DID YOU HEAR THE MAYNA BIRD SING?

‘What is with your face this morning?  Didn’t you sleep?’

Mayna smiles at her neighbor from the next shack.  She had in fact slept very soundly indeed.  She had put her head on her husband chest and listened to the rhythmic beat of his heart all night.  She felt secure and comforted like a baby.

Yes, it was an unusually calm, peaceful night indeed. 

Most nights are different.  Her husband Hassan comes every night somewhat intoxicated, with only a few takas in hand and demands food.  She has also come back after working on the road side construction jobs, toiling under the hot sun, underpaid, underfed.  Eventually and inevitably the discussions will turn towards food or rather the lack of it.  On most evenings, she would also be ridiculed and put down for being barren and childless.  Both know that the lack of a child is an economic blessing and yet both feel less of a human because of that.  Hassan feels that his manhood is ridiculed and Mayna feels that the right to motherhood is being denied to her. 

Yes, she slept.  She came out of her shack right by Gulshan lake and take in the view.  Surrounded by immense wealth, fashionable morning-walkers , and  foreign joggers, she makes her way to the sacred bush at the end of the lake, demarcated for women.  Usually most women have finished their bodily chores, but she was late this morning.  She wanted to crawl right back to her shack and lie down on the floor, put her head on his chest ,take deep breaths, and take the day off. However reality beckons.  If she is not on the construction site for her brick chipping job on time, some other lady, any lady, even her neighbor will take her job for the day. That means she has to starve tomorrow.  She takes a deep breath.  In spite of two incomes within their meager household, meals are rare, spartan and day to day.

They have been married only 11 months.  She used to live in the shanty town of Agargaon behind the huge edifices of government buildings there.  Hassan used to ply the Mirpur Shymoli by-roads for his fares and used to end up in front of the tea stalls located by the shanty.  Her uncle owned one of those stalls and she used to come by there occasionally,  in the hope that he would give her a free biscuit every now and then, which he did.  In those days, she also has started earning, as a ‘Chuta Bua’ in one of those flats in Shaymoli, wiping floors, washing clothes, and helping the mistress of the house in the kitchen.  Unlike the stories she used to hear from other girls, of mistreatments, scolding and beatings, and even sexual harassments, her mistress was a kind one, occasionally giving her old clothes and cosmetics and always some tidbits to take home.  She had come from work and was hanging out by the stall and her Uncle blurted out, ‘By the way Mayna, will you not get married?’ .  If the truth be told, she did not think about it seriously.  She wanted to become a ‘garment girl’ in one of those factories in Mirpur with a steady income, movies once a month and dress up with her coworkers on holidays and hang out. 

She had given her Uncle a blank look, at which he exploded, ‘Dhangor  Maiya ek-khan’.  Embarrassed by the public ridicule, she meanders through the maze of her slum and enters her shack, shared by her mother and a younger brother.  Mother gives her a stale chapatti with sugar on top and asks her coyly’

“Did your Mama say something to you?’

‘He scolded, why are you smirking Amma ?’.

‘Shona, a proposal has arrived via your uncle’.

Hassan has noticed her a couple of times at her uncle’s teas stall and had breached the subject with him.

There was none of the romance or courtship dancing in the rain in a wet sari like Sakib and Sabnoor in one those movies.  It was just a somber affair of a red sari with gaudy gold trimmings, a thin gold chain, 1,500 taka cash, and distribution of sweets to the neighbors.  The local Imam was given 20 takas to officiate and that was it.  She was put up in a rickshaw while her mother and brother bawled, Hassan wearing his starched pagri, and they were brought to the lakeside of Banani , overlooking Gulshan. 

Mayna loved her new surroundings right away.  The slum was cleared by the police only weeks ago and was slowly creeping back.  It was sparse, empty, almost luxurious after the crowded mini-city of squalor of Agargaon.  Hassan’s distant relative of sorts from the same village has helped him put up a few discarded corrugated sheets and covered it up with plastic.  True it was cramped inside, there was no way of standing up straight inside the shack, unlike her old quarters, which were more like corrugated huts. She has her own man now and her own room to share him with.  That was enough.

After a week or two, it was casually suggested that she should look for work.  Among all the rich households, and with her domestic background, finding work should not be a problem.  However, it turned out, Gulshan and Banani was not Mirpur and Shyamoli.  Getting to the front door was not a possibility.  It was all through referrals.  Garo girls dominated the scene.  Those who were hired, were hired from other households, an incestuous cycle of referrals.

The honeymoon ended violently.

Hassan came home one day and demanded a bowl of rice.  She herself had starved all day and there was none.  She was eagerly awaiting his return with some money.  She would rush over to the Banani Bazaar, get some rice, lentils and spinach, and cook up a meal.  The hearth was all ready with firewood, and the few utensils were scrubbed and cleaned.  She smiled and put her hand forward.

 ‘Give me a few takas’.

Hassan simply lost it that day.

‘ I toil the streets all day, sweating from hand to foot.  Cant even expect a bowl of rice to quieten the growl in my stomach.’

Shocked, Mayna slowly retrieves here hand.

 ‘So what can I do?  These rich people won’t even let me get through the front gate’.

Instead of a sympathetic ear, what she got a loud slap on her left cheek.  Then Hassan took hold of a tuft of her hair and started shaking her violently.

‘One Beyadop magi you are, You surely know how to eat though.’

The ordeal of that day ended because of the Hassan’s cousin from two shacks down came over.

‘You brought her not only four weeks ago, and already beating the crap out of her?  Let me tell you, this one will leave too.’

This one?  There were others?  Mayna, swallowed her shock and finally took a 20 taka note from her husband, knowing very well what meager provisions she could be purchased with that amount.  She assumed that there would be more beatings and she assumed right.

Yes there was another wife, two in fact, the cousin next door filled in the next day.  The first household was established in the guard room of a house in Kalachandpur.  The landlord evicted them due to their constant fights and beatings and the pair went their separate ways.  The second one was a cook in one of those ferangi  households.  For Hassan, it was the perfect marriage.  He got to sleep in a proper quarter, they both earned aplenty she as a cook, he as a gardener, and the shahibs would send down tasteless but fulfilling dishes every now and then, which her wife would turn into spicy casseroles.  However, he was literally caught red handed by the shahib with his hands in the liquor cabinet.  Given the choice of eviction or keeping the job, the second wife promptly and wisely evicted her husband with a verbal divorce and kept her job.

After wandering listless for a few weeks, he finally managed to hire a rickshaw on a daily basis.  It would take months of hard labour and near starvation to accumulate enough to be able to pay his mahajon on time daily.  Nowadays, when he shows up in the warehouse, no questions are asked and a richshaw his allotted to him for the day right away.  He missed the company of woman.  The floating girls of the streets took care of his lust and occasionally his wages , but he longed for permanence, household, and his own family.

When he spotted her at the tea shop, she was wearing a plain salwar kameez and had kohl in her eyes.  She wasn’t skinny like the rest either, rather curvy, and luscious, and perfect for plucking. Tea and biscuits became a regular habit at the end of the day.  On rainy days when passengers were few and far, he would even skip the afternoon meal and spend the savings in the tea store.  Most days he was not disappointed.  Her mistress of the household would let her go right before the Maghreb azan and she would stop at her uncles’s shop to say hello, pick up a thing and two and disappear inside the maze of huts.

One day he mustered enough courage and asked the shopkeeper.

 “Know that girl?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one who just left.’

‘Why? ‘ The Uncle was  all alert and suspicious.

‘What is your intention?’

‘No  no, no bad intentions at all.  As I was saying…..Uncle, you know that I am a rickshaw puller.  I am tired of living by myself.  You know what I mean……’

The shop keeper smiles finally, “That’s my niece, very very nice girl indeed.  A real Lokkhi….Whats your story?  No other wives?’

Taken aback with the directness of the question, there is a small moment of silence.

’  What are you saying?  No no, never married.  Just saved enough now…’

There are further questions about kins, home districts, relatives close by, …..all kinds of questions.  Mynah’s family, also eager to pass off an eligible girl and a liability did not dig further. 

Once the first barrier of hitting her has been crossed, it became a regular affair.  Too little rice, too much salt, not enough gravy, the water glass half empty….one trivial issue after another.   The beatings stopped when she found the job of braking bricks but eventually it crept back.  He would even take her daily wages away.  She countered that by spending her money in the bazaars first.  Slowly but surely, the tables turned. The husband became her kept.  He no longer contributed to anything.  Yet the beatings did not stop.  He picked up or rather resumed his habit of taking all kinds of intoxicating spices and condiments.

That night he came quite late, high on bhang and low on patience.

 ‘What are you looking at, you barren whore?’

 Maynah, numbed over the months by his constant verbal and physical abuse could not care less.

Incensed by the indifference, he screamed,

 ‘Gone deaf I see, lay out the food.’

 It was past twilight, with light of the houses shimmering on the waters.  She actually loved this play of light and shades after the first moments of sunset.  She had also forgotten the oil for the lamp.  It was not a priority for her, or most of the neighbors on the row for that matter.  In spite of the fact that they lived right in the middle of a teeming metropolis, their cycles of lives were still very much dictated by sunrises and sunsets, just like their parents back in the village.

Hassan was in cloud nine that night.  The shimmering lights of the lake, fueled by the narcotics in his blood, turned him amorous.  He started caressing her in the hut, but at some point the foreplay turned violent. She felt being bitten with such harshness that she wanted to scream but he had covered her face with one of his hands.  Finally at one point she grabs one of the small botis neatly stacked on the side of their tiny linear hut and hits him on his back.

 It works.  The sharp pangs of pain stops.  He slowly relaxes and slumps on top of her.   She feels her husband relax totally on top of her, taking deep breadths.  She also relaxes. It is one of those moments of marital bliss that may not come back.  She also passes out in a deep slumber, her momentary passage of contentment.

When she wakes up, it is dark.  Even the lights of the living and bedrooms of the households behind her has been turned off.  This is a good time to take care of the bodily function by the bushes.  Her husband is still on top of her, but Hassan feels a lot heavier. Cajoling him gently does not work.  He does not respond to her verbal request to get off her.  She finally manages to push him off, fiddles through the utensils and finds a stump of a candle and manages to light it. The view splayed in front of her in that tight confined space does not frazzle her one whole bit.  Hassan’s shirt is blood stained at the back, he seems to be breathing and putting her head on his chest, there is also a heartbeat it seems.  She doesn’t care.  She feels no compunction to call someone and ask for help.   The thoughts of law enforcements does not cross her mind even though she can see the police stand at the end of the line of shacks.

She just sits there, staring at  the semi cloudy sky.

She calls him, “Hassan, are you awake?’.  She calls him by his name only when she thinks he is asleep.

No answer.

She feels this calm like never before.  Taking a deep breadth, she pushes him more to the side, pulls out a bronze ladle, one of her very few prized possessions and starts digging.

The distant sound of the Azan for Fajr prayers  wakes her up.  She had layed her down on the mound of dry clay that her Hassan is covered in now.  After the ordeal was over, exhausted she had lied down and she was soothed by the constant beat of the heart.  It reminded her of falling asleep on the chest of his long dead father.  It was the safest place to be on the face of this harsh cruel world.

‘What is with your face this morning?  Didn’t you sleep?’

‘Hoi, I did. After a long time’

She had her gold necklace in her hand, the one given during the wedding which Hassan had forgotten about. 

Time to find a new place of work and a new address….

She starts following the path by the lake, covered in beautiful greenery, shimmering green water on one side, and rows of buildings on the other. 

She wonders if she will miss this neighborhood.