Underwater Homes for Drowned Women

Joutha Monisha

(After Fayeza Hasanat’s “The Anomalous wife”)

I say, Shomudra, I am here. I’ve escaped all who would keep me to sink into your embrace. Take me       home.

Shamudra says,

I say, I am so tired. This life is not for me. I want to leave.

Shamudra says,

            I say, My sons don’t speak my language, my daughter doesn’t know my name. I hate my         husband. I hate my house. I can’t breathe, only I hate, I hate, I hate.

            Shamudra says,

I say, please. This life is not for me. Please.

I am standing where the immense body of water, undulating with the call of the moon, reaches just past my ankles. The waves rush past me to the shore so they can throw themselves upon the land.

They drag the unstuck grains of sand in their retreat, drawing rolling lines on the beach, etching    their own shape on the thing which offends them. The seawater is the uncanny white of the wet sand  beneath the translucent, pristine black of the porous night sky. The wind howls and the waves shushes it as gently as it can, which is not very gentle at all.

I understand. I, too, am an unkind mother. When they were little, my children howled all night long too.

I never had love enough to soothe them. That dumb shrink thought it was because my parents    never had love enough for me. Neither did my sister or my brothers, nor either sets of grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins, or friends. He didn’t mention my husband, that fucking idiot, but I could tell he thought my husband didn’t love me enough either.

Shamudra says,

I say, I don’t want to hear it. I know nobody is enough for me. I want a love so vast and so deep that it might as well replace you. A love like an ocean. I want oceans of love from every person I’ve ever met, just so I can turn it sour and throw it back on their face. So they drown in it like I do. I am cruel and indiscriminate in my rage, like Bhabatarini, when she wears the name of Kali. I am a cyclone from the belly of my Shamudra. I crush everything in sight. My children took after me. They wanted a love like an ocean too. But their small, greedy hands are too much like their fathers. They wanted to take from me, so I gave them my wrath, I gave them rotten indifference. I wanted them to join me in the kingdom of the drowned. But my daughter, my Niranjana, she learned to swim and my sons never breathed to begin with.

Shamudra says,

I sit down and say, no, he was never alive either. He, who was my keeper, my jailor, my pati parameshwar, my Mr. Cahn-de-cahr, whose name ate all my other names like insects eat sweet fruit. He had anger in him too. He could hate too if he cared too. But he was a bhodrolok, you see. He had his civility and polite conversation and a thousand and one layers of chivalry and one million rules of masculinity. He was a man through and through in daylight and nothing but a pathetic animal by night. In moonlight, he dared as far to raise his voice until it boomed through our house, but never his fist like his own father used to. Always acting the way he is supposed to, never a hair out of place, the perfect stereotypical Bengali husband in his heroisms, in his villainy, even in his perversions. Only I could see the hollowness behind his breastbones, only I saw the apathy in his eyes. Oh, Mr. Cahn-de-cahr, oh poor doll-husband, oh barren archetype, you are just as empty as me and I hate you for that emptiness.

Shamudra says,

I say, desperate now, Please, don’t you see? It doesn’t matter! None of it matters! My story can only end one way. Yes, his emptiness and mine are a perfect match. What else could it be? We’re allegories, he and me. The Bengali Bhodrolok Everyman and the Bengali Bhodromohila Everywoman, stuck in this blank white page of a country, where we are isolated even from our context. Empty, empty, empty! He can live with this desolate, apathetic, unthinking blankness. I cannot! I can’t! I can’t be Nirjhara, without my father’s gruff voice calling me by that name, I can’t be Labonyo if my mother doesn’t pronounce each syllable with a different emotion. My grandparents are gone now, and with them, Ameera and Durba have disappeared too. My husband won’t call me Ranji’s mother, how can he? When Ranji has disowned us all for the mourning tune of a foreign instrument. I have no shokhis like Bhabatarini-Annapurna-Parvati-Durga, no children left to hand me a weapon for each of my ten arms. Nobody calls me Ma anymore. No tree can give me a new affectionate nickname and no house can call me by it. These vacuous, yawning, gaping empty shells that walk and talk and sleep and shit and eat surrounding me are failed parodies of humans. Their half-constructed crimson mouths and pearly white dentures and absent tongue cannot fit any name that can fill me. All I am is rage. All I am is madness. Virginia, Sylvia, Edna. There is nothing but this Wasteland in my sight. Like Kali, I must bring my own doom. I cannot stand to be empty and so I must be mad. The drowned woman must go back underwater to go home.

Shamudra says,

Be quiet, I say, my weariness tugs at me, pulls me down, I let it. I lay my head on the soft, damp soil; the black of my hair is a contrast to the pale sands of their artificial beach. I think of the golden brown sands of Cox’s Bazar’s shores. I think of how different my Shamudra sounds there. The roar of the waves and raging wind never manages to drown the cacophony of human bodies, calling to each other with many names and honorifics and their unfiltered noises of joy. The weather is always warm
there, nothing like the vicious cold of this country. The beaches here are empty half the year; the frigid winds driving everyone away. The soft tremors racking my body transform into violent shivers as high tide arrives and the waves begin to submerge me and then pull away once again. It reminds me of the way my little sister’s warm body next to me on the bed used to throw the kantha off and pull it back several times a night. God, it’s been almost 35 years since those mild winter nights. I haven’t spoken to Nadi in years. I ignored her calls a billion times over before she stopped trying to reach me. The freezing water begins to cover me. My black hair floats freely in the water as does the achol of my saree while the rest of it sticks to my body. The shivers die away as numbness spreads.

Doctor O’Sullivan, you were right, nobody ever gave me an ocean of love. That day when I drowned in Boromama’s pond. The pond tried to quench the Sahara in me, a desert wasn’t there yet. But it knew that I’d be begging for love someday, in a foreign land, where there are only chlorine-sanitized pools instead of ponds brimming with life.

It was my Boromama and four of my cousins who combed that lush, green water to find my tiny body. Their love for me wasn’t enough to be an ocean, no, but it was bigger than that huge dighi. My parents’ love for me wasn’t like the ocean either. It was rain, unmeasurable in its quantity. My brothers’ love was a dozen lakes. My sister was a river of love for me. I was the one to name her Nadi. My meager friends and acquaintances, even they offered me bottles full, bucketfuls when they could. I could feel love grow in me with beautiful words that ever touched me, words that became meaningless in this alien place. My husband’s love, polluted and filtered, was barely a puddle. My children needed to take before they could give. How could this drought of a family ever make me anything but a desert, when I was the Shamudra where all the waters of love from my home gathered in.

I am underwater now. The waves pull at me in their retreat, dragging my body deeper each minute. The land at my back will be gone soon, just as the air in my lungs slips from me, bit by bit, and their absence burns. I open my eyes to the sting of saltwater and look at the blurry outline of the moon as I drown. The same moon I saw the night before I became Mrs. Cahn-de-cahr, the one my grandfather pointed out to me every night in childhood, the same moon that bore witness to my entire life.

Shamudra says,

I say, I am in you. Take me home.

Shamudra says,

I say, you are cruel. Just for once, don’t be so cruel to me. Take me home.

Shamudra says,

I say, Please, please, please.

Shamudra says,

Shamudra says,

Shamudra says,

I say, okay and I give in.
I push my body up.
Water breaks against me.
I breathe.