Taslima’s Lies, Ismat’s Truth

Where are they - these women of substance, who are quietly chipping away at the huge barricades waiting for the walls to come tumbling down? The ones who come out occasionally to fight against the niggling laws in their religion do not interest me. I like the fire-and-brimstone kind. Call me elitist, but it is they who can show the world that the only fruitful activity is not merely looking to get out of a cage but how to preen your feathers, do a little pirouette, fly, free-fall.

You don’t find many of them around. There are a few who might fool you with their seductive adaabs in high society salons, champagne kissing their lips. But do they really know who they are, what they want to be? I have to do a little rewind and only one name leaps out at me. Of a woman so spunky that she had her way even in death, when she wanted her body to be released into the sea so that the fish could savour it. Ismat Chugtai was the kind of woman who despite the risk to limb and reputation remained a thinker, a person with feelings that ran deep and had laughter coursing through her veins, as I discovered several times in meetings with her years ago. A sense of mischief, even irreverence, punctuated her most mundane moments. She smoked, she drank, and she led a full and uninhibited life. She is respected even today.

Falsies

Can we say the same about Taslima Nasreen who seemingly does the same things, but is more like a candle to Ismat aapa’s wind? She is in the news again for a perspective other than literary or ethically significant. She has written an autobiographical account in which several writers and political figures have been mentioned, not for their role in damaging society, but for sleeping with her. Does one wonder at her naiveté or call her brave or pat her on the back for exposing the men?

Yet, she will not be dismissed as another Jackie Collins. Or a squealer like so many others. Even though what we will get is a tits-and-ass take on social mores. That is if Taslima is capable enough of looking beyond the cup size and thongs. She has always struck me as a woman in a hurry who builds up a sweat running in one place. She goes nowhere. Her mind is her prison and she decorates it with tassels for her pleasure, but the smart signal sent out is that they are pennants of a crying heart that wants escape.

If there is one person who enjoys bondage, it is she. Give her complete freedom and she won’t know what to do with it. She has nothing much going for her. I went to my bookshelf and brought out a copy of ‘Lajja’. The blurb famously said that it took her seven days to write. Had she done away with quasi-historical truths she could have managed it in a day. It’s that kind of a book. It revealed what one always suspected since that day in July 1993 when a fatwa demanding her head was pronounced in Bangladesh – that she was like a child crying over spilt milk, although she knew that it was only water that had boiled over.

She had chosen to waft in the clouds and ended her 13-day saga with false hope, “Let us go away…to India,” she made her character Sudhomoy Dutta, the sturdy secularist and patriot, say. I wonder if she finds it ironical that ten years later the Kolkata high court has passed an interim injunction restraining publication, sale, marketing and circulation of her latest book, ‘Dwikhondito – Aamar Meyebala Tritiya Khando’. I do not agree with this move. What she says about the men she bedded will reveal a lot more about her. I do not think she can get any worse after ‘Lajja’.

Her pathetic attempts at connecting the Partition, the Bangladesh War and the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots in India showed quite clearly that the historicity she wallowed in could only be restricted to yesterday.

What was she trying to prove? Patriotism? Her ‘humanitarianism’, which hangs round her neck like an albatross, weighty, but drawing sufficient attention to her prized position? Or is she just another writer with perfect timing and a sharp marketing sense? Had she not written ‘Lajja’, she would have continued to be a minor writer in Bangladesh wooing labels and watching CNN. Besides, is she really as secure as she makes herself out to be? I am not alluding to some people’s accusations that she was at the time mouthing the Advani-BJP ideology. She could not; she lacks any sort of commitment. My question refers to a sentence in her book: “Most of Suranjan’s friends were Muslim. None of them thought he was Hindu.” What does this mean? Was she trying to say that a religious person could not have friends from another community? Is faith designed to make you inhuman? Then Marxists should be the most human and humane people on earth, and she herself would have written about communal harmony in the purest sense instead of sprinkling stereotypes from Hindi masala movies.

If she scratched herself, she would be faced with the truth she refuses to acknowledge: that the lungi being yanked off is nobody’s reason for running away, that children pissing on temple ruins are not like writers throwing dust on crumbling ideas, that making a Bengali eat beef is like telling an Eskimo to live in an igloo. And yet she persisted in pushing these points through. She is so insecure that she feels the need to deny her antecedents. Were it restricted to a personal position it would have been all right, but she used characters insidiously to make generalisations only in order to anoint yourself as a progressive.

Did she care about communal harmony when she wrote, “After all, Haider was a Muslim, and employing a Muslim to hunt Muslims was as bad as using a bone to pick up other bones”?

There have been others who have written against minority persecution in her country. The human rights activist and writer, Salam Azad, wrote two books, ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and ‘Post election atrocities on the Hindus in Bangladesh’. How many people have heard of him?

Taslima knows what to say and when. After she married Imran Khan, Jemima Goldsmith found Taslima sympathising with her, worrying about how she would lead her life in Pakistan, when before ‘Lajja’ she herself did it all including cohabiting with as many men as she desired in that little dump of hers. Today, she can even try and make an attempt to exhibit it. Shrewdly, she has selected a time when Islamic or fringe Muslim societies are going through a phase when the red alert sounds everytime their names get mentioned.

She is just too canny. A bit like Lady Di. Such women have no doubt undergone tragedies, but they have the presence of mind to collect evidence. Truly they are the queens of heart with a mind that never lets them down. They manage to sell shame at bargain rates over the counter.

The real thing

Ismat Chugtai did not have to do any of this. Without being tagged with the label, she was a feminist. “I did not know if I was doing anything for women,” she admitted, “I was expressing my own anger, clearing my own mind. And I often discussed it with writer friends like Manto, Bedi, Krishen Chandra, all men. Of course, their writings were different. Their heroines committed suicide. My heroes did.” And then she wrote about older women, younger men. “Why not?” she had exclaimed then. “Why should man always be the bully? To deceive man is important. I know women think like that,” she was convinced.

For someone who is remembered as a literary figure, her writings had begun on scraps, with curses jotted down against her brothers. And her inspiration came from romantic books. “But my knowledge of sex came from the servants and the way they described it, I found it all horrible. But my jottings were something different. The girl was always very beautiful. I imagined she was me. And she was always sick. The hero was a handsome doctor. This character emerged from the fact that our family doctor was fat and ugly. These stories I preserved in a box. And finally, when I was I3, my first story was published in an Urdu women’s magazine. As it was a romantic story with the couple kissing, I requested that my name should be left out.”

But her ambition grew and she wanted to write for men’s magazines. And did. This time her name was mentioned, but luckily for her the family had forgotten it! “I was called Chhuni at home. They did not realise it was I until the money-order came and I was discovered. Then I got an award of Rs.10 from which I bought a chiffon saree for six rupees.”

Soon chiffons were to be replaced with controversies. “In ‘Lihaaf’ I wrote about an eight-year-old’s view of lesbianism. They were discussions I had heard, though I did not know what the words meant. I knew what two men could do but not two women. A case was filed against this story in Lahore. Apparently, the people had understood it, although I hadn’t!” She rejoiced at having shaken the citadels of false morality. And she even won the case.

No wonder she could not stomach the portrayal of the self-sacrificing woman when I met her a short while before her death. “The greatest revolution they show today is that a woman marries according to her wishes. But I don’t think marriage keeps you from things. I married traditionally. (She was married to film director Shaheed Latif). It is the brain that’s important. But now most of the stories are about the sacrificing woman. I don’t know how the hell they suffer like that. Why don’t they make others suffer presuming that to suffer is in vogue?”

Even now as I reminisce about her, I find her words so true, so potent. “These people pity prostitutes, I envy them.” Years ago she, along with some women, had gone to a brothel to ask a woman there to give up the ‘dhanda’. “I was so fascinated when the woman fearlessly started abusing us. I quietly went again to meet her and realised that her boozard husband was the cause of her state. Prostitution, I feel, is a man’s profession, not a woman’s.”

Though her writings created controversies, she was given awards - the Ghalib award, the Nehru award, and various state awards. But is this the yardstick for success? Can this ensure timelessness? “Perhaps... but wait, I don’t think it can work when a minister is a patron. Things tend to get misused then.” Ismat aapa was one person who may have stopped kicking up a storm, but the ripples were evident till her end. How did she feel being recognised - elation or resignation, the feeling that I-have-seen-it-all-and-couldn’t-care-less? “I don’t feel anything. Or maybe I feel all right. At least I am not a freak any more.”

Her days had not been spent in absolute penury, like a fading prima donna’s. In a well-appointed apartment, she showed me the rooms, including a small shrine with various gods and pictures; it was so unselfconscious as to be unobtrusive, no screaming out to make a point. Right across was her grandson’s room where a sticker read “I love girls”. Grandma was indulgent to such things. “His friends come and watch dirty films sometimes and they ask me to join them. I tell them that I don’t want to get spoilt now. I think it’s important to have an open attitude. I did not obey anyone and I don’t expect anyone to obey me.” And she missed nothing from the past because she knew she could recreate it. “I cleared my confusions long ago.” Though she sometimes did get confused about society. She watched films on video. “Some of them are so irritating, but I have to watch to know what’s happening.”

And to know that not all things change for the better. This is why she is still like a beacon because she understood darkness. Unlike a Taslima Nasreen who safely walks through a tunnel aware that there is always light outside. She can make the same discovery by merely shutting and opening her eyes. But who’ll buy that?