Taslima's Pilgrimage (Page 4)

Meyebela, which has been excellently translated by Gopa Majumdar, is dedicated "to my mother, who suffered all her life," and much of the book centers on Ma, who loves learning but whose father pulled her out of school at a young age and married her off to a poor student from the countryside whom he picked up in the street. Most of the marriages in this book are that arbitrary. Baba, a handsome man who is always criticizing Ma for being too skinny and too black, is a philanderer; in one memorable scene, Ma takes her young son by the hand and they walk across town to the home of Razia Begum, whose love notes she has found while doing Baba's laundry. Razia Begum's ancient husband is standing guard, but Ma gets past him, finds the two lovers in bed and drags her husband home. But his womanizing is a constant theme; frequently she finds him in bed with servants, whom she immediately attacks and sends out into the streets crying, with no job and no money.

Denied education and thwarted in love, Ma has nowhere left to turn but religion, and she does so with a vengeance, joining the cult of the holy man Amirullah, her sister's husband, whose female devotees are so obsessed with getting into heaven through his agency that they fight over who will wash his feet, who will massage his legs and who will lick up his spittle. Ma drags her young daughter Taslima with her so that she too will be saved by hearing Amirullah describe what will happen to those who go to hell, to be racked by unbearable heat, stung by snakes and scorpions, and fed boiling water and pus. The child Taslima's distaste for religion grows from such encounters:

I sat silently behind Ma, the prayer beads still in my hand. I was sorry to see her cry. Her whole body was racked with sobs. It surprised me greatly to see so many people crying in fear of being burned by a fire. It was exactly like frightening a child. Perhaps I ought to cry, too, just like the others. I waited for tears to gush, but my eyes remained completely dry. Having heard how Allah might roast people alive, He began to strike me as someone cruel and heartless.

Baba, a doctor, wants Taslima to study science, not religion. He wants all his children to study, setting them impossibly long hours with no time for play and beating them if they don't do well. His wrath at those who fail him is terrible. When his son Chhotda drops out of high school to marry a Hindu girl, Baba and an uncle kidnap the boy and shackle him in the living room with heavy chains. Baba proceeds to beat him half to death, then locks him in his room without food or water until the boy is a walking corpse. When Chhotda will still not agree to leave his wife and go to college, Baba disowns him and throws him out of the house. Then he locks up his daughters, determined not to let anything romantic happen to them.

Baba and Ma fight like dogs over Taslima, one pushing study, the other religion. Terrified of her father, she loves her mother but is a born skeptic and has gone to school, where she learned the scientific method. She finds a Bengali adaptation of the Koran, meant for women, which says the sun moves around the earth. This was not what she learned in school. What the book says about women is even worse. "So, even Allah was not prepared to treat women equally? Was Allah no different from Getu's father? He used to beat Getu's mother because she did not obey his every command." One day, while everyone in the neighborhood watched and did nothing to intervene, Getu's father beat his wife nearly to death with a burning log because she didn't put enough salt in his food. Then he divorced her by saying he gave her talaq three times. That was all he had to do, and Getu's mother was left with nothing while he married a teenage girl the next week. Thus the thoughts of the child Taslima. In a culminating scene, she goes poking around in her mother's holy books and finds them riddled with termites, because the house is damp and the books are never aired. She is infuriated by what she reads about the position of women.

Now that I knew, I did not wish to delve any deeper. I knew that it was useless to search for pearls or diamonds in a pot of shit.... I thought that the Koran was written by a greedy, selfish man like Uncle Sharaf, or the man who grabbed my breasts by the river. If the hadith was the words of Prophet Muhammad, then he was definitely like Getu's father: nasty, cruel, an abuser, insane.... Even after I had put the book back, millions of termites remained deep inside me, silently eating away all the letters and words in my head, and who knows what else.

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