# The Diary of the Man in the Wrong House The day I realized I was living in someone else's house, I didn't feel the shock I'd expected. Instead, there was a strange, dawning relief—as though I'd finally found the name for something that had been troubling me all along. It happened on a Tuesday. I was searching for a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer when my fingers brushed against a photograph. A family stood in front of a Christmas tree: a man with kind eyes, a woman with a bright smile, two children holding hands. The back of the photo bore a date—December 1987—and a name I'd never heard before. That's when I understood. None of this was mine. --- The house had always felt borrowed. Not in the way a rented apartment feels—I'd lived in three rented places before this, and they never troubled me. No, this was different. The walls held secrets I couldn't decipher. The creaking floorboards in the hall seemed to whisper in a language I'd forgotten. And the photographs on the mantelpiece—how long had I been walking past them without truly seeing? I should have noticed sooner. The wear on the furniture. The way certain drawers stuck. The stain on the bedroom ceiling that looked like a map of a country I'd never visited. The marks on the doorframe where someone had measured the children's heights, the last one dated fifteen years ago. The kitchen still smelled of someone else's spices. Turmeric, perhaps. And cardamom. In the pantry, I found jars with names written in someone else's handwriting. *Homemade pickle. June 2001.* The ink had faded to brown. --- I began keeping a diary that day. *Tuesday: Found photograph. Not mine. How long? Days? Weeks? Months?* The entries grew more frantic: *Wednesday: The neighbor called me by a different name. I didn't correct her. She seemed confused when I didn't respond, but she walked away without pressing. Did she know?* *Thursday: The postman brought letters addressed to "Mr. Ratabhor Sen." I signed for them without thinking. My hand moved as though it had done this before.* *Friday: The keys in the drawer—there's a third key I've never used. It opens the door to the basement. I haven't gone down yet.* --- By the second week, the house had begun to show me its true nature. Or perhaps I was finally learning to read its language. The living room had a color television, the kind with dials instead of a remote. In the corner, a shelf held books with cracked spines—*Tagore, Bankim, Saratchandra*. Someone had loved these writers. Someone had read them carefully, left notes in the margins. I read those notes like letters from the dead. *"How true—we are all prisoners of our own making."* *"Does anyone truly know another person?"* *"I think I am becoming invisible."* In the bedroom, I found a wedding photograph. The same woman from the Christmas photo, younger, radiating a joy so fierce it hurt to look at. And the man beside her—was he the one who'd written in the margins? What had happened to him? To them? The wardrobe held clothes in three different sizes. I wore what fit me and tried not to think about the others. --- The strangest thing was how easily I fit into the man's life. His shoes were my size. His desk held bills addressed to him, which I now received without confusion. His wife's recipes in the kitchen, scrawled on the backs of envelopes—I tried to follow them, and the food came out almost right. The neighbors stopped asking questions. The milkman left his delivery without speaking. The mailman nodded and moved on. In a drawer beneath the bed, I found another diary. It was older than the house itself, I thought, or perhaps it simply felt that way. The handwriting was careful, deliberate: *"I am afraid I am not the man she married. I am a shadow of him now, a sketch in graphite, fading with each passing day. Does she see it? Does she know I'm disappearing?"* The last entry was dated twenty years ago. --- Sometimes I wonder if the man who wrote those words is still here, walking through these rooms at night, watching me sit at his desk, sleep in his bed, eat from his kitchen. Sometimes I wonder if I was ever truly anywhere else. The other day, I heard children playing outside. I went to the window and almost called out—but I stopped myself. I'm not their father. I don't know their names. I don't have the right. Instead, I marked their heights on the doorframe. New measurements. As if continuing an old task. The pencil felt natural in my hand, as though my hand remembered doing this before. As though I had children once. Or as though I was never anyone else. --- Today, a real estate agent called. The owner, she said, was considering selling the house. She wondered if I was interested in purchasing it officially. I almost laughed. How could I purchase a house that purchased me? But I said nothing. I simply hung up and returned to my diary. The light is fading now. Soon I'll switch on the lamps—the same lamps that have burned in this house for decades, casting the same shadows on the same walls. The photograph on the mantelpiece will grow darker as the room dims, and the faces will become harder to see. Perhaps that's mercy. Perhaps that's how we finally belong to a place—not when we know all its secrets, but when we forget we ever had any of our own. I am still writing. Every evening, in this diary, using the pen I found in the desk drawer. I write about a man who lives in a house that isn't his, and with each sentence, I wonder if I'm discovering him or inventing him. The house breathes around me. The walls settle. The floorboards creak. And I wait—for someone to come home, or for the daylight to finally leave, whichever comes first.

 
Sometimes I think I was simply born in the wrong place. I cannot fit in with them, nor can they fit with me. I don't dislike anyone in this house, and even when their views clash with mine on countless matters, I have never imposed my opinions on them, never foisted my philosophy or worldview upon anyone. They go their way, always have, always will. I do my best to understand them from where I stand. I have done everything that could be done for them. I have received all their ways with an open heart. But from childhood I've noticed one thing—nothing about me aligns with their thinking. Whatever I do, they find fault. Everything about me seems violent to them, excessive. I never knew that simplicity itself could be read as violence.

From childhood I was an outsider, a wanderer. I was like a duck or a hen, really—coming home only when hunger called, otherwise always out. Until class seven, I bathed in the pond in front of our house. Once in, I wouldn't come out before four hours had passed. I'd slip away from home like a thief after grabbing a few handfuls of rice at noon. I'd return in the evening caked in dust and dirt. And every day for this, I'd get beaten by sister—punches, slaps, hair-pulling that yanked my head back. My hair suffered so much from her relentless cruelty that it simply stopped growing. From childhood they kept it cut short like a boy's, never letting it grow. If I wanted it long, I'd face a barrage of mean remarks from her. I don't know about others, but being the youngest in my house, I endured countless forms of cruelty in the name of affection from the elders. That's why I say now—I've landed in the wrong place.

Even as a child, no one let me be as I wished, live as I wanted. Now that I'm grown, when I try to live the way they taught me from childhood, it displeases them, and so I hear all manner of cutting remarks. I cannot grow my hair even if I want to now. My hair lost its natural capacity to grow long because it was cut so many times, so repeatedly. Now when I try to grow it, it reaches a certain point and simply snaps from the middle on its own. I eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. I sleep well. I have no health problems. I even see doctors for this hair, take medicine regularly, but nothing helps. Yet everyone—family and outsiders alike—points a finger at me for it. Do I not know that short hair doesn't suit tall girls? How many of them know I've been taking medicine for years because of this? Whose fault should I blame? Mine? Should I blame myself for not rebelling then, for not living as I truly wanted? I still suppress my own desires and accept their endless demands. These things are causing me real pain.

Sometimes I feel like I’m suffocating in a dark room, holding my breath.

I shouldn’t have been born here at all! I’m not at peace with them, and no matter how hard I try to go against my own will, I can’t keep them at peace either. The reason I’m saying all this today is that I’ve been irritable since morning. I do everything for them, and only then do I sit down to my own work. I cook, I clean their clothes, I clean the house. After everything is done, I sit to my work, but even that bothers them. The moment they see me at my study table, it seems they can’t bear it. They’re constantly on my back about everything, and… I’m human too. How long am I supposed to sit quietly and endure all this? From dawn until nine o’clock, my father recites the Quran non-stop. He reads with such force, his voice so strained and grating, that I forget it’s supposed to be a sacred text. This way of reciting the Quran isn’t right at all. It’s not just me—many people in the house are bothered by it. I’ve told my father countless times to read it with a gentle melody, with feeling, but he won’t listen to a word I say. For some strange reason, he insists on reading the Quran in this style.

It falls to me to set everything right in this house—all the problems land on my shoulders, and they’ve all collectively taken it upon themselves to correct me, by force if necessary. Yet when it comes to housework, none of them remember their share. They all sit with their hands folded when there’s work to be done, but when it comes time to eat, each one takes their portion and walks away. And I have to watch their faces and still respect them in silence. I understand everything. I wonder why I don’t talk needlessly with them—as if that’s another big problem for them. They can’t seem to accept it. But what am I supposed to talk to them about? The moment I try to have a conversation with them, they start criticizing this person and that, their children, various issues in the country. According to my father, the government, ordinary people, followers of other religions, even the great scholars and theologians—those who give the true interpretation of religion and speak the truth—they’re all disobedient or something. They’ve all lost their minds, and they all need to be beaten severely to be set right. This terrible situation unfolding across the world is all because of them.

From that morning onwards, he reads the Quran in such a harsh, grating voice, with incorrect pronunciation, that no one else in the house—even if they wanted to—can manage to pray two units of prayer. He reads as if giving a sermon, loudly and forcefully, because he feels it’s his responsibility to grab everyone and force the words into their ears, to make them hear. I’ve never complained to him about his Quran recitation, for one simple reason: it’s a holy book, and it’s not fitting for me to say anything about it. But I’ve asked him several times to read a bit more softly, with a pleasant melody, because the neighbors suffer too, especially those who sleep late at night. But explaining this to him is a problem too. Why would they sleep late? Who sleeps late and who sleeps early—as if this must happen according to my father’s will and pleasure alone! And no one else in the house has the courage to say these things except me, because the neighbors know that telling him does no good. If anything, it’ll only make him do it more.

When I complain, he comes close to my ear and reads louder and louder, telling me I’ve become disobedient, that I’ve picked up Jewish culture, that I’ve become this and that, and all manner of other nonsense.

I believe in Allah. I pray five times a day. But Father’s excesses—they’re pushing me away from my Creator somehow. Before, whenever I’d sit down to pray, he’d tell me I was praying just to show him, to please him. If I finished prayer before he arrived home, he’d start in: we don’t pray, we’re all Jews, all sorts of vile things. In his eyes, anyone from another religion is simply a bad person. They all do devilish work. Sometimes life feels worse than hell itself. Father sits obsessing over a Creator who’ll beat a man to pulp with seventy thousand whips of fire if he misses even one prayer or says it late. Since I’ve skipped millions of prayers in this life, surely—certainly—the life after death will be nothing but relentless torment! I tell him: am I at peace in this life either?! Then when he finishes reading the Quran, his mobile will blast at full volume—an endless series of sermons from every charlatan mullah and preacher hawking religion in this world. It drones on all day. If I so much as ask him to lower the volume, another lecture begins.

My mind is completely corrupt, he says. These things won’t reach my ears. I’ve adopted Jewish culture. The volume won’t decrease—it’ll go up. Father has a Bluetooth wireless speaker. He’ll turn it on. We must be proper people; we’re all becoming devils. The truth is, those fraud preachers running their business only survive because of men like my father. Where there’s a market and customers willing to sustain it, any enterprise thrives. What business doesn’t flourish when given favorable conditions and safety? Everyone in this world tries to exploit their abilities—stretch themselves as far as they can—to build financial and social standing. I find no fault with the mullahs in that. Could they grow without shelter and patronage? Anyway, since this goes on all day, I decide: I’ll study at night after everyone sleeps. But even then, problems arise. If I stay awake too late, naturally I can’t wake early. I prepare breakfast by seven every morning, yet one day when it’s nine o’clock before I finish cooking, they still don’t let it pass. When even strangers don’t deny me a little grace, I stop minding—because my own family won’t give me an inch! If those closest to me don’t understand me, how can strangers?

That day I heard it: surely I’m watching twisted videos all night, that’s why I can’t wake up. Yet everything I do for everyone becomes somehow wrong in a single day. Everyone treats me badly however they can. Complaints reach Sister, reach the aunts on the phone.

I stay awake all night and don’t make breakfast in the morning, and because my room light keeps them from sleeping all night, thousands of other complaints pile up. And inevitably, this becomes the reason they say I don’t want to get married, that I’m using my studies as an excuse, that marriage is what I’m really running from. Then they take turns calling me, one after another, to discuss my rudeness, why I don’t look after my parents, what trash I’m burying myself with in my room all day, how I don’t talk properly to anyone—endless, rehearsed words that never stop. I listen to them and think: if I don’t take care of them, who will? My siblings, my aunts and uncles—not one of them has visited my parents, not once. They just make phone calls when someone’s ill and call it a day. Then they make excuses: if we come to visit, it’ll just add to your burden, how can you manage all that work alone? Better you let our parents get well first, then we’ll come see them.

Why? What’s wrong with cooking their own meal? They can’t cook in their own brother’s house? If they wanted to, they could visit for a day. They could eat out once. None of them lacks money. Why don’t I understand why they won’t come? Because if they come here, they might have to go to the hospital. If they come, what if they get stuck here until my parents recover? What if they end up saddled with extra responsibility? Ha ha ha! They think they’re geniuses and everyone else is a fool! I understand perfectly well why they don’t come. I remember everything. The day Ma had her stroke, I was in Dhaka. When I heard the news of her illness, it was eleven at night. How could I, a single girl, rush to Jessore at that hour alone? My aunt has her own private car. If she wanted, she could have sent one of my cousins with the car to get me to Jessore right then, because no one at home was in a position to take Ma to the hospital. My sister, my brother—they were all in Dhaka with their own families. I was unemployed, I had nothing else to do, so it had to be me. I left for Jessore at dawn the next day, without asking any of my relatives for help.

My youngest aunt somehow got Ma admitted to the Heart Foundation, but through that whole night, there was no one beside her except two of my friends. My father doesn’t even understand the basic hospital procedures. He left Ma completely alone in the hospital and came home to sleep. If she needed medicine in the night, who would buy it and bring it to her? I’m still grateful to my two doctor friends. But we have so many relatives—couldn’t even one of them come just to sit with her for a night? I’ve come to know them now, truly know them. I remember—I left home at six in the morning, took the seven-ten bus from Uttara to Jessore. Came straight to the hospital to see what condition Ma was in. When I got there, I found her barely admitted to a regular bed. Her face was twisted. Ma should have been admitted to the ICU the night before, but my father just sat there waiting for me to come, saying I’ll handle everything when you arrive. He had no money problem—the problem was in his mind.

# from the original Bengali story

The ICU bed alone cost three thousand taka a day, and Father wouldn’t even arrange it until I scolded him into it—though he spent the whole night putting an ailing person through needless suffering while he slept comfortably at home.

My friends had told me some of it, but not everything, because I was out of Dhaka and couldn’t make it back that night, so they didn’t want to pile worry onto me. They only said the night could be managed somehow, but first thing in the morning he’d need to be admitted to the ICU or there could be serious complications. After that, I didn’t sleep a wink for five straight days. Someone has to stay with the patient in the ICU at all times—medications might be needed suddenly, or any number of other things—so I couldn’t even go home to bathe. That was when I finally saw the true face of my relatives. You never really know who belongs to you and who doesn’t until disaster strikes. I’ve always been there for every relative in their moment of need, but that day, in one of the hardest moments of my life, nobody stood by me. Five days without sleep, and I was going mad. And I couldn’t abandon such a critical patient alone either. Not a single person was there with me then—not even my father. All my life I’ve watched my father mouth off wisdom without ever putting it into practice.

It was four days before Eid when it happened. I had gone to Dhaka to shop. By then all my friends had gone back to their own towns, and if they’d been in the city, at least four or five of them could have stayed with Mother for a few hours. When I think back on it now, I can’t bring myself to exchange pleasantries with anyone anymore, because I know—I know now—what people are capable of doing, and why they do it. During those days, apart from my aunt, nobody even bothered to give Father a single meal. I was eating out. Mother was getting food from the hospital. Father went to his maternal uncle’s house during Ramadan day after day, even though my uncle’s house was right next door! Couldn’t he manage to feed his own brother for just a few days? Nobody even called me—out of fear, I suppose, that I might ask them to come or ask for some kind of help. You only truly know people when disaster comes.

How am I supposed to speak sweetly with them? How am I supposed to talk with them? They’re always in front of me or behind my back, saying whatever they please about me, and then they expect me to be kind? I’m not even unkind to them. I just… exist as I am. I don’t mesh with anyone. I stay apart from everyone. I let them all be as they are. It’s been five months now since my uncle moved into our house from Dhaka. He and his family live downstairs. I check on him as much as I can manage. I can’t visit their place myself because I have so many things to do all day, and when the work’s done, I just don’t have the energy to go anywhere. Besides, there’s no time left by evening. At night, I barely make it to bed half-asleep. Two months after he arrived, that uncle went and told my other uncles and aunts that I put on airs, that I don’t talk to anyone. That you won’t see my face for a whole week. That I waste all my money on books and papers but don’t give anything to anyone else.

I was completely stunned hearing all that.

# The Offense of Education

He’s my uncle, of course—educated man, with honors and master’s degrees to his name. Finding nothing else to pin on me, they finally fixed their eyes on my books! What am I supposed to do? I genuinely don’t know. Then the two brothers sit together and start blackening my reputation. I stay in my room most of the time, and God knows what I’m supposed to do with all this studying! Just the other day, one of my father’s aunts came from the village to our house to see a doctor. Village folk are always like this, you know—they come to see a doctor, and on top of that, they come to gossip endlessly. She started lamenting to my father: “Oh, your girl’s life is being ruined! What kind of problem has she gotten into? She’s getting old now—what boy will marry her? So what’s the problem? Why don’t you marry her off? What’s the point of all this studying? Is there something wrong with the girl? Tell me plainly—I’m family, after all.”

On the other side, my father started up too: “Auntie, that’s the problem with girls these days! She doesn’t pray or fast. She’s become too educated—that’s why she doesn’t want to keep house. She just puts on airs and uses this studying nonsense as an excuse for her stubbornness and refuses to marry.” That day really hurt me. I love these people so dearly, I’m always careful with them, I endure everything for them, I never think of myself—I didn’t expect this from them. My father acts as if marrying me off means her husband and his family will take care of everything in his life. This aunt of his—who in all her years has never brought even a thread from the village to this house, and leaves only after taking her rent money from my father—she and the like are probably my parents’ true well-wishers, probably the ones who’ll always be there, the way they’ve been before! I never say anything to anyone. I just watch silently. Don’t I understand why they call my father “sir” all the time? If they didn’t, who would give him all that charity money every year? And I know it’s these very people who’ve created discord between my parents and destroyed my mother’s household, piece by piece.

People like them always appear at such opportunities. The day my father or mother falls ill, not one of them will even look back! But my father thinks, “Oh, what good people they are—they understand all my sorrows!” If my mother had been shrewd, she would have driven these worthless people out long ago with a broom! I know these types well—the ones who eat money and pose as saints. They’re always scheming, always figuring out how to squeeze out a little more. The more oil, the more money. And someone has to listen to all my father’s hadith recitations too. He sits at home all day reciting hadith to his family, yet nothing changes, and now no one’s left to hear his sorrows! And these religious preachers he listens to all day—they’re all madmen, every single one. Put a microphone in front of them and they spout such nonsense, distorting religion, screaming as if the whole world is drowning in sin and corruption and only they are righteous. And women—women have come into this world only to lick men’s feet, to stand and sit at men’s command. And nowadays there’s not a single good woman left anywhere. They’re all shameless, the whole lot of them.

And God will surely beat these shameless girls and throw them into hell. These shameless ones are ruining the faith of our learned men.

My father spends all day listening to such sermons and comes home with his blood boiling, roaring and bellowing at everyone. It never occurs to him, not for a single moment in this life, that he is tormenting the rest of the household. He wakes at half past three in the morning and makes such a racket that he disturbs everyone’s sleep before he rushes off to prayers. By six in the morning he’s at the tea stall gossiping with the others, and when he comes home, the torment begins all over again. Either we listen to his sermons, or he deliberately reads the Quran in that grotesque voice of his. Sometimes that sound becomes so unbearable that I feel like taking an axe to my own head. But my father does this deliberately, knowingly, every single day. Sometimes I think: what strange, bizarre place have I landed in, surrounded by such strange people? No one in this house can say anything about it—the moment someone speaks up, my father’s roaring starts again.

I don’t enjoy anything anymore! Life feels like nothing but pointless garbage. I wish I could just go into some forest and disappear. I need nothing from life. Everything, it feels, is sinking. I can’t study, I can’t write. The moment I close my door and try to read, my father paces back and forth outside my room, spouting moral lessons—the whole world is calling out to Allah now, but I still haven’t come to my senses! Why do I spend all day buried in books? My father never thinks for a moment that his daughter has already prayed right in front of him, and now she’s trying to study a bit because she has an exam coming up. Soon the girl will have to run to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. None of this ever enters my father’s head. I truly believe I’ve landed in a terribly wrong place. I should never have been born here, and if I want to stay sane, if I don’t want to lose my mind, I have to get away from here soon. I can’t take any more of this. My head is always spinning in the middle of all this. The real test for me now is just how to keep up with my studies in this sick environment. How to survive it.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me instead. I can’t get along with anyone. Yes, I’m the bad one—I don’t even want to try to fit in anymore. Let me be myself, and let them be themselves. Let me be fine. Let them be fine too.