A daughter-in-law’s sole duty was to earn a good name and social approval for her husband and his family. If she had any desires, hobbies or ideas of her own, this was tantamount to insulting the family.
Writing poems and reading books were considered serious crimes. My husband warned me to stop reading. He threatened that if he happened to see any books lying around the house he would burn them, and if he saw me writing he would break my fingers.
I also had to give up my identity as a poet, which I had fought so hard to establish between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one. The expectations of my in-laws threw me off balance. I did not understand why my reading and writing should upset them when everyone in the house was doing whatever he or she wanted to do. Everyone considered the activities they pursued as right or important for them. In the same way, my activities were my own; how could they have an impact on other people? I was not troubled by anyone else’s desires; why were my activities alone deemed dangerous to them? Bewildered, I sought to understand the reason behind such a notion and came to the following conclusion: it had to do with the place of a woman. In a world full of women who lacked a place in society but were unaware of this deprivation, no one was ready to accept me as a woman who was aware of her existence as a distinct individual. I experienced this truth through the strictures imposed on me by my husband and his family.
I recall one incident distinctly. It was around six in the evening and, as my husband didn’t normally return from work until after eight, I was sitting alone in my room, reading a book on Gramsci.2 It was a thick volume, which had been translated only recently by a friend of mine.
There was a knock on the door. I got up to answer it, wondering who it could be. My husband stood there.
‘What are you doing at this hour, behind locked doors?’ he asked, angrily.
‘Nothing really. I was resting,’ I said, and went back to sit on the bed. That fat book lay open on it.
With mounting fear and anxiety, I realised there was no time to hide the book. He walked over to the bed and picked up the book. His face turned red. ‘So you lock yourself up and keep reading and writing, don’t you?’ he bellowed. The anger in his voice made me tremble. Don’t let your fear show, I thought; that would be humiliating.
He started searching around the bed, then he lifted the mattress to check whether I had hidden any of my writings there. Many times previously, he had found my poems and torn them up.
‘Why shouldn’t I read? I read to pass the time. What’s your problem?’ I wanted to scream it, but I was so scared that the words caught in my throat. Those feeble-sounding words of resistance fuelled his anger.
‘Don’t talk back to me. How dare you ask me why your reading should bother me? These books have made you so arrogant.’
He flung the book into a corner of the room.
‘Let this be the last time. If I see you reading any kind of book or writing anything, I’ll turn really nasty. You won’t have fingers to write with anymore. Remember that!’ he shouted. He picked up the paper bag filled with eggs that I had on my table, and threw it on the ground before he walked away.
The yolks of the broken eggs splattered all over the floor and across the walls. I stood there, numb with shock, humiliated and weighed down by the silence.
6. Writing in secret
Sometimes, in the middle of the night after my husband had gone to sleep, I would smuggle a few blank sheets of paper and a pen into the bathroom to write my poems in the dim light that trickled in. I would write down those lines of poetry urgently, anxious that I might forget those feelings and metaphors by the morning, and exhale deeply. I would hide the poems in a cupboard in the bathroom, then retrieve them the next day when my husband was not at home, and hide them between the pages of my diary.
I sent the poems that I wrote clandestinely, as if writing them was a crime, for publication. Once they were published, the problem became more serious. Some men don’t flinch from using violence against women who resist their authority and disobey their commands. For an Indian man, it is not that difficult a task.
Almost daily, my husband would pick a fight with me. He would use cruel words to tell me not to write; if I stayed silent or talked back to him, he would bang his head against the wall. Time passed in a series of sleepless nights and silent days. While this torture adversely affected my mental state, my resolve to never give up my individuality or identity for such triviality grew stronger.
I decided to hide my real identity behind a pen-name – Salma – and send my poems for publication anyway. It was only when I changed my name to the pseudonym that I reached a state of total freedom, and could finally experience the creative freedom of an artist.
Living in my husband’s house, it was impossible for me to send the poems to various magazines by post. I couldn’t get out of the house and go to the post office to mail them. Nor could I ask others for help. Similarly, no magazines could be received at my address. If they arrived, they would have created problems for me. It was under these circumstances that I would send the poems hidden in a cloth bundle with my mother. My mother would get someone’s help to post them. She would bring the mail I received from magazines in a cloth bag. I would read them without anyone’s knowledge, and stash them away between the stacks of dresses in my clothes cupboard. This went on like a hide-and-seek game for several years.
After a certain period, a publisher brought out a book of my poems. Unbeknownst to my family, the collection helped me to achieve wide recognition in society as a poet.
8. Betrayal
I cannot so easily forget those countless gruesome nights when my husband threatened to hurt me, or announced that he was going to kill himself, if I didn’t promise to stop writing poems. I often wondered if those long, sleepless nights, filled with my husband’s pleas and menacing threats, would ever come to an end. My futile yearnings spread over me like a grim fog.
One night, after I had gone to sleep, I heard someone trying to wake me by pummelling my pillow. I awoke with a start.
‘Why are you sleeping? Get up!’ It was my husband.
Frightened by his voice, I sat up hurriedly and said, ‘What is it?’
‘So, a monkey cannot identify its husband; and its young one doesn’t know its father, is it?’ he lashed out, referring to my poem ‘Unfettered’. ‘If you wanted to live like that, why did you get married?’
Not knowing what to say, I sat trembling on the edge of the bed, looking nervously at the faces of my children, afraid that their sleep might be disturbed by the light.
‘Why don’t you listen when I tell you so many times not to write poetry? How dare you defy me?’ he hissed into my ear. ‘Say it now, that you won’t write anymore,’ he said, as he flung open the door of his cupboard and picked up a small bottle from a shelf. ‘Look, this is acid. I bought it just to throw it in your face. Tell me you will never write poems.’ Although in the semi-darkness I couldn’t see the small bottle or its contents clearly, fear wrapped its grip around my insides.
‘Promise me now that you won’t write another word. This poem shows your true character – that you are a whore. If they had sent you to college and let you loose in the outside world, you would’ve slept with a thousand men. You’ve written as much in this poem.’
Disgusted at hearing those words, I sat still, without any response. What could I say?
After a brief period of silence, I heard the sound of his banging his head repeatedly on the wall. I watched him in disbelief. I didn’t know what to do.
I momentarily considered telling him that I wouldn’t write anymore, but my anger at the vile abuse he had just flung stopped me from doing that.
After a few more minutes of beating his head against the wall, he stopped and picked up a bottle of kerosene that he had brought into the bedroom earlier. ‘Look here, I am going to drink this and die. You can live in peace,’ he said and started drinking the kerosene.
Wailing, I ran to him and tried to snatch th
e bottle away. When the struggle between us came to an end, I made a solemn promise that I would no longer write or read. I stayed awake the rest of the night, weeping and hugging my children, thinking about what I had just witnessed. The arrogance of being a man had fused with an inferiority complex, and this torment had affected my husband’s psyche. And within me there was searing uncertainty about how I was going to get through what remained of this life.
Every minute was like living in hell. Giving birth to my children forever closed the possibility of choosing to evict myself from this life. It would be no exaggeration to say that societal and familial pressures pushed me to seriously consider the idea of eviction.
When a woman is unable to choose whether she needs an education, or whom she should marry or at what age she should marry, or when she should have children and how many children she should have, how can she find happiness?
It was during this time that I finished writing my novel. For three years I had been writing in notebooks which I had kept buried among my saris. Anxious that the key to that cupboard should not fall into my husband’s hands when I was asleep, I would hide it in a different place every night and retrieve it in the morning. One day, when I returned from a visit to the hospital because my child had fever, I found that the entire manuscript had disappeared from the cupboard. It was three years’ work. I wept and pleaded with my husband to return the notebooks.
‘I have burned them,’ he replied.
9. Freedom
I will never forget how I cried that day. I lived like a walking corpse for the next few weeks.
The emotions I felt when I happened upon the notebooks in my husband’s cupboard cannot be described in words. Eventually, I recovered the manuscript without his knowledge. My novel, Irandam Jamankalin Kathai (The Hour Past Midnight), was published in 2009.
Salma would never be voiceless.
* * *
1. A form of divorce under Islamic law in which the husband repudiates the marriage by saying ‘talaq’ three times.
2. An Italian Marxist theoretician and politician active in the early twentieth century
THE VILLAGE WITHOUT MEN
ANITA AGNIHOTRI
Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha
As a writer and development worker, I have travelled extensively, exploring the faraway and uncertain terrains of India, a large, complex and diverse entity. The Sundarbans is a fragile, biodiverse zone in Eastern India, where human existence has been made immensely difficult by the fact that forests are protected in the south. The crisscrossing of turbulent rivers surrounding the islands has always fascinated me as it challenges the reality of human development. Around four million people live in this region. In the last decade, I have had the chance to explore the Sundarbans several times. Each time I come back with a feeling of deep anguish and determination to initiate change after meeting women (single and in groups) in desolate villages where men have mostly migrated for work.
Cyclone Aila hit the Sundarbans in 2009, causing severe damage to the embankments and land, destroying the already thin support system that the poor had. The day I spent in the village Mohanpur, months after Aila, has remained vivid in my memory.
It was on this day that I met Taramoni, a single woman in a household, who to me represented all the courage and fragility of a woman who has been left with the task of running and managing a household alone while waiting for better days.
The narrative that follows is the story of Taramoni in a village of no men. But it is also a story of each and every woman of the Sundarbans.
Cyclone Aila struck in summer.
It was dawn. Satyen, Taramoni’s husband, had gone to the field behind the house to clear his bowels. He came rushing back: ‘The water’s broken through the big embankment! We have to leave at once!’
Within moments, the salt water had entered the village.
It was already flooding into the house.
Somehow Taramoni and Satyen managed to wake up the two sleeping boys, make a bundle with whatever dry clothes were within reach, collect the money tucked above the bamboo beams beneath the roof and leave, taking shelter in the raised verandah of the middle school.
They saw numerous other families like theirs from the village rushing in, one by one, with a few meagre possessions.
The speed of the wind rose as the day advanced. The raging storm was uprooting trees and dislodging tin roofs from houses. They let Bhanumoti the cow loose so that she could escape the flood, but what if she was killed by a flying tin roof or a falling tree?
How could the strong and sturdy embankments, built during the era of the zamindars1, actually break? That morning when Aila came, bringing with it such chaos, there was little time to ponder this.
Taramoni had seen it rain all night, and witnessed the upheaval of the tides on countless occasions. Storms, hurricanes and tornados were a regular feature in the Sundarbans. There had been a cyclone the year before Tara’s wedding. This time, however, the water rose when the tide flowed in, but refused to subside when the tide ebbed. And yet how they suffered from a lack of water! There was no water to drink, to bathe, to clean themselves after going to the toilet. Neither for humans nor for animals. People were dying, gasping for water. The stagnant water in the rivers was giving off a stench, as though something organic were rotting in it. Flies swarmed everywhere – on the floor, on beds, on utensils. People were crowded together on the verandah and in the hall. Wailing babies, old men beating their breasts.
Weeks and months passed, but the wounds still did not heal. The memory of that dawn sent shivers down Taramoni’s spine, every single day.
But at least they had survived.
Six months on, Taramoni found herself gazing emptily at the drumstick tree near the front verandah. Bereft of leaves and fruit, the tree looked like an emaciated spirit, dying slowly. A flock of chirping grey sparrows was tumbling in play under the tree. Taramoni could hear them faintly, like murmurs floating in from the distance. The afternoon was strangely calm: the winter sky a deep blue, without clouds. A dove was calling from the distance amid the silence in the bamboo grove. It did not ring gladly in Taramoni’s heart. The river Gomar was in high tide at midday. The water made splashing sounds in the wind.
She was grateful that they at least had drinking water now; all the hand-pumps were back in operation. Still, Taramoni walked half a kilometre every day to fetch water for drinking and for cooking, storing it in buckets.
Finding drinking water wasn’t Taramoni’s only problem. She tethered the cow to the drumstick tree and let it graze – but there was no grass. She had to collect leaves and straw from the edge of the forest and store them. There had been no rice this year, and no hay either. The once-bounteous cow’s ribs and bones were visible now, and her tears had dried beneath her eyes. She had a strong appetite. But because Bhanumati the cow understood Taramoni’s sorrows, she did not low very often these days, only staring straight ahead with her large eyes, the lids always open, and licking Tara’s hands.
The hours were ticking past, the hours of a winter day.
It was time to let the cow loose and tether her in the shade. But where was the shade? The trees had been submerged in waist-high water. The roots had rotted away underwater. Salt water had gathered in the rice fields. Water was everywhere, and there was no question of re-entering their old home, but still Taramoni’s heart was yearning on the verandah of the schoolhouse.
After Aila had struck, Taramoni waded back from the safe shelter of the school for a glimpse of her beloved home, bursting into tears at the sight of the devastation. The tin roof had been blown off by the wind, landing in a distant field. The swaying walls had collapsed over one another, although the walls of the kitchen at the back had miraculously survived. During Diwali, Taramoni had added a layer of red clay to the front wall and drawn on it with her own hands. As though the wall were a gigantic screen and Taramoni, a rapt artist. She had drawn such beautiful hibiscus flowers, scarlet with green l
eaves – not like actual hibiscus, but so what? Satyen had made fun of her art, and Taramoni’s indignation and embarrassment had reddened her cheeks. The home that they had made bit by bit, with so much love, like the painted wall, with so much blood and sweat over twenty years, had been demolished in just a few seconds.
Her favourite wicker basket, the dolls displayed in the wooden cupboard, the silk clothes for herself and her family, bought with patiently accumulated savings, were all underwater, rotting away. Water snakes were moving about in the room, scorpions too, the bedclothes covered with swarming black flies.
They had not been able to get their possessions – who was going to risk his or her life to retrieve them? It was Taramoni who had asked her husband and sons not to try.
Satyen had not grieved openly as she had. Men had appearances to maintain – they would not weep, even if they wanted to, in the presence of others. But Taramoni knew of the tempest in her husband’s heart. He was a singer. His harmonium and cymbals had all been damaged by the water.
Even now, six months on, a cold current of fear gripped the people of Mohanpur when the round full moon rose in the sky and a liquid silver melded into the water of the Gomar. During high tide there was always the anxiety that the fast-flowing water could attack through cracks in the embankment. The damage to the Mohanpur embankment had not yet been repaired.
Taramoni’s new home was built with bamboo poles, bamboo screen walls, and a sheet of black polythene tied to them with ropes. Fortunately the kitchen wall of the former house had survived, or else they would have had to cook in the open.
‘This is our new home. Do you like it?’ Taramoni asked me, on that day of my visit to Mohanpur. She had dark circles under her eyes. Her tears were overflowing on her cheeks.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 13