Hearing his words, my body went limp, the silken sari dropping from my shoulders, from my hips, pink and gold crumpling to the floor. I stumbled toward the bed to steady myself. Haroon thought I’d pushed him into marriage because I was pregnant! In one terrible moment, everything turned upside down—my home, my existence in my husband’s family. A gale of agony swept away safety and certainly any joy I felt at the presence of the child in my womb.
Feelings of suspicion had been brewing in Haroon since our first night together. I was a virgin, but I had not bled. I remembered now Haroon fussing over the sheets to find a stain as I took in the pain of my first lovemaking.
Now, he was looking at me strangely. “You were lying then, weren’t you,” he said, “taking those painkillers to make a show of your virginity!” As I listened to him, I almost doubted myself. In the months of our courtship, he had come to know all my friends. Often, on the spur of the moment, my friends and I would come to his office and he’d take the afternoon off to drive us far into the Garo hills. They all adored him. “What a gentleman!” they’d exclaim, and I’d
turn to him and say, “What do I need a gentleman for! I have a man to love.” My friends had already decided I’d be happy with Haroon. “Ah, you are lucky,” Nadira often gushed. “I wish I had a man like Haroon!”
But this group of friends was a gang of both boys and girls, and Haroon had seen how freely we went around town. I now understood that he was thinking I had made love with Subhash or Arzu, and that, pregnant by one of them, I’d pushed him to marry me, a rich man and a better catch than either of them. I could see it burning like an ember in his stony eyes, feel it as his gaze pierced my body, burrowing into my womb where he was certain Subhash or Arzu had planted his seed, where he could almost see a fetus gaining human shape, a nose that resembled the nose of Subhash, a brow that mimicked Arzu’s brow. Seeing myself as Haroon saw me, I almost believed I was a degraded woman, a wily slut who had betrayed her husband, manipulating him into marriage. I felt a wave of disgust at what his jealousy had provoked in my imagination.
Suddenly I was terrified I had actually slept with Subhash or Arzu. Locking myself in the bathroom, I saw in the mirror a face that was not my own. In the light of Haroon’s insistence, I saw a low despicable creature who had played a secret game of love with someone other than her husband, who had taken her place on the wedding piri not as a virgin but as a woman pregnant with a child not her husband’s. I began to feel sorry for Haroon and to loathe Subhash and Arzu, dear friends suddenly turned secret lovers. I persuaded myself that at any moment Subhash would scale the garden wall, that Arzu would appear and rape me in the corridor
leading to the front parlor. I could feel the heat of mortification rise to my face.
Yet, in spite of this power Haroon held over me, or perhaps because of it, I loved him and him alone. It was from Haroon that I’ d learned the lessons of love on our wedding night, not from some errant lover. But now, because he had lost faith in me, I was too frightened to declare the extent of my love and desire, to tell Haroon that I’d married him quickly not to legitimize a pregnancy but because of a pledge I’d made to my father. How much I wanted my husband to understand that even now, in spite of all the misunderstanding of our first weeks together, it was him I desired and loved, for him that I forced my reluctant body out of bed in order to cook for his family, for him and a dream of our future that I chatted with Hasan, Habib, and Dolon whether I liked it or not, for the vision of happiness born in our marriage bed that I kept my head covered for his parents and stood in silence for their guests.
Once, before we were married, Haroon had taken me to the house of a business colleague who was away in Dhaka. As we entered the empty foyer, he took me into his arms. “There’s no one here to disturb us,” he said.
“So?”
“I’ll make lots of love to you!”
“Now?”
“I’ll love you completely.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean I’ll love you entirely, bring our love to culmination.”
“But I have to go now. I have to be home.”
I thought Haroon had immediately understood that I had no desire to be a mere peccadillo. “Do you take me for a moron?” he said. “I would never seduce you without your consent.” He lit a cigarette and gave me a mysterious smile, resting his hands on my shoulders. “We can postpone all of this until after the wedding. I was just testing you.”
“Testing me?” He was no longer smiling enigmatically and he had a satisfied grin on his face.
“I know now for sure that you are a good girl, a woman of virtue,” he said. His words made me uncomfortable. I saw no distinction between girls who slept with boys and girls who did not. Why was it that girls were to blame when it took two to play the game? Hadn’t Shipra and Dipu had a sexual relationship before they married? Weren’t she and Dipu both responsible? When Haroon was madly caressing me in that empty house, I felt the heat of my body rise. I had wanted him to touch me all over, and if I hadn’t been so hard pressed to get home early, I might not have rebuffed him. What could be wrong with two young bodies coming together?
Haroon hadn’t let me leave quite as soon as I would have liked. “What’s the hurry,” he’d said.
“I have to take Kakima to the hospital,” I replied.
“Who is Kakima?”
“Subhash’s mother.”
“Why you? Can’t someone else do it?”
“There are others, but she wants me to do it.”
“And so you go running instead of staying with me! Why can’t you refuse her? Call and tell her you’re busy.”
Strictly speaking, Haroon was correct. Kakima could easily have asked someone else to take her to the hospital; the appointment was just a checkup. But she was family. She and Subhash and his brother Sujit had stayed at our place for almost two months when Subhash and I were at school. She loved me like a mother would, and Subhash and I often played at being twins (he was sixteen days older than me). The arrangement had come about when Subhash’s father, Nitun, had decided to move to Calcutta and asked my father to buy his property. My father refused, but instead offered to help with money—he and Nitun were lifelong friends, and Baba was upset that Nitun was even thinking of leaving Wari, but Nitun insisted on the move and sold the property cheaply. There were farewells, but just on the verge of departure, Nitun developed chest pains. Very quickly, his heart weakened, and when he suddenly died, Baba advised Kakima against moving to Calcutta.
And so Kakima rented a place next to us and Baba became her protector and guardian to her children. Subhash and his family were not, therefore, merely neighbors. Though she did sewing to maintain herself and her sons, Kakima was always there when we needed her. She sent the boys to a good school in the city, but when it came time for Subhash to go to college she couldn’t afford it. Baba paid the costs until Subhash got his MA and became the man of the house. I met Arzu though Subhash. They had become close friends in spite of the fact that Arzu was from a very rich family. None of this ever stood in the way of their friendship or of Subhash and me descending on Arzu’s elegant
Gulshan house for an afternoon meal. Arzu was a playmate whose hair we pulled, whose back we thumped, and whom we teased to no end. Arzu and Subhash were my childhood friends, just like Nadira and Chandana, with whom I was free and easy.
Then I found myself in love with Haroon, a business-man. I hadn’t intended to fall in love with someone who had money. Nor did I know the world from which Haroon came. I fell for his looks, his voice, and the way he spoke—the memory of it moves me even now that I understand it was not his everyday voice. He certainly no longer spoke to me that way once we were married, in that voice wet with feeling.
As I sat there in the bathroom, taking stock of the past few days, my mind throbbed with scattered, panicked thoughts. Everything was topsy-turvy. My life was being pulled down into a tornado, a gathering storm. I had managed pretty well, I’d always thought. But what I felt coming toward me was utterly unfamiliar, and I was too young to understand that my husband’s irrational behavior had nothing to do with me, that he was in the grip of a monstrous obsession of which not even he was conscious. I had never felt such confusion and fear. What was I to do now?
6
H
aroon took me to the Dhanmundi clinic for the abortion. We’d told the family nothing and they thought we were out visiting friends. I had tried hard to talk to Haroon. “Look, it’s our first baby, we can’t do this . . . how can you be so wrong about your own flesh and blood? You’re making a terrible mistake and you are humiliating me with these suspicions.” I pleaded with him, reaching for his hands, but he jerked away, threw me off, pushed me toward the closet where my clothes were and told me to dress fast. I cried and cried, hanging onto the closet door. But Haroon pulled at me and said, “Change into fresh clothes, quick now!” I grabbed one of his hands and placed it on my belly. “This is your baby. You are killing your own child.”
“I want to.” Haroon’s voice was harsh.
“But the baby is mine too. Have I no say in the matter? I won’t go—I won’t have it ripped from me,” I cried out. But I knew I had no choice. I was, as Haroon said, his wife, and therefore contracted to do whatever he told me to do, no matter how cruel. I was at his feet begging,
weeping. But he shrugged me off. “Stop making an exhibition of yourself!”
His choice of words did not surprise me. I had no doubt now that Haroon was unreachable. I finally dressed and followed him quietly, wiping my tears.
“Why do you want to abort?” the doctor asked before I was taken into the operating room. Why indeed? I looked to Haroon.
“It’s highly inconvenient for us to have a child now.”
“What’s the problem?” the doctor asked. I could tell he believed that no man in his right mind would want to abort his wife’s first pregnancy.
“We have no choice.” Haroon said. He packed all his emotion into those few words. The doctor sighed.
“She’s your wife?”
“Of course she’s my wife,” Haroon sputtered.
“Then why,” the doctor continued, “do you want to abort the pregnancy?”
I was afraid Haroon would tell the doctor he wasn’t the baby’s father, but instead he smiled enigmatically.
It was as if I was shrouded in a fog of silence. All feeling in my sinews was suspended, my body like mist beneath skin and bones, as if I no longer existed but had escaped from the prison of the physical to some obscure realm beyond human reach.
I was not put under general anesthesia, and so I watched as the doctor scooped from my insides the gore which would in time have given way to my child’s shape. The local anesthetic numbed me and I stared, dazed, at the spilling of the clotted blood, the vital fluid. If someone had found his way
into my heart just then, he would have discovered a sticky lump of blood there too, but I could hear the doctor declaring the operation a success. “The womb has been thoroughly cleaned out. There is nothing left.”
Haroon smiled, paid the doctor, and came to me. He sat next to me in the recovery room as I dozed. A couple of hours later, he drove me home. He announced to everybody that I had been ill, that I must be given hot milk, plenty of fluid. Members of the family took turns sitting next to my bed, giving me medicine or tea, even though Haroon assured them my illness was not serious, that I’d be well “in a matter of days.” In the morning he kissed me lightly on the lips before he left for the office.
I hadn’t been cared for this way for a long time, and, with relief, I came to the conclusion that Haroon was, in his own way, fond of me. Even so, I couldn’t reconcile this new knowledge with what I had come to recognize as his deep mistrust of me. I couldn’t fathom that he could imagine I would deceive him, pass off his child as someone else’s! And if I was actually the cunning slut he imagined, why hadn’t he turned me out of the house or dumped me onto the street with society’s refuse? Then I remembered my mother once explaining to me how a man’s desire differs from a woman’s. “No matter how much you are loved,” she said, “you are his possession, his territory.” At the time I dismissed her as old-fashioned, but now her words returned and strangely, they comforted me. Suddenly it made sense that Haroon was giving me medicine rather than showing me the door. As the pain lessened, I saw the trouble he’d gone to—all the bottles of medicine arranged neatly in a row on my bedside
table—and heard the concern in his voice as he reminded me over and over that I was not to miss a dose. I watched him closely. He was not smiling that mysterious smile anymore, though I saw traces on his face of the self-satisfied look he got when he talked about letting go a laborer at his factory whom he had caught in the act of secretly disposing of machine parts.
The family took my illness as being related to my stomach. Looking sad, Dolon remarked, “It’s not good,
bhabi
, to be ill so much! Husbands get fed up.” My sweet, innocent sister-in-law Dolon, pure as air, always laughing! She could say what she wanted, but if she did not take care of me, Haroon would get angry. And if I did not recover or if Ranu got sick, she and Amma would be without a
bou
and stuck with all the housework. Amma never stopped grumbling if Rosuni got sick—and Rosuni was forever panicked that she would displease her mistress and lose her job. Temporarily, I was free of those worries. Dolon could not push me to get up and get busy. My misery was a kind of triumph: there was not a single person in the household who could now punish me, hassle me or do away with me.
Little Ranu came to visit me. Sitting at my feet, she sighed. She suffered herself from abdominal pains, but did anyone rush to her bedside? And Rosuni! Sitting hour after hour on the cold floor, she declared that to get well, I need only brush a plantain leaf against my belly then destroy it by fire. I did my best to smile at the poignancy of her good intentions.