Passage on a Monsoon Day

continued from last week

“I need to finish cooking before they discover the smoke coming out from this part of the village,” she thought, as she hurried her way to the well some 50 yards away from the kitchen shed, walking carefully on the wet ground.
The well stood on the south-western corner of this homestead. It was skilfully blanketed from the lowlands in the front and roads beyond by a thick cluster of bamboo trees. Women could bathe and wash here without being seen.
An old woman, some hundred times removed aunt of hers whom she did not really remember seeing before this year was already at the well, pulling up water with a bucket suspended on a worn out rope. She turned towards Meena, staring with a dead pair of eyes set deep inside blackened eye sockets from a face so bare of flesh one would think she was nothing but a ghost… perhaps from the great Bengal famine of the 1940s!
The haggard woman nodded at Meena without her asking, signalling the young girl to extend the earthen bowl in her hand, as she tilted the bucket to pour some water into it.
‘De ma, batita agaye de,’ Kohinoor Begum said (hold out your bowl to me my child) with her toothless grin.
What is the use of being so dead and still struggle to stay alive?
‘Rannar kisu oilo maa?’ Kohinoor asked softly as she poured the water. Her voice was shaky and laced with fear lest she got told off in fury.
No one spared the old woman their fury.
The days had been hard on them all; they had lived on almost nothing for two days in a row. It was not this bad all the time but this past week had been hard. The incessant rains had meant a shortage of supplies and the seventeen families clustered between a few households had been struggling for food.
Meena’s heart melted in pity. She knew why the old woman served her with all her might. She had no living relatives having lost her sons and brothers to cholera. Hanging around a pregnant woman meant there was something to eat for one or the other would be sure to find Meena a handful of something to eat. And Meena never forgot to share with this old many times removed aunt.
‘Just a little bit more khala , I am cooking gourd and prawns and the rice is nearly done. We will all eat rice today,” she said gently.
The breeze under the bamboo trees felt cool on Meena’s hot and grimy face as she looked around at the scene surrounding her.
The village homestead at Chandanpur was her forefathers’ and only her octogenarian grandfather lived here now. Her great-great maternal grandfather had famously surrounded this homestead in a large circular line of mango trees, sealing the circle in a bandh with his prayers so that no unearthly beings could ever harm his daughter had married off into this household miles away from anywhere.
Her father, a policeman by profession, moved from one corner of the country to another according to the government’s choice. Meena had loved that life of travel, always coming back here to home.
Then she was married off and rooted again in some remote part of Dhaka, building a home of her own.
Only that wasn’t totally true.
She was on the move again; more truthfully, on the run. Her husband had left for the war four months ago leaving her in the safety of his parent’s village. She had been proud of him then.
But her bravery had not lasted long. The first few months of her pregnancy had been bad and she had been very miserable with her inlaws whom she barely knew. She was scared all the time. The war had spread and it wasn’t always safe in the village either. Somehow, she convinced her father-in-law she would be safer with her grandfather.
“Let me go to dadu. I will be safe that side of the river,” she pleaded.
In a way they were relieved she asked to leave. It was difficult enough with all their daughters home and most men in the village gone off to fight. Kohinoor Begum was travelling this way and was a relative one way or the other – as most people in neighbouring villages are – and that’s how Meena got saddled with her.
It was a long journey but a large group of women were travelling together this way and some male relative or the other would accompany them from one point to another. People were generous at such a time of need.
But grandpas home had been no sanctuary and he too had sent her off somewhere safer.
Who was here to protect them now? Meena thought, certainly not the mango trees. Her great-great maternal grandfather had not forethought that danger would never come here in the shape of ghosts but the God-fearing Pakistan army.
War was everywhere. Danger walked in every nook and corner of existence even in daylight. Every other man who had not gone off to war to defend the country was a messenger for death.
Everyone knew who they were and what they did. They were the ones who informed the Pakistan army genteel which families had young boys. They were the ones who brought the vultures in. They were the ones who lifted women from villages and took them to the army camps, bartering the women’s flesh to buy the protection of the Pakistani army.
There was no escape.
Meena and the female members of three families from her grandfather’s village had taken shelter in a village called Ghagotia southwest to her grandfather’s village. They had been given shelter by a family which was her uncle’s in-laws. The village stood on an island strip in the middle of the river. There were no proper bridges – only a bamboo shako on one side.
Here seventeen families had been in hiding there for almost 3 months now, making it back to their own homesteads once or twice to check out on the few remaining at home, or to bring back supplies. Meena’s eleven year old sister Kohinoor and her stepmother were with her.
They had decided to return two days ago to visit their aged grandfather and ten year old brother and pick up some supplies. Rabeya, the daughter of one of the families had given birth to her baby a few days back. Her parents decided to return home with the sickly newborn. Meena and a few others tagged along to visit home and pick up some supplies. Their village was not too far and they were all familiar with the locality. Her stepmother stayed back with the other chachi who was down with a fever.
Yesterday they had been south from the village. They could not find a boat to cross the river and had to take a detour further down to find someone to help them across the swelled up river. It had rained all the way and the new born had got sicker.
By the time they crossed the river it was already late afternoon. An old man approached them and asked them where they came from.
“Apnara ferot jan.The army has set up a camp on the other side of this village. It’s best not to come here with womenfolk. You better go back the way you came,” he advised.
But Rabeya’s parents would not return. The newborn was dying and they wanted to return to their own home. Afzal Hashem was the only man in the group. He knew a detour to his homestead.
Meena and the other women got separated from them but they knew the way to Chandanpur, it was just a few hours walk.
On the way they learnt the local collaborators had set one nearby village on fire. The young men in that village had resisted being picked up and it had ended badly.
Meena and her companions had literally run on hearing this.
Meena had run with the baby in her belly. She had never been so scared for her life. They were off their initial track and at night took shelter in a hut owned by a boatman. It was a tiny little hut, not large enough to hold all of them. It was cold and miserable. No one slept. No one ate.
Early in the morning, they started walking in the drizzling rain.
Meena’s feet ached. She could not remember the last time she had worn a pair of sandals. The muddy, slimy monsoon soil beneath her bare feet made her nauseous at times. Her throat was parched. She cupped her hands together to collect some rain water and drink it.
Her sister Nima wept half the way.
“I am so scared, I am so hungry” was all she would say.
Kohinoor Begum, the old hag, took the young girl by hand. Always resourceful, she had a betel leaf tied into the knot at the end of her sari. She shared it with Nima.
“Just chew on it and let the juices flow in your mouth,” she told Nima.
A child cried out and his mother scolded him to silence. Somewhere far away a dog barked.
“What are you scared of? Chandanpur is sheltered by the river from the other side where the police station stands. The army is unlikely to come through the overflowing rivers,” Meena told her sister.
Meena’s grandfather Mobassher Ali Mollah’s homestead stood on the banks of the Brahmaputra river, just a stone’s throw from the local thana. Generally a safe place but not since the war broke out. The army was sure to set up camp at the police station when they came this way.
Mollah was alone with his 10 year old grandson Raju.
At night, it was not safe to keep the young boy home. The local collaborators – mullahs and peace committee members and all – lay siege to houses where boys had not gone to war. They were picked up in the dark of the night, and rarely made it back.
Raju was sent each night to sleep at least a mile away. He stayed at someone’s house or the other – sometimes even under a tree – always coming back once a day to check on his grandfather and cook him some rice.
The first few months of the war had been rough on Mollah. His sons had joined the Mukti Bahini, their wives had been sent away anywhere safer than here. The village was empty say for a few old ones like him who stayed back to guard their homesteads.
It was their forefather’s land and they would not budge from here. Not even for the pretender Pakistani Muslims.
Mollah was not safe from the wrath of local mullahs.
‘Sending all girls to school and trying to turn them into non-believers? We will teach him a lesson now,’ Ikramullah had threatened when the war broke out.
Ikramullah was notorious for his back handedness. At only 44 years of age, he was onto his fourth wife – a girl of only sixteen. The oldest had not been able to give him a child, the second had given him two daughters and the third had fallen in love with one of his male servants – or so he said. These were all good excuses to bring home a new young wife.
No one said a word against that except the likes of Mollah.
Ikramullah lived to spit on such men.
The war had been kind to him. He was a senior member of the local peace committee. He was the self proclaimed village pundit and since the war began his blessings seemed endless.
He spoke Urdu and extended all kinds of assistance to the Pakistan army. He wore a white prayer cap on his head and carried a string of prayer beads on his left hand at all times. His lips were deep red from the betel nut he chewed constantly. In his crisp white starched punjabi and pyjama, hair and beard dyed pitch black, he cut quite a figure among the war struck peasants.
‘Nauzubillah! Chhay chhay chhay,” were the words most common on his lips, words that seemed to turn even a blatantly non-religious action to an anti-religious gesture with the way he spat out the words.

to Be continued next week