‘Why are they marching? What are their complaints against you?’
‘I have no clue what complaints they have.’
In a grave tone the director-general continued. ‘Very dirty things are written on that banner. What do you think? Why are they doing this?’
‘Probably because of my writing.’
‘So many people write. Look around you, all these writers, all of them write books. There are never processions against them. Why against you?’
Alam intervened loudly. ‘What do you mean why? How would she know? Ask the ones marching. And why should everyone have to like Taslima Nasrin’s writings? She doesn’t write compromised pieces like most others.’
There were murmurs among the writers present. Were they being called sell-outs, the ones who compromised on their views? Stopping the chatter the director general raised his eyebrows and turned to me again. ‘Despite being a woman why do you try and write like a man? All this is because of that.’
‘Why should I write like a man? I write what I feel,’ I countered immediately.
The other writers in the room stirred in their seats. ‘Not everything is meant for everyone. Don’t you understand that?’ continued the director general with a smirk. Some of the glitter of that smirk had found its way to the lips of the other authors as well. ‘I have read your writing. Can a woman ever write in the sort of language you write in?’
I had nothing to say to that.
‘No, they don’t,’ he supplied the answer. The others nodded in agreement; other women really did not write the way I wrote.
My jaw tightened.
‘Your writing is very obscene.’
Gritting my teeth I replied, ‘It’s my writing. Some find it obscene, some don’t.’
Meanwhile, Muhammad Nurul Huda went outside and announced over the mike that no one was supposed to take out protest marches through the fairground and disrupt the atmosphere of the place. Asking the protesters to calm down he informed them that if anyone had complaints or grievances they should get hold of the organizers. Suddenly, a loud din could be heard from afar. ‘Fire! Fire!’ The people sitting in the room rushed to the window to see what was happening. A fire could be seen raging in the middle of the fairground. The protesters had gathered whichever of my books they could get their hands on, collected them in a heap in the middle of the field and set the entire pile on fire.
Khoka was standing on the balcony of director general Harunur Rashid’s office. I got up and walked up to him. He was stunned by the proceedings, perspiration dotting his forehead, his jaws tight.
‘Khoka bhai, do you know who these people are? What is happening?’
Khoka shook his head in response. He had no idea either.
The director general conferred with the other organizers, his deputies at the Bangla Academy, and passed his verdict. ‘You should stay away from the fair. That’ll be best.’
‘What does that even mean? Why should I not come?’
Fazlul Alam spoke up. ‘Why should she not come? What’s her fault?’
‘Her presence causes trouble, so she should not come.’ He also informed me that should anything happen to me at the fair it would not be their responsibility. So the best recourse for me was to stay away. They did not wish for the spirit and schedule of the fair to be upended because of me.
Outraged, Fazlul Alam asked again. ‘You are the organizers. It’s you who should be responsible for her safety.’ The director general turned towards him with his eyebrows drawn together, the question implicit in his gaze—who was this strange man screaming at him?
‘Just because some boys are protesting against me I should stop coming to the fair? There are many who like my writing too, they . . .’
Nothing I had to say was enough to convince the director general otherwise. With no other solution in sight, he remained firm on the judgement he had pronounced. His advice to me was to stay away from the book fair. Since I wrote like a man despite being a woman, since my writing was obscene, since what I wrote hardly had any literary merit, it was not surprising that people were marching in protest against me and neither was it surprising that some of them wanted to crush me entirely. So it was best that I stayed away, more to maintain peace and order at the book fair than because of any concerns over my security. I was packed into a police van and sent home.
The book fair was in full swing but I was prohibited from attending it. I was used to adverse reactions to my writing. The previous year a group of boys, around nineteen or twenty years old, had approached me with a book of poems, showed me one of them called ‘Biparit Khela’ (Reverse Play) and told me, ‘We want to be bought for 10 taka. Please buy us.’ At first I had taken it to be a joke. But then their demands had grown more insistent. Flabbergasted, I had gulped and quietly told them it was simply a poem, that I was not going to buy them for real, and moved away. Khoka had been nearby and noticed the entire exchange. He had gone after the boys, called them back and told them, ‘It’s fine that you want to be bought but are you willing to go along with the other conditions laid out in the poem? Read the entire poem, then come and ask to be bought.’
Nowadays I wish I could buy boys for five or ten bucks.
To buy them and then destroy them,
Throw them to the ground and kick them, and tell them to fuck off.
I will buy boys, kick them in the balls, and tell them to fuck off . . .
I had written the poem after noticing civilized gentlemen picking up destitute girls standing in front of Ramana Park one evening. Where did these men take these girls in their rickshaws? What did they do with them? All these questions had made me very curious. One day while walking past Ramana Park I had stopped at the sight of more of these girls, combing their rough, unoiled hair, holding broken mirrors and rubbing powder on their dirt-crusted faces. I had asked them, ‘Why are you decking up like this?’ None of them had replied at first. On probing further one of them had said, ‘For food.’
Ruffled hair, sunburnt skin, old bruises on their faces and hands, a swollen eye here or a cut forehead there. A young girl, a swollen red bruise on her forehead, had been standing listlessly leaning on the railings. I had asked her, ‘What happened to your forehead?’ She had looked at me once and then looked away without bothering to answer, as if I was nothing but an unwanted pest. I had stood there staring at her hair sticking to the sweat on her forehead. Seeing how she was not moving the errant lock aside I had felt the insane urge to do it for her and then take her home, wash her, feed her and give her a bed to sleep on. She had looked so sleepy, that girl, as if she had not slept for many nights. Suddenly, she had spoken. ‘It’s all about what’s written on the forehead, why it bruises and bleeds.’ She had looked at me with vacant eyes and cried, ‘Those men, they hit me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they wanted to.’
‘How much do you get? How much do they pay you?’
‘Ten. Five. Some days two. Some days not even that. Only kicks.’
Seeing the police approach, with a bitter smile she had moved away, and the other girls too had packed up their make-up and left. The police were men. Did they not exploit these women too? Even if they did not, they did not hesitate to take money from them, their cut of the five or ten bucks these women managed to ‘earn’. In exchange the deal was that they were not going to beat up these women or put them in jail. The men who haggled and picked these women up in their rickshaws, did the police ever think to arrest them too? No, they did not. Were these men called dirty? No, they were not. I had walked away asking myself these questions, the answers all quite obvious, the heaviness in my heart escalating with every step.
~
The ban imposed on me upset Khoka deeply. Pushing every other occupation aside, his business, his books, his accounts, even the book fair, unearthing who was at the root of the Taslima Nasrin Suppression Committee became his sole obsession. Who were they, what did they do, what were they after, were they politicians, if so
then which party—he wanted to find answers to these and many more questions.
Learning that the chairperson of the committee was a BNP member, he looked up a distant cousin of his from his aunt’s side, or perhaps it had been his uncle’s—who was also a member of the BNP—to try and broker some sort of an agreement. An agreement, however, did not just come about through word of mouth, such things always required financial investment. I never found out how much Khoka had to spend because of me. Unfortunately, when it soon became clear that despite being paid off my opponents were not going to let go of their grudge, the only alternative left for Khoka was to arrange a meeting between us: the opponent leader versus me.
I agreed after immense persuasion and Khoka warned me repeatedly to not lose my patience and answer everything the leader had to ask me calmly. The meeting was held at Khoka’s place. Alam, who had gone into shock after the judgement passed by the director general, was yet to recover. On finding out that I was going to talk to the leader of the Suppression Committee he was insistent that he would come with us. He was suspicious that the leader was going to try and attack me again and he wanted to be the one to leap in at such a moment and rescue me. I had no desire to take him with us but he would simply not listen to reason. Khoka would have none of it; he was firm that the leader only wished to speak with me. Even if there could be a third person in the room it could only be Khoka. He was not allowed to speak, that I had to do myself. Khoka had a cool head and in times of stress he could help in managing things. In such moments, calm heads had to prevail and Alam’s was too hot and thus susceptible to cause more harm than good. Alam’s hot head was asked to stay put beneath the fan in the other room.
We sat across from the university student leader who had formed the committee that wanted to crush me. He was not exactly imposing—with a moustache, pimples and hatred clearly visible on his face. As he looked up at me I could glimpse flashes of that hatred in his eyes, which was goading him to crush the life out of me. When it came to officially presenting the charges levelled against me the boy, Hafiz, or Haroon, or Hamid, or perhaps Hasan, or whatever his name was, said, ‘You are destroying our mothers and our sisters.’
‘How?’
‘You don’t know how!’
‘I know that I write for them, about them. Why should I cause them harm?’
‘You have asked them to walk out of their homes. You have goaded them to leave their families.’
‘I have never said anything like that.’
‘In “Balikar Gollachhut” you wrote, “for all of us old girls to run away.”’
Hamid, or Hasan, opened a book of my poems to show me the offensive lines.
‘Read it, read it again. And tell me why you wrote this poem.’ The warning and the command in his voice came at me like a poisoned arrow.
The afternoon used fall upon the world so us girls could play,
A game called gollachhut.
. . . I feel like playing again,
My feet are restless, they want to feel the dirt underneath
And they wish
For all of us old girls to run away.
It was like I was testifying in court. I was standing at the witness stand, having sworn to tell the truth at any cost. I had to because no matter how unimpressive the leader was, even if he could be asked to shut up and sit with a small slap, even if he looked powerless, the truth was that he was immensely powerful. He had the power to form a collective and the power to use that collective to obliterate me.
‘You are asking all old girls to run away. Our mothers and sisters should just leave their families. Do you even know what damage you are doing to society?’
‘This is a poem about playing gollachhut, about playing tag. The girls who used to play tag when they were young can’t play it any more once they grow up. But the desire remains. I have only spoken about my desire to play tag again.’
Hafiz, or Habib, shook his head in disagreement.
‘You have spoken about all older women here, not just yourself.’
‘All women desire something like that. Everyone wants to turn back, go back to being a child again, isn’t it? When I am writing about myself I am also feeling what many other women are feeling. This poem is about their feelings . . .’
‘No, all women don’t feel like that . . .’
‘Many do.’
‘No, they don’t. Admit it, it’s only you.’
I could not think of what to say to that. Habib/Haroon, his eyes rapier sharp, ‘By game, you refer to her family, right? Her husband, her children?’
Out of the corner of my eye I could sense Khoka’s desperate silent pleas—I will take you to the book fair come hell or high water. Just tell him that you meant only the game and not the family. Faced with such earnestness I swallowed the reply I was ready with: ‘If you think like that then it can be a family, as well as the chains society puts on women.’
Before I could respond Hasan/Hafiz continued, ‘How do you know what other women want?’
Turning the pages of the book, I replied, ‘It’s what I have felt.’
‘Did you ask anyone before writing whether they want to run at all? Or do you judge everyone by your standards?’
There was something in his eyes, a flare of a feeling that would not let me raise my head. Putting the book down, I answered, ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘It’s what you think other women want. But you don’t know for sure.’
This time, looking directly into his eyes I said to him, ‘It’s my wish. I will write my own thoughts in my poems. That’s not wrong.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘What is so wrong about it?’
In a mild voice Khoka intervened. ‘Writers write what they think they should. Not everyone finds the works of all authors as good. Not all readers agree with what a writer has to say. I feel she meant the game. It’s possible for someone reading it to misunderstand.’
Agreeing with Khoka, I continued, ‘Yes, many people misunderstand. For example, take that poem “Biparit Khela”. Did I actually want to buy boys in the poem? It was a form of protest.’
‘Why don’t you explain it to him?’ Khoka suggested.
‘I’m trying. I’m trying to show how different people react differently to the same piece of writing. The writer may have his own explanations and the reader may have his own.’
The student leader had formed the committee to suppress me, to get his hands on me, parade me naked through the fair and crush me under his feet for all to witness. What was I supposed to explain to him? He had formed his group without understanding a word of what he was protesting against, purely from the suspicion that I was out to destroy society and play with the heads of his mothers and sisters. That sort of thinking was not restricted to only the Hasans and Hamids of the world, there were many other people who believed the same. Looking at his eyes I could not understand if he had accepted my simple explanation for the game in the poem. Khoka’s eyes met mine but this time I could not read what was written in them.
The man’s next problem was with the poem ‘Joy Bangla’ (Long Live Bengal). ‘Why did you write this poem?’
‘Because I believe in the greatness of Bengal,’ was my simple reply.
‘In the poem you have wished that the unfortunate souls who do not believe in it should die. I don’t believe in Joy Bangla. Would you call me unfortunate? Why would you say rubbish about those who don’t believe in it?’
‘You don’t believe in independent Bangladesh?’
‘Why won’t I? Of course I do!’
Completely agitated, I shot back, ‘If you do then there is no reason to not believe in Joy Bangla either. When Bangladesh won its independence what slogan did we all chant? Joy Bangla! All of us sang the same song.’ Looking away from the leader’s angry face I turned to Khoka. ‘Khoka bhai, did you not shout Joy Bangla in 1971? Only the Razakar traitors did not chant Joy Bangla. They are the unfortunate souls I wrote about in the poem.’
�
��Joy Bangla is the slogan of the Awami League!’ The man’s voice was hard, his nostrils flaring.
‘Why should Joy Bangla be an Awami League slogan? It belongs to everyone. It refers to the victory we won, it refers to our independence. The muktijoddhas, the ones who were never part of the Awami League, did they not use the slogan all the time? Joy Bangla used to give them the energy to face their enemies head on.’
His face lighting up in a smile, Khoka joined in with his bit. ‘He wasn’t even born then, was he! You were born after the war, isn’t it?’ The student leader’s head froze in indecision between an agreement and a denial. Turning to me, Khoka added, ‘Why are you getting angry? They don’t know what happened during the Mukti Juddho. Or they don’t remember. It’s true that the League has co-opted the slogan. They have no right to Joy Bangla . . .’
‘Just because the League thinks the slogan is their property it doesn’t just become so. Joy Bangla does not belong to any political party. I have been saying it since 1971 and I have never been a member of the Awami League. I have always been neutral and non-partisan. And there are many things about the League too that I don’t like.’
Even after the Q&A was over Hasan/Habib/Hafiz/Hamid remained unsatisfied and Khoka had another round of discussions with him. Against his wishes he had to smile and bear the ignominy of it all because at least on the 21st he wanted me to be present at the book fair. Selling books at the fair was not a factor, what was more important for him was to restore my right to attend. Respite, however, is never easy to come by. Is it possible to completely ignore a constant nagging worry that plagues one’s mind? The leader of the Suppression Committee promised that for the time being they were willing to back off but with the caveat that in the future I had to be more careful. If I were found writing obscene things again, things meant to incite mothers and sisters and things meant to disrupt society in any way, they warned me of far-reaching consequences.
Only one of the members of the committee had promised these things, were the others going to toe the line too? Khoka assured me they would but his confidence in the matter did not deter him from hiring a set of muscled guards tasked with ferrying me to and fro from the book fair. Flanked by unknown musclemen I did attend the book fair on the 21st but not with the same spontaneous joy as before, though I was immensely grateful for everything Khoka had done for me. No other author had come forward to help and the organizing committee too had shirked all responsibility. In such a scenario if Khoka had not stepped in and made these arrangements I would have probably had to return home dejected.
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