The most wretched person in this world is the one who has no one to understand them as they truly are. Then that suffering soul begins to desperately try to reveal themselves, at least to someone. In doing so, they sometimes resort to lies or pretense. People generally find falsehood easier to accept than truth, artificiality more favoured in society than authenticity. So many live forced into a kind of hypocrisy in thought and deed, just to make themselves acceptable. Those who cannot do this gain little, their worldly failures are many. They have few friends, scarcely anyone close to them at all. This is not a world for such foolish people.
I am a dreamer, a lover of imagination. Perhaps not terribly practical either. I don't grasp the world's complexities and cruelties. What is in my heart comes out of my mouth. You might call me a foolish girl. As a person, I value my freedom. I love excitement. From childhood, my home had an atmosphere of reading. My mother deserves the greatest credit for this. She read the complete works of Sarat Chandra, the complete works of Bankim Chandra. From Rabindranath to Gorky, whether political novels or detective stories or poetry—there was nothing she hadn't read. She showed no discrimination in choosing what to read. From my mother's lips, since childhood, I heard stories from classic books and was entranced by them. I haven't read even a quarter of what she has. In my childhood, I read some simple books—like Humayun Ahmed, Jafar Iqbal.
And at university, because I was favoured by one of my professors, I had the chance to read some famous essays. I have some historical books. Among them are Joya Chatterjee's Bengal Divided, Sir William Wilson Hunter's The Indian Musalmans, Rajat Kanta Ray's The Conspiracy of Plassey and Society of That Era—I read those. I borrowed Bimal Mitra's Badshahi Amal from my uncle and read parts of it in the beginning; I loved it. Later I bought the original Indian print edition from Aziz Super, though I haven't opened it yet. Many of my books fall victim to this cruel helplessness of remaining unread. I read a controversial book on the Liberation War—Sharmila Basu's Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. I won't judge whether it's good or bad. I want to read books from all sides on history, religion, everything—like my mother did. During whatever time I have left in this life, that is my wish.
In 2005, I had just passed my SSC and got admitted to college. Then, suddenly, love came crashing down on me—that teenage love, you know! The kind of love at that age follows no logic. Utterly childish, bewildering infatuation. Many boys from college liked me. The truth is, I'm not terribly ugly to look at. But I didn't like any of them. I was drawn to a tall, handsome young man who came out of a shack-like room next to my house, his shirt sleeves always rolled up, a person with a certain quiet charm. Whenever he stepped out from his place, I would watch him in secret, every day. There were times I missed my first class waiting to see him. This went on continuously for a full year. I had been watching him even before I passed my SSC. After a while, he noticed me too. During his daily comings and goings. I knew nothing about him. Between us there was no acquaintance, nothing at all.
One day I discovered that not far from our neighbourhood, the boy had a small pharmacy of his own. At that age, I was captivated by whatever I saw. It was an age to fall in love with everything so easily.
# The Weight of Longing
Even after getting into college, I couldn’t shake him from my mind. One day, gathering what courage I had, I pressed a notebook of my poems into his hands. I said nothing. By then, the two of us understood each other through glances alone—we both knew something had taken root between us. So handing him something wasn’t particularly surprising to him. What surprised me was that he could never bring himself to say anything first. There was only one reason: the gap between our stations in life. Still, after some days of this, he began waiting for me on the street every day, hoping to talk. There were no phones then, so we had no way to arrange things. One day, seeing me approach, he said, “I need to talk to you. Where can we sit? When?” We decided on a place. After college, I went with a couple of my friends, and he came with one of his. That was our first real meeting.
Through conversation, I learned that he had a B.Com in accounting from some college. Now he ran a small business. His parents were gone. He had a brother who lived in Saudi Arabia. He stayed here with his cousin’s family. Whatever he’d made of himself, he’d done it entirely on his own. He’d never had anyone beside him. His whole life had been a fight. Hearing all this, my heart ached for him. I didn’t understand then that what I felt wasn’t really love at all—it was perhaps just pity, at best. But it took me years to see through that haze. Whether what I felt was genuine love or whether I simply drifted through those years in delusion, I still don’t know. None of my friends approved of us. He wasn’t my equal, they said. There was no match between us—not socially, not economically, not in education. You might call it an “unequal love.” On top of everything, he was ten years older than me. I took all this disparity as a challenge. There was something irresistible about my attraction to him. That’s how it is at that age.
I’ve always been stubborn, headstrong. I do as I please and listen to no one. Our love carried on. It was an old-fashioned kind of love. He was the most virtuous, gentle, sheltered, and poor man who had ever entered my life. It took me six months before I could bring myself to call him “tu” instead of “aap.” Before I knew it, I’d gotten into university. Let me mention something else here, something perhaps beside the point. I didn’t take the university entrance exam in colleges all across Bangladesh—only at the one near home. There was only one reason for that: I couldn’t bear to leave my mother, my father, my older sister. I’ll come back to my sister’s story later.
I had wanted to study Bengali. I didn’t get in. I never imagined I’d end up studying history, coming as I did from a commerce background. From the very first year at university, because I was sharp, vibrant, and ambitious, I quickly caught the attention of the teachers. Back then, I felt certain that studying history alone would let me conquer the world. In my first year, I came in first class third. That’s when my mother’s dream took shape: I would become a university teacher. After that, every year I placed somewhere between first and seventh—never less than that. I was utterly serious about my studies. I spent my days in the library, taking notes from seven or eight books, Bengali and English mixed together. I was consumed by my academic work. No one guided me toward the civil service exam or gave me any tips then. Besides, becoming a civil servant wasn’t even on my radar. I didn’t even know what I wanted to be. But my mother’s wish lived in my heart. Yet becoming a university teacher requires connections, political maneuvering. I wasn’t capable of any of that. Even though the teachers liked me, I preferred to keep my distance from them. I remember one professor in particular.
# The Teacher’s Advice
Sir used to tell the class, “You girls! Study hard. If you study well, you’ll marry a good man. These poor fellows are working so hard trying to make something of themselves in life. You ought to study a bit too.” We’d all laugh when Sir said things like that.
And so, in the midst of all this, he’d come to campus now and then. We’d see each other, we’d talk. When I was in my second year, my family found out about this “lopsided love” of ours! Mother was furious. There were obstacles. They would never accept it. They’d disown me. On one side there was chaos at home, on the other side my love. I was young, so I gave in and ended it. Six months went by without any contact. Then somehow, we got back in touch. But the problem was, we couldn’t see each other. The moment we did, word would get back to the house through the landline! My family had put a spy on me. After that, we stopped meeting altogether. On the way to university, a phone call. On the way back, another phone call. That was it! That’s all we had. Every day, the same thing. Sometimes catching a glimpse of each other from a distance. This was our love. In all this, I received quite a few good proposals. An Army captain, even a university professor proposed to me, but I held firm in my moral stance about my relationship and was desperate about it. We were both terribly stubborn, and it was this very stubbornness that ultimately drove us toward the break. We’d fight often. Sometimes six months, sometimes four, sometimes three months would pass without any contact. To be honest, over such long stretches we mostly just fought and stayed apart. Yet my conscience wouldn’t let me leave him.
Let me digress here for a moment; it’s relevant to what comes later. I was born in Chittagong, at CMH. After birth, we moved to Dhaka. Dhaka was where I spent my childhood. In those early years, I witnessed a lot. We lived in Defence quarters. I saw firsthand how stark discrimination could be. Our school had a rule: the tall girls sat at the back. Because I was an officer’s daughter, the teachers always seated me in front. At the hospital, officers had their own waiting area, non-officers had theirs. There were so many rules and regulations that sometimes I felt suffocated. My father couldn’t even wear a lungyi and go to the mosque by our house. Seeing all this bred a distaste for Defence. After my father retired, I got the chance to mix with civilians. That’s when I had this dream—to marry someone poor and humble, like the heroes in films. I was drawn to communism. It was really from those ideas that I got entangled in this relationship.
Let me tell you something about our financial situation. We were a struggling middle-class family, barely getting by. My father had eleven siblings. He was the eldest. My grandfather did nothing—whenever money was needed for the household, he’d sell off land. Naturally, all responsibility fell on my father. Uncles and aunts would often come stay at our government quarters. By the end of the month, the ration would run out. My father put his brothers and sisters through school and sent them abroad. Now those uncles don’t even ask after us. They never call. I suppose that’s just how the world works. My father was indifferent to the family’s needs. Having spent so much on educating and sending his siblings abroad, he couldn’t afford to spend much on our education. My middle sister couldn’t do a private medical course because of money. Everything was ready for her to study in India—the funds, the papers, all arranged—but we fell into the hands of a fake agent. In the end, she got admitted to the National University.
Things got a little easier after I was born. My father was an exceptionally honest and pious man. The Audit Section where he worked was a den of corruption. No one could bribe my father; eventually they’d try to force it on him. So you know what my father did? He started fasting. That’s the kind of man my father is.
# The Extension He Refused
He could have extended his service for two more years. But he wouldn’t. He was going to leave the job, take us back to the village, and start farming—bring about a green revolution there. That was his dream. Mother objected strenuously. She was a woman of considerable pride. Throughout her life, Father had never been able to give her expensive saris or jewelry, though she harbored no regret about it. She had sold her own gold chains one by one to send Uncle abroad. Father sent most of his monthly salary home. The household lived in want, yet appearances had to be maintained in public. That’s how middle-class families are—all show on the outside, a warehouse of sorrows within. In the Defence quarters it was even more pronounced; if you worked there, you had to put on quite a display for the neighbors.
My mother, though, had few demands. After marriage, she lived in Saltgola. When the quarters proved too cramped, Father managed to get her a room in a civil compound. The place had no electricity. Mother didn’t mind at all. Seeing how she loved to read, Father would bring books from his office library. By the light of kerosene lamps, night and day, she devoured Niharranjan’s *Dark Bees*, *Death’s Arrow*, *Black Serpent*, *Meteor*, *Northern Star*, *The Hospital*, *Stigmatized Kankavati*, *Lalu and Bhulu*, *The Night-blooming Jasmine*—lost in wonder. She gulped down Promothonath Bishee and Kiro’s works as if possessed. Time would slip away unnoticed. Our household was poor in money, but rich in happiness. Mother was pleased with everything Father did. As a man, Father was devout and good-hearted. Mother still tells us these stories sometimes.
So, after retirement, Father wanted to take us to the village. Mother’s opposition was fierce. What about our education, our futures? Father’s logic was simple: if he could manage, why couldn’t we? Hadn’t Father himself grown up and been educated in the village? After much quarreling with Father, Mother finally gave in, and we built a house here. Our ramshackle two-story building sits among palatial houses. Though we did lay the foundation for five stories. Most of the neighbors—the ivory-tower dwellers—are second-grade civil servants. My father, despite being first-grade, lived nothing like them. The gulf between my father’s lifestyle and theirs was vast. Yet I harbored no resentment. Instead, I felt pride in this man. This poverty was our honor. No bribery, no corruption—every inch of this house was built with honest earnings. Father wouldn’t even have completed the second floor. In this world, he had not the slightest interest in accumulating property. All his thoughts, all his energy, were directed toward the afterlife. He’d wake at two or three in the morning to worship until dawn. He’d reserved one ground-floor room to teach poor neighborhood children Arabic for free.
He had learned to recite the Quran correctly in Quetta, Pakistan, during the war, when he was imprisoned alongside other Bengali soldiers. While working, he’d completed his BA from Karachi University and had just filled out the form for the MA exam when he was taken captive. He was released in 1972, after independence. His grandparents didn’t know if he was alive or dead. There’s an extraordinary quality of Father’s that I’m longing to mention. Father could pick up any foreign language with remarkable speed. Wherever he went, within days he’d master the local tongue and become a proper translator. In his youth, he looked exactly like a tall, handsome prince, and he still does! No one would guess he was a farmer’s son. Father was quite fluent in English, Urdu, and Arabic. Even in Yugoslavia, he mastered the language in just twenty-one days! I can count from one to ten in that country’s language: *yadna doowa tri chatri pet shoset oset debet doset*. Father was a devout man.
# But They Gave Us All Kinds of Freedom
But they gave us every kind of freedom. Never stood in our way about anything. Once I was born, our hardships began easing up little by little. Whatever I asked for, I got. As a child, I wanted a bicycle, and they bought me one. On that bicycle, I’d roam through the quarters, around the basketball field until evening came.
Anyway, my father built a two-story house with great difficulty and sacrifice. It started as a single story. This second floor was built only because of me! I’ll come to that later. But building the house wasn’t just my father’s doing—my mother contributed too. She sold all her jewelry. I had a chain, that was sold as well. Of course, I have no attraction to gold whatsoever. I prefer antique jewelry, and I love dark kohl. My mother is an unusual kind of woman. She always says, “If everyone in this world wants to win, who will lose? Let everyone win if they must—I’ll just take on the responsibility of being cheated.” She never said anything harsh to anyone; her voice never carried bitterness about anything. That’s why everyone cheated her as they pleased. My uncles gave her barely any land. She sold those pieces for a pittance and poured the money into building this house. If she’d gotten the proper price for the land, we’d have had a four or five-story building by now. She has no greed for property. She just wanted to build this house as a safe shelter for us three daughters.
I’m telling you all this to explain our financial situation. To gather the money for my university entrance coaching, my mother pawned her jewelry. I studied day and night, nothing but studying. No matter what, no matter how difficult the subject, I had to get into university—for my mother’s sake, to justify my father’s sacrifices. Because my father couldn’t afford the expense of hiring private tutors. We had a widow grandmother at home. And also my uncle’s widow—my middle uncle’s widow with her four children. Neither the marine engineer uncle living in Singapore with his luxurious lifestyle, nor the younger uncle working decently in Saudi Arabia, had the means to support them. I got a mobile phone only after I got admitted to university. At university, I mostly hung around with friends who were in relationships. It had already been made clear to me—there would be no interference with my freedom. I would spend a lot of time with my friends, and there would be no objection to that.
I was involved with two organizations at university. The Rotaract Club—I even became vice president. And I was a member of a recitation group. My boyfriend at the time was struggling financially to begin with, and on top of that he’d lost money in business, lost in the stock market. Whenever we ate at restaurants, I’d split the bill with him. On birthdays and festivals, I’d scrape together whatever little I could save and buy him gifts. Since I was still a student then. He couldn’t even afford to do that for me. Once my mother divided thirty thousand rupees from selling her land between me and my middle sister, asking us to keep it in our separate accounts. The fourteen thousand I received, I handed over to him. He was in dire straits then. Bank loans, daily reminders, but he had no one to borrow from. That money he paid back to me slowly, little by little, even after we broke up.
2014. Our master’s final year. I was dreaming of taking the circuit tour after my exams. Every batch from the department goes. I had so many dreams about this tour. I’d never been anywhere in my life, never seen anything—except for that one fieldwork trip to Kantajiu Temple in Dinajpur. I’m a homebody. I’d never spent a night away from home. This was my first time venturing out. Seven of us friends registered for the circuit tour. Along with one sir, his wife, and another ma’am. A continuous twenty-one-day tour. It was supposed to be fifteen days. We got stuck for a week in Kataraa near Kashmir because of the flood.
# Journey
I have traveled through Kolkata, Agra, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Delhi, Punjab, and parts of Kashmir. Only Kashmir remained beyond my reach! What an exhilarating journey that was with friends! That life—fleeting as a grasshopper’s flight, as restless as a bird’s—will it ever return? That was the last true joy I found in my life, the kind worth remembering. Perhaps smaller happinesses have come since, but nothing memorable.
I returned home carrying dreams of going back. Dreams of touching Kashmir’s ice, of spending entire nights in a boat on Dal Lake! But if I go again, it might not be with friends anymore. It would be with a husband. But has the Creator blessed my fate so generously? I cannot say. I had a sponsor who gave me roughly thirty thousand. All told, the India trip cost about forty thousand. Wherever I went, my mother came to mind first. Whatever I could afford, I bought for her. Near Katra, below Kashmir, my friends and I set out after evening to see the town. We were then several thousand feet above the plains, in a mountain town at the base of the range. This is sacred ground. At the mountain’s peak stands the temple of Mother Tara. People come from far and wide to see it. We went straight to the market. I wanted to buy my mother a shawl. A Kashmiri shawl. The shopkeeper showed me the “sos bahu ki shaul”—exquisite in its two-toned beauty, maroon on one side, ash-grey on the other. Husband and wife, he said. I told him I didn’t want it for a husband and wife—I wanted two shawls, one for my mother and one for my sister!
The day I left Bangladesh for India, sitting in the Kolkata bus, I told my mother, “We won’t be able to talk anymore—the network will be gone.” She wept on the other end. Of course, I bought a local SIM and we stayed in touch later. The moment I returned to Bangladeshi soil, I called her. She tried to say something but couldn’t. Her voice broke. I came home after so long. During those days, my mother hadn’t eaten her favorite singara even once. She made them for everyone else, but not for herself. When I got home, I learned that my eldest sister had fallen gravely ill. Her blood sugar had plummeted dangerously low—she could have died. My heart sank when I heard.
A week or so later, I enrolled in a BCS coaching center. Everyone said I should. I hadn’t had much time to prepare. I took the 35th BCS exam. It was the most difficult BCS preliminary in history. I didn’t make it. At the coaching center, there was a sir who taught International Affairs and was very fond of me. Even now, he says I am his favorite student across all his campuses—all the different branches where he taught. He believes I will become a Magistrate in the Admin cadre! I had done my Master’s in International Relations, so I knew a bit and always ranked first in class quizzes. Besides, I had always been reasonably good at general knowledge since childhood. My real problem was mathematics. My fundamentals were terribly weak. So the sir insisted on taking my phone number. He began various attempts to connect, subtle and not-so-subtle. I didn’t even have a Facebook account then. He practically forced me to open one so he could share his articles with me. I understood he liked me. But I had no such intentions. Besides, I was already in a relationship. I have always tried to be completely honest and committed in my life.
Then something happened. There is another person living in our home. I call her Apo. More than thirty years before I was even born, she came to work in our household as a maid. Her father died when she was young. At one point she was married off to an old man.
He left that old man and came to Dhaka. House to house, he took work where he could find it. But nowhere could he stay for long—his thieving ways and lies always caught up with him. In the end, he remained with us, and that was only because of my mother’s virtue and forbearance. From my childhood, he raised me with such tenderness when I was small. He doted on me endlessly. Even now he hangs my mosquito net, arranges my bedding. He tends to everything in this house—the upkeep, the daily care. The market, the cooking. A woman denied the ordinary joys: she never married, never had a home of her own, never knew children. Life gave her none of these things. So he stayed with us instead. His mother was in the village. She died four years ago. He has a sister in the city. Beyond that, there is no one left in the world for him. Those who have no one cling to someone, anyone, to survive. They are starved for love. We are his siblings, his parents, his family—his everything.
So this same uncle came to me one day with news: the boy I loved, the one I wanted to marry, had only passed his intermediate exams and came from a family of six children. I didn’t believe it. We had made a plan—finish my master’s degree, then run away and marry, since my family would never accept it. I wanted to hear it from him directly. He was cornered. He confessed everything. He said he had lied to keep me close. He wept. He begged my forgiveness. My heart softened. I couldn’t turn away from him. Meanwhile, I had thrown myself into my BCS exam preparation and coaching. My contact with him dwindled. I thought: once I have a job, I’ll have solid ground to stand on. Then I’ll have the courage to seek social acceptance for this marriage. But I never thought of leaving him. When you love someone, you love them. I’d be with him for life, no matter what the circumstances. Why would I leave him? Should I break up with him just because his social standing is poor? Is that what love is? That’s just selfishness! How can you love someone with such calculations? These were the thoughts that consumed me then.
2015. For three months my mother had a terrible cough, but she wouldn’t go to a doctor. My uncle happens to be a physician, so Mother fancied herself half-medical herself—she knew the names of countless medicines. Whenever any of us fell ill, she’d tell us what drugs to take. Eventually her condition worsened. Pneumonia set in. We had to take her to CMH. The doctor examined her and said her state was critical. At any moment…! And yet, looking at my mother, you’d never know. An oxygen mask on her face. My world collapsed. The doctors said two nights at most. I lay beside my mother that last night. The doctors said they would make one final attempt. They would make a hole in her throat, insert a tube, and see if her lungs could still take in air—because by then her lungs were clogged and hardened with phlegm. The doctors told us plainly: the chance of consciousness returning after this kind of operation is only ten percent. We had already accepted it. Mother would not survive. We were all just waiting for news of her death.
(To be continued…)