Putul – First Part

Bangladesh, February 2020

 

Sushita Pal's fingers have been molding clay since she was a child.

Seeing them move on the ocher paste was like admiring a spider weaving its web.

While most of the women had turmeric yellow fingertips and nails on their right hands, hers looked like marigold petals, the orange flower used in puja garlands.

From clay she created splendid tepa putul, the small traditional dolls that made her caste Patua famous since the past.

Every morning Sushita Pal got up at dawn and, after praying, went with her daughter Shobha to the right bank of the Jamuna River to collect clay.

Sushita Pal was not too far from turning forty and she had changed more villages in her life, always staying in Sirajganj, Rajshahi district.

She now lived in Sayadhangara, with her twenty-year-old daughter to whom she had taught her art.

She was deeply proud of this skill. She not only models the clay but also paints the little dolls with bright colours.

She had taught this art to Shobha since she was a child, sitting in their small flame-lit room on nights that resounded with fireflies and frogs in concert.

Shobha stared in admiration at her mother's fingers as they transformed a piece of red earth into figurines of women with children in their arms, animals, stylized beings with long arms open at their sides as if to welcome the entire universe, while the acrid smell of the incense stung the nostrils.

“We come from India, way back. From Bihar, from Jharkhand. Migrating over the decades, always following the course of the great Brahmaputra since the time of Saraswati, the Goddess of the waves and rivers, when we were still called Chitrakar and we wandered from village to village and in the courts of the Kings with our painted scrolls telling stories in return of food and money. No one is as skilled as we are at painting and modeling clay.”

Sushita Pal said with her smile outlined by the light of the flame. Shobha nodded.

They were alone, but they were happy.

Not every little girl could boast of having an artist mother and, in every house in the village, there was a putul made by her.

The gopals, small sacred statues of Krishna, decorate the prayer corners in homes and the tepa putuls of Sushita cheer up the children.

“So, Ma, is our river the same as our ancestors?”

Shobha asked, her hands shyly imitating her mother's on the clay.

“Yes, my daughter. The same great Brahmaputra which, for centuries, has divided into two branches and descends to the east to flow into the Meghna, while our Jamuna ends in the west in the Padma. For us, as for almost all people who live in Sirajganj, the river is our life – and often, even our death. Without him I could never create these.”

She said, showing a little doll with her arms open in a T shape, huge eyes and two crowns on either side of her tiny face on her elongated neck.

Shobha had failed to go to school and she could not find anyone to marry her. The people of the village knew them. As they were known in Ariamohon, in Kandarpar, where she was born.

Everywhere they went people soon knew who they were.

Although Shobha envied women with shakas on their wrists and red sindor she had decided that, as her mother had taken care of her until she was twenty, so she, without bitterness, would accompany her into old age.

 

Sushita Pal had very long black hair that was enriched with small waves every now and then, as if they were truly a river of ink caressed by a light breeze. At her hairline there was not the vermilion red of the sindor but the silver of a few white hairs.

Her eyebrows were thick and her gaze was hard and deep. Her skin was still smooth. The nakful, the little ring on the side of her nose, looked like a miniature golden sun. The parted full lips revealed an upper tooth that was more protruding than the others but this did not affect the image of a beautiful and intense face.

She favored dark colors and often wore black orna.

The skin on her hands and feet was as dry and tough as a crocodile's – after all, they were both river creatures.

Shobha, on the other hand, was simply wonderful: her round face framed by her long hair always tied in a ponytail and her wood-colored skin.

They slept next to each other on the floor surrounded by dozens of putuls, some already painted and others waiting to solidify.

They were their survival.

Every morning Sushita put them in a sack and loaded them into a large basket on the head, while her daughter brought a wooden box from the market to place them on for sale.

They toured the markets, traveling for kilometers at times.

Wherever they went they always managed to sell some, enough to buy rice, lentils and vegetables.

She was so well known for her skill that they often ordered putuls with specific features and colors.

Mother and daughter, sitting behind the box covered with an old faded ornament and the putuls straight like flowers.

When the sun began to set on the treetops, the two women collected their things, bought what they needed for dinner with the money they earned and returned to the village.

Every day similar to himself, for twenty years.

 

However, not every day was the same.

Because not all the people we meet are similar.

The sun rises and sets the same as itself from the day in which Hiranyagarbha, the cosmic egg, opened into two shells creating the sky and the earth, but the human beings who inhabit the earth have a thousand shades of soul color, from lighter to darker shades.

Precisely because my mother was defenseless and alone, she was often harassed by a small group of men who frequented the market. It had already happened.

When my mother saw them coming from afar she lowered her face and fell silent, pulling the edge of the ornament down with her hand to cover half face.

Most of the time it was mocking laughter, or they kicked up dust towards the putuls with their feet.

That morning two of them arrived, with prominent bellies, stocky like calves and date-coloured complexions.

Once in front of us they stopped. There were few people, the weather was not good and promised rain. One of them bent down to stare into my mother's eyes turned towards the putuls.

He took one on his hand: the wide funnel-shaped base and her arms on the chest holding a micro-baby, gold and blue in color.

He turned it between his fingers to get a good look at her, with brown wolf teeth and dull eyes.

“Good morning, boudi. How are you?"

He then turned the putul upside down and inserted his index finger into the hollow of the base, moving it in and out.

“Is your beautiful little doll still a virgin or is she already abused?”

His companion, standing with his hands in the trouser pockets, burst out laughing. The other dropped the putul to the ground and stood up laughing loudly. They left still laughing.

My mother hadn't moved an inch.

Her motionless profile. The nakful set in a teardrop.

 

It happened during the month of Aswin, between September and October. In 1971.

I had recently turned sixteen and I was supposed to get married the following month, in Kartik, in the auspicious month of Durga: everything was ready.

Like every morning we went to the river to get water and clay.

On the way back we saw a military van arriving. We knew the war had started but we thought it would never reach our village. We hid among the plants and saw the Pakistani soldiers dragging two men out of the van; they tied them to a tree and shot them.

We hid in a swamp, terrified. Then we ran home.

I told my family everything. We took some of our things and fled through the bushes. We were near a school where we saw a woman who we knew had given birth to her child three days ago. Several military jeeps and vans arrived in the village. Five Pakistani soldiers and rajakars, collaborators of the Pakistani army, entered the woman's house. After a few minutes we only heard piercing screams that made our blood freeze. I trembled like a leaf during the monsoon and held my father's hand tightly.

We started running but didn't get very far. Suddenly a group of soldiers surrounded us with rifles pointed. A rajakar named Biswas and another, Sayed, came behind me. They took me and my mother. My father died before our eyes in tears struck by the rifles of the five soldiers. The last memory I have of him is his body lying on the ground in a pool of blood.

They took us into the school where dozens and dozens of very young girls and women were gathered on the floor, completely naked, trembling and crying, some with bloody wounds on their bodies.

I begged to let us go, with my arms stretched out towards my mother, whose sari was being forcibly torn by three soldiers, laughing like pigs. A soldier hit me violently on the forehead with the butt of his rifle. I passed out with the sensation of warm blood dripping between my eyes. It was lucky, because in the fog that descended heavily and closed my eyes I just had time to see a soldier over the body of my mother lying on the ground. Screams. The crying, then the darkness.

I woke up and was already in the camp in the city of Sirajganj, where there were about twenty Pakistani soldiers and about forty rajakars, under the orders of Major Muzaffar Hasan Gardigi.

I learned that, as soon as they were brought into the camp, the soldiers had separated the men from the women and that the young girls and women were in turn separated from the women over fifty. I would never see my mother again either.

 

©Hashem Khan. “Gift of razakars: Genocide and Torture”. Drawing, 2012

 

I stayed there for five, six days. I don't remember anymore.

What I can never forget are the screaming, day and night, the supplications to Allah and Vogoban, and the crying.

And what I saw.

Girls and young women, even pregnant, abused and tortured as if they were livestock. Every evening, upon returning from the villages and cities where they killed in search of the muktijoddhas, the freedom fighters, six or seven soldiers and rajakars raped us, sometimes one by one in line outside the torture rooms, which were empty rooms with a cot made of bamboo canes and poles to tie our hands or ankles, even by our hair, or in groups. Every terrible hour, every moment of the day, even when we were all together, humiliated in front of the other women. Those who cried were hit with fists or the butt of a rifle. While they were above us, the pigs, asked where our husbands were, our children, if we had muktijoddhas relatives and put out cigarettes on our skin.

But those whose husbands were freedom fighters faced a much worse fate.

We saw a young woman raped for hours alternately by rajakars and Pakistani soldiers, eventually her breasts and buttocks were severed with rifle bayonets while another of them tortured her with the bayonet between her legs until she bled to death.

 

When we were released it seemed like months had passed.

I no longer felt my body.

Many women from nearby villages did not have time to see their tormentors killed by the muktijoddhas when they came to free us. A large number died first from the violence they suffered or from the blows of their rifles. Most went crazy.

After the war Sheikh Saheb opened a shelter for us birangonas.

Some remained there for a short time, others until the end of their days.

The vast majority of families and husbands who survived those terrible nine months no longer accepted those women. Wives and daughters were repudiated because they bore the indelible stigma of the enemy.

Those who became pregnant went to hospitals to have an abortion.

I do not. Shobha is the daughter of that misery.

Obviously whoever was supposed to marry me refused.

I didn't even have a family anymore.

Only scars. My daughter. My art.

I didn't even want to participate in the collective ritual of violence and killing of the rajakars in the streets.

They wouldn't give me back everything I lost.

From then on I was called birangona*.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED...

 

 

* Birangona. In the six months of the Bangladesh Liberation War, from March to December 1971, the Paksitan army and their Rajakars collaborators killed three million civilians and raped, tortured and enslaved a number of women ranging from official of 200,000 to the more realistic one of 468,000. 56.50% were Muslim and 41.44% Hindu. Over 66% were married women, 33% were still unmarried. A study by WCFFC Research reports that 90% of the birangonas interviewed suffered from mental disorders related to guilt for what they had suffered. Thirteen out of twenty-two birangonas in Sirajganj were recognized as freedom fighters in 2016.

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