Some Petty Rumours About Salema Begum

The first time Salema came here, she was taken aback by the sight of the tree early in the morning.

On the previous night when she was brought here, it rained heavily, and darkness swallowed the whole place. Only a few bulbs flickered in the office room. Not a drop of light fell on the various curves of the long veranda or in any of the cramped cells. Salema walked behind the constable in the dim glow of a kerosene lantern hung from a rope that ran overhead along the middle of the veranda. The constable boasted that power cuts never happened here in this jail, but because the big generator had broken down just the day before, the jail was now swallowed by darkness during load shedding. Her hunger had died down after gnawing at her stomach for the most part of the day. The only thing rising in it now was acid. The smell of the khaini that the policemen continuously crushed and rolled between their palms churned her stomach and made her retch again and again. Her body refused to move. Yet she dragged herself along behind the constable like a shadow.

‘O maago … saala kutta!’

Salema tried with all her might to scream through a throat that had turned to stone as a strong male hand squeezed the left side of her chest in the dark. But her screams, drowned by the loud patter of the heavy rain, did not reach even her own ears. She pushed the man away with both hands and freed herself.

‘Saali! You whore’s child!’

The constable moved ahead a few steps as Salema collapsed onto the floor, rubbing her left breast with her hands, writhing in pain.

‘Come, quick. I got to go home after duty,’ he barked.

Having heard the same filthy abuses countless times in the months since her first night here, Salema was no longer affected. She had even picked up a few herself. But what she could never bear was being touched. She stood up and began to take slow steps behind the man again. They entered a long room where two lanterns glowed dimly. On the floor, four or five women lay curled up on old, fraying blankets. The constable pointed his finger at a bare corner of the room.

‘Take that blanket for now. Will sort out the rest in the morning.’

He slammed the iron-barred door shut and disappeared. Salema could not take it anymore. Her legs threatened to give way. As soon as the lock clicked, she pulled a blanket from the corner, spread it out and lay down.

In addition to the foul stench coming from a nearby room, the air was heavy with another maddening scent. Must be white champaka. The smell entered her nose, surged into her head and coursed through her whole body. Salema longed to go out and see the tree. In the strange and unfamiliar prison cell, the sound of rain mixed with the musk of champaka flowers made her hair stand on its ends. She took a deep breath. And tried to conjure the tree in her mind. A huge tree, dripping with rain, stood alone in the darkness, silently spreading its fragrance. Maybe not alone. Perhaps a kamini or a kadamba or a chhati tree, enchanted by the smell of the champaka, was stretching its arms in the air to touch the source of that scent, or perhaps a keya vine was burying its face in the tree’s bosom like lovers in the embrace of first love. A sudden gust of cold wind swept fresh waves of that scent into the cell. Salema’s skin erupted in goosebumps again. She wanted to cry.

Salema had a beautiful childhood. Her father taught at the village school where she too studied. He had a passion for reading. He arranged for the bus driver from the city to bring newspapers all the way to their remote village. The driver would drop the day’s paper at Abdul chacha’s roadside shop, and her father would pick it up on his way home from school. When the afternoon sun softened, he would lay a straw mat under the big haritaki tree in their courtyard and read the newspaper. He would read bits of news from home and beyond to Salema. Sometimes books came for her too. If he spotted a book ad in a corner of a page of the newspaper, he would send a money order from the post office to procure it. Salema had her own modest collection of books by the time she reached ninth grade.

Like her father, Salema too loved to read. There might have been small hardships in the family of three, but they lived in peace. Until one day, when everything fell apart.

Salema was in tenth grade that year and was going to take the matriculation exam. That was when the notice in her father’s name came. Foreigner.  Bangladeshi. Refugee. Everything changed overnight. A few others in the village were served notice too. Endless rounds of the police station and court could not save them from landing up in detention camps – in jail, to be precise.

Salema’s father began losing his mind. He stopped bathing, stopped eating, and ran from lawyer to lawyer, and to panchayat members and local authorities. His little savings evaporated. He lost all interest in the school, in his wife and his daughter. Salema sat for the matriculation examination. When the results came and she had failed, he couldn’t seem to comprehend the news. He spoke of nothing but the notice. The once healthy and composed man became shabby, confused. He would mumble to himself and scratch patterns in the dirt with his fingers.

‘I signed upon receiving the notice, I signed, the police can come any time,’ he would say, grabbing Salema’s mother and making her sit beside him. ‘They beat you badly, dear wife, and then let you cross the border and shoot you in the back.’

He would sob like a child as he said this. Sitting beside him, her mother would weep too, covering her face with the end of her saree. Salema would watch everything silently.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, he would slip out of the house and sit for hours under the tamal tree on the riverbank, his head between his knees. He would suddenly call out to passers-by.

‘Look at my country! This country of tamal trees,’ he would say, slapping the tree trunk hard. ‘Such notices don’t belong in a tamal country. No, no, no. If I die, tie me to a tamal branch…’

The police had taken her father from under that tamal tree. When two policemen, one on either side, were dragging him into their van, Salema saw that his eyes were tightly shut in fear, his hands clasped together against his chest. He was trembling, and his lips moved in inaudible prayer. And somehow, she knew that she would never see her father’s eyes open again. He would not survive this.

Four days later, the news arrived from the police station. Her father was now a body. Heart attack, they said. Exactly eight months after her father died, her mother followed. After much persuasion, some of the relatives convinced an old khala, a distant aunt, to come and stay with her. Salema got a job as a cook at the school where her father had taught. She thought that the catastrophe that had begun the day the notice in her father’s name had first arrived had finally reached its end with the death of her mother. With nothing left to lose, she tried to hold on to her aunt and rebuild her life again. But she soon realized that some misfortunes exist beyond the frontiers of human imagination, impossible ones, absurd ones that befall real human beings in the real world. Such was the fate that visited Salema again.

Less than a year after her mother died, the police returned. This time the notice bore her name.

The old khala loved orphaned Salema dearly, but that love fell short before the fear of the police. If a notice had come for the father, and now the daughter, who is to say that one wouldn’t come for her next? So, the day the notice came, the old khala packed up her things and fled, leaving Salema alone in her house. And not just the khala, every relative and neighbour started avoiding her. She spent her days alone, but as dusk fell her hands and feet would get cold. She knew that no one in the neighbourhood would open the door for her because they were afraid of the police. She was even more afraid of the light of the handheld lamp. Finding darkness to be a safer refuge, she would blow out the lamp, curl into a corner of the bed, and wait for dawn to crack. Night after night passed like this. Sometimes, late at night, she would hear the sound of hesitant footsteps outside the door. At other times, she would hear something like a knock on the door. Inside the room, Salema would cover her face with both hands and, sweating in fear, silently call out to Allah. She would pray for the police to come the next morning. At least there would be people in jail, good or bad, she would think. A few days later, her prayer was answered.

In the months that followed, Salema went in and out of various jails on suspicion of being a Bangladeshi as per government records. She now preferred to think of herself as a refugee.

The small plot of land that they had once owned was taken over by the son of a distant chacha and sold. Forget about the cousin, she hadn’t heard her parents mention this chacha even once. Salema’s address now was this jail today, that jail tomorrow.  Many things in her life changed with the changing jails. Her face, her manner of speaking, even her character and temper, and she knew this. These days, misbehaving with people for no reason gave her a strange pleasure. She felt a raw power in hurling out loud, filthy curses. In fact, the atmosphere was such that only the foul-mouthed were healthy and happy. The docile ones who bore all the verbal and physical abuse in silence ended up taking their own lives. Given the addiction to self-harm among the inmates, every bathroom door in the jail was half broken.

Had it not been for the champaka tree, Salema would have long vanished behind one of those half-broken doors.  She understood now why her father spent hours under the tamal tree by the river after the notice came. Only when she sat under the champaka did Salema forget that she was in jail. As she sat leaning her back against the tree, stretching her legs out and closing her eyes, she could feel the touch of the old haritaki growing back home. A touch that reminded her of the sweet moments of her childhood and adolescence, of lost mornings, noons and evenings.

Salema was a detainee, but there was no such thing as a detention camp here. Inside the jail, the so-called D-people like Salema must live together with murderers, madmen and thieves. This was a world of arguments, fights and scuffles that never seemed to end. Even if she didn’t want to, she often got dragged into these things. There was no peace to be found. And then there was Nibha mashi, who they said was mad. Salema could see only one sign of madness in her. Nibha mashi was normally oddly cheerful, but suddenly, without warning, something switched, and she took off all her clothes. This was on Independence Day. In the morning, when the whole country stood before the national flag singing ‘Jana Gana Mana’ in unison, Nibha mashi climbed onto the flag-hoisting platform and stripped herself naked. Her bloodshot eyes restlessly scanned the sky and ground for someone or something.

The scene was unbearable, and everyone, prisoners and policemen alike, for obvious reasons, ran after her with clothes in hand.

Nibha mashi let out a stream of abuse mixed with spit and rage. ‘You motherfucker, don’t touch me, no one will touch me.’

Then a string of nonsense words tumbled out of her mouth. ‘Udurkhaura, mudurkhaura, dalmutkakatuarbaicha, chandirpathi…’

To Salema, there was nothing mad-shad about Nibha mashi. Like her, Nibha mashi too had no permanent address outside the jail, no home to return to, so madness was her pass to stretch out her stay here.

In jail, dinner was served at four in the afternoon. Nobody ate at that time. They would keep their plates covered and eat the food later at night. Salema did the same that day and was sitting outside getting some air when Sumati came running.

‘Come quick and see what Nibha mashi is doing! That old witch is getting worse by the day.’

Salema looked at Sumati puzzled, saying nothing.

‘Look where your rice plate is!’ Sumati said.

‘What! That bitch took the lid off my rice plate.’

Salema felt a fire rise in her head. She rushed inside and froze at what she saw. Right in front of the half-broken door of the hellish bathroom-cum-latrine was her uncovered plate. Four or five filth-flies lay sprawled on her rice. Nibha mashi had done this deliberately, to make the poop-flies settle on her food. Something cracked in Salema’s mind, and she went straight to Nibha mashi and yanked her hair with both hands.

‘Saali pagli! I will beat the madness out of you today.’

‘Let go, let go of my hair, haramzadi, you Bangladeshi whore, you slut.’ Nibha mashi screamed at the top of her voice.

After spoiling her plate of rice, she had the gall to hurl such filthy abuses at her. Salema could take it no longer.

‘You call me a Bangladeshi whore! A whore?’

She slammed Nibha mashi’s head against the wall. Once. Twice.

The ward erupted. The other girls came running at Nibha mashi’s screams. They pulled Nibha away from Salema. The old woman kept screaming even then.

‘Whore, whore, whore. A Bangladeshi whore. That’s what you are. You flirt with the constables and the jamadar under that tree all day. You don’t let a single blade of grass grow under the tree, you tear out everything. You plucked out every leaf of my old betel vine from the tree, haramzadi! What makes you lie there in the dark, you little bitch?’

Sitting with her back against the tree, Salema could hear everything. She knew they were all angry. Angry that this was the one place where she forgot all her pain. That it gave her peace.

But who would want to live peacefully here! Nibha mashi was right, Salema truly could not tolerate any weed or leaf on this tree. She had pulled down the betel vine herself. How dare Nibha’s creeper wrap itself around the tree that had filled her lungs with its sweet fragrance, almost intoxicating her? Impossible. A tree like this was where the princess in her forest exile, having lost her kingdom to the queen’s conspiracy, laid her head and wept. When the demon king came for her, the tree split itself open and hid the princess inside its masculine chest. Many times, Salema had whispered quietly to the champaka: If you are a tree of truth, give me shelter inside you. The tree never cracked open to pull her into its chest, but in those moments, the leaves suddenly became a little agitated, the smell of the flowers grew more intense, the branches seemed to dip a little lower to touch her. Salema could feel the tree responding to her call. She wrapped her arms tighter around her tree-man.

Lately, Salema has been hearing the occasional whisper in the prison that D-people like her might soon be released. Her hands and feet froze with fear each time she heard it. If they really released her, where would she go! Her father used to say they shoot D-people in the back in the name of release. Was that the government’s intention now? She looked at the champaka with helpless eyes and asked: Where would I go?

Every now and then, Salema turned around and asked the same question. The tree seemed unusually calm that day. Not a single leaf moved. The sun, appearing to be melting and dripping fire, singed her even though she was sitting in the shade. Still, Salema did not go inside. She didn’t leave her spot under the tree. And remembered how her father used to sit under the tamal tree by the riverbank. He used to sing, If I die, tie me to the tamal’s branch. The police had dragged him from right under that tamal. The same tree that her father had loved so much had watched in silence when the police apprehended him. That is how trees are. This tree-man of hers was also a silent witness to everything; it only knew how to give her shade and captivate her with its scent. Neither the shade nor the scent belonged to her. It belonged to no one; it was distributed bountifully to everyone. Salema became angry. Anger mixed with hurt pride. But even then, her love for the tree overflowed in the form of tears. She asked again: Where would I go if they release me?

Suddenly, in a fit of rage, she picked up a brick and began hitting the thick trunk. All men are the same. You just watch in silence. Watching an orphan girl roaming the streets with no home is fun, isn’t it? But Salema won’t allow that. Let’s see who dares to send me away from here.

The other women in the cell stood on the veranda and watched Salema with wide eyes. No one stepped forward, but they whispered among themselves.

‘The heat has got to her…’

‘Affair with a tree! Hihihi…’

‘She’s gone nuts. Like Nibha mashi…’

‘Deliberate antics.’

Furious, sweating in the sun, Salema flung the brick away and ran towards the bucket used to store water from the morning’s brief supply. Left all day in the sun, the water had turned almost scalding hot.  Salema poured a mug over her head. The water trickled down from her head to her face, along the curve of her ripe breasts. She stumbled back into the cell and lowered herself on the floor in a corner, her hair wet, her breasts damp.

A loud roar woke her. She sat up with a start. It was pitch dark. That meant night had fallen, and she had slept through the day. After the scorching sun all day, the sky had finally split open and rain came crashing down. The wild wind swept the dizzying smell of champaka flowers into the cell. Salema shivered a little. Her stomach twisted, reminding her that she had eaten nothing in the afternoon or at night. To suppress her hunger, Salema drank a glass of water, wrapped the blanket tightly around her and lay down again. The intoxicating scent was everywhere now. Her eyes fluttered shut. Just then, lightning flashed somewhere close, followed by a deafening clap of thunder.

Next morning, the sun rose again in the prison sky.

The inmates gathered in a silent circle. The huge champaka tree in the prison yard had been struck by lightning the night before. Its lush green crown, bushy branches and leaves were burnt to ashes. A deformed skeleton stripped of all flesh.

Everyone stood still as ancient statues, staring with unblinking eyes. Only Salema did not look.