“The Refugee” is a story of a Bangladeshi refugee in India | Publisher: Black Eagle Books, Dublin, USA (2023)
Available in “International Kolkata Book Fair: Boi Mela” : Stall 645 (near gate no. 9), Table no. 144 – Kolkata Shobdohorin
Paperback (Rs. 250.00 / $14.00)
Kindle (Rs. 99.00 / $1.00) and Kindle Unlimited
60 years ago, thousands of people lost their lives in the riot in East Pakistan. Gunen Sarkar escapes to India with his family. On the way, he is separated from his wife, son, and one-year-old daughter in a forest. In India, he faces new challenges because of the new rules set by the Government. Will he be put in a detention camp? Will he ever find his family?
Sample Chapter
1
1964
Every year in December, after the harvest had been gathered, the Hindu peasants of Munsiganj used to celebrate nabanna. At nabanna, all the members of the Hindu families were invited to Gunen’s house.
To help Meghna, Gunen’s wife, some women busied themselves with cleaning up with bamboo brooms. Some carried water from the pond while some mopped the courtyard and the floors of the houses. Drinking water was brought from the well and tanks were filled. The women, who were adept at dancing and singing, rehearsed in the outhouse, shutting the doors and windows so that none could disturb them. Two women, Gunen addressed as kaki-ma (auntie), engaged admiration for drawing motif in the courtyard with rice powder coloured in diverse colours.
In Gunen’s house, the nabanna feast had always been better than in other peasants’ houses. No families could break the record Meghna had set. Like in other years, that year too, Meghna’s cakes and rice pudding became a talk, and Gunen was sure it’d linger till next year.
Gunen and Meghna were born and brought up in the two separate villages in the district of Mymensingh, and they spoke the common Bengali dialect of the district. They’d never gone to school and didn’t feel ashamed of admitting that they were illiterate.
Their home comprised two small houses they used for themselves and guests, a kitchen, a cow house, a store house, an outhouse, and a granary. The roofs of all the houses were built with corrugated tin sheets except the roofs of the cow house. The roofs of the cow house were built with grass. Thatched bamboos were used for building the walls of all the houses. In response to necessity, the walls were repaired or replaced after examining the walls’ resistance and presence of termites. Special attention was given to the granary walls. Failing to enter the granary through the wooden door, the big rats made holes in the walls by sitting on the horizontal bamboo bars supporting the structure. They ate a lot of paddies. In response to time and need, all the walls were scrubbed with cow dung.
‘Gobar gorome ghar thanda rakhe aar shite gorom’, Meghna used to say in Bengali dialect of Mymensingh, after scrubbing the walls with cow dung. (‘Cow dung keeps a house cool in summer and warm in winter.’)
Gunen was of medium build, strong and sturdy, and brown-complexioned, his face neither round nor long. He was clean-shaven. Since she’d picked a crust of milk from his moustache, he had never let his moustache work as a filter. As an orphan, he’d been raised at his maternal uncles’ at Pipradanga, six miles from Munsiganj, his village.
Gunen had objected to his marriage at twenty-one. He’d planned to marry after buying eight bighas of land to add to his father’s eight bighas so he could feel comfortable with his property and live like a rich man at Munsiganj. But everything had moved in a reverse direction when he had been forced to see Meghna, a nineteen-year-old piece of beauty. Throwing a sly glance at his maternal uncle, the instant he’d nodded his head and let his smiling eyes negotiate with hers and get locked, his maternal uncle had not wasted a minute to say yes to the proposal to the pleasure of both the families.
Gunen hadn’t taken dowry. But he’d gladly accepted the wooden chest gifted by his father-in-law. They considered the chest their most precious property.
In the first year of their marriage, Gunen and Meghna became parents of a son they named Gyanpada Sarkar Ginu. She again became pregnant when Ginu was two years old.
*
The nabanna feast was over around two hours ago, and all the invitees had left except Taimoor Ali, who hadn’t moved from the chair on the veranda since he’d sat in it. He smoked cigarettes one after another and ogled Meghna, smiling his nasty smile, whenever she came out of the kitchen and went to the main house to put the utensils back in the chest.
‘The courtyard is waiting to be cleaned up, Taimoor. Dusk will fall after an hour. How long will you keep sitting here? I think you’d better go home now,’ Gunen said, looking at the slanting sun.
Taimoor laughed out loud. He lit another cigarette, gave a long drag on it, leaned back in the chair, and propped up his legs against the veranda post in front of him. ‘We’re friends. I’ll forever remember Meghna’s cakes and rice pudding. I won’t go home without eating some more cakes and pudding.’
‘I didn’t invite you.’
‘I’m your dosto. I’ve the right to attend a feast at my dosto’s, uninvited. I’ve the right to sit if I want to.’ Taimoor blew out the smoke and laughed louder than before. ‘Dosto means friend. I told you I’d teach you and Meghna English. Say when I can start.’ He wiped his lips on the backs of his hands and smiled. ‘My bad luck I couldn’t see Meghna before her marriage.’
‘You’re a beast. You’re nothing but a beast. I’ll always call you beast.’
‘How can a kafir call me beast? I’m Chairman Arif Ali’s son. You know that. And you also know people swallow thrice before looking at my eyes. It’s your good luck you’re my dosto.’ Taimoor spat his paan-juice upstream on the side of the veranda and wiped the trickling juice the wind had blown to his cheek. He lifted the chair, dropped it. Then he sat down, lit another cigarette, gave a long drag on it, and the smoke he habitually blew through his protruding lips faintly clouded Gunen’s stare. ‘I’ll set fire to your house if you again call me beast.’ He stared at the glowing point of the cigarette, and then, laughing like a villain, he spat the paan juice on the veranda wall Meghna had scrubbed with raw cow dung early in the morning.
Gunen thoughtfully focused on Taimoor’s atrocity constituting provocation. Taimoor wouldn’t find an escape route, if Gunen erupted like a volcano. Taimoor had ogled Meghna since he’d first seen her. Not caring his warning and request and her severe objections, Taimoor had often looked for chances to talk dirty.
Meghna came out from inside the kitchen, slightly bowed to him, and spliced her hands at her chest. ‘Please leave us to ourselves. We feel disturbed.’
Taimoor stood up and walked over to her, wearing his nasty smile, and then as soon as he touched her cheek, Gunen decided not to allow Taimoor to cross the limits anymore; he’d already crossed the limits beyond tolerance. So anger boiling in his head, as he flew into his room and came back with his dagger, he saw Taimoor laughing and struggling with her trying desperately to prevent his hands from touching her breasts. Not wasting a split second to think if he should attack Taimoor, he let loose his rage Taimoor failed to overcome despite trying hard. Then, before he could strike Taimoor’s right forearm, Taimoor stepped back, and he lowered the dagger, his focus on the blood on Taimoor’s left forearm Taimoor pressed to stop the blood flow. Taimoor wiped the wound with his handkerchief, smelled the blood, and spread the handkerchief to show them the stains. Taimoor looked bewildered, his mouth moving like that of a fish out of water.
‘Meghna will wash this handkerchief,’ Taimoor said when he came back to normal, after a few seconds.
‘I’ll send the dagger into your belly if you delay here even a minute,’ Gunen said, the dagger in his hand at the level of Taimoor’s belly.
Taimoor, the putz, who seemed to have failed to sense Gunen’s disdain raining on his face, snickered, took a currency note from the right side pocket of his kurta, and thrust it into Gunen’s hand. ‘Buy toys for Ginu with this gift of one hundred taka.’
Without a word, Gunen tore the note into pieces and hurled them to the raw cow dung heaped up near the pomegranate tree to scrub the courtyard the next morning.
Taimoor stepped close to Gunen. ‘You bloody son-of-a-kafir. I’ll crush your bones if you fail to stand corrected.’
Throwing an angry look at Taimoor’s contorted face that looked more despicable, Gunen scooped the raw cow dung with his right hand and threw it into Taimoor’s face so hard Taimoor’s face got ignominiously soiled. With a violent jerk of the head, Taimoor gripped Gunen’s neck and, by wrenching his head into a reverse position, gave him the feeling of being strangled. Before Taimoor could succeed in using more violence, Gunen collected whatever strength he could and continued struggling until he could manoeuvre his neck free from Taimoor’s grip. Gunen punched Taimoor’s belly, and Taimoor bent double to retard more punches. Then, the moment Taimoor failed to resist the impact of Gunen’s kicks and looped down on his bottom, Gunen felt Maghna’s hands arrest his from behind and pull him hard back so that Taimoor, torn from Gunen’s grip, stood aloof, defeated.
‘Don’t dare to come to our house again. Next time, I won’t let you return home. You were never my dosto. You are not my dosto. You’re a beast. You’re my enemy. My enemy can never be my dosto,’ Gunen said in a tone of severe warning.
‘If I fail to marry Meghna, I’ll set fire to your house and throw you out of Munsiganj.’ Taimoor smiled his nasty smile.
After Taimoor had stalked out of the compound, with a violent gait, his father’s gift, Meghna poured water on the stains of blood on the veranda and purified the place with raw cow dung from near the pomegranate tree.
*
Meghna sat beside Gunen silently sitting on the bench, leaning his head against the veranda wall. Glancing at the room, where Ginu was sleeping, oblivious to the melodrama in their compound, Gunen looked at Meghna: she looked distant, a coil of fear like a python likely to wake up from its slumber to stir into action to its necessity any moment in her eyes; her deep breathing heaved her chest. She had become more beautiful after Ginu’s birth. He stood up, fingered her unkempt hair before running his fingers over the remains of Taimoor’s blows on his swollen lips and on his face, and thought more fight would’ve given him the real satisfaction he needed to feel his anger melt away.
‘Don’t fear him, Meghna. I’m with you.’ He flopped on the dirt floor of the veranda, the dagger in his hand and his mind floating in the stream of thoughts he had no control over.
Arif Ali considered himself as the most powerful man and abased the Hindus as slaves though they had voted for him. A year ago, he’d married a girl, who was his elder daughter’s age. The Hindus, the victims of bigotry, couldn’t stand united and protest about his biasness and injustice. They remained in constant fear of robbers and thieves. The women couldn’t move freely. They were teased and followed. Like a pack of hyenas, uncertainties haunted the families of beautiful young women and girls and disturbed their sleep. The broken pieces of the Hindu dreams had lain scattered here and there in the village corners. To get rid of the curse of living as Hindus in East Pakistan, they had only one option and that was to leave for India, where he assumed they’d be able to live like humans without fear and subjugation. But next moment when he thought that East Pakistan wasn’t Arif Ali’s father’s country and it belonged to all, he resolved to motivate the Hindus to fight for equal rights, not yielding to injustice.