By Neeman Sobhan
She is wondering how to enter the story, if she were to write it. The story she has been circumambulating in the last few days, ever since the encounter at the Bar in her piazza.
Was it possible to enter any story directly, as if through a front door? It occurs to Naureen that there might be as many doors and windows to a tale, as there actually were in any house. Her own, for example, here in a suburb of Rome, as also in all those houses she had inhabited in her childhood and growing years, all over undivided Pakistan before 1971.
In West Pakistan, there was the red brick colonial house in Multan of the late fifties, the modern bungalow in Nazimabad colony in Karachi of the early sixties, or in East Pakistan, the pink and grey two-storey house next to a boys’ school in Dhaka Cantonment, when the city was still written as Dacca, and the school was owned by the powerful Adamjees of West Pakistan and not a college yet, and the momentous seventies had not started. East Pakistan was not Bangladesh yet, and still yoked to its bullying Western half.
Naureen brushes off her thoughts about the past and returns to the story nagging her, which was not about houses. But wasn’t every story like a house? The house of an amnesiac who enters it as if it were an unfamiliar space, till certain things made him realise that this might be a place he knew well: a piece of furniture, a smell, a view, adding up to a sensation of déjà vu.
Or it could be an oddly familiar face. Or a voice, husky and wounded, whispering, even laughing, hiding its unspeakable pain.
*
A week ago, Naureen adjusted her mask and entered the Bar in the piazza near her house.
“Un caffè Americano, a tavolo.” She ordered her coffee at the counter and went outside to sit under the striped awning. The August heat, like clockwork, had turned after the middle of the month and it was cool in the shade. She opened her laptop but her eyes scanned the streets of her neighbourhood. Things were almost normal now, more people were out and about, wearing masks. Since the lockdown in Rome in March, her university had shut physically, but till June, Naureen had taught on-line her classes of English and Bengali to her Italian students. Now, finally, she was free.
A writer friend in Dhaka, editing an anthology dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of Bangladesh’s independence had requested her to translate into English a Bengali story submission, and Naureen had been happy to return to the world of fiction.
The story, based on facts, the editor friend mentioned in his email, concerned the experience during the war of liberation in 1971 of a teenage girl abducted from a high school in a district town by collaborators and brought to a military camp. A rape camp. A harrowing, yet ultimately redeeming story. How could such a cruel fate end in redemption? Naureen started to read.
She had barely finished reading the first page of the story when she heard a voice across the street from the Bar.
“Apu[1]!” Naureen turned around. On the pavement, under the Nespole fruit tree stood Sadia with a pram. She looked plump since the birth of her baby. The last time she had seen her young compatriot was the year before, when Sadia had regretfully announced that due to her pregnancy, she could not continue the lessons of Italian and English that she loved taking with Naureen. Those two hours once a week were something even Nareen had enjoyed. Then came Covid. So, they had not seen each other for a long time, even though they lived in the same zone, different neighbourhoods.
Standing beside Sadia was another Bengali woman, in shalwar-kameez. Despite the mask, and her head loosely covered in a scarf, Naureen could see she was an older person, Naureen’s age, or a bit more. Possibly in her late sixties. Sadia waved with genuine delight at Naureen and whispered to her companion, who took off her mask and nodded in Naureen’s direction.
The woman looked strangely familiar. Where had she seen her? Naureen knit her brows, before she produced a polite smile. Meanwhile, Sadia left the pram with the other lady and crossed over. She walked up to Naureen’s table and beamed.
“Apu, how have you been? You never came to see my baby.”
“I know, Sadia. But with this Corona virus situation…” Naureen rose saying, “But let me see the baby now.”
“Oh! Stay where you are, Apu. Let them walk over. I’ll introduce you to my mother.” She signalled and the mother ambled over pushing the pram. Naureen cooed appropriately and forced a fifty euro note into Sadia’s reluctant hands.
“It’s for the baby,” Naureen said.
“Your blessings would have been enough, Apu,” Sadia protested.
The lady kept a smiling but dignified distance. They exchanged formalities, and the mother said: “My daughter has mentioned you often. How special you are, your home…”
Naureen kept looking at her, not listening to her words but absorbing that husky, bruised voice. “When did you come from Dhaka? Didn’t you have problems with the visa, and with quarantine?” Naureen asked.
“Oh! I don’t live in Bangladesh. I live in London. I have a small tailoring shop there in a Bengali neighbourhood. Brick Lane. I came to Rome early this year, before the corona problem started. I am now stuck here. But happily, of course, with the baby….”
Naureen was only half listening.
Somewhere, through a cloudy window she peeked into another era. Dacca, 1972, the year after Bangladesh’s tumultuous birth. Naureen and her young aunt Fahmida, a doctor and social activist, had gone to the Dhanmandi Rehabilitation Centre to interview some of the rescued rape victims….
The baby was getting cranky. Sadia was saying “Apu, you have to come over to my flat and have tea with us one day.”
“I will,” Naureen said, then turned slowly to the mother. “Is your name by any chance, Shopna?”
Sadia laughed, “No, her name is Shamima Akhtar Begum, Shumi.”
The lady turned placid eyes to Naureen, a glint of recognition surfacing. They locked eyes for a second. She said, “Sadia, you can’t just ask your teacher to drop by. Invite her for a meal.”
Sadia joined her effusively. Naureen said, “You should bring your mother to my place, too. But I will come over for tea very soon.”
After they left, Naureen sat over her coffee, her laptop, and the world of stories waiting to be uncovered. She was thinking, after fifty years, everything becomes fiction: our past, our lives, our dreams, our struggles and pains, our joys and triumphs. It all transforms into story.
Story. History. His-story. Her-story. Everyone’s story. All we could do was to preserve it by narrating and transmitting it to each other.
*
Why the hell was she talking so much? The bitch. Spawn of bloody Hindus, or sister of some ‘Mukti’ for sure. Traitors! Bastards all
“Shut the hell up!” He didn’t want to hear her voice, especially her pleading, broken Urdu. Nor look at those limpid, fraught eyes. Already it was diluting his rage, his fire.
No. He had been told while being posted to Jessore, these Bengalis needed to be a taught a lesson. . . His slap knocked her down, her head hitting the floor.
“Oof! Allah!” She cried out, and instead of terror she looked up at him with wild, angry eyes, as if she would jump up to his throat, kick and slap him back. Just the way his younger sister, Laali, would as a kid. Lalarukh, far away in Quetta.
Instinctively, he was on his knee. “Oh! God, I’m sorry.”
In a flash the expression in the girl’s eyes changed from anger back to fear. Her cracked lips trembled and so did her hand as it lifted to wipe a trickle of blood from her forehead.
But before he could pull her up, they froze on the floor listening to heavy footsteps coming up the corridor outside. The boots stopped at the door next to their room. The door handle rattled as voices jeered.
‘Oye yaar! Let us in. Why is the door locked?”
“How many do you have there? Come on, give us a share.” There were thuds, sounds of laughter interjected with the sharp notes of women’s screams and wails.
He pulled her up. She was shaking and clung to him. He held her for an instant then moved her away and said, “Listen, see that door at the back. It leads out. Just go.”
She looked at him blankly.
He repeated, “Go!”
“Go where?”
He shrugged, “Kaheen bhi. . . wherever. Just leave. Now.”
She turned her face away. “Yes, and have a whole battalion of grizzly animals descend on me. I’d rather be protected by someone decent like you.”
“I can’t protect you and I am not decent. In war, we are all barbarians.” He sat down on a chair, face in hand. She stood before him her shoulders sagging, her dupatta pooled at her feet.
*
“And then? What happened?” Seventeen-year-old Naureen asked.
Shopna gazed unseeing outside the windows of the Dhanmondi Rehab Centre and let out a shuddering sigh.
Fahmida said. “It’s okay. Shopna, you don’t have to tell us more, if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that.” The dark eyes were strained but tearless. Her voice was low and scratchy. “It’s just that this is not a ‘story’ but things that actually happened to me, so in my mind it’s all jumbled up. Some parts are erased, others sharp as a knife. What we saw and endured…no language has words to describe these. . .”
Shopna started to sway from side to side. “We were a dozen women, all herded like cattle in that room…. One woman was fortunate and died after being assaulted repeatedly. Her body was hauled away like a sack of rice . . .” Her voice was thin and low as a keening.
Fahmida stroked Shopna’s head. “It’s okay, dear. We don’t want you to dig into anything you don’t want to. Unless it helps you.”
Naureen wiped her eyes and whispered to her aunt, “Khala, I just can’t process what she went through! Imagine, her husband brought her, a newlywed bride, to be safe with her parents in Dacca and went to join the guerrillas, and a neighbour betrayed her!”
Shopna raised stony eyes to them and muttered, “Yes. I will never forget that morning. It started as any morning. How was I to know what destiny had in store for me by day’s end?”
*
Yet the girl knew how lucky she was not to have been herded into the other crowded rooms where they took the rest of the girls brought in military trucks. She was deemed more educated and pretty, so reserved for officers. Thus, she was in a separate room.
And she survived to narrate her story.
Early the next morning, it was still dark when the officer opened the back door and smuggled her out to the compound outside. She hid behind a drum while he went and got a jeep. He backed to where she was. She scrambled in and lay low at the back. There was only one sentry at the check post at that hour, who saluted and then they were out.
She stayed hidden till he stopped the jeep. It was near a road edged with paddy fields. This was the road going out of the cantonment. He asked her to sit up. She peeked out and saw in the distance two figures: old men, farmers, watching them from the field. Nearer to them, across the road and beside a ditch stood a little boy.
“O Ma! Military!” She heard him say as he ran into the grove of thatched houses. She hid her face in her hands. He observed her reaction and understood. It would not be safe for either of them. He drove further off to a more isolated spot, took his jeep down the earth track and stopped under a tree. He let her out. She barely had time to utter her gratitude before he turned the jeep sharply around, said, “‘Forgive me.” and drove off.
*
Teenaged Naureen let out her breath. She felt she had aged since she entered the Rehab Centre that morning.
Fahmida whispered, “I wonder what happened to him.”
Shopna was far away, silent. And within the silence, each moved further into the untold story.
*
A month later the girl was in her uncle’s village home. It was a safe zone, far away from Jessore, near a Mukti Bahini training camp. Some freedom fighters including her brother and cousins had come to stash arms. She was in the kitchen boiling rice and dal for a quick khichuri for the men when she heard shouts. Then grunts, groans and sounds of jostling and kicking came from the courtyard. Her brother and his group of freedom fighters had captured a Pakistani soldier.
They dragged him to the inner courtyard and were beating him with the butt of a rifle. One of the men held up his head by his forelock. She glimpsed his terrorized, bewildered eyes in his bloodied face. In an instant, she ran outside leaving the pot simmering on the fire.
“Stop. Oh! Please stop.” She screamed and dashed between the attackers and the prone body. “Let him go.” She shouted, beating at the others.
“What?” Her brother motioned the others to stop.
“Don’t touch him. Please! He… saved my life. A month ago, in Jessore. . . before I came here.” She sank to her knees and started to weep. The soldier’s left eye was puffed, a side of his face bloated and bruised. He looked at her blankly.
The beating had stopped. “What the hell do you mean?” her brother shouted.
The girl wiped her tears and said, “Bhaiyya[2]. You have not been in touch with our mother, and when I came here, I only told you that I was with my friend Mubina at her aunt’s house outside Jessore and had come here directly to be safe. That’s true, and I told Uncle to tell Amma that also. But there was one day and night, earlier in Jessore town, when Amma was desperately searching for me since I did not return from school.” Her lips trembled. “Bhaiyya! I was abducted and taken to a military camp by someone. . .”
Her brother yelled, “Which haramjada bastard did this…? I’ll rip out his. . .”
“Bhaiyya! Listen. Nothing happened to me. It was the new chowkidar of the school. He said that Amma was seriously ill and had asked me to come home quickly. He whisked me away in a three-wheeler. With his beard and prayer cap, I trusted him Bhaiyya!” Instead of tears, her eyes are aflame with loathing.
She continued steadily, “Luckily, I was spared, because this soldier saved my honour. He helped me escape. I recognised him.” The brother, still breathing heavily kept his rifle pointed at the soldier but told the others they needed to discuss. The others turned away, all shouting and gesticulating, and motioned the brother to follow. “Lies!” One of them spat on the soldier’s boots before he left. They stood not too far away, keeping an eye on the soldier. When they came back, they told the girl that they had decided to tie his hands and feet, blindfold him and set him adrift on a boat.
“He will die,” she cried.
“Oh! Don’t you worry. Every village, every riverbank is crawling with collaborators. Some bloody razakar[3] will find him and help him get back to his camp. It’s only important that we obliterate our tracks.”
While the freedom fighters discussed the proceedings among themselves, the Pakistani soldier turned to whisper to the girl in Urdu. ‘I don’t know why you saved my life. I can never repay you for your humanity.”
She put a warning finger to her lips and muttered. “This is what I owe someone.”
He looked at her baffled. “You said I saved your life. I don’t understand. But God bless you, my sister.”
The men came back with a bundle of rope and a thin, chequered gamchha[4]. Before they dragged him away, he turned to the girl and said, “Khuda hafez[5].”
“You too. God be with you. . . and with him,” she whispered.
*
Naureen opened the windows of her study room wide to get some air to dispel the August heat and sat down at her desk computer to look at her translation so far. The rawness, the immediacy in the Bengali narrative was not coming through in English. It was sounding trite. The fault was hers. She could not improve it, because another story was fidgeting within her. She wished she could write that: Shopna’s untold story that Naureen could not even begin to imagine.
Still, she was wondering how she could enter that tale, if she were to write the story. Not through doors or windows, but possibly by burrowing through like animals, tunnelling underground, and re-imagining the trench of captivity. The grave-like penumbra, the women not knowing if it was night or day, summer or winter. A dozen half-naked ravaged females with unseeing eyes lying like corpses, wishing they were properly dead and buried, and not awaiting the shame of light, of discovery, the world outside.
Naureen got up. She needed to talk to Sadia’s mother. Not to Shamima Akhter Begum, Shumi, but to Shopna.
*
Naureen calls Sadia for directions. Her flat is near the Viale dei Caduti per la Resistenza — “The Street of Those Who Fell during the Resistance.” — the Italian struggle against the enemies during the Second World War. Naureen finds these long street names both musical and moving. How painful must have been the path of those who fell during any struggle, whether men or women. But in Italy, the “Fallen” had been elevated and preserved in public memory, and they had shady avenues dedicated to them, lined with pine trees and flowering oleander bushes.
In 1971, the struggle for freedom was fought not just by men; countless women had made sacrifices. Remembering and honouring them was of fundamental importance. Naureen feels excited that today, this peaceful street named for the spirit of resistance was leading her to Shopna. For her Italian students of Bengali, she could translate that name as “she who dreams.” But how would she tell the story of dreams mutating into nightmares?
*
Sadia’s flat is on the third floor of a well-maintained, middle-class apartment block between a supermercato[6] and a shady children’s park.
Naureen is welcomed by Sadia and ushered directly into the main bedroom.
“Apu, the room at the front, we have rented to two Bengali bachelors who work in a restaurant nearby. We hardly see them.”
The bedroom Naureen enters is well lit and airy. Next to the neatly made-up bed is a two-seater sofa facing a TV on a laminated bureau. Once Naureen is settled on the sofa, Sadia goes to the kitchen to make tea. Naureen watches Sadia’s mother put the baby in her cot in another room.
“I keep the baby in my room,” she says coming back to sit on the bed.
Without preliminaries, Naureen says, “So, Shopna, tell me your story since we last met.”
Shopna’s head is uncovered today. She takes time to knot her loose hair into a bun. There are some grey strands. “Sister, I am no longer the person you met with your aunt that day in Dhaka, fifty years ago. That Shopna died in 1971 and was reborn since then. A cruel rebirth. Still, here I am, sitting before you, smiling.” She looks out at the view of the distant hills.
Sadia returns with a mug of milky tea. It’s sweet. Naureen only drinks black sugarless tea. But she sips it to not make a fuss.
“Have you taken your mother to the hills?”
“What’s there to see, Apu?”
“You have never been there?”
“Well, my husband is so busy all week working at the petrol station that on Sundays our only outing is to go shopping.” Sadia laughs.
“Those hills that you see in the horizon, that’s where the Pope’s summer palace is. You know, the Pope? The Vatican? Anyway, in summer he lives there, overlooking a volcanic lake . . .”
Sadia is listening gravely, trying to absorb all the information.
Naureen rushes on. “Anyway, it’s a scenic place. Go there sometime.” Naureen ends, feeling slightly foolish.
Sadia says eagerly, “Apu, please write down the name of the place. I will ask my husband to take us next week. I always learn so much from you.”
Shopna smiles. “Actually, even in London, I hardly go anywhere. Once a nephew took me on the bus and showed me the Queen’s palace. Otherwise, I only know Wembley and my area.”
They are quiet for a while. Sadia goes to check on her baby, saying, “Apu, it’s her feeding time. I hope you don’t mind. It takes a while. You two chat.”
After Sadia leaves, Shopna says, “Sadia’s father, my present husband, was a widower when I met him. He married me after my first husband abandoned me. Another day, I will tell you about my life. I had thought, the ordeal I went through with the army animals during 1971 was hell. But another fiery dozakh[7]awaited me when my husband came to see me at the Rehabilitation Centre. He and his family could not accept me. To be fair, they tried at first, but could not when they found out I was pregnant. I, too, wanted to die, but failed. I recovered from the abortion. And the day after your aunt and you came to the Rehabilitation Centre, I joined a sewing course and decided to live in a women’s hostel. I started to work as a seamstress. One day, I met Sadia’s father. He had a small business in London…”
Shopna pauses and looks towards the open window. “Some might consider Sadia’s father to be an ugly man. But I only saw a beautiful heart. He came like a fereshta, an angel who took me away. I was granted a new life.”
Naureen follows Shopna’s gaze, directed, she realizes now, not at the lofty faraway hills. Shopna, a smile like a tremor on her lips, is looking nearby, at a shard of sunlight on the open windowpanes, one of them reflecting a tiny balcony with baby clothes drying on a stand.
*
That long ago February winter morning in Dacca was not as chilly as Shopna’s eyes were, as she recounted her ordeal, in bits and pieces. The room at the back of the Dhanmandi Rehabilitation Centre was quiet at this time.
Fahmida put her hand on Shopna’s head and said, “You must allow the tears to come.”
Shopna let out a hysterical laugh. “I watched my parents being shot dead in front of me, my mother’s blood and father’s brain splattered on the verandah by the military. I was dragged away to the hellhole of the army camp. For months we women underwent torture. All my tears dried up. Forever. Even on the day we heard ‘Joy Bangla’ shouted all around us and we were released and rescued by some Bengali brothers and kind Indian officers who wrapped us in blankets, I had no tears of joy. And the day my husband sent me the message to not return home, I had no tears of sorrow.”
Suddenly Shopna burst into tears. Wild tears. She howled in fury. Her eyes were molten lava: “If only one day I could find that razakar, the neighbour who betrayed my family, led the military to our house as the family of freedom fighters, thrust me into hell fire…. and if I could avenge myself, that day I would find peace.”
“Do you know his name, where he lives?”
Shopna sighed. “Yes. But he’s not there. He escaped.”
Naureen blinked back tears and let out her breath.
Fahmida said, “I wonder what happened to him…and to other devils like him….”
Shopna was silent. And each of them burrowed into the silence of untold, unspeakable stories.
[1] Elder sister
[2] Brother
[3] Vernacular, mercenary soldiers
[4] A lightweight cotton towel
[5] Vernacular, goodbye. Persian word for ‘May God be your Guardian’
[6] Supermarket, Italian
[7] Hell
Neeman Sobhan, Italy based Bangladeshi writer, poet, columnist and translator. Till recently she taught Bengali and English at the University of Rome Publications: an anthology of columns, An Abiding City: Ruminations from Rome; fiction collection: Piazza Bangladesh; Poetry: Calligraphy of Wet Leaves. Armando Curcio Editore is publishing her stories in Italian. This short story was first published in When the Mango Tree Blossomed, edited by Niaz Zaman, for the 50th anniversary of Bangladesh.
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