*****

Originally published in Forum: http://thedailystar.net/forum/2011/july/the_economics.html
(here with translations)

The Economics of Our Loins

Life, they say, and death, for sure, are beyond our control. Just like my worth. “Ajke tumi 100,000 taka, kalke 50,000, porshu 25,000, aar tar porer din … NAI!” is what he said to me when I told him I am in my twenties and not interested in getting married at the moment. “Boyosh toh are kom holona!” he said, “Taar upor dekhteo eto bhalona. Kaalo. Shomoy thakte thakte biyeta kore felo. Eto porashuna-ghuraghuri-chakri-bakri diye ki hobe?”(You’re not getting younger! On top of that you’re not that good-looking. Dark-skinned. Tie the knot while you still have time. What are you going to do with all this education-travelling-work?)

A couple of years back, I had gone to this monk with flowery expectations – spiritual detoxification, carnal detachment, cathartic solace … blah blah blah. Clearly, I got none. And if you’re thinking he stopped with the spiel on my age, looks and depreciating market value, you are mistaken. He ended with a death threat.

He gloated about how he has Jinns; how an elephant once bowed down to him; how someone was once rude to him and he broke that guy’s neck just by lightly stroking it and immediately healed it with another stroke; how a recovering alcoholic once promised him he’d never touch liquor again, but did, and died. Yes, he told me the guy died solely because he broke his promise. I lost my attention somewhere around him telling me how he cured his own “purushali okkhomota” with his special powers.

I do a pretty neat job of zoning out while making a person think I am paying attention. So I launched my tried and tested method of staring and nodding at skewed frequencies. All of a sudden I snapped out of my daze when he said “Shotti toh?” (Really?) I just smiled not knowing what he was talking about. He continued, “Ei chaar deyaler moddhe bole jokhon diso, tomar agami bochhorer jonmodiner moddhe biye na korle kintu tumi moray jaba. Aami chaina tumi moro, kintu amar kacche je protiggya bhange, shey moray jaye.” (Since you have made a promise within these four walls, you will die if you don’t get married by your next birthday. I don’t want you to die, but whoever breaks a promise made to me, does.)

But I didn’t say a word! He said my nod was my proxy for a verbal promise. Talk about backfire!

It has however been a couple of years since this encounter. Birthdays have come and gone, you still haven’t received a wedding invitation from me (I promise biriyani at my funeral), and I am still around. As is the unenlightened, inhuman and adamant malice this man represented — a contrived, persistent and rampant value index of a woman’s worth.

My experience with the monk is nothing out of the ordinary. He is like those aunties you meet during the wedding season, which is like a series of Black Fridays for the meat/marriage market. “Haate bhalo chhele ase” (I have a good boy at hand). Please aunty, keep your Tom Thumb in your purse. I’m no Thumbelina.

His forecast of my value being on a slippery slope runs parallel with the general practice of the commodification of women — that same bhanga record reminder of women’s diminishing marginal utility — the inversely proportional relationship between maturity and desirability. The only deviation from the norm in this case is that it came from a monk. But he is afterall, a product of this society. What this really was, was a reassertion of an abominable normalcy. Whether we have cut across all classes, religions, ethnicities in other ways or not, in terms of disseminating vulnerability and objectification of women, we have.

Normalcy as reminder that our bodies are not wine and don’t get better with age; that flawed skin, vintage uterus, active and assertive vocal chords don’t make quality potpourri. It is the same normalcy that insists that women remain useful yet docile — functional, maternal, absorbent (popular as ‘tolerant’ in misogynist vernacular), obedient (“feminine”), subservient (‘soft type er’), silent; that asserts that we are at the disposal of others and it is alright for us to be treated however they want; that our bodies are something to be ashamed of, and that body parts are hierarchical; that normalcy kneads us into dough — play and edible.

*****

What is alarming is how unalarmed we often are. It is most pronounced in our dealings with children. I remember this conversation I witnessed when I was around eight or nine years old. A 3 year old boy had said “aami amar bouke fan er shathe jhulaye dibo,” (I will hang my wife from the ceiling fan) when one of his parents asked him “tomar bou jodi shoitan hoy ki korba?” (What will you do if your wife turns out to be evil?) “Kintu bou jodi shundor hoy, taile ki korba?” (But what will you do if your wife is pretty?) He had said, “taile ekta thappor marbo.” (in that case, I will slap her). I think I remember this conversation still because I found it disturbing then, but did not know why. Now, I am constantly reminded of it when I witness similar cutesy, seemingly harmless backdoor entrance to subconscious-building — othering the (female) partner, insisting on heteronormativity and most horrifyingly, normalizing violence.

On a popular talk show on NDTV, there was a debate on attire. One participant claimed that women should dress “modestly” and wear the hijab since they would otherwise be inviting trouble. She said, “When you walk by a bakery and you see all those pastries lined up, you say to yourself ‘I want that pastry! I want that pastry!’ So it only makes sense that if your body is revealed men will want it.” If I was on the show I would have asked her if I see a pastry, salivate, break into the shop, rob some and run off, how long the shopkeeper should be imprisoned for. Minus the fallacious and degrading logic of the argument, what is striking here, as is in most metaphorical conversations on women’s bodies, is how it is consistently equated with consumable items. When I was discussing this with a friend sometime back, she mentioned that during the anti-rape movement at Jahangirnagar University, a professor had remarked, “mangsher tukra shamne thakle kukur toh mukh dibei” (if chunks of meat are just lying around, naturally, dogs will want to taste them).

*****

The same sentiment comes through when a woman complains about a lewd remark made about her sleeveless top or when a rape victim is asked what she was wearing at the time of the incident. All these lean towards holding women as consumable items and provocateurs of that consumption, especially if they display no guilt about having a body.

I’m sorry I have arms, I really didn’t mean to. And if you can find it in your generous heart to ignore my ankles today, I promise I will put them away tomorrow.

What this also brings me to, is how problematic the language we use is. Let’s take “eve-teasing” as an example. A word that dilutes the gravity of an act that infringes on basic human rights — right to education, right to independence, right to mobility, right to life; that leads to self-mutilation, suicide and murder — is harassment. It’s torture. It’s violence. Similarly, “street Romeo” imbues a playful, almost romantic accent to the harassers. As far as I know, Eve was tempted not teased and Romeo was a lover. Calling harassers street Romeos is like calling Oedipus a momma’s boy.

Earlier last year, there was a fairly regular influx of reports on suicides and murders associated with sexual harassment. Elora (Madhya Nandipara) and Reshma (Sherpur) took their lives with pesticides when they could no longer tolerate the torture. Chand Moni (Kishoreganj) hung herself from the ceiling fan from the same reason.

Iti (Kalachandpur) quit school a year ago for the same reason, and then lost her parents to murder when they did not consent to marrying her off to her harasser. This form of harassment and the fatal eventualities that often accompany them aren’t new to us. In fact, I would also call the suicides murder, because the way I look at it, the social infrastructure provoked and enabled their deaths.

Once in Pabna, I met with a group of young girls who were compelled to change their courses of life to avoid harassment. Some quit school, some were married off soon after they hit puberty, and some before. All 25 girls in the room, regardless of age, were burkha and hijab-clad. Not only that, but of the very few girls and women that were actually visible on the streets, not a single one had an uncovered head. Conversation with the girls and locals revealed that their mobility is restricted by the Nakshal and Bahini goon-squads, as well as individuals who notoriously harass girls, especially in public spaces. The area’s low literacy rate and high rate of childhood marriage were attributed to “teasing.”

We haven’t come across as many stories on “eve-teasing” recently. Maybe it’s not the fad anymore. Tenacity can make something bland. And I suspect, we won’t read about Rumana or domestic violence after a while. It would probably become oh-so-five-minutes-ago five days later. We don’t really talk about the 13 year old girl who was gang-raped and has still not recuperated socially and emotionally. We probably don’t even remember her. Just the same way, Rumana will take a backseat in our zeitgeist very soon. Something else will come up and we will roar and howl for a while.

Our collective voices do a Mexican wave as if in a stadium. Fluid and rotational. Ebbing and tiding across galleries. It is of course not just ignorance or negligence. While a part of it is time and other constraints, another part of it is a culture of denial and a deviation from nuanced thinking. We believe in the arithmetic of visible fatal eventualities you see. No blood + no puss = no malady. No rape + no out-of-wedlock pregnancy = no problem.

It reminds me of that arts and craft show artist Mostofa Manowar used to host. In one episode he drew a line on a piece of paper and asked a participant to make it shorter without touching it. After the participant gave up, Manowar drew a longer line under it. I often feel, in evaluating our social circumstances, we play a similar game of relativity.

*****

I find flickers of self-gratifying, uninformed and unrefined “progressive thinking” simultaneously amusing and unnerving. Especially, when the “kintu/tobe” (but/however) arrives after a declaration of how wonderful it is to see women doing well for themselves, as a reminder to continue mollycoddling our male counterparts — our heroes and our babies: “…tobe jotoi modernity fodernity’r kotha bolo na keno, ekta kotha aami bolbo, meyeder khub smart hote hoy. Bujhte hobe chhelera alladi. Raag kore, distracted hoy. Meyeder dayitto manaye chola, bujhaye nawa.” (“…but no matter how much you talk about modernity, I want to say one thing; women need to be really smart. They need to understand men need to be pampered. They get angry and distracted. It is the responsibility of women to adjust themselves according and comfort and appease them). In a similar vein you hear “jedi meyeder borkot hoy na” (stubborn girls are never blessed), “jei shob meyera beshi golabaji kore, oder bhalo hoy na” (good things never happen to loud women), “meyeder beshi ambition bhalo na” (it’s not good for women to be too ambitious), etc. And then there is my all-time favourite — ‘olokkhi’ (inauspicious woman).

The Rumana Monzur case is an excruciating example of this mindset. Let’s do a little exercise. We will insert some of these adjectives into this story and try to find a happy ever-after:

It was really good to see independent Rumana pursue her academic ambitions with the support/permission of her liberal-minded husband Sumon. When Sumon, in a vein of alladi (childishness) asked Rumana to discontinue, jedi/teji/beshi ambitious (stubborn/fiesty/overtly ambitious) Rumana refused. Naturally then, raager mathaye (out of anger) adhkaana (half-blind) (one of Sumon’s excuses is he does not see well without his glasses, so he “might have” hurt her eyes), Sumon made Rumana full-kaana. Olokkhi Rumana was unable to manaye chola. We hear this wasn’t Sumon’s debut into physical expression of alladi. Rumana must have been jedi/teji/olokkhi for 10 years.

(I could also insert the “affair cholchhilo” (she was having an affair) bit into this, but even sardonically, I can‘t develop an appetite to accommodate it.)

The Canadian Bangladeshi community came in with a dilution plan in support of Rumana Monzur, complete with a character certificate. This testimonial is a reassertion of parameters and possibilities. Since she has managed to comply with an acceptable code of conduct, this incident is condemnable.

But what if Rumana wore short skirts, was an atheist and drank wine? What if she was loud, laughed too much and did not have that “childlike simplicity and innocence”? What if she was rude and ill-tempered? Would that make her less of a woman, mother, daughter, person? Would that make this crime less of a crime? If she did not abide by the said parameters, would/should there be a possibility to justify what happened?

What if she wasn’t Rumana? What if she was Romela, a village home-maker or Rozina, a domestic aid or Rahela, a slum-dweller? Would there even be a conversation?

They are venomous, these “buts.” They insinuate invitation and prohibit victims from reaching out and escaping abuse/harassment/torture. “But… she asked for it.”

I remember last year, when a 13-year old girl was gang-raped in Faridpur and escaped being married to the main perpetrator at the very last minute. The incident was recorded on a phone, along with an earlier recording of her conversing with one of the men. Smiling. When the story hit the papers, the OC of the area claimed, “kintu agey theke toh porichoy chhilo. Amra dekhsi ok ei loker shathe heshe kotha bolte” (but they knew each other from before. We have seen her speak to them amicably).

*****
There have been girls and women like the ones I mentioned before, and there will be more like them after. Not all of them will make it to the newspapers. Maybe we won’t know about the wife who is being tortured by her husband as I write this. We may not hear about the girl who is being molested as you read this. We probably will never know of the girl who stood by the doorstep, when you sent your last SMS, afraid to walk to school because of the eyes that will devour her on the way and the lecherous voice(s) that will haunt her for a very long time.

But we do know that we can’t rely on a constant supply of losses and losses of lives to shake up our zeitgeist. What good would it do if this attention is only a temporary and impulsive reaction to the moment’s malleability?

We know that women’s bodies are sites of violence and we need to shatter the foundations and tamper with the architecture of misogyny and patriarchy; of cosmetics of progress and half-hearted consolation.

We know when we are wronged, we are wronged; and there is no “but.” We don’t ask to be beaten. We don’t ask to be harassed. We don’t ask to be raped. We don’t ask to be blinded. We don’t ask to be burnt. We don’t ask to be afraid. We don’t ask to be silenced. We don’t ask to be murdered (even if it is called suicide).

We don’t ask for any of it.

Zakir Naik is a doctor by training. But that’s not what he is known for. It’s actually hard to describe him. His acolytes would call him a scholar of Islam — an aleem. But the traditional ulema, from both his native India as well as from elsewhere, don’t consider his scholarly bona fides. And in the way he uses the television and the English language, he isn’t like any traditional aleem either. One might say he is the closest thing in the subcontinent resembling an American televangelist. He says his mission is to reconvert the Muslim youth to the path of faith — not dissimilar to the American preachers seeking to create born again Christians.

Dr. Naik visited Dhaka in early December, giving a series of lectures. The reader would recall, that was a time when the hartal politics seemed to have made a return. It was also a time when the Indian film star Shah Rukh Khan’s Dhaka concert captured the attention of Dhakaites. Naik’s visit was overshadowed by these events. And yet, Naik’s visit may be portent of things to come in a more significant way than most other recent developments.

While the mainstream media has been rather silent about the implications of Dr. Naik’s visit, it has received some attention in the blogosphere. Consider the post ‘Zakir Naik er Bangladesh safar, rajju tey sharpavram?’ by Hasan Morshed in Bangla blog Sachalayatan1.

Morshed’s thesis is that Naik’s visit is problematic because it could hurt the war crimes trial. But Naik has as much to do with the war criminals of 1971 as Saddam Hussein had to do with Osama Bin Laden. The connections are laughable, except for their dangerous implications. In the case of war crimes trial, when progressive bloggers link Naik to the trial, they only support the war criminals’ claims that the entire trial process is an attempt to denigrate Islam. Progressives conflate the trial with other issues at their own peril. Nothing good can come of these kinds of intellectual mistakes.

In the English blog Unheard Voice, Khujeci_tomai takes a different approach.2 Her thesis is that there is an arc connecting Naik’s preaching with the fire and brimstone of the proponents of violent jihad. Theoretically, the connection is undeniable.

But in practice, how seriously should we take this? After all, the kind of stuff Naik says is also heard in thousands of mosques around the country on any given Friday. And the annual gathering in Tungi draws a far, far bigger crowd than anything Naik will get. If we were to take Khujeci_tomai’s fear seriously, would we not be wary of Tabligh Jamaat and the local mosques? Needless to say, if one were to worry thus, one would have a hard time in a 90% Muslim country.

So, what does Naik preach typically? Here is a direct quote:
Suppose my sister happens to be one of the unmarried women living in USA, or suppose your sister happens to be one of the unmarried women in USA. The only two options remaining for her are that she either marries a man who already has a wife or becomes public property.

Videos of his ‘lectures’ and ‘debates’ are widely available online.3 And there is of course the Peace TV, which can be viewed in most households in Dhaka.

Dr. Naik’s oratorical style follows a pattern. Let’s stick to his views on women for illustrative purposes.

First, the opponent’s words are twisted to perplex him (very rarely, if ever, her). This is followed by a few hard-hitting, unblinking punch-lines that convince the general audience (which usually applauds at this point). This is followed by the sentimental melodrama that reminds one of the classic Dhallywood dialogue — toder ki maa bon nei? By this time, the all-male audience has had a major morale boost because they feel like saviours, protectors and heroes — women are sexual beings so if men don’t marry them, they will go astray.

Then Naik takes it up a gear. Apparently, Americans are converting to Islam in droves — clearly this is great and any questioning of misogynistic interpretation of Islam is redundant. Of course, while talks about Islam degrading women, it’s the American ‘art and culture’ that degrades women and sells them — apparently only BMW and beauty pageants constitute art and culture. Of course, Islam won’t allow it (does that mean Islam is opposed to art and culture?) — more applause.

The big take away: women can’t do anything for themselves, if men don’t take care of them, they are doomed.

The arguments are like this: all cats have whiskers, your grandfather has whiskers, your grandfather is a cat. Needless to say, this fails Logic 101. And yet, Naik has his audience enthralled.

His facades make him terrifying. He claims to quote from various religious texts — a tolerant fellow, not a typical mullah. Fans gush over his memory and knowledge based on the fact that he is able to throw page numbers and verses at them effortlessly from memory. He holds up the books when he refers to them. Of course, no one really bothers to cross-check what he is saying?

A doctor by training, when he says ‘evolution is just a theory which became popular because it was against the Bible’, the crowd swallows hard. And he appeals to men’s base instinct, in English: if men don’t marry, women are doomed into prostitution — you are only here to save my brother!

He appeals to the ‘educated Muslim’. He is in a class (pun intended) of his own, so very unlike the typical mullah. He is the very model of a modern Muslim man!

But think about Naik’s message. He talks about women’s empowerment, but does not once mention self-sufficiency. He talks about women as if they are something to have ownership over. He says that men should assume the role of caregivers, automatically suggesting that women are inferior. He says it as if it is not only normal, but right. Not only does he assume and accept a patriarchal social system, but justifies it. He asserts, leaves out nuances and leaves no room for the listener to reflect and/or scrutinise.

And this message Naik peddles to the influential.

Language is a class statement and since his teachings are in English, we can safely assume that his followers would have had a certain level of education. When groups that are relatively less socio-economically vulnerable fall prey to ideology-induced vulnerability, it’s extra alarming since these are the people who have more space to manoeuvre free thought. In societies such as ours, tapping the classes is far more dangerous than tapping the masses. You control the top, you control them all.

Our political economy reality is that an ordinary farmer who believes in the local pir’s magic waters over medicine is at most a threat to his self and family. But if a businessperson/professional/politician chooses an Imam over a professor, it threatens the broader society because this person has more agency to execute his or her belief.

And this is also why, like Khujeci_tomai, we need to worry more about Naik than so many home-grown fanatics and fundamentalists who preach the same stuff. We don’t yet have a home-grown fundo who has the shikkhito facade. The most (in)famous Naik-like person in Bangladesh is Delwar Husseyn Sayeedi. And he has the accusation of being a war criminal hanging over him.

Naik, as we noted right at the beginning, is free of any 1971 baggage.

But why does the educated class of Bangladesh find what is supposed to be the opiate of the masses so appealing?

We seldom think about it, but if we thought for a moment, it would be self-evident how rapidly the Bangladeshi society is changing. Nowhere is this felt more acutely than among the urban educated folks, people who once used to call themselves shikkhito moddhobitto bhadralok. In any random conversation in any random social event, one can notice a nostalgia, a sense that something valuable is being lost even as people’s lives have improved materially. One doesn’t have to believe in Marx’s theory of alienation to recognise that capitalist-materialist social changes inevitably cause massive social disruptions.

Faced with the disconcerting pace of change, many find refuge in Naik. When worrying about how to raise children in the digital world, seeing the changing gender dynamics at home and abroad, facing difficult decisions about parent’s health, Naik’s simplistic messages resonate to. And some will go one step further and seek politics based on religion. Not necessarily violent politics. Perhaps perfectly legitimate, democratic, peaceful politics. But Islamist politics all the same.

And when the war criminals will be dead, when 1971 will not be in the living memory of 90% of the country, we will still have to contend with that politics. Yelling tui razakar will not help then.

In fact, it won’t help with Naik today. And that, dear reader, is the biggest trouble with Naik.

1. http://www.sachalayatan.com/hasan _murshed/35478.
2. http://unheardvoice.net/blog/2010/11/ 02/zakir-naik-2/.
3. An example is available here: http:// unheardvoice.net/blog/2010/11/05/for-fans-of-horror/.

All women, by virtue of being second-class citizens, live in exile. If you don’t believe me, ask Euripides. Exile to the south—the political south, the economic south, the social south, the sexual south. In a nutshell, the public south and the private south. This, I will call the First Exile.

Then, some find themselves in Second Exile. This is when we feel kicked out from within. The angry and melancholic recognition of being a minority. Exiled by and into realization. This is when we feel alienated, because most around us don’t seem to feel the same way. AKA, the “no-one-understands-me” drama-queen syndrome.

Some of these women remain cauldrons of bubbling wrath-potion, and some boil over and spill out to be rejected, ridiculed, misunderstood, labeled different, strange, or even too anal. Misfits in most “normal” circles, they are inmates of a soft alienation: the Third Exile.

Few others end up seeping through skins too porous to respond to the rage with sympathy or deflect with indifference at best. Some of these women are the writers I will be talking about. They burned. Then they burnt some. Such rude awakenings they were! Such strong antidotes to the system-infused sedatives, that they were banished from their own homes like witches on broomsticks with two buttons—”Out” and “Away.” These women are now in the Fourth Exile.

I think from the very preliminary onset of cognition, we live in fear of exile. “What will they think?” “What will they say?” “Would that be alright?” are all undercurrents of that very fear—the fear of being outcast and ousted. I don’t believe most overcome that fear, but many work against it. In spite of it.

If thou cannot be a gate-keeping defender of “the Faith/the System/the Man/the Machine,” thou shall be banished. No country for some women.

While 9/11 was a tragedy for the world, it turned out to be a blessing for the Eritrean government. It didn’t join the world in mourning or in its outcry against the debacle, but used the tragedy as an opportunity to silence thousands of voices of its own, especially in the independent media.

During this witch-hunt, media outlets were shut down and people were jailed. Journalist Sara Habtemichael found herself jobless and platformless when the papers she worked for were erased. Dearth of options directed her to a state-run paper—a government mouthpiece.

There was no room for a self-actualized journalist like her there, and there was no room for compromise in her. She left her job. There was no scope for free speech amid the foreboding fear of doom in Eritrea, and she had no will to gag her voice. She left her country. Had she stayed, her choices would have been limited—detained like many or disappeared like her brother, editor of the now non-existent Meqaleh newspaper.

“Martha” was the nurse she was named after. “Kuwee” is her adored middle name she was never allowed to go by in Ethiopia. It’s the name of an Oromo heroine, a heroine from the history of the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, a group that is severely marginalized.

Martha Kuwee Kumsa took to the streets in support of the Marxist government during the 1974 revolution. The high of what she felt was her process of “reclaiming history,” was soon replaced with the Red Terror of the military regime, when thousands of suspected “counter-revolutionaries” were detained, persecuted, and even executed.

She continued writing for an Oromo newspaper, urging women of her ethnicity to retain a firm grasp over their cultural traditions. To cut a long and harrowing story short, soon after her husband’s long disappearance, she was taken away for almost ten years to be kept away from her children and tortured.

She was never told what the official allegations against her were, but she knows her crime was fourfold: ethnicity, gender, beliefs, and expression. In spite of wanting to continue working for the Oromo people after her release, she chose exile—for her children. But she knows she is destined to move back to Ethiopia to pursue her cause. “My spirit is up. My wings are up, but I don’t know where I will be landing.”

When the Tudeh party members and its women’s organization were under attack in 1981, during continuation of the fundamentalist revolution of 1979, Saghi Ghahraman—poet, activist—fled Iran to live in Turkey as a refugee until 1987. She now lives in Canada, but her battle with the state continues from afar.

In 2007 Shargh, a leading Iranian reformist newspaper, was shut down for printing an interview of her. Havoc was wreaked when the conversation that was about literature proceeded to the topic of ethics and she argued for sexual freedom. Her lesbian identity has earned her criticism galore. Even from afar, her speech does not have the freedom to enter Iran.

Writer, librarian, scholar, editor and translator Fereshteh Molavi has been in exile since 1998. For her, it was a long haul to seek solace with a forced linguistic diaspora. In her essay “English Has Raped Me,” she writes how her need for opposing an authoritarian regime warranted her shifting base to a safe zone.

“Should a writer cross a border, it pleased me to think, she would be safe and secure in knowing that her wealth was within. When it would become time for me to cross the border, I thought, my mind and language were wealth invisible to ideological inspectors and worthless to customs officials. I crept into the sweet fantasy of bearing my home on my back forever like a snail.”

Emma Beltran has been in exile since 2002. She has been involved in the struggle of indigenous people of Mexico using poetry and popular theatre as props to communicate with women and children. She was a founding member of the first community radio station in Mexico’s history during the student strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1999.

She was kidnapped at gunpoint by four men on a busy street in Mexico City in March, 2001, and was subjected to physical and psychological torture by the Mexican National Army. Beltran was blindfolded the whole time.

The late 1960s saw a radical and political student movement at the University of the Phillipines. Petronila Cleto went into theatre organizing during this time, working with out-of-school youth and child education among the urban poor of Manila. Following Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law in the ’70s, which forced the student movement underground, she became a journalist.

Her investigative reporting on human rights stories, socio-economic issues, as well as feminist issues had gotten her recognition quite quickly. Her poetry and plays also revolved around themes of injustice and democratic rights. In the late ’80s, her reportage on a Marcos ally, who was terrorizing the journalists in the Visayan part of the archipelago, brought her a million-peso libel suit.

Although she managed to beat the libel suit, she could not bear being under constant surveillance, especially during the civil war, and acute censorship. She now works in Canada on a project to advocate for the journalists in her country.

Ameera Javeria—exiled women’s-rights journalist—fell prey to Islamist fundamentalists using religion as a springboard for valorizing their extremism. Shooed away by the threat of Sharia law, armed executioners of women’s rights, she now lives in exile in the United States. This, however, was not the beginning of her exile.

She remembers her family’s opposition to her chosen career in an essay. She recognizes their decision to be a consequence of an acknowledgement of women’s assertiveness being an unwelcome hiccup in a patriarchal peace. Her exile to the United States was a political and then geographical manifestation of her self-conceived exile, the one that comes with recognizing the self as an alien within his/her own paradigms. For her, it began with the realization that “to be a woman in Pakistan is to ask for a life of subservience.”

Add to this list Gordana Icevska, Kaziwa Salih, Sheng Xue, Jackleen Hanna, Zdenka Acin, Cristina Rossi…

Another person I want to talk about here is Taslima Nasreen. She too was bundled up and thrown out for blatantly challenging patriarchal values, women’s human rights clashing with social and religious credo, and openly discussing women’s sexuality and sexual desires.

I first came across her when I was fourteen. Until then, I knew her name, though I didn’t know why it was so known. I had heard people around me talk about her with disgust and contempt. But when my grandfather came to live with us for a few months, he spent his afternoons teaching me how to play solitaire, talking to me about why he was an atheist and why I should read Nasreen.

I had heard many talk about how confused, insane, and evil this woman was. Heavy allegations from people, most of whom had only known her through news articles and criticisms, not her work. Men spoke of her with resentment and women with vengeance.

I had bouts of curiosity about her, but since any mention of wanting to read her prompted my mother to scream out, “No! No! No!” like I would catch cooties if I did, I refrained.

After conversations with my Dada, I dug up Nirbachito Column. It was tucked away in a bookshelf along with some Freud books. Another personification of alleged madness I was being sheltered from. Oh, I think Humayun Ahmed’s Noboni was in that pile too. Probably because of the scene where Noboni bled.

I grew up a pretty angry teenager. I was haunted by a million questions that no one bothered to answer. Why did people constantly comment on my complexion and puberty-induced skin outbreaks? Why did people always look me up and down to see if I was dressed “properly”? Why was a boy’s rebellion cute/immature/justified and a girl’s a reflection of bad character? Why did I have to sit a particular way? Why was I not to play outdoor sports? Why was it so difficult to get things right, even if I wasn’t doing anything wrong? And much more.

I have much to be grateful for—good schooling, three meals a day, a home with weather-appeasing utilities, clean water, transportation. In families with male members—in both your own, and in your extended family, the differences don’t come up in the obvious, they come up in subtleties.

I was mostly angry at my mother. I didn’t understand why she never defended me, in spite of having the same experiences. In spite of resenting those experiences herself. In retrospect, I realize she was a product of her circumstances and her experiences. She did, and does, what she was taught was right—accept or block out.

We are the same, my mother and I. We both live in the same world, run by and for men, running-shoes polished by women. Men here have the option to live as people, women need to live lives of martyrs: sacrificing shadows who exist to serve. Always living for someone or something else. She came out mold-perfect and harmonious, and I came out deformed and cacophonous. It’s not that she doesn’t understand me. She does. Almost relates. Gets this close to agreeing. Then she takes a step back and asks me to shed my “abnormal” beliefs. She quickly takes two steps back to graceful acceptance of the first. She lives in fear of the third exile. I live in the second, taking unsure baby steps towards the third.

It was gruesome, that disregarded rage, that feeling of being misunderstood, that frustration of not seeing most around you feel the same way. Then I came to know Nasreen. It was a relief to see someone else feeling the same. It was therapeutic and consolatory. I didn’t feel so alone anymore. I did not feel weak, and I thought I was ready to talk, to fight and not just brood.

Then the fact that Islamist fundamentalists had declared a fatwa on her, and she had left the country, dawned on me. This inculcated a fear of articulation—will I be ousted by my loved ones since they seemed to have no problem with her being thrown out altogether? Would my family disown me? The way most around me constantly ridiculed her did not help, either. I did not want to lose anyone.

I remember hearing women who were thought to have a “loose-character” being called “Taslima.” Her name had become a curse word. Accompanying parents to dawats can actually be a very unnerving experience.

I never spoke of my fondness of her until we moved to Brussels. There, few knew her, and fewer knew me. I was in a circle of supportive teachers and peers. I joined a student writers’ club that published a magazine appropriately (though coincidentally) titled Zeitgeist. I submitted my poem I had written a year before as an expression of a deep-seated resentment Nasreen had helped me scoop out.

Below are excerpts from the poem. I’ll tell you I’m not putting up the whole thing for space issues, but it’s mainly because I am embarrassed of the quality of writing. It’s drama-queen-ish enough as it is:

“When?”

(excerpt 1)

Long enough have I tarried
I sit back on my couch
—tired and wearied
Fourteen Years—I spent in dreaming.
Silently screaming.
Striving to be free.
Trying to be me.
In tedious affliction.
In some preposterous addiction.
Searching my soul.
Dreaming of my goal.
In utter disgust.
I let my eyes burst.

(Excerpt 2)

“When? When will it come?
When will we get rid of this fruitless scrum?
When can we throw away the frightful disdain?
When will we stop enduring the pain?
When can we wipe off our eyes dew?
When can we jump and touch the sky blue? When will the ‘people’ open their eyes? When will the air be—happiness in disguise?
When can we flash a genuine smile?
When can we willfully run mile after mile?
When will they realize we are also people?
When will they throw away their mind—
So mean and crippled?
When will they gain their sanity?
When will we be treated with respect and dignity?
When? When? I beg you when? The world will come to an end Will it be then?

When I think of the impact Nasreen has had on me, on my childhood, I wonder about all the other women who are in exile. For them to have rubbed the wrong people the wrong way, they must have struck the right chord with a few wounded others.

When I talk about Taslima Nasreen now, many say, “She is a terrible writer anyway. Her stories are so poorly written!” or, “Look at what she is up to.” It’s true I feel sabotaged by how bonkers she has gone post-exile. I miss her fire. But really, let’s take a step back.

She wasn’t kicked out for incompetent art, she was kicked out for inadequate compliance. It wasn’t the writer in her that they couldn’t tolerate, but the uncompromising documenter that they couldn’t swallow.

Abrupt and unwelcome wind, swindling walls on sides of myopia-friendly, rose-tinted lenses, they are fearless entrepreneurs of the queasy-making business. It might just be a 14-year-old girl, or a handful invisible others, but I believe that in spite of whatever weaknesses one may point out in these women, their exiles must have satiated an effected many, but must also have helped an affected few find home.

There are a few things I want to say to my peers.

Dost, we the “new-new,” don’t know much about our history other than the heroism of our relatives, the brutality of the hanadar bahini, some specific dates, some illustrious names and some songs.

When we wear a Che t-shirt, he looks like Michael Jackson. Most of us haven’t read his biography. Most of us are unaware of his flaws. Yes, he had some. You’d know if you dug beyond the translation of “Hasta La Victoria Siempre.”

When we buy a t-shirt with “Joy Bangla” printed on it, we kind of know what it means. To us it resonates as something parallel to “carpe diem/noctem” or “veni, vidi, vici” sort of a deal or even a yin-yang tattoo.

History is not a thing of the past for us to relish on particular days. It is what we make everyday, whether we know it or not – just by virtue of existing. When we were too busy being the Converse All-star, Old Navy hoodie and gaamchha clad ‘casually classy’ generation, Bengali settlers burnt down over 200 homes of Bangladeshis who don’t look like us. The army joined in and brushed-fire killing several of them. And we were here making history – once again with our silence.

We are going down in the books babe, as the one that didn’t speak up; as the one that when asked to attend a rally to protest said, “kintu dost, oita toh plan a chhilona.” Sorry for the disruption bud, but I don’t think being subjected to this kind of atrocity oder “plan a chhilo.”

Some elders tell us this land really isn’t ours; that we don’t respect our history and are too west-bound and east-wounded; that we really don’t know what it means to be Bangladeshi since the desh was fed to us with a silver spoon. We resentfully worship the rubble we stand on, as if it’s all over; as if there is nothing else to fight.

But there is one more thing left to be defined though. We have that one more edge to etch that shows when we say “us” we mean “them” too. Why did we vote in 2008, in what was arguably the most monumental political event we witnessed in our two-decades-and-then-some old lives? I thought we took a few vows:

To not only chuckle when our friend laughingly tells us that his dad, an army officer, asked him to “stop acting like a bloody civilian” when he was disappointed, but be alarmed by how people who are paid to protect us, see us.
To be repulsed by their gunshots and read it as rokkhok morphing into homicidal tokkhoks, disrupting the silence we choose to bury those darn paharis under.
To not only high-five me when I tell you how I walked into the check-post to give that officer a piece of my mind for winking at me, but remember how you especially loved the part where I told him that he gets paid to protect me and I have the right to make him surrender his uniform if he makes me feel vulnerable. Since playing poker is your favourite after-work past-time, can you see that same sentiment to the hills and raise it a thousand notches?
To not forget to notice the face some several inches above the pinon your sister was wondering where she could buy.
To notice the human-being whose dancing feet you admiringly watched while saying “era kintu ektu Thai-der moton, na?”
To cringe at the patronizing generalization when the aunty asked for a chakma cook because “ora khub sincere hoy” or a night-guard of the same because “ora khub teji hoy.” To burst this greedy and exploitative bubble of fantasy traits attributed to those who are forced to be third-class citizens for our needs and convenience, as if their sole purpose is to serve us – the Raj.
To slap our friend who has a crush on his chakma classmate and calls her “minority” behind her back as if that’s her name, and allows his friends to do the same. “Dost, Minority’r shathe khub mojaye asos na?”
To not pervert “majority rule” to mean the rule of a power-tripping, vile and nonchalant majority, but the rule of a conscientious majority.
To put an end to those darn brackets – “foreign” … “stranger” … “unknown” … “different” … “them.”
To harness a Bangladesh that isn’t exclusively for Bangalis.

Can we vow to not allow evil to defecate all over our Home? Can we fix our radars to catch their corpses though we have skipped their lives? One of these days during one of those addas at one of those coffee joints, can we touch on their plight? Maybe just throw in a “dost, oi paharigulir na life a onek para … purai bad buzz” for good measure?

When I lifted the most adorable two-year old in the world to sit her on my lap, she started screaming “Amar lengtu! Amar lengtu!” with an angry and disturbed look on her face. I didn’t realize I had accidentally pulled her dress upto her waist. Perplexed and alarmed by her premature recognition of her ‘shame’ zone that would in a few years evolve into her ‘fear’ zone, I worried about what grounds her intuition was building up on. As I fixed her dress, she lightly slapped my arm to ‘punish’ me for revealing her shame. She seems to be perfectly fine with bare arms and legs. I was as disheartened as I was resentful to see how aware she is of the hierarchy of fear/shame attached to different parts of her body. Why has it arrived so soon – her terrorized conscious?

Her five year old sister wanted to show off how her little sister is able to identify different parts of her body.

“Tomar chul dekhao toh!”

The little one pulled on one of her curls, “Eita amar chul.”

“Aar tomar chokh?”

She pointed at the corner of her eye, “Eta amar chokh.” Then she took over. “Eije amar naak! Eita amar kopaal …Eita amar gaal.” Extending her arms she said, “Egula amar haath.” Then she lifted her frock, and said, “Eita amar pet … aar eije amar dudu…” Right then, a male staff of the house walked into the room to get something. Before I knew it, I quickly pulled down her dress, pulled her close, and asked her to tell me that story about two girls and their tea-drinking cockroach friend that she had made up a few days back. “Ekta telapoka aar duita meye boshe acche…” Why did it creep up on me without any warning – my terrified conscience?

This Ramadan, a bunch of friends and I would go to Dhanshiri for post-iftaar tea quite frequently. There we befriended a group of kids – approximately 10 years old, who live in Korail, but hover in the area ‘collecting’ money after school everyday. As soon as we got there, they would come shake our hands, sing for us, ask us to sing, tell us about their lives, inquire about ours … you get the picture.

Interacting with children is always refreshingly cathartic until that one jolting moment, when a manufactured adult befalls their persona like it did when this one little girl, out of the blue, told my friend Afrina that her black scarf which she had carefully wrapped over her t-shirt, was too thin. She then pointed at my cotton orna dangling from my right shoulder and approvingly used that as an example to demonstrate what kind of fabrics she should be looking out for.

She proceeded to grab a side of my scarf and pulled it to cover my chest ‘properly,’ and then pointed at Afrina, who she was dissatisfied with just a few moments ago, to illustrate how I should be wearing my scarf. Afrina and I were exchanging surprised and awkward glances when another kid, with her scarf over her head, pulled mine and lightly jumped in an attempt to place my scarf over my head. Simultaneously, she reminded us of the decorum inscribed in the invisible TOR of being ‘Bangali’ and ‘Musolmaan.’ “Mone rakhben Apu, amra hoilam…” I turned to Afrina and said “this is so weird! These are kids!” “Yeah,” she responded, “makes you wonder who has been teaching them this stuff.”

Their parents? Relatives? Neighbours? Friends? Teachers? That man who kept on interrupting our conversation by trying to hand us a flyer with some religious ‘baarta’ and asking for donation for a madrasa? No, that’s too convenient a coincidence. Maybe it’s no one in particular, but everyone in general that they imbibed this from. I don’t know…

Trying to divert the conversation, I told her I wish I too had played in the rain seeing that she was wet, while all her companions were dry. She said she didn’t play in the rain. “Then why are you wet?” “Oi betaye paani maarse amar gayer upor,” she pointed at one of the shop-keepers at a slight distance. There were quite a number of them, so I don’t know exactly which one she pointed at.

Generally distrustful of adults around kids, and feeling queasy about the picture of an adult splashing water at a child, I immediately started correlating why she felt it important to advice me and my friend to take shopping and wrapping advice from each other, and her super-conscious realization of being ‘Bangali’ and ‘Musolmaan’ with her need to protect herself from her seemingly predatory surrounding.

What has this identity done for her apart from fraternizing her with a remote, unyielding and superficially homogenous community? Does she already know that if the water had made her clothes translucent, fingers raised would have pointed towards her? Is that why she tries to ensure that there are no ‘loopholes’ in her presentation of herself? Am I giving her too much credit?

Probably not. Her fear/consciousness is probably not based on intuition solely, but also knowledge and God forbid, experience. If 1 out of 3 children in Bangladesh is a victim of sexual abuse, then children everywhere – streets, shacks, houses and mansions – better forego thoughts of unicorns and kittens playing on a rainbow made by Fairy Godmother, and buckle up.
**********

I still shudder at the recollection of that harrowing story of a working mother who walked in on her father-in-law dipping his penis in his infant grandson’s mouth while babysitting him.

I feel chills down my spine every time I remember the story of that one girl who was molested by her mama (maternal uncle) as a child, and had known it to be the only form of sexual interaction. So much so that she went through a series of boyfriends, all of whom she addressed as “mama,” and after the first physical contact, dumped them.

I feel my skin spike up like thorns when I think of that boy who would be raped by his uncle everyday that he took his herd to graze.

I feel my gut tie up in knots when I think of that 7 year old girl regularly raped by her uncle for a year. I want to choke that female relative of hers who blamed her maturity and ‘exposure to the world’ as props used to provoke the poor, helpless, grown man.

I feel my blood boil when I recall the story of that boy who would breakdown everytime his parents coaxed him into studying with his (male) home tutor. Later they discovered the child was subjected to groping on a regular basis and was threatened into keeping mum.

I feel I might pop a vein everytime I remember the little girl who had the same experience with her Arabic teacher.

I however find it slightly funny when I remember my “mohila hujur,” who would flash me her chest every chance she got. Back then, she masked it as education – showing me what I would look like when I grew up. I was never explicitly threatened into silence, but I intrinsically knew to not complain and blindly accept everything the “woman of God” taught me. Come to think of it, she wasn’t that well-versed in Arabic. I discovered later that she had taught me a bunch of Surahs incorrectly.
**********

Sexual abuse of children is a harsh reality which is more common that realized. It comes in varying degrees of every form – physical, emotional, verbal and visual. Some surveys say at least 1 out of 5 adult women and 1 out of 10 adult men report having been sexually abused in their childhood. BSAF studies reveal that though there is no safe age for boys and girls, vulnerability tends to be at its peak between10-15.

The long-term emotional and psychological damage caused by sexual abuse can be devastating to a child. No child is conditioned to cope with sexual stimulation. Even an infant with no concept or awareness of sexuality or sexual development, will develop problems resulting from the inability to cope with the over-stimulation.

Mullen and colleagues (1996) found that women with histories of sexual abuse as children, have had over five times the rate of physical abuse, and were three times less likely to also report emotional deprivation. There tends to be a considerable overlap between physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and children who are subjected to one form of abuse are significantly more likely to suffer other forms of abuse (Briere and Runtz 1990; Bifulco et al. 1991; Mullen et al. 1996; Fergusson et al. 1997; Fleming et al. 1997).

Then there are children who are more often than not subjected to one or all three forms of abuse. I would like to focus a bit on the situation of child domestic workers since they tend to be more marginalized than other children, even other working children, as a result of being confined within household premises with no or extremely limited mobility.

Since there is no formal jurisdiction to protect working children from abuse, child workers, particularly child domestic workers lead lives of shadow citizens. There is of course no acknowledgement of their role as economic actors or their role in harnessing domestic discipline.

Their parents are often not aware of where they are working or under what conditions. Generally informal verbal agreements are reached between the employers and the guardian responsible for linking up the child. In a lot of cases these agreements are ignored, and there is no institutional accountability measure for them to fall back on. A lot of domestic employments occur via intermediaries – relatives, acquaintances, “bua suppliers,” etc. This further dissolves the already bleak transparency regarding the children’s conditions.

**********

Almost every family of lower middle class and up has domestic help, and the number reaches about 2 million approximately. Statistics published by UNICEF in May 1999 showed that 45% of the children working as domestic help did not receive wages.

There are frequent reports of abuse towards child servants. Remember Ratna? The 15 year old brutally tortured by wife of the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Sylhet? She was kept under lock and key and tormented. Despite there being visible marks of persecution on her chest, back, thigh and tongue, the police refused to file her case. What happens when the umpire goes to bed with the batsman? This happens.

Remember the 9 year old Tanjina Akter tortured by a doctor’s wife, daughter and two sons? The one who was regularly caned and harder if she cried? Ratna and Tanjina are 2 out of hundreds of similar stories. James Melik and Duncan Bartlett reported on One World South Asia that in Bangladesh, over 300 deaths of child domestic workers were reported between 2001 and 2008.

Though not termed so, these shadow citizens are in a manner of speaking, child soldiers – churning the economic wheel, greasing the societal pedal, fending for themselves and their families, sacrificing their rights and their lives before they even get a chance to conceive or embrace them.

And there is an army of them. ILO estimates that of 218 million working children around the world, 7.4 million (BBS, UNICEF and DSS Baseline Survey) Bangladeshi children are economically active between the ages of 5-17 years. Out of them 400,000 are child domestic workers (CDW) in Dhaka alone, and are between the ages of 6-17 years. Another survey found that 38% of them are 11-13 years of age and 25% are 5-10 years of age. In 2004, the Financial Express found that out of 1181 child workers in Maghbazar alone, 770 were domestic workers.

Sexual abuse of CDW is extremely prevalent. In Bangladesh, over 25% of CDW report that they have been raped.

Breaking the Silence (BtS) reported the case of 10 year old Mukta who worked as household help in an urban area. One day she left her tasks undone and ran home to her mother. Her mother’s effort to explain the risks of living in a slum seemed to fall flat on its face. Eventually she revealed that her private parts were frequently touched by the old man of the house.

Her mother dismissed the allegation on grounds that such behaviour was sinful, and therefore could not be happening. She apologized to Mukta’s employers and returned her. She didn’t mention Mukta’s complaint to them, but requested them to not send her out to shops.

The extent of abuse aggravated and became more unbearable over the next couple of weeks. Mukta`s mother contacted BtS who were preparing to bring her back. However, shortly after, the mother reported that the employers had reprimanded her for her daughter’s absconding. Despite wanting to, the mother did not tell them why Mukta was so desperate to leave since her husband earned a good salary as a guard at their house.

Their desperation for economic security made her send Mukta back to that house.

Ratna Yasmin reports on Ayesha. This 15 year old girl would be raped by the man of the house whenever the wife was away. When she got pregnant, as expected, her character was slandered and she was thrown out of the house. She sought refuge in her relative’s house in Kamrangirchar and eventually gave birth to her daughter. When she returned to the Mohakhali house where she used to work to demand her and her daughter’s rights, she was brutally tortured by the family.

Studies show that both male and female CDW are subject to frequent sexual abuse. Generally in these cases, boys tend to be more marginalized than girls as a result of gender stereotyping, social denial, underestimation of sexual victimization of males, and the relative inadequacy of research on sexual abuse of boys. I remember asking a group of women in Bauniabadh if they thought boys were vulnerable to sexual abuse at all. After a minute’s silence one of them said, “Chhele manushder korleo, kototukui ba korbo?” It’s all about visible-tangible eventualities. That’s why when asked if women can be perpetrators, I got the same answer, “Mohilarao omon hoito pare, kintu mohila toh, korleo kotutuki ba korbo?”

**********

Sometimes I wonder if children are viewed as people. I see them treated as angels, toys, monkeys, entertainers, assets, liabilities … all out of affection of course (except the liabilities part), but I rarely see them treated as people. Above every child’s halo dangles a tong that would pick it up and throw it out the second the child exhibits anything ‘unchildly.’

Yes it’s true that perpetrators of sexual abuse attribute educational value, sexual pleasure (the child’s) and even provocation to their actions. Yes it’s true that they subtly or aggressively threaten the child into remaining silent. But let’s not forget to acknowledge where we falter.

Can a child’s silence be entirely attributed to the threat of the abusers? Have we not set-up an inarticulate, but deep-seeded decorum on how to behave as a child? Are there no unsaid rules about what a child is allowed to know, think or talk about?

Even the most “haba-goba” child can intrinsically identify ‘adult’ content, and will refrain from talking about it. They know that the repercussion of certain articulations will earn them the infamous “ichre-paaka,” “mitthuk,” “spoilt,” and “noshto” titles, and possibly bear corporal repercussions.

So are we not partially responsible for the silence by denying them a platform where they will be heard, trusted and dignified; by putting so much romantic weight on “innocence,” that being a child becomes a burden?

If we can’t protect the child from impure adult infiltrations, why try to prevent them from acknowledging and articulating them? Is it the uncanny suicidal knack for denial that makes us do this or a conscious pretence of perfection? Who is the audience? Are we all Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca?

Think about the child domestic workers. It’s as if they have avatars. They are bearers of double-gaggers these doppelgangers; shoulderers of many burdens – of innocence, of all-encompassing deprivation, and of obligation (“amra toke ja dei tor baap dite parto?”). They also bear the burden of bitter colonial brine smothered all over them.

The ruthless treatment of child domestic workers mirrors the irrational power-trip of colonizers. It seems these legal slaves are pawns in the quest for vendetta against an almost-forgotten offender, but a resented and lamented, yet (on a certain level) sadomasochism-friendly offense; dormant punching bags for exhaling inner doormat frustrations.

We have warped illusions of loyalty. If a domestic worker wants to switch houses for a higher salary, their loyalty is questioned, though it is perfectly alright for someone with a ‘proper job’ to switch between organizations for more lucrative incentives. Not that we needed further proof of domestic work being in the grey zone between employment and new age slavery, but here it is.

And if there is a trace of any kind of ‘disloyalty’ in a child worker, then lo and behold! Not only has s/he betrayed the owner/employer, but also the sanctity of being a child – the obligation of not having agency.

The treatment of child domestic workers reminds me of the only lesson I retained from my 8th grade Bangladesh studies class. We were taught the concept of ‘maatshonnay” a metaphor explaining feudalistic mistreatment of subjects and how the assertion of power of the higher echelon swallowed that of the lower the way a big fish swallows a smaller one.

This is probably where our obsession with ‘kochi’ (tender) is rooted – kochi daab, kochi shosha, kochi bou, kochi shishu. When asked what kind of a girl she was looking to employ, the lady asked for one within 10-12 years of age. Placing her hand about 3 feet off the ground she said, “shundor size.” The rational behind this is parallel to the rational behind propagation of early marriage for girls – “naile poray adjustment problem hoy … manaye cholte parena.”

Yes, I understand. The more ‘kochi’ they are the more modest they will be; and modesty here is systematically equated with subservience. The more “tender” they are, the more conducive they would be to “shokto haathe domon” measures; the more susceptible they are to succumb to a manufactured reality born out of historical suppression leading to aggressive or repressive behaviour (e.g. most physical abusers of CDW are female, though sexual abusers are of both sexes), vertically founded upon suffocating propriety, stringent social decorum, persistent practice of denial and a lively game of guilt-torch relay.

**********

“Egula toh oder deshe hoy,” is something you have probably heard almost every time something taboo, especially if sexual in nature is brought up. The establishment of a dogmatic culture of silence is generally justified by an “us vs. them” disposition. It is common and convenient thinking that all things sexual (deviant and otherwise) are a Western phenomena

Then you bring up real life deshi examples and the jealousy and conspiracy theories begin to flow. You press a little harder. You bring it closer to home, and then comes the full-throttle west bashing.

“Tomra bidesh giye and TV dekhe eshob shikhso. Nijer deshke kokhono chhoto korbana. Amader ki history!” We have given our lives for our language, we have fought for our land twice! “Aar ora khali rights rights kore! Oder ki aar emon acche? Khali jeans, beer aar burger!” Then proceed to gush over our clothes and food and CULTURE.

Yes culture, it’s a beautiful thing. It provides with diversity, identity, unity and security. But it becomes the justification for pushing people (particularly girls) into blind marriages. It sent Humayra Abedin to a mental institution for no clinical reason. It justifies domestic violence. It springboards coercion of the weaker. It made that 16 year old girl marry her rapist. It gave that influential father the license to throw his daughter’s boyfriend in jail for no reason so he can get her married to the boy of his choice. It made it alright for the mistress of the house to deprive the child worker of a meal. It allowed the father to stop his son from studying astronomy so he can become an accountant. Who needs to find the Holy Grail when you have found culture?

Therefore, it’s also a bipolar thing that contradicts and counter balances its pretty counterparts by forcing homogeneity; by undermining diversity, but catalyzing dispersion and disconnect by upholding feudalistic hierarchy; through identity-jacking via value imposition and infringement; and lastly, but most horrifyingly, by causing insecurity by instilling a fear of losing culture and thereby the security it allegedly provides.

“Uff! Eto dhoro keno?”

I’m sorry, but I’ll take a culture of bacteria over a culture of phantom barbed wire around my throat, pisciculture over P.C. culture, any day.

If you pitch Tagore’s western prize for his eastern book as compensation for Mukta’s abuse; if you sing “khelicche jolodebi” to overshadow Ratna’s screams, you could not have found a hasher way of disrespecting the artists.

So, it’s not my desh or my culture I am belittling, it’s some deshis and their culture that I am stabbing.

My intention is not to highlight where others are better off, but to emphasize what we need to work on. This is not a “whose mobile is more expensive?” competition.

The tragedy behind the struggle to preserve and respect culture while using it as a shield is that, the harder you press it on, the more likely the receiver is to distance him/herself. If kids today seem to have sold out to “their culture,” a huge part of the reason might be shackles placed around their ankles in the name of culture and demand for blind acceptance and obedience in the name of respect. That’s when B-Grade Hallmark Channel teenage heroes/heroines with their juvenile revolts, teenage pregnancies and erratic driving, the One Tree Hill kids, the OC characters, etc. begin to look more liberated. Chuck Norris and Ali G are not the enemies stealing your child’s culture. The kid loses his/her culture – one gag at a time.

Gross and indiscrete rejection of western or universal values has become a convenient scapegoat for harnessing predatory abusiveness.

**********

“Meyeta khub bod, barir shaheber shathe shuito. Chhoto hoile ki hobe? Ajkalkar gorib manush aar ager moton shorol nai. Tandor shob.” Hmm the girl “shuito” with the shaheb, but didn’t the shaheb “shuito” with the girl?

“Bhabi, ei boyoshe nanan dhoroner fantasy hoy.”

“Ei class a ei dhoroner fantasty amader niye beshi.”

“Ei class khub chalak … eshob bole fashaite chaye … dhurondhor! Kichhuina shudhu taka chaye!”

Yes dear, blame the hormones, not the hubby. Yes, it’s your family lineage and bank balance that was so irresistible to the 10 year old. Yes, the 12 year old provoked the 55 year old to make sexual advances. Ah! The conclusions of the suspicionist class!

Why do a people with a history and concurrent reality of oppression and violence find it so difficult to digest that victims can be just victims without being instigators?

Seduction is for lovers, not perpetrators and predators.

Verticality based on age, class, geography has created a circle of cannibalistic devouring spree. We are eating ourselves. It’s like an intense acid trip en masse where we are eating our own arms thinking them oranges.

“Hoise! Eto eshob niye kotha bola lagbena. Amra baba conservative Muslim desh. This is not America.”

You’re right. This is East India Company in brown skin instilling a culture of “respect” and “modesty” (P.C. pseudonyms for gags and travesty), placing romantic weight on innocence and feudalistic weight on silence; not defying the metropolis to provide a platform to the satellite…

…the pangs of being a child, especially a ‘backup-less’ one. Where is their independent Bangladesh?

The Raj hasn’t been repatriated, it has been renovated. Tragic that after all these years the colonial traces are not residual but sedimentary, so brushing off is not an option – we need to scoop it out. Maybe that explains why there is more fear attached to report cards than question papers.

**********

There is something I need to tell you in private.

Sweetheart, you have been possessed by what you think you exorcized. You have become what you claim to have defeated. You are what you escaped.

With translation:

Zehal-e miskin makun taghaful,

Duraye naina banaye batiyan;

Kitaab-e hijran nadaram ay jaan,

Na leho kaahe lagaye chhatiyan?

(Do not overlook my misery

Blandishing your eyes, and weaving tales;
My patience has over-brimmed, O sweetheart,
Why do you not take me to your bosom?)

– original by Hazrat Amir Khusrau, translation by “Unknown”

Borsha* did not know she had no right to fall in love. In fact, she did not even know, she had no right to be. She was one of the many floating prostitutes of a mazaar area, who existed, but not really. She was a fool who made the mistake of falling in love, an imbecile who forgot she was not a human-being, and tricked herself into believing the promises her customer-turned-lover made of marrying her.

She was a dweller of a mazaar, the place where hundreds of people flock on a weekly basis to conduct wish-fulfilling rituals. And apparently they work. So why wouldn’t her wishes come true when she lived amidst all that magic?

She forgot magic wasn’t for her either.

So her eyes were pulled out, and she was killed by her lover in the Shaheed Minar area. An unfit awakening for fitness freaks who workout there early in the morning and discovered her dead body dangling from a tree.

She needed to exist to cater to our needs, but she had no right to exist. Her story is the perfect example of filth permeating through what we would like to believe is our holy and untainted society. Not the filth we accuse her of diffusing, but the filth we create and conveniently shove under the rug. Borsha lived her life to hone our selfishness, and died at the hands of our nonchalant cowardice.

One for All, But None for One

Group work is usually a part of any orientation process as it has proven to be an effective ice-breaking and team-building technique. That is probably why most of the women I spoke to when I went to a mazaar area mentioned that when they landed there for lack of places to go seek refuge in, or were tricked and brought there, gang rape and blade cuts were an integral part of their induction process. Some of them, like Meena,* also made the colossal mistake of ignoring her mother’s advice and took a candy-pill from a stranger. She and many like her then found themselves in a brothel upon regaining consciousness. Some of them like Meena, fled brothels and upon being rejected by their homes, came to the city to find work and ended up in mazaars as homeless, floating sex slaves.

“Slaves” may seem like an exaggerated way of labelling them because as commercial sex workers, they do in theory, get paid. But given how invisible our society has rendered them, when a customer refuses to pay for a service, there really is no agency or organization that will fight on their behalf to get them their remuneration. And it’s not as if their customers just don’t pay and leave, they are often subjected to unbelievable amounts of violence for asking for their dues.

The state of the floating sex workers – battered, beaten, and banished – brings to question our sense of community. That we live in a community and we are responsible for each other only seems to be realized when we want to quench our thirst for butting into other people’s businesses. But when it comes to fighting, to protecting, there is no one.

How is it that 15 year old Laila* feels the need to tie her infant of several weeks around her waist while napping, that even in the afternoon when the mazaar premises are abuzz with people, she wakes up to find somebody is trying to cut the rope to steal her baby? Why is it that they are forcefully taken away and raped at anybody’s will and no one in the vicinity steps up or steps in?

Babies being stolen and babies being bought are common practices within these premises. When I asked Laila why babies are sold, she admitted that just this morning, she sold an abandoned infant to a childless woman who came to the mazaar to buy a baby. She said in the future she might even consider selling her baby to a rich family so at least she can feel safe about him being free from the kind of life she has to lead. I don’t know if she is that naïve or if she was pretending to be so, but we all know that not all babies go to fill voids in the laps of childless parents. Especially not the stolen ones. They go on to become camel jockeys, involuntary organ donors, sex slaves, heroin money…Their mothers never get a chance to warn them against taking candy from strangers; they become the currency for strangers’ candy.

Razia* said she would be better off giving her baby away because if he ever asks her about his father, she would not know what to say. “Mukh rakhbo koi?” (Where should I keep my face?) is not a question on the lips of just this one person.

The way we have laid out our social infrastructure is phenomenal. The state and we fail to protect women falling into communities we go on to stigmatize later. We fail to dignify them as women and mothers. We deprive mothers of their right to raise their children, and children of the right to be raised by their mothers. We push them into a hole, step inside and use them as we need and please, and climb out to point fingers at them. We really give them no spaces for their faces. Mukh raakhbe koi?

As our sense of community degenerates at a fast pace, we have found a stupendous way of safeguarding the undeserving and relaying responsibility onto unknown actors. When my friend got into a chain accident very recently, a motorbike rider who was most hurt in that accident, and was just a victim of the situation, was blackmailed by the investigating officer into paying a bribe or else he would have filed a case against him. What were the hospital personnel doing while this was going on?

How is it that another friend gets mugged and dragged along the street by the infamous muggers-in-cars on the evening before Eid in a busy shopping area, and everyone is a spectator? It is because perpetrators know that everyone is too scared or nonchalant to step in, or is relying on someone else to do it, that they gather the courage to act in public spaces. There really is no difference between an empty, dark alley and a crowded street anymore.

We do, however, have an amusing culture of redundant compensation. My first field trip after I joined BRAC was to Mymensingh. Between field visits, the local staff took me and two other colleagues to the Muktagachha Palace. Well now hardly a palace, but more a skeleton of a once palace. Its last inhabitant had fled during partition, following which the locals came to strip the place of all things of value. So what we saw was a spooky, naked frame.

The layout of the place was quite mind-boggling for me. The jalsaghar area in particular was eerie. A huge space in the centre, cabins for baijis at its foot, a puja mandap by its head, the zamindar’s main bedroom to its left, and torture cells for fathers who refused to send their virgin daughters to the zamindar to its right. Between the jalsaghar and the torture cells was a well with a chopper installed, where dead bodies would be dumped to be cut up and transported to the river to which the well was connected. I could go on to draw metaphoric parallels between then and now, but I am sure you can read between the lines and do that yourself.

Coming back to the culture of compensation, the last zamindar who inhabited the palace was allegedly the cruellest of all “jodio uni shikkhar jonno besh kichhu kore gese” (though he has done a lot for education). The consumers for Muktagachhar monda were he and his family, his favourite elephant and his Baijis. Anyone else having or even trying to have those mondas was penalized. For some reason, feeding his Baiji mondas reminded me of people who feed beggars on Fridays, Borsha’s lover who distributed jilapis among all homeless people in the mazaar after killing her, dancers on stage compensating for a lack of steps by waving bright-coloured fabric, corrupt officers who distribute food, clothing and other forms of charity on Fridays to partially whiten their black money, cook show hosts making up for their inability to make clever comments about the food by repeating “bachchara-o khub pochondo korbe,” writers’ over-usage of “and then s/he lit a cigarette/ took a long drag,” TV dramas filling up the space left by lack of crafty dialogues with “ei na maane, bolchhilam ki … yeh … maaaannneee … umm yeh aarki…” Excuse me, what?

Then there are more brutal compensations, compromises rather – these mothers selling their children with hope for a better future for them, cleaner identity; that one woman who took her 3 year old son to her slum’s goon-squad to pour acid onto one of his arms so he can show that off and make some money. “Dui haath diya ki korbo, jodi pet-a bhaat na thake?” (“What’s he supposed to do with two hands if he can’t find rice for his stomach?”)

Putting and Pudding

Around the world, across cultures and throughout history, prostitution has ubiquitously provided societies with an ambivalence of necessity and fecundity. Despite the diverse underlying complexities in its nature as per varying socio-cultural contexts, one universal attribute of prostitution is that it is, and has always been, the filler that has catered to lust and compensated for the gap between desire and avenue for satiation.

Though criminalized, it has always been (even if implicitly) acknowledged to be a tolerable and often relieving counter to emergence and increase of sex crimes. As much as there is an unscrupulous amount of moral policing surrounding prostitution and even porn, studies have shown that they have to a large extent, served as alternate and alternative ‘solutions’ to rape and other forms of harassment.

Minus the need-fulfilment function which has been a consistent consumption for all classes within a society, prostitution has also been nuanced enough to make status statements. Tawaifs and Baijis were the ‘shaan’ of the aristocracy back in the day. I suppose a contemporary parallel can be elite escorts, though this niche is more subdued and barely flaunted.

Dear bonedi poribaars, khandaani ghors, shikkhito Bangalis and bhodrolok shomaj, I know you would like me to believe that theirs is a parallel reality so far removed from yours that the two will never intersect. I agree. But only because just from one fragmented brush with a small segment of theirs, and a lifelong membership in yours, has made me aware of how you and I will never be able to fathom how they survive in theirs.

Yes, we will never intersect.

Funny though, since even from within separate peripheries we feed into each other’s realities. Even funnier is how everywhere the ones below stand to cater to needs of the ones above. As much as ‘gentlemen’ would like us to believe consumers of commercial sex are rickshawallahs, truck-drivers, durwans, day-labourers, goons and the likes, the fact that the prostitution market itself is so nuanced and classified, is statement enough that there are consumers in every strata of society. This is not a recent paradigm shift or stretch, it’s just a paradigm exposed.

For simplicity’s sake let’s assume that the clientele of the homeless floating prostitutes in the Mirpur and High Court mazaar areas are restricted to aforementioned, local goons, slum-dwellers, rickshaw-pullers, bus and truck-drivers and homeless men in the vicinity, and not people of higher classes who frequent and inhabit the area, but who are the prostitutes frequenting and residing in mid-range apartments and second-tier hotels for?

So if the girls I see standing on street corners of Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara tri-state area only cater to drivers, durwans, rickshaw-pullers, etc. why do they approach SUVs when they pause for even a brief moment? Don’t they know their clientele? And why have I seen ‘those bad type of women’ in 5 star hotels? That 15 yr old girl in a bright red t-shirt, skinny jeans, obnoxious and messy make-up, poorly bleached hair and a severely underweight body, who walked into the lobby with her colleagues – straight into the gluttonous eyes of our fellow brothers – why was she there? Just for the foreigners? What about the two giggly ones in the bathroom of another hotel, fixing their make-up and teasing each other about how many directions each can bend in?

It’s time to fold up and throw away the scaffold. Class can be a shield, but not a mask. So please, do continue to keep your eyes shut, but do not assume you’re invisible as a result.

Comedy of Terrors

A while back, when we were still useless teenagers, a peer shared one of his most relished experiences with a few of us. He and some friends had gone out for a drive pretty late (in the tri-state area) and pulled over when they spotted prostitutes. As expected, one of them approached the car and the stud on the driver’s seat rolled down his window. Expecting high-fives and pats on the back, he told us his friend pulled the woman by her hair and started driving. Yes, while dragging her. And that is not all. Whoever was sitting next to him was throwing eggs at her. Egging prostitutes, as I learned from others later, was apparently a routine practice during midnight fun ‘n frolic ventures for some of our peers.

Yes it is infuriating, ridiculous, stupid, despicable and anything else you are probably (hopefully) muttering. Those kids probably found it amusing to brutally brush against these forbidden females and found it a sufficient scope to power-trip at the expense of their powerlessness. They also thought, while having fun they were teaching ‘bad people involved in bad things a good lesson.’

Of course the kids are to bear a hefty chunk of the brunt of the rage this has invoked, but let’s not forget that this attitude is not innovated, but rather inherited – be it from their parents, extended family or greater society. Everybody is out to play prophet; to denounce and penalize whoever and whatever is contaminating their pristine surroundings in their own little way.

Prostitution is dirty, and we janitors have set out to clean with whatever props we have at hand (read eggs).

What is most frustrating is that while writing pieces like this, there are juvenile moments when the obvious needs to be stated. What makes prostitution “dirty” is the process in which it operates. It is the deceit, the victimization, the abuse, the exploitation, the insecurity, the vulnerability and the exclusion of the prostitutes that accumulate to the filth we so shamelessly take stabs at.

Our society has become a network of cheeky monkeys standing on play … I mean high … moral grounds and slathering dirt on these people and their profession we either pushed them into, or failed to protect them from falling into. Then we defiantly turn around, point, cringe and call it ‘dirty’. A naïve bluff of calling a spade, spade; a perverted bluff of calling the killed, killers.

But I guess it’s ok to treat these ‘maagis’ like dirt. They ain’t no Anarkali or Umrao Jaan. If you can’t use them to make ostentatious statements, wring them and make pretentious judgements.

Zakia*, approximately 20 now, was sent off to the city to find work. After working as domestic help for a while, she could not bear the torture inflicted upon her by her employers at the time, so she fled. She came to seek refuge in the mazaar, and as per ritual, was gang-raped by the local goon-squad (syndicate) and inducted into the world of prostitution. She once went back to her village, but was disowned by her family because of the kind of work she was involved with. The family could not bear that their economic crutch had now morphed into a moral burden. She returned to Dhaka – to the same place and same life.

Tara’s* story is similar. After she and her baby were abandoned by her husband, she was tricked into the trade by a phoney well-wisher who promised to set her up with domestic work. She left her baby with her family back home. The ‘agent’ sold her to a brothel in Faridpur. After a while she ran away from there and went back home, only to face rejection. She then came to Dhaka in search of work, and before she knew it, the woman who was helping her find work, led her to the mazaar area. In a jiffy, she went from being an organized slave to a floating slave.

Theirs are not the only stories. There are many like them pushed into the quicksand of this isolated world, and kept there to make us look clean. It is as if they cold-shouldered us and walked into that life, when in fact it is the double whammies from four different directions – state, which failed to protect them from falling into this profession and cannot make up its mind about whether or not to criminalize or legitimize them1; family, which cannot bear their economic or moral burdens; extended society, which is too busy acting clean, playing under the sheets and extending concern about ‘society’s moral fabric’; and umbrellas of religious credo, which don’t accept them unless it’s time to act like basket-cases and make charity cases out of them to earn tickets to personal mission fulfilments (read food or money distribution for ‘mannats’) – that keep them quarantined.

It’s how Rokeya* put it, “poolisher dhakkaw khawon laage, mainsher mair o khawon laage baap-maa’r gaali-o khawon laage. Eida ki kono mainsher jaga?” (“The police pushes us, people beat us and parents chide us. Is this a place for humans?”)

It’s like that Mollah Nasiruddin story. Remember the one where the king went hunting one day and ran into Mollah in the forest? Declaring him an ‘opoya,’ (bad omen) the king summoned for Mollah to be subjected to 20 whip-lashes. His hunting trip that day however, turned out to be phenomenal. When the king called in Mollah to apologize, the latter said, “Hujur, you call me an ‘opoya,’ but you see my face and your hunting goes well, but I see yours, and I get a beating. Who is the real ‘opoya’ here?”

Sages and Savages

As I was speaking to these women, at one point I got really overwhelmed and just went numb. They started laughing at me and asked if I was feeling bad. They endearingly called me “shorol” and “bhalo.” I was taken aback by their laughter. I could not decide whether to read that as strength, optimism, conditioning or desensitization. What have become of these women? What will become of them and their children? The M-word and the ch-word drop out of their breath like splinters drop of a termite-infested shelf. The age and stage of consent?

We talk about giving business and development interventions a “human face,” but in that process we neglect to acknowledge, let alone dignify, the ones suffering the most at the hands of inhumanity. Typically risk-averse, we are so busy playing safe; so absorbed in generating multifarious responses to mono-dimensional issues; so caught up with feeling good and being right, we forget about doing right.

“Human face” will not come with discussing Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach over a glass of white wine or devising a better, more-inclusive microfinance system that can cut through/penetrate and capture the ones furthest down the socio-economic echelon, nor does it come with reviving 1952 and 1971 sentiments for the purpose of boosting SIM card sales.

In these attempts, we are not giving a “human face,” we are just wearing a human mask. To assume that face, we need to face the faces we forcefully keep buried; to shed our prophet-skins and expose our own faces first.

As I was speaking to these women, I was jostled by a million thoughts coming at me from every direction. I was thinking of what kind of rehabilitation measures would be most effective, how our society needs to step up and seek redemption by assuming responsibility, and an overall need for the revival of humanity. But I was all of a sudden interrupted by Tara*: “deen raat jai koshto houk na ken Apa, chawa khali ektai, ghoom-ta jani shanti moton ghoomaite pari. Raate bela mazaar a ek ghor a amra 250 jon chapachapi koira thaki. Tao ashpasher polapain aisha jalaye. Khali ekta ghor koira den Apa, aar kono chawa nai.” (Come what may throughout the day, sister, all we want is to sleep peacefully at night. 250 stay packed up in one small room in the mazaar. Even then miscreants from the neighbourhood come bug us. Just give us a place to stay Sister, we have no other demands.”)

Jotsna,* who hadn’t uttered a word the whole time smiled as she said, “Manusher jonno koy manusher jibon, kachhe ashle kaachkola.” (“Supposedly people live for one another. Come close, and nothing.”)

(*real stories with altered names)

Original:

“Oh Sister when I come knock on your door

You should not treat me like a stranger

……………………………………………..

And is our purpose not the same on this earth?

…………………………………………….

Don’t turn away you’ll create sorrow”

-“Oh, Sister,” Bob Dylan

Role Call: “Girly Girl…” “Present, Please!”

I don’t wake up to Sultana’s Dream everyday. I wake up to my own very rose-tinted, idealistic, maybe even immature daydream of a perfect, balanced, free, equal and generally hatred-free world, where disparities are eradicated, and battles are fought in unity.

Wow, that made me queasy the way bubble-gum pop music does. But the good thing is, there are many interruptions to my day-dream. Or should I call them reality-checks?

So what are they?

Many human (usually acknowledged to be men), institutional and socio-cultural sergeants of suppression, actually. The demoralization, exhaustion and dehumanization propelled by the turbines of these stifling underpinnings are as tacky and have become as normal as caveman tactics. Fighting them is a given. They don’t shock me. The tiff with them is old and consistent. In that regard, they are quite sincere

The ones who intrigue me are the ones who devalue themselves. The ones who sadden me are the ones who degrade others of their own. The ones who anger me are the ones who just don’t know how to stay out of the way. The ones who crush me are the ones I have accepted as comrades without asking or being asked. The ones who shock and sabotage me the most, are these serpents in my sorority.

For example just a couple of months back, the research department of a very well established development organization that regards women as principal agents of development, conducted a study among the organization’s female staff members to gauge how successful they have been in making the work environment “gender-friendly.”

At their presentation I felt a little, actually very, sabotaged by one of the findings. A number of women, (I can’t remember the exact statistic, but I remember it being fairly substantial), claimed that the organization should have flexi hours for women.

“…But it does…” I thought to myself.

As it turns out, these respondents actually meant that women should be allowed to work lesser hours, not flexible hours as we understand.

“Why?” if you ask,

“Because we are women. We need/deserve such flexibilities,” they will say.

Just the way, they say, fieldwork for women should be limited to areas of close proximity.

Women apparently, should not be asked to go too far, some (women) say.

Yes it is difficult. Yes women have a lot to juggle physically and mentally, on both the professional and domestic fronts, but this battle is not to press you more than you need to be pressed, but to make sure you are no longer pressed. Equality is not, and has never been a consequence of playing victim or V.I.P. (and in this case, there is no robust delineation between the two). Our claim over equality will remain uncatered to if we can’t prove ourselves equals.

Therefore, my clash with such deliberations is that whether you bat your eyelashes when saying “because we are women,” or bang your fist on the table, you are negating the achievements of many, undermining the struggle of more, and are egging on the devaluation of women’s status with self-sabotage leading to unintentional, but nevertheless substantial self-dehumanization overall.

Beauty in Trash

I often tend to blame the saas-bahu TV serials with their grandiose, trite, and implausible portrayal of domestic harmony for the ‘matha noshto’ of mothers who choke their children, particularly daughters, even if out of fear or concern – a paranoid prevention of the seemingly unchallenged and allegedly ‘all-engulfing’ infiltration of western values through western or even westernized media, that is feared to eat away at our tradition, culture, and cause us (particularly the youth), to get derailed.

I will only emulate the benarasi-wearing-vegetable-chopping “ideal woman” or mother-following-husband-seeking demure single girl, if every time I emote, my face turns blue, green and pink, and there is an appropriate background score. Otherwise, I’ll keep drinking copious amounts of coffee mixed with green tea as per Oprah’s recommendation.

But should these serials bear the brunt of all my rage? At the end of the day, they are only being made because there is a market for them. Unfortunately and surprisingly, the core audience is not just housewives, but young people (including young adults) – both male and female, and even more frighteningly, children.

The media’s role as I see it, is three-pronged: it informs, often leads (sentiments), and at other times delivers (organically and/or artificially generated) catharsis. When I was growing up, we were referred to as the MTV generation for the most part. As much as the young adults today can be generalized as the facebook/twitter/Godknowswhatelse generation, in our part of the world, a disturbingly large chunk of young’ins also fall under the saas-bahu-drama-chomping generation.

Being the murubbi that I am, I find myself drawing a comparison between teenage girls today and my teenage self. Naeem Mohaiemen talks about Taslima Nasreen before she went all “batty”. He says she “was unique and necessary, in that Bangladesh of that time (“Street Defenders,” The Daily Star).” Yes she was. She brought a 14 year old me and many others to different levels of understanding, opposing and appeasement. I wonder why she isn’t necessary to “kids” today. If products of a time reflect intrinsic demands of that time, then the kind of products we endorse and consume today sing a sorry song. I am apprehensive about the avenues in which we seek cathartic solace.

So in retrospect, at the end of my self-righteous banter against this convenient scapegoat, I see futility in my (misdirected) rage. There is pointlessness in this finger-pointing, just the way there is pointlessness in blaming fairness creams. Simply put, they exist because there is a demand for them. Of course the demand is the result of a warped socio-ideological construct, but the pickle is with the fact that it is largely generated and harnessed by women. I have heard more women complain and criticize dark skin on themselves and other women, than men. Some try to redeem themselves with “shyamla holeo sweet” comments, but really, calling a pretty girl pretty despite her complexion is not the same as finding beauty in trash.

Bottom line, there is no point in blaming the delivery-boy. The flaw is in the customer’s order. And let’s not try to justify that with arguments of brainwash and other conspiracy theories, or even a sympathetic/pitiful acceptance of the need to find utopian harmony in Tulsi or Parvati’s homes amidst impending chaos in almost every corner of our psycho-physical reality. (Yes, some people do argue that.)

It’s time to take a break from self-righteous intellectual masturbation and hold people accountable. Sometimes it’s not “the Man above” or “the System’s” fault. It’s just us. Yes experience, fear, conditioning, or even victims’-vengeance-syndrome may all be reasons, but they are not adequate excuses. If challenging ‘the System’ was impossible, then there would not be traces of revolt or change in any history.

Get up, stand up! It’s time to fight it right.

Perverted Pyramid

As much as we see and/or like to believe times have changed, coy, demure and obedient girls float an Aunty’s boat like placenta floats a baby in a womb. And if that girl is one who let go off her aspirations to uphold the Bangladeshi Dream of “sh”-s (shami, shontan, shoshurbari, shongshar), then Bingo! Nothing spells perfection like c-o-m-p-r-o-m-i-s-e.

I have witnessed bride-hunting women ‘reject’ girls who have lost their fathers on grounds that “struggle kore boro howa, challu/oversmart hobe.” This “struggle kore boro howa” phrase is also used to blacklist small-town girls who have moved to the city and “made it.” They are, “ektu onnorokom.” Had they not made it, they would be alright. Their failure would testify to their good character. “Bechari, khub bhalo toh, parlona.” But alas! Their success becomes their kryptonite.

Then there are the girls from the upper echelon, who are plagued by their own, or their families’ reputation consciousness and multiple paranoia. Their struggle, where there is one, is nuanced on a different level. Their affluence becomes their kryptonite. Their need/want for freedom often renders them to greedy princesses. A generally protective upbringing doesn’t help their cause either. Need/hardship sometimes becomes a catalyst for liberation by warranting a lot of exposure and toughening, and since at the outset they have none, the ‘feisty’ ones are just looked at as ungrateful trouble-makers.

Every class bears with it hoards of assumptions. Though at the end of the day every woman struggles for the same end, their rationale and means of attaining that end vary. Due to this difference and due to assumptions associated with unfamiliarity, unity among women often gets the short end of the stick. Every woman’s struggle is nuanced and unfortunately estrangement and moral policing (by women themselves) within each class downplay their overall battle and cause.

Besides the socio-economic class, women have themselves created another class system of their own, constituting gung-ho gals (quite self-explanatory), chicken chicks (mentally weak) and bimbo babes (intellectually bleak). Allotment in each of the categories is often arbitrary and presumptuous, therefore leading to existential clashes. For example, a woman who has declared a pursuit of self-actualization may raise an eyebrow at the woman who works without passion. The latter in turn, may deem self-actualization to be nothing but flair. But such clashes are expected at the face of concentric spheres of wishful thinking hinged upon simultaneous, but incompatible realms of expectations. Everyone is out to feel good, to hold on to the scrap of unadulterated identity they may have endowed upon themselves.

Because We Are Women

Women paralyze women.

That is not to say patriarchy has subsided, but reducing an opponent to a punching bag or pinning cushion by not holding other proponents accountable is not only unfair, but also self-destructive. Don’t feel betrayed by my acknowledgement of the many men who believe in and work for women’s rights harder than a lot of women do. Overtly demonizing a kind, and over-assertion of a portion of a truth dilutes its entirety, and truth by tenacity can be a dangerous by-product of self-sabotage.

That patriarchy is intricately embedded in foundations of our functioning is a given, but this is not a valid excuse for letting things slide. And it is most definitely not a legitimate scapegoat for harbouring gag and victimizing others of your kind with the excuse of being a victim. ‘Oppressed Turns Oppressor’ stories are now really cheesy, boring, and not to mention, lame.

In a nutshell, the root of my bitterness is this: women’s struggle is that of attaining equality. It is a petition for rights, not a requisition for privileges. The claim over rights should not be based on the presumed benevolence of a generous giver. It’s not anyone’s to give. The question is why has it been taken away? The bigger question is, why are YOU allowing it?

“Let’s get together and feel alright.” We are not in this rink for the consolation prize; we are here to co-host the show. We are not squabbling over wheelchairs or crowns, we are battling for air. That becomes difficult if some of our assumed comrades turn on us. In the struggle for existential validity and due dignity, there is no room for undue glorification or self-inflicted weakening. The more some women uphold gaps, the more others will fall through them. The aim is to demand our rights, not request for them; to rise in victory, and not fall prey to cannibalism of the soul (-sisters).

Battles are won in unity. The unison comes with demand, the hiccup with requests and the fall with animosity. Maybe I am taunted by immature irrationality, but as a part of this sorority, I am entitled to hold you accountable with questions, screams and tears.

We are all in this together…because we are women…

(in New Age extra under “Our women Fridays” in 4 installments  –

1st installment: http://www.newagebd.com/2009/mar/06/mar06/xtra_also4.html
2nd installment: http://www.newagebd.com/2009/mar/13/mar13/xtra_also3.html
3rd installment: http://www.newagebd.com/2009/mar/20/mar20/xtra_also3.html
4th installment: http://www.newagebd.com/2009/mar/26/mar26/xtra_also2.html)

original/unedited version………

<1>

Shakil found Lamia so adorable, that he had no choice but to pretend that he was highly annoyed with her existence. For one, she wasn’t one of the cool girls. In fact her presence was usually unrealized, and she was only sporadically acknowledged as a landmark when trying to locate the misplaced cricket ball or badminton shuttle. These objects were often found lying on the left side, right side, in front of, or behind “that girl.”

Moreover, given his recent outstanding performance in the inter-class basketball matches, he was pacing up the social ladder quite swiftly. By now, he was the recipient of anonymous love letters and innumerable silent phone-calls on a daily basis. His mother’s irritation was a testimonial to his popularity, and he relished each and every chiding like peace treaties. He was a smart boy, and knew not to jeopardize this influx of adulation with a confession of feelings for a nobody with braces and a unibrow.

He felt pity for her when she lay under the mango tree on the otherwise barren school yard during recess everyday, either engrossed in her book, or her thoughts. He felt even more pity for her nonchalance towards her absence in the social barometer.

“Poor thing doesn’t know the joy of recognition. What a pity…,” he thought.

At times when she lay under the shade stretching and twirling around, smiling at God knows what, he felt an urge to go tickle her – not out of affection or playfulness, but rather to disrupt her bliss that spurted out of oblivion. But he refrained lest she misconstrues that as an act of violence or worse, flirtation. After all, the line between vanity and paranoia is quite meagre, and the spheres of neither allow space for the possibility of disturbance without a cause.

He silently chuckled at his aspiration to be like that goblin in the kettle from Radiant Reading. The only difference is, he didn’t want to be green.

<2>

As was her undeclared ritual, Lamia sat at her study table on a Friday afternoon, with her hazy gaze affixed on the same line of her physics textbook for hours; obviously absorbing nothing. She would occasionally try to lend an ear next door to her younger sister Tanisha, trying to learn Arabic from the same lady who taught her.

She was fascinated by the idea of having a “Lady Hujur.” She liked that everyone else she knew of had male Arabic teachers, and that at least something about her was unconventional. Of course, her parents’ reasons for assigning a female instructor were not geared towards making a statement of any kind.

As her sister rifled through the Arabic text racing towards the “Khatm” line, a formality she had already graduated from, Lamia realized that these couple of hours apart from her diction-crazy-new-age-rendition-of-Amy (of “Little Women” fame) sister, were perfect for getting some studying done. It is very difficult to fathom an overtly simplified version of Newton’s Law of Attraction with a ten year old mosquitoeing around her ears with words too heavy for her own tongue, and her audience’s ears.

What’s more irritating, though admittedly endearing, is how she occasionally misconstructs certain words. For example, the other day, she took a quick scan of Lamia’s desk, briefly pausing on the pen-holder. After scrutinizing the pens and pencils Lamia had distorted with obsessive chewing, she exclaimed, “You have oral Phoenix.”

Their father found this unintentional metaphoric rendition of oral “fetish” particularly amusing and humoured her with a further twist,

“Yes, Lamia does have oral phoenix. Sometimes when she argues, a fiery bird hatches out of her saliva bubbles, morphs into words, and burns her opponents.”

Tanisha didn’t exactly understand the reference, but gathered that her sister was being praised for her argumentation skills. She did not agree. She always thought her sister could do a much better job at defending herself when their neighbour Monica tried putting her down with her unjustified over-confidence.

For one, Monica had to do exactly what Lamia did, and then claim to be better at it. On top of that, she had the thorny spine to assert delinquent diagnoses to put her down. Last Friday, Lamia’s first stab at “stream of consciousness” writing was interrupted by the intrusion of this unwanted neighbour. Pulling out pencil splinters from her mouth, and trying to peel off the little paint bits off of her tongue Lamia complained,

“As much as I try ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, I can never finish.” Then putting on a very ‘wise beyond age’ expression sage Lamia added, “It’s like a tennis ball falls into my stream out of the blue, splashing my thought water all over the place. I am too easily distracted I guess.”

“Sounds like you Missy, have a grave case of A.D.D.,” exclaimed psychology prodigy Monica.

Frustrated with her sister’s “hmm” response, Tanisha sprung out of her chair, fidgety and stuttering with rage,

“Well may be she has I.E.E., you know, Interests Erupting Effect! Since when is it a crime to be curious; to be too interested?”

Followed by a moment of silence, Lamia burst out into laughter, while Monica blankly stared at the two sisters, feeling slightly ostracized by the moment. Meanwhile, Tanisha shaking with the jolt of betrayal stormed out of the room screaming, “Your behaviour springs hydro-eruption out of my cornea.”

Lamia wanted to tell her that these words would strike a sisterly chord within her if they were simple. “Lamia, you make me wanna cry,” would melt and (almost) kill her. But she has never given Tanisha the recipe to this kryptonite. She did not need to know that she has a sister who would go to any length for her; even for no substantial reason. Such knowledge is redundant and dangerous luxury. Plus, natal chronology induced hierarchy dictates that she hold her tongue and harness power through negligence and contrived nonchalance. She does not have the audacity to contradict and insult the doctrine.

<3>

Lamia never felt more docile than she did in their art classes. An avid fan of Oscar Wilde, she wanted to believe in the uselessness of art. That’s why she didn’t understand why art classes were made mandatory in schools. What she detested the most was how art was constricted to pencils and colours. When she addressed the futility of imposed art classes with her principal Mrs. Akram, the robotic lady tried explaining the necessity of art as a means of liberating innate repression. But Lamia failed to see the promised liberation in “Draw as You like with a Tree,” or “Draw as You like with Mickey Mouse” assignments. However, she didn’t continue with her argument because she figured a two-dimensional stick figure like Mrs. Akram would not be able to fathom the versatile wholesomeness of art, which cosmically ties it to the revelation of futility in everything. She would not be able to convince her that reading, thinking, doodling on mud with a twig can command liberty with equal success, and are all arguably forms of art.

The idea of doodling on mud was particularly appealing to her, and she did practice it incessantly. On most occasions she would do it with the same zonal disposition of her reading ventures; pretending she is deciphering ancient theological codes. At other times she would convince herself she is an artist of immense talent, too poor to afford stationeries, but will soon be discovered by a patron and taken to her destined pedestal.

During one of these moments she realized that either through, or because of her nonchalance, she was quite desperate to be discovered, and that is why she was so fascinated with, and devoted towards mystical discoveries. Maybe at the end of the day, the discourse of discovery is itself ignited by a desperation to be discovered.

<4>

Lamia stood next to her mother Nasrin, watching her fry vegetable pakoras. She always felt that the way her mother fried the pakoras was a direct reflection of the way she delegated their upbringing, and other household functions in general. Unlike other kitchens, their kitchen never delivered mixed pakoras. At their house, mixed pakoras meant a variety of individually fried vegetables on the same platter, with the same chutney. She thought this was symbolic of the way their mother valued and nurtured everyone from her father to her sister individually, but under the same uncompromising domestic order, uncustomized at the face of individual needs – each fried in the same batter.

“Broccoli and cauliflower aren’t exactly potato-potata even if they are from the same family,” Lamia angrily pronounced to herself.

Lamia always felt that her mother was a lost potential. She did not know exactly what her potential was (though there must have been one by virtue of being human), but now she is nothing but a case lost to intolerable mundaneness. She thought the only thing exciting about her mother was the difference in the aroma of each of her culinary delights. Even the mystery quotient on that was pretty low since they were directly out of her frayed recipe journal – instructions absolutely untampered with, and impeccably followed word-for-word. Another doctrine saluted.

Little did she know that Nasrin was once not only a young bride of a much older gentleman, but was also an aspiring romance novelist of the distastefully appetizing genre. Like herself, the heroine of her first and only secret novel had “the fissure of her dimpled buttocks of her innocence whipped by the pangs of her lover’s masculinity;” that like her, the heroine had “cracked her multi-coloured glass bangles to make vivid little fragments of  kaleidoscope to view different morsels of her life with.”

What made Lamia queasy about her mother the most was how no site on her mind-slate was blank. She was a woman of many suspicions and few illustrations.

Lamia always informed her mother of her whereabouts beforehand. But when she returned home, her mother would invariably ask her where she went, who she was with, etc. She addressed those queries with a lot of apprehension because she felt her mother was not asking out of forgetfulness or curiosity, but cross-examining her out of suspicion of mendacity and misinformation.

She found her mother’s interest in her to be very selective and condescending.

She wanted to believe that she was being paranoid, but that questions (especially those of her mother’s), were meant to confirm pre-conceived notions instead of filling up a scrap of tabula rasa, felt more like an intuition.

<5>

It is true that all food, particularly rice and curries taste better when not eaten with cutleries. But the task of getting rid of turmeric sediments from nail-beds after a meal is quite laborious. Lamia cringed at the thought of touching her books with those fingers, so she scrubbed her fingers with soap as if seeking vendetta against her cuticles. The scrubbing got even more rigorous because the residue of the lunchtime conversation lingered to her fingers.

She felt this way after every Friday lunch at her house. What made her sceptical about these family conversations was how everyone echoed each other’s one-track mindedness. The monotony of pseudo analysis was more extended than the family members strewn across different corners of their living room. She was convinced she was adopted. The hilarious myth of her being picked up from a dumpster hoarded more plausibility every Friday.

One of the recurring topics of discussion was the miracles of God. This Friday people gushed over balance in God’s games. God’s benevolence was exemplified with “tsk tsk” remorse over the death of an elderly relative two years ago, which was shortly followed by her cousin’s pregnancy. Such blanket statements of balance are very eerie and unnerving to her.

She wondered why the rage against such undesired losses only surfaced as a tease, especially since news of one death is generally followed by a few more. She was embarrassed at the oversight of simultaneous deaths everytime; the domino effect on grave-digging.  One pregnancy cannot balance that out. Why did the surprise visit of the stork overshadow the laziness of Azrail? It seemed to her that Azrail convinced God to waiver the multiple-trip memo, and lapped up a few souls everytime he visited the neighbourhood. When it shits, it really does diarrhoea. Or for good measure, when it rains, it really does pour.

She felt lonely in her battle against the rage of unacceptance. What bothered her the most was how she could not explain her unacceptance of the acceptance of others; how she could not fathom the physical paradox of death. As far as she knew, cold preserves. But when bodies grow cold, it is a sign of internal rotting. She cringed at the realization of this bluff; at how frozen bodies corroded in their cold storage. What she cringed at the most, was the crude phrasing of this thought.

<6>

Tanisha made a decision to have some fun with puns before she rolled out of bed that day. “I’ll take some pun-i-tive actions today,” she thought, and curled up to a foetal position, paralyzed with breathless laughter for a good five minutes. When she finally gathered herself, she remembered that she had invited a few of her friends over for a “Hello Kitty Party.”

She had often heard her mother and her neighbourhood friends speak tartly of the kitty party subculture of the elite women – late afternoon meetings of an unproductive club, harping on about jewellery and other people’s marital hiccups, and occasionally loosening their Tk. 35,000 sari strings to make a Tk. 3500 donation to self-validation in the name of breast cancer research.

“I wish I could cure these headaches guised as women with Paracetamol,” Tanisha had heard her mother coon to one of her friends over a late afternoon tea-session. And there! She had gotten her idea for a seating arrangement for her “Hello Kitty Party” sans “Hello Kitty” paraphernalia. She and her kitty friends would say “hello” to each other and take seats on parallely arranged chairs. Yes, she would para-sit-‘em-all.

She explained her idea to Lamia and asked for her help in setting up. Lamia took a pensive look at their living room and started walking around it, stopping on spots for placing chairs that would enable Tanisha to materialize her dream design.

“There…and there…aaaannnd theeeere…aaannndd there….,” she marched in slow motion with extremely long strides, as if playing “Twister for the Inflexible.”

Having completed their arrangement, the two sisters stood on the coffee table they had removed to a side of the room, aligned with the couches framing the design for their anticipated congregation like a moat.

“There and there, yet a square. I think the outer square is engulfing the inner parallels.”

“Well Tanisha, this is the best we can do. Squares are, afterall, a set of parallel lines put together. One way or another, a parallel seating arrangement would put you guys in a square or any other form of parallelogram.”

“Yeah, I don’t have the time to rearrange the place anyway. I have to help mom fry the kitty shaped potatoes, then…”

“Where did you get those?” Lamia interrupted.

“Mom got them from somewhere. It’s by Silky Foods.”

And they both roared in laughter. Catching her breath, Tanisha remembered decorations were still pending.

“Do we have candy sprinkles?” she asked Lamia.

“I don’t think so, why?”

“I want to sprinkle those all over the living room to add some life.”

“Sweet life for ants and roaches you mean. Are you crazy? I have a few sheets of poster paper that you can cut up to make confetti out of. You want them?”

“No, either sprinkles or nothing. Well maybe baby spiders…” she said smirking as her eyeballs elevated diagonally, “…confetti in fretful motion: confretti!

“It’s ironic how you never have what you want. For your birthday party you wanted confetti and there was none, but there were boxes of sprinkles for the cake. And now it’s the reverse.”

“10,000 spoons when you need a knife isn’t exactly an irony, it’s sheer misfortune.”

On that note, Tanisha exited the building. Living room rather.

<7>

Lamia found that boy’s presence to be quite unsettling. “What’s his name again? Oh, Shakil,” she thought to herself everytime he staggered into the classroom with his posse. Everything about that boy was pathetic to her – the way he left the classroom every half an hour to go re-do his spikes with tap water, the way all the girls stopped conversing with each other everytime His Fabulousity made an entrance, and got extra giggly and straight-backed.

This happened every 32 minutes – exit every 30 minute, followed by 2 minutes of copious amounts of whispers about him, and then his return. She could not decide what was more pathetic; his exits, their reason, his entrances and re-entrances, the moments in between, the people around, or the pest himself. Or is it her masochistic and fruitless obsession with this that takes the cake?

Quickly she snapped out of it, embarrassed at her banal indulgence, and realizing her time would be better spent trying to bite dust.

She tried to concentrate on the in-class exercise Manowara Miss had assigned. Lamia realized she gulped a lot in her classes. That was probably because she found an exaggerated resemblance between her Manowara Miss and her Lady Hujur. In fact, the resemblance wasn’t exaggerated at all. It was just on the superficial level that both of them wore abaiyahs and covered their heads with wide white scarves. Also neither of them, Manowara being a chemistry teacher, and Lady Hujur being an Arabic teacher, needed to use English at all, but they both did so with millions of mistakes and unbent confidence.

Tanisha already had a ball picking faults and poking fun at the Arabic teacher’s mistakes. If by the time she reaches Lamia’s grade, Manowara Miss is still there, she would probably do the same with her.

Lamia has an extra dollop of affection for Tanisha because she sees a lot of herself in her, especially in terms of humour. The only difference is, all of Lamia’s articulations are in her head, and Tanisha’s are actually articulations. That’s why on many occasions, despite having an urge, Lamia refrained from asking Tanisha for details about her Arabic lessons.

For one, there was some barrier that she did not know how to overcome to address questions of this nature with her little sister. Besides, she figured if Tanisha did face similar “spectacles,” she would bring it up herself. And if she wasn’t doing so, that is probably okay too, because they can’t exactly confide such matters in their father – they have had a proper upbringing – and telling their mother would bear no or negative results.

Their mother would either refuse to believe the allegation against the female voice of God, or slide it under the carpet with some excuse or explanation. She would however, not do so if this had happened to someone else’s child. In that case, she would dish out some stern advice and be genuinely enraged from the core of her being. We often don’t give importance to the injustice and tribulations of our close ones the same way we give to others. Maybe because we are, in one way or another, responsible for their instigation; or maybe because in case of others it is easier to dodge the obligation of taking action of any consequence, and a stance of any level against the atrocity is always applauded and put under a heroic spotlight.

For example when Lamia’s uncle had an affair, Nasrin was infuriated, supported her sister-in-law to the hilt suggesting she leave her husband (as in Nasrin’s own brother), and move on to worthier pastures. When her sister-in-law almost succumbed to her husband’s desperate pleas to give the marriage another chance, Nasrin explained to her that there really is no remedy or compensation for infidelity.

No one knows that Lamia knows about this, but when her father had an affair with his co-worker, Nasrin forgave him immediately, attributing stress, workload and frustration to this venture. When asked how she is taking it so easily, Nasrin explained that it is easy to forgive when you love someone passionately.

But Lamia disagreed wholeheartedly. She thought passion cannot, and should not allow for rational compensation and immediate respite. All this traditional loyalty hocus-pocus was a little too modern for her to digest, especially since it came from a woman who inculcated values of honesty and stability in her.

“When did modernity creep up and possess tradition, rendering it devoid of any emotion but fear?” she often wondered.

Her romanticism was sabotaged by the same person who instilled it. She had decided that once a grown-up, she will tell her mother,

“The stories you tell me of your courtship days sound like somebody else’s. I cannot identify you as the woman who once contemplated elopement, wrote silly little love songs with jingle-like tunes, snuck out for crazy little romantic escapades. I had always wondered why you began your anecdotes whispering, ‘don’t tell your father I told you this,’ but I now I know he isn’t your beau in those stories. I have stopped wondering why institutionalization of a relationship implies gagging deliberate experiences of raging passion.

You never lied to me when you told stories of ‘him.’ You never said ‘your father and I.’ My presumption should not be your burden, and your unloading isn’t mine now that I know. My only regret is, I have never seen that classical heroine my mother once was. I process your efficiency in all you roles and chores with replicated rationale, but I wish I could have felt you in my gut. At least once.

It pricks like a fang, your modernity in my Neanderthal. You know, you can’t validate people to parallel your expectations.”

And then Nasrin Begum will know that her daughter is actually a mute raven perpetually collecting carcasses of choked stories, but finding them too unappetizing to chew in the end.

<8>

On the last day of school, the kids were quite antsy. On one hand, there lay the excitement of a three month long summer vacation, and on the other hand, the remorse of being detached with most of their friends. This year like all the others, saw shattering crushes and reassuring friendships. The inherited intrinsic doctrine of middle school life dictated that friendships should only be established with people only within their particular sections, and then be recycled and redistributed as sections were rotated. So the partings that day would not only stretch over 3 months, but threatened to extend over a longer, indefinite period of time.

As was the tradition, everyone stayed an extra couple of hours that day to play and engage in mild, harmless debauchery. Lamia too stayed back to absorb the only place that gave her a sense of belonging and ownership. It is not as if she did not feel at home at her home, it’s just that she did not feel so at all times. Those are the gaps that were filled by the shade of this mango tree, which honed all her secrets, talents and musings.

She desperately needed those extra hours at her sanctuary because the upcoming vacation may entail some sacrifices; sacrifices as grave as subsiding brownie points from above by way of deterring divine despotism.

She knew what rape was. She knew it was the physical and emotional incarceration of a female rodent by a male scavenger. She was grateful that she was never raped. She also knew that it is not only the infliction of severe explicit trauma that called for condemnation, but that inducement of morbid awkwardness was also of substantial gravity. She did not need to be told this, she just knew. This realization replaced her mother in the void of her gut.

She felt her fists clenched, eyes dewy and jaws stiff as the failure of identifying the reason for her angst dawned upon her. Although she felt her Hujur meant well, she knew there was something wrong with abrupt stories embodying contrived lessons.

“Whatever Allah has given is divine. You should never challenge God. Once this girl threaded her eyebrows and shaved her arms and legs, and the next day the removed hair was replaced with caterpillars,” said the Hujur, interrupting Lamia’s stuttered skimming of the Arabic text before her.

“She means well,” thought Lamia, and went back to reading.

“I am happy to see you are showing breasts. They are small now, but as you grow older, they’ll get bigger… like mine.”

And she flashed.

That was only the beginning. From then onwards, every chance she got, she would exhibit her blessings.

“I am thinking of getting my daughter married off. Her breasts are almost as big as mine.” *FLASH*

“Your mother might ask you to wear V.C.R. (brassiere) when you grow older, don’t. You shouldn’t try to manipulate what God has given you. I never have and never will.” *FLASH*

“I am so lucky my husband gave me a daughter before he died. I have nothing more to ask for. God is great. The greatest feeling in the world is breast-feeding your child.” *FLASH*

At the time Lamia did not know why she felt violated. She wanted to tell her mother, but she didn’t know what to say. She wished during one of those “flash parties” her mother would wake up from her siesta and walk in on them. But as divine dictations would have it, that never happened.

The maid at their house, Rahima bua, was like a second mother to them. Lamia wanted to address this with her, but her struggle with this avenue resembled that with her mother’s. On top of that, Rahima bua would never take her side and malign the Woman of God. She had immense faith in people of God.

When Lamia used to hide upon her Lady Hujur’s arrival, Rahima bua would help the prophetess hunt her down. She would later lecture Lamia on not disrespecting religious authorities since they were holders of unimaginable power. She would give examples of how at different points in time, making small donations for milaads in mazaars had fulfilled her wishes. She told stories of how chits of prayers had cured illnesses. Apparently once, a prayer had to be written with deer blood for it to work, but the Hujur at her local mazaar was so powerful, that he had attained the desired result with plain red ink.

At the time when Lamia was receiving her Arabic lessons, she hadn’t menstruated, and had no idea as to what menstruation was. No one had briefed her- no mother, no teacher. She remembers that when her Lady Hujur brought it up out of the blue, she had no clue as to what she was being told, but she remembers being terrified. She remembers the skinny dark lady with lines of fatigue on her skin, and eyes too big for her face leaning over and saying,

“Have you had your ‘B.D.R.’ (period) yet?”

“My what?”

“‘B.D.R’… ‘mens’…It is something girls must go through. I won’t tell you anything about it, but if you don’t get it on time, you are going to have to put a glass through you‘lojjar jayga’ (shameful place).”

Lamia did not know how to process that, and she did not know why she was scared. When Rahima was putting her to sleep with folktales that night, she asked about “B.D.R.,”and Rahima comforted her with,

“If Hujur says so, it must be true. One way or the other, you will be fine.”

Then pausing for a moment she said,

“Even if women can do damage, how far can they go? Your parents know what’s best for you shona.”

<9>

Agewise, Lamia and Tanisha weren’t that far apart, but by virtue of menstruation catching up with Lamia without the aid of glass, they were, like two different generations (at least temporarily), separated by a stream of blood.

Lamia had heard elders speak of sacrifices generations have made for justice, morality, conscience, consciousness, gratification, but mostly for the next generation.

Lamia felt a responsibility towards her little sister. Depending on the situation, she would either warn or threaten the “Woman of God.” She did not care about disturbing divine dignity and the consequence(s) that it might bear.

She conceded that sacrifice was a battle that left heaps of rubble to be cleared off afterwards. Post fulfilling all strata of decorum, warriors are too tired to enjoy the fruits of the sacrifice, and too desensitized to feel its zest. The optimum execution of the “humanness” of humanity rips humanity of the same “humanness.”

For humanity, Lamia was willing to forego her humanness.

<10>

Shakil did not know he was in Lamia’s neighbourhood, and that he was walking right by her house. He was too overwhelmed by the bitterness of a lost cricket match to notice that he had treaded upon an unknown neighbourhood to seek solace with his stars.

While he approached Lamia’s apartment building, inside, Lamia’s mother had just served slices of mangoes to her husband. He had given the aati to Lamia, since that was her most favourite part of the fruit. Lamia being in a sacrificing mood, handed it to Tanisha.

Tanisha felt bad for the crows in the vicinity, and in a zest of magnanimity, she threw the seed out the window so the crows could fight it out. Incidentally, the seed landed on Shakil, who got even more agitated, and threw the seed back at the building. The seed then bounced off the wall, and fell on the Lady Hujur as she was entering the building to teach Tanisha.

It is at this point of bones chasing banes on a Friday afternoon, that these jarred pickles failed to harmonize; unless cancelling each other out at an uncovetted equilibrium can be called harmony.