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9
Where the False Have a Merry Time
Vanished
December, 1970
We spoke of the war in hushed voices to suppress the panic rising like a kalach snake up from our stomach to build a home in our windpipes. It was a slender serpent, this dread; it stung at my throat to keep me from speaking loudly of the terror I lived in.
Shhh, Tarannum, shhh.
It hissed at the inquisitive letters Ami sent, overflow- ing with questions in cursive I could not answer about my daughter Rumana’s safety and my husband Haider’s fears. And just as the bite of a kalach left no mark, not even the faintest trace of its lethal impact, the war touched us silently, marking us as its victims long before it actually killed us.
It started with a splash in the dead of winter. Right after David left.
In Chittagong: the body of a Bihari poet maimed and dumped into the bay. His Urdu verses were deemed inappropriate. No matter that when he read them aloud at home, enunciating his seen-sheen and choti-yeh, his two-year-old daughter giggled with mirth, and his heart, stopped forever with a dagger through it, expanded with pride for the things he created, both his beautiful child and the words that made her happy.
Then the shrill ring of the phone in the middle of the night, jolting us out of dreamless sleep. That was how the news traveled. Not in the columns of The Daily It- tefaq but through a grapevine of gasps and disbelief.
Here are the things I thought about but dared not vocalize: what sound does a body make when it is thrown into water? How quickly does it sink and then disintegrate? What would become of the poet’s work, his unfinished couplets? Were his notebooks set on fire or was his widow allowed to hold on to them as keepsakes of a man she would never age with? Would the child remember her father as one of the first to vanish—for that is what they were called at first, those who disappeared overnight, the vanished—or would she recall the person behind the tale, the man who rocked her in his arms every night and softly sang Khoka Ghumalo Para Juralo, a Bengali lullaby his own mother had once crooned to him? Where would
they go, mother and daughter, now that their true north lay lifeless and grey at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal? Would they be allowed to leave, and if not, how long did they have before they, too, were thrown off a dinghy from the shores of Cox Bazaar, made to join the ranks of the vanished?
Asking these questions was futile. No one had any answers, not even Haider whose usual confidence took a nose-dive into a self-pitying state that ap- peared so pathetically foreign on him, it was easy
for me to forget, at least briefly during David’s last year in Khulna, that he was my husband. The war progressed into Spring and Ami’s letters, which once arrived promptly on the first of each month, disap- peared after January. War made the postal service
in Khulna unreliable. February, March, April, May— eventually, her monthly multiple letters arrived together, like the sweet relief of flat ground in an endless, uphill climb. By then, of course, the war had already claimed us.
~
January, 1971
To: Tarannum Haider Haridas Babu Road
Khulna District, East Pakistan
Dearest Tarannum,
I trust you are well. Although that is not the impres- sion I got from your letter last month, it is still my hope, as a mother, that my daughter is theek-thaak.
The newspapers in Karachi are not very descriptive, but your father has heard of the tensions brewing in East Pakistan. I urge you, my daughter, to distance yourself from any bothersome elements of this conflict.
From: Afshan Hassan 50 Clifton
Karachi, West Pakistan
Basmah sakrani