Tag: Dhaka

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Essay

Discovering Rabindranath and My Own Self

Musings by Professor Fakrul Alam

Tagore writing
Tagore performing, 1881
Apnake jana amar phurabe na/Ei Janare shongo tomai chena/

There will be no end to my discovery of myself/And this discovery keeps coming with my discovery of you

On the one hand, Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941] has been with me almost all my life. On the other, I only began to discover that I had Rabindranath so centrally in me relatively late in my life. In fact, I have now realised that the process of discovering the way he has been embedded in me is part of the process of discovering my own self in the course of the life that I have been leading till now.  Indeed, at this stage of my life, it seems to me that there will be no end to my discovery of the way Rabindranath has become part of my consciousness since I feel that there will be no end to discovering myself till I lose consciousness once and for all. The one thing I can say with certainty, using his words but in my translation is “There will be no end to my discovery of myself.”  For sure, this process of discovering myself endlessly keeps happening with my continuing discovery of Rabindranath.

Surely, the process through which Rabindranath had become embedded in me began in childhood. However, I did not encounter his work in my (English medium) textbooks since I did not learn Bengali in school for a while. How then did I come to remember poems such as “Tal gach ek paye dariye/shob gach chareea/ Uki mare akaashe” (Palmrya tree, Standing on one foot/Exceeding all other trees/Winking at the sky”) or “Amader Choto Nadi chole bnake bnake” (“Our little river keeps winding its way”). How do I remember these opening lines even now? And why do I still associate such palm trees and winding little rivers with these lines even now whenever I am in the Bangladeshi countryside? Surely, it must have been my mother who planted Rabindranath in me in my seed time so that he would become embedded in my unconscious, only to surface in my consciousness decades later. It is surely no coincidence that she taught me Bengali and made me learn Rabindranath’s poems indirectly.

 As a boy growing up at a time when the radio was the main source of entertainment in middle-class Bengali houses, my siblings and I were made to listen to Rabindra Sangeet in our house by my father, who felt that he had to share his favourite songs and singers in the musical genre with us, whether we wanted to listen to them or not. Of course, at that age I would have much rather not listen to those solemn-sounding, soulful songs, and whenever I could put my hands on the radio dials, I would listen to English popular music on Radio Ceylon. My favourite singers were Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Cliff Richards and—a little later—the Beatles. In school, when we were not playing or talking about sports or girls, we boys would be discussing the pop music we heard on Radio Ceylon. By the end of the 60s, we would be talking about the English thrillers and comedies we saw on Dhaka television. What place could Rabindranath have in one’s life then? If Rabindranath had been placed in my innermost self by my mother through her reading of his poems to us children or my father through his addiction to Rabindra Sangeet, for the moment he was getting occluded deep inside me and, it would now seem, all but forgotten!

But from the middle of the 1960s, our lives in Dhaka began to change as the claims of Pakistan on us East Pakistanis started to loosen, little by little. It was a time when in neighbourhoods and on streets, processions would come out singing gonosangeet—literally songs of the people, but in effect music of protest and patriotism.  First, the Six Points Movement and then the Agartala Conspriacy case were on everyone’s lips and East Pakistanis everywhere were becoming activists in one way or the other. There was no escaping songs like “Shonar Bangla” (“Golden Bengal”) or “Banglar mati, banglar jol, banglar baiuo, banglar phol/Punno houk”” ( “Let the land, the waters, the air and fruits of Bengal be blessed…) and “Bartho Praner Aborjona Purea Phele Agun Jalo” (“Burn the frustrated soul’s detritus and light up a flame”). In my school where we boys now studied “Advanced English” and “Easy Bengali”. There was no way we could have learned enough Bengali to read Rabindranath or Nazrul in the original in any sustained attempt, but how could we escape the call from such songs and poems like Nazrul’s “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”) or the call from the streets to protest and even burn for our emancipation?  At home, three of my four sisters would be practicing Rabindra Sangeet regularly, since this was what my parents wanted them to do, and so there would be no evading Rabindranath’s songs at home for this reason as well, but I was more interested in friends and sports than staying home and so I would hear the songs only in snatches at this time.

By the end of the decade though, Rabindranath was everywhere in our lives since becoming Bengali became first and being a Pakistani only came later. Even on Dhaka Television, Rabindranath’s songs and dance numbers were being aired fairly regularly then. Outside, one could get to see his plays and dance dramas being performed every now and then in functions and cultural events all over the city. He would soon become an important part of Pohela Boisakh, which itself would become instantly popular amongst us all almost as soon as Chhayanaut[1] organised the first event in Balda Garden as the decade came to a close.  But while Rabindranath was everywhere around me all of a sudden, I was still not reading him at all, preferring English thrillers and westerns initially, and later, when I became a “serious” reader from college onwards, contemporary classics of English and European literature available in English editions.

In the early seventies, however, you could not be in Bangladesh without imbibing Rabindranath at least a little, for there was a process of osmosis at work at this time. Glued as we were to Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendro[2] during our Liberation War[3], we kept listening to his patriotic songs on our radios; the promise of Shonar Bangla seemed alive and possible then. The years after liberation, my generation was exposed to Rabindranath in new ways; we would get to hear and view singers like Kanika, Debobroto and Suchitra Mitra on stage in Dhaka; their songs became freely available in tapes in our shops; and Satyajit Ray’s film version of Rabindranath’s fiction and Ray’s documentary on him became staples of Dhaka’s film societies. I was finally growing up intellectually and was hungry for culture, and so how could I have escaped the poet’s works totally at this time?

But the Rabindranath that I was imbibing thus was almost entirely coming to me aurally and visually. Because he was becoming embedded in my consciousness through songs and the silver screen as well as television, he still inhabited the surface of my consciousness. And I was certainly not making any conscious bid to savor him. The seventies and the eighties were, in fact, decades when I was becoming an even more “serious” student of English literature than before and getting “advanced” degrees in my subject and acquiring expertise for my teaching career; where would I get the time to read Rabindranath then? As an expatriate student for six years in Canada and as a visiting faculty member for two years in the USA, I would be getting small doses of Rabindranath in those countries through the songs I kept hearing in the cassettes I had brought along of my favorite singers and in the occasional film versions of his work that I would get to see because of campus film societies, and I suppose nostalgia played a part in my yearning for him then, but I had no time to spare for him and not enough exposure to his works to let his ideas and his achievement resonate in me in any way.

To sum up my encounters with Rabindranath till then, I was discovering Rabindranath in small doses all the time and experiencing him directly here and there, but my knowledge was all very superficial and my understanding of him too limited. And nothing much had happened that would allow me to tap into the unconscious where all the memories of poems and songs by him I had first come across through my parents’ enthusiasm for his works were hidden.

“Dekha hoi nai chokkhu melia/Ghor hoite shudhu dui pa felia”/

“I haven’t seen with my eyes wide open/what was there only a stride or two away from my house”

In the 1980s, I became smitten by theory, especially the works of Edward Said, and suddenly questions of postcoloniality, ideology, power and location became all-important for my understanding of literature. I was coming around to the belief that I could not be a good and truly advanced student of English literature in Bangladesh, let alone a good teacher of the subject here, unless I sensitised myself to my roots and look at the world around me. And now I remembered some lines I had been hearing since childhood without realising their relevance for me and everyone else around us then: “Dekha hoi nai chokkhu melia/Ghor hoite shudhu dui pa felia” (“I haven’t seen with my eyes wide open/What was there only a stride or two away from my house”). Rabindranath had been all around me and yet I had not opened my eyes wide enough to learn from him. I had not read his works with any kind of sensitised attention at all and I had not been able to arrive at any kind of appreciation of his achievements except the smug sense of self-satisfaction at the thought that this Bengali had once won the Nobel Prize.

Towards the end of the 1990s, for the first time really, I plunged into Rabindranath and found—to quote Dryden on Chaucer— “here was God’s plenty”. Having opened my eyes to him I realized that there was so much to him than one could take in at any one time. He had once said in a song about the infinite contained in the finite and I now thought, “How appropriate of him!” He had said in one of his most famous poems, “Balaka[4]” about how one must not succumb to stasis and how the essence of life is motion and I thought, “how inspirational!” He had written in a song about viewing the Ultimate Truth through music and I thought “Exactly!” He had looked on in amazement in a starry night at how humans have a place in the cosmos (Akaash Bhora Surjo Tara[5]) and I thrilled at the idea now. He made me see the monsoonal kadam flower that I had passed every year without blinking an eye as immensely lovely. Every poem that I read enlightened me, every song lent my soul harmony, every short story or novel took me to eternal truths about human relationships. Who would not learn from a man who had been given some of the highest honors the world has offered any human being, when he says with such unambiguous humility, “Mor nam ei bole khati houk/Aami tomaderi lok…” Let this be my claim to fame/I am all yours/This is how I would like to be introduced.” And so I kept reading him in between teaching and writing, finding him an endless source of inspiration, creativity and wisdom. I strove to learn about nature, the universe, people, relationships, beauty and the dark side of humans through his works.  And soon I felt compelled to translate some of them.  

Rabindranath, then, opened my eyes not only to the world I lived in but also helped me discover my own self as a product of forces that had taken our nation past 1947 to true liberation. He helped root me in Bengali and Bangladesh as never before, making me discover myself not merely as a Bengali but as a citizen of the world, a product of a certain history but also of the history of mankind. My discovery of him and my place in the world was furthered by the work I did in co-authoring The Essential Tagore and authoring a collection of essays on diverse aspects of his work.

But Rabindranath truly contains multitudes. What I now realise is that it is impossible to discover him fully in one life, especially when one embarks on the process of discovery so late in life. By now, therefore, I have despaired of knowing the whole man and feel I will get to know only parts of him. But I also know whatever I read of him will enlighten me and make me know myself better in every way than before. And so I’ll keep reading him and translating him, if only to know him and myself better in the days left for me!  

[1] Centre for promotion of Bengali Culture established in 1961

[2] Free Bengal Radio Centre

[3] 1971 Bangladesh was liberated from Pakistan.

[4] Swans

[5] The Star-Studded Sky

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Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Categories
Poetry

Dear Deaf Cockatoo

By Afrida Lubaba Khan

Dear Deaf Cockatoo,



I mostly stare at the empty ceiling;

watching the imaginary pink bees,

I sometimes try to match up with people, chaos in my wake, no one sees.

You will never know how your absence strikes my heart,

until you are in my place.

Every time I watch “The Notebook”,

I see your non-existing face in front of me --

Enjoying, laughing, seeing the miserable shredded parts of me.

My heart always ached to hear the echoes of your soul;

But you were never ready to hear.

Because you did not feel me as I felt our deja vu.

I screamed and screamed, loudly and madly just to be with you.

But you turned yourself off like a Deaf Cockatoo.

Afrida Lubaba Khan is an aspiring poet, writer, and translator from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is one of the Sub-Editors of ULAB-MUSE Magazine, and she is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in English Humanities at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Categories
Stories

Just Another Day

 By Neeman Sobhan

These days, it seems to sixty-year-old Husna that the past is clearer than the blur of her mirror…

The black Morris had come to a halt near the major crossing on Top-Khana road. In the back seat, feeling as plump as the upholstery, Husna was sweating and dabbing her pretty twenty-year-old face and neck with the anchal end of her cotton Jamdani sari.

Pregnancy had made it hard for her to fit into the long tunics and gathered pants of her hitherto comfortable shalwar-kameez outfits. Beside her lay the folded newspaper that Baba, her father Dr. Rahman, had left behind that morning, when he got dropped at the Dacca Medical College. She picked it up to fan herself. It was the Bengali language daily, Azad[1], dated February 20, 1952. The headlines wafted back and forth, screaming in print the news of the continuing agitations around Dacca, East Pakistan, on the language issue.

Without needing to look at the paper, she knew about the meeting that day of the Language Action Committee from her youngest brother Shonju, the student activist. She knew that they were meeting to discuss a nationwide hartal[2] scheduled for tomorrow, a general strike against the government’s repressive policies and disregard for the legitimate demand of the people that their mother language be given its rightful place as one of the two state languages of the country.

Since January, when she had returned home from West Pakistan for her confinement, all the discussion around the family dinner table involved the Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin’s reiteration of Governor-General of Pakistan, Jinnah’s enraging declaration of two years ago that “Urdu, and only Urdu shall be the state language of Pakistan.” 

She glanced at driver Rashid Miya. The middle-aged man seemed unaffected by the heat, unlike Husna. She was due for delivery in a “matter of days”, as Daktar Chacha[3], her father’s MD friend, had promised during the last check-up, patting her head as if she were still the teen-aged, newly married bride, who had left for West Pakistan a year ago with her banker husband, Jamil.

In a way she was glad that Jamil and she had left their familiar world of Dacca immediately after their arranged marriage, helping two newlywed strangers to bond over the shared adventure of starting life as Bengalis new to the quasi-foreign, Urdu-speaking territory of Karachi in West Pakistan.

Not that Urdu was unfamiliar to Husna. Despite problems with gender in the language, she could manage basic social conversation (though, it annoyed her that she never found any Urdu speaking Pakistani who could utter even a word of Bengali, or tried to). But she was proud that just by listening to the radio she had learnt to sing the popular film ghazals of her favourite Indian playback singer Talat Mahmood, or Noor Jahan, now a Pakistani singer, who migrated to Lahore recently, after the Partition of India five years ago.

It was a bit disappointing that Jamil preferred her to sing the Tagore and Nazrul songs her music teacher had taught her since childhood, when all along her heart hummed with film songs. Songs from Bengali and Hindi films that her strict mother had seldom allowed her to see, unless escorted to the cinema halls by friends and relatives, and on special occasions, like Eid.

She had hoped to right this wrong immediately upon getting married. After all, Ma always said, “Do whatever you wish….after you’re married.” And Jamil did take her to the cinema, though, mostly to see English films. Matinees or late shows at the Rex or Ritz, or an early show at the Odeon followed by dinner in a hotel like Beach Luxury. Once she had seen a belly dancer from Beirut or Cairo perform there and had felt embarrassed yet fascinated by the lissom female body, the unfettered, uninhibited moves. She had felt a dizzy sense of freedom just watching the dancer.

She sighed, running her hand over the watermelon that was her belly! Today she didn’t feel like that bright eyed young girl in Karachi anymore. Nor even a mother-to-be. She just felt like a bloated animal, she sulked looking out of the car window. They were at a standstill for what seemed like an hour. Minutes crawled like the runnels of sweat under Husna’s new high-necked blouse, inspired by the popular Indian Bengali actress Suchitra Sen. She dabbed the constant beading of her nose and upper lip that Jamil always said he found endearing.

She started a mental reply to his last letter. “Dearest one. . . ” She began, then floundered. This would be her third letter to him since she arrived in Dacca, but she was still not convinced about how to address him in writing. Some of her Urdu-speaking female acquaintances in Karachi called their husbands by name, though often using the polite pronoun “aap[4].” Ma always called Baba “Ogo[5]” or “Shuncho?” as in “Are you listening?” That was funny because even if Baba were not listening, Ma would chatter on.

She felt awkward and insincere mimicking the spontaneous affection in Jamil’s letters, calling her “Beloved” and his “Myna bird” and so many other endearments, while she was unable to address him in a way that felt comfortable and not a lie. As usual, she settled for no salutations but an outright “Kemon acho?”

How’re you? I’m as well as can be expected. It’s only February and already Dhaka is uncomfortably warm. How is Karachi? Here, it’s not just the weather that’s heating up, but the political environment as well. The ‘bhasha andolon’, which the English newspapers refer to as ‘the Language Movement’ is going on full force. Baba and Ma are always worrying about Shonju, who is out on the streets every day and in student meetings at all hours. He creeps home late and stores all his protest posters and fliers under my bed and fills me in on what’s going on. I often have to cover for him to the family….”

She pulled forward the end of her sari and tried to cover her belly and wipe her glistening face. Oh! Pregnancy was so boring; and this heat was claustrophobic. If only she could be like Shonju, free to just come and go, walk the streets or ride the cycle or take a rickshaw.

“Ki holo, Rashid Bhai? What’s up?” she asked, as she wound the window all the way down.

“Apa[6], I think there’s a procession approaching. I feel we should take a side street. This road is blocked.” Rashid was already turning the steering wheel.

“Oh! Then, no New Market today? I wanted to collect my harmonium that I left for tuning.” Husna’s voice was lost in a volley of shouts that came from somewhere ahead. Meanwhile, a rickshaw edged close to the car, and two boys, possibly students, with cloth bags hanging from their shoulders, started throwing pamphlets through the windows of a few buses and into other rickshaws that were milling around.

One pamphlet landed on Husna’s lap like the silly, anonymous love-note she had once received while being driven to college, just two years ago. She smiled. She had often wished the author had been her elder brother’s friend and her girlhood crush, Farid. But he was hardly the type to write something romantic to her. Certainly not “Beloved one” or “My Myna bird.” No, it was hard to imagine that serious, brooding, good-looking face bent over anything but medical books. 

Rashid stopped to make way for a group of demonstrators, banners folded under their arms. Some raised a slogan and the rest joined in. “Manbo na! Manbo na! Never will we accept!”  Husna’s heart pumped. Ah! Unlike her, these boys dared to proclaim that they rejected whatever was being imposed on them. Was this possible? She wished she could get out of the car and walk with the boys, raise her voice in slogans. Unthinkable and unladylike, of course; plus, she was a waddling, pregnant beast.

Rashid Miya swung the car around and they entered a narrow street that led out to a wider road. He braked to give way to a truck that sped past, full of khaki-uniformed police, their rifles flashing in the sun. “Too many demonstrations today near the university, Apa. I hope tomorrow, your father will not go to Medical College. And our Shonju Bhaiyya should be careful. He and his friends were getting on a rickshaw at the gate this morning, when I was wiping the car, and they were talking about processions tomorrow. I kept hearing the date. 21st…Ekushey February. God only knows what will happen!”

“We better go home, Rashid Bhai. Shall we pick up Baba?”

“No, it’s only past 5. I’ll come for him later. Let me drop you first.”

Suddenly, preceded by the rumble of microphone, a van came into view. As it crawled past, it left the sputtering debris of words in crackling Bengali. She could decipher only: Section 144 imposed in the city… for 30 days…a ban on gatherings of more than 4 people in public places…processions or demonstrations to be severely punished…

Husna grew restless for Shonju. She prayed he would come home safely and not get embroiled in something foolhardy. He usually confided in her. At least, he used to till Husna got married. They were the closest among their many siblings. Even on the eve of her wedding, it was he and not one of her sisters who had insisted that if she had any doubts about this arranged marriage, it was not too late to speak up.

But she had never mustered enough courage. Or conviction. After all, Farid had not really confessed his feelings for her, and, from what she discovered about Jamil, he was a perfectly decent human being. In fact, she had no complaints about her husband, except that he was not the one her heart had chosen. If only she had met him on her own, and he had not been imposed on her, as if by state decree: “Jamil, and only Jamil shall be your husband!” And… if only elusive Farid had been clear about his feelings. Even if it were non-reciprocal, she would have felt free. Her heart would not now feel so mute.

Why was the language of the heart so complicated, so hard to decipher? It was as if its familiar truths, which could be accessed non-verbally, instinctively, were now locked in a foreign alphabet that she had to relearn in order to decode their meanings. Almost like that ridiculous proposal in the Legislative Assembly two years ago that Shonju had laughed with her about, regarding the use of Arabic script to write Bengali!

“Just imagine, Bubu, the word ‘mother’ would still be pronounced ‘Ma’ but not written ‘moye-akar’ but ‘meem-alef’! Our Brahmi script curling and prancing forward gracefully from left to right would be attacked from right to left by the slanting arrows of the Nastaliq squiggles, and then both colliding explosively in the middle!”

Nastaliq
Bengali script

Oh! Shonju was so dramatic! A laugh escaped Husna, then she fell silent.

They were driving past the Ramna Racecourse. Her baby shifted in her womb. Later. . . many years later, she would think that her son Azeem knew that they were passing what in two decades would be a historical spot: the pulse point of an unprecedented political gathering on a March morning in 1971. On the seventh day of that month, a voice would rise like a colossal bird filling the Dhaka sky with its fateful, uncompromising call, announcing that the time had come “for the ultimate struggle, the struggle for freedom”: Ebarer shongram, shadhinotar shongram!  

Had she been clairvoyant, known that the heady creature would swoop down and snatch her son and hurl them all into the whirlpool of destiny, perhaps she would have told Rashid Miya to change route, take another road. But would that have changed the course of history, erased the scribbling of fate?

For the moment, the Black Morris like a rigid pen on paper drives inexorably forward, and the future is drowned out by the sporadic shouts in the distance of “Rashtro bhasha Bangla chai! We demand Bangla for national language!”

The baby came early. In fact, the very evening after she returned from her outing, the pains started. There was no time to shift her to the maternity ward of the private clinic of Daktar Chacha, so he sent a nurse over to help deliver her baby at home. Early in the morning of February 21, her baby son arrived.

A trunk call was made to Karachi to give Jamil the good news. Then there was much rejoicing in the house with relatives dropping in to see the baby. By late afternoon, however, the atmosphere in the house became subdued as disturbing news from the streets filtered through.        

The police had opened fire on protesting students. There were hushed discussions so she would not hear. But she overheard the day nurse telling the night nurse before she left that injured students had been taken to the Medical College. The very next day, Husna’s elder brother, the final year medical student, Monju Bhaijan, had come to the breakfast table shouting in rage that a student had succumbed to his wounds, and the body of another had been found on the floor behind the Anatomy room. Baba confirmed it with sadness.

Even Jamil’s letter to her after the joy of the news of Azeem’s birth contained a postscript: “Stay safe. These are volatile times. Worried about Shonju. The Dawn newspaper here carried an editorial saying that the people of West Pakistan have no objection to Bangla getting a status equal to Urdu. Why is there always such a divide between the wielders of political power and the populace?”

A few days later, Husna wasn’t sure if it was the 25th or 26th, Ma and the nurse had just taken away the baby when Shonju arrived. He was carrying a box of sweets. “Moron Chand and Sons” it said on the box. Inside were her favourite sweets: the soft, creamy white, renin-based balls of rose-scented pranhara-shondesh.

Ma must have bought the sweets and forced him to come visit his newborn nephew. Husna breathed a sigh of relief, seeing her brother, who paced restlessly, refusing to sit.

“I saw the baby in Ma’s room on my way in. Looks like Dulabhai.”

“Really? I think he has our family nose.”

“Poor kid! Hope not.” Shonju finally grinned, but his mind was elsewhere. He was wearing a black badge of mourning on his white kurta sleeve.

Husna stretched her arm and took his hand: “My heart aches for those who died, Shonju. But I’m so grateful you are okay.”

He didn’t let go of her hand but turned his angry face away.

“We students are still in battle mode. It will continue, the andolon, the protests, the confrontation. The Shaheed Minar memorial we constructed outside Medical College was destroyed, but we will rebuild it.”

“Shabdhan[7], Shonju!” Husna cautioned.

He pulled his hand away, clicking his tongue: “Oh! Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to me. When you fight for a cause you feel superhuman, invincible. The collective spirit strengthens us, makes us feel immortal. We are more than an individual life. What will our enemies do? Kill or wound one person, right? But the cause… they can’t defeat that. We are the multitudes… ”

“Uff!  Stop this speechifying!” Husna rolled her eyes. “Mothers don’t want multitudes. They just want their sons. Sisters want their brothers. Yes, even though you’re a moron, I’d rather have you than a street full of heroes.”

Shonju laughed. “In that case, Bubu, you better start speaking only in Urdu. Sell your mother tongue to these politicians.”

After Shonju left, the nurse brought the baby to be fed. Husna touched baby Azeem’s toes, his petal-like fingers. Once, she had laughed at her elder sister for her incessant baby talk when her son was born. Now it spilled out of her, and she felt no embarrassment. Soft, mashed up balls of Bengali words lisped with maternal love, sweeter, and more tender than the pranhara in the box.

Was that how all mother tongues started? With silly, besotted mothers cooing to the babies in their language? She realised that if she had to make up baby talk in another language, she probably couldn’t do it. There was something about expressing oneself in one’s own tongue, heard from infancy. It was the home that one carried within, because the earliest memories of the mother’s voice absorbed from the womb animated it. It was a birth right that no one could be permitted to take away or undermine.

But was it worth dying for? Worth being martyred like the student the police had shot on Thursday, the twenty-first?

A week later, after lunch, the house suddenly filled with voices. Shonju entered, followed by Monju Bhaijan, and Farid. Husna looked at him surreptitiously. His face was impassive and he gave her a distracted nod. What else could he do, or say, Husna could understand. After all, there she was, much married and a mother, to boot.

Loudly ordering tea to be served, sounding like a housewife, she left the room, disappointed in herself that despite her show of poise and indifference, her heart still ached in a dim way.

She asked herself, if, in the past, she and Farid had been granted the opportunity and the courage to express to each other what she was certain was a mutual attraction, would her life be different? Would the knowledge that her feelings were requited, or not, have made a difference to her sense of self?

When Jamil’s proposal of marriage came to her parents, and they had accepted on her behalf. It was too late. Farid was not around, having gone to visit his parents in Barishal, so nothing had been acknowledged. There had been no beginning, and subsequently, no closure. 

During her impending wedding she had to make sure her feelings did not go into a Bhasha Andolon of sorts within her, agitating and demanding the right of her heart’s true language to be respected. Instead, she had gagged her heart, imposed on herself another language: a formal, emotionally correct, and socially acceptable language. The vocabulary of wedded propriety appropriate to an obedient daughter and daughter-in-law. An official language, foreign to her, like Urdu.

She sighed. Language supposedly empowered humans and differentiated them from animals. But if, despite the ability to verbalise, people could not make their wishes known or heard, were they not equal to dumb beasts? What use was the mother tongue when ones’ own mother had not understood her daughter’s unspoken wish just because she could not speak out: “I don’t want to marry, yet. I want to wait! Manbo na! Manbo na!” And what use was language when Farid too, had failed to use his tongue, express himself at the right time, ask her clearly to wait and not accede to the arranged marriage.

*

No, it was better that the Bengalis had spoken out. It was better that they had taken to the streets. This andolon would lead them to express their rights and desires, claim what was true. Of course, it would take four more years for Bengali to be constitutionally recognised as a state language of Pakistan, along with Urdu. But time was a tiny link in the cosmic chain of historical and personal events. Obviously, this last was not something thought up by Husna at the time, but by the Husna of today, watching her past self.

Today, she observed herself through the telescope of time, on the first day the young mother Husna nursed her baby son. Surely, she was unaware at that moment that everything was connected: her breast milk and baby talk in Bangla nourished not just her child, Azeem, but through him later, Shonju’s “multitudes” of a future generation, as a whole nation journeyed from Ekushey or twenty-first, to Ekattor or seventy-one: from the upheaval for language of February 21, 1952 to claiming a home for it in the war of independence of 1971. All were linked, even if separated by time and generation. In the end, everything existed in a grand NOW, where past and present simmered together.

Needless to say, all this was what she would think many years later, as an older sixty-year-old woman, looking back on her life as she wrote her journal, sitting in her room in her daughter’s suburban home in Maryland, in the US.

She dusted the photo frames on the painted bureau. Her doting late husband Jamil, and her gentle yet impassioned elder son Azeem looked at her from the distance of lost eras. One was gone in 1966 in a helicopter crash. The other in 1971, as a freedom fighter.

Farid, unframed, was a forbidden, almost forgotten memory. Lost like an unspoken language. Lost, because she had never fought for him.

She has a fanciful wish: in some after life she would like to ask those who had agitated and fought for a cause, and even laid down their life for it: in the end, was the sacrifice worth it?

“Today is February 21, 2002. Commemorated as Omor Ekushey in Bangladesh. But just another day here…” She wrote in her diary in Bangla, a language that her grandchildren could not speak.

She pulled out from under her bed the harmonium her daughter had recently bought for her from an Indian family that was moving back to India. She sat down on the rug, stroking the black and white keys with one hand and pumping lightly on the bellows at the back of the instrument.

On top of her harmonium lay open her old songbook, marked and written on by the music teacher of her childhood. She was a trained singer, and in 1950, she with a group from her school had performed some mass anthems and marching songs on what was then Radio Pakistan Dacca. There, they had met a musician named Abdul Latif, who would later put to melody a poem written by a journalist named Abdul Gaffar Choudhury for the student who had died on February 21. Later, the song would be recomposed by a noted composer named Altaf Mahmud and emerge as an anthem for what became Mother Language Day.

For her, of course, the day had a different and personal significance. It was the sacred anniversary of her motherhood that she had entered so reluctantly. On this day, every year, she sang to the son who had taught her the ultimate lesson of love and sacrifice and of never forgetting.

She started to hum the familiar refrain as she tried out a few chords.

Her granddaughter Zainab peeked through the door.

“What’re you singing, Nani[8]?” She said in her American accent.

“It’s a song about love, sweetie. About loving one’s language.”

“Which language, Nani?”

“Any language that you love, sweetheart. For me it’s Bangla, which you hear me speak with your mom.”

She sang the first lines. Zainab sat down beside Husna, gazing at her moving fingers.

“Cool! It’s like a portable piano! Can I learn to play it?”

“Well, only if you also learn to sing this song with me.”

“Deal!”

In bed that night, Husna wrote in her journal: “Today is February 21. International Mother Language Day. Today Zainab learnt to sing the Ekushey song, especially the refrain ‘Ami ki bhulite pari?’ And when I tested her on what it meant, she got it right as she ran away giggling and yelling: ‘Can I ever forget it?’

So, today turned out to be. . . not just another day, after all.”

Husna closed her eyes with a smile on her face. Just before she fell asleep, she felt as if she understood the world not with the uttered meanings of any language, but like an unborn baby breathing in the womb its mother’s voice, dreaming his or her first spoken word.

Dreaming in whatever language would become their home, their motherland.

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[1] Literal translation of Azad is free

[2] Strike, translated from Bangla

[3] Doctor uncle, translated from Bangla

[4] Formal way of addressing in Urdu or Hindi — You

[5] Informal way of addressing a husband in Bangla as taking a husband’s name was seen as disrespectful and harmful

[6] Elder sister

[7] Careful, translation from Bangla

[8] Maternal grandmother, translation from Bangla

Neeman Sobhan is an Italy based Bangladeshi writer, poet, columnist and translator. Till recently, she taught Bengali and English at the University of Rome. She has 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 Ekhushey Anthology 1952-2022, edited by Niaz Zaman, writers.ink in 2022.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Categories
Stories

The Untold Story

By Neeman Sobhan

Exodus of 1971 refugees, out of East Pakistan, the name for Bangladesh between 1947 & 1971
Rome, Piazza

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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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Interview Review

To Egypt with Syed Mujtaba Ali and Nazes Afroz

A discussion with Nazes Afroz along with a brief introduction to his new translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay), brought out by Speaking Tiger Books.

Joley Dangay by Syed Mujtaba Ali in Bengali

Translations bridge borders, bring diverse cultures to our doorstep. But here is a translation of a man, who congealed diversity into his very being — Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904-1974), a student of Tagore, who lived by his convictions and wit. Like his guru, Mujtaba Ali, was a well-travelled polyglot, who till a few years ago was popular only among Bengali readers with his wide plethora of literary gems that can never be boxed into genres precisely. People were wary of translating his witty but touching renditions of various aspects of life, including travel and history from a refreshing perspective, till Nazes Afroz, a former BBC editor, took it up. His debut translation Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe as In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan in 2015 was outstanding enough to be nominated for the Crossword Prize. Recently, he has translated another book by Mujtaba Ali, Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay[1]), a book that takes us back a hundred years in time — a travelogue about a sea voyage to Egypt and travel within.

This narrative almost evokes a flavour of Egypt as depicted by Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937) or The Mummy (film, set in 1932), simply because it is set around the same time period. Afroz in his introduction sets the date of Mujtaba Ali’s travels translated here between 1935 and 1939. The book was published in 1955. This book is a treasure not only because it gives a slice of historic perspective but also weaves together diverse cultures with syncretism.

Mujtaba Ali has two young travel companions, Percy and Paul, who despite being British (one of them is on the way to study in Oxford) seem to have a fair knowledge of Indian lore and there is the inimitable Abul Asfia Noor Uddin Muhammad Abdul Karim Siddiqi, who almost misses a train while trying to argue about the discrepancies shown in the time between his Swiss watch and the clock at Cairo. The description is sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek humour.

The voyage starts at Sri Lanka and sails through the Arabian Sea to Africa, where the ship pauses at Djibouti. Here, Mujtaba Ali expands his entourage with the addition of the long-named Abul Asfia, well-described in the blurb as a man who “carried toffees, a gold cigarette case, and other sundry items in his capacious overcoat pocket and who had the answer to all problems though he barely spoke a word ever.” Afroz himself has given an excellent introduction to the writer and the book — almost in the style of Mujtaba Ali himself. This is a necessary addition as it highlights Mujtaba Ali’s perspectives and gives his background to contextualise the relevance of this translation.

Mujtaba Ali’s style is poetic and humorous. It demystifies erudition and touches the heart simultaneously. His ability to laugh at himself is inimitable. He tells us a story about how the giraffe from Africa was introduced to China by a king from Bengal. At the end, he and his companions reflect about the tallness of this tale!

Mujtaba Ali contends: “‘…One of my friends is learning Chinese in order to read Buddhist scriptures in that language. Possibly you know that many of our ancient scriptures were destroyed with the decline of Buddhism in India. But they are still available in Chinese translations. My friend came across this story while searching for Buddhist scriptures. He had it translated and published in Bengali with the copy of the painting in a newspaper. Or else Bengalis would never have known of this because there is no mention of it in our history books or documents in the archives in Bengal.’”

The irony is not lost that Buddha is of Indian origin and yet an Indian has to learn Chinese to read the scriptures. The narrative continues with more dialogues:

“Percy said, ‘But sir, it didn’t sound like history. It [the giraffe’s story] exceeds fiction.’

“I [Mujtaba Ali] replied, ‘Why, brother? There is the saying in your language, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’

“And my personal opinion was that if the narrative of an event could not rouse interest in someone more than fiction, then that event had no historical value. Or I would say that the narrator was not a true historian. In our land, most of our historians are such dry bores.”

As Mujtaba Ali’s renditions are colourful – is he a ‘true historian’ by his own definition? Such narratives dot the travelogue, generating curiosity about major issues in a light vein and linking ancient cultures with the commonality of human needs, creating bridges, taking us to another time, finding parallels and making learned, hard concepts comprehensible by the simplicity of his observations.

Similarly, he says of the rose: “The Mughal-Pathan era of India ended a long time ago, but can we say for how long the roses brought by them will continue to give us fragrance?”

Some of his renditions are poetic and beautiful. Mujtaba Ali watches the sunrise by the pyramids and describes it: “Streaks of light were gradually lighting up the liquid darkness. The white parting in the middle of black hair was becoming visible. There was a light daubing of vermillion on that.”

Borrowing from diverse cultures, Mujtaba Ali skilfully weaves the commonality of cultures, customs and countries into his narrative under the umbrella of humanity. Afroz with his journalistic background and a traveller himself, is perhaps the best person to translate this narrative of another traveller from the past. The depth of erudition simplified with humour has been well captured in this translation too. In this interview, Afroz discusses more about the author, his new translation and the relevance of the book in the present context.

Nazes Afroz

You have translated two books by Mujtaba Ali. Is he essentially an essayist? Were there many essayists and travel writers at that point, especially from within Bengal? Where would you place him as a writer in the annals of Bengali literature?

I don’t think that ‘essentially an essayist’ is the right description of Mujtaba Ali. Of course he wrote many essays but his repertoire included novels, short stories, funny anecdotal pieces based on his experiences (in Bangla they are called romyorochona) and stories from his travels, his encounters with extremely interesting people across the globe. He was deeply interested in culinary experiences. So he wrote a lot about food habits, multitude of cuisine and also gave recipes. Hence, it is difficult to box him into one genre of writing. With the publication of his first book, Deshe Bideshe, (serialised in 1948 in Bangla literary magazine Desh and as a book in 1949) he instantly occupied a significant place in Bengali literature.

Syed Mujtaba Ali

His Bangla prose, steeped in effortless and seamless multilingual and multicultural references, swept the discerning readers of Bangla literature off their feet. It was not only the prose that he created but the breadth and depth of subjects his pen touched was unparalleled. No author in Bangla language has been able to write on such a wide range of topics till date.

Coming to the other part of the question about travel writers and essayist in Bengal in early part of the twentieth century: the short answer is, yes there were many. Travel writing has been an important genre in Bangla literature. Bengalis had been travelling – for pilgrimage, for rest and recuperation following illnesses, or just for pleasure since the middle of the nineteenth century, which was the time of Bengal renaissance. Writers who undertook such journeys, wrote about their travels too. So Mujtaba Ali is no exception in that regard. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and also his peers.

You have called the book ‘Tales’ of the Voyager — would you say that some of the stories are like tall tales here — perhaps tales to convey an idea or a thought which in itself would be larger than history in explaining the truth of a civilisation, like the tale of the giraffe? Would you see this as a comment on the gap between popular and documented narratives in history and on the different interpretations of history? 

Ali was an excellent raconteur. He was also gifted with an almost eidetic memory. This allowed him to learn a dozen languages – some with native proficiency. He was a voracious reader too. So, not only did he read tomes on history and philosophy in many languages across cultures but also he gathered fascinating tales from many corners of the world as he loved storytelling. Whenever opportunities came, he masterfully wove those stories into his writing. Thus the tale of the giraffe’s journey from Africa to China via Bengal found its way in this book as he was narrating stories from the east coast of Africa. There is another thing that makes Ali’s writing attractive. He weaves in fascinating quirky funny stories while discussing something apparently dense and dry. I have not come across many writers who have done that. I don’t know whether to name it as his comment on bridging the gap between popular and documented history. There’s no evidence to prove that he was trying to achieve that as he never mentioned it. We could only conclude that it was a style that he invented and mastered in an effort to engage with his readers.

A writer that came to mind while reading this book of Mujtaba Ali is, one who is really more entertaining than accurate –Marco Polo. We know he lived five centuries before Mujtaba Ali. Mujtaba Ali of course is erudite, a scholar, but he seems to have a similar fire within him, a wanderlust. Do you think he would have been impacted by the writings of Marco Polo? Was wanderlust not a very typical phenomenon that was part of the culture that had evolved in Bengal post the Tagorean renaissance? Did Mujtaba Ali also travel for wanderlust? 

Reading Ali’s books, one may think that he had wanderlust in the true sense. It will be correct to assume that he was fidgety; he refused to settle down; he moved jobs; he moved cities and even continents. But to be  truly smitten by wanderlust, one has to enjoy the travel, which wasn’t possibly the case for Ali. His son told me that even though he travelled extensively, Ali didn’t enjoy travelling much. There had been many, of his time, who were really smitten by wanderlust — like Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963, walked to Tibet twice and wrote only in Hindi), Bimal Mukherjee (1903-1996, a true globetrotter who cycled to London from Kolkata), Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay (1902-1997, who crisscrossed the Himalayas from one end to another), Probodh Kumar Sanyal (1905-1983, his travelogues of the Himalayas), Premankur Atorthi (1890-1964, author of Mahasthobir Jatok) — to name a few. While these authors were inherently bohemian and were drawn towards travelling only for the sake of it, Ali was more of an unsettled soul who travelled with a particular purpose and wrote about his experiences as he had picked up fascinating stories and observed connections between cultures. Because he loved to tell stories and also because he was infused with the idea of internationalism that he inculcated from Tagore, there was no way he could escape but narrating the stories and cultural experienced from his travels.

Tales of a Voyager takes us on a sea voyage to Egypt. Did you travel to Egypt while translating the book? Would you say that the Egypt of those times still resonates in the present day — especially after the 2011 uprising?

Even before his one night stopover in Cairo that he narrated in Tales of a Voyager, Ali had previous experience of Cairo where he spent a year as a post-doctoral scholar in 1933-34 at the Al-Azhar University. So there are many short pieces on Cairo and Egypt by him in his other books. He raved about the café-culture of Cairo and came to the conclusion that Egyptians surpassed the Bengali in terms of adda—hours of the purposeless sessions of chitchat and chinwag. I have been to Cairo at least half a dozen times and realised how acute his observation was. I witnessed in person why Ali mentioned that this was a city that never slept. The cafes and shops were open all night and the streets were full of people with families including children until well past midnight.

Late night, a cafe in Cairo. Photo Courtesy: Nazes Afroz

As expected, the political landscape that you mention in the question, would be completely different between Ali’s time in the 1930s and in 2010 when I started visiting Cairo. When Ali first went to Cairo in 1933, Cairo had just gained full independence from the forty years of British occupation (not as an annexed state but more of a protectorate). So there are some references of the political figures like Sa’ad Zaghloul Pasha[2] in his various writings but the main focus was on its cultures.

When I started travelling to Cairo from 2010, I witnessed some similarities in the cultural traits as elaborated by Ali. But politically by then, Egypt had moved far from where it was in the 1930. It had become an architect of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s. It was the most prosperous country in North Africa and an important leader among the Arab nations. But it was also reeling under the oppression of one party rule and the youth were bubbling to break away from that. This is something we witnessed unfolding from 2011.

What were the challenges you faced while translating this book? Was it easier to handle as it was the second book by the same author? 

The main challenge of translating Mujtaba Ali is transposing his unique language steeped in multi-lingual references into English. Also to get his oblique sense of wit and puns from Bangla into another language, which at times, may not have the right words for them. Translating the second book of the same author doesn’t make it easier as the challenges I just mentioned remain for every book.

Tell us what spurs you on to continue translating Mujtaba Ali. Please elaborate.

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writing had a huge influence on me from my young age. His writing shaped my worldview, planted the seeds of curiosity about many societies, taught me how to make friends in distant lands and start making connections between cultures. So what I’m today is largely due to his writing. As an avid reader of his texts, I felt that it was my duty to introduce him to a wider readership. That’s the motivation of my taking up the translation of Ali. It is also a tribute to a writer who had such an impact on me.

In your introduction you have written of Mujtaba Ali and his writing. What had he written to be put on the Pakistani watchlist in 1950s? 

He had penned an essay opposing the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan’s national language on the Bengalis who were in majority in the newly created East Pakistan. He even predicted how the Bengalis would rebel against such a policy, which came true in 1952 in the form of the Language Movement. He wrote this when he was the principal of a government college in Bogura. So he drew wrath of the Pakistani leaders and an arrest warrant was issued against him. That was the time when he left Pakistan and returned to India in 1949.

There also the other difficult personal situation. His wife (married in 1951) who was from Dhaka and was working in the education ministry, continued to live in East Pakistan with their two sons while he lived in India working for the Indian Government. So Pakistanis always thought he was an Indian spy while he was under suspicion in India that he was on the side of Pakistan!

Did Mujtaba Ali participate in the political upheaval between Pakistan and Bangladesh? Please elaborate if possible. 

Ali was hugely affected in 1971 because of his personal situation as I just mentioned. I don’t know how deeply he was involved with the liberation war in Bangladesh but he wrote a novel, Tulonaheena (his last novel), against that backdrop – based in Kolkata, Shillong and Agartala and told through the story of a lover couple – Shipra and Kirti. So it is likely that he was involved in some capacity with the war efforts.

Tulonaheen( Incomparable), Syed Mujtaba Ali’s last novel
Gurudeb and Santiniketan by Syed Mujtaba Ali
More books by Syed Mujtaba Ali

Mujtaba Ali studied in Santiniketan — that would have been in the early days of the university. Would he have been influenced by Tagore himself and the other luminaries who were in Santiniketan at that time? Can you tell us how? And did that impact his work and outlook? 

The simple answer is: it was huge. Tagore was the polar star for Mujtaba Ali, which he acknowledged every now and then in his writing. This experience also decided his life’s journey. He imbibed humanism and internationalism as a direct student of Tagore in Santiniketan. He also developed deep apathy towards all sorts of bigotry. So it was not surprising that he would find it very difficult to accept a country that was created on the basis of religion.

Do you find him relevant in the present-day context? Is your writing influenced or inspired by his style?

I feel that his relevance will never fade. His ability to create cultural connection from different corners of the world will continue to fascinate readers for generations. Yes, in this globalised world when information from around the world are at our finger tips with the click of a button but one also needs to learn how to look at those information beyond mere facts and go deep underneath to make a sense. Apart from being fun and entertaining read, I feel his writing is one such training tool to learn how to make cultural connections. This way, if one wants, one can truly become a global citizen.

As for me, my outlook towards the world is massively influenced by Ali’s writing but not my writing style. It’s simply because I’m not a polyglot like him! I’ll not be able to come anywhere close to his style even if I try.

Well, that is for the reader to judge I guess! You have books on Afghanistan. But you do travel with your camera often. Will you write of your own travels at some point — like Mujtaba Ali but in English?

I have only one book on Afghanistan – a cultural guide book that I co-authored with an Afghan friend. I was working on my own book on Afghanistan, which would have capture one decade of Afghan history and interspersed with my own direct experiences of the country between 2002 and 2015. But the research got stalled for lack of funding. I hope to revive it at some point. And, yes I would like to do my own writing from my travels. That’s there in the wish list.

What are your future plans as a journalist, writer and photographer? 

Travel more, see the world more, make more friends and photograph more!

Thanks a lot for giving us your time and the wonderful translation.

[1] Literal translation from Bengali, In Water and On Land

[2] 1857-1957, Egyptian revolutionary and statesman

Read the excerpt from Tales of a Voyager by clicking here


(The online interview has been conducted through emails by Mitali Chakravarty)

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Interview

Translation as an Act of Possession: Fakrul Alam

Professor Fakrul Alam discusses his new book of Tagore translations, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore, published by Journeyman Books, Dhaka

Professor Fakrul Alam

Professor Fakrul Alam translates Tagore songs with a passion, refers to them as ‘song-lyrics’. In a recent essay, he claimed his favourite book is the Gitabitan, which houses 2232 songs by Tagore. The first edition of the book was published in 1931 and 1932 in three volumes. Over a period of time, Vishwa Bharati combined the three into one single volume.

During the pandemic, Professor Alam — a translator who has been lauded for his translation of Jibananda Das and also something as diverse from poetry as the autobiography of the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — took to translating Tagore songs to make a 300 strong collection, which has been published recently. When asked what was the basis for his selection of the songs, he responded: “What was the basis of my selections? Most important was my love for them. I listen to Rabindra Sangeet, that is to say, the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, every day without fail, unless I am travelling outside Bangladesh. Over the years, some songs by a few singers became so much a part of me that I began translating them. As was the case with my Jibanananda Das translations, you could say that translation was an act of homage as well as a way of coming really close to what you love. It strikes me also that many of the songs I ended up translating are by my favourite Tagore song singers — artistes like Debabrata Biswas and Kanika Bandhopadhyay for instance.  Once again, translation as an act of possession!”

Professor Alam has been the recipient of  both the Bangla Academy Literary Award for translation and the SAARC Literary Award. He has published around a hundred translations of Tagore songs and poems, edited and translated The Essential Tagore with Radha Chakravarty and lectured in a number of countries about Tagore. In his recently published translation, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore, he brings to us a wide variety of songs which he has grouped into different sections. In this interview, he discusses his translated works, especially his new book.

You have translated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and Jibanananda Das, Nazrul and Tagore. What turned you towards translating poetry from prose?

Actually, I translated poetry first and then switched to translating prose. The first literary pieces I translated were poems by Jibanananda Das—surely the greatest Bengali poet of the twentieth century, if we leave aside Rabindranath Tagore who, of course, began writing poems towards the end of the nineteenth century and stood out among Bengali poets till his death in 1941. I then turned to translating some Tagore poems and songs for The Essential Tagore (2011) that I co-edited with Radha Chakravarty.

Also, from the time my book of translations of Das’s poems came out I either ventured into translating some poems by contemporary Bangladeshi poets from time to time either because I felt like doing so, or as responses to requests of a few poets to translate their verse. An example is Masud Khan, some of whose poems you have published in my translations in Borderless.    

What moved you into translating?

I have to begin answering this question by once again naming the person I mentioned at the beginning of my answer to your previous question—Jibanananda Das. It was when I came across his works in Abdul Mannan Syed’s selection of his poems in the mid-1990s, and was so swept away by them, that I felt like translating Das’s verse. This was translation as an act consequent to being possessed—or if you like—gripped. Poems like “Banalata Sen” or “Abar Ashibo Pheere[1]” or “Bodh[2]” or “Aat Bachor Age Ek Deen[3]” seemed to want me to translate them. In fact, my translation of the word “Bodh” for the English poem is “Overwhelming Sensation” and that is how I would say I was taken by these works. And once I started with these poems I felt like translating a whole lot more.   

You have a book of Das’s poetry and many poems of Tagore in various anthologies and sites. What made you decide to do a book of Tagore translations?

Rabindranath, of course, is the summit as far as Bengali poetry and song-lyrics are concerned. Because I grew up in a house where his songs were either being performed on the radio or on television, or sung by one of my sisters, in retrospect it appears to me that I was destined to translate them sooner or later. Once I had published Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems in 1999, I began to translate a poem or song by Rabindranath every once in a while. When I heard some of Rabindranath’s songs being sung by a singer like Debabrata Biswas or Kanika Badopadhyay, I felt I had to translate them. And that is how I ended up with the nearly 300 songs that constitute Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics.  

Is translating Tagore different from translating other poets?

Of course, and inevitably! Almost every great poet writes differently from his predecessor or contemporary poets and composes uniquely. As the great American critic, Harold Bloom, has put it in talking about Western canonical poets, they suffer from “the anxiety of influence” and must destroy all vestiges of their predecessor poets in them. They may begin conventionally but will soon find their distinctive voice or voices. They will as well move away from their earlier works all the time and not get stuck with one style. Thus, Tagore kept experimenting and, so to speak, shifting gears and taking new routes in versifying all the time. This is also true of Jibanananda. That makes the early Tagore or Das different from the later versions of these poets. In Tagore’s case, let me stress that he was particularly polymathic and kept opting for distinct poetic directions all the time. But as far as I can tell what makes him truly different is the musician in him. In particular, the songs have melodic components that take them away from established poetic forms. In fact, I would be happier with the term “song-lyrics” for his songs. Only in his later verses, did he move away from a melodic base towards relatively free verse or prose-poems. And so a translator of Tagore must strive to capture the music in his poetry, especially the songs, which makes the task of translating him quite a distinct as well as challenging task.         

Tell us about this new book of Tagore translations. Are the translations a collection of your earlier publications or do you have new songs?

My new book is the result of years and years of translating the song-lyrics, something I do mostly during weekends. A few of them I published in Bangladeshi English language newspapers and a few came out in periodicals like Six Season Review, which I co-edited.

A few in have come out in Borderless. But all these years, I translated not with a definite plan but unsystematically. It was during the enforced period of home confinement during the pandemic years, however, that my translations of the songs gained momentum. I began at around this time to post my translations on FB regularly, hoping that the comments I receive would include constructive ones that would enable me to revise my work, if and when necessary. Nabila Murshed, an ex-student now living in the United States, then came up with the idea of forming a FB group called “Gitabitan in Translation” for not only my translations of the songs but also those of others who might be interested in contributing their own translations, or sharing their responses to the translated songs posted. She also decided to complement the translations with recorded versions of the songs that she collected from YouTube. All these things eventually led me to the idea of publishing a full book of translations.

I then hired an ex-student as a kind of assistant to sort out the songs I had been translating, according to the divisions and sequencing Tagore imposed on them in his collection. There are thus 13 divisions in my book, one of which, “Prokriti” or “Nature”, is itself divided into six sections following the six seasons of the Bengali calendar. But to sum up my answer to your question, the majority of the song-lyrics are going to see in print for the first time. I would say no more than 100 of them have been printed before.

Sometimes, your republications change from the earlier publications. The words change. Have you done that in this anthology too?

Occasionally. As I said previously, I translate a song when I hear it on YouTube. I might listen to the same song a couple of years later and feel like translating it again, forgetting at times that I had translated it before. This led occasionally to 2 or 3 versions of the same songs. Inevitably, while these versions would be close to each other, they would never end up being exactly similar. For the final round of selections for my book, however, I have chosen only one version of what I did, that is to say, the one I think was definitive. And, of course, I revised what I had done for the final print version.

Would you consider translating Tagore’ prose?

Of course. And I have translated a few already. For The Essential Tagore I translated “Hindus and Muslims” and “The Tenant Farmer”. And for Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, I translated “The Co-operative Principle” and “The Divinity of the Forest.” As these titles indicate, Rabindranath is a writer whose works you can mine for topics that have continuing thematic relevance. That is why all translators will go back to him every now and then for essays and prose extracts relevant for our time.

Would you like to bring out a book of Nazrul translations too?

Who knows? I have translated about 12 of his poems and a short story by this great Bengali writer, who is also Bangladesh’s national poet. But at present I feel more inclined towards going back to Jibanananda Das and will continue to translate more of Rabindranath’s song-lyrics. This is because around the time I published my translations of his poems at the turn of the century, a trunk full of new poems by Das were discovered. Most of them have been published by now. If and when I can, I would like to bring out a new edition of my Das poems, incorporating some of these newly discovered ones. This is because I have already come across some that are truly memorable and deserve to be translated. Certainly, he is a poet the best of whose unpublished as well as published works need to be introduced everywhere.    

Tagore is unique in as much he was socially committed to improving the lot of the villagers in Bengal. He practically created Santiniketan and Sriniketan. At a point, he wrote: “My path, as you know, lies in the domain of quiet integral action and thought, my units must be few and small, and I can but face human problems in relation to some basic village or cultural area. So, in the midst of worldwide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Santiniketan and Sriniketan hoping that my efforts will touch the heart of our village neighbors and help them in reasserting themselves in a new social order. If we can give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others—and my life work will have been done.” This was in a letter in 1939 to Leonard Elmhirst, an agricultural scientist who helped him set up Sriniketan. Has any other poet done work of this kind in Bengal? What do you see as his greatest contribution —poetry or his ideals of human excellence and the work he did to realise his ideals?

Very few writers can come close to Tagore as far as the variety of his works are concerned. Such a polymath dedicated to the world of the spirit and the mind as well as human welfare is surely rarely to be found anywhere in any period of world history. Once he took charge of his father’s estates in what was then East Bengal and is now Bangladesh, Tagore plunged into work for the betterment of the people there and the surrounding areas. But he kept writing poems, fictional and nonfictional prose, plays and wrote all sorts of things for the amelioration of his people as well as his own need to articulate beauty and depict the Sublime in all its manifestations. And he would combine theory with practice, carrying out experiments and introducing new ideas for his tenants and others to implement in their farms and lives. His greatest contribution, however, was not only his poetry and prose but also his contribution to Bengali language and literature. I remember Dryden on Chaucer at this point: “He [Chaucer] found it [English writing] brick and left it marble.”

Thank you for giving us your time.

(The online interview has been conducted by emails by Mitali Chakravarty)

Tagore articles & Translations by Professor Fakrul Alam

My Favourite Book by Fakrul Alam

The essay is a journey into Fakrul Alam’s fascination with Tagore’s Gitabitan. Click here to read.

Rabindranath’s Monsoonal Music 

Fakrul Alam brings to us Tagore songs in translation and in discussion on the season that follows the scorching heat of summer months. Click here to read.  

Songs of Seasons: Translated by Fakrul Alam: Fakrul Alam, translates seven seasonal songs of Tagore. Click here to read.

Endless Love: Tagore Translated by Fakrul Alam: Ananto Prem (Endless Love) by Tagore, translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Monomor Megher Songi (or The Cloud, My friend) has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Giraffe’s Dad by Tagore: Giraffer Baba (Giraffe’s Dad), a short humorous poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read. 

Oikotan (Harmonising) has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam and published specially to commemorate Tagore’s Birth Anniversary. Click here to read.

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[1] Fakrul Alam translates this as ‘Beautiful Bengal’, but lietrally, it means I will return again

[2]  Fakrul Alam translates this as ‘An Overwhelming Sensation’, but literally, it means sensation.

[3] Translates to — eight years ago, this day

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Stories

Letting Go

By Tasneem Hossain

Courtesy: Creative Commons

“If only you had some wisdom, then you would not have raised that issue. I am going to block you. I am going to sever all ties with you. Bye!” The harsh words kept echoing in Farzana’s head. Her eyes moistened. She could not control the incessant tears rolling down her cheeks. The man behind the counter looked at her sympathetically. Farzana tried to smile back but her face distorted. She had never ever been able to control her emotions.

She was standing in the immigration line to board the next plane to New York from Dhaka.

The last one year came flashing back.

She had come in contact with Tariq during an official online meeting in Bangladesh.

He was a man of great repute. They had to contact each other often for business purpose. Gradually, their relationship changed from that of an acquaintance to very close friends. They would talk almost every day. He would go on telling her about his life. How he had built a million dollar business. How unfortunate he had been in his personal life. She would listen patiently.

She met him twice during two workshops on financial management. Tariq had invited her many times but somehow they had never been able to meet in the real world.

Tariq was a short squarely built man. But there was an air of personality that was undeniably magnetic. His well-articulated deep voice and the twinkling smile in his eyes were enough to make women swoon over him. He was witty and had a sense of humour that made him very attractive. He had sharp twinkling eyes but something told Farzana that he was a sad man, hiding behind his witty and jovial nature.

Their professional relationship turned into friendship.

Tariq would tell her details of the problems he faced in life and ask her to pray for him. Farzana became emotionally attached to him as a friend and would pray for him religiously every day.

Four months passed. One day they were chatting lightly and having fun in an online conversation on Messenger. Suddenly, Tariq got irritated and muted the Messenger box. She had never faced anything like this before. She felt insulted. She called and urged him to unmute, but he was reluctant.

A week later Farzana sent Tariq birthday wishes on his phone.

He called her and apologised. He told her he was very sick that day and couldn’t control his anger and, hence, had muted her.

Life became normal. Months passed. Farzana would wait for him to call or message her. When he called he would go on talking about his problems, his life and sometimes even flirt with her. Farzana knew he was just having fun. She would ask him to be serious and then again they would have the normal conversations.  

She never called him because he was a busy person and he would remain sick for days too. Sometimes Farzana had doubts that he was lying to her.

“Why? We are not romantically involved. We are just friends so why does he lie to me?” she would ponder.

*

She was getting ready to meet Tariq today. He had invited her for a candle light dinner in one of the fanciest restaurants ‘Rose La France’. This was the first friendly meeting with him. Farzana wore a pink chiffon blouse and saree. The white pearl necklace set with earrings and bangles were a perfect match: simple, yet elegant.  As she looked in the mirror, a smile curled up on her face. The reflection of a tall fair woman with an athletic supple and strong physique with a pair of hazel coloured eyes and thick black eyelashes stared back. She brushed her shoulder length wavy auburn hair. She was an attractive woman in her 30s. She was aware of the fact that her presence, anywhere, made quite a few heads turn.

Tariq picked her from her home and they drove to the restaurant. Somehow Farzana felt very conscious of herself as Tariq smiled at her.

“You look ravishing.”

“Thank you,” she smiled.

“Is it happening? Is he falling in love with me?” Farzana was quiet for a while.

Farzana wanted to change the topic, “You can recite so well. Please recite the poem you were reciting on that day over the phone.”

“First you have to kiss me,” Tariq said mischievously.

Farzana burst into laughter. She couldn’t stop laughing.

Tariq looked intently at her.  

*

“Why do you text? Don’t text me.” suddenly Tariq fumed one day.

Click!No sound on the other end. Farzana called every other day to check but the calls would only show ‘calling’, no ‘ringing’ sign. The messages she sent also didn’t pass through.

After trying a few days she realised he had blocked her everywhere without any reason that she could think of. She would cry long nights. No one knew that she was suffering inwardly as she would act totally normal in front of her family.

Farzana knew that Tariq was the only child and couldn’t control his emotions, but deep down he was a compassionate man. He always made amends so sweetly and genuinely that it was impossible to resist.

*

Tariq loved the way Farzana talked. The smile on her lips and twinkle of her eyes somehow vibrated through the calls. He could visualise the innocent smile on her happy face talking with fervour. She would also listen to him talk patiently for hours.

“Oh Lord I am in love with this angel!” The moment it popped in his head, he felt his nerves playing havoc in his mind. He cut off the line. He blocked every single thing: Telephone, Facebook, WhatsApp and Viber.

“No, I cannot destroy her life. She is such a kind soul. I am not suitable for her. I am a devil, and she is an angel. What if I propose her and get married? What then?” He kept rambling, “I am sick and she will suffer seeing my illness. I cannot let anything sadden her.”

Tariq had a very traumatic childhood. His father was an alcoholic and mother was on drugs. Almost each day they would have fights. The fights did not end just in verbal abuse but would turn into physical scuffles.

He lived in terror of such violence as sometimes he would also become the victim.

His father would point at him and say: “Ah. This bastard! Who is his father? Tell me now or I will kill him.”

His mom would just sit there and keep laughing and say. “Why? aren’t you man enough to have a child of your own?”

His father would then push away Tariq and start kicking his mother.

One day Tariq’s grandparents came and took him away. That was the turning point for him. He had a loving aunt who started looking after him. Slowly his life became more meaningful. He started to have great results at school.Soon he got involved in sports. The confidence in him attracted the attention of his teachers and they started mentoring him for inter school competitions.

Success followed him everywhere. It was as if he was with vengeance erasing his past life and pouring the best that he had into his present. Rather than being defeated by the harsh childhood he had had, he became adamant to succeed. But the trauma remained with him. Often he would have panic attacks and it was difficult to calm him down.

On top of that he was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder on his 39th birthday. Occasionally, he would become violent and would hurl abuses at anyone who came in contact with him. It seemed as if his parents’ demons overpowered him during those times. He seldom remembered what he had done. He was an informed man and knew the consequences and symptoms of this disease.

As he had suffered in his childhood, he didn’t want anyone to be hurt by his behaviour. So he asked his caretaker to tell him everything that happened during those attacks. Later when he regained sanity, he would beg forgiveness in such a gentle way that no one could stay angry with him.

Though he was a famous and moneyed man, his compassionate nature earned him respect from everyone who came in contact with him.

*

For some days she had been having stomach aches. She saw a doctor and had to do some tests.

“You have appendicitis and need surgery,” the doctor informed.

“If something goes wrong and I die?” she mused.

She knew it involved a major surgery. Though fatality was rare but it could happen.

She didn’t want to leave the world with the regret of not having talked with Tariq. So she contacted Tariq’s friend, told him about her surgery and requested him to tell Tariq to call.

That evening Tariq called. He was very rude with her and threatened that he would not unblock her. She pleaded that she wanted just to talk normally with him before the surgery. She wanted to be mentally strong and prepared. She just wanted him to be friends again. He cut off the line.

The next evening Farzana called him. He had unblocked her. They talked for an hour. Farzana disclosed to him about the surgery next morning. The call ended on a friendly note of wishes and prayers.

The next morning, as Farzana was getting ready, he called her and wished her. These small little gestures made him irresistibly charming.

The surgery was successful.

Days passed. Farzana was happy. Sometimes in the mornings Farzana would see that Tariq had called her at night, knowing fully well that she did not take calls at night. She would say “sorry” in her texts.

“Has he fallen in love?” She would muse.

Another evening he called and told her that he was sick. Farzana was concerned.

“You know I have been praying the whole night for your…”

Stop! She was cut short in the middle of her sentence.

“You know what? This is why I don’t want to talk to you. If only you had some wisdom, then you would not have raised that issue. I am going to block you; I am going to sever all ties with you. Bye!”

*

Tariq knew that Farzana had developed a soft corner for him over time. He had fallen madly in love with her. She was there all the time in his heart.Whatever he did he could not get her out of his head. Her gentle sweet smile was like a magnet and oh her eyes! Those had so much innocence and concern that they were irresistible. He had fallen madly in love with her.

He knew that if she saw his condition when he had those panic attacks, she would not be able to bear it. She was too gentle. She would be heartbroken for him and he could not let that happen.

He would call her but somehow it was so painful not to be with her that he would become rude and cut the line off. There was an unbearable silence as Farzana sat dumbfounded. She couldn’t say a word.

Suddenly all emotions dried up. She knew that Tariq was a self-made man. Though soft at heart, it had made him proud and egoistic too. But it did not give him the right to be so discourteous and ungrateful towards her. He knew fully well that she wished him well unconditionally and his welfare had always been a priority for her. 

“This is the end,” she muttered. “I have been supportive of him all through, prayed for him every day. Yet, he treats me like trash. He knows that I care for him too much. Perhaps, this is why he has taken me for granted.”

The thought of abandoning him suddenly made her realise that she was in love with him. It would be unbearable for her to part with him. 

She couldn’t take it anymore. “I have been sympathetic all through but there’s a limit to being compassionate. He has his tantrums, but I am also human. I have my pride.”

In her heart she knew that she loved him. But there was no hope for this love to materialise. So she needed to leave him before she did anything irrational.

Her decision was final.

She decided to go back to the USA. She knew if he was ever alone and needed her, she would come back to help him; give him company in his old age. But right now she needed to leave.

“Your ticket Madam.”

“Oh, sorry,” Farzana replied unmindfully. She showed the ticket and passport to the immigration officer.

Leaving Tariq without telling him was painful. She couldn’t hold back her tears. The man behind the counter looked concerned. Farzana gave him a reassuring smile and wiped away her tears confidently.

She felt a heavy stone lifted away from her chest. Too much neglect and verbal abuse had made her strong. She was free now.

“Thank you,” she smiled and waved. “Have a wonderful day!”

As she walked towards the shuttle bus, she felt the warmth of the sun on her face. Everything around her wore a brighter look. She was ready to face the world: alone but stronger. The needle pricked her heart and she flinched in pain.

“Is he thinking about me and in pain?”

Whenever Tariq needed her she had this feeling inside.

“It can’t be!” Her pace slowed down.  

Tariq stood behind the glass looking at the girl whom he loved with all his heart. He prayed silently. Teardrops rolled down his cheek for the first time

She would never know…

.

Tasneem Hossain is a multilingual poet, op-ed, columnist, fiction writer, translator and trainer. Her writings have appeared in different countries. She has authored two poetry books and a book of prose.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Contents

Borderless, November 2022

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

We did it! … Announcing our first anthology … Monalisa No Longer Smiles… Click here to read.

Conversations

Suchen Christine Lim, an iconic writer from Singapore in conversation about her latest book, Dearest Intimate. Click here to read.

Blazing trails, as well as retracing the footsteps of great explorers, Christopher Winnan, a travel writer, delves into the past, and gazes into the future while conversing with Keith Lyons. Click here to read.

Translations

Rows of Betelnut Trees by My Window by Nazrul has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

A Day in the Life of the Pink Man is a story by Shankhadeep Bhattacharya, translated from Bengali by Rituparna Mukherjee. Click here to read.

The Clay Toys and The Two Boys is a story by Haneef Shareef, translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Saturday Afternoon is a poem by Ihlwha Choi, translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.

Tagore’s poem, Tomar Shonkho Dhulay Porey (your conch lies in the dust), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty as The Conch Calls. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read

Jared Carter, Asad Latif, Rhys Hughes, Alpana, Mimi Bordeaux, Saranyan BV, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Quratulain Qureshi, Jim Bellamy, Sourav Sengupta, Ron Pickett, Davis Varghese, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Jonathan Chan, Terry Trowbridge, Amrita Sharma, George Freek, Gayatri Majumdar, Michael R Burch

Poets, Poetry and Rhys Hughes

In Infinite Tiffin, Rhys Hughes gives an unusual short story centring around food and hunger. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

The Scream & Me

Prithvijeet Sinha writes of how Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, impacts him. Click here to read.

A Fine Sunset

Mike Smith travels with a book to a Scottish beach and walks in the footsteps of a well-know novelist. Click here to read.

The Death of a Doctor

Ravi Shankar mourns the loss of a friend and muses on mortality in his experience. Click here to read.

My Contagious Birthday Party

Meredith Stephens writes of her experience of Covid. Click here to read.

Dim Memories of the Festival of Lights

Farouk Gulsara takes a nostalgic trip to Deepavali celebrations in Malaysia. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Strumming Me Softly with His Guitar…, Devraj Singh Kalsi talks of his friends’s adventure with the guitar. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Therese Schumacher and Nagayoshi Nagai: A Love Story, Suzanne Kamata introduces us to one of the first German women married to a Japanese scientist and their love story. Click here to read.

Essays

My Favourite Book by Fakrul Alam

The essay is a journey into Fakrul Alam’s evolution as a translator. Click here to read.

The Ultimate Genius of Kishore Kumar

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, an eminent film critic, writes on the legend of Kishore Kumar. Click here to read.

T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land: Finding Hope in Darkness

Dan Meloche muses on the century-old poem and its current relevance. Click here to read.

The Observant Immigrant

In Piano Board Keys, Candice Louisa Daquin talks of biracial issues. Click here to read.

Stories

The Funeral Attendee

Ravi Prakash shares the story of the life of a migrant in rural India. Click here to read.

A Letter I can Never Post

Monisha Raman unravels the past in a short narrative using the epistolary technique. Click here to read.

Red Moss at the Abbey of Saint Pons

Paul Mirabile takes us to St Pons Abbey in France in the fifteenth century. Click here to read.

You have lost your son!

Farhanaz Rabbani gives a light story with a twist that shuttles between Dhaka and Noakhali. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An Excerpt from Manoranjan Byapari’s How I Became a Writer: An Autobiography of a Dalit, translated from Bengali by Anurima Chanda. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems by Afsar Mohammad, translated from Telugu by Afsar Mohammad & Shamala Gallagher. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Reba Som has reviewed Aruna Chakravarti’s Through the Looking Glass: Stories. Click here to read.

Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises. Click here to read.

Basudhara Roy has reviewed Afsar Mohammad’s Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems, translated from Telugu by Afsar Mohammad and Shamala Gallagher. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Rahul Ramagundam’s The Life and Times of George Fernandes. Click here to read.

Borderless Journal Anthology

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Categories
Essay

My Favourite Book by Fakrul Alam

Professor Fakrul Alam

My favourite book? Over the years, I have had many favourite books, and have been totally captivated by at least one of them at any one period of time. Indeed, once I began to take literature in English seriously, I was completely swept away by one book or the other that I came across at the University of Dhaka B. A. (Hons.) and M. A. English department syllabuses year after year. In my first year as an undergraduate, for instance, I read D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913)compulsively, finding in its protagonist Paul Morel’s growing up into a young man’s storyline parallels with mine—although he was a miner’s son in Nottingham in the early twentieth century and I a boy growing up in Dhaka in the 1950s and 60s and the son of middle-class parents. A couple of years later, it was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice(1813), for the story of the Bingley girls and their marriage encounters sounded familiar to me, for I too had four sisters whose marriages had become central to my parents’ thinking in all kinds of ways. And in my M. A. I read a book which harpooned me fully for many a decade—this was Melville’s Moby Dick (1851)—a whale of a book, I’m sure many of you in the virtual audience will agree. In all three cases, I read not only the novels I mentioned but almost everything by Lawrence, Austen and Melville I came across. Indeed, Melville’s fiction became the subject of my M. A. dissertation at Simon Fraser University.

But in the 1990s, I began to pay attention to Bangla writing seriously —something I had neglected for long, thanks first to an English medium education exclusively geared to the “O” levels that scanted our own literature and then my specialisation in literature in English afterwards. I began to read Bangla poetry intensively for the first time in this decade, although I had read some fiction in the language over the years. And it was sometime in the middle of the 1990s that I came across Jibanananda Das’s verse in an edition of his selected poems by the Bangladeshi poet-critic Abdul Mannan Syed. I would like to stress that this poet was born in 1899 in Borishal, a very green district crisscrossed by innumerable rivers all heading ultimately for the nearby Bay of Bengal; he died in what seemed to be an accidental death in Kolkata in the mid-1950s. Das’s verse possessed me completely, leaving me, who had till then read only some Bangla poetry but had concentrated mostly in fiction and non-fictional prose in English, with the urge to translate his verse into English. For the next three years, I kept going back to Das’s poems for their beauty, for the way they immortalised in verse the beauty of Bengal, and for the way they made me the poet’s intimate, for it is only when one translates intensely, all caught up in the source text, that one comes closest to the mind speech as well as the deep emotional life of the poet.

Having translated Jibanananda Das—surely the greatest modern Bengali poet—I felt I had to try to translate Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry—the greatest poet and literary personality Bengal has produced. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s, I had only paid sustained attention to poetry, fictional and nonfictional prose and plays in English, how could I have escaped Tagore then? He was everywhere in the Dhaka I experienced and very much part of the mindscape of us Bangladeshis as we moved towards becoming citizens of Bangladesh. His work was championed in the media; his songs were sung in events such as the Bangla new year festivities in mid-April; cultural events everywhere spurred by nationalism highlighted him in one way or the other. Besides, my father was addicted to Rabindranath’s songs and listened to him on the radio whenever he could, making us share his delight in the melodies then. My mother, for her part, quoted him all the time to give her children a sense of what we should be emulating and where we were going wrong.

In other words, Rabindranath was very much part of my consciousness, although I had occluded him till now. As I began to read him in the turn of the decade after translating Jibanananda, I felt I had to read as much of his works as I could. Inevitably, I began to translate many of his poems. By the time his sesquicentenary came up in 2011, I was invited to co-edit an anthology of his works and that led to the extensive reading of the myriad-minded writer’ work and increasing familiarity with this wonderful personality as well as writer.

And this is how I came to my favourite book of the last decade or so—Tagore’s Gitabitan. It is a book that is always on my study cum desktop computer table’s shelf over ten years now. It is something I resort to every time I listen to a Rabindranath song on YouTube in my desktop’s audio system. Sung melodiously and passionately by a favourite singer, a song by Tagore so allures me into rendering its spirit in another language that I feel I have to come as close to it as possible by translating it to the best of my ability. This means not only listening to the song again and again but also reading it on the printed page repeatedly, word by word, line by line, and stanza by stanza, time after time, till I feel I have been able to capture every aspect of it nuanced by Tagore by blending the tune and the song lyric as well as I could in the English language. In the end, of course, I fail to do so after a point, but the fascination of what is so appealing when heard, even if in the last analysis the task is an impossible one, induces me to render it into an alien language system after repeated readings and attempts to come up with a version that is close to the original in every way. I hope thereby to come to the heart of the song and am content to spend an hour or so on a few lines so that I can make its meaning clear to myself and then to others.                

Truly, there is a magical quality in the songs collected in my favorite book of this time—Tagore’s Gitabitan. It is a book that has also kindled the imagination of quite a few people—singers, musicians and translators— over eighty years now, making them represent the song-lyrics either as songs to be sung or as translations meant for foreign and even Bengal language speakers who might otherwise listen to a song swept away by the tune and opening lines without bothering with the later lines or making no attempt to understand its content.  The net result at the end of a few hours spent first reading many of the song closely, then reading my own translation again and again, is the satisfaction that I have been able to capture its essence in English through my translations. After all, and as Tagore himself has said, “the essence of a song is universal, even if its dress is local and national” (77). Why should I as a translator then not attempt to translate his songs for the world at large as well as myself even if their loveliness is uncatchable in the last analysis? He himself had led the way, and had learnt lessons along the process that were worth considering for later translators. I am hoping to bring out my own collection of translations of 350 plus songs by Tagore by the beginning of next year.

Let me point out that the title Tagore gave to the volume indicates that Gitabitan is meant to invite readers and musical devotees of the poet-composers to his “garden of songs.”  In all, the volume contains over 2,300 songs, nearly 1800 of whose tunes can be found in the musician-poet’s Swarabitan with their musical notations. In fact, there are sites now that you can google and access where you can find the Bengali words, some English translations, and notations, and even brief histories of the origins of the most commonly heard songs.

Let me point out too that Gitabitan itself is divided into six sections—songs of devotion, love, the six seasons of Bengal, patriotic songs, songs for festive and miscellaneous occasions, songs written for his plays and other publications. In their final form, the Gitabitan was published in 1941—the year the poet died. By now it has been reprinted, with new inclusions from scattered sources, innumerable times.

To conclude, why is Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitabitan my favourite book? He had himself said to Bengalis in 1939, “You can forget me, but how can you forget my songs?” Tagore’s collection of songs connects me to him endlessly, becoming a way of linking me as well with the universe and the Supreme Being and even my departed parents. They stir my patriotic side and make me one with the seasons of my country and its landscape and whatever is still romantic in me. And as I head towards the Great Unknown, they console me that there are possibilities of communion after we depart from this world as well!   

Fakrul Alam is Supernumerary Professor of English at the University of Dhaka

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Categories
Stories

You have Lost your Son!

By Farhanaz Rabbani

“Jethi Maa[1]..you have lost your son! He will never come back home!”

With these words, Kalam entered the old hut where his Jethi Maa was cooking lunch for her family. Having lost her husband at a very young age and with no financial support of her own, Chand Banu had to let her elder son stay as a jaigir[2]  in faraway homes so that he could continue his studies. Once he got admitted to Jagannath College in Dhaka, the whole village was elated. Habib would go to the big city Dhaka to do his ISC [3]! Habib, the eldest son of the family was always a bright student. His local schoolteachers wondered at his intelligence and diligence. Coming from a very poor family, Habib never gave up on his dreams. After his father’s death, the additional burden of looking after his mother and siblings was thrust upon him when he was only in Class 4[4]. He used to sell peanuts when he was not at school. Never averse from taking in new challenges, Habib did all kinds of manual jobs from his childhood — some of which would shock some of his colleagues much later in his life.

In Dhaka, he was struggling to find a place to stay. He needed to find a place soon or else he would jeopardise his studies. A family finally agreed to keep him as a jaigir. They liked the quiet and humble boy who was full of dreams and ambitions of his own. As the days went by, they began to appreciate the intelligent young man and decided to let him tutor their children at home. Later Habib would recount how the mistress of the household would force him to eat more and to have milk everyday so that he could study well.  Gradually they embraced him as a member of the family and began to see him as a prospective son-in-law for one of their daughters. Habib of course had no inkling about their secret plans. He was too intent on earning his keep and focusing on studies. Every month he used to send the extra money he earned from his private tuition classes to his mother. His goal was to sit for the ISC exams.

On a pleasant spring day, when Kalam informed his Jeti Maa that he was going to Dhaka on an errand, he took Habib’s address. Not knowing how her son was doing, his Jeti Maa held his hands and tearfully told him to see how her beloved son was doing.

Reaching Dhaka, it took a few days for Kalam to sort out his affairs. Finally, after three or four days, he went to meet Habib. When he knocked on the front gate of the house, a young girl opened it. As soon as she heard that he was from Habib’s village, she let him in and took him to Habib’s room. A tiny little room with a desk and chair at the corner was lit by a hurricane in the mellow evening. Kalam stepped into the room and said “Habibullah! Are you here?”

 Overjoyed with this surprise visit from his cousin, Habib jumped up from his chair and embraced him. It felt as if the whole village of Kafilatoli had come to see him! How he missed his family and friends back home! Taking Kalam’s hands, Habib urged him to sit down on his tiny bed and asked him about his mother, brothers and sisters.

Kalam was happy to see Habib in good health and spirits. But, as he looked at his cousin animatedly describing his experiences as a college student of Dhaka, a strange ominous thought entered his mind. Kalam noticed how the family was taking care of Habib. He was well fed and was treated as a beloved member of the family. And furthermore, he also noticed that there were three young beautiful girls in that family — all students of Habib. It did not take long for Kalam to understand the true motives of the family. Back in those days — in the 1930s and 1940s, it was not unusual for parents to marry off their daughters to well behaved and academic jaigirs. It was generally known that these young boys were destined to shine later in life either as government officers, doctors, academicians or reputed scholars of the country. Many parents successfully married their daughters to these bright young men with the hopes of ensuring the best future for their daughters.

Kalam left for his village early the following morning. Hurrying into his Jeti Maa’s hut, he did not waste any time to beat around the bush.

“Oh Jeti Maa! You have lost your son. He will never come back home again!”

Shocked, Chand Banu dropped the wooden ladle on the terracotta stove and ran towards him. “What do you mean Oh Kalam? What happened to my Hobu?!”

As soon as she heard about the family of three daughters with whom her dear son was staying as a jaigir, her whole body froze. The grim image of her dear son being bewitched by an unknown strange Dhaka family — people who belong to a totally different region – was agonizing to her.

Although she was illiterate, Chand Banu was an extremely astute and wise mother. Despite her poverty, she knew that her Hobu had much more to offer to prospective brides in her village. Her frantic search for a Noakhali girl for her dearest Hobu began. She told Kalam, “Go and find a suitable bride for Hobu—from the nearest villages—so that he never deserts us. We must make sure that he starts his family in his home—in Noakhali!”

Habib’s mother never allowed her adverse financial condition to hold her back in dreaming and aspiring for the best for her children. She knew of a reputed family in Meerganj — the Meer family — who had several eligible daughters. Long before Habib left for Dhaka, Chand Banu had a secret desire to welcome one of the Meer Bari daughters as her daughter-in-law. She had heard that the eldest daughter of the Meer Bari [5] had been married off to a cousin, an educated head teacher of a local High School. The second daughter was next in line.

Chand Banu did not waste any time. She knew that the Meer family valued education more than anything, they would definitely want an educated son-in-law for the other daughters. She summoned her extended family to consult with them on how she could send a proposal to the Meer family. Unfortunately, one of her neighbours informed her that the Meer family had already decided that their second daughter would get married to a rich chilli merchant’s son of the same region. They were extremely wealthy and boasted several warehouses all over Meerganj and an impressive three floor ‘paka[6]’ house in the region. How could Chand Banu compete with them?

Imbued with an immense fear of losing her son to the strange city of Dhaka, Chand Banu decided to take a huge risk. She sent a representative of the family, Selim Miah, an elderly neighbour, who was a mutual friend of both the Meers and her family.

The Meer Bari, as it was known and is still known today, was one of the most reputed families of the region. They were one of the few families who had acres of land, ponds, a huge mansion and dozens of families working for them all throughout the region. They had several silos or warehouses to store the rice harvested from all their fields!

On a warm and humid summer morning, Meer Saheb was sitting at the verandah watching his men drawing in fishing nets with catch from the large pond behind his home.  When he stepped onto the verandah, Selim Miah found him in a good mood, because his second daughter was due to get married the following day. Greeting each other warmly, the two men sat down to have a friendly conversation of fishing and farming in general.  Meer Saheb was especially in a good mood. After a few furtive glances towards Meer Saheb, Selim Miah finally mustered up the courage to convey Chand Banu’s message to him. Meer Saheb turned towards Selim Miah and looked intently into his eyes.

The following day, the chilli merchant and his son came to Meer Bari with twenty other members of his family. The whole mansion was decorated to the tees and the groom was looking exquisitely handsome in his satin white sherwani[7] and silk turban. As the guests arrived, the ladies of the household quickly ran inside and allowed the men to greet them. The very tall Meer Saheb, elegantly dressed in an off-white punjabi, payjama and white tupi[8], stood in front of the guests. Accompanied by the senior members of the family, Meer Saheb, requested that the guests be seated. After they had all settled in, Meer Saheb took a deep breath, and apologised to the chilli Merchant.  Bewildered, the groom and his father looked inquisitively at Meer Saheb. Then the news was given to them…the news of Meer Bari’s second daughter getting married to Habibullah of Kafilatoli village just the night before!

A few miles away, Chand Banu was rigorously fanning her terracotta stove so that the flames could cook the meat quickly. She did not have much time left. She finished sweeping the yard earlier. Her eldest daughter was in charge of cleaning the only two rooms of her dilapidated mud hut. The local boys and girls were making handmade streamers out of cheap coloured paper to welcome the new guest.

Chand Banu’s daughter-in-law was finally coming. Her dear Hobu’s bou[9] was coming!

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Glossary

[1] Father’s elder brother’s wife – aunt. Translation from Bengali

[2] Meritorious young men from rural regions staying with a host family in the city

[3] Intermediate of Science

[4] Fourth grade at school

[5] House or family home

[6] Made with cement and bricks

[7] Long coat

[8] Punjab …tupi: Kurta…Cap

[9] Wife

Farhanaz Rabbani loves to chronicle interesting stories and events that happen around her.  She is an avid listener.

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