Arts & Letters Vol 2 Issue 4

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ART Who doesn’t like to be fooled, if the end result is pleasant? In this April issue of Arts & Letters, we are featuring several musicians and prominent personalities whose ‘voices’ transcend media. Look out for their work, spread across the following pages. We hope our April’s treat is a pleasant surprise for those readers looking to be just a tad bit fooled.

Editor Zafar Sobhan Acting Editor Arts & Letters Iffat Nawaz Artist Shazzad H Khan

Shayan Chowdhury Arnob is best known for his music but he also has a degree in Fine Arts from Shantiniketon and doodles regularly. Arnob’s doodles bring forth a sense of whimsical spontaneity and an element of humour.

Saadul Islam’s guitar strings have struck a chord with many, starting from his work with Arnob and Friends and Ajob to his independent compositions. But few have seen the world through Saad’s eyes. Saad’s photographs capture a different side of his psyche and tell intricate stories, with or without soundtracks.

2 ARTS & LET TERS

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LETTER FROM LONDON Ahsan Akbar

Ghost in the Machine

K

now what, guys? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that while it’s only April, the most talked about piece in literary journalism for the year has already been written.

Titled ‘Ghosting,’ it’s a long memoir piece — running to just under 27,000 words — published as the cover story of the 6th March issue of the London Review of Books. Raised some dust, it did.

Scottish author and contributing editor Andrew O’Hagan revealed — for the first time — what it was like to be the ghostwriter for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Julian and WikiLeaks are no strangers to Bangladesh: Back in December 2010, we all thumbed through those juicy US embassy cables re us. My favourite ones, I have to say, revolved around some of the shenanigans of RAB. What is a ghostwriter? A struggling author typing away for some megalomaniac? A poet meeting the demand of some despot’s desire to wax poetic? The overwhelming number of them are professionals.

However, the ghostwriter in this case is no struggling artist. Andrew O’Hagan is an established figure in the literary world; in 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s elite 20 Best of Young British Novelists. Prizes, praise and accolades followed. In the piece, Andrew drew comparisons with Alex Haley (ghosted Malcolm X’s autobiography), Ted Sorensen (JF Kennedy), and HP Lovecraft (Harry Houdini). So in 2011, when the phone rang and he was offered the role by his publisher (Canongate), his interest was piqued. The offer was to ghostwrite the memoir of Julian, who had just signed a contract for a healthy $2.5m, offered collectively by the publishers – Canongate in the UK and Knopf USA, headed by Sonny Mehta.

Vaughn Smith, the founder of the Frontline Club in London, which aims to champion independent journalism by networking with reporters across the globe, was one of Julian’s sureties. Smith had offered his country residence — Ellingham Hall — to Julian and his crew. Mind you, this was the time when there was still a halo hanging over the WikiLeaks founder, with lots of support and celebrity endorsements.

Not surprisingly, in the piece we come across some big names: Alan Rusbridger, Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, the billionaire-financier Matthew Mellon (who choppers onto the front lawn and then sends Savile Row suits for Julian), and many more. Just like Smith, all had either declared their allegiance to him or believed in his work of leaking, among others, US diplomatic traffic cables.

But Julian had other things in mind.

“All memoir is prostitution,” Julian declared to Andrew at the beginning of the project. Defiant, the Scotsman carried on, making earnest attempts to get Julian to focus on the book. But alas, the whole thing fell apart after six incredibly trying months. By then, a lot of the supporters, including Smith, had gone off the genius hacker (third greatest in the world, as per his own assertion) amid rape allegations coming in thick and fast from Sweden.

One aspect that keeps recurring in the piece is the sheer size of Julian’s ego. And his weirdness in the eyes of Andrew: “I made lunch every day and he’d eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate.” Julian not only comes across as a man obsessed with himself (narcissism would be a mild description) but also extremely paranoid and insecure. Julian’s incessant need to lecture everyone on Chomsky and Voltaire hardly endears him to such a company of highly literate men and women. The passage below should suffice to give an idea: ‘A meeting at Ellingham Hall attended by Mehta and others was excruciating. Sonny had to sit for two hours while Julian lectured him about power, corruption, the police state and the truth about publishing.

The editor-in-chief of Knopf said almost nothing.’

At Andrew’s flat, Julian approached the meeting with the publisher Verso bigwigs (Anderson, Ali and Wilmers) with the same attitude. Quelle horreur? Perhaps they saw a bigger potential in him – with WikiLeaks empowered as the undercover platform subversive of American power, dominance and manipulation, as the disruptive agent of transparence and openness. For Andrew, it was clear from the beginning and he puts it so eloquently: ‘Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the United Kingdom, under Thatcher and Blair, those of us who lived through the Troubles and the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the deregulation of the City, and Iraq, believed that exposing secret deals and covert operations would prove a godsend. When WikiLeaks began this process in 2010, it felt, to me anyhow, but also to many others, that this might turn out to be the greatest contribution to democracy since the end of the Cold War.’ Sadly for all of us, Julian kinda blew the last chance saloon.

n Apart from the quality of the writing and the startling content, what’s remarkable about this story, a sort of sub-text not getting much play here in London, is the fact that Andrew chose not to cash in. He was offered ridiculously large sums as advance, only if he co-opted with the book, which Canongate ultimately published later in 2011, in spite of legal threats from Julian, calling it Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography. One is curious: Is it because this behaviour is expected of an author, i.e., a writer shall never compromise integrity? What would have been said had Andrew laughed all the way to the bank?

Andrew has maintained an admirable public silence about it. I saw him on stage with — amongst others — Pankaj Mishra, for the Folio Prize Fiction Festival at the British Library.

This was only after a couple of days of Andrew’s piece being published in the LRB. The topic of discussion was ‘On Context’ and even though the audience was thirsting for it, Andrew never did veer away from the subject matter, to bring in ‘Ghosting,’ maintaining a noble discreetness. n

Ahsan Akbar

is the author of The Devil’s Thumbprint (Bengal Lights Books, 2013), a collection of poems.

Follow this link to read one of the best pieces of nonfiction you’ll come across this year: www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting

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ARTS & LET TERS

Between the language of poetry Sadaf Saaz

Sadaf Saaz is an entrepreneur, activist and writer.

She is co-founder and producer of Hay Festival Dhaka.

countries could be a way to connect as a people. I wished to read out my poem ‘Birangona (Brave Women).’ Why did I feel a need to engage with Pakistanis on this topic? I felt parallels with the Korean comfort women who wanted their voices heard 40 years after their persecution in Word War II, and had demanded an apology from the Japanese government; an acknowledgement of what they went through under the Japanese army.

Our Birangona women, after all these years, finally had the courage to speak out. I owed it to these brave women to make sure their voices and experiences were heard and acknowledged. Poetry, I felt, gave one the license to address this topic in a way that could connect to people’s emotions. Some of the young people attending were perplexed at the emotive topic of a war fought years ago as a first point of communication, though many admitted 1971 was a ‘mistake.’ Some told me it was very bold to have read out such a poem, having feared a small but vocal outcry, which didn’t happen, the packed hall eventually listening attentively to the recitation. For the next few days, students, young academics and writers came to me in support. Many, while visibly moved by the topic, hadn’t realised how deep and raw the scars and wounds remain to this day in Bangladesh. Conversely, many liberal thinking Pakistanis felt the weight of history and responsibility on their shoulders, and the need to apologise for the past came across in many interactions. I found the students open to being aware and acknowledging the past.

This educated, liberal section of Pakistanis, albeit a small, select group, showed warmth and friendship, without the intolerable snobbery or overt racism that I had experienced in the UK many years before, and had come to expect as a matter of course from many Pakistanis who denied what had happened or refused to acknowledge the extent of the atrocities which had taken place. Consequently, being on the ‘right side of the ’71 issue’ had become an unspoken rite of passage for any fruitful engagement with a Pakistani. The positive attitude of those attending the LLF was therefore a welcome surprise.

A fascinating session at the LLF on Afghanistan, with leading political commentators Ahmed Rashid and Vali Nasr, with the former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khair, and former UN ambassador Maleeha Lodhi, was also an eye opener. It starkly brought home the very real fear at the escalating situation of violence and Islamic fundamentalism, imminent because of the stopping of cease fire by the Pakistan Taliban and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the impending elections in Afghanistan, of whose outcome no one was sure. The need for dialogue and solidarity between educated, thinking citizens across South Asia seemed more important than ever, to fight religious extremism, which is a threat to the very fabric of our societies.

It has been said that the post amnesia of a nation where a shattering event has taken place is 50 years. In our 43rd year of independence, maybe it is the right time to be open to dialogue when a section, albeit perhaps only a small privileged section of Pakistanis, are showing a genuine wish to come to terms with their history. An official apology from Pakistan is what we need to continue to demand. As an alternate avenue to political ‘positioning,’ literary festivals seem to be a viable platform for such conversations to start. n

Photo by Amin Rehman

S

o what is the big deal about this new wave of literary festivals sweeping South Asia? Having co-produced Hay Festival Dhaka in November last year, attended the world’s largest free festival (Jaipur Literary Festival) in January, and recently participated in the Kolkata Literary Meet and the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), it does actually seem that these festivals are creating a space for debate and discussion away from ‘politically-stuck’ narratives, in addition to making literature accessible, relevant and engaging, despite the celebrity fanfare and hype surrounding them.

During a discussion on bilingualism in Kolkata, between authors who write in Bangla, English, Hindi, Urdu and some of the other languages of the Indian subcontinent, I felt a stab of regret that this generation didn’t have the wealth of knowing several languages, as was more common in our parents’ generation. I thought about the encompassing canvas of an ancient civilisation, the beauty of our inherent bonds, based on stories of friendship and family ties, and rich cultural diversities with underlying commonalities something easy to feel nostalgic about, despite our turbulent and divisive histories. Understandably, we have not been able to fully avail this heritage due to entrenched realities, yet the interwoven threads connecting us in many ways to our South Asian identity remain. In Kolkata, I felt the undeniable nostalgic interest in Bangladesh, with many eager to point out their ancestral connections — contrasted against the dismissive ‘big brother’ attitude towards Bangladesh, as the ‘poorer, lesser’ neighbour, underlying many Indo-Bangladesh interactions. It seems that we in Bangladesh are at a juncture of being able to avail the richness of a shared culture, while having the confidence, the vigour, the potential and the expectations of a vibrant young nation, which is certainly paving its own way. In Jaipur, even though it felt that sometimes Bangladesh was lumped with the North-East, Nepal and Bhutan, without much thought, a session given over to the reaffirmation of democracy and the importance of freedom of expression, though somewhat predictable, was nevertheless inspiring and invigorating.

Earlier, during Hay Festival Dhaka in 2012, Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani-British novelist, had spoken movingly about the platform created by such festivals: “I can’t think of any event … during my 14 years as a published writer, where I’ve felt greater generosity from the audience, than the session on writing about 1971. It was a reminder also of what can be so valuable about literary festivals – the opportunities to have conversations across borders which everyone recognises as both difficult and necessary.” At Hay Festival Dhaka in November last year, Razi Ahmed, the founder of LLF, mentioned the constructive and sensitive way the panels on 1971 were presented. When he invited me to LLF to read out my poetry, I felt the tradition and love of poetry in both

4 ARTS & LET TERS

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Neville Ferdous Hasan is known for his work in the advertising sector and in acting and music. But Neville has been painting on and off for a decade now. His work with the human body and form stands on its own.

Poonam’s voice has graced our ears since the early 2000s, whether it be covering S.D Burman or Bhupen Hazarika or singing one of her own creations. But her artistic voice reaches beyond music. Her striking self portraits and unique approaches to presenting her thoughts on canvas are capturing the eyes of audiences everywhere.

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ARTS & LET TERS

Meeting Khushwant Singh: January 2008 Khademul Islam

I

Khademul Islam is literary editor, the Dhaka Tribune, presently on a much-deserved sabbatical.

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w a s running late. I was due for an afternoon tea with Veena Sikri, the exIndian High Commissioner to Bangladesh at the India International Centre, after which I was to meet Khushwant Singh at his house. Who, as is well known throughout India, is notoriously finicky about guests arriving and leaving on time. I had been suitably warned by Ajeet Caur, the head of SAARC’s cultural and literary wing: “It was difficult setting it up with him. You go to his house at 7:00, and you leave promptly at 7:30.” Fine with me, I had thought, since I just wanted to see him up close, not badger him with some set of questions.

But I had not accounted for Delhi’s rush-hour traffic, which can get as bad as Dhaka’s. Stuck in a three-wheeler amid blaring horns and stalled cars, my cellphone rang. Which had been generously lent by an event manager for SAARC’s folklore festival (“Aray lay lo yaar, you give back when you finished, na! Only do top up, no?”).

“Yes, Veena, I’m almost there,” I lied into my mobile.

No way was I even close! But thank the good Lord for human lust and avarice, as Khushwant has said over and over again. I leaned across and informed the driver that some extra bucks would be his if he did jaldi quick double time fast fast yaar. He responded with an afterburnerson, crash-and-burn zigzagging sprint that careened down side roads and spun through traffic roundabouts to finally crash past the startled gatekeepers of the very staid India International Centre establishment.

I clambered out wild-eyed to face a broad paan-stained grin, which got broader as I yanked out notes from my wallet and paid without counting.

Jesus, let this bugger loose in the Indy 500, he could wrap it up in his sleep!

After a pleasant chat with Veena, she very kindly dropped me off at Khushwant Singh’s Sujan Singh Park apartment complex, close by the IIC. I thanked her, got out and went inside the building. It was still three minutes to 7:00, and I waited till it was a minute to, then rang the bell.

I stepped inside to a drawing room with high ceilings, into a hum of conversation arising from the several people gathered there. In a corner easy-chair sat Khushwant with a lap robe on his legs. It was a plainly furnished room, with old, beat-up chairs and cushioned wooden sofas.

Simple whitewashed walls, with some cobwebs and mildew stains up in the corners. I guess when you are Khushwant Singh you can live however you wish. His father Sobha Singh, once Delhi’s construction king, had built most of the city that surrounded Lutyen’s Raj centre. Khushwant looked frailer than in his photos, but sharp-eyed. I introduced myself, and he shook hands. “From Bangladesh, yes, Ajeet had told me,” he said, and cordially bade me to sit down. A burly Sikh in a shiny blue suit promptly got up from near him and made way for me. Several bottles of whiskey occupied a side table. He looked at me curiously, and asked how long I had been in Delhi. I told him. His voice was gentle. Adjoining the drawing room was what normally would be a dining room space, but it was empty. “A drink?” Khushwant asked. How do you say no to the Grand Old Man of Delhi? So somebody handed me one, and a lady who said she was Khushwant’s neighbour, an Assamese, came over to sit by me and recount her experiences of working in the Calcutta refugee camps during the 1971 war.

The mention of 1971 perked up Khushwant. “You know,” he said to me, “I went to Bangladesh just after the war to report for The New York Times - in an Indian Air Force transport plane.” I said I had read about his going in his autobiography Truth, Love & A Little Malice, but he had written

little else about Bangladesh there. He shrugged and didn’t say anything.

Bangladesh came in the book in the context of a Khushwant visit to Pakistan and meeting with Tikka Khan, who angrily denied charges of genocide by his forces. Suddenly, though, he turned to me and said that near the end of that stay in Bangladesh he became aware of a change in the public mood about India. During a visit to Shantosh to see Maulana Bhashani, he asked the latter about it. The Maulana told him that the Indian army had taken away even ceiling fans from Bangladesh, and that had soured the public mood. Khushwant said to me “I was simply dumbfounded to hear it from the Maulana’s lips, since after all, very many Indians had laid down their lives to liberate Bangladesh from the Pakistanis. Now ceiling fans?” I looked at him. “I didn’t say anything back to the Maulana,” he responded. But ceiling fans?” he said again, wonderingly, then shrugged and looked away.

It was pleasant in that warm room. People plainly ministered to him, hanging on his words. I was talking with an assistant editor of Outlook magazine I had met at a book launch previously when I became aware that it was getting close to 7:30. I rose to leave, but Khushwant waved me back down on the sofa. “Sit down,” he murmured. “From Bangladesh.

You are a two-Scotch guest. Have one more, and then you have to excuse this buddha, who goes to sleep early.” I sat down again, was handed another drink and began talking with Rahul Singh, Khushwant’s son, who himself is a writer and journalist based in Mumbai.

But what I was really thinking about was the Khushwant shrug and the ‘ceiling fan’ comment. No doubt it had rankled him that Bangladeshis could so quickly forget how much India had aided them in their liberation war. Had I not grown up in Pakistan, amid Sindhis, Pathans, Punjabis, UP migrants and Balochis, his comment and shrug would have passed me by - it had been so subtly understated. Though Khushwant was a committed liberal humanist, I wondered if the experience had reinforced ideas non-Bengali Indians have about excitable, fickle Bengalis. The real South Asia, despite political boundaries, is a collection of ethnic communities bound firmly in other ways, not the least in their collective unconscious about the Other. We Bongs do it too. Very frequently, in a 1971 liberation war story penned by a Bangladeshi, when the Pakistan Army is heading towards a town or neighbourhood, Bengalis run away screaming “Paanjabi aitasay, Paanjabi aitasay.” But there were Baloch and Pathan regiments (not counting our homegrown Razakars), that did equal amounts of murder and rape. But in the construction of our grand liberation war narrative, the ‘Paanjabi’ stands for them all, for all the terror and barbarism of 1971. We South Asians do have an amazing diversity of languages and culture, but we can also be imprisoned within them, and even today it feels odd to think of English as our common linguistic link. And this is where I think that Khushwant’s contribution is immense, in that while his deepest affection is for Urdu poetry, his unselfconscious, uncomplicated, uninhibited English writing, in a stream of books, magazines and columns, daily, weekly and monthly, demystified English, liberated it for all of us. In his hands, English was a language like any other, to be used from writing the history of Sikhs to his wife’s bathroom proclivities, from Indians having sex in train compartments to the horrors of communal violence. He made it declasse, de-Brahminised it. In Khushwant’s world of English you can talk about anything, and not be particularly aware of the language.

“Ilish,” Khushwant Singh asked me, “you guys still getting your ilish?”

I told him that the haul this year had been particularly good. “The last time I was in Bangladesh, Hasna Moudud fed me the finest cooked hilsa fish I’ve ever eaten. It was very tasty.” Where was Hasna now? he asked.

“In London, as far as I know,” I told him. He nodded, but ah, that hilsa! He almost smacked his lips. The buddha (old man), as he likes to call himself, is young in his responses and his conversation. In a recent answer to a question about afterlife, his first words were “That’s bullshit.” I told him that if he ever made it to Bangladesh again, I would get him some ilish, maybe not as tasty, but ...

I had asked him how he now felt. “Still going at 92,” he said, “I’m still writing every day.” True. But now a lot of the material was merely being brought out in his name, such as the latest two from Penguin,

ARTS & LET TERS

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Celebrating Urdu Poetry (which contains his translations of Urdu poetry, something he has done on and off over the years), and The Khushwant Singh Treasury (which is a collection of his favourite prayers, poems and proverbs). The latter typically mixes Shakespeare sonnets with anonymous contributions: The sexual life of the camel Is stranger than anyone thinks In the heat of passion He tries to bugger the Sphinx.

But the Sphinx’s rear orifice Is full of the sand of the Nile Which explains the hump on the camel And the Sphinx’s mysterious smile.

As I finished my second drink, the blue-suited Sikh, evidently on the hunt for yet another interview of the great man, moved in on Khushwant.

But Lady Luck was not with him. With a noticeable scowl, Khushwant said, “Enough now, this buddha needs his rest. So goodnight.” I shook his hand, thanked him for his courtesy, waved at Rahul and got out of the door along with the rest of the crowd.

Should I take a three-wheeler back to the IIC, I asked myself. I shuddered, but not due to the Delhi cold. A brisk walk would do me no harm. Pulling my muffler tighter across my throat, I set off, past the apartment complex gates, onto the footpath, and into the wide, grinning night. n

BOOK NOTES Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer Waqar Ahmed

C

yrus Mistry’s Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, which won this year’s prestigious DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, documents the lives of the untouchable subsection of India’s Parsi community. In so doing, it gives voice to a segregated part of Parsi society not covered by leading (Indian) Zoroastrian writers such as Rohinton Mistry and Thrity Umrigar.

At the outset of the novel, it appears the protagonist, Phiroze Elchidana, will serve as liberator of the khandia corpse-bearing class. The son of a Parsi high priest, he is disowned by his family for marrying the daughter of a khandia. Once he becomes a nussesalar (an exalted, but still banished khandia), he leads his fellow corpse-bearers in the only recorded strike against the Parsi high bureaucracy. Late in the novel, Phiroze tries to persuade his father to bless the burial of a half-Zoroastrian family member of a friend, something not permitted by the religion.

Yet every one of Phiroze’s rebellious steps is met with tragedy. His khandia wife dies by cobra bite not many years after their marriage.

The benefits from his strike are annulled because he foolishly forgets to cement the agreements in writing. And the first signs of rapprochement with his father are extinguished once Phiroze proposes blessing the halfZoroastrian.

Chronicle, originally tabbed to be a documentary, is based on the true story of a Parsi dock worker who falls in love with a khandia, becomes a corpse bearer, and leads a strike against the Parsi Punchayet. Though the novel’s storylines are based on factual events, one senses they were useful in contributing to the larger message: The need for the Parsi community to reform its cultural tenets, many of which, such as the treatment of khandias, are not even rooted in the religion.

The great strength of Mistry’s novel lies in the first hundred pages where descriptions of khandia and temple life carry the reader through the rest of the plot. There is a magnificent scene at the beginning of Chronicle where we find Phiroze carrying a body with his fellow-corpse bearers, through traffic and nationalist protests, to the Towers of Silence where it will decompose and be eaten by vultures. Unique details related to the burial process abound in the novel: “Before modern medicine reserved that right for itself, it was canines that were believed to have an uncanny ability to sniff out the slightest flicker of vitality persisting in a body presumed dead. Hence, not once, but thrice in the course of the funerary ceremonies my Moti is brought before the corpse. Invariably though, after no more than a moment’s hesitation, she wrinkles her snout and looks away.”

If there is a flaw in Chronicle, it is the uneven tone of the writing and, at times, the dialogue. For the most part, Mistry employs a minimalist style that is peppered with appropriate Hindi words. But in certain passages, the prose veers towards academic writing: “Naturally, I could not help being amused by the overblown logic or lack of it in some of these injunctions, which may have had good reason for being enjoined upon primitive pastoral tribes some three thousand or five thousand years ago, but didn’t need to be glorified into obsessive, all-embracing moral codes.”

Mistry’s Anglo-Indian dialogue is crisp at the beginning of the novel, but starts to falter, and the use of American idiomatic expressions (“we corpse bearers stuck to our guns”) and words like “cakewalk” and “desperado” — which don’t have clear equivalents in Hindi or other dialects spoken by the Parsis of India — begin to creep into the prose.

At the conclusion of Chronicle, we learn that modernity is also to blame for some of the inauspicious changes to Zoroastrianism in India. A retired Phiroze laments that high-rises have been erected around the Towers of Silence and vultures, once an integral part of the burial ritual, have become extinct, replaced by solar powered receptors now used to hasten the decomposition of corpses. These are bleak developments which suggest that even if structural reforms were made to “open up” aspects of Zoroastrianism, the thrust of modernity will continue to play its part in transforming the diaspora permanently. n

Waqar Ahmed is currently nearing completion on a novel and a collection of short stories. He grew up in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

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ARTS & LET TERS

Serialized Story

Samira - Part 10 Dravidian or Aryan, Truth or Dare Sharbari Ahmed

Dhaka Log: Five God has the most elegant sense of irony, and Bangladesh is nothing if not ironic. eing an only child had its perks. She never had to share her toys or her mother’s affection. But there had been times she wished for a sibling, someone to confide in, who would fully understand her adolescent angst at her doting, overprotective parents’ rules.

She had nine first-cousins from her mother’s side. Her mother was the youngest of four girls, each of whom had multiple children. Family gatherings were a raucous affair. They were from Chittagong, so everyone spoke at once, always at two octaves higher than necessary. To someone who did not understand the dialect — which was a vast chunk of the planet — it would appear as if everyone was heatedly arguing. When Samira moved to New York and walked through Chinatown the first time, the gaggle of Cantonese voices, yelling, bargaining and shooting the breeze around her reminded her of her mother’s boisterous family. It made her homesick and lonely. Samira always carried loneliness around inside of her.

She was not treated like an outsider, though she looked nothing like anyone in the family. Her mother was pretty, with a wheatish complexion and round, soft face. Samira’s features were sharply attractive. She did not look like her father, whose people hailed from Faridpur and also had less angular features. That she was much darker than almost all her cousins, on both sides, male or female, was rarely commented on by the aunts or uncles. Once, her cousin Reenie infamously declared upon seeing a family picture taken on Eid, 1993, “Look at you! A little ant in a bowl of milk.” For this, Reenie was soundly smacked and sent to her room without dinner.

Samira explained all this to her therapist in New York, Sheryl, who she had started seeing in the desire to answer the questions that plagued her.

She explained that her duskier friends often lamented how insensitive various relatives were compared to hers.

“I guess I’m just lucky,” Samira said. “Maybe my family is more enlightened? No pun intended.” She knew it was not a likely explanation.

“Are you asking me?” Sheryl said, jotting something down in a notebook.

“I guess I always felt like my mother’s sisters went out of their way to make sure I was given special treatment.”

“It’s interesting that you bring this up as something suspect,” Sheryl said. “What do you think that’s all about?”

“They were always so careful around me, like I was fragile or something,” Samira replied. “At birthday parties I was given the biggest piece of cake, even if it wasn’t my birthday!”

“Did the other kids in the family single you out for special treatment?”

Sheryl asked.

“No. Actually one had it in for me, my cousin Reenie. We’re the same age and we’ve always had a combative relationship. But now I don’t blame her so much. She got into trouble for things I did.”

“Do you feel guilty about that?”

“I would if Reenie was not such a raving bitch,” Samira said, snorting.

“That’s interesting.”

Samira was suddenly self-conscious. “Why is that interesting? Because I’m also a bitch?”

“Do you think you’re a bitch and not worthy of the love you were shown?”

“I have no idea. That’s why I’m here,” Samira said, scowling. Sheryl

B

Sharbari Ahmed is a writer of fiction, plays and screenplays.

She lives in Darien, CT with her son.

8

jotted something else down.

“What’s that you’re writing down?”

Sheryl smiled enigmatically. Samira made a metal note to switch therapists as soon as possible. As fate would have it, she was summoned back to Dhaka before she could. In Dhaka there was only one therapist and she called him ‘Rafik uncle’ growing up. She could not picture herself saying, “Well, Uncle Rafik, I think my abandonment issues started when I lost my virginity on a faded green couch in the basement of a frat house.”

Samira generally liked her family. She might not have chosen them as friends if she met them at a party or a farmer’s market, but she found them pleasant enough. It was really only Reenie who pushed her buttons like no one else.

When they were 15, their mothers, in a misguided attempt to foster cousinly love, engineered a sleepover.

Reenie, annoyed that she had to entertain a cousin she despised, said, “Why don’t we play a game?”

“Yeah, I don’t feel like playing Dravidians and Aryans,” Samira said.

When they were smaller, Reenie had invented a game specifically designed to torment her. It consisted of dividing all the cousins into two groups, Dravidian or Aryan, and forcing them to engage in fisticuffs. Not surprisingly, Reenie’s favorite part was ‘picking teams’ and Samira spent a lot of time alone on the Dravidian side while Reenie decided who was reasonably dusky enough to join her.

“I was thinking more like truth or dare,” Reenie said.

“Fine, whatever,” said Samira, equally resentful of the situation.

“Ok, you first,” Reenie said.

“No, why don’t you go first since you freak out because you never get to go first,” Samira said generously. “So? Truth or dare?”

“Ohhh, umm ... truth,” Reenie said. “Ask me about our family. Ask me why you get treated so much better than the rest of us?”

“Don’t I get to pick the question?” Samira said.

“No. Ask me why I get into trouble when you do something bad? Ask me why, if you shit your pants, I have to clean it up.”

“Ok, fine, why, you jerk?” Samira said.

Reenie looked at her sharply. “If I go and tell Amma you called me a jerk, you know what she’ll say? Thak thak. Becharah.”

Samira’s heart began pounding.

Am I dying? And no one bothered to tell me? She wondered. “ W h h - w h y becharah?” Samira stuttered. Before Reenie could answer, they were called downstairs to dinner. Afterwards, the normally brassy Reenie seemed to lose her nerve. When Samira asked her later, she brushed it off and even softened a little. “Oh, I was just joking,” she said. “Let’s watch Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” she offered. “We can fast forward to the sex scenes.”

More than a decade later, when Samira returned to Dhaka and pushed a dog-eared, worn envelope toward her mother, demanded an answer and got none, none that satisfied her, she found herself on Reenie, the dreaded Aryan cousin’s, doorstep.

Reenie, a new mother, harriedly opened the door to see her childhood nemesis smiling at her. To Samira, she seemed smaller and less fierce somehow.

Sleep deprived, Reenie was confused.

“Sam? I heard you were in town. I didn’t think you would drop by.” She chuckled.

“We never finished that game,” Samira said.

“I’m sorry?” Reenie said, wiping baby spit-up off her shirt.

“Truth or dare?” Samira said.

Reenie paused and sighed. “Well, I guess you better come on in.” n

ARTS & LET TERS

D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N D AY, A P R I L 6 , 2 0 1 4