He valued the adoption of a simple mindset. Disorder confounded him, so he explored and made sense of it by gaining knowledge from a range of scholars, experts, and artists. A true polymath.
Dada went to Calcutta Alia Madrasah, later known as Aliah University. Fluent in Arabic, he carried the verses of the Quran in his heart, shared them with his students as a professor at the same university. He eventually came to be regarded as an adviser in matters of both faith and the material world.
He died a year after the 1971 Liberation War. Abbu didn’t have a photograph of Dada, so I’ve never seen what he looked like. Nevertheless, Abbu seemed to carry an image of his father that he could conjure upon any and every conundrum. Before he spoke, he lifted his eyebrows as if he was asking some invisible manifestation, “Baba, tell me: what would you do?”
“Duniya,” Abbu would begin, squinting as if Dada were only just barely out of sight, “it’s just a passing dream. Why do we need so much when we have everything here?” Pointing to his heart, pointing to his head, pointing to the sky. And I trusted that Dada would probably have said and done the same things.
Parakeet must have loved Abbu. When he arrived home after a long day of work, Parakeet would predictably turn its head and make an indecipherable sound, as if to alert me. I’d jump off my swing and run to the door.
“How was your day?” Abbu would ask.
To which I’d smile and pull his arm to play. Abbu was a busy man, but like Parakeet, he’d keep his eye on me from afar, never with judgment, only compassion and pride.
To Boro Mama he’d say, “My daughter has everything here that she needs.”
Yet, my mother, Ammu, disagreed. She’d been convinced by Boro Mama that there was a world grander than ours. For her, its sparkling newness contained unlimited possibilities — even its ambiguity was there for her to graft her own dreams onto.
“We can stay with my sister. She says Canada is livable and even magical — mammoth buildings, lush greens, nicer people, cleaner streets, and mostly made up of something called snow. She says there’s no better place.”
Ammu had four sisters. One lived in Canada, one in the United Kingdom, and the other two in Dhaka, who would eventually move abroad, as well. She also had a couple of uncles in Australia, Europe, and the United States. Whenever they visited, they brought suitcases of gifts — the softest sweaters, the most unique fragrances, handbags of various opulent styles and textures. It was an entire ritual, relatives and the domestic help all gathered around while the suitcases were opened and the gifts were revealed one by one, sorted, and then handed out. Everyone wide-eyed and wondering what new fabric or appliance would be unveiled. If they were lucky, the gifts would be American or European brands, like the celebrities modelled on television.
Equally intriguing was the elusive accent of a person who spoke English as if it was their mother tongue, suggesting a refined sense of status and knowledge about the true size and contents of the world. For Ammu, migration was a rite of passage, if nothing else.
To Ammu’s frustration, Abbu replied, “You can get the same things here, if not more. There will be new opportunities, but they’re not worth more than a sense of home.”
Parakeet listened to them both go back and forth in the living room, watched the hot cha simmering in their hands. An uninvited guest to the conversation, a spectator, but never in violation of confidentiality. A proper parakeet, not mischievous in any way.
Sometimes though, Parakeet and I would share a glance when we knew that a lie had been spoken, or perhaps a quip, as both animals and children are astute that way.
On Ammu’s side was Boro Mama, who’d planted the idea in the first place. He was a man of expansion. When he entered a room, his chest would lift and open, his chin always up, his well-built arms with hands snug in his pockets, not shyly but with a self-assuredness earned through a confidence that was frequently praised and admired. Not a very tall man, maybe he was five foot eight or so, but the way he moved, swiftly and with purpose, made everyone follow.
Boro Mama often made the family decisions, large and small, sometimes to the point where others may have not had a say, but he was trusted. “He will do the right thing,” they’d repeat among each other. “He always does the right thing.”
He revered self-sacrifice; he was his father’s right-hand as a young child during the family’s migration from newly independent India to East Pakistan, and then later, as an adult, during the Liberation War, when East Pakistan became the separate country of Bangladesh. Plunging into lakes and taking shelter in abandoned homes while the leaves ruffled under enemy footsteps, the far-reaching screams and shallow whispers, gunshots, bullets, bodies — only with his instruction did my family survive.
To the sisters, Boro Mama was an absolute authority, one promotion short of God. When he would enter the living room to find his siblings indulging in black-and-white films he would yell, “This is a waste of time! Feeble, what they teach in those films. Fantasy.” His ideas and opinions were absolute and went unquestioned.
Just the hint of his voice would cause everyone to scurry out of the room and hide, as if they’d done nothing, seen nothing, felt nothing — not just in the moment, but ever. Their put-on blank expressions offered Boro Mama the opportunity to project that which he found beautiful, interesting, comforting — whatever confirmed what he already knew and, in so doing, affirmed that he always knew what was best.
Perhaps to him he was only doing what any eldest brother should do, what was expected of him. When the family settled, he made it a point to arrange the weddings of all of his sisters, with their enthusiastic support, one by one, and to good respectable men, before he married his own wife.
This included Ammu, who loved to eat too much and was just a bit too short, reasons for suitors to withdraw their proposals. “A little rasugullah, my brother called me,” she said. Still, these “flaws” were very much compensated by her creamy glowing skin and the rosiness in her cheeks, her subservience to her elder brother, her master’s degree, and everything else that indicated a good, respectable woman.
“He was an engineer. What more could I have asked for than a man of respectable profession?” Ammu said about Abbu. “And he was a man of faith. Your Boro Mama thought he was a good human being.”
So, when Ammu saw Abbu from the rooftop of her mother’s white house in Rajshahi, pulling up in the tangerine rickshaw, the corners of her mouth lifted slightly. Abbu caught her glance and smiled back, and then quickly lowered his gaze, to protect himself and her, astag furallah, and as if to say your majesty, for Ammu had that effect on others; especially on him.
Perhaps it was true that Boro Mama was a decent matchmaker. For on the walls of our Dhaka home there were plenty of photographs of the romantic sort. In one of them, Abbu and Ammu were sinking deep into flower fields, Abbu placing a red rose gently behind Ammu’s curly black hair while she smiled coyly. In another, Abbu is placing a gold chain around Ammu’s neck as she beams into the camera, glowing like the planet Venus. Ammu in a royal-blue silk sari and chunky black heels, standing next to Abbu, much taller, with his shoulder-length hair and light-cerulean collared shirt, me in a frilly white lace dress, hair short like a boy, on his shoulders. We are touring India. In these photographs, Abbu’s lips are always curved tenderly, his eyes always in reverie, as if he were actually in heaven.
Ammu and Abbu were so different in personality, Ammu much more gregarious and concerned with matters of everyday life, and Abbu a little more pensive, an intellectual and lone wolf. Somehow, however, they made a union, a match, and it had a great lot to do, Ammu said, with the “clear judgment of your Boro Mama.”
When Ammu was pregnant with me, they’d all expected a boy. Perhaps Ammu thought her brother would be disappointed by my birth, but he wasn’t at all. With me, I remember Boro Mama being a similar way: an adviser of sorts, gentle mostly but also stern at times. “And only,” he said, “for her educational good.”
Despite
his demanding work as an engineer, he found himself on most days with Ammu holding me, admiring the glint of my iris, within which he saw his own. I was born the shade of a creamy frangipani (plumeria) and near weightless like one, too, and so he’d often pick me up, throw me into the sky.
“Think bigger than you are now,” Boro Mama said to Abbu. “If you move to Canada, your daughter will get a better education. And not just that. She’ll meet better-quality suitors, more educated, worldly, and therefore wise in every sense. There will be much she can pass on to her future children.”
Abbu at the time had also received an offer for a well-paying job in Jeddah, Saudia Arabia. If he accepted the offer, he’d receive not only the title of chief engineer, but also a grand house for us to live in. Despite the temptation of luxury and ease, Canada was still seen as the ideal. It was the West, after all.
Every school year, the top-three ranking students would get a medal. During one of these years, I was wearing a silky light-blue dress. At the awards ceremony I saw, from behind the stage, rows upon rows of parents and teachers. I bounced up and down in anticipation, praying underneath my breath for my name to be called. And it was. I made my way to stage, my view fixed on the three twinkling medals. I wanted the gold but that year I got the bronze. The excitement of my heart rose to the volume of the claps, and they sounded like thunder that gained momentum then faded to hush. The headmaster stooped down to my little body and put the medal around my neck. The weight of it pulled my neck down, and I could feel my chest sink with it. As elated as I was, I still thought I could have done better. I imagined Boro Mama’s face, then Ammu’s and Abbu’s. I wanted their smiles almost as much as I did the metal.
Later that day, I sat at my desk, reading over instructions on how to do long division because I was determined to improve. My Boro Mama hovered behind me, watching me work while my feet dangled from the chair. I pressed the lead of my pencil deep into the paper, almost piercing through it, scratching my head from time to time and biting my lip.
“You carry the one over like this,” Boro Mama said, using his hands to demonstrate the action. Learning was important to him, and he planned to send his eldest son, just an infant then, abroad when he was older, to become more global and well-educated in every sense.
Half circle, loop. I followed suit.
“Good, good,” he said. “Good, good.”
I didn’t search Boro Mama’s face like Ammu often did, nor did I mind his presence. I was fond of his company more than I was nervous. I narrowed my eyes like a fishing line to better catch the numbers floating on the page. Boro Mama sat next to me as if he were helping me scout out my prey. He was a protector, a friend. A part of me would always want to make him proud.
“Good, good,” he said. “Nothing will stop this spirit.”
When I looked into his eyes, I often saw a benevolence that rose from ashes of loss and defeat. The humble understanding that one could always have to rebuild. This much I deduced as a child from the stories Ammu had shared about Boro Mama during the Liberation War. In one of these stories, Boro Mama; my maternal grandfather, whom I called Nana; and the rest of our family were taking shelter in Nana’s friend’s house. Like Nana, this friend was Urdu speaking and culturally ambiguous. He kept the family hidden in the most discrete corners of his home and brought them food while the government forces shuffled outside his door. It was during one of these times that Boro Mama, seeing the chaos and uncertainty of the future, decided that he would go back to newly independent India, where they had emigrated from, to find a place for the family to live. So, he embarked on a solo trip, disguising himself. On his way he decided he would stop by one of their old family homes, just to relish it, before leaving it for good. He headed to Kushtia.
In the family home in Kushtia, not too far from Shilaidaha Kuthibari, where Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, once lived, Boro Mama touched the walls with his hands, now soiled with the dirt of negligence, and sniffed for the lingering smoke of cigarettes he had inhaled many weeks before. He lay down on one of the uneven beds and folded his arms over his eyes. He would listen for the faint tête-à-têtes between his father and mother, or sisters, now tucked under the floorboards and layers of wall paint.
Miles away, Nana sensed that his son was in trouble; he had the inkling Boro Mama would indeed return to Kushtia, so he himself left to track him down. By the time Nana got to the house and entered it, he could already hear the footsteps of government forces gathering around the place. He ran through each room hastily — open doors creaking and swinging, his heart pounding — until he found Boro Mama snoring on a bed.
Nana shook him awake. “What are you doing here? We have to go!” Nana said in a loud whisper.
Then they heard the gunshots, and the smell of burning tires wafted to their noses. Boro Mama and Nana looked at each other as if it could be the last time, and bolted through the door in front of them, hurling any object in their way — old tables, photographs in frames, handmade boxes with handwritten letters — until they found their way through the back door. They ran without looking back, pretending not to hear the shouting behind them, or see the rising smoke. Until they did.
And there it was: their home burning to ashes, soon to be scattered under people’s feet. It had been set on fire by the government forces, or maybe enemies that had informed the forces, the flames obliterating the lifetime they’d shared. The tears in Boro Mama’s eyes unable to put them out. The gunshots fired again, and they ran.
So, when Boro Mama offered his advice we all trusted he was streetwise. He knew the secrets of resiliency; he had built his life all over again, and had hoped to do the same for all his kin.
I only vaguely remember the intensity of the diverse opinions on moving to Canada. Boro Mama, Abbu, Ammu. My memories of that time are like dreams that stay with you when you wake up in the morning, the fine details lost. What remained was a kind of lineament of both the stress and excitement of that time — which in Dhaka also seeped into our clothing, our skin, glistened through our shirts, lungis, salwar kameezes, and saris, impressed their promise on all of our movements and fluctuating voices.
One day Boro Mama strode through the door with a cardboard box of ladoos in one hand and paperwork in the other, and a smile that spread across his face. A few days later, we had more visitors — Ammu and Abbu’s siblings and cousins, my first and second cousins, neighbours, friends, and even strangers. They sat in groups in our living room: their high-pitched laughs that later turned sombre. A celebration and a mourning, and I struggled to understand what was really going on.
It wasn’t too long after the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone — one of the deadliest in history, which, like a wild carnivore, swallowed the Chittagong District whole as if it were a sacrificial lamb — that we would emigrate to Canada. The aftermath of the cyclone was the result of mismanagement and poor planning by authoritarian military governments and their civilian successors.
Near the time of our departure there seemed an impending feeling that homes would continue to be broken, and by forces greater than us. As a child, I didn’t know that the country was just recovering from years of oppression, torture, and loss. Political instability, military rule and repression, the rise of fundamentalism based on politicized religion, famine, and starvation. Outside the doors of our home, as I sat my little bottom on sticky but slippery rickshaw seats, I saw more Nike shoes on people’s feet, faces of Hollywood celebrities sneaking onto billboards and some television screens, more of my neighbours on the streets with suitcases saying goodbye to their loved ones. People were leaving. The world was evolving.
Parakeet must have known that some great change was coming, for that clever bird somehow slipped out of his cage and flew to every corner of the house, only occasionally stopping to rest on the windowsill. We chased it for days, but it would not return to its cage.
As a six-year-old, I didn’t know I had already started grieving. While the family dreamed of the gains
that would come with moving, there was also much to loose. Wayfaring down the streets, being greeted by everyone we saw, invited over for cha spontaneously and at various times of day, sitting on the balcony into the hours of the evening, the cars beneath us jamming — near-death collisions but no big deal — their volume and intensity comparable to my family’s passionate debates as we sipped tea and ate. There were the stall owners in Newmarket or Gausia, calling out to us, telling us about the latest sale, only to catch our momentary glares. Also, the Bangladeshi news anchors who’d greet us every morning and evening from the television set, usually women and often in lively-coloured, body-hugging saris, perfect hair, pristine faces, moon-eyed, and speaking impeccable proper or shubdo Bangla. I’d try to figure out what they were saying while Ammu rolled up balls of curry-soaked rice in the palm of her hands and pushed them into my mouth.
I’d also lose the wooden swing that Ammu had to chase me off when scolding me about my flagrant dilly-dallying, like during the mornings of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice.
One of these Eids, I was a hot mess: my dark-brown hair in tangles, dirt beneath my fingernails, and my blood ecstatic with sugar I’d snuck from the kitchen.
The car horns were memorable that day. They were loud even for Dhaka; they rang out in obnoxious harmony.
“Good morning, good morning!” “Eid Mubarak!” I heard these greetings through the walls; they came from the streets outside. I could already taste the marmalade-hued amriti sweetmeat. I could already smell the nutty chiraunji and fruity kewra in the traditional Mughlai flatbread. Just the idea was enough to make me salivate. I wanted them in my grubby little hands. I could already see the middle-aged and old men in their chikan-embroidered dopalli topis biting aromatic paan soparis, areca nut wrapped in vibrant green betel leaves. There would also be shops where cow, goat, and sheep Qurbani meat could be purchased. Sometimes, during the rainy season and floods, the blood of these slaughtered animals would flow to the peoples’ feet. I could imagine the vermilion water, its ripples dancing to the rising melody birthed by the catgut strings of mango-wood dotaras and from the bamboo flutes.
The Shaytan Bride Page 2