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If you have Bengali friends, there is no need to meet them or remain close; think twice about who you can trust. As for the hopelessness you say you are feeling, I can recommend a cure to that. It’s high time you think of giving Rumana a brother or sister. Haider’s work keeps him preoccupied and Rumana goes to school. A baby will ease the burden of solitude you are carrying and fill your home with laughter and love. Remember, you are not a bird lost in migration; you are a mother, a wife. You are rooted by those who depend on you.
What has become of the garden spirit? I trust you have not felt its malevolence presence again since the inci- dent you described in your last letter. To tell you the truth, it’s quite difficult to imagine that there is an un- seen presence occupying your outhouse. If you haven’t ever seen it, how do you know it’s there? Your cook Aziz claims he fell under a trance while doing wudhu for Tahajjud, but might he have just been sleepwalk- ing? While I have personally never dealt with such a dilemma, I do know Rukhsana has some experience in these matters. You remember Aunty Ruxi, who used to live two flats above us with her paraplegic father? She would visit us daily at chai time with a roll of Marie tea biscuits, and you would dip them into my cup three at a time, splashing my chai everywhere and leaving
a mushy biscuit sledge at the bottom of my cup. Well, her father, poor old uncle, he passed recently and when I visited to pay my condolence, she recounted a story similar to yours: Uncle would, in a dream state of slumber, hear the voice of an old friend calling out to him every night at 2am. In his condition, he could certainly never get up to follow the voice but Ruxi told me that, if he had, this spirit would have consumed him. He would have just vanished!
Ruxi consulted a few different aalims and of course those mullahs just brushed her off with a couple of Hadiths and told her to fear the wrath of Allah because she went to them during Jummah Namaz when she should have been home and praying (and of course, she walked away quietly without asking why they weren’t inside the masjid themselves but feasting on biryani outside, typical Ruxi!). Her pir saab proved use- ful though and he told her what I’m about to relay to you now. This spirit that you heard, that Ruxi’s father heard, is supposedly a Nishi, a night spirit. It strikes by calling out your name in the voice of a loved one and
if you respond to the call, you become hypnotized. You end up following the voice and are never to be seen again! The night spirit only calls out twice, so advise dear old Aziz (and heed this yourself too, my child) to never answer a voice at night until it has called you at least three times.
Now I hope this piece of information is helpful to you. While I can’t alleviate any of the stresses on your heart from afar, I wanted to at least offer some solace for your garden spirit situation. Heed my advice and try for another child. I promise you, it will help.
All the love, Ami
~
Silver Transistor
February, 1971
I listened to news reports on the radio like a disciple desperate to hear from a messiah. My heartbeat became a death knell. To think that in all this, Ami encouraged me to conceive again. A thought so ludi- crous, I burned her letter the moment I finished read- ing it. How could I bring a child into this world when I awoke each morning with my chest pounding and just one thought on my mind: Leave. Get out. Run.
That was how I spent my days after David left me. Left Khulna.
After Rumana went to school, I turned on all the tran- sistors in the house. The red Panasonic on my night- stand was the loudest. It had a long leather strap that Rumana liked to dangle off her little shoulders, and she would sashay about with some strange enigmatic charm that made me question my decision to let her watch all those Hindi films with me.
The brown one in Haider’s study looked like a brief- case and crackled if I turned up the volume. We didn’t touch that one. But the gold transistor, which stood proudly next to the gramophone at one end of the liv- ing room, that one stayed on all day. With two round speakers the size of frying pans, it blared news from Islamabad, from Dhaka, from Delhi, from London— all the voices of the world converging on the glass- topped cabinet counter where, behind the wooden Tambola chest, Haider used to hide his whiskey.
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