by Kim Kellas
The uncle’s place turned out to be quite luxurious: a top-floor apartment in a brand new development and, in minutes, Aila felt the stickiness lift as the air conditioning kicked in. Her scalp stopped melting and, joy of joys, there was a maid who served home-cooked food without passive-aggressive seasoning.
So when, at the end of the weekend, Abba and Amma left to go home, she didn’t panic. Gourab decided to be uncharacteristically amenable by saying he had to go out for a while and, for the few hours he was gone, Aila felt safe. For breakfast, the maid cooked a rather grand curry with Dupatta roti, after which Aila spent an inordinate amount of time in a bathroom with tiles on the floor, and then, in mellow mood, she decided to call home and asked Gourab for her phone.
He said the phone was dead. There had been times, over the past few weeks that he’d asked to borrow it, and she’d handed it over without thinking any more of it. By return, it seemed reasonable that he’d top it up for her whenever he went into town, but he apparently had not and he didn’t seem remotely concerned. She asked to use his phone instead and explained, as though speaking to a belligerent child, that she hadn’t spoken to her own family for some while and they’d be wanting to know how things were.
Tough, she couldn’t have his phone. What was she going to do about it?
War had been declared and there she sat, in a flat in the Chittagong hills, completely and utterly powerless. She could be a wife facing her husband across the void. As perhaps Shafia and Nayan had done, or Nessa and Sadhan, or a million other people joined in marriage, forced, arranged or otherwise, and it could have been the point at which she had to capitulate, except just at that moment, she heard someone knocking outside.
Gourab buttoned his shirt back up and the knocks became more insistent as he went to open the door. Then Aila heard a male voice ask for her by name, and saw an officer in a navy uniform walk in, flanked by two older women. She covered her chest.
One of the women said, “It’s all right, is there somewhere we can talk?” Aila pointed to the bedroom door and the women followed her, while the uniformed officer stayed outside with Gourab.
They asked first if Aila was safe, and she realised that these people must be something to do with the Forced Marriage Unit, though she couldn’t understand how they found her. So she answered, “I’m not in danger,” and anticipated that they’d explain.
But they weren’t going waste time. “Do you want to leave?”
“Yes,” she said, just like that and with no drama, no tears and no need for elaborate explanations, the women escorted her past her husband, without making eye contact and out of the flat into the back of a waiting police car.
One woman sat in the back beside her and said she would be driven to her father-in-law’s house to get her passport and belongings; then she explained how they had found her. When her case officer hadn’t heard from Aila, he raised the alarm and the police went straight to the village, in which, being a close-knit enclave, it had been easy to find Gourab’s house and then get the address of the apartment.
The second woman sat in the front and the police officer drove, with a rifle propped upright between them. He wore the navy uniform of the Rapid Action Battalion, the ones who’d been called in to restore order when the riots broke out in Dhaka. The same ones, Aila heard, who’d cleared the butchered bodies after the massacre. She wondered if it was entirely necessary to send the fiercest law and order people just to deal with her in-laws.
Then she understood. They parked outside the house and the officer walked in first, carrying the rifle. He stood beside Amma and Abba, as the women went with Aila to get her suitcase. She packed as quickly as she could and because it mattered that she packed only the things that were hers, she left the gold she’d been given at the wedding. That way, no-one would say it had been done without respect. When she’d finished, they walked back into the main room. No words were spoken as she salaamed her in-laws and left.
They drove into Sylhet, where a room in a small hotel had been booked for her, chosen for its proximity to the Land Registry Office, and Aila realised the officers knew exactly what they were doing, down to the last detail. Without being asked, they gave her a black mobile to call home and left her to it. She sat on the single bed and dialled the home phone. Sadhan answered.
“I want a divorce. Can you tell Uncle to come and represent me? I don’t want to be here anymore, Dad. They’re not very nice. So the officers have taken me. I’m in Sylhet.”
They talked through the details of what had to happen next and then there was a pause. Sadhan wanted to say something but couldn’t. Aila waited in the hollow silence until he finally hung up and then she stayed on the bed, in the same position, with her back against the headboard all through the night.
Breaking boundaries
The first call to prayer came softly to the window and she watched the city wake to a distilled light, the white essence of day before it became a day, and when the sun rose, the sky turned salty blue and the sound of horns started.
Fadil called to say he’d get to her as soon as he could, yet Aila felt no compulsion to move. Things would happen as they would, now. So hours later, when he and Bhabani arrived, she still hadn’t moved from the bed, or eaten or drunk anything and no-one thought to ask, but it didn’t matter.
On Sadhan’s instructions, he’d brought all the necessary paperwork for the Land Registry and although it was a Sunday, it was business as usual, which Aila found quite strange, given the obstructive nature of Bengali bureaucracy. The first step was to give back the land her in-laws had given as part of the mahr on her wedding day. Under normal circumstances, this would have been quite a labyrinthine process.
But Aila would be fast-tracked, because women shouldn’t be seen in the Land Registry offices and this woman had the strong arm of the Rapid Action Battalion behind her, so the job was done in fifteen minutes, and they walked back to the hotel for the actual divorce.
The same Imam who performed the Nikah was waiting in her room, armed with a massive sheaf of papers, while Gourab and his parents stood nearby. He proceeded to ask asked both Aila and her husband a series of questions and wrote each of their answers down in turn, working through the pages one by one, until he came to the final page, and turning to Aila first, he said, “Do you want to do this?”
She exhaled, letting the tension go. At last, the end had come. Drops of sweat slid like tears down her chest, but, before she’d opened her mouth to speak, Bhabani answered.
“She doesn’t want to do this. Munni doesn’t know what she’s doing. Look, her hand’s shaking. Her head’s all over the place. Someone put her up to this.”
Voices filled the room and the bickering escalated as Bhabani argued with Amma, Gourab and Fadil exchanged insults, and Aila tried to understand why they had chosen that moment to kick off.
It was all down to Shamim. Fadil’s eldest son had loved her since forever – well had wanted to marry her since forever, so in a convoluted bit of Bengali logic Bhabani concluded Shamim and his father were to blame. Everyone knew about Fadil’s greed and Shamim’s obsession with Aila.
It took the last of Aila’s strength to calm everyone down and convince Bhabani and, more critically, the Imam that her uncle had never said a word to her, that she had no idea about the rest of it and this was completely her own decision.
When Fadil backed her up, the Imam accepted her version and proceeded to read the final statement of the land and jewellery given, and declared that everything had now been returned. He asked for Aila’s signature and, when the last page was signed, the divorce was complete, although it would take a further three months and ten days before she would be officially divorced, to confirm there was no pregnancy.
A wave of nausea rose in her belly and she knew she had to leave the room. Outside she stopped in front of her father-in-law, “Forgive me, Abba, and don’t wish me bad luck,” she
said and, trailing the battered suitcase behind her, she left with Bhabani and Fadil to spend the last few days at her father’s house, before the flight home.
And, back in her room, she looked out over the lake. White herons took flight and soared away from the water towards their nests, leaving the wooden poles of the fisherman standing in the water like sentinels.
When the Imam read out the actual acreage, she realised Abba had given her the same amount of land as her father’s estate. She and Gourab would have used it to build a bigger house for their children and their joint relatives, just as her father had done, and another dynasty would have grown on the land she now stood on and solidified under the feet of future generations and that was Desh and though she was part of that tribe, Aila wanted something different and for the first time in her life believed she was entitled to it.
On the morning of the flight, they drove Aila to the airport and left her on the street outside. She checked in and, as soon as her passport was registered, she was whisked past the snaking queues and guided to the exit doors, like a VIP. Almost immediately, the flight was called and the minute her head touched the back of the seat, she closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep. She didn’t stir until her belly tightened and the plane began its descent into Heathrow.
Her gut dragged her feet through immigration and her legs felt unbearably heavy while people moved around and behind her. Even her breasts felt laden, almost to the point of pain. She reached arrivals and dropped the suitcase down. The glass doors slid back and she saw friends laughing, lovers with dark eyes, and children’s legs wrapped round the barriers, but something held her back.
It kicked again. She grabbed her belly and doubled over in pain. As the wave passed she reached for the suitcase to straighten up and smiled. Her family were all waiting on the other side. She might have accepted that she was Bengali, but her child definitely wasn’t. Would her family accept a do rag as well as the hijab? The glass doors slid back again and she walked through, ready to find out.