to her as well, she, like Baba, had no regrets at having two daughters. Even when friends took her aside and urged her to try for a boy, Ma bristled. “Will a boy solve all our problems? He’ll take to smoking at thirteen, at fourteen ogle girls outside the school, and at sixteen carry a knife! Girls are much less trouble.”
My mother’s rejoinder cowed her arrogant advisors, and she was just as bold with us. She always told us to stand tall and even though she’d never gone to school, she encouraged our studies. “I have turned my mind to spiritual matters, my dears,” she would proclaim, “because I have nothing else to do. Religion is the preoccupation of those who have no work at hand.” And then she’d go on. “I have always lived a life of leisure—almost from the moment I was born. Your lives will be different. Of that I am sure.”
Perhaps.
Yet now that Nupur and I were married and now that I was learning what married life was, I wondered how much difference there was between us degree holders and our thwarted mother. Weren’t all three of us yoked to the drudgery of running a home? Hadn’t my mother once been the
bou
of the house, just like me? In Haroon’s home, all my degree gave me was a rather irrelevant superiority to Ranu, the younger
bou
, who had barely finished secondary school, let alone gone to college.
Tears were running down my cheeks. I wiped my eyes, walked to the telephone and dialed Haroon at work.
“What’s up,” he said brusquely.
I wanted to share my new perception, to declare myself in some way, but all I could manage was, “Nothing really.”
“Why on earth are you calling me then?” Haroon was astounded I would ring him up on a whim, and I was astounded that he could forget all the carefree hours we’d spent on the phone before we married. “Don’t call me unnecessarily,” he barked. “You know how busy I am.” Of course I knew—it seemed these days that he had not a second to waste. How could he have changed so drastically? Just as I put the phone back in the cradle, Amma swept into the room and, seeing me doing nothing, began to complain about Abba’s arthritis. He wasn’t feeling better, she said; in fact he was getting worse. What did she expect me to do about it? Haroon was the person who attended to his father’s aches and pains. Haroon would take Abba to the doctor, I suggested. I stood there, my face veiled, sighing deeply in order to show my concern about my dear father-in-law.
“It’s not enough just to be a
bou
,” Amma had once announced. “You have to deserve the title.” She herself had been her mother-in-law’s pet, had singlehandedly run her in-laws’ house without any hired help. I could hardly imagine it, looking at her now—she was such a ball of fat, sitting idle most of the day, walking with such heavy steps. Now she was rubbing her back. “I have such aches and pains,” she moaned. “I want Rosuni to give me a massage, but then who’ll cook our supper?” I knew what she wanted and I went to the kitchen, sent Rosuni right to her, and began the
cooking on my own. It was not that I begrudged Amma a massage—I’d done it once. Such a mountain of flesh! That night we sat down to leftovers.
“Why haven’t you cooked?” Haroon demanded, making a face.
“I couldn’t find the time,” I said. “I’ve spent the entire day pressing the pain from your mother’s legs.”
“There’s a saying in Bangla,” Haroon said, irritably. “‘A woman who cooks always finds time to put up her hair.’”
“Giving a massage to one’s mother-in-law and putting up one’s own hair are hardly the same thing,” I snapped back, “are they?”
“You wouldn’t begrudge your own mother a massage!”
“My mother doesn’t suffer aches and pains.”
“What if she did?”
“She would take an aspirin and lie down.”
“Aspirin and a nap are not the only answers to the problem.”
It was clear Haroon had spoken the last word on the matter, and so I bit my lip. Months before, I would have contradicted him. How well I now knew that medicines were not the panacea for every physical discomfort! Wasn’t it true that the pills he had given me had not stopped my vomiting?
With Rosuni massaging Amma, Sakhina doing the laundry, and Ranu chopping the cauliflower, the cooking was left to me. Ranu was the younger
bou
and she knew very well that I as the elder had greater responsibility, and though Dolon swanned into the kitchen every few minutes, as Haroon’s sister and the mother of the first grandchild, she
had no domestic duties whatsoever. If the baby cried, she’d announce, “Somaiya is hungry,” and come running to me and I would hasten the cooking. When I had supper underway, I went back to Abba’s room to offer him a cup of tea before supper and inquire about Amma’s aches and pains. Had the massage helped? No, she was still in pain.
When it was time to eat, I summoned Haroon’s brothers from the television room where they were watching a Bollywood film; Ranu was fiercely crocheting in a corner of the room. “Lunch is ready,” I announced, wondering how my sister
bou
found so much of interest in needlework.