Putul – Second Part

"আমি বীরাঙ্গনা বলছি" (I'm talking Birangona). ©Artist M. Shafik, 2023

I knew my mother's story.

Not having a father wasn't easy; even worse then knowing who he was.

So when I started to grow up I decided not to talk about it with my mother anymore.

We let the looks of pain and disgust slip away.

Every morning I observed the careful and loving way in which she collected clay from the river and I reflected that it was her daily care – as if removing pieces of red earth from the river banks was equivalent to removing shreds of blood from her perennial wound, to make small works of art that gave joy.

When you have nothing left, even the smallest and most insignificant action can fill an entire existence with meaning.

For Sushita Pal, and for me, making tepa putul was a damn serious thing. Like morning and evening prayer.

Sometimes I looked at her sitting on the ground, behind the wooden box with the dolls on top, wrapped in her black veil, in the indifference of the people who passed in front and I thought it was absurd to imagine her as a national heroine. She is a freedom fighter.

Yet this was in the blind eyes of the nation.

A heroine, violated and wounded, forgotten in the dust.

She was even mocked by those who are now free thanks also to those injuries.

It took me years to understand how a father or husband can refuse and chase away a daughter or wife who has suffered, without any fault, what my mother and four hundred thousand other Bengali women suffered in 1971

I understood it thanks to the looks and words that, at times, rained on my mother.

The road to the market was a land snake that slithered alongside the riverbank.

The chirping of the doyels cheered us up every morning.

The hours at the market were not hard, except in the month of Borsha, in June and July, when the monsoons made it impossible to even leave the house.

Those were the hardest and longest days, so we started saving rice a couple of months before because we knew we couldn't sell our putul.

During the rainy season, when the river overflowed and flooded the village, my mother taught me to put all the putul and the most important things we had in a sack, to dig a deep hole in the earth near a tree, so that it would be possible to recover them when the water and mud went away. She had learned it from her mother and she from her grandmother.

Ours was a simple existence.

The days followed one another without too many jolts.

The only moments of tension were when the usual group of three or four men arrived and enjoyed teasing my mother.

When they addressed me I could ignore them, but seeing my mother cry over their insults made my blood boil.

My hatred grew day by day.

We had sold a few putuls that morning.

There were few people at the market.

Furthermore, four of them came this time.

Always them. The stocky body and bellies swollen like the hari* of the misthi doi. The face of monkeys with brown skin and hairlines a few fingers above the eyebrows.

Just seeing them walking made me nauseous, arrogant and vulgar.

They stopped in front of us and, without bending down, began to laugh.

“Business wasn't good today, boudi! What a pity!"

One exclaimed, which was echoed by another man in his thirties.

“I think you'll only eat potatoes and milk this evening”.

They burst out laughing. Then a third man approached above me.

“It's a shame that you're the daughter of a Pakistani... You wouldn't be bad, I'd take you to the woods one afternoon...”

He said in a thick voice as his hand was about to touch my cheek when I smacked his arm away.

“Not even you were the last man on earth!”

I replied with a snake hiss.

He insulted me by laughing and they left.

My mother stood still, looking at our little creatures.

“We'd better go home, my daughter. Today is not a good day.”

Before going, with the little money we earned we bought a bag of lentils.

The way home was silent. The clouds in the sky were gathering and their whiteness was tinged with grey. It would certainly rain at night.

My mother walked slightly bent under the weight of the basket on her head, supported by the right hand.

Every time I asked if I could take it she refused. One day you will have your own basket, when I can no longer come with you. She told me with a hint of melancholy in the voice.

When we reached the halfway point we heard the sound of footsteps behind us.

“Do you need a hand carrying your basket, Pakistani bitch?”

Both of our blood ran cold.

In an instant we were surrounded by the four men. Sushita's face turned whiter than milk.

Her lips trembled like feathers in the wind.

“Please...”

I stood between my mother and the man in front of her, but they grabbed my arm and threw me to the ground.

My mother put the basket on the ground but when she was bent over a man about twenty years old behind kicked her on the bottom and made her fall to the ground. She tried to stand up with the hands pleading towards them.

“Please don't hurt us!”

“Don't worry, boudi. We won't rape you. None of us would ever stick anything where the Pakistanis and Rajakars have gorged themselves: it's an infected area!”

“Let her be!” I screamed at the top of my lungs while my mother was still crying in the dust.

“You shut up! Daughter of the wrong seed!” The oldest among them shouted at me with dog anger.

Then another bent down and emptied the sack onto the road: a dozen putuls rolled in the red dust.

“What beautiful little dolls!”

One of them sneered.

Suddenly, he stepped on one with his sandal and it shattered into small pieces.

“Noooo!”

My mother's scream was excruciating.

Even the forest fell silent.

She threw herself at the man's feet, grabbing his foot. Then two others kicked the other putuls: some rolled intact, others broke into shards.

The blood swelled hot in my veins, in my neck, in my temples, on my forehead.

“Enough! Enough! For pity's sake!”

Sushita tried to save them but the men trampled on her hand and the putul. They had destroyed more than half of them.

Satisfied with their work, all four of them turned towards my mother and, still with their sandals red from the dirt, began to push and roll her body as if it were a balloon.

“Why don't you change village, boudi? Go to one of those shelters that our Sheikh Saheb has opened for you Pakistani prostitutes. At least you're all together, locked in your rooms, without polluting the air we breathe. Your mouths still taste like Hurdu milk. You drank a lot in those days, right?!”

"আমি বীরাঙ্গনা বলছি 2" (I'm talking Birangona). ©Artist M. Shafik, 2023

I closed my eyes. From my belly I felt a fire rising that made my skin tremble. The fists were clenched so tightly that the nails cut into the palms of the hands.

I felt like throwing up.

I opened my eyes. The four men were still around my mother.

Four putuls that were still lying intact on the ground straightened up. In a few seconds they grew to over two meters, with very long arms open at the sides like colored crosses.

One of the men who saw them let out a scream. The others turned and stared in terror at the giant dolls that were already around them.

My mother's face, dirty with tears and dust, was petrified.

“But what magic is this!”

The oldest man shouted as he tried to run between two putuls, but both bent slightly to the side and with their two outstretched arms hit him violently, making fall backwards.

The other three also tried to run away.

The twenty-year-old boy was grabbed by the tip of the stylized hand by the collar of his shirt and pulled up, dangling like a hysterical monkey almost ten feet in the air. He cried and begged for mercy like a terrified child.

The man who first stepped on mother's putul tried to escape by crawling after one of them. I looked at him with eyes full of resentment. The giant putul turned and crushed his legs with the wide funnel-shaped base of her body. The man remained lying on his stomach, beating his hands in the dust in pain.

The last one was grabbed and held tightly to the chest with both arms by the fourth putul, as if he were his child: she held him so tightly that his nose began to bleed and he couldn't say a word.

I walked towards my mother and helped her up.

I led her in front of the man who was lying on the ground with half his body crushed by the doll's blue and white skirt.

He struggled to look at us from below, his brow furrowed in pain and his eyes full of fear.

“Compassion! Compassion! Let us go! We will never bother your mother again!”

He begged, his voice strangled by the weight of the putul.

“Shotti?” Really, I asked him with a look full of hatred.

My mother caressed my back.

“Enough, my daughter. Let them go. Enough...”

I pushed my mother a step forward until her feet were out in front of the man's face.

“Ask for forgiveness and maybe I will let you go.”

I told him, pointing to Sushita's foot.

He suddenly grabbed it with both hands and rested his forehead on the dusty back of her foot, begging for her forgiveness and freedom.

Even the other three men, some dangling from above, some suffocated in the embrace, some on the ground hit on the head by continuous blows, screamed for mercy and forgiveness.

I closed my eyes and exhaled deeply.

The four putuls freed the men.

They lay next to each other, kneeling, their faces soaked in tears as each massaged the painful part of their body.

I hugged my mother tightly, standing in front of them.

“Now beg for freedom. What a beautiful word! Freedom. Print it carefully in your mind. Today you had your little fight for freedom. Miserable and petty. My mother's was much worse, and it was for the freedom of all of us. Next time, if there will be, if you are really that stupid, I will have no mercy.”

The men nodded so intensely that it seemed as if their heads would roll off their necks at any moment.

I pointed to the road: “Hurry away before I change my mind.”

I said, looking at one of the putuls with a small red mouth under two enormous fish eyes turned left and right.

The four yokels got up and staggered away, holding each other up.

Sushita Pal didn't take her eyes off them until four dots appeared at the bottom of the street.

When she turned, the enormous putuls had returned to their original size, the only survivors among the shards and fragments of the others.

She bent over them. With his hand she picked up every little piece and put them all in the bag.

She loaded it into the basket, shook the sari to remove the dust and placed the basket on her head.

She kissed my forehead.

“Thank you, my daughter. Let's go home now. This evening we have to make many new tepa putul for tomorrow.”

I nodded and smiled at her.

THE END

*Hari, the pot used for the Misthi Doi.

The story told is fictional but Sushita Pal is the name of a real birangona, who at the age of 18, in Barisal, was taken to the Gournadi camp where she remained for 15 days, raped every day by four men. She decided for the termination of her pregnancy, her mother and her brothers were good to her but her husband's family chased her away from their home. The story I told through Sushita Pal is what the surviving birangonas told in interviews collected in two books.

“Birangona 1971 – Saga of the Violated Women” by Muntassir Mamoon (Journey Moon Books, 2017) and “The Unsung Ballads – Statements of Birangonas of Bangladesh Liberation War 1971”, by Shafiqul Islam Kajol (Desher Kotha Publications, 2011).

A drama that is still too little told.

Special thanks to the artist M. Shafik for the works he created specifically for this story.

Italian version