As the conversations continued, all other topics of discussion came to a halt. I slowly stopped going out with my family, or stopped feeling as if I were allowed out. There was a zero-in on my responses to Boro Mama’s questions. What did she say? How did she react?
“We’re all part of something bigger than ourselves,” Boro Mama told me on one of the days. “It won’t just be you and him, alone. You have to think about the life you’ll end up creating for yourself. Chinta koro. Do you want your children to be confused? There’s so much of your roots you’re already forgetting, moving to Canada. Think long-term. Not just with your impulses in the present moment.”
To which I replied, “If you meet Bhav, you’ll see. His character — Abbu says character matters most, and that’s what he has.”
And then Boro Mama’s lips twitched. “Apart from his lack of education and higher career aspirations, this is religiously wrong. Your fundamentals are wrong.”
“In Canada,” I began, “there are so many cultures, religions, and backgrounds. Everyone is together, while still practising their beliefs. And I believe this is how it is also in Bangladesh. From what I know, it’s also a very diverse place.”
To which Boro Mama let out a deep roar of laughter. “Are you that naive? All that is great, but who you are doesn’t just disappear; it is always there. Our differences.”
I thought then about Yonge and Dundas Square, how it hung in my memory like a watery watercolour, the edges of the different faces dripping into each other. But Boro Mama, he had a point. For in Toronto, ethnic enclaves were many in number, and there were many different reasons for this.
One of the reasons that made sense was that people with shared religions, histories, and languages would be inclined to stay together, especially in new places that didn’t yet value them — not entirely. It was a testament to the idea that the essence of people are made of their lands, customs, and beliefs. These things are not so easy to leave behind, even in a new place.
A memory drifted by as I further considered Boro Mama’s words: myself as a child with Ammu and Abbu at annual functions organized for and by Rajshahi University alumni in Ontario. Ammu offering her flavourful kaachi biriyani, setting it on the table. Tagore tunes transmitted through tablas and harmoniums. “Amaro porano jaha chay.” Abbu shaking hands with his fellow comrades, his rare throaty lion laughs. The people intoxicated by the nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, and ghee, all the laughter merging into one harmonious note.
And it was true, that Canada — touted around the world as democratic, peace loving, and tolerant — also had its own set of challenges. First being swearing to a queen and other practices that marked allegiance to an old world. Even the word tolerant itself at first glance seeming to be a liberal and welcoming description of the country, but dig a little deeper and the asymmetry appears: the white, anglophone Canadians do the welcoming, and the brown-skinned immigrants, such as myself, are welcomed. In Canada, racism still existed.
So yes, there was something to be said about differences — how they were perceived, amplified, used to oppress others.
So, I told Boro Mama. “Bhav and I, we are of similar racial roots. We would have many similarities. That should help.”
I was optimistic, but Boro Mama’s face hardened. He brought his right hand to his chin and said, “Religion, for us, is the most important. Don’t you know the lines of South Asia are, to an extent, determined by it?”
The ceiling fan above our heads turned as Boro Mama reminded me about the history that both represented and reinforced differences in beliefs. It took me to the time when I saw Nana’s face in a particular photograph. It was the one where he was planted in a chair with brown leather padding, me standing on his lap, almost on my tiptoes to reach one of his wrinkled cheeks with my perfectly puckered lips, through which I freed a smooch. Nana gleefully received the kiss, as if in the front row of a magic show.
Nana had passed away, but he was still alive through his stories. He was as diaphanous as he was opaque: playful and lightweight yet prodigiously stern. Nothing could get through to him when he’d made up his mind. Ammu had told me once about the non-negotiable daily curfew of 6:00 p.m. she and her siblings faced. That Nana would be waiting for her at the door at exactly the time, with a wooden baseball bat or, of lesser punishment, an outstretched hand. The slap on the back of their heads with his heavy palm.
“It would hurt so much,” Ammu had explained, rubbing the back of her head. Then, she’d go on to share that Nana was of fine texture, almost workmanship quality, in the way he was built.
“He was the best part of my day. I think I was his favourite.” Ammu beamed. “And you, well, he was enthralled with you the most.”
Nana was born in Malda and spoke Urdu, Bangla, and Hindi, too. His wife, Nani, was from Murshidabad, the predominantly Muslim, Urdu-speaking town in India. Nana was a political activist who did not support British colonial rule. One of my Khalas told me once that at some point, he had also worked for the same government. So, I wondered whether he was notorious for not only his protests, but something else: Had Nana exposed the ways in which people in power could distance themselves from the oppression they create through layers of paperwork and cryptic language? I knew for certain that Nana was of rebellious spirit, but also that he left newly independent India because his popularity had made him some sort of target.
There were always missing pieces to the fuller story of both my paternal and maternal history. I wondered often if the forgetfulness was self-inflicted and a response to the desire to forget the lifetimes before, or was it just poor memory? I did not know.
What I did know was that Nana and Nani left their home in Murshidabad in newly independent India for East Pakistan, one of the five provinces of the Dominion of Pakistan. This was at a time when over half of Pakistan’s population spoke Bangla, and the rest other languages, Urdu not being a major one. Many of the Bangla speakers were in the East Pakistan region. Nana and Nani moved to East Pakistan and eventually settled in the city of Rajshahi, and then Kushtia in later years. Rajshahi sat right on the border with India, and became one of the first places where Muslim Muhajirs, or émigrés, settled, often for political reasons. It was world famous for its silks, the reason Europeans had posts there, specifically the Dutch.
Nana brought Ammu and her elder siblings to visit Murshidabad and Malda after Partition. He would paddle the boat himself on the river to Malda, and sometimes he would jump from the boat into the water, and Nani, Ammu, and her siblings would scream. Nana would dive into the water, pop his head out, swim closer to the boat, and rock it back and forth, pretending to be the giant sea serpent Avagrah, found in the waters of Bengal, also known as the Nyan in neighbouring Myanmar. The children would scream and scream until they cried, then Nana would release a bellowing laugh, sending ripples through the water, climb up back onto the boat, and continue paddling away.
Nana’s childhood home had vivid green bushes surrounding it. Mango orchards and mulberries and a streak of mahogany across the mid-sky. There were also the Mahananda, Kalindi, and Padma Rivers, how they glistened with speckles of sunshine. At the time when they crossed these waters, there wasn’t a need for any passport or signifier of where you were from.
Much has changed since, with modern times came modern borders between the different parts of South Asia — checkpoints, round-the-clock surveillance, and guard dogs. Memories that can never be made or revisited. Flags on both sides of the border changing over the decades — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.
In 2011, a few years after our visit to Dhaka, a Bangladeshi citizen, a young girl who worked in New Delhi as a maid, would try to cross the India-Bangladesh border, get caught in barbed wire, and be shot to death.
A decade after Partition, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (co-founder of East Pakistan’s Awami League) had an overwhelming democratic success and became the first democratically elected prime minister of Pakistan. It would have been the first time a Pakistani Bengali
would have a say and be in power since Partition. However, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party) and President General Yahya Khan refused to accept the results of the democratic election. This led the military government of General Yahya Khan to shoot the first bullets, and the predominantly Bengali citizens of Pakistan responded in resistance — legitimate self-defence on the part of the voters, who were mostly concentrated in the province of East Pakistan.
So, the Liberation War, or Shadhinota Juddho, broke out, and Bengali nationalists and rebels sought to pull East Pakistan out of the Dominion of Pakistan. Nana, being multilingual and able to pass for multiple ethnicities, was able to get his entire family, with the help of his son Boro Mama, to safety during these treacherous times.
Embedded within these stories was the story Ammu told me once about the government forces that knocked on Nana and Nani’s door. Ammu and her sisters scurried to a room in which they had dug a hole in the ground. They jumped in the hole and Boro Mama moved a board over their heads. The Razakars, Al-Shams, and Al-Badr were scattered in different parts of the country, always monitoring, making their respective rounds. Ammu and her sisters had to always be on the alert and, as girls, especially discrete.
When the government forces knocked, Nana opened the door and welcomed them in Urdu. He conversed with them for a minute or two. During these moments, Ammu’s mouth was dry. She almost shrieked, feeling her heart leap out of her chest, but her sister quickly slapped her mouth shut.
The footsteps grew louder, thudded on the floor above her head. A man’s foot missed the spot where Ammu hid, just by an inch. When the government forces went away, Boro Mama removed the board and said, “The men could have taken you away. Alhumdulillah, you are safe.”
When newly independent India stepped in and helped the Bengali nationalists and rebels, and East Pakistan won the Liberation War to become Bangladesh, this life before Bangladesh became but a secret.
I often asked my family questions about our family that still remained in India and Pakistan, details about the specific political agendas during both Partition and the Liberation War, and their viewpoints. I asked them, too, if what they’d seen ever made them feel ungrounded or suspended, like scattered particles in the air, the way I sometimes felt. I hardly got answers. As a child of diaspora, of communities that themselves went through a lot of internal migration and were subject to varied cultural influences, the concept of one solid place to ascribe all of who you were to seemed like a sort of half-truth, a reduction.
I wondered if being born in a place meant that’s where you were from, or whether where you were from was the place where you found the most love. For when I closed my eyes and thought of Bangladesh, I thought primarily of Nani, Nana, Dadi, Dada, and all of the people who loved me in my childhood. When I thought of Canada, I thought mostly of Bhav.
Boro Mama’s lips continued to move. I thought, If warfare and bloodshed over the course of generations has made the battlegrounds layered and fluid, people’s identities can be similar. Whatever deep fears we had about the unknown or the different, which led to ideas or stereotypes that justified the most atrocious of things, in both subtle and drastic ways — well, we didn’t have to perpetuate them. That was how I saw it, sitting in Boro Mama’s living room, talking to him.
Boro Mama, on the other hand, advised self-preservation and caution, and asked me to consider history and the current state of the world, as well as what was written in religious books. I felt, however, that destiny was amenable, limitations were negotiable, and possibilities were endless. The world was a bowl of fruit you could simply pick from. In my teenage body, I could feel no other way.
A light in a window across the street flicked on, casting shadows across the claret cloth sofa, the glass table before us with nimki snacks and two glasses of water, mine untouched. Boro Mama and I sat in silence and took our leave from the conversation soon after.
It was summer. In Toronto, the city would be alive. The streets would be full of people, not looking down or away, as they usually do on winter evenings, but instead looking at each other, soaking up the calm, joyous, ever-present expressions on one another’s faces. They’d be sitting on patios, raising their glasses for no reason at all, or trying on vintage clothing in Kensington Market. People on subways and side streets, in front of bright murals, playing tunes on various instruments in a type of vagabond fashion. There would have been all sorts of festivals lined up: Caribana, Pride, Jazz, Afro-Carib, Summerlicious, Cider, just to name a few. There would be wild bergamot and meadow rues in High Park, and ferries doing daily rounds at Harbourfront. People would still be humming to Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird” or talking about the last season of Sex and the City or digesting the newly aired Grey’s Anatomy.
The sun would be bright — yes, it would be bright. Bright for Canada, at least.
But I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh, sitting in a room full of darkness, in a city where sunlight is a constant. It was almost a month into the trip, and I was now under house arrest in Boro Mama’s home, no longer allowed to leave the premises. There were relatives and servants everywhere, and they followed me around asking the same questions. To avoid them I hid in the small storage closet that was a passageway between the bedroom and the bathroom. During the five months I was stuck in the house, that was where I would retreat to.
The closet was the size of two-and-a-half average toilet stalls. It was crowded with dusty suitcases of all sizes, textures, and colours. Dusty suitcases that were sealed shut, the keys missing. Dusty suitcases that held in them lucidity.
The small room was windowless and relatively dim, even in the light of day. My eyes fell mostly to my feet, a few inches from Ammu’s barn-red expandable thirty-two-inch luggage and a ninety-five-litre indigo canvas duffel bag. Against the walls were shelves, each loaded with cardboard, metal, and wooden boxes. These boxes were enormous, and I wondered what they contained. I imagined old photographs, thousands of them, with clues of kinships and pedigrees unknown to me.
When Boro Mama wasn’t home, all the Khalas who visited and Nani herself would ask the same questions he did the day before, as if hoping I would change my answer or perspective. They wondered why it was that I debated so much, why I wouldn’t just accept the advice being offered from the man who influenced most of their family decisions. Yes, I would take advice, but I also had my own mind. I would make my own perspective make sense to them all, win them over somehow. I would not try to run away, nor would I acquiesce. I would make it my goal to explain through logic, the way that they did.
So, when I was back at the living room of horrors with Boro Mama, and he gave me examples of women who had married out of the faith and the problems they had faced, I said sternly and firmly, “Do you think forcing me to see other men, with whom you want to set up my marriage, is any less un-Islamic? I didn’t agree. And also, this much I know: Islam doesn’t teach force, hate, discrimination, or violence.”
I didn’t know that I’d have a similar conversation with Abbu a few years later, under very different circumstances. We’d be at a Turkish restaurant, finishing our kofte and bazlama, moving on to baklava, kadayif, and tea. It would be warm, introspective, and I would feel like I was at home in this familiar pensive dialect with Abbu.
“Is it true that East Pakistanis, us Bangladeshis, weren’t seen as true Muslims by West Pakistanis? That we were thought to read the Quran in Bangla and that this made us less Muslim? It doesn’t make sense. Wasn’t the Quran translated into Urdu, too? Even if these things were true, the people were probably just trying to be more inclusive; make faith more accessible,” I said.
Abbu looked into the distance and took a deep breath. “Hmm.”
I leaned in closely.
“I used to be quite involved with the Tablighi Jamaat.”
“What is that?” I asked.
Abbu explained that the Tablighi Jamaat is a non-political global missionary movement started in 1927 by Muhammad Ilyas a
l-Kandhlawi, which had thrived to the present day. Rooted in the Deobandi movement in India, its purpose is to revive the Islamic spirit; disentangle Islam from politics, and focus simply on the Quran and Hadith.
“What did the Tablighi Jamaat believe in?” I probed further.
“We believed in following the path of Allah, especially in times of crises, and we supported everyone in a spiritual journey, including those from West Pakistan.”
Abbu went on to share that one of his best friends killed another one of his best friends during the Liberation War, because of misunderstandings related to faith.
“It had nothing to do with religion. Just politics, propaganda. Such a shame.”
Prior to the war, Abbu and his two friends spent many days on the emerald fields of Rajshahi University, their noses buried in textbooks under the carnelian sun. They’d frolic down promenades by the lake or sip cups of tea in the nearby coffeehouse, inseparable — that was, until the heat of the war diffused into every village, city, institution, and private circle of the country, leaving all the people much too hot-headed.
I asked Abbu where he stood on the matter, and he said that despite his religious inclinations, one Islamist state would have been a challenge to achieve, given the linguistic, geographic, and religious composition and diversity of the two areas. He understood the blood boil behind a more unified country on the basis of religion, but didn’t think it was practical.
I nodded, for I appreciated Abbu’s pragmatism. But then I drifted off, thinking about how India functions as an extremely diverse country. Wouldn’t it have been possible to include Bengalis in a similar way in Pakistan? They were also Muslim. And why couldn’t Bengalis, Indians, and Pakistanis acknowledge they were all once from the same place? Why isn’t a shared heritage enough for Bengalis, Indians, and Pakistanis to coalesce around a shared feeling of belonging? Why couldn’t they be one while also being the other? Perhaps something like a federation?
The Shaytan Bride Page 13