Suraiya’s hands were almost numb. She let the pieces of frozen fish fall into the bowl of water and brought her hands up to her face—she could see tiny cuts on the tips of her fingers from the sharp frozen fish bones. She shook the water off her fingers and turned on the tap, letting the warm water flow over the fish. The maid called out from behind, “Amma, why are you fiddling in water? Your joints will hurt again.” Suraiya dried her hands and said, “I’ve separated the pieces as much as I could, they were absolutely frozen together. Let the water run for a minute, okay?” Suraiya left the kitchen and went into the veranda. She sat in the old wicker armchair and picked up her knitting. Her fingers hurt from the tiny cuts, her blood returning to the tips as she moved the tips of size eight needles, her five centimetre rib pattern almost done. Suraiya was in her late fifties, a widow. She lived in this second floor flat in Mohammadpur, a sprawling congested suburb of Dhaka. Theirs was one of the many cheaply painted brick houses, sometimes three storied, sometimes four, sometimes three and half, depending on when the landlord ran out of money. They lived in a rented flat, in a building shaped like the last remaining piece of a birthday cake—not really a square, not really a rectangle--the perfectly square windows trying not to spill out of the trapezium walls. Their landlord lived downstairs; the man was Suraiya’s husband’s colleague from the Revenue Department. The rent was low and they had full use of the roof. Within these low ceilings, Suraiya lived with her son, Rafique, his wife Beena, their 7 year old son Babu and Suraiya’s daughter Laboni. Rafique was a radiologist at Sir Salimullah Medical College Hospital. Beena worked as a personal assistant at the Department of Environment. Babu has just started school and Laboni was at university, third year, sociology. It was late August; it had been raining earlier in the afternoon. The rain had stopped, leaving only puddles of dirty water and a chorus of frogs. Laboni came down the stairs from the roof, her long hair twisted in a red gamcha, one arm holding an empty bucket. Her mother looked up at her and asked, “What’s the matter? Why did you take a shower so late?” -“Oh I took a shower in the morning, but on the way home my rickshaw hit a puddle and I got mud all over my feet. This greasy mud, makes you feel so dirty, na?” Her mother was listening to her, but didn’t respond. Not that her mother went out of the house much. Laboni continued, “Achcha, did you know? The new maid? Saleha?” -“What about Saleha?” -“Yes, remarkable life, Amma, you wouldn’t believe!” Her mother looked up and said, “Oh?” -“Yes, I was just talking to her on the roof. Did you know that she was married? She doesn’t look it, na, Amma?” Suraiya thought Saleha was quite likely to be married, but she didn’t interrupt Laboni. -“Do you know what she told me? Listen to this, na, Amma?” -“Yes, listening.” She said, while she checked her Purl stitches. -“Saleha, got married when she was about 13—your typical case. Her husband was a lot older and was into all sorts of debts, she wouldn’t say how exactly, but I think he drank or something. Anyway, so her husband owed the money lender fourteen thousand taka. This man trades in corrugated sheets, so he’s pretty well off.” -“I thought you said he’s in debt.” -“Arrey na, not her husband, the moneylender. So one day, the money lender fellow caught hold of her and said that if she came with him, then he would give her husband more time to repay him. So after pestering her for some time, he got her. And he gave her no good husband the three months that he was begging for anyway. So after this, the money lender man will not leave Saleha alone and soon enough, things got out.” -“What, she had a child?” -“Uff, Amma!” Laboni laughed, the climax of her story now diluted considerably, “No, word got out about that this man was exploiting her this way. But of course, the villagers didn’t see it that way, na? Her husband beat her up, called her a prostitute. She went to the money lender for help but he was no help. By now the whole village was against her, so she went away to her brother’s house. And even he wouldn’t keep her! Can you imagine Ammu? Not even the brother!” -“Well, she had sold her body, how was the brother supposed to cover that up?” -“Uff, Amma!” Laboni was irritated, “Don’t you think he owed her some kind of justice? Some kind of protection?” Suraiya laid out the woollen sleeve on her lap and looked down at, waiting for this conversation to finish. She didn’t like the word “prostitute” being thrown about like this. Laboni went on, “Well, then it was her sister in law, who sent her off to Dhaka, because apparently these bastard men in her father’s village—even they were calling her a prostitute and disrespecting her. So she came away to Dhaka and got a job at a garments factory. She didn’t say, bechari is too ashamed, but I bet the men in her village wanted to harass her, don’t you think, Amma? And then she gave up the job at the factory—do you know why?” Suraiya didn’t answer. -“Because the landlord at her shanty threw out unmarried working women because they are polluted! Can you imagine Amma, how beastly men can be to these helpless girls? I’m so glad you’ve kept her, really.” Laboni got up, satisfied with sharing this story. She unwrapped her gamcha and hung it out to dry on the clothes line. “What’s for dinner, Amma?” -“Hilsa fish.” Suraiya said. -“Oh good. Do you know, Amma, the other day I had fresh hilsa in mustard sauce?” Suraiya didn’t even ask where her daughter had eaten it. Their old maid, Farash’s mother, came in with her tea and said to Laboni, “Eat it when you still can, apa. The one tonight was brought frozen from the markets. Your poor mother almost caught a cold pulling the frozen pieces apart—didn’t you Amma? I’ve let the water run for so long, but the fish is still frozen, the bones are harder than ice!” Laboni and Farash’s mother left the veranda. Suraiya doubled up her knitting speed as the light faded. In a while, Saleha came downstairs from the roof, the bare skin on her shoulder wet from a bath. She asked Suraiya if the lights needed to be switched on. She watched Saleha’s back, as the girl walked towards the kitchen. She was healthier than most garments workers. Suraiya set her knitting aside. Why was she bathing on the roof? Why at dusk, so near Maghreb prayer time? When Suraiya first got married to Laboni’s father, she moved in with them at their house in Azimpore. It was a housing colony built for families of teachers from Government schools. Thirty five years ago the area held a lot less people than it does today, but there weren’t as many street lights and every family had only so many bulb sockets allocated to them. In that dimly lit household, Suraiya was the only female. She lived with her husband, his two brothers and her father in law. She had a mother in law, but she hadn’t come to their wedding. She left for her father’s house a long time back and kept no contact with her husband. Her younger brother in law had let slip that their father had brought home a second wife, who had died soon, apparently of typhoid. But everybody in their mother’s side of the family said that the wife was from the beshshapara of Old Dhaka and that she wasn’t his wife at all and that she’d died of some dirty disease and that Suraiya had better wash the sheets in her father in law’s room with hot water and soda. She was petrified. She would not come in front of her father in law. Every morning, she would feel nauseous when she heard his plastic shoes drag along the cement floor of the veranda. One two three. Four five six. He would walk up and down the veranda six times every morning, his lungi bunched up in his fist, his body smelling of sweet hair oil. People from her mother’s house would tell her about the second wife, her vain and unnecessary laughter that could not have come from the manners of a girl of highly moral upbringing. She wore coloured saris with puffed sleeved blouses and her petticoats were lined with satin ribbons bought from the English shops in Calcutta. And she had come into this grey ground floor flat with those fancy petticoats. Now what use would a girl of sound morals have for satin piping in her undergarments, Suraiya’s aunts asked her. They had only a part-time maid then, an elderly woman, who had been coming to them since before her mother in law left their house. Suraiya made sure his sheets were washed separately from that of the rest of the family. Her maid laughed and said, “It will be of no use, bou. He is up to no good, don’t you know?” Suraiya began to suspect the maid of stealing the washing soda—why were the sheets so grey? Then the fights started between her youngest brother in law and his father. Yusuf wanted to marry Mukta, a hindu girl he had met at university. Rasheed refused to speak to their father on his behalf about it. |
