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Inside

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Short Story: Peace for O-Lan

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Poetry: The flute I would leave behind for my Daughter

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Arts & Letters

Saturday, March 5, 2016

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Remembrance: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Send your submissions to: anl@dhakatribune.com

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Arts & Letters

16

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Short story

Peace for O-Lan n Urmi Masud

A

ll of a sudden I started writing poems. They came to me. But now they are gone.

One or two got published at the beginning. But afterwards when a phone call came from an acclaimed man, who expressed wonderment at my poems, they left me. I understood very limited things belong to you.

Like the time when I was sitting at the doctor’s and I had to throw up. At that time my husband was sitting next to me, holding my hand. He couldn’t help himself. It is not that simple, holding hand in public – a Bangali wife and a Bangali husband. Yet he did it because he couldn’t remember where he was. It was similar to when we are in bed and he never objects to my closed eyes.

“Congratulations!” the lady doctor said.

I don’t remember her name but she is a renowned doctor. My husband would make sure I saw the best doctor in town. He is one of those who never forget to ask if I’m alright – if and when I stumble. He always walks behind me with a palm resting on my waist, asexually. He always says “Thank you” in English. He pours his own glass of water at the breakfast table.

“Now, it will be a regular occurrence, the morning sickness. If you are lucky you may not get any. It is not that rare, the absence of it.”

My husband held my hand, a strong grip, almost crushing.

It was the first time I felt his hold on me. Most of the time I don’t remember the man he is. I didn’t look at him. I knew exactly what he was feeling. It was not my love for him that made him transparent. It was actually simple – because it was predictable. It was the cycle – birth, name, parents, institutions in the form of school, college and university, stamp-papered degrees, job in a tall building, salary that pays a dowry, marriage, children and it starts all over again. The cycle goes on. He has done his duty.

That was the exact moment I had to get up and run to the bathroom. I needed to throw up. Not because of the morning sickness – no.

I looked at the mirror

}

There was a man in my bed now – legally; and he was satisfied.

I must be acceptable now

afterwards. I stared at the thirtyfive-year old face that had caused me so much fear. The frightening specter of youth that had been slipping off my fingers – I seemed to have defeated it. It followed with the memory of the time when I had wanted to hold on to this face at the age of thirtythree. Was it still there? I couldn’t recognize its shadow. True, I was no longer the thirty plus unmarried daughter. It must be alright for me to be myself now.

There was a man in my bed now – legally; and he was satisfied. I must be acceptable now.

“Riya! Are you alright?” drifted in the concerned voice of my husband.

His baritone is what often causes people to do exactly what he wants. Yet, when he uses it on me it is always whispering. As if I might flicker out if he exhales.

I have noticed that about him.

Whether I forget him sitting right next to me or I turn my face away as he attempts a kiss, he always holds his breath.

He has a specter too; it seems, unfamiliar to me.

“Umm…may I come in?”

“No.” I left it at that. I knew that would be sufficient.

He would not push any further. Somehow, he knows I am incapable of recognizing sympathy – his, anyway.

“I am right outside.” He said after a pause.

That shocked me. That was the first time in our three years

marriage he exerted himself. He didn’t leave it to silence only. I was startled and stared at the closed bathroom door. The room felt smaller.

I remembered the day I had packed my suitcase and left my in-laws’ house without a word. Nothing melodramatic had been at play. My in-laws are respectable people who married their bright and only engineer son to a highly educated, ageinappropriate woman. They had all the methodical reasons behind their choice that sanctifies arranged marriage – a daughter of respectable government officials, renowned family, own establishment in Dhaka, moderate Muslims, no known boyfriends. So they were incapable of stopping me when I had left their place, without an explanation, to my husband or my shocked parents. My husband showed up at my parents’ house the next day – luggage included.

A month later, we moved into our own flat close to my workplace.

At that time my best friend said I was very lucky. No man would do so much for his wife. I didn’t smile at her. Her husband had spent all his savings in order to save his ancestral home which eventually his younger brother took from him. My friend’s mother-in-law now lives with the younger son. We were having slushy and she was making queer faces. She never was a slushy drinking type, my best friend.

She liked milk tea boiled twice over. She refused using the end of her dopatta to wipe her nose. I offered her mine if it suited her.

When we began our life, my husband made a point of not doing certain things. He never attempted to call out my name after he had knocked on my locked bedroom door. He never asked me if dinner was ready whenever the table remained empty after nine. He always made sure we got a taxi – not a CNG – when we went on dinner dates.

He bought a Toyota X Fielder when it was time.

In a way, he never tried to exist for me. He somehow knew we only shared a body like regular passengers taking the same bus, now and then, in ritual alienation.

Until … that day.

I opened the door and walked past him. He followed me.

We went back to the doctor’s chamber. The doctor began again.

My hands were trembling. I had to turn them into fists.

My husband sat down next to me. He reminded me of an immobile object. I suddenly realized this was where it all changed. There was an inevitability to us at that moment and it was inescapable. The world within and outside recognized him and his claim to what was inside me. And they had already decided I would be a mother.

There was no denying that fact.

And it empowered him. Not because he knew the truth about

me. But because he knew I was incapable of stopping this.

That could have been a moment of triumph for him if he were a vindictive man. But I know this man. He only recognizes the traditional. He is the product of the cycle. He is not capable of vindictiveness where he can hold my very womb against me.

That requires originality.

It requires a need to suppress rage, calculation afterwards and execution in the precise moment.

No. For him, it was duty.

I would have felt him if he existed. Rage has a searing quality that exudes presence. I would have been keen to seek out the eyes of a man who is capable of exacting revenge if I kept them closed when he needed them most. But not for a man who performs his duty to his body and to mine, to his future and to mine.

There is no shattering a man of this component. Therefore, there is no chance of rebuilding either.

He is a man, granite like and I am, impregnated, with a child, that is his.

I looked at the doctor. She smiled at me. She trusted – no – she believed me to be happy.

She was certain this was exactly what I wanted. Sitting next to my five feet seven inch tall, fairtoned, presentable, composed husband. Any woman’s dream come true – an undeniable man whose Blackberry buzzed every other minute because he was needed insistently. The amber on

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Arts & Letters

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Poetry

The flute I would leave behind for my daughter

}

Ruby Rahman

My husband sat down next to me. He reminded me of an immobile object. I suddenly realized this was where it all changed. There was an inevitability to us at that moment and it was inescapable. The world within and outside recognized him and his claim to what was inside me. And they had already decided I would be a mother. There was no denying that fact. And it empowered him

his finger glistened, the ring that I never chose for him, the one that my socialite cousin decided was suitable for him when my parents needed the engagement ring. His Omega that he bought from the USA, the one that he had asked me about while I was staring at my Starbucks latte – and I had nodded – without looking. A dream, it seems, has come true for all of those who surround us and look at us. At that moment I had let everyone have a say in the matter. That was my life.

I couldn’t feel my insides. It was only a month and a half.

I was stagnated. The walls that kept me in my day-to-day existence were not concrete. The reason our body shrinks with age is not because our spinal cord loses strength – it is because gravity pulls us toward the earth while the atmosphere keeps an invisible pressure on our body.

In this perfection that was me and my husband, I was capable of playing the part but incapable of becoming the act. In all my neglect, somehow my husband refused to believe me. For some faith, deeply rooted in him, he persisted in becoming the act.

He only saw a woman, not a being, capable of denying the title and molding the frame into something that can be defined as unwomanly or better associated with adjectives like cruel, heartless, unfeeling.

In order to finish this story I may have to give a reason why what happened next happened at all. Yet just as acceptance ruins the flow of poetry, it might tarnish the idea of me, if I attempt

to sanctify the woman – the wife, the mother, the lover. Instead, it would be easier if one hated me for not trying to be any of them.

If I refuse, how hard would it be to exist?

The moment I felt fear when I asked this question, I realized the truth.

Poetry never died in me.

I wrote it for the wrong reasons.

Have you ever found yourself at the mercy of someone who didn’t understand the scale of your defeat? Would you allow such a defeat that only you are aware of the depth of your fall?

Like when you were waiting for a gale to throw you off the edge but instead a startling whisper makes you stumble over?

One of the novels that I hated most was The Good Earth. I would like to believe people read such great classics to find a sense of self. Reading this novel left me crippled inside. Not because of empathy, no. Simply because O-Lan could lay a claim to her space no matter how many walls her world raised around her. She could even contain her world in a single pearl and it enraged me.

Her world could shift from a big front to a small corner in the blink of an eye. She refused to claim any ownership to this space that she structured for her husband.

She made me feel small.

My best friend called me couple of days after the visit to the doctor. My morning sickness had gotten worse. I couldn’t tell her. But she had a lot to tell me.

“I have a very boring news to give you,” she said. I didn’t

respond. I always tried my best to make her feel that her experiences mattered to me. She always felt I was the rebel and my friendship made her look like one. She had a morbid fascination for stories that made my tone bitter over the phone.

I was contemplating a piece of lime.

“I am pregnant,” lingered her voice.

“Why would it be a boring news?” I was genuinely surprised.

“This is so mundane. I know you don’t like this sort of … ” I groped for the fallen thread. “… this sort of?”

“You know. Triviality.” She is a university teacher and likes to use technicality.

I hung up the phone.

It took some time for me to realize that she is still my friend not because she can love me but because she can be jealous of me.

I looked at my hand that held the piece of lime. I was told it is not wise to eat bitter things.

What was it that created numbness? Something must have been in the past to create this lack of entitlement. I hovered over the possibility of being a woman, a daughter, a wife, a mother. I chose to have a right to make a choice.

My husband was very sympathetic. He regretted the miscarriage.

I don’t know what it was that slipped out of my inside. I want to believe and trust and feel that I exercised my right. l The writer is a poet, playwright and short story writer.

I wonder, what can I leave behind for my daughter!

I am in my late fifties.

I do not have the ability to buy a flute that I would offer her when I would leave this world.

My mother had wonderful bright fingers

that danced upon the keys of pianoShe glowed like a tiger seen in the forest

on a moonlit night.

She held up the glorious arrogance of

the mount kanchanjangha As she stood upright.

But keeping aside all those She gave me a shawl-An ancient worn-out shawl Which she inherited from her father- in -law.

I wrapped up my entire world with this wrapper

in winter and in wet days, In the days of happiness or days full of dismay.

The houses these days are cloudy and filled with clouds.

The cold winter wind always trespasses into the house With endless effort I somehow manage to protect myself

with that worn out shawl.

As a star-studded sky The old shawl is gradually getting filled up

with numerous holes.

I have not inherited my mother’s instinctive skill of mending; Cotton derived from lamb’s wool That could have kept the shawl warm

is unknown these days in the market.

I can only faintly remember a flicker of fire That I found glowing inside my mother.

Nowadays the houses are too much cloudy Our days are ridden by bone-chilling cold.

How can I assure myself that My daughter would be provided with adequate warmth

by that old worn out shawl ?

Or should I ask my mother for that indomitable holy fire That I found burning within her !

February, 1997 Translated by the poet

Ruby Rahman, born in 1946 in Dhaka, received her BA and MA degrees in Bangla, English and Psychology from Dhaka University, and for many years taught English at a college in Dhaka. She has several books of poetry to her credit and is one of the few luminaries in the feminist literary tradition of Bangla literature. Her poems, translated by Carolyne Wright and Syed Manzoorul Islam, have appeared in Chelsea, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry, and in an anthology of Bengali women’s poetry edited by Wright, Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women (White Pine Press, 2008). The following poem is reprinted by arrangement with the poet.

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Saturday, March 5, 2016

Arts & Letters Remembrance

What Sultana dreamt of On the occasion of International Women’s Day, to be observed on March 8, we take a look at Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s writing in which she offered a brilliant feminist critique of our culture

n Rifat Munim

W

hen the west was preparing for the World War I that would once again demonstrate the destructiveness of male militarism; when most of the Asian and African countries, having dealt with a Europeanstyled renaissance, were facing the dilemma of whether or not to continue the colonial legacy, a Bengali woman in then undivided India constructed an ideal world where the men are forced to remain inside the house and look after household chores while the women are responsible for ruling the country known as Ladyland, steering it towards prosperity by scientifically harnessing natural energy sources.

The female author in focus is Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the feminist utopian short story, referred above, is Sultana’s Dream, the first of its kind in the whole world, which was followed a decade later by the much better known novel Herland by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Rokeya’s story was written in English and published in a Madras-based English periodical called “The Indian Ladies’ Magazine” in 1905. It is not known if Gilman read Rokeya’s story, but considering Gilman’s storyline which lies in establishing women’s equal rights, one would be apt to say her story owes much to Rokeya’s.

Rokeya was preceded by the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote The Woman’s Bible in 1895. It still would not be inappropriate to say she was the first female writer in whom converged the different narrative modes of fiction and nonfiction that feminist writers made use of in different periods of history to assert their rights. In the feminist tradition of Bangla literature, her achievement is equally towering in prose fiction and essay. Yet, it was not until recently that her works are being read with utmost seriousness at home and abroad, especially in many American and European universities.

Rokeya, who was born on December 9, 1880, into a conservative Zamindar Muslim family in Rangpur, was denied

access to formal education altogether. But it was from her generous elder brother, who believed in women’s education, that she learnt Bengali and English. In 1898, she was married to Syed Sakhawat Hossain, an Urdu-speaking civil servant from Bhagalpur in Bihar. A deputy magistrate by profession, Sakhawat Hossain was liberal and progressive; he encouraged his wife to read literary works from all over the world. Within a few years of her marriage, she showed a flair for literature by publishing some of her essays and the celebrated Sultana’s Dream.

Unfortunately, her husband died in 1909. Meanwhile, she had given birth to two daughters who died in infancy. After her husband’s death, a dispute arose with her stepdaughter’s husband and she decided to leave Bhagalpur and settle in Kolkata. Despite all her personal losses, she began to continue her literary and social activities in Kolkata more unflaggingly than ever before.

She soon cut a figure among readers for her essays, most of which were compiled in Matichur.

Among these, “Strijatir Abanati” (Subjugation of Women), “Ardhangi” (The Better Half), “Griha” (The House), and “Borka” (The Veil) are her strongest polemics against patriarchy.

Abarodhbasini (The Secluded Ones), published in 1929, which is a collection of journalistic vignettes of purdah observance, also struck a chord with many readers.

Much like modern feminist theorists (Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir), she strongly argued in the “Strijatir Abanati” that the centuries-old perception of a woman’s identity was not natural to her being, it was rather an ideological product of the patriarchal social system constructed to shut women inside home and force them to remain in purdah, a custom which does not allow women to appear before men. On the one hand, she questioned the emasculating way of associating a woman’s identity with jealousy, incompetence, weakness, irrationality and lack of intellect and on the other, vehemently reprimanded women for unthinkingly acquiescing to men’s demands. She clearly pointed out that illiteracy

and unemployment are the main reasons behind women’s subjugation. But what made her essays stand out distinctly was the logical manner in which she presented her arguments.

When this logical strain was combined with wit and sarcasm, the outcome was enormous and it immediately attracted a huge readership both supporting and opposing her views.

A critical reading, however, reveals that Rokeya’s uncompromising attitude towards the excesses of purdah observance waned a little in “The Better Half.”

The extremely conservative milieu which triggered huge

reaction among Muslim readers, especially against her stance on purdah, made her realise that she would have to rebel from within, not by rejecting it altogether, but by being a part of this culture. So, she eventually attenuated her stance on purdah and justified it on religious grounds.

But she never wavered from the principal aim of women’s equality in all spheres of social and family life, especially in education and employment. She always stressed the importance of women’s mental powers by which she meant a resurrection of selfconfidence in women about their worth and equality.

In her essays, her thoughts were constrained by patriarchal ideologies prevalent in her time. But fiction offered her ample opportunities to explore the boundless potentials of her imagination. That’s why Sultana’s Dream boldly challenges all existing norms and customs, including those reinforced by religion. It enacts a reversal of traditional gender roles by associating shyness with masculinity, and boldness and intellectual prowess with femininity. To some it may seem that she unchained women but chained men. Obviously, the utopia in Sultana’s Dream is constructed in reaction to contemporary history, especially to the savage destructiveness unleashed the world over by male militarism. So her Sultana hoped if the reins of the world are passed over to women, hatred and destruction would be replaced by love and equality. Towards the end of the story, when Sultana asks Sara about the religion of Ladyland, the latter replies: “Our religion is based on Love and Truth. It is our religious duty to love one another and to be absolutely truthful. If any person lies, she or he is….”

“Punished with death?”

“No, not with death. We do not take pleasure in killing a creature of God, especially a human being.

The liar is asked to leave this land for good and never to come to it again.”

Padmaraag, her Bangla novel, is rooted in the real world, however. It is not artistically perfect. Fraught with message, its structure is somewhat untidy. But its strength lies in its commitment to the feminist cause. It evokes the camaraderie of sisterhood felt by characters through shared concerns and experiences.

Siddiqua, a courageous female character in the novel, slams the door on her husband, much like Nora, to emancipate herself from the confines of the house. Leaving her husband forever, which in itself is an act of rebellion, she embarks on a mission to prove that women too can fight back and reclaim their rights, that they too can be independent, although the world in which they want to achieve this is hostile towards them.

The writer is Editor, A&L, Dhaka Tribune.