‘Did you hear the helicopters, Mama?’ Araf asks, squirming in Nurzamal’s arms as he waves his arms like a helicopter and squeals ‘wop, wop, wop’.
‘I did, my love. They came just before Dhurh.’
The azan, call to prayer, for Dhurh used to float across the fields from the mohzeem but the police closed the town mosque a few months ago. The call to prayer now comes from the handsome wall clock Ibrahim, Hasina’s father, brought home for his wife. It hangs just outside their bedroom. The clock’s call would have come while the helicopters were overhead.
‘Did you miss your prayers?’ Nurzamal asks her son.
For a moment, Araf looks like he might cry. He adores his mother and fears disappointing her.
‘We all missed Dhurh,’ Aunt Rukiah explains. ‘The helicopters were so loud. We can make it up later.’
Nurzamal does not reply, and Hasina knows her mother can’t help but feel that Aunt Rukiah and Ghadiya brought bad times with them. Seeing her mother and aunt side by side, Hasina is struck, as she often is, by how different they are – and not just in the way they think. Her mother’s eyes are large and round, her nose straight, with a pronounced bridge; her skin is tea-coloured, with roses in her cheeks, and her lush eyebrows meet in the middle. All of these mark her as a Rohingya. And Rohingya are not wanted in the land once known as Burma, and now known as Myanmar.
Her aunt on the other hand, who is also Rohingya, has a flat nose, and folded eyelids. Like Hasina’s father, Ibrahim, and grandmother Asmah, Aunt Rukiah’s skin is fair. In the bazaar no one would look at Aunt Rukiah twice without her numal, the headscarf that she wears in public as a polite Muslim woman. She could easily pass for Arakanese or even Myanmar.
Nurzamal gently prises Araf from her lap and stands up. ‘Hasina, your father’s lunch is ready. You will take it to him at the bazaar. You are already late.’
‘But I still need to finish my geometry problem …’
Hasina regrets her words almost as soon as they are out of her mouth. Nurzamal would prefer she went to a religious school rather than study maths and history and geography in her aunt’s madrassa. Yet Hasina suspects that her mother would have loved the chance to study herself; would still love the chance to read books and discuss ideas and think about the world.
Nurzamal’s face tightens with anger. ‘We’ve already missed prayers. You want your father to miss lunch as well?’
‘No, Mama.’ Hasina hadn’t meant that.
As the eldest child in the family and without an older brother, Hasina had more responsibilities than other Muslim girls. Rohingya men usually do the shopping and take trips outside the home. If Hasina had an older brother, he would be taking his father’s lunch to him.
‘Can I go to the bazaar too, Mama?’ Araf begs.
Araf loves the bazaar. He loves the family shop, where there are toy soldiers to play with. He loves his friends, the boys from neighbouring stalls. But most of all, Araf loves the television set up at the entranceway. It is the only TV in all of Teknadaung, and sometimes it shows cartoons!
‘Please, Mama, please please pleeeaaazzze!’
Whoa, Hasina thinks. For someone of just six, Araf is as deafening as any helicopter.
Nurzamal smiles; how Hasina loves to see her mother smile. Ever since Araf had fever a few years ago, Nurzamal has paid him extra attention. He is also a funny kid, dark like his mother, but with a knack for making people laugh. Both these things make him precious to Nurzamal. When she replies, her tone is unusually soft. ‘Of course. Someone needs to protect your sister. Hasina, you may take Araf. Now, go quickly to your bedroom and fetch your numal.’
Hasina doesn’t wear a numal indoors, but her mother insisted that she do so outside as soon as she turned thirteen. It is dignified, modest and polite.
‘You get your numal too, Ghadiya,’ Araf commands. ‘I will protect you as well.’
Hasina sees a look pass between her mother and aunt. Although this house was Aunt Rukiah’s home when she was a young girl, both she and Ghadiya are officially ‘foreigners’ to the district – and illegal. Every trip out of the house risks arrest by police, heavy fines, bribes or worse. Ghadiya isn’t allowed to go out much.
‘No, Araf, Ghadiya is staying here,’ Aunt Rukiah says gently.
Ghadiya’s face falls, and Hasina feels sorry for her cousin. Ghadiya might be bossy, she might like to show off, but having to stay home all the time must be pretty boring.
‘Ghadiya, we can finish your geometry,’ Aunt Rukiah soothes. Ghadiya makes a face.
‘Or you can come out and help me in the kitchen,’ Nurzamal offers. Despite everything, she is fond of her niece.
‘Kitchen,’ Ghadiya says happily. Lunch is late and Nurzamal’s kitchen is the best place to be when hungry.
Chapter 3
Hurrying to fetch her numal, Hasina dashes down the hall that runs alongside the madrassa and into the central part of the house. She loves her house made of thatch and wood and brick – a real patchwork, unique in Third Mile, where most houses are made of bamboo or wood. She skids past the wooden wall of Araf’s room, then past the handsome clock outside her parents’ room.
Hasina breathes a sigh of contentment as she reaches her own beloved room. It is in the new part of the house, where the woven bamboo walls are perfect for the heat. There are two beds in the room, covered with identical striped bedspreads. Her grandmother, Dadi Asmah, jokes that the invisible line between Hasina’s and Ghadiya’s halves of the room is like the Farak River, dividing Teknadaung, for Hasina is tidy and her cousin very untidy.
Hasina pulls her headscarf from the chest of drawers. On her bedside table is a book in English, a few more in Burmese, and a notebook in which she likes to work out her thoughts. On the wall behind her bed is a poster of Sun Wen, the Chinese soccer star, in mid-air, the ball at the edge of her foot. Beside this is a poster of the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. An old, worn soccer ball sits in pride of place on a shelf.
Ghadiya’s side of the room is a disaster zone. On the wall, three posters: one of the Burmese popstar Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein, one of the pop group The Four and the third a map of Malaysia where her father, Uncle Rashid, is. Her clothes, htamein and T-shirts, and bazu blouses she likes, litter the unmade bed. One object, however, is always neatly placed on the shelf – Ghadiya’s tattered and faded orange cotton bag, a lawl ait from Shan state. It is the only thing that came with her from the south. Hasina has never seen her use it. As for what Ghadiya keeps inside, that is a secret. Hasina had a peek once, but the bag was empty.
Hasina quickly mixes a little water with thanaka, the sweet-smelling powder that everyone wears as sun protection in Myanmar, that she keeps in a jar on her dressing table. Sometimes Hasina paints thanaka onto her face in a leaf shape; other times, as a flower. But today, she hurriedly draws squarish patches on her cheeks with an old toothbrush – every female in Myanmar has a thousand uses for old toothbrushes and Hasina keeps several on her table. She checks herself in the mirror – a slender girl with long, wavy hair, dark eyes, skin tone halfway between that of her mother and aunt. Like her aunt, she can pass for Myanmar. Sometimes she wonders if her mother sends her to the bazaar to avoid the humiliating calls of ‘kalama’ or black scum. The word makes Hasina burn with shame. She snatches up her orange and purple numal, and drapes it over her hair, tucking the ends around her neck, framing her face, before dashing from her room.
There is one small thing she wants to do before she heads out to the bazaar. Hasina’s bare feet skid swiftly back along the hallway past her parents’ room, and past the brick walls that mark the passage to her Aunt Rukiah’s room and her grandmother’s beside it.
Dadi Asmah is as old as the house and the house is as old as Dadi Asmah. She has lived here all her life except for a few years at university in Sittwe. ‘This house,’ Dadi Asmah likes to say, ‘is like this country. Lots of rooms, all different, but one house. Burma – lots of religions, lots of ethnic groups, lots of languages, all
different, but still one country.’
Dadi Asmah looks a bit like her house – a mix of styles and races and dress. Her face is dominated by a hawk-like nose, but her eyes are gentle and she is inclined to smile rather than frown. She wears long blouses, like the Indian kameez, with Myanmar-style htamein or longyi, the wraparound skirt everyone wears. She prefers Myanmar-style sandals too. Her favourite headgear is not a numal, but instead an ancient pith helmet she found in the bazaar long ago, left behind by some colonial gentleman. In the cool weather, Dadi Asmah loves a cricket cap.
Dadi Asmah’s room has plastered walls, and pink, English-style curtains pulled to screen out the harsh sunlight. Against a wall is a wooden bureau, where Dadi Asmah keeps her box of jewellery and her clothes. On top of the bureau are her photograph albums, a gramophone, and records. In a blue tin in the corner are Danish biscuits, brought out for very special occasions. Dadi Asmah loves biscuits and, truth be told, she is quite plump as a result.
Ghadiya loves playing with Asmah’s jewellery. Araf loves the biscuit tin and gramophone records with their scratchy, tinny music. For Hasina, most delightful is the bookshelf. Books in Burmese, English, Urdu and Bengali. Storybooks and atlases. History and biology. Hasina has loved to pore over these since she was a wee girl.
It is one of these same books that Asmah is reading, reclining on her bed.
‘Dadi?’ Hasina calls out softly, using the affectionate Rohingya term. ‘Dadi?’
Asmah drops the book onto her chest. Her large dark eyes peer over a pair of ancient reading glasses, held together with tape, now sliding down her nose. Asmah’s black and grey streaked hair is piled up on top of her head and held with a clip. She smiles at Hasina. ‘My dear, please come in.’
Hasina sits at the end of her grandmother’s bed. This is her favourite spot in the whole world. She feels safe, more herself, when she is near her grandmother.
‘Did you hear the birds, Dadi?’
‘Yes, I heard them. But they did not sound like birds to me. Machines, perhaps.’
‘Ghadiya says they’re called helicopters. Araf is calling them wop wops.’
Asmah smiles and levers herself up into a sitting position, her back leaning against the wall.
‘Wop wops is a good name.’
‘He thought they were nagars.’ Princes of the ocean – dragons that could fly through the air and swim through earth as if it were water.
‘I first saw helicopters when I was a young woman. There was a war in Bengal then. They terrified me.’
‘What do they mean, Dadi?’
Her grandmother quotes the old saying. ‘ “Kalaa ma naing Yakhine-meh – if you want to learn how to keep the blacks in their place, go to Rakhine.” If I were a superstitious woman, I would call them nagars too, for dragons breathe fire.’
Hasina feels a spike of fear at her grandmother’s words.
‘But you say you do not believe in such superstitions, Dadi.’
Her grandmother shakes her head ‘No. But those stories have power – that is why people believe them.’ She changes the subject. ‘Are you taking your father his lunch?’
Hasina smiles. Her grandmother knows that she often takes her father his lunch and shares it with him. But the question is part of a ritual between her and Dadi Asmah.
‘Yes, Dadi.’
‘Then you will need this.’ Asmah reaches in under her kameez and unpins something from inside. She hands it to Hasina: a fifty-kyat note. ‘Buy yourself something nice.’
Hasina hasn’t the heart to tell her grandmother that these days you can’t buy a thing for fifty kyats.
Hasina adjusts her numal before shoving her feet into her sandals and crosses the yard to the kitchen.
The wooden kitchen is low and dark and sizzling with heat. It smells good. Wood burns in three stone braziers. Cast-iron pots bubble on top, one with fish curry, another with rice. On the third, a metal deshi cooking pot cools. The air is tangy with fish, coriander, ginger and turmeric, the sweetness of rice, the sting of onion and the perfume of wood smoke. An earthenware chatty pot, full of cool water for drinking, sits on a stand in one corner. On the square kitchen table lies a suri, a wide-bladed chopping knife. Oranges are piled in a bowl, and a bunch of bananas hangs from a cord slung from one side of the kitchen roof to the other. If you want to eat one, all you have to do is jump for it. Ghadiya and Araf are eating bananas now. Hasina hasn’t eaten since early this morning and her belly gurgles.
Nurzamal hands Hasina her father’s lunch, packed in tiffin carriers – three round metal containers stacked one on top of another, and held together with a handle. Hasina knows that inside will be massor salon, fish curry, made with onion, ginger and garlic. Maybe a sweet-sour rice cake, rice with some dhal and lots of gravy, plus potato and greens and Kalarlay-brand special spice mix – her mother’s secret ingredient. Hasina’s mouth waters.
‘Go straight to your father, Hasina,’ her mother commands. ‘Take the road, speak to no one.’
‘Are you ready, Araf ?’ Hasina asks her little brother.
‘Wop wop wop wop.’
Chapter 4
The sun is high in the sky by the time Hasina and Araf turn out of their garden. Up and down Third Mile Street, families are getting ready for lunch. Delicious scents are in the air. Excitement too, thanks to the helicopters.
Hasina lives in Eight Quarters District, the Rohingya part of the town of Teknadaung. Eight Quarters sits between a bend in the Farak River and the paved ‘beach’ highway that runs along the coast of Rakhine State and leads to Sittwe, the capital. Hasina was born here. Her father and aunt, her grandmother and great-grandmother, and so on and so on were born here too. She knows this place so well, she could walk blindfolded along this row of close-together houses and tell you exactly whose home she is standing in front of based on what she can smell cooking.
Today, for example, two doors down, there is the scent of massor salon with a dash of coconut. This is where Araf’s friend Rehana lives. Sure enough, the little girl comes running as Araf passes.
‘Araf, Araf, did you see the birds?’ Rehana demands.
‘They are called heliwopters,’ Araf informs her, knowledgeably.
Further along the dirt road, a delicious smell of hodu hak, fried calabash, a long gourd, floats from Aziza Begum’s kitchen. Every house on Third Mile Street is surrounded by gardens, where people grow their food. Vines are hung with boothi, a vegetable like zucchini. Pumpkin leaves, mounds of leafy cress and pennywort grow in patches and rows. Ducks, chickens and sometimes geese waddle and squawk. Aziza Begum’s garden is the most sumptuously green and lush of them all. And her calabash are divine.
‘Aasso-lamu alaikum.’ Hasina is quick to greet Aziza Begum politely in the Rohingya language, bowing her head. ‘Has Allah kept you well?’
‘Aziza Begum,’ Araf calls, a little rudely, ‘did you see the birds? They are called heliwopters.’
‘Wa alaikum aasso-lam,’ Aziza Begum replies, ‘Yes, Allah has kept me well.’ Then, smiling, ‘Thank you, Araf, for your information.’
The dhal at Hussain’s house has a burnt smell. His lunch often gets scorched because he is too busy telling the children to stop playing and be quiet. In this close street, everyone mostly looks out for everyone else. Sometimes, Hasina feels there is a little too much of being watched over, and these houses, huddled together, can feel claustrophobic rather than protective.
At Tara’s house, Monu Mush, her family’s prized buffalo, is chained in the yard, stamping at the ground and eating sweet grass. Tara’s mother, Sabikam Nahor, stops them with a friendly, ‘Aasso-lamu alaikum. How is your mother, Hasina?’
‘Well, thank you.’
Harvest is coming soon. Both Sabikam Nahor and Nurzamal are farmer’s daughters, and the two families’ paddy fields are side by side. At harvest time, they compete to see whose rice is best quality. Whose ducks are fattest. Who has the most ducklings. The biggest eggs.
Hasina loves watching her moth
er at work in the paddy field. Nurzamal knows how to read the soil, when to drain the field, when to introduce the ducks. Since she was a little girl, Hasina remembers watching the ducklings grow as the rice got taller and greener until finally it was ready to harvest. Every year, there is hard work, special foods and drinks, stories told by the older women, jokes and games. And her mother at the centre of it all. Harvest is the happiest of times. Why, then, does this year bring her feelings of foreboding?
‘Sabikam Nahor,’ Araf asks shyly, ‘did you see the metal birds?’
‘See them! I had to come out and soothe Monu Mush.’ Sabikam Nahor loves Monu Mush almost as much as she loves Tara and her other children. ‘You were frightened, weren’t you, Monu? Poor thing.’
‘Heeeyoouuuuu,’ bellows Monu Mush, tossing his handsome head.
‘Phoo,’ exclaims Araf, as he ducks behind Hasina. ‘Monu Mush has very big horns.’
‘Time to go!’ Hasina takes her brother’s hand in hers.
At the end of Third Mile Street, Hasina begins to shake off some of the morning’s drama. She can feel a cool breeze on her face as they turn towards the Farak River. The air is scented with coconut palm and river water and new growth.
Hasina and Araf stop at the standpipe at the top of Third Mile Street.
Every morning after Fagr, first prayers at 5.40 a.m., Hasina and Ghadiya trudge here, half-asleep, to fill up big buckets with water for the family and carry them back balanced on their heads. That water has to last them all day long. Water carrying is a job Rohingya girls do. It is hard work; very hard work. But mostly the two cousins enjoy being out together in the early morning. Besides, Hasina reminds herself, it is great training to keep her fit for soccer – if she ever gets to play again! In the evenings they return for washing and teeth-brushing, girls at one time, boys at another.
Hasina: Through My Eyes Page 2