In Extreme Need of Guidance

Chapter I

The House on R.K. Mission Road

The first home my parents lived in was on Ram Krishna (R.K.) Mission Road in Old Dhaka, where it still stands. It was gifted to my parents by my paternal grandfather upon their marriage. The building has been extended upon and renovated since then, but at that time, just around Partition, it was a modest two-storey home with high ceilings and thick walls that kept the interior cool during the summer. Now, it is the only single home still standing on the street, all others since been converted to tall apartment blocks.

My parents had nine children, of whom I am the eldest. Our feet, and those of our children and their children have pressed on the cool cement of the house on RK MIssion Road. Many mouths have tasted the rose apples from the tree that stands in the courtyard. When I think of the thick limestone walls of the house now I think of the essence of the generations of our family that it has absorbed. The house feels like a living thing.

I was born exactly at 11 PM on July 19, 1948 at Mitford Hospital in Dhaka. It was soon after Partition, and some British doctors and administrators had remained in the country to continue the transition of the hospital’s operations to local hands. The hospital had a good reputation overall, but reserved their best service for the British and other Europeans living in Dhaka at that time. My mama (uncle, or mother’s brother) was a magistrate at the time, and he pulled strings to have my mother, Shamsunnahar Begum, admitted to the hospital when she was close to her date of delivery. She was given a cabin that was normally reserved for those of European descent, or for natives who were Very Important Persons.

My mother was sixteen. I would be her first-born child. The English obstetrician was astonished to see a (in her eyes) tiny girl about to give birth. She and my mother did not have a language in common, so the doctor would regularly peek in with just her head and offer an elongated ‘kemoooooon’ whenever she came to see my mother.

I was considered a heavy child at 8 pounds, and unattractive enough to send my mother into a temporary whirlpool of depression, so distressed was she to be somehow involved in my arrival to this world. But these feelings gave way to motherly ones soon enough — when I grew older, she told me that I was born the same year as Prince Charles of Britain, and was four months his elder.

My father, a police inspector stationed in Dhaka, was very excited about the birth, spending much of his modest salary to hire two nurses to look after my mother. One of these nurses would come to our home on Mission Road once my mother was released from the hospital a week following my birth. The quality of care that my mother received at Mitford, the gleaming cabin and the excellent food, would stay with her the rest of her life. Alas, given the nomadic existence that my family would experience following my birth, none of my mother’s remaining eight deliveries would match up to the experience of her first.

In keeping with the culture of the time, no one would have been surprised had my father been disappointed with a first-born girl. Thankfully, he was excited to have a child regardless of gender. He bought so many sweets to celebrate my birth that a horse cart had to be hired to deliver it all. I received a very expensive and smart looking pram of khaki canvas cloth, but much like my mother’s hospital stay, this extravagance was also limited to only my birth. None of my father’s subsequent issues would be greeted with such fanfare.

Our home was large enough that my family decided to host live-in guests. This was not only done as an additional source of income, but also because my parents saw this was a communal service. They paid a modest amount a month and had their own quarters but we would dine together. My mother would serve them as they ate. This was expected of her as a hostess. On occasion they would make special requests of her in terms of the dishes served.

The gentlemen we hosted were well-educated and on the path to future prosperity and/or renown. I remember four clearly: Mr. Rashid-uz-Zaman who was then a Reader at Dhaka University. Dr. Lutfur Rahman who would later become a CSP Officer, Mr. Mazumdar who worked for British Tobacco. And Mr. Awal, who managed a textile mill.

One-time Mr. Awal’s mother sent for him from the countryside some aam shotto (mango fruit leather). A great delicacy. Upon receiving the package Mr. Awal handed it to my mother with a request to store it and to give him some when he asked for it. He was planning to have it with milk from time to time. My mother put it on a high shelf in the kitchen but I soon found the jar and began to pilfer from it on a regular basis until one day I finished all of it.

Eventually Mr. Awal remembered his mother’s gift and asked my mother to serve some with his meal. My mother went to the kitchen and discovered what had happened. Embarrassed, she returned and told Mr. Awal that her daughter, Rosy, had eaten all of it. I don’t remember the extent of Mr. Awal’s irritation but he said something to the effect of ‘one mother sent it and another mother has eaten it’.

Another time, when I was a little older, say seven or eight, I was wandering aimlessly through our backyard when I came across Mr. Rahman, who was by the well we had at the back of our house. He was shirtless and had a small pot of oil with him; he was planning to take a bath. Seeing me, he said, ‘mother, would you mind putting some oil on my back?’ The request gave me pause. A latent sense of propriety reared up in me. The task seemed simple enough but a small voice in me insisted that it would not be proper for me to fulfil this request. So I said ‘let me ask my mother first.’ At this Mr. Rehman quickly declined my help with thanks.

Dr. Rashid-Uz-Zaman on the other hand liked to quiz me on my studies. One evening he asked me to compose an essay about Dhaka. I began with the line: “Dhaka is situated on the banks of the Buriganga river.” He read the essay and commended me on my work. I didn’t tell him that I had copied the essay line by line from my textbook.

Our house was located in Old Dhaka, where there were a number of stately manors and zamindar houses. One had a beautiful rose garden and a menagerie of birds such as ostriches, peacocks and swans. In the late afternoon we would go there to play as it allowed for the neighbourhood children to enter and browse the gardens. Nearby this rose garden was another called ‘Sadhur Bagan’. It had a large pond in one corner. Bathing there one day I lost a gold ring of mine. My father was understandably very angry with me and beat me. Later I returned with a colander and strained the mud for days but never found the ring.

I came to this same pond one morning to find it overflowing from heavy rains the previous night. The water covered the green grass. A large catfish had become stranded on the ground. It was mature and light colored and alternated between struggling on the ground and staying still, as though conserving energy. I ran home to fetch a copper bucket and returned to find the fish still there. I held the bucket close to its head and flicked water at it as I was afraid of touching it. It crawled dutifully in and I ran back home to show it to my mother. She was happy to see the night’s dinner in the bucket and cooked the fish with the stalks of data shak. This was a relief in those days as my mother was frequently in a conundrum as to what to cook on my father’s meagre salary.

Given the crowded house my most cherished time was early in the morning, when I was often the only one awake. When I was six or seven I developed a passion for collecting flowers at dawn. My chosen spot for collecting them was beneath the shefali tree in our neighbour’s front yard as they normally left their gates open early in the morning. I would gather up the flowers and later in the day thread them into garlands.

On one such occasion I woke up thinking it was near dawn. As usual no one else in the house was awake. I opened the deadbolt on the bedroom door standing on the bedposts to reach it, which I recall had a sun motif on them. When I stepped out to our verandah I didn’t notice that it was much darker than expected. I went outside to the neighbour’s front gate and found it closed. So I took the narrow passage that ran between our houses that led to their outhouse, which like the outhouses of most middle-class families were built on concrete pillars, and climbing up from the bottom I gained access to their backyard. Taking this circuitous path I eventually made it to their front yard to find that not a single flower was on the ground, and roaming the grounds was a frightfully large monitor lizard.

The front gates of most houses then were narrow and wooden, since cars were very rare, so despite being a small child, I was able to open the deadbolt easily and run out. Returning to our house however I saw a great, massive black dog sitting in our front yard with its head between its paws. The hair on its body was long. It was so large that when it sat up its head reached the second storey of our house. My screams drew my family to the front yard, where they found me shivering with fear. I told them what I had done, and seen. They checked the time and saw that it was two in the morning. My mother heated salt on a spatula and made me take it to calm me — a village remedy for those badly frightened by the supernatural.

The experience of the dog in our front yard, despite its immense size, was not a dream. Of this I was convinced, even though my dreams at that age were unusually vivid, full of wonder and mystery. In many of them, I could fly, often around the house, or more memorably in a dark, empty temple with soaring ceilings, its walls crowded and bulging with carved figures. In another I was in a strange city, flitting around giant humming structures the size of buildings, made of shining steel. I had the sense that they were immensely powerful and arcane machinery of some kind, with great moving gears, pistons and unknown mechanisms moving upon their surface. In my dreams they would hover far above the ground and were extremely loud, but I had no clue as to their true purpose.

Returning to the matter of the flower picking: my childhood was defined by such unruly and aberrant behaviour. Biris held a particular fascination for me. Whenever I would spy an unfinished one on the ground I would immediately put it in my mouth and try to smoke it. One day, having spotted one on the floor of our verandah, I was about to pick it up when my father came up from behind me and grabbed me by the back of my neck. He asked me what I was doing. He had been watching me for some time. I thought quickly and told him that I was simply keeping the house clean by picking up trash. “The servants keep throwing biris on the ground,” I said.

He caught me like this many times. Another time it was when I used the epithet ‘shala’. He asked me to repeat what I had just said and once again I was able to think quickly. I said I was simply saying ‘sala’, a near homonym that means ‘burlap sack’.

I was always looking for things of interest on the ground. One day I had an incredible bit of luck and found a one anna coin in the house. I ran to the shop immediately to buy lozenges with this substantial sum of money. I asked the shopkeeper for one anna worth of lozenges and he placed eight on my palm, but when I searched for the coin to pay him I could not find it. I had put it in the elastic band of my trousers, but it must have fallen out while I was running to the shop. I returned the candy and returned home greatly disappointed.

I was involved in all manner of neighbourhood sports and games, and especially enjoyed playing marbles with other children, who were often the young servants of other households. These games would take place by the side of the road and involved hitting marbles from a distance with your own. Whichever marbles you hit became yours. Passersby would often stop to watch us play. One time, a European man walking past us stopped to watch us play and after a particularly good strike by me exclaimed, ‘very good’ in English.

One of these marble sessions ended badly as one day my maternal uncle, returning from classes at medical college, caught me playing with the servants — an unforgivable act. He took me home, threw all my marbles in the well and struck me with a length of firewood until my knees bled. These beatings from my near relatives were frequent occurrences in my childhood. My mother did not have the nerve to stop them, but later, with a sad face but no words of comfort in her mouth, she would bathe and clean my wounds.

All manner of street food merchants hawked their wares on the streets where I played marbles. When my mother handed me six paisa one day to spend at the grocer’s I found my opportunity to taste these wares. I saw that a man was selling serbet — colored drinks of many hues attractively packaged in long-necked bottles. I sat down at the table and requested a drink from the yellow bottle, having forgotten all about the coriander my mother had sent me out to buy. When the drink was set before me in the heavy, green-tinted glass I took a big sip and found it less delicious than I had imagined. I got up and began to walk away, making a terse comment that the drink was not tasty, the six paisa clutched tightly in my hand. Seeing me leave the serbet wallah said, “khuki, paisa?”

Yelling that a kidnapper was after me, I ran home without looking back. My father had just returned from the office. He was in uniform and held a leather baton in his hand. I told him that a child snatcher (considered a great menace in those days) was following me. My father was understandably very concerned and accompanied me to the sherbet wallah’s cart. When he inquired to the man as to what had happened he said, “Sir, I only said, ‘khuki, paisa?’” My father wanted to then pay the man for the drink but he refused. I am not sure if I was later beaten for this incident.

I am certain that my frequent beatings at the hand of my father (my mother was the only adult in the family who did not beat me) had an effect that manifested itself in other ways. For example, I would frequently wet the bed. I would be dreaming that I was urinating in the bathroom only to wake and find that I had done the deed in the real world. My invariable strategy upon discovering this was to stack all the pillows I could find over the offending area of the bed and flee the scene. This bed-wetting wasn’t confined to our house. When visiting relatives in Kaliganj once again I wet the bed and employed my trusted pillow strategy. However, when I was standing in the kitchen my auntie shooed me away, complaining that I smelled like pee. I kept wetting the bed until the age of ten.

My father was a gazetted officer respectably placed in the police. He had a limited income and never took bribes. Such scruples, uncommon at the time, meant a meanness in our upbringing. We ate simple foods and my siblings and I always wanted for new clothes. I remember that once my mother sewed me new knickers with a print of red flowers on a white background. This was underclothing but I was desperate to show it off to the world. I eventually found a way: I stood before our main gate and faced the road. Then, as if I had collected rocks on the lap of my frock, lifted it up so that my underwear was visible to the passersby. I held the pose for a few minutes and once satisfied that enough people had seen my new underwear, went inside. I was about four or five.

As I grew older and our family became slightly more affluent, I became more possessive about the clothes I wore. There was a tailor our family frequented and I warned him that he must keep exclusive any design work he did on my clothes, barring that he would have to stitch the words ‘Rosy Frock’ onto the dresses of any girls who wore a design identical to mine. But the tailor would break his solemn compact with me, for I soon saw saw a neighbourhood girl wearing the same frock as mine. I pretended to play tag with her and smeared amlaki juice on her nice new frock. Amlaki stains are permanent.

When I was a child, adults would invariably ask children one of three questions, all of which I found irritating. The first involved a child’s roll number - adults always wanted to know my roll number, which I was reluctant to reveal as it was quite high. The other was what their mother had cooked that day or would be cooking that day. This question I would answer by inventing a list of fantasy dishes to hide the actual simple dishes that my mother was making that day, but I would get them mixed up and the dishes would sound increasingly nonsensical, for example: catfish and beef curry, rice pudding made with lentils, etc. The final question or demand from adults to children would be to translate a sentence from Bangla to English. I don’t remember how I did with these questions but I suspect poorly.

My distaste for any activity related to education, or studying, began early. In 1954, when I was six, my father came from the office with a gentleman in tow. At that time he was working for the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Dhaka. I was not yet attending school. My father informed us that this gentleman was to be my private tutor. Upon hearing this news I went to the bedroom, crawled under the bed and started crying loudly. For a long time no one could get me out. Even when someone was able to finally extract me from under the bed I ran to the neighbour’s house to crawl under one of theirs. When my father sent his nephew to fetch me, our neighbours began berating him because they thought I must have been beaten very badly to cry so hard. My cousin then explained to them what had happened.

Nothing I did could keep the teacher from visiting our home every day. This familiarity and routine didn’t change my attitude. In fact, matters became so severe that my mother resorted to drastic measures: when it was time for the teacher to visit, she would take me to the front room and tie my hands with a rope that she attached to the desk leg. She would then quickly leave the room as she was a purdah observing woman and did not wish to be in the same room as a man who was not her husband. The teacher would arrive and leisurely untie me so our lessons could begin. Through all this, I wept with outrage. Some weeks passed. My teacher tried to mollify me with the occasional sweet, melting my heart but a little. In that time I had realized that I could lift up the desk leg and slip off the rope. I was able to do so once or twice before my mother began tying me to the window grill. It was dawning on my family that I would never be academically distinguished.

Unlike my studies, I was diligent about music. This pleased my father, a music lover. Anyone expressing interest in music had his unstinting support. When my mother revealed an interest in learning to sing he immediately bought her a harmonium and appointed a music teacher to provide her with lessons. She quickly became a decent singer and in turn taught me. Unfortunately, while my father was a music lover, he was quite strict about the lessons, and would beat me if I made a single mistake. While singing before him, I would always be nervous about an incoming blow. I would make errors, stammer and stay stuck on a single word in fear of a blow. But thanks to him and my mother, by the age of six I could both sing and play the harmonium. In time I also learned the tabla and practiced it with great devotion. I sang loudly at night and fell asleep with my harmonium on my bed.

Early morning rewaz was very much in vogue at that time, especially in the Hindu households. Conventional knowledge claimed that it was critical to keeping one’s voice in tune and improving vocal range. There was an informal rivalry in the neighbourhood as to who could rise the earliest and begin singing. This is why I would rise before dawn and sing at the top of my lungs, my voice blaring out into the neighbourhood. The mornings when my voice was the first to infiltrate the neighbourhood the girls in the others homes would hurriedly rise and begin their own singing. The mahalla would pulse with our dueling, disparate harmonies. The mornings when I was the first to begin singing were counted as a victory, and the ones when I failed to be the first lent a bitter taste to the remainder of my day, and I would vow to rise even earlier the next day. This zealousness about rewaz would cause problems later during my time at the Home Economics College in Lahore, which I will recount shortly.

Once music and breakfast were done, in my pre-school years, I would head out to play immediately. A V-shaped wall separated us from our neighbours at RK Mission Road. I would climb up on this wall and run around on it all day. Sometimes a girl named Khaleda who lived in the neighbourhood would join me and we would spend the whole day on the ramparts. Thick green moss clung to their tops, leaving us comfortable cushions, sitting on them, Khaleda and I would wonder if we could spend our whole lives up there.

We could spy on our neighbours from these walls. One of these households, our next door neighbour, was quite wealthy. Whenever I heard the clitter and clatter of utensils I knew that if I sat on the wall I would see them devouring delicacies far beyond our modest means. It seemed the matron of the family would eat her food with great relish, nodding and sighing in appreciation as she ate. Watching this, my mouth would water and I would swallow hard. I began to discuss these things with my mother — who sometimes acted like an older sister given the small gap in our ages. When I raised this topic with her she excitedly claimed that the rich ate such good foods that they defecated in very tiny amounts, as little of the nutrition was wasted by the body. ‘Their shit is like the tiny droppings of a goat’, my mother said.

I became obsessed with eating like the rich. Having heard of steak, I once fried a piece of meat in butter on a pan, all the while thinking to myself ‘this is what wealth smells like’. I would dream of buttered toast and jam, which to me was the height of luxury eating. In comparison, our breakfast was usually chapati, alu bhaji and sometimes sattu. On special occasions some ghee and sugar might be sprinkled on the chapatti. This was a delicious and rich breakfast, but I couldn’t bring myself to appreciate it at the time.

At one point my father and my eldest maternal uncle decided to rent a large house together. We shared the rent and split the cost of the groceries. My aunt was came from a wealthy and haughty family and she forbade her children from mixing with me and my siblings. I was curious about my cousins and one of the questions I asked them concerned what they ate for breakfast. They confirmed that their food was similar to that of our rich neighbours. ‘It must be very tasty, those foods,’ I said to them and they said ‘yes’ before being called away by my aunt. I had proof of my cousin’s claim one morning when I watched from the doorway as my aunt put butter and jam on a whole stack of toast right in front of me. Once done, she closed the door on my face me without offering me a single slice. I was no more than five, I don’t remember my exact sentiments from that the time, but I recall not being happy.

Chapter II

Mercolized Wax

My father’s incorruptibility meant a life of want for his family. Police officers back then were overwhelmingly corrupt and lined their pockets handsomely with bribes and grafts, but my father was adamant in his refusal to participate. He was well-supported by my mother in this regard, who, on the eve of her wedding, was cautioned by her father to never ask her husband to buy her expensive gifts as that would pressure him to solicit bribes.

She took this advice to heart, and for the next 47 years of their marriage (until my father’s death) never asked him for anything that wasn’t a necessity for the household. This was no small sacrifice for her. She came from a family of means and had had a very comfortable upbringing until her marriage.

It was my mother’s strength that allowed my father to resist temptation. His scrupulously honest career had negative impacts beyond the monetary. His refusal to take bribes put his dishonest colleagues in an awkward position, and his disinclination towards showering his bosses with gifts drew their ire.

As a result, my father’s colleagues conspired with their superiors to transfer him to undesirable posts around the country. It was rare for him to last more than a year at a new post. Although these frequent moves strained my parents, they never worried about the impact on my schooling as the children of government officials could transfer from one school to another with minimal fuss, but attending eight or nine schools until matriculation left a mark on me; I never built up the cadre of childhood friends that others have nor possessed a stability of lifestyle to help me focus on my studies.

However, this didn’t bother me as doing well in examinations was not a priority for me. In fact, each time we received the news that my father would be transferred, I would get excited about seeing new places and meeting new people. My father never grumbled or complained when he found out that he would yet again be transferred. He would smile sadly and say something like ‘I will have to go wherever the lord sends me’ and begin to pack our holdols. He never remonstrated with his superiors to stay at a certain post or lobby to move to another. He inherited this strong sense of ethics from his mother.

My father was well-educated. His bachelor's degree from Dhaka University, was a rarity in those days. He received first division in both his matriculation and intermediate and graduated from Dhaka University with distinction. He was also a ‘blue’ in athletics.

But he had a bad temper and of his children I got the worst of it. I don’t know if it was an inheritance from his parents or an outgrowth of his career frustrations, but his anger would frequently be volcanic. Standing before him, facing his wrath, one imagined he would begin to destroy everything before him but he never did.

As his children we were very scared of him. An example is if we were ever near and he asked for something, say, his glasses. We would immediately line up and the glasses would go from one hand to another until finally to him, like a relay. I got the worst of his beatings. My younger siblings managed to evade him by alway staying out of his way and generally doing well in their studies.

His expectations of my mother were unrealistic given that she was a woman who married at a very young age, before finishing her education. He would become very angry with her when she did not rise to meet them, but he never struck her because he had very particular ideas about moral conduct, and not just towards humans. I remember going somewhere with him during the winter (perhaps the bazaar) when we came across a bridge. There was another man before us with a cow, who for whatever reason was taking the bridge himself while making the cow cross the stream. My father shoved the man in the water and told him to follow his cow if he wouldn’t take it on the bridge.

He was a devout Muslim who never missed his five daily prayers. He would pray with utmost focus. He considered it as much a physical activity as a spiritual one and believed that all concomitant activities around prayers such as wudu were wonderful things as well. Whenever we visited a new place, especially an outdoors setting that was lovely he would find a quiet area to pray and thank god. Despite being devoutly religious however, he did not like the indiscriminate building of mosques.

He never failed to fast during Ramadan. I once saw him maintain his fast even though he was suffering from typhoid fever, only medicine passing his lips that day. But he was not doctrinaire about religion, and reluctant to push his beliefs onto others. ‘Prayers aren’t enough to get you into heaven’, he would say. According to him, the first in line to heaven was the person who discovered quinine, and doctors and scientists, regardless of faith.

An incident that I remember vividly about my father involved a housemaid who was departing our service. She was an old woman. As she was about to leave it was discovered that she had truly eclectic tastes in thievery as we found in her bags my father’s wristwatch, his glasses, some of my mother’s cosmetics and one of her earrings. Even some of my father’s medicine. When we raised the issue with my father the whole house trembled in anticipation of his legendary temper.

He came out to see all the stolen goods laid out on the courtyard, but surprised us by just saying to the maid: ‘go mother, go,’ and turned away without even trying to reclaim the things she had stolen. I don’t remember if the maid had the nerve to still take the stolen goods with her.

Another time an old woman came to his work to lodge a complaint with the police as her relatives were threatening her for a plot of land of hers that they wished to claim. My father sat down to write the complaint himself instead of relegating it to one of his junior officers. But before she began dictating her complaint the woman fished out a small paper bag from her waist. My father stopped writing as he thought she was about to show him some documented evidence. Rather the bag held money that she offered to my father, thinking that like every other officer he required a bribe as well. My father grew angry and tossed the money back at her.

Whenever he tutored us in his studies he was likely to beat us if we made mistakes, but I don’t believe that his strict parenting left lasting emotional or mental scars in us. We were afraid of him, yet respectful. He gave his nine children lessons on religion as well as music and dance. He would often say that the house was a club and we were all members. He loved to play with us and at times he would call the local youngsters to participate in sports and he would buy prizes to distribute afterwards. He had skills in art and his own tricks; he would ask me to name any animal or object and he would draw it using either Arabic numerals or English or Bangla alphabets. Once he asked me to write a capital ‘M’, and when I did he used the two peaks of the letter as the ears of a cat, drawing the rest of the animal around it.

He was stern but not cruel; pious but not dogmatic, and scrupulously honest even to the detriment of his family’s well-being. He learned frugality from his mother in that he would say that nothing in this world goes unused. His example was the rice plant; the husk was fed to ducks, the plant stalk to cattle and the roots were burned to make the land fertile again.

While he encouraged a variety of experiences in his children, he disliked the use of cosmetics at a young age. When I was 12 or 13 I would wake up at night, sit in front of the mirror and apply my mother’s makeup to my face. I would use expensive, tantalising products such as Cuticura talc, Mercolized Wax, snow and Brylcreem (my father’s). There was no lipstick on the dressing table so I would soak red kite-paper in water until the color leached out and applied it to my lips. Although my father forbade it, my mother recognized the behavior as instinctual for a young girl.

Thus made up, I would parade around the house in the middle of the night, the spiders and wall geckoes my only audience. I was careful to always remove my makeup before returning to bed. However, one morning I forgot and my father frowned when he saw the tip on my forehead and when he asked me why my forehead was dirty I ran to the bathroom and quickly washed it off.

During ramadan my father liked to sit in front of the food, waiting for the call to prayer to begin eating, considering it a sign of patience. During one of his fasts I joined him. It was my first time fasting and I absentmindedly took a single grain of puffed rice and started rubbing it on my tongue. When my father inquired as to what I was doing I said ‘I’m not eating; I’m just rubbing it on my tongue’.

He was methodical and disciplined in life. When we rode the train he always counted the luggage going in and then again getting out. Coolies in those days all had a metal plaque with their numbers on their shirts. My father would note the numbers of the coolies who carried our luggage so that we could find them again if something went wrong.

He tutored me in English, taught me the rule of ‘s’ or ‘es’ after a verb when it was in third person singular present tense, a simple concept but that took me a long time to master. My father would ask me for a simple translation of ‘shey jai’ in English and I would say ‘he go’ and he would hit me on the head. I became terrified of these ‘lessons’, which continued even after I began attending school. Eventually my siblings devised a way to deter him from tutoring them by telling him that they were studying maths, a subject my father was fearful of. Faced with a maths problem he would hem and haw and after some time mutter something about a right angle being ninety degrees before giving up (he was stronger in geometry).

He had a soft spot for musicians. If one ever came to my father for help he would immediately insist that they become my music teacher. Some would agree reluctantly and for some time go through the motions of giving me music lessons. I would also go through these lessons, too scared to say no. Music lessons were the only bribe my father would accept.

My father’s orderly would polish his shoes everyday. I watched him and eventually took over this duty, which I enjoyed. When I was older and studying at Lahore, I would always have the most resplendent shoes in the dormitory. In fact, I went on a shoe buying spree in Lahore with my generous stipend just so I could polish shoes all night. It brought me much joy and satisfaction.

Milk products would always be ready in the house as my father received 12 or 15 KGs of ghee from the government, among other milk products. He would always have milk and rice at the end of a meal, and when in season to this combination he would add fruits such as mangoes, jackfruit and palm fruit. He would insist that we have dairy in order to put some meat on my bones. His faith in dairy products making people fatter convinced me. I would force myself to eat these highly buttered and gheed foods and then closely watch my arms to see if I was gaining weight.

Conversely, my father would also insist that we eat korola and drink chirota juice, as he believed that bitter foods held immense health benefits. He taught me that the particulars of good honey were in its color and smell. That the smoother a chicken’s legs, the younger it was, that ripe bananas have thinner skin, and that the flesh of a mango that is ready to eat will not bounce back once pressed, that the stem of a good orange should be firm, as that’s where it begins to rot, and that if the leaves of a plant fell off easily it would live, but if it took an effort to pry them off then it was likely dead.

My paternal grandfather would receive an English newspaper daily, which was very rare indeed in that time. He was respected by the locals in his village (Kaliganj) for his philanthropy. He had a endless appetite for acquiring land and maintained his power by being extremely litigious about his properties and those of others, at one point winning thirty judgments in a row, following which he hired drum beaters to go from the rail station to the village broadcasting his victory all around the town square.

Once when my father was posted in Noria, my grandfather visited him. I forget the occasion but it might have been the name-giving ceremony of one of my younger brothers. Accompanying my grandfather was a very handsome young boy perhaps three years younger than me. Later in the day when my father returned from the office he encountered the child roaming about the house, and not recognizing him irately asked him who he was when my grandfather came in and gently informed my father that the young child was actually his younger brother from one of my grandfather’s more recent marriages.

My father was the youngest son of his first wife, named Meherunnessa, a stocky and fair-skinned woman with a deep voice who hated wastage. She was very intelligent and had a fantastic memory. I had a demonstration of this when she visited my father when he was in Faridpur and she recounted the details of every single port her steamer had stopped at on the way. Whenever she met someone for the first time (especially children) she would pose for them a math riddle.

It was my grandmother who initially taught my father to read and write and not my grandfather. When she saw that my father was writing on his own on the ground with his finger she insisted that my grandfather send him to school. My grandmother used to provide free lodging to students of great academic promise. Many renowned people including future ministers and high-level government bureaucrats spent time in the early days of their studies at my grandparents' village home. This was all at my grandmother’s initiative.

When my grandmother saw me playing with one toy and putting it aside when I had grown bored, she joked that ‘this girl won’t be satisfied with one husband’. I would sleep with her sometimes at night and among the many things she taught me was that if one says ‘kulhu allahu ahad’ three times in one breath and then claps their hands loudly then no thieves or robbers come within the confines of the sound’s reach.

She had a hookah habit and would give me one anna with which to buy tobacco from the grocer’s. This was a modest sum but still sufficient that I could use the change to buy some candy for myself, but at one point this endowment began dwindling until it became just two paisa, barely enough for me to buy candy or a khir sandesh with the leftover money. Then one day my grandmother gave me just one paisa, leaving me too little to buy both her tobacco and candy for myself.

I went to grocers dejectedly, but when I stood before the store front I saw an opportunity: the tobacco was in the front, stacked pyramidically in large tins. This is a good chance to describe what a ‘mudir dokan’ looked like when I was a child. They were simple structures. The sundries were stacked in front: the lozenges and candies in glass jars and spices or other granular objects such as tobacco openly in pyramid shape in tin cans, they were measured out using scales with stone weights. Hanging by the side would be a hard and brittle rope made of coconut husk whose end was constantly lit so that passersby could light their cigarettes. There would be other items too such as hair pins, lace and other beauty products. People would bring their empty glass bottles with ropes tied at the mouth and the grocer would fill them with oil or kerosene as needed. People would also bring woven bamboo baskets called ‘dula’ to buy and carry back fish, and these baskets seemed to let the live fish live a little bit longer than metal or clay pots.

That day my grandmother gave me the tobacco money, the grocer had just finished cooking rice and was busy draining the water. When I arrived he had his back turned to me. I called out to him and he told me to wait while he finished with his rice. I took this opportunity to grab a great handful of tobacco from the stack before me and smoothed it over to hide the gouge my hand had left. I hid my thieving fist behind my back. When the grocer returned and asked me what I wanted I used my grandmother’s money solely to buy lozenges for myself.

I had three uncles from my father’s side. Two of them lived in the village and the other uncle and my father were students at Dhaka University. In fact, both my father and my uncle were the favorite students of the famed linguist Dr. Shahidullah. Later, when my uncle gave up his studies to become an ascetic, Dr. Shahidullah relocated to the village for a period of time, regularly visiting with his student, saying that my uncle needed to be nourished spiritually. His life story is fascinating and deserving of a book all its own, but this is not that book.

My grandfather’s house had a pre-existing relationship with a nawab household. He would often come back from his visits with them and ask his wives to recreate the dishes he had encountered there. This required quality ghee, thankfully we happened to have a good supply of that. I have been sensitized to quality cooking thanks to my early childhood experience at my grandfather’s house. People of Dhaka division tend to be good cooks, in my opinion.

My maternal grandfather (my nana) was the first from his village to finish University when he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Kolkata in 1911, securing first division in all his subjects. He was especially adept at English and Mathematics, and took it upon himself to tutor us in these subjects whenever we visited. My parents decided to send two of my brothers to him so that he could prepare them for admission to a better school than the one they attended at the time. It was apparently effective as one of my brothers was subsequently admitted to Jhenaidah Cadet College, admissions to which was highly competitive at that time.

I would steal money from this grandfather’s pockets. He kept change on the front pocket of his achkan. I would take the money and then stay out all day. I was generally quite skilled at stealing. In our defence, we were forced to steal from my nana as they fed us very little and we were constantly hungry. They fed us the bare minimum needed for a child to survive and to ensure that we didn’t get more than our allotment, kept their fridge locked.

My grandfather realized that we were stealing his money and confronted my mother about it. My mother, who was often timid before her family, for once vocally defended her children to her father. She said it was not true that my brother and I were stealing money from him, and that he was always accusing them without proof. She was of course unaware that for once, my grandfather’s accusation had merit.

One day I got lucky and managed to steal one whole taka from his achkan, which was such an enormous sum of money that I couldn’t spend it all in one day. After spending much of it on myself, I decided to buy some lace and hair clips for my mother. I don’t recall what her reaction was on being presented with these gifts by me but it likely confirmed to her that I was indeed stealing from my grandfather. Nonetheless, she kept silent and said nothing to me.

Later my brother confirmed to me that he also stole from my grandparents but that he got his money from under their mattress. He said he only did this because he was hungry and he never stole more than two annas which he needed to buy bread. He claimed that my grandparents also made him do all the unpleasant chores in the household, such as slaughtering chickens. They would tell him that the person holding the chicken’s head when it was slaughtered would get the head and the others would get the drumsticks. My brother always ended up holding the head. Later in life my brother would become a District Commissioner.

Chapter III

The Madwoman of the Woods

My father was transferred to a border station in Rajshahi called Godagari when I was eight or nine. This town was a known redoubt of snakes. They were so innumerable here that it was a common sight to see men and women walk down the village road while snakes also slithered along side by side. The animals were focused on their own concerns and paid no mind to the people, who sometimes loudly clapped their hands to ensure that the truce was maintained, apparently unaware that snakes have no sense of hearing.

My sister Beauty and I would roam about Godagari. She was five years younger than me and got into all sorts of adventures, including one day when found some palm fruits that had fallen from the trees. These fruits take root on the ground and inside its seed grows a sweet kernel. To get at it one must cut it with a heavy dao. That day my sister held the seed in her hand while I foolishly swung down with dao. Unfortunately, I missed and left my sister with a deep wound on one finger. The scar this wound persists and my sister likes to remind me of it when she sees me still.

Our large family posed challenges for my mother when she had to give us snacks as there were nine of us in total. Once my mother gave Beauty and I two bananas to eat and cautioned us to tell no one, likely because she didn’t have enough for everybody. Beauty went around telling everyone that she was given a banana but was not supposed to talk about it.

When we would go to sleep my siblings and I would tickle each other’s backs, counting from one to hundred. The understanding was that we had to reciprocate. If I tickled someone’s back they would have to do the same. I would always make my sister do it first, I promised to do it in turn. My siblings would not believe me as I had a shaky reputation for keeping my promises. So they would make me swear on the Koran. I would swear and then they would tickle me and I would inevitably fall asleep and not tickle their backs. When held accountable the next time I would say that I swore on the ‘Oran’ and not the ‘Koran’, so there was no sin against God.

Beauty and I shared a bed and frequently fought as to who would get to keep the kol balish. Eventually, I offered a solution: that I would keep it until midnight, following which it would pass to my sister’s possession. She agreed to this not realizing that she would never be able to rise before midnight and claim that which was her due. This way, the pillow was always mine.

Sometimes, while my sister slept beside me, I would look out from the second story window into the dark night because I had heard that frogs and snakes carried precious gems on their heads to light their way at night. One night when I saw a blue light in the jungle I watched it make its way through the woods. Then, as it was passing just below my window I dropped a bowl on it hoping that it would trap the frog or snake and I would finally get its gem. But the next morning when I ran out excitedly I found the bowl upwards, facing the sky. There was no frog, no snake and certainly no gems.

There was a patch of kash ban behind our house that would sway in the wind and look evocative, beckoning you to come and explore its mysteries. One afternoon my mother and I went into it to wallow in its beauty when suddenly two animals appeared before us, apparently as startled by us as were by them. The two pairs, humans and animals stood staring at each other until my mother compelled me to run away. Later she told me she thought they were wolves.

Godagari was a remote area, and the home allotted to my father was the worst one I had lived in in my short life. It was a red brick, two storey house with small cramped rooms. There were no nearby schools, so my studies were limited to a half or a full hour with my father. Since I was the eldest child it followed that if I were not attending school neither would my younger siblings. I would study by the dim light of candles, lamps or a hurricane lantern. For a pen I used a piece of wood with a nib stuck on it. I would dip it into a vial of ink that had to be made by dissolving ‘ink tablets’ into water.

I ate wonderfully while at Godagari. I was obsessed with a flatbread made of a mix of lentil and rice flour called kalai ruti while in Godagari. It was a staple food of the poor in the area and normally eaten with a chutney of onions and red chillies. I found kalai ruti irresistible. I wouldn’t get tired of it even if I ate it every day. I still remember its taste to this day, and whenever I meet someone from the region of Rajshahi I ask them if they would make it for me.

You could also get delicious bundia in Godagari, delicious bubbles of sweetness that came in red, yellow and green colors. The region was famous for its mangoes. My father bought me one once when the train we were travelling in stopped at Amnora station. It was sweet and tart and so big that even holding it with two hands and with my great appetite I could not finish it.

There was a swing in the front yard of our house that hung from a large tamarind tree. I would play there while my younger brother Kamal would explore the environs. Oddly, during these explorations he often carried a small pair of scissors with him. My mother felt relieved if I spent time just near that swing so that she could keep an eye on me, but when she wasn’t looking, I would often venture into the forest that was just by our house. The large trees of the forest were densely enmeshed that the sunlight could hardly make it through the thick canopy.

It was in that forest that I once met a young woman. She was about twenty years old. She was dark-skinned, which was discriminated against at that time and not considered desirable but she had beautiful features. She also wore a big golden nose pin. I recognized that she was a woman called ‘pagli’ by the villagers because she was not sound mentally. But through our regular concourse in the woods a friendship developed between us. We engaged in long discussions on matters that seemed to be of great import at the time but which I now cannot remember. I liked her nose pin and wanted it for myself. But when I asked her for it she refused. Mad or not, she knew the value of gold.

It was in Godagari that I developed a large stye on my eyelid that would not go away on its own. A doctor came to operate on it and then returned every few days to change the dressing and note the progress of the healing.

As Godagari was at the border my father was responsible for catching smugglers. Low quality cigarettes would come in from India while eggs and fresh milk would go over from the East Pakistan side. When my father caught the smugglers he would say ‘you’re sending them amrita in exchange for poison’.

Cigarettes were popular in Godagari as all the people had to smoke there were biris. In fact, many of the poor in Godagari subsisted by making biris in makeshift factories that were little more than a place for people to sit and make biris with simple ingredients. Men and women would sit side by side and make a whole pile of biris while sitting on cane mats. They would use a small sharp stick to close the upper and lower parts of the tobacco leaf after stuffing it with tobacco dust. On each biri maker’s lap were flat baskets containing leaves, dust, the sticks and reels of thread. They were paid by the number of biris they produced.

I was a regular visitor to this ‘factory’. I would sit for hours and watch the women making biris. Desperate to emulate them, I would beg them from time to time to let me make one. Sometimes they would indulge me. Going to the biri factory made things very difficult for my father’s orderly as he had to look for me all over town. Eventually when he would find me at the biri factory he would tell me that my parents were very angry and escort me home. On the way he would tell me how tired he was of looking for me all over town every day.

Other times I would not even be at the biri factory, rather at the homes of strangers where I had ended up during my wanderings. On one occasion I went into a stranger’s home and convinced the homeowner to let me participate in their household activities. My parents, not finding me, sent the weary orderly as usual. When he could not find me they joined him to search the nearby area. When they eventually found me at the stranger’s house I was grinding spices for them on their mill stone. Not knowing that it was I who had imposed on the family, my parents became angry with them that they had allowed me to work like a common servant. I dared not tell my parents that before they arrived I had been chopping vegetables on a sharp boti. But more than anything, I was mortified that my parents were being so rude to the kind people who had allowed me to partake in their household chores. I wanted desperately to apologize to them for the behavior of my parents but could not as I had to leave.

Following a year in Godagari we returned to Dhaka. I was nine. My father enrolled me in Kamrunnessa Girls High School, which was conveniently located close to our house. I sat for the entrance exam to Class 4. My father waited a few days and then visited the school to find out how I had done. He saw my name at the top of the list. This was the first time in my life that I would formally attend school.

At Kamrunnesa School I had an accident playing on a slide in the playground. I hurt my left knee quite seriously but was too afraid of my father to tell anyone about it. I thought the fault was mine, as though my injury was some kind of crime. So for several days I wore long dresses and kept my knee hidden from everyone even as the wound became infected and the bone began to show and I began to limp. When my condition eventually caught the attention of my parents and they asked me what was wrong I broke down crying and showed them injury. They were shocked that I didn’t tell them for so long. I still have that scar.

Senior students at the school were not allowed to cross the gate during the tiffin period as the younger students were, so the older girls stood forlornly behind the bars of the gate as the younger girls swarmed the food vendors, their delicious wares tantalizingly out of their reach. One day a senior girl asked me to buy her a 1 anna packet of channachur since I was a Class 4 student and thus allowed to go out. I tried to negotiate with the girl, suggesting that I would buy the channa for her if she also gave me money for a packet of my own. She didn’t agree.

I was negotiating because at Kamrunnessa the school-provided lunch was so good that parents wouldn’t give me any money to buy my own food. I remember in particular a cheese they used to give to the students to take home that came in huge, costly-looking tins. It was deep orange in colour and soft. I haven’t seen its like anywhere since.

Throughout my schooling life I would always fail at least one subject. This tradition began at Kamrunnessa. Failing grades were underlined with red ink, however, I didn’t mind them. Rather I liked looking at the red lines, thinking they looked pretty. Nonetheless, I was always a marginal case, never doing so badly that I wouldn’t be promoted under ‘special consideration’. One day I came home and boasted to my mother that I had the highest roll number, not realizing that that meant I was the worst student.

I felt no shame in seeing red marks all over my progress report as I always believed there was nothing wrong in getting poor marks in school or college. Bad results did not embarrass me. I believe I had no good reason to do well in the examination since I did not study. In fact my results were better than they should have been. The fact was that I should have failed in all the subjects.

Those days one was not debarred from being promoted to the next class for failing in a few subjects. I do not know about other schools but in my school it was like this. I attended several schools from 4th to 10th class. I am saying so because I passed my school final examination without losing a year for not doing well in the previous class.

I always stated that throughout my student life I never wrote my class routine. I used to carry all my books to the school lest I missed one for any class. Homework I never did. My sleeping time was 7 or 7:30 in the evening. That one hour at the reading table I would not read I would only copy something from the book and then went off to sleep. During my school final examination also there was no change to this routine of my studying time. It was really unexpected that I passed all my subjects in my hsc. It was a miracle.

Math was a paper I never passed in throughout my school life. I clearly remember that I used to score 0, 3, 6, 13 from 6th to 9th class. In my matric only I got 45 in maths. I want to tell you a true story to understand the situation of those days. Three students used to study in the nearby school in the same class. Two were nephews and one was a maternal uncle. They were of the same age. Two of them failed and one passed after special consideration. Those who failed requested their private tutor to go to the headmaster of the school to give them a promotion to the next class. The private tutor was enthusiastic enough to go to the school and convince him of the promotion. The headmaster was astonished at such a request and asked why he should promote these boys. The private tutor replied ‘because they come from a very respectable family’. Readers must know that those boys were finally promoted to the next class.

Things were like this those days in some schools maybe. But one thing I can tell with all certainty is that for me no one had to go to my school for my promotion. I never had to repeat a class.

Unlike other students I would never write down my class schedule on the back of my exercise book. This meant I would have to carry my books to school as I would never know what books would be needed on what day, and once in class I sat at the back to avoid the teacher’s scrutiny. However, in poetry class the teacher liked to walk right up to me and ask me to quote stanzas from certain poems. Thankfully, I could often predict which stanzas the teacher would ask me to recite and explain so as I saw her approach I would quickly put my head down and commit it to memory. The teacher was usually satisfied with my efforts.

I would spend the time after school playing outside. After school I would only visit home for as long as it took to drop off my books and immediately head out to roam the city. Sometimes I would catch rides on horse carts as people were still riding them in Dhaka in the 1950’s. The cart was small. On the back was an iron bracket that supported a small wood shelf on which I lay on my stomach as the cart drove through the city, watching the pitch of the road pass below. When the driver, unaware of his stowaway, whipped his horse its tip would hit me on my back as he raised it. It was quite painful and I wondered how the horses could stand it. Sometimes the cart would take me so far from home that it would be hard to find my way back. There were times when I would be trudging back to the house as evening fell.

Once there I would creep to my room with soft steps and sit at the reading table pretending to study, which for me consisted of copying text from a book. I preferred copying text to reading, as I thought it was a better way of committing facts to memory. The longest I could stay awake was 7:30 as I was often sleepy from a long day of play. My body would bear many injuries from adventures of the day. This routine of absconding in the afternoon was invariable and remained unchanged even during the week of final examinations and my matriculation. Despite not studying however, that year I managed to get the 45% marks required in mathematics to pass the course.

Chapter IV

Cement Swans

After a year at Kamrunnessa Girls School in Dhaka our city life came to an end as my father was transferred to Noria, a town in Faridpur district. We were allotted a large house that once belonged to a zamindar family. The house had thick walls and columns carved into which were statues in various poses of Bharat Natyam. Colorful decorative light bulbs were set around the door frames. The doors themselves were heavy, tall and wide, with blue glass in a half-moon shape on top. On the lintel was a sun shape made of chips of wood, and the same line of multi-colored, non-functional light bulbs. There were many rooms and the ceiling was high to keep one cool in the summer. The kitchen was a separate structure and a concrete poultry pen was nearby.

My father’s office was spread across two large rooms at the front of the house that faced the courtyard, next to which was a fragrant rose garden. I found the scent of the roses intoxicating. They differed by the time of the day; morning smelled different than noon, and noon in turn smelled different than night. I learned that the roses were named ‘Basrahi Gulabs’, named after the ancient city in Iraq. On moonlit nights when the perfume of the roses thickened the air, I was in a trance, an ecstasy of body and mind. Through the tall window near my bed, I would look to the night, the vast horizon studded with stars, the full moon. The beauty of the night has held an allure for me my whole life.

From my verandah a wide staircase descended to the courtyard, the balustrades terminating in the shape of raised elephant trunks. On the other side of the courtyard were the offices of my father’s subordinate officers. Beyond was a field, alongside which ran a narrow path that led to a nearby forest. I was the only one who would visit this patch of jungle. I would go in there during the hot summer noons and pick fruits that were hard and colorful like beads.

At the four corners of the roof of the constabulary were massive cement swans spreading their wings. I was standing on the terrace one day when one of them crashed down very close to me, breaking into several pieces with a loud sound and missing me by no more than a foot. People said that I was spared by God, but I was too young to appreciate just how lucky I had been to escape.

In Noria I once again had to be admitted to a new school, this time for Class Five. This school was nominally a co-educational one — as I was one of only two girls in a class of thirty-five. The other girl’s name was Rashida, the daughter of one of the subordinate officers in my father’s office. She was also my neighbour. As the only two girls in the class We quickly became friends. We gossiped a lot, much of it concerning our future marriages.

These discussions usually happened after school, when we bathed in the pond by our house. The pond was large and had a paved bank. On one side a large mango tree reached halfway across the pond, the branch dipping low and touching the water. Rashida and I would swim from the bank to reach this branch. We would climb up on it and sit. Then the discourse about our marriages would truly begin. We would run down the list of boys in our class, the agreed upon rule was ‘first come first served’, whoever one of us named first the other could no longer claim as a future husband.

Unfortunately there was an odd number of boys in our class, so inevitably Rashida and I would have a tug of war over a boy named Maula Box. The dispute would always remain unsolved even after arguing so long that our clothes dried out. even when our clothes had dried. Then we would swim back to the paved bank.

My friendship with Rashida lasted the whole time I was in Noria, but I always felt she retained an undertow of malice and resentment towards me. I noticed this when I recited to her poems that I had written and she would say (perhaps with the intent of hurting my feelings) that she had read it before in a book.

Other than Rashida I didn’t have many friends in Noria. This didn’t bother me as I liked my own company and made my own entertainment. One such entertainment was to watch ants at work. During hot afternoons this was done best under the shade of a tree. I was concerned by the ants’ endless ambulations in search of food. One day, my mother was astonished to find a whole pot of sugar spread out all over the yard. I explained that I had done so to feed the ants and give them a break from walking.

Our house overlooked a field, to the right of which was Rashida’s house, and to the left a narrow path that led to a small forest that I would visit mostly in the afternoons. I seldom saw anyone else there, as during the hot summer days in the villages the women napped with their young children on cane mats and the men retreated from their work in the fields for a respite from the sun. On those hot days an enchanting stillness fell upon that place. I could hear even a single leaf fall, and the humming of bees and flies were pronounced. The vegetation smelled hot, dark and green. At those times I felt as does an intruder in a sacred place. I would try to catch butterflies, or spy resting birds, and collect hard wild pink and purple fruits in the folds of my frock, until I heard footsteps from the path nearby and the spell was broken.

However, on certain days of the week I could not go for my afternoon jungle visits as at that time I was tutored in Arabic and Islamic studies by a mullah who came to our house. He was a young man with bright and fair skin, glowing with good health. When I asked for the secret to his wondrous complexion he replied with serene certainty: “This glow is the Noor of Allah, child.”

Following his departure that day, I sat and wondered as to how I too could gain this ‘noor of Allah’. Too impatient to cultivate it through a lifetime of piety, I chose the next best option. Before the mullah’s next visit, I smashed a mirror and, scraping off the mercury, smeared it all over myself. When the mullah arrived, I showed him my newly resplendent limbs with pride, “Look huzur, I am like you now.” But rather than express joy at our newly shared luminescence, or concern that I had smeared a highly toxic substance on my skin, the mullah became angry, thundering, “Do not trifle with the Noor of Allah!”.

The noor incident came about a time when I was freshly obsessed with religion and spirituality. I had just read the biography of the sufi mystic Rabia of Basra and wished to be like her in every way. I would tie a bandana on my head and pray for hours. I would hope that the miracles that happened during her life would happen in mine — I would put a four anna coin under my pillow and pray that it would double in amount. And at one point I thought this did happen, but I may have just forgotten the amount of money I had put under my pillow.

At this time I read somewhere in the hadith that any Muslim who prays for forgiveness before their death will be automatically admitted to heaven. As soon as I read this, I ran next door to Rashida’s house. Her mother, a very pious woman, was praying at the time. I waited impatiently for her to finish, and as soon as she did, asked her to forgive me. She naturally asked whatever I needed forgiveness for but I would not say, only insist that she forgive me, but infuriatingly, Rashida’s mother was not willing to issue me blanket, pre-emptive forgiveness unless I told her why I required one. I returned home unforgiven and with no assurance of heaven.

One day in the backyard of our Noria house, my younger brother Ismail and I were in a fight about who would get to bathe first using the tubewell. The fight ended when I threw a tin jug at his head. It hit him and he started bleeding. My mother came out and told me what I had done was the criminal offense of murder and that the police would arrive shortly to arrest me. I believed her and became very frightened. I started crying about my impending arrest, forgetting that my father was a police officer himself.

Behind this contested tubewell was a stand of at least one hundred coconut trees that was a haven for monkeys. They gesticulated wildly at the people who mocked them. I would mime throwing coconuts at them in the hope they would throw back actual coconuts at me, but the ones they threw were always unripe or empty. I had other encounters with monkeys during my childhood when they were more prevalent. Once my mother had given me a porota wrapped with ghee and sugar and I was eating it on the roof of our house when a large monkey approached me to take it from me. But rather than give in I held my food tightly. The monkey however was stronger than me, and he pried my fingers apart one by one and took my snack away from me.

When I wasn’t battling monkeys I would be fishing, which was a passion I pursued doggedly throughout my childhood. I would head to the big pond on the grounds of our house before dawn with fishing gear and a hurricane lantern in tow. To bait my hook I would dig the ground with a dao for earthworms that smelled rich and dark like the soil they came from. One such morning I felt a strong tug on the line and reeled in a large chital fish. It was flat, silver and wriggling in desperation to get away. Excited, I was bringing the fish up the steps to the pond when it managed to loosen itself from the hook. It bounced once or twice on the steps and splashed back into the water. Naturally, when I described the fish to my mother later it was twice the size it actually was.

There was a narrow canal that led out from our pond. The space between its banks was no wider than six feet. During the heavy rains of the monsoon months a great flood of water would pass through it in a turbulent rush. I would anticipate these events and lay down in the canal ahead of time to enjoy the rush of the water over me. I would also set here small fish traps called ‘chai’ that were made of woven bamboo. The fish would go through a trick door and then be unable to get out again. I caught a lot of fish this way.

I would visit far-off ponds to fish, carrying a small basket, a fishing rod and bait. I would sit down before a solitary pond and fish for hours. One time while fishing at a pond some distance from our house I caught a solitary pabda fish. It was small and yellow in color, which is a pabda species that is longer found in Bangladeshi waters. These all-day fishing ventures burned my skin and made my nose run. I would wipe it on the back of my sleeve and keep fishing. Once I got home I looked like a weather-beaten crow, burnt-dark, tired, dirty and smelling like a fish. My mother would then ask me to take a bath and I would jump into the pond immediately.

We had no electricity at that time. The heat was mitigated by a large flap fan that hung from the drawing room ceiling, bordered with red fabric. It was operated by the means of a rope that led out from the window to the porch where a muscular man would sit and pull it so that the fan moved, cooling those inside the room, particularly my father. The man would sit on the floor and brace himself against the wall using the soles of his feet, his legs spread wide apart. He had a rhythmic cadence to his rope pulling, which was likely necessary for efficient use of his energy. When he grew tired, the fan-puller would tie the rope around his big toe and pull it that way. His official designation was ‘pankhapuller’.

There were other dedicated staff as well, including a dhobi who came to our house to collect the soiled clothing for washing, who I would follow home to see how he worked. I discovered that his washing process required two men if a large piece of fabric such as a sari were involved. After washing, each man would hold and end and they would twist, pull and fold in the sari over and over until it was dry and ready to be ironed. I carried the secret of this technique with me ever since and have applied it whenever I washed my own saris.

Like the dhobi and the biri makers, I also carefully studied the art of sandesh and sweet making. I would closely watch our neighbour Narayan, who came from a long line of sweetmakers. To make his sandesh, Narayan would first make ‘chhana’ by curdling milk with old ‘chhana’ water. Then he would hang this in a cheesecloth to drain for hours. This strained cottage cheese he would then mash by hand on a cheesecloth that he laid on a wooden table for a long time, following which he would cook it with sugar on a low heat for a short time. Once this mixture cooled he would smash it down on the same wood table and shape divide it into small sandesh, garnishing each piece by embedding a raisin in the centre. These sandesh were perfectly sweetened, that is, not too much or too little. He would sell these from his sweetshop in the market.

Narayan’s mother used to live with him. She was Hindu and was very doctrinaire about her religion, which apparently forbade close physical association with Muslims such as me. She would not even let me enter her room, which she always kept very nicely polished with cow dung. So I would wait until she was washing at the pond to go into her room and touch as many things as quickly as I could in a misguided bid to spoil the sanctity of her religion. I would then wait a few days to reveal to her what I did so that it was too late for her to re-purify her belongings. Sometimes I would even place a beef bone near her door simply in order to irritate her. My behavior was motivated by her attempts to segregate me from herself but now that I look back on it I feel quite ashamed.

I remember another incident that was like my interactions with Narayan’s mother. I had observed a young Hindu bride come to our pond to fetch water. She always had the cowl of her sari pulled well before her face to hide it in a bid to preserve her modesty. Sitting on the cement benches that paved the sides of the pond I would watch her and slowly became obsessed with seeing her face. I imagined that her beauty must have some dazzling otherworldly quality for her face to be well and consistently hidden. I became desperate to see her. So one day I waited near the pond for her usual arrival and once she did and was bent over to collect the water I sneaked up behind her and pulled her cowl down with the excuse that she had a big insect sitting on her head. The bride turned around. She said nothing, only regarded me with cold disdain as she emptied her vessel and filled it again, as my touch had polluted her and in turn the water. Her reaction so shocked me that I no longer remember what she looked like, and whether she was indeed as beautiful as I had imagined her to be.

Chapter V

The Life Aquatic

My next encounter with the ‘achhoot’ culture of high-caste Hindu families came when my father was transferred to Bhanga station in Faridpur district. Our house here was near the river — A bungalow with a tin roof. My father’s office was attached to it. There was a large banyan tree in the front area of our house, which enclosed a large, wooded space. There was also a small temple to Kali.

The second officer’s house was close to ours. They were a Hindu family. His daughter’s name was Manju and she was a little older than me. At that time my brother Jalal was just a baby, so one day Manju took him on her lap to visit her home and at one point, entered their kitchen. Her mother started shouting at her and began throwing pots and pans out of the kitchen as well as all the food they had prepared for the day. Manju had forgotten that Muslims were not allowed in Hindu kitchens. Everything had to be discarded, purified. It took the rest of the day to finish their meals. By then I had become used to it so this did not surprise me. I understood what was happening but not why.

In Bhanga I got better at riding bicycles. I would take a bicycle from the police station where my father was posted and ride it. These were large, heavy and unwieldy for a small young girl like myself, but I would ride mile after mile on them on the uneven mud roads. I would often be bruised in the process but that would not stop me from riding. I was in class six at the time.

Our financial situation, perpetually dire, had not improved in Bhanga. I had just one school dress, while other children had at least two. My mother would wash my dress and dry it every night and I would wear it in the morning. We wore white keds to school that were made of canvas. I would wash them and then just like all the other children chalk them to make them white. I had only one nice dress I would always wear to social functions I attended with my parents. Other children, who were of wealthier families, noticed this. One day a girl said to me: ‘I knew you would wear this dress today’, a comment that hurt me deeply.

There was a weekly haat in Bhanga that took place by the river bank, by a great banyan tree. There was a great contrast between when the haat was beginning and when it would end. The atmosphere at the beginning was like a festival, and both the young and the old were excited. I would roam about the whole bazaar, which by noon would fill up with people and goods. By the evening few would remain apart from a stubborn seller or two desperate for sales. The flames of the lamps would dance in the wind coming over the river. But at one point even the most desperate sellers would leave. The remnants of their merchandise would remain scattered on the ground. Ropes, straw, paper and broken pottery. Looking at it all, I would feel sad.

It was at this haat that I saw a beggar eating chapati with coconut and sugar. I quickly returned home and asked my father’s orderly to prepare a coconut by grating it and adding sugar to it just the way I had seen as there were many coconuts in our kitchen. I also requested the maid to make the rotis for me. Once my wishes were granted, I found that the combination did indeed taste great. I’ve continued to indulge in this simple pleasure over the years as have I in other peasant dishes, which I find are often more delicious than the complicated recipes full of expensive ingredients favoured by the rich. An example is firni (or kheer in Hindi), a classic Bengali dessert traditionally made with rice, milk, sugar, saffron and cardamom. When I was young, milk was often beyond the reach of the poor, so they made their firni with coconut milk and sugar instead, and rather than use expensive spices such as cardamom, they used bay leaf, and of course omitted the nuts and raisins. I find the peasant version of firni to be as good if not better than the traditional version. I also like to put in a pinch of salt, which is a secret to great desserts.

There was a river called Kumar near our house in Bhanga. A river of calm, small waves full of youth and life, The water was so clear that at places you could see all the way down to the bottom. Boats would be anchored along Kumar, and one windy day I took one and paddled to the middle. The boat capsized but thankfully I was able to swim back while pulling the boat by the rope. When the boatmen saw me pulling it they helped me bring it to shore. Back then, I was like a river otter.

There were even bigger boats called ‘Goyna Nouka’ and these were reserved for police officers such as my father. He had five assigned boatmen who would do other work around the household when they did not have sailing duties. The boat had a large room for the officer and his family and a smaller one for everyone else. It was meant for long journeys, and when taking long boat tours, the boatmen would anchor by the river every night and resume the journey the next day. These trips could last as long as a week, and my father would often return from them carrying sweets, vegetables and fruits from the places he had visited along the way.

There was a pukka bank by our house leading down to the water where I and other girls my age would bathe. When we saw the male folks moving around shamelessly, their wet lungis clinging to their genitals, we would whisper and laugh. These innocent jokes may have heralded my impending puberty for I was in Bhanga, about eleven or twelve years old when I found my pyjamas red with blood. I thought I was suffering from some terminal disease, but I did not know of an ailment where blood flew without injury. Not realising that my menses had come, I waded into the Kumar river with the hope that the blood would go away after some time. After a while I went home to don new pajamas but again I found blood in them. So again I went to the river and sat there a long time. I rose and found that it had not stopped. I dipped down again and waited. People passing by asked me what I was doing and I said I was taking a bath. I did this five times without success before I went home crying to my mother. I told her what was wrong with me and she brought me some clean old white clothes from which she made a pad and fixed it with a ribbon around my waistline. Then she then told me not to mix with malefolk. She explained nothing else. Nor was I curious to know.

Shoals of fish would move along Kumar, visible through the clear water. If you pulled up the hyacinths floating on the river’s surface, you would see big prawns clinging to its roots. If you were quick enough you could catch them before they fell back in the water. They would have yellow roe on their uncovered bellies. Prawns were so numerous in those days that you could see from above a great dark green bed of them at the bottom of the river. The best way to catch them was using a triangle net called an ocha. One needed to only plunge the ocha into the water once to catch enough fish for a family, for those were the days of abundance. Being an avid fisher was another reason for me to love the river.

One day, when my mother informed the family that there was no fish at home to eat I took my rod and bamboo dula and headed for the river and in no time caught a number of bele fish, so many that there was no more room in my doula. They were fat and of a pinkish hue, with gills that made them look monstrous when flared. I returned with the creatures and my mother was happy.

I was an otter. I was an amphibian. Even at night I would be in the pond or the river. When I bathed in the latter I would sometimes swim to the middle and dive down. Straining against the great weight of the water above me, I did not stop until I reached the riverbed, where I would sit down and look up. If it was a bright day I could look up and see the great shafts of light piercing all the way to the bottom, spotlighting the swimming fish, the bedrock, the plants swaying around me. I could stay there a long time as my lungs had a tremendous capacity at that age. When I felt short of air I would swim up, cutting it so close that my lungs felt as though they would explode, seeing stars before my eyes before bursting through to the surface, where I would gratefully gulp air.

When it flooded in Bhanga ankle-length water would cover the fields. Once when a cousin of mine was visiting we went out for some night-time fishing. We took a hurricane lamp, a basket and two daos (curved machetes) with us. The lamp was intended to both light our way and to freeze the fish by shining it on them, at which point we would strike at them with the heavy daos to stun or kill them. A brutal yet thrilling sport. The second night we took an electric torch instead of the lamp and this proved even more effective as we caught many more fish.

Gas was only affordable to the rich back then. Villagers would rely on firewood and other dry plant matter to fuel their hearths. Patkhari, an unskinned jute plant, was one such material. It could also be used to reinforce earthen homes. My grandmother had a small supplemental kitchen in our ancestral home that was made of patkhari. Dhaincha served a similar purpose. It has a hard stalk and is a beautiful green color when immature. But it smells unpleasant. I’ve also heard that it can be planted in barren lands to make them fertile again. Both were found in abundance in the villages, and even now they form the bulk of fuel for most village homes.

Unlike jute, dhaincha’s skin had no special value. You could cut a dhaincha plant so that it resembled a large cane. I would take one of these dhaincha canes and stalk the river banks. Whenever I saw a fish near the surface I would hit it with the cane with a swift whipping motion to kill it, deriving sadistic pleasure from seeing the fish die and float on their back. This was an example of the mindless cruelty that children embody during childhood. Since I did these things away from the eyes of my parents, there was no one to tell me ‘no’.

I would cross the river on a ferry boat every day to get to my school, which was on the other side. But another reason I loved crossing the river was because the sweet shops were all on the other side. On the way back from school, before I would board the boat back home, I would stop at the shops to eat sweets. I rarely carried enough money so the shopkeepers kept a tab open for me, the accounts of which would be forwarded to my father at the end of the month for payment. From what I remembered the amount was between 25 to 35 taka a month. An enormous amount for a small child.

The sweets I had as a child were bigger, purer and more delicious than what we get now. One was called Lady Kennee after the wife of a British dignitary. It was shaped like a pillow, red on the outside and creamy white on the inside. There were also large Rajbhogs with cardamom powder at the centre. They were so big that it was hard to finish even one of them by myself. Another source of sweets were from the goalas who would visit our house to make these confections from scratch from the purest, freshest milk from their cows. They would dig out clay from our yard to make a crude earthen hearth on which they boiled milk on large, square metal pans. The sweets made from this milk were far better than anything one could buy at the shops. This spoiled me for later in life as I could no longer abide by the sweets from the shops.

My parents had never taught me proper dental hygiene; combined with my sweets consumption this meant that my teeth were considerably decayed at a young age, so my parents took me to a dentist in the city. But I had a dreadful fear of needles, and each time the dentist revealed a syringe to inject my gums with an anaesthetic, I ran away crying. At least three or four syringes were wasted on me before, in a moment of unexpected tenderness, my father said, “It’s alright. My daughter is frightened.” Maybe my father could empathize because he had a similar fear of needles.

My mother and I would sit on the back porch in Bhanga and observe the darkness. In the villages there was barely a dusk before it was pitch black and we had to light kerosene lanterns. We would sit there in fear of what was behind the house: a large field dotted with palm trees which at night became crowded with howling jackals. But even in the day it was a desolate and wild place with an eerie cast. We were close enough to the field that on quiet days we could hear the palm fruit fall to the ground from their great heights with a loud thud. At the sound, provided it were day, my mother and I would run to the field to quickly collect the fruit and run back before we were hit as well, as palm fruit was heavy enough to seriously injure us. We would end up with a huge stack of them on the earthen floor of our kitchen. If you didn’t eat them quickly enough they would begin to grow roots. We never ate the actual fruit, but rather the kernel of the seed, which was delicious.

In winter the circus would come to Bhanga, bringing elephants, tigers and women who performed feats of balance and stunts on bicycles, unicycles and on ropes. They would hop from one rope to another and bend their bodies into astonishing shapes. I remember vividly an elderly woman who would hop on a large ball and roll around on the grounds while standing on it. The circus would run through the night for a whole month. I would be in bed early as I was a child, but the sounds of the circus would seep through my window: the reedy notes of harmonium being played would pierce the distance between me and the tents. I would wake then and listen, step out of the house barefoot and follow the music all the way to the tents, my feet, my shins slicing through the thin winter mist on the ground, growing numb from the cold. I would be shivering as I traversed empty fields walking along the narrow embankments between rice paddies, going through dark woods. I would sit with the crowd on the field and watch the acrobats while my parents slept on at home, oblivious. I would be one of the masses then, not the privileged daughter of a police inspector.

The nagordola would always be in the middle of the field, a colorful blur as it swung counterclockwise, carrying the riders thirty, forty feet in the air as they squealed and screamed with delight. I would always get a funny feeling in my stomach riding it. Eventually the circus would leave, and the children touched by its magic would be left contorting our bodies in the manner we had seen the circus performers do. I achieved a modicum of success through slavish practice. I could place a handkerchief between my feet and pick it up with my mouth while bending backwards with my hands folded on my chest.

Chapter VI

The Engineer

When I began Class Eight in Bhanga, I wanted to sit for a scholarship exam. I didn’t think I would do well necessarily, in fact, I was not even planning to take the scholarship exam. Rather my plan was to visit Faridpur, the town where the exam would be held. My parents allowed me to take a steamer there by myself.

I was seated in the galley when an older gentleman asked me about my aims in life. I told him that I wished to become an artist, an answer that irritated the man. Apparently to him a girl wanting to become an ‘artist’ was a shameful proposition. He grumbled to the other passengers about my answers and on finding consensus about my waywardness, he turned to me and asked if my school was ‘co-educational’, as though it was the final evidentiary piece he needed to prove my corruption. I didn’t know what the word meant so I said “I don’t think so”. At this the man raised his eyebrows and asked me if I knew the meaning of the word “co-educational” and I admitted that I did not. I had grown tired of pretence.

One of the subjects I had at school in Bhanga was Urdu, taught by a strict, humorless mullah teacher. During the final we were given a list of ten words in Urdu to translate into Bangla. I was able to translate only one of these words correctly, but fearing that I might not even receive that single mark, I felt compelled to add a note requesting that if I received a zero ‘I will rip your beard to shreds’. The outraged mullah, my sir, arrived at our house the next day. We met in our drawing room, where he informed me that he was going to show my father the insolent threat I had written in the notebook. I sat quietly, not knowing what to do. My father’s office was adjoining the drawing room. While he happened to be in that day, he was in a foul mood; we could hear him loudly berating his constables. The mullah, with my notebook in hand, nervously edged towards my father’s office several times, but hearing the shouts, kept losing his nerve. When an uneasy silence eventually fell in my father’s office, the mullah went to investigate if this would be a good time to present him with the evidence of my crime. Fortunately for me, he left the notebook behind. I took this opportunity to rip it up.

In a dak bungalow near our school in Bhanga lived an engineer named Nazrul Islam. He was a bachelor and would visit our house from time to time for dinner. At other times he would send his orderly to our house with a tiffin carrier for some of my mother’s cooking. Sometimes I and other girls from the school would go and visit him as a group. On those occasions he would offer Horlicks. He would prepare it in a special way, adding the Horlicks, some boiling water and sugar in a cup and blending it into a smooth batter before adding the remaining water. He always made it this way, except for the one time when his orderly found the cups first, and thinking them dirty, cleaned out all the Horlicks batter.

On one occasion when my family and I were on holiday in Dhaka we visited the Engineer’s family, who lived in the capital. His relatives surrounded me and teased me that I was going to marry him. This was news to me, but rather than thrill I felt only awkwardness. They surrounded me and showed me one of my own pictures which so irritated me that I took it and ripped it up right in front of them. But for some reason the part of the picture that was my face would not rip. I threw it into the well in their front yard.

When we went back to Bhanga, the Engineer visited our house one day and presented me with a gift that was very nicely wrapped. I opened it to find a beautiful sky-blue jamdani orna with a white border. I barely glanced at it before throwing it on bed and running out to play with the other girls, leaving the engineer standing there. The engineer was visiting us with his father, who suggested a marriage between his son and me. My father gently rejected the proposal saying that at fourteen I was too young. Nazrul Islam eventually married a well-educated woman closer to his own age.

Following their wedding in Dhaka, the two of them visited us in Bhanga. My mother greeted them graciously and treated them well. The new bride’s name was Hazera and she had taken the name of her husband, Nazrul. She didn’t look upon me kindly. I felt small and nervous. A large pimple on my nose compounded my insecurity. By dint of his official position, Nazrul was entitled to a large riverboat. He took me for a ride on it that day along with him and his wife. In my presence he taught his wife how to steer the ship, holding her closely from behind as she giggled. I realized that this may have been their honeymoon trip, and my presence felt awkward. I wished that they had not brought me along with them.

Hazera Nazrul would go on to join Home Economics College in Dhaka as a lecturer and I would eventually become her student. She would teach our chemistry class, which I attended nervously as I felt that she did not like me and because I was already very weak in that subject, in fact I remember only one term from the class: ‘molecule’. Years later, Mr. Nazrul would die in the Bangladesh Liberation war as a renowned freedom fighter. His wife would go on to become a famed author. I have in my library a copy of her collected works.

Some months after the visit by Engineer Nazrul and his wife, I was invited to sing in a social event. My father was invited too. While I was practising backstage the heavy bamboo scaffolding holding up part of the stage broke away and fell on my head. I was terribly hurt, bleeding and dizzy, but I pushed myself through the performance. I didn’t dare disclose the injury to my father, such was my fear of him. Throughout the evening the pain and dizziness threatened to choke my voice, but my trembling hands stayed on the harmonium keys, and I kept singing. It was not until we were back on the boat to cross the river to go home that I finally began to wail from the pain.

My father was shocked and asked me what was wrong and I told him what had happened. He checked my head with his electric torch and found a large lump under my thick hair. He could also see dried blood. He laid me down and poured river water on my head to reduce the swelling, exclaiming aloud all the time about how I could have sung so loudly and for so long with such an injury. I soon developed a high temperature so once we reached home my father summoned a doctor. This doctor’s name was Brajen Dash. He would visit us whenever someone fell ill in the household. He was meticulous about washing his hands after seeing a patient. One of us would be enlisted to pour the water on his hands while he leisurely scrubbed them with soap. Buckets of water were brought to the verandah for this very purpose as the bathroom was far from the main home. Our orderly would stand alongside with a towel for him.

Home visits by doctors were common then. No one was ever in a hurry. Life seemed secure and unthreatened. Political murders and accidents such as we have now were uncommon. Even when there was the occasional robbery the dacoits would considerately inform their victims beforehand about their invasion. However, at times they would also send misleading information, suggesting one venue but then attacking another. These dacoits were highly superstitious. Hindu dacoits would perform a puja before setting off on a robbery.

There is an unforgettable story from my childhood that illustrated this. A group of dacoits had invaded a home for a robbery that was conducted with particular brutality. An entire family was massacred in the course of it. Later, when the dacoits were sitting in the gathering room dividing up the spoils, they were shocked to see a beautiful, naked middle-aged woman appear among them, wielding a great ram dao in her hands. It was the matriarch of the household, driven to madness at the sight of her dead children and husband. But the dacoits were convinced that it was Mother Kali who had come down from the heavens to punish for forgetting to propitiate her before they embarked on their robbery. They fell on her feet and begged for mercy. What ultimately happened to them or to the woman I do not know, but I recall reading this story in a police magazine.

From Bhanga my father was transferred to Sherpur, a sub-division of Mymensingh district. We stayed in a dak bungalow in our first few months there, as the house allotted to our father was not yet vacated by its resident at the time: a widowed Hindu officer who lived there with his mistress. In our neighbourhood there were many Hindu girls who were good singers. They would visit our house and sing for hours while my father listened attentively. While in Sherpur my father took a renewed interest in my music education. He hired a tabla teacher for me who would play the tabla while I played the harmonium and sang. He taught me the main beats of the tabla: trital (16 metre), kaharba, dadra, jhumur, teura and jhap.

But at one point my tabla teacher decided to move out of Sherpur and back to his home district of Rajshahi. He came by the day before his departure to say farewell to us. As it happened, that was a day when my father had just administered a beating to me, and my teacher found me crying. Misinterpreting my tears, he said, “Oh this world of maya. Do not cry daughter. Do not cry.” Neither my mother nor I had the heart to correct him.

My singing improved rapidly while I was at Sherpur and I was encouraged by my family to take music as one of my SSC examination subjects. In fact, this decision probably helped me pass my SSC examination. I had to travel to Jessore to appear for my music examination. I was one of only two students who was taking music as a subject that year. The other girl was named Nadira. At the exam she sang Raag Bageshri, while I sang Raag Malkauns. Nadira would go on to become an accomplished singer later in life.

We were in Sherpur no more than a few months before my father was transferred to the main town of Mymensingh. Behind our house here was a paddy field, and still beyond a graveyard covered with tall swaying grass. I developed the habit of visiting this graveyard very late at night. I would stay there for hours, utterly unafraid. I felt compelled to be there and once there, was in a trance. I was found there one night by my parents when they had woken and found the door of my room open. Not finding me in bed they had come out the open backyard door and, carrying torches and hurricane lanterns, continued the search in the area nearby until they located me in the graveyard. I no longer recall my parents' level of anxiety on this matter but after this incident there was a lock on my door at night. The news caused a sensation in town, and for many years afterwards when I met people from there I would ask them if they knew of a policeman’s daughter named Rosy. They would admit to knowing of the family, adding that the daughter was obviously a mad girl as she would visit graveyards at midnight.

From Mymensingh my father was transferred to Bagerhat, where I was admitted to Class Ten at Bagerhat Girls High School. The headmistress was a short lady whose name I don’t remember, but I was only at that school for one or two months. In our backyard in Bagerhat was a mature Mango tree whose branches spread out widely. The tree was right next to our outhouse bathroom so I would climb the bathroom walls to the roof with a boti in hand to cut the fruit from the tree and eat them on the roof. It was here that I was in mortal peril late one night. I had risen to visit the bathroom, and although normally I carried a hurricane lantern with me this night I was too lazy to get one. However, upon coming to the bathroom door I changed my mind and went back to fetch the lantern. It was just as well that I did, for once I actually entered the bathroom, greeting me on top of the water tank was a full-grown cobra hissing with its hood flared out.

Near our house was a dak bungalow in which a pair of American Peace Corps volunteers named Don and Lyman used to reside. Although my siblings and I could hardly speak English we would nonetheless visit the Dak Bungalow to gawk at the foreigners. One day when we visited them, Lyman was apparently asleep. Seeing us, Don called his friend, saying “your company is here.” God only knows what I said to them as in those days I only spoke broken English.

One evening in Bagerhat there was a loud knock on our door at 7 pm, which is considered a late hour in such a rural area. My father was out of town on a tour, and it was my mother and us in the house with no other male adult. We were naturally alarmed by the knock on the door and did not respond. After repeated blows we finally yelled out “who’s there” in Bangla. Some seconds passed and then a heavy voice said “Don”. Don didn’t speak Bangla but had surmised what we had asked given the context. When I opened the door I found Don standing there with a small pair of shoes in his hands. It was my younger brother Iqbal’s that we had left at the bungalow when we had visited earlier that day. Another evening, when it was Lyman’s turn to visit, he arrived holding his belly and moaning. As it turned out, he had eaten some bad hilsa fish. My father gave him some of his homeopathic medicine and advised him to lie down on our sofa. Lyman did so, remaining at our house for a long while during which my father would check on him from time to time.

After just a few months in Bagerhat my father was transferred to Narail. We were there for three months, until I took my matriculation exams. Thereafter my siblings and I went to Dhaka to spend time with my maternal grandparents while my parents went to Patuakhali so that my father could take up yet another posting. I discovered in Dhaka that my maternal parents had not mellowed over the years. They were still very harsh, bordering on cruel, with me. My nana relished teaching us, and interpreted that responsibility as overloading us with a lot of homework such as translation and reading comprehension. He was not reassured by the effects of his tutelage on us, darkly warning that I was headed for academic disaster.

As the day of my final school examination approached, one of my maternal uncle’s wife's (my mami) who had come to visit, furtively whispered in all ears “Rosy will never pass”, referring to me by my nickname. These dour pronouncements took a toll. I became increasingly nervous as the day of the exam approached. I kept forgetting the year the Battle of Plassey took place. So on the day of my history exam I wrote the year (1757) down on the hem of my white pyjamas to remember. My father was visiting me in the city at this time and somehow he discovered my scheme. When I emerged from the exam room I found him in the hallway in full uniform, extremely anxious that I had cheated on my test. I told him that the question on Plassey never appeared.

As we awaited my results in Dhaka it seemed that my grandfather was looking forward to confirming my failure. On the day the results were to be published he visited the newspaper office very early to check the papers for my name, which would appear if I had passed. He returned shortly after and triumphantly declared that my name had not appeared in the paper. My extended family appeared visibly delighted by this turn of events. I was indifferent to the news as I believed that the only thing that stood between me and academic excellence was a desire to apply myself, and since I did not wish to apply myself, it was of course no surprise that I had failed.

The morning my results were to be published, I was sitting on the verandah. I watched the newspaper man leave the daily paper under our gate at the usual time. I picked it up and found my roll number in a separate section on the first page. This was the rule for students appearing in a different board than Dhaka, which in my case was Narail. My extended family was irritated at having been proven wrong, but eventually my grandfather grudgingly asked me where I wanted to study next now that I had completed matriculation. I told him that I would have a better idea if he would show me the campuses of the different colleges. My plan was to select a college not based on its academic merit, rather based on how pretty I found the buildings. My grandfather took me around the city to see a few before I decided that the buildings of the Home Economics College in Dhaka were the most beautiful. I informed my grandfather of my intentions of studying there.

Chapter VII

Captain O’ My Captain

I had been attending my new college for only a few months when I heard of an ‘Inter-wing’ scholarship. Students applying to it would have the opportunity to study in Lahore in West Pakistan. I was determined to see the principal about this, so one day I marched into her office without knocking. When I went in the principal had her head down, working on some papers on her desk. As I spoke she stared at me, astonished by my temerity, before managing to recover her composure. She instructed me to leave, knock on the door, ask for permission and re-enter.

I did so and subsequently expressed to her my interest in applying for the scholarship. She asked me why I wanted to study in Lahore and I told her that I was unhappy in Dhaka as my grandfather and extended family treated me cruelly. She pointed out that my second division results in my Matriculation did not meet the scholarship requirements. I asked her to send my name in nonetheless as I wanted to face the interview board. ‘I will do the rest,’ I told her. It took some convincing on my part but eventually she said she would.

Apparently she kept her word, as a few weeks following my visit to the principal’s office, I was called before the scholarship board. I faced twelve men across a huge oval table. When they asked me why I had managed only a Second Division result in my matriculation I told them that they could ask me questions they considered worthy of first division students and that I would answer them correctly. So they did. One of the questions was about who authored the poem ‘Captain O’ My Captain’.

Luckily, I remembered seeing the name by accident in a book whose pages were fluttering in the wind before in my room one day, so I was able to answer: ‘Walt Whitman’. Another question was about Eastern Classical Music, about which raags should be sung at what hour and what different raags I knew. At one point one interviewer even asked me if I could dance as the girls in West Pakistan were very smart and cosmopolitan.

Upon being asked this, I got up from my chair and went to the middle of the room. With no musical accompaniment whatsoever, I started gyrating, saying, ‘look, I can do the twist’, which was in vogue in those days. Embarrassed, the interviewers asked me to sit down, and not long after, told me the interview was over. Although I left the room without even a ‘thank you’ I returned within seconds, sticking my head through the heavy drapes to tell them in English, ‘listen, don’t forget to send me to Lahore, ok? Remember it!’

I chose not to visit my grandparent’s house until I was accepted for the scholarship. The last time I had visited him he asked me to provide an account of the money that I had taken for my hostel expenses. I provided him with a list of accounts that included ten takas worth of grapes. Seeing this, my grandfather wanted to beat me. He viewed my purchase as a huge waste of money. I fled the house and vowed never to return. My parents were far away to the South, in Patuakhali. They were ignorant, perhaps willfully, of the abuse I was enduring at the hands of my grandparents, perhaps even relieved that I was under their surveillance.

Another reason I wanted to escape to Lahore was because I hated hostel life at Home Economics College in Dhaka, and missed my parents terribly. During the day I busied myself with studies the best I could, but at night the thought of my mother made me homesick. Bewildered and sad, unable to sleep, I would sob in my bed for her night after night at the hostel. My roommate, a senior girl, half-asleep herself, would console me when my crying woke her at night. My homesickness was such that I even approached one American teacher and asked her if she would be my mother as she bore a passing resemblance to her, leaving her speechless.

Incredibly, the college authorities informed me after a few weeks that I had been selected for the inter-wing scholarship and would be going to Lahore. Rather than reflect on my good fortune I felt relief that I would no longer be beaten by my grandfather. I hoped that the excitement of a new country would mitigate the pain of missing my mother. When all the details were finalized I visited my grandfather and his family and told them I was going to Lahore. They were shocked but made the necessary arrangements. On the day of my PIA flight my grandfather took me to the airport to see me off.

The biggest thing I took with me was my harmonium, which incurred an enormous 54 taka surcharge at the airport. I carried a small bag with me inside which was a blue sari with a white border and two old salwar kameez, the totality of my wardrobe. It was late December 1964. I was 16.

On the PIA flight with me were other students going to West Pakistan for studies, including a smart young man named MAS Akbar, my future brother-in-law. Akbar had received a scholarship to the engineering university in Lahore while I had been admitted to the Home and Social Science as an ISC (Science Intermediate) student. He was two years older than me. His father was a deputy magistrate. Chatting with him, I found him to be a serious, polite young man with a strong personality. As we were landing I asked Akbar for his contact information as I thought it would be useful to know another countryman in a foreign city.

As for the rest of us, we were received by our respective college representatives at the arrivals hall of the airport. They were standing there with cold bottles of coca-cola with straws in them. Having never encountered this drink before, I took a first sip and nearly lost my mind. It felt as though my nose and mouth were on fire. I stood there mutely suffering, wanting to scream, unable to bring myself to spit it out or throw my drink away. Shackled by social norms, I kept taking sips, each a greater and greater shock to my system until I was about to scream out of fear and dismay at the thought that I might have to finish the whole bottle as I thought that act would surely be the end of me. ‘Where will they bury me in this strange land’ was my thought at the time.

Somehow I got through the drink and focused on what was before me. Our college representative was a man so tall he was stooping. His white salwar kameez made him look taller still. Once our greeting period was over he ushered us out to waiting taxis. Once on the road I could see that Lahore was bigger than I had imagined. The trees were large and red dust, like that from the desert, billowed in wide avenues.

This country looked much drier than mine. My conviction about this trip was already shaken by the coca-cola, and sitting in the taxi it ebbed further. I felt disappointed, abandoned. The other students were excitedly taking in the sights of their new home for the next year. In the dark interior of the taxi, my tears went unnoticed.

My mood lifted when we arrived at the campus of the Home and Social Science College in Gulbarg. It was evening but there was enough light for me to see that the grounds were large, with a well-maintained garden. It was like a Western University, I thought, or at least what I imagined was the campus of a Western University. There was a small visiting room by the main gates, from it, a long tree-lined driveway led into the college. The staff quarters were on the left and the hostel on the right. The students of my new college were roaming the grounds. Along with other South Asians, I saw Europeans and Africans also, but the cheer I felt from seeing the other students on the grounds was brief, as when we were led to our rooms I found mine cold and sparsely furnished. It felt like an igloo, or perhaps a tomb. It didn’t help that it was winter.

While I was settling in during my first week, students from all around the world would peep through my door and utter a single, strange word: ‘hello’. I had never heard this word, which I had until then believed to only be employed to answer the telephone, used in such a way. As I spoke neither English nor Urdu well, I kept quiet and didn’t acknowledge the greeting, but that pesky word kept returning every time I passed a fellow student in the hallway, met them in the cafeteria, or sat next to them in the classroom: ‘hello, hello, hello’.

I did not understand that this word, like so many others in the English language, simply needed to be repeated back to the person who first uttered it. This went on for months before I realized that the correct response to ‘hello’ was ‘hello’, but it still vexed me to go through the hassle of repeating this brace of unimpressive syllables over and over again. I was a rough country girl who found social niceties to be alien and tedious. In the remainder of my time in Lahore, my attitude would improve but little.

I hadn’t told my parents of my decision to go to Lahore until I had already arrived there. Once I was suitably settled in, I wrote them a letter explaining what I had done. From their response it seemed that my father was less surprised than my mother, but both of them were calm and accepting of my decision, not to mention proud of my accomplishment. I wrote a second letter, in a completely different tone, to my maternal grandparents. Written in my limited but most vindictive English, the letter began with the words “You people of Gopibag”. As he would later tell me, the import of these words were not lost on my grandfather, as he immediately recognized them as less than complimentary.

When I arrived in Lahore, I was unaware that I was entitled to a substantial stipend as part of my scholarship. I thought it was rewarding enough that I would be living and studying in a foreign country, and had given absolutely no thought to how I would support myself while there. So it came as a great surprise to learn that not only was I entitled to a stipend but that it would be an astonishing sum of 350 taka per month, an amount so large that I would find it difficult to spend in one month.

Curiously, I did not use the first instalment of my stipend to resolve my urgent need for new clothes. Rather I availed myself of a senior girl named Qaisra Niazi who had some skill with sewing. She was kind enough to alter one of my large salwars into a nice teddie dress. Qaisra was the head girl that year in the College.

I didn’t necessarily make friends in the first days at the college, but had some acquaintances who I spent time with. They teased me, correctly assessing me as a rural unsophisticate. This teasing would continue when I needed a new mattress for my bed. I wrote to my seatmate on the plane, MAS Akbar, to see if he could purchase a mattress for me. Akbar arrived after a few days at my hostel bearing a brand new mattress with a print of big blue flowers. He would help with a few other matters in the year that I stayed in Lahore also, courtesies that were misinterpreted as romantic interest by the other students of my college. I paid no mind to their speculation. Both Akbar and I knew that there was no romantic intrigue in our relationship.

Despite this, during Eid some of the students put mehendi on my hands, and wrote the letter A on them, for ‘Akbar’. ‘We are writing the first name of your mangethkar,’ they said. As always, I remained indifferent to their excitement.

About a month into my stay in Lahore, I became very ill. The cause was unknown, the symptoms mysterious. I lay in bed, vomiting if I as much as raised my head from the pillow. In addition to this vertigo I also had diarrhoea. The college nurse, an Englishwoman, performed a cursory examination of me and told me that she wanted to perform a stool test, a procedure that I had never before experienced and found disgraceful. I told her it would be impossible on my part to give her my stool as I found it humiliating.

She assured me it would be easy. All I had to do was to put my stool into a plastic container and write my name on it. I told her that it would be impossible for me to give her a container of my stool with my name on it as she would carry it everywhere for people to see. But she was insistent. I told her I would never write my name on the container and identify myself. Eventually we came to the compromise that the nurse would write her own name, Stella, on the container instead of mine.

From my sick bed, awaiting the results of my stool test, I wrote a strongly worded letter to my parents expressing my severe displeasure with them for never taking good care of my health. My father responded solicitously, writing that he and my mother were very concerned about my illness. But my anger with my parents was misplaced. I had never taken good care of my health. I had rarely eaten vegetables or anything healthy growing up.

Enabled by my massive stipend and lack of supervision, I had been eating outside the hostel quite often and quite recklessly while in Lahore, and I was paying the price. This is the aspect of my life that has changed the most since my youth, as I am now very careful about my diet. One grows wiser once the cow leaves the barn, as they say.

After recovering from my illness I finally went for a big shopping day in the markets and returned in a taxi hauling many large bags. The driver helped me take the bags out and put them in the lobby of the college. They were large and awkward to carry. A girl named Nilufar Monkani saw that I was having some difficulty taking them all to my room and asked, “Rosy, should I help you?” I brusquely replied “Yes, help me” in my limited English. Nilufar brought my bags into my room, smiling all the while. When I had nothing to say to her for her help her smiled faltered and she said ‘Rosy, kabhi kabhi thank you bola koro’. I still said nothing.

Chapter VIII

The Dust Storm

One day at the college the students were asked to wait by the football field. The Girls Guide Mistress would be inspecting us to find volunteers. She was a tall, pretty woman wearing a smart uniform of a white sari whose edge was fed through a belt loop on her shoulder. She lined us up in sitting positions on the football field and walked the lines, asking us one by one what we wanted to do with our lives.

I became steadily more panicked as she started down my line, wondering what I would say in my poor English. My heart was beating so fast I thought I would have a heart attack. Eventually she came to me and asked me the same question and I managed to say “I want to be a guide” because nothing else came to mind. ‘How sweet,’ she exclaimed. So I began girl guide training in my spare time. I was taught how to pitch tents, basic wilderness survival, tracking, and other skills. I was also given a special knife that had different tools folded into the handle, similar to a Swiss ‘Offiziersmesser’. Before long on, this knife would save me from a dangerous situation.

Life at College was organized and disciplined. Its pseudo-military principles extended into our daily lives. The expectation that we should keep our quarters clean and tidy was enforced through routine inspections by the principal. She would give us a few days' warning before arranging for a visit to our rooms.

On the first such occasion I cleaned my room thoroughly, and when she arrived she did appear impressed with my efforts, until near the end when she approached the table lamp on my desk, which was quite striking: a pumpkin gold flourishes on it that looked like Arabic calligraphy. As she asked where I had received such a beautiful lamp she ran her finger on it and it came away covered in dust. The lamp was the only thing I had forgotten to clean, mistaking the dust for the actual color.

I was embarrassed. Then the principal noticed that there were large patches on my wall where the lime had been picked away. I explained that I had developed a strange obsession with picking and eating the lime on my walls. It had been going on for some time and I could not stop, I told her. I had made quite a map on it. The principal was concerned that this indicated that I had some underlying disease.

We talked a little longer and I confided in her that while I could write English fairly well, speaking was difficult for me. She advised me to practice reading English out aloud. I didn’t mention to her that my Urdu was quite bad also. Once I had said to the khansama ‘hum pani khayenge’ and he replied ‘bibiji aap pani khayenge aur roti piyenge’.

My inability to master Urdu frustrated me. I expressed this in English class one day when we were given four words with which to construct a sentence. One of the words was ‘language’ so I wrote ‘I hate Urdu language’. The teacher was a Pakistani Urdu speaker, but rather than being offended, she gave me full marks. I have forgotten her name but remember to this day her graciousness.

I had cultivated good relationships with the staff, and one day when a fellow East Pakistani student named Satera Kashem was planning to visit Bangladesh, she asked for my help: she needed a large metal trunk and wanted to borrow the khansama’s. He was an old man who was understandably possessive of his property. Eventually, after much lobbying by Setara he said that he would let her have it if I vouched for her. I did so as Setara swore she would bring it back. However, Setara left and never returned and the old man never got his trunk back. This incident pains me to this day, as back then I was too thoughtless to replace it for him.

My camaraderie with the staff was a double-edged sword. When my eldest uncle Shamsuzzaman, a chief engineer at Chittagong Port Trust came to see me at Lahore, he introduced himself at the visiting room and eventually found his way to me. Upon seeing me he berated me because the staff seemed to know me quite well. To him this indicated that I was badly behaved. I remember little else from that visit. His admonishment overshadowed the joy of seeing a member of my extended family in a foriegn place. This uncle of mine was tragically killed by the West Pakistani army six years later, during the night of March 25, 1971, when the invading army targeted the intellectual backbone of East Pakistan.

I discovered a Chinese restaurant near the college and began to frequent it, always alone. I would order the fried rice and vegetables and chicken and take the leftovers back to the hostel. They would take a long time to serve the food. The different accoutrements of the dining experience would arrive in increments of half hour; first the plates, then the knife and fork, finally the food. During this period I would get increasingly impatient and hungry, so when the food finally arrived it would taste delicious no matter what the quality. I once tried a soup at this restaurant after seeing it on the menu. When it tasted strange I asked the waiter what it was made of and he said lizard’s tale. I expect he was joking.

Even though I had a generous stipend, I often ate on credit at the hostel canteen. This was only because I was too lazy to carry money with me. My dues at the canteen built up to an alarming amount but for some reason I kept avoiding settling the bill. So one day I ventured there in full niqab and ordered a number of things to eat. I paid for the food but only for that day. The manager saw me and may have suspected that I was the girl with the delinquent account. I was anxious but said nothing the whole time. He drifted close to me several times but in the end seemed to lose his nerve and walked away.

Communication continued to be a problem for me in Lahore. I greatly wished to become a better speaker of Urdu and English, but I found it difficult to motivate myself to master these two languages. This inertia was overcome one day when I was lying on my bed during the day and overheard two girls fighting in English in loud voices in the verandah. The hairs on my arm stood up. I was astounded that such a gulf in linguistic abilities could exist between three non-natives speakers of the same language, where two of them could argue in a language while the other struggled to even get a sentence out. I vowed then and there to master English at a level of proficiency so that I too could one day quarrel in that language.

My English skills were poor in part because of my father’s frequent transfers. They not only interrupted my education but also led me to studying preponderantly in village schools that had Bangla as the medium of instruction. As a result, among other academic deficiencies, I spoke English poorly.

But thanks to my father’s supplementary efforts on that front I was still leagues ahead of the other East Pakistani girls at the college, who, upon discovering my relative facility with the language, would call on me to write their English reports and take me with them to the shops to speak to the shopkeepers. I had only a few stock phrases such as ‘show me this one’ or ‘show me that one’ but this was enough to suit their needs. Since I was a junior student they felt comfortable ordering me about.

While I was shy about speaking English and Urdu given my lack of ability in both, I nonetheless sang loudly and shamelessly while playing the harmonium I had brought with me from Dhaka. I had minimal interactions with the other girls because of the language barrier, so my harmonium became my best friend. Even though the songs I sang were classical, I overheard some girls sneer and say that I was from a ‘baiji’ family. In the sixties women who sang and danced were looked down upon in West Pakistan.

The rewaz that I was so particular about would begin nightly at ten pm and continue for at least an hour. One night I was halfway through one of my sessions when Zahera, the African girl next door, yelled out: “Rosy we are sleeping. Please sing quietly or practice in the morning.” I was outraged to be so interrupted. I fumed for some time as I translated my rage into (what I thought were) the appropriate English words: “Look. This is my room. This is not your father’s room. I will sing a hundred times if I want to.” Zahera, who had much better manners than me, simply said: “Rosy, I said ‘please’.” I don’t recall if I granted her request to spare them my singing the remainder of the night, but the general incivility and rudeness I displayed with Zahera was typical of my behaviour in Lahore.

Despite these fractious encounters with the students, the teachers were amused by my naivete and lack of inhibition. They would often call me into their chambers if they ran into me roaming about in the courtyard and sometimes ask me to sing. One song I remember singing on those occasions was ‘Bachelor Boy’ by Cliff Richards, but whether the lyrics were in Urdu or English, they were tinged by a strong Bangla accent.

The teachers at the college ate very well. Sometimes when the bearers carrying their lunches and dinners passed me by I would peek under the covered dishes. Although I was often tempted I could never muster up the courage to taste these dishes. I saw that one teacher fond of coconut was getting slivers of it with her food. Another, Ms. Doshi, was kind enough to share her lunch with me on occasion. She was tall, heavy set and dusky-skinned. She have a lot of achar with her food and it was only the achar that she would share rather than the other food which looked more appetizing.

I ate a lot considering I was only 5’ 2” and 90 pounds. I could grab a hold of my waist with my two hands. The other girls measured my figure and they came out to be 32-20-30 - very thin but the girls still envied my figure and thought I was shapely. As I would leisurely walk down the driveway to join the boys the girls would call out to me: ‘figure nikla ke nikla ke kaha jati ho?’ They thought me bolder than all of them and when I would go out of the campus with male students they would betray their curiosity, asking how I felt sitting with the boys. Whether I felt shy, etc. As always, I told them the truth, which was that I felt nothing.

Actually, the truth was more nuanced: when I sat with the boys I just felt like one of them, or I felt that they were like me. Perhaps the boys were more confident of their charm, for if there were any films or programs that involved East Pakistani culture, the Bengali boys from the other colleges and universities would come and convince the principal that I should go and experience it so as to stay connected to my culture. We would take packed taxis where I was the only girl sitting with all the boys in tight quarters.

These extra-curricular activities meant I found time for everything but my studies. My marks were strictly mediocre, but even though I hardly spent any time studying I was never branded as a bad student. I didn’t find the subjects hard, rather I found them uninteresting. My attitude was that I had not come to Lahore to study but to get away from my grandparents. At that time I subscribed to magical thinking where I could stay back in Lahore even if I failed all my courses. Even when Shamsul Haque, who had been on my interview board for the scholarship, came visiting the college one day, I complained to him that I didn’t like the subjects that I had to study at this college and if he could transfer me to another. He laughed and said that this was not possible.

My neglect of my studies caught up with me, as I soon discovered when I was late on returning to the college after attending a cinema screening. The principal informed me that I would be under detention at the college for the next few weeks, a period in which I was not allowed to leave the campus for any reason. I didn’t mind the punishment. Rather, I worried more about the program I had planned for the next week with the boys. I stunned the principal by asking if my punishment could be postponed for a week so that I could still go out with my male friends. Shocked by my audacity, she muttered something about ‘East Pakistani girls’ to the other teachers present.

Unlike East Pakistan, West Pakistan had TV broadcasts. The local TV station in Lahore at the time was promoting East Pakistani culture and would invite a number of us East Pakistani students to sing Bangla songs at the studio. This became a fortnightly routine for us. Along with the East Pakistani boys I would go to the TV station and sing songs live on television, the only girl in the group. The TV producer, Mr. Aslam Azhar, would ask us to sing Tagore songs but we would sing random modern songs instead and claim that they were Tagore’s, figuring the audience and the producers wouldn’t know the difference. Thankfully, they didn’t. Instead, they paid us handsomely: 44 rupees per person per appearance, and the next morning my picture would be in the dailies. I regret that I didn’t save a single one of these news clips.

I had no one in Lahore to look after me. I was all by myself in a foreign city, and mostly fine with it. I would watch the relatives, loved ones and local guardians of the other students visit, bring food. Once a student’s grandmother brought mustard saag for her, which she later ate with great relish. Apparently, this was a delicacy in West Pakistan, even though back home it was considered the food of the poor.

Other students would receive carrot achar from home, which I found went very well with chapati and meat curry. I began to ask for it from the other girls during my meals. The achar was simple: just slices of carrot soaked in vinegar, sugar and salt, but it tasted wonderful. We could also get excellent seekh kabab and naan for just one anna at the hostel. The meat was cooked in a unique way, where it had the appearance of looking raw even though it was perfectly cooked. I don’t know how they did it. When we sat at the table a teacher always came and joined us - one for each table - to ensure that we were following proper dining etiquette and not wasting food.

During Ramadan the menus changed. Paratha and keema or some other meat was served during sehri. Fasting was compulsory. We had to rise every night for sehri and finish the meal no later than 5 AM. Absolutely no food was served during the day, until iftar. Under such draconian circumstances, I somehow managed to observe my fasts for the first few days, but soon found it impossible to continue.

I would find ways and means of getting around fasting. So, during sehri I began wearing pants with large pockets, into which I would abduct extra parathas from the meal. These I would consume in private during the day, in a private place where I would not be spotted. I assessed that the bathrooms were the safest place for this sinful act. This is how I survived my first and only Ramadan at the college. This situation has not improved with time, as I still find it very difficult to fast, even though I understand that it is meant to be a challenge. During Ramadan I would think back to my maternal grandfather, who would tutor me while fasting and when restless with hunger, rise from his desk to pace back and forth, muttering to himself about whether anyone would beat him with a stick if he broke his fast secretly and ate some food. Perhaps I inherited his mentality.

For iftar during that month we were served milk with rosewater which I found quite delicious, and gulab jamun served as dessert. When some girls didn’t want or didn’t finish their portions they would give it to me and I would accept happily. I rarely ate any food that was good for me, but retained the fondness for grapes that I had developed back in Dhaka. When I discovered that they were cheap in Pakistan I gave 2 taka to the khansama to buy me some. He brought back an enormous amount, far too much for one person. I nonetheless put in a heroic effort to finish them all in one night and as a result had an upset stomach the next day.

I would eat anything that tasted good. Dairy products such as chhana, ghee and doi (yoghurt) were everyday food for us growing up. And even during my childhood my parents would nag that I didn’t have a healthy diet, that I should eat more vegetables. I never listened, perhaps because my eating didn’t appear to affect my figure. No matter how much I ate I stayed thin.

During one holiday my friend Setara and I were out in the bazaar in Lahore and met a Bengali family. We were excited to find countrymen, and when they offered us to stay at their house we agreed. It was a good fortune, we thought, as the college was closing for the holidays and we needed a place to stay. We followed the address to the edge of town and after an uneventful dinner retired to our rooms. Mine was on the first floor and overlooked a patio. There were two beds in the room and I took the one closest to the door.

Later that night, I woke up with a start when I felt a hand on my neck. I began yelling that there was a robber in the house, trying to snatch my necklace. I called for the man whose house we were in, referring to him as ‘uncle’. I didn’t realize that it was his hand that had been on my neck. My yelling had shocked him in the dark room. He ran out to the verandah and pretended that it was my shouting that had woken him and that he was there to investigate. He asked me where the thief was and I said that he had just been there, putting his hand on my necklace. I left the next morning. Setara, unaware of the depredations of my host, stayed behind.

I returned to the college to see if I could stay there, but they were closed for the next few days, so I had little choice but to return to the home of the attempted rapist. I hired a taxi to take me back to the house, which I remembered to be on Ferozepur Road. However, I was no longer certain of the exact address. We drove along the road several times in vain hope of finding the house. The taxi driver was getting impatient as a great dust storm was brewing on the horizon and he was eager to get away. He was unconcerned about leaving me in the middle of it. I finally asked to be let off at a spot that seemed somewhat familiar, thinking I could find the house by walking around on my own.

The light was fading fast. The wind was rising so dust was everywhere. The shops were pulling down their shutters. I needed help, so I found the oldest, kindest-looking shopkeeper I could and asked him in Urdu if he would take me to the house I was looking for, giving him a general description. He agreed and we set off down the road. We had been walking for only a little while when he grabbed my hand and told me I would have to come with him. Thankfully, I had the girl’s guide knife with me. I took it out of my vanity bag, held it toward the man and told him that if he didn’t put one mile between us I would stab him with it. The man ran away begging for his life, referring me to as ‘bibji’.

I kept walking through the dust and darkness, more and more lost. I saw no one in the howling sands. Everyone else had taken shelter. The storm eventually stopped, but by then I had completely lost my bearing. I walked for hours, not finding the house, my legs getting cramped and numb, my surroundings growing increasingly more desolate. The houses were farther and farther between until I crossed an empty stretch of road with nothing but empty fields and jungle on both sides. I saw a group of men sitting around a big fire they had built in an oil drum. They were bare-chested and scary looking, their glowing faces intent on the fire. I kept walking and they didn’t notice me. Now that I think back on it, they may have been dhobis.

A car began following me, creeping behind slowly, I don’t know for how long. When I walked it would follow. When I stopped it would as well. I went to the window and asked the driver why he was following me. He tried to persuade me to get in his car, assuring me that he had no one at home other than his aunt and that I would be safe and comfortable there. I told him that he was welcome to help me but only if he came on foot. My experiences over the last day had shaken the naivete out of me. When he refused I told him to leave. I kept walking. He crept behind me for a while longer before finally turning around.

Around midnight I saw a large gate with lights above the two columns and ran toward it, and when I saw the sign declaring it to be the Punjab University Girls’ Hostel I wanted to cry with relief. I woke the security guard and told them all that had happened. The man fetched the superintendent and I repeated the events of the day to her. She asked me where I wanted to go and I asked her to send me to Punjab University. She said that they would be happy to help me as long as I left the knife in their care. The following day I would be taken to Punjab University, she promised.

Chapter IX

In Extreme Need of Guidance

On summer days when the sunlight falls through the trees it scatters into a play of light and shadows on the ground. My memories of Fareed are like that. I’ll try my best to stitch them into coherence here.

I first met him in Lahore. There was a visiting room near the main gate for the student’s families, relatives and concerns to meet them there. Once someone arrived there, they would send a message to the student through a college employee. I would sit and watch as the other girls in the college (from both wings from Pakistan) received visitors. I didn’t have anyone visiting me, but I wasn’t bothered by this. I didn’t feel sad, lonely, or envious. Rather I observed the interactions of the other students and their loved ones with great amusement.

On one of these visiting days, a senior East Pakistani student named Sabiha Ahmed was visited by an older cousin who was her local guardian. When she saw me hanging around she asked me if I wanted to come with her and meet him. I saw a tall, handsome man who had come to see her. He was, I thought, about 25 years old. She introduced us, referring to him as ‘Fareed Bhai’. I introduced myself and stood by as they chatted, laughed and argued playfully. I observed their relationship with awe.

For the next few weeks, Sabiha kept inviting me along for these sessions. Although the first day we did not speak, I engaged Fareed more and more in conversation, to the point where I asked him to also be my local guardian along with Sabiha. I asked this while she was standing right next to us, because my intention was innocent, leaving the college to visit the city my only motive, as only the local guardians were permitted to take the students out of the campus. Fareed agreed readily. He told me that I would come and pick up on holidays. I didn’t think that this would be an issue with Sabiha as she had so many local acquaintances and relatives. But as I later discovered, that assumption was wrong.

Initially, Fareed took me to see the many sites of Lahore. We had fruit chaat in Banu Bazar. We visited Akbar’s grave. And many other places that I no longer remember. We quickly became close. Although I intended the relationship to remain platonic, I did not mention this to Fareed. At times, he would elaborate on the historical context of the sites we were visiting. I realized quickly that he was quite learned for his age. I would listen to him, and admire him in a distant way, but unfortunately his words did not touch me. I was still like a child. I would barely listen, and was annoyed by advice given to me in a lecturing or hectoring tone, which he was wont to do.

Fareed’s assumption of my guardianship led to a deterioration of my relationship with Sabiha, and ruptured matters between him and her as well. I didn’t understand that I had found a rare man. Even by the standards of my young age, I was quite inconsiderate, thoughtless. To my young mind, the entire Lahore chapter of my life was an escapade, a holiday, a way to avoid the punitive presence of my maternal grandparents. I rarely thought beyond the day that lay before me. My ability to plan long-term was non-existent.

He was supremely patient with me even when my behaviour was aberrant and shocking, such as one time when I was returning from East Pakistan by PIA at the end of one of the many holidays I had taken during my stay in Lahore. Sitting beside me was a gentleman with whom I chatted casually. Even though he was speaking in English, I could tell that he was from Sylhet, so strong was his accent. In the course of our conversation I told him that I was returning early from Dhaka and that my college would not open for a few more days. He said that he was pleased to hear this as he was staying at a hotel in Lahore. ‘Would you like to stay with me,’ he asked.

I was excited by this unexpected offer as I had never stayed in a hotel before. I peppered him with questions: What did the hotel look like? How was the food? What were some things you could do there? I speculated aloud that it must be very exciting to stay in a hotel and my new friend solemnly confirmed that yes, it was. I spent the rest of the flight in a state of excitement as I daydreamed about staying in a hotel.

We got into a cab to go to the hotel. Halfway there however, I remembered about Fareed. I told my new friend that I would have to ask my local guardian for permission. I asked the taxi to turn around and go to Samindabad, to Fareed’s mess. I left the man sitting in the taxi cab while I ran to see Fareed to tell him what had happened. Fareed said nothing to me but asked to see the man. I hung back while they talked but I was shocked to see Fareed admonish the man loudly, who, after being yelled at for some time, left meekly in the taxi without speaking to me. I was mortified by the incident, as I felt at the time that the poor gentleman had been insulted for nothing more than wanting to take a young girl on a tour of a hotel, but I said nothing, fearful of angering Fareed further. But he said nothing to me. Maybe he knew by then just how naive I was. I stayed with him until my college opened.

During my visits to East Pakistan Fareed would arrange everything. There were times when he paid for everything related to me, but I was completely oblivious to it. It never occurred to me to enquire how my expenses were met, much less to offer to pay for myself, even though I received a massive monthly stipend as part of my scholarship. Despite my naivete I knew that Fareed was never romantically interested in any woman but me. The proof of this was once when we went to Banu Bazaar. Fareed happened to give some money to a beggar woman. She prayed in Punjabi to Allah in thanks. Fareed then translated her prayers - that we would have many sons. I laughed upon hearing this but said nothing else.

He wrote me many letters, full of warmth, substance and wisdom. Fareed was fluent in Bangla, English and Urdu - I remember that when he would bring me fruits such as oranges had ‘suruk inside’, meaning red. I would also discover that he was an exceptional letter writer who wrote long letters that were well-composed and written with an immaculate hand, always arriving in blue envelopes with paper of a similar hue. These letters were steeped in detail, in the history and the import of the places he had seen. Fareed would enclose many photographs of different places he was visiting. One of them was in Chitral where he was frolicking in the snow in a nice hat and warm clothes. Often they contained advice that was precocious for someone of his young age. The times he would write to me while I was in East Pakistan my father would read these letters first and then hand them to me. If only I had preserved them.

There was a senior East Pakistani student named Mariam Mahmud at my college in Lahore. Thin, with a doll-like face, she was exceptionally beautiful. For some reason she began stealing Fareed’s letters when they would arrive in the common mailbox. She did this openly, reading the letters and then discussing them with impunity with the other students. Fareed was incensed when I told him what was happening. In a following letter he wrote ‘This is a short letter but it is deep with emotions and things left unsaid as I am concerned that your Mariam Apa might read it.’ This was the only letter that Mariam returned to me.

What no one knew until now is that I was so furious at Mariam that I plotted to kill her. I stole a knife from the kitchen and was determined to stab her with it. I was very close to going through with it, until I examined the knife more closely and noticed how flimsy it was. That was the only reason I didn’t proceed with the murder attempt. Like much else in life, I had very fanciful and romanticized conceptions of homicide. I didn’t think there would be any adverse consequences if I killed Mariam. I thought life would go on as normal, perhaps even improve because she would no longer be stealing my letters.

Amazingly, a few months down the road the same Mariam would give me a box to take to Dhaka on her behalf as I was travelling there. The box was unlocked. I opened it to find many letters addressed to Mariam from her lover, whose name I no longer recall. I was amazed that she would trust me with them. I exacted my vengeance on her by ripping up some of these letters.

Fareed could occasionally be patronizing. He was, after all, quite young. Sometimes he delivered needling comments so subtly that I would miss the meaning but intuitively understand that I had somehow been insulted. In fact, one of his obsessions - that I become a graduate, began to grate on me. I thought it was putting the cart before the horse to worry about my bachelors when I had not even finished my intermediate. Perhaps some of his fears about marrying me played into it. He was Sylheti, a people who are infamous for marrying only within their clans and locales. He may have been afraid of breaking that norm. He confessed at one point that he was obliged to marry someone within his extended family, but that he was not interested in her. Her name may have been Nazma, the heir of a vast fortune, but Fareed did not find it an appealing proposal.

Although he was wise beyond his years and broad minded, he was still only 26, and as mature as he was for his age, I was immature for mine. This bothered him. He would exclaim often, following an episode of a childish statement, deed, question, or other instances of general naivete from me, that I was ‘in extreme need of guidance’.

He was meticulously clean, unable to abide even a spot of dirt in his house. If he noticed any spots on the floor he would immediately set to clean it with a mop, soap and water. He was adept in English, completely fluent, and taught me turns of phrase with which I had no familiarity, such as the ‘waxing and waning moon’. These lessons were conducted in the rear courtyard of his mess in Saminabad, under the shade of a henna tree. He would put out two chairs and we would sit there dappled in moonlight while he helped me practice my English. I found these sessions tedious and would try to escape them by feigning sleepiness, but even this he would seize as a teachable moment by asking me to translate my request to English. “I will go to sleep,” I would say and he would correct me. “No, you should say ‘I will go off to sleep.’”

I would go into his bathroom and use his cosmetics. I would slap his aftershave on my face. His antiperspirant sticks I was less sure about so I would apply them to my hair, thinking that was where it was meant to go. I liked its scent. I would eat three or four times daily at the officer’s mess but I never wondered who was taking care of the bill. Rather, I was eating more oatmeal porridge than was allotted for me, as I had suddenly developed a liking for that dish.

After breakfast I would come down to my room and he would later follow with two cups of tea. He would sit on the sofa and we would chat. I would be on the bed. He would ask me if he could put his feet on the edge of my bed and I would say yes. He would often be cold so he would be rubbing his hands. Although he had his own quarters the larger building was shared between him and other officers. They were kind and upstanding men. They never spread any salacious or ugly rumours about us.

I got to meet some of these friends one day. I was in my room at his place when Fareed came in. Some of his friends were visiting him, would it be ok if they came in to say ‘hello’? I said it would be fine but didn’t bother to get up. Even when his friends came into the room I barely acknowledged them. I stayed in bed, flipping through a magazine. Fareed seemed embarrassed by my behavior but didn’t seem to know what to do about it. Later, he calmly told me that I had been rude, but rather than feel remorse I was annoyed that people would have the temerity to complain after coming into my room. These were some of the ways that Fareed tried to make me more civil, a better person. None of it worked.

While at Fareed’s, like elsewhere, I behaved like a child. I would be irritated if he ever asked me to do anything, because while I loved behaving as a child, I despised being treated as one. Once when he told me to fetch some matches from the kitchen so he could light his pipe, I peevishly told him that I didn’t know what to say to the Urdu-speaking khansama. He told me to go to the man and say ‘machees dey do’. He was quite lean, which back then was a cause for concern rather than celebration. He would drink some liquor based elixir that he claimed would help him put on weight. I thought this was misguided because he looked better when he was thinner.

Years later when I would run into him at a party I remember being shocked to see his bearded, round face. I couldn’t find my Fareed in him. His wife was with him at this same party and I found her to be pretty, smart and sophisticated. She was smoking and held a cocktail in her hand, behavior that would be unthinkable for me.

Fareed was not my only admirer in Lahore. There were some boys (all East Pakistani) from Punjab University who were ardent fans of mine. One of them would frequently write to me expressing his affection. The feeling was not reciprocal, so I wrote back to him saying that he reminded me of a brother of mine who died when I was young. It worked. He stopped writing to me. This young man would later become Inspector General of Bangladesh Police.

Another was a young man who sang with me during our Bangla cultural programs for Pakistani television. He was from Chittagong. Yet another was an engineering student named Tarek who would send me letters on lovely, expensive stationery. I loved the envelope and the paper but never properly read his letters. This same Tarek would always somehow know when I was travelling to Dhaka and show up at the airport. Once it was Fareed dropping me, and Tarek, upon seeing him, hid behind a newspaper, but Fareed noticed this and told me to go and say hello to Tarek. Otherwise it would not be polite, he said.

Fareed had manifold talents, and was a quick learner. He appreciated my devotion to music and asked me if I would teach him the harmonium. I taught him one Tagore song and in four days he was able to play it on the harmonium and sing it perfectly. When he wasn’t singing Tagore his preferred music was in Urdu. He would hum them, and direct the lyrics towards me. One song was ‘na mangi mei sona chandi mangi darshan debi teri duare khara ek jogi’. Another was (while showing my photo) ‘tasvir teri dil mera behlana sakegi; ye teri tahra mujse to sharmana sakegi; mei baat korunga to ye khamosh rahegi; sine pe laga lunga to ye kuch na kahegi’.

Chapter X

A Bomb Falls

I was too young to appreciate Fareed’s exceptional qualities. It didn’t impress upon me that he was a desirable bachelor and that many women would be flattered by his attention. I didn’t know what love or romance was, so I didn’t feel attracted to him in that sense, but I still felt possessive about him.

Here’s how that feeling expressed itself: Fareed kept a photo of me on his dresser. It was a stylish one where I was wearing sunglasses and a check-patterned coat around my shoulders. It was very much a staged photo. When I saw the picture I just made a note of it, but it made no deeper impressions on me. I didn’t consider the import of this gesture by him. He noticed my apathy. It wasn’t lost on him that no matter how much he tilled the fields that were my sense of romance they remained barren.

“You don’t behave like a mature woman,” he said to me one day, a sixteen year old girl. “That’s not what I am looking for. So here is my offer: either you behave like a woman, or you stop coming here. Now, what will it be?” I thought about it for a moment. “I would rather stop coming here.” “Fine,” he said, without emotion. “Don’t come back.”

As was the case of most of my interactions with Fareed, I felt nothing in the aftermath. Not hurt, angry or upset. I returned to my hostel unperturbed. But for some reason, I found myself back at his house a few days later not because I missed him or because I had changed my mind, but simply because that was what I wanted to do. Simply because I could.

I went in through his door. Fareed didn’t see me as he was in another room doing something. I saw that my picture on the dresser had been replaced by a picture of himself. This enraged me for some reason. I took the frame and smashed it on the floor, revealing that my picture was still in the frame, just behind his. When he came into the room upon hearing the sound I demanded to know from him why he had replaced my photo. He tried to explain but I stormed out, crying. Soon I was on the road, walking back to the hostel in tears as he followed me like a gentleman, gently coaxing me to not make a scene in public and to go back with him to the house. I only remember walking for a long time while he followed. I don’t remember what came of that day in the end.

It never occurred to me that my presence in Lahore was dependent upon my scholarship, nor the corollary that I would have to do well in my studies in order to preserve my scholarship. I whiled away many hours and days singing, roaming the college campus and seeing the sites of Lahore with Fareed, who would gently encourage me to study, emphasizing many times how important it was for me to complete my Bachelors degree. This was an exhortation that I found premature, given that I hadn’t finished my intermediate certificate yet.

He would help me with my studies, especially with English, and thanks to him, I did better in those subjects than others, but I struggled with Home Economics subjects such as food and nutrition, clothing and textiles. Back then I had little natural intuition for cooking as my mother never asked me to cook nor to watch along as she cooked herself. One of the first tasks in my cooking test was to prepare a breakfast with eggs. I broke all the yolks and was unable to poach a single one. There was no one watching the door so I abandoned the exam without telling anyone.

In the textile practical exam I had to stitch some clothes of such heavy grade that I started sweating just trying to push the needle through it. My hands became slippery with sweat and I nearly stabbed my finger with the needle. This too was a test that I snuck out of without completing. My thinking at the time was there would be no consequences to my non-appearance at these exams. Or maybe I had no thinking at all. This consequence-free existence was a fantasy that I had wholly embraced at that period of my life.

The results were released when the college residence was officially closed. I was staying with Fareed at the time. The offices were open however so when it was announced that the results were available Fareed went to the college to look for my roll number to see how I had done. When returned he looked embarrassed. He said to me ‘aap fail ho gaya’. He seemed more embarrassed than I was. I decided it would be unwise to tell him that I failed because I left the exam without finishing. I had the belief that even if I failed my exam I would still be allowed to stay in Lahore. In a similar way, I thought that Fareed and I could continue to have a relationship even if I did not reciprocate his love, but in the end none of this would matter, as my failing grades were the harbingers of the end of my happy little life in Lahore.

Late in the summer of 1965, as I was fleeing my examination halls, war was breaking out between India and Pakistan over the perennial sore spot of Kashmir. In September my college announced that they would close for an indefinite period of time. The students were told to find their own way home. I arrived at Fareed’s house carrying my small bag and harmonium. He said that it would be inappropriate for me to stay with him, a bachelor, and asked me if I had relatives in West Pakistan who I could stay with instead. I remembered then that I had a cousin whose husband was a squadron leader in the air force in Peshawar. “Fine, I’ll take you there,” he said.

Fareed took a leave for seven days from work and booked two train tickets to Peshawar. It was a long journey during which I saw the vast length of the country I was in. In our cabin there were two Englishmen who were also travelling North. At one point during the journey the train stopped at a station for several hours, for what reason I no longer remember. There was no food available and all of us in the train were starving. The Englishman sat sour-faced and starving like the rest of us, eventually offering us some lozenges, as he too seemed to have no food. When the train finally moved we were able to buy food from a passing vendor at the next station, only then did the Englishman bring out his own meal, which included a whole roast chicken. Fareed whispered to me that he probably didn’t reveal it earlier because he was afraid he might have to share it with us.

The other Englishman in the cabin had with him a very beautiful, expensive-looking blanket with a pink and white print. When his station arrived, he didn’t want to take it with him, and offered it to anyone who wanted it. I was sorely tempted but in fear of offending Fareed I stayed silent. In the end the man left without taking his blanket. I regret not taking it to this day. I remember little else of the journey other than passing a rock-strewn plain that Fareed said was Taxila.

When we reached Peshawar we were welcomed at the station by my cousin and brother-in-law, Jashimuddin. The journey from the train station to my cousin’s home was my only impression of the wider city, which to me seemed smaller, less clean and tidy compared to Lahore. But I was told you could get excellent chapli kebab here, so that was something to look forward to, as I would mostly be stuck in the house because of the war. Fareed went to stay in a resthouse after dropping me off. He was planning to visit a friend of his who lived in the city. I stayed at my brother-in-law’s place for a few days as I acclimated to my surroundings.

The following day Fareed invited me to his friend’s house, another bachelor. During the visit, his friend’s chef brought us a try with hot water, milk, sugar and instant coffee. Fareed asked me to prepare it for them, which irritated me because I didn’t like being commanded by him. However, I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his friend. So I read the instructions on the bottle and made coffee for all three of us. I found it only passable, but the other two said it was good. They may have been trying to spare my feelings.

Fareed stayed in Peshawar for a week. In that time he visited me at my relative’s house. Jashimuddin’s family would prepare tea and snacks for him with great enthusiasm. Fareed forged a good camaraderie with my brother-in-law, whose family seemed very impressed by Fareed overall. Perhaps they were making the assumption that I was going to marry him, which was reasonable. On his final day, before he was about to leave for the train station Fareed asked Jashimuddin to take care of me. I came to the living room where everyone was. Suddenly very emotional, I held Fareed from behind, put my head on his back and cried in full view of everyone. Fareed held me in his arms and his smile seemed pained. He left for the station accompanied by my brother-in-law. I didn’t go up to the gate.

I disliked Jashimuddin almost instantly. As I soon discovered, he would find sneaky ways to touch me against my will. I told his wife and thankfully, she believed me. Perhaps she was clear-eyed about his character. One night I was able to get my revenge. I was in the kitchen frying fish because my cousin had asked me to help her when the power was cut because of load-shedding. While I stood in the dark kitchen, frying fish, my brother-in-law came in, calling out, “Rosy, where are you?” I knew he had the intention of putting his hands on me yet again so I turned and said, “Here I am,” while holding out the spatula that had been in the extremely hot oil. Jashimuddin grabbed it thinking it was my hand and screamed. I told his wife later what happened and she laughed, saying that he had needed the lesson.

The war began fully while I was in Peshawar. Whenever we heard the huge sounds of bombers passing over us we ran out to dive into a trench we had dug near our house. One day, when one of my cousins was taking my picture a bomb fell very close to us, leaving a huge crater in the ground. We ran into the trench immediately. My cousins, two university-aged boys who were the younger brothers of Jashimuddin’s wife, were very nice to me. One of them carried a camera and it was him who took my picture when the bomb fell near the house.

Another memory that remains from my time in Peshawar was that the neighbours had a dog with the same name as mine, ‘Rosy’, and sometimes when I heard them calling their dog I would think someone was calling me, and would answer. This made my cousins laugh.

Eventually, as the heat of war lessened, I prepared to return to Lahore. My brother-in-law sent me back on the train with a group of his air-force colleagues who were going the same way. I stayed with Fareed at his Saminabad mess for a few days while my flight was arranged for Dhaka, from where I would go to Patuakhali in Barisal where my father was posted. I had asked Fareed to make the travel arrangements for me. However, this flight would be in the middle of a war, so there were no direct flights from Lahore to Dhaka. I would have to go to Karachi first and then take a connecting flight.

Fareed asked his friend Abdul Jalil to receive me at Karachi airport, handing me a picture of his friend so that I would recognize him. Thankfully, I was able to do this without issue once I landed in Karachi. Jalil was very kind and treated me well. He took me to his house, where he offered me Ovaltine. Then he took me to the home of his relative, Colonel Kalimullah while he tried to secure the ticket to Dhaka for me. Colonel Kalimullah’s wife, Tipsy, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, reminding me of the film star Mala Sinha. She interrogated me fiercely. She likely believed that I was Jalil’s fiancee, until I convinced her otherwise.

I was then put up in their daughter’s room, which I would be sharing with her. She was no more than eight or nine years old. It was a big room, and while their daughter slept I spent most of the night leafing through all the magazines that were stacked nicely in one shelf. As I went through them one by one, I tossed them to the ground, not bothering to pick them up at the end. At long last I fell asleep, waking up late in the morning. I descended to the main floor where a nice breakfast of toast, jam and boiled eggs was awaiting me. I ate hungrily, without saying ‘thank you’. I requested and received extra helpings of eggs.

Jalil returned with my ticket later in the morning. I didn’t ask who paid for it, nor did I offer. And actually to this day I don’t know who did. He kindly offered to take me to the airport and I accepted. But we happened to get there too early. Jalil suggested that we visit Clifton Beach to kill time. So there we went. It was a huge beach. After walking for some time we decided to take a camel ride along. The animal proceeded at a steady but sedate rate down the beach. Unfortunately the camel driver dropped us off all the way at the other end from where we had entered, where all the taxis were.

Looking at the time, we rushed to get back but no matter how fast we walked we seemed to make no progress as we were trudging sand. We finally reached the other end following an interminable slog, but it was getting late and when we hired a taxi we told the driver to rush us to the airport. We arrived to see my plane taxiing on the runway. I threw my vanity bag on the ground, sat down and started crying loudly like a child in the middle of the terminal. Meanwhile, a guilty Jalil ran about frantically trying to secure me another flight.

I eventually got on a flight and made it to Dhaka. Once there I took a steamer South. Everything had been arranged beforehand by my father so when my steamer landed in Patuakhali a group of police officers were already waiting there to meet me. From there it was another short steamer ride to where my father was, but I could hardly sit in the cabin; I kept buzzing from one side of the deck to the other. A man stood at the railing, drinking from a green coconut. I asked him if it was his intention to throw the coconut once finished and he said that it was. I asked him if I could have in that case since I wanted to eat the flesh inside. He gladly handed it to me. I didn’t have a machete to open it up with. I stood around like a fool until a gentleman who had noticed my predicament stepped forward. He called a khalasi and asked him to bring a dao. Later I would come to know that he was the principal of Patuakhali College, which I would shortly join as a student.

As soon as I reached Patuakhali I put my room together, setting my trusty harmonium on the bed as I wanted to practice my rewaz. I wrote a letter to Fareed narrating my journey. I didn’t mention that when I boarded the flight to Dhaka, I had made up my mind that I would be staying in East Pakistan. I had failed my exams; there was no point in returning. As was so often the case, I felt no emotion at the thought of abandoning my scholarship, leaving Fareed. I would enrol in a college in Patuakhali, I decided. It seemed a pragmatic decision and I felt carefree.

During the war months communications between the two wings of Pakistan had trickled to a stop. No goods flowed between East and West. So my family was overjoyed to see me, as my father had not heard from me in months. Later my mother would tell me that in the silence my father had assumed the worst. Unable to openly weep, he would stand at a window and stare at the empty Western sky. I told my family that given the war I did not intend to return to Lahore. They happily agreed. I was relieved that they did not ask about my scholarship.

I set about arranging for a new life in Patuakhali. Fareed kept writing to me. As always his letters were detailed and insightful, concerning the places he’d visited and the things he had seen. They also held advice, lessons. My father would read his letters first before passing them to me. Based on the letters he appeared impressed by Fareed and indicated that he approved of a match between us. When I happened to write that in my room was a marble table-top from the zamindar house in Muktagachha, in his response Fareed made a throwaway comment that rung as snide to my ears, and based on this smallest of offences, I decided immediately that I would not pursue a relationship with him.

How harsh I was with him for such minor lapses. The thought of him marrying another woman induced no jealousy in me. I believed that he could not but be mine even if he were someone else’s husband. I don’t know why such a stupid idea took deep root in me, and it would take me many years to realize that he was no longer mine and never would be. He was loving to me, but he could not love me for myself. He looked at me and could only see what I could become, but not what I actually was - a rough rural girl years from maturity.

He once confided in me that at a party he had attempted to kiss a woman on the cheek while dancing but ended up kissing her ear instead. I burst out laughing when he told me the story, but again, felt no jealousy. I had a dim awareness that he may have been telling me the story with the hope of a reaction, but that was not the way it worked in my mind. I found his stories only mildly amusing, even occasionally irritating. I feigned attention, making the requisite sounds of encouragement and interest as I listened.

Later I would sense his frustration that I was not yet his intellectual equal, that I was not yet one who could engage in discussions of richness and depth with him. He was careful never to express this frustration openly, channelling it rather into encouragement and exhortations to prioritize and pursue higher studies. Later, I would think back to what he used to say: that ‘when wealth is gone nothing is gone’ and when ‘health is gone something is gone’ but when ‘character is gone everything is gone’, and I would realize that he told me the story of his attempted kiss not as a boast or as an anecdote but to relay an instance of moral failure, for he was a scrupulous man to whom betrayal, lying or philandering was inconceivable.

It was in Patuakhali College that I met the man I would eventually marry, with whom I had my four children. Fareed would send frantic letters to my father to stop this marriage, whose story is not for this book, but I ignored them. My heart had inexplicably hardened against him. Some years later, I would receive word that Fareed was in town and that he wished to see me. My husband was a high official in the government, so I took his car and went to an address in Banani. I sat in his drawing room mostly in silence, as he spoke. I remember little of the conversation other than that he was planning to buy a gift for his sister who was going to visit him in Dhaka. He didn’t inquire about my married life, nor demanded to know why I hadn’t married him.

My relationship with him had proceeded without encumbrance and in perfect faith. His dignity and extraordinarily humane quality forbade him from hurting my sentiments. Though I was always a disobedient junior to him, he was always ready to pardon me countless times. He did not abandon me, rather he showed great patience and the indulgence he gave me I used to do and undo anything I liked. He was never harsh with me, and now, at such a late stage in my life, I marvel at his patience. I can’t find the words to express the gratitude that I never did when I knew him. The goodness in him was so pervasive that even after decades of our separation my heart breaks into pieces because of my inability to thank him. It has been many years since I have seen him, and I have accepted that I never will. I only wish him happiness. He marked the beginning of the end of my adolescence, and was also the best part of it.

Epilogue

Afterword

I know that this book lacks coherence, that I have failed to provide a chronological picture of Fareed and our intermittent relationship. He was 26 years old and I was 16. My strange nature never allowed the relationship to grow in the manner it should have. Nevertheless, no amount of immaturity on my part could break or lessen our attachment for each other. How a gentleman copes with the whims and caprices of an uncouth and uncivilized country girl is a big question.

It was only when on the wrong side of sixty that I felt an urge to open the door of my long past yesterday with a man who was more mature than his age and more civil than required. The differences between us were irreconcilable, but they did not osbstruct the flow of a strange relationship. I am not the same person I was. That rough rural girl who could be unthinking, unfeeling, rude and casually cruel. This does not mean that I have finally, as Fareed so desired, grown. To me that is a journey and not a destination.

I have heard that lobsters, provided they have space and food, can continue to grow indefinitely, reaching prodigious sizes if left unmolested in the dark ocean depths. I feel that maturity too has no end point. If I should live a thousand years I feel I would be like a lobster, growing all the while, but only within. Things have changed for me as I have grown older. I cannot bring myself to deliberately hurt a living thing. Sometimes I cannot even bring myself to kill the live fish brought from the market to eat. I put them in water to survive, then throw them into the pond. I made it a point to avoid killing insects if possible. If someone in my house catches a mouse in a mousetrap I forbid them to kill it. If I see children or adults trapping a bird I urge them to release it, even though I used to trap birds myself when I was young.

Fareed often observed that I was ‘in extreme need of guidance’. I do not remember if I ever replied or paid attention to such remarks. I did not like to be lectured. At times I wondered how one could graduate without completing eleventh or twelveth class. Why he wanted me to be mature, why he thought I was in extreme need of guidance and why he wanted me to be a graduate I do not know. The fact was I had no interest in study and did not mind to pass my days without performing any duties of a student.

As a child my family moved from one place to another, roaming the country like nomads, without developing any attachment to any particular place or people. We had never been wealthy. We always lived in want. We knew little comfort or luxury, and so did not crave for what we did not know. I had all I needed. My eyes for the natural world around me. The fragrances of the seasons, and my childhood freedom, things that many are deprived of, that gratified my longing for wandering about the woods. These were the bits of happiness that I possessed and in one sense today I feel that freedom was a great luxury. Material affluence was subordinate to freedom and my love for nature.

My unstructured childhood had a cost. Unlike many, even my own siblings, I was without academic excellence or notable skill in any field. My childhood was spent in nature, living in want, and all people and characters I met throughout my life have filled that void with ease. They have given me the strength and courage to face life head on. It is a life in which I can hold anguish and delight with equal ease. As a child, I was sated with whatever shabby clothes my mother gave me, and whatever food that was enough to fill my belly, and now that I reflect on my poverty-stricken childhood and I can only adore it for I have observed life from both sides.

To live in want is a blessing, I recognize that, as much as I recognize the danger of a decadent life lived in luxury, especially one that is built on illicit wealth. I’ve seen people who live such lives, who can and do buy anything they fancy, seek out and obtain any raw pleasures that their souls desire. They are vain. In constant fear of losing their ill-gotten wealth, unable to imagine that the decades ahead of them may not be materially fortified. They seek out others like them to accumulate even more wealth and power. Their minds are singularly focused on these subjects.

I do nonetheless thank God for giving me the opportunity and scope of experiencing the taste of affluence as well as austerity and for giving me the sense to tell right from wrong. The onus of honesty is heavy. Only a few can walk that narrow righteous path. Now, at the fag end of my life, I feel strongly the need to live a life where material gain no longer reigns supreme. I pray to God to lead me in that direction.

I graduated. I practised in the supreme court for decades. Wrote poetry. Wrote books. My children graduated, worked, loved, married and had their own children who also graduated. Yet I still wonder if I will ever mature. My family apparently knows this. Some years ago my daughter-in-law was preparing Cerelac for her two children when I was surprised to see her prepare three bowls - the last one was apparently for me, for she knew that I never lost my taste for baby food. I was happy to note her common sense and consideration. Even when my sons were little I would hope that they would leave some of their tapioca and milk for me but they always finished all of it. I would get upset if they didn’t leave it for me and sometimes would take it away from them early and have some myself.

If you’ve read this far, dear reader I don’t doubt that you are disturbed, perhaps also intrigued, wondering what there is to learn from this book when all I have narrated are my follies. The truth is: nothing. Following in my footsteps will lead to ruin, but I do remember what my father used to tell me, that you could find the path to modesty by observing an immodest person. Happiness and unhappiness are two sides of the same coin, I know that now, and that shortcomings were the only thing I had in abundance when I was a child. By the time I had grown, it was too late to fix myself, so I devoted myself to raising my children the correct way so that they would not be burdened by my lackings. I taught them manners. I taught them to be truthful, kind and like my father, to cherish incorruptibility. Being the eldest of my siblings, I told them the same things, even though almost all of them were more polished and academically accomplished than me.

Now that all my children are educated, well-mannered and content, I entertain the thought that perhaps I am happy. Finally happy after all these years. When I turned sixty, following the death of my husband, I decided to settle down to a solitary life in an unfamiliar place where I knew no one. I fell in love with the hills and streams of Sri Mangal. There I built for myself a small house. It is my piece of heaven and every morning I rise full of love for this land, now no longer as I was before, having gone through a metamorphosis. Now people think of me as amiable, interesting, and when they see how I live they say that they wish they could do what I do now. That what they want most is a life like mine.