SABERA AHSAN
This story is a fictional version of a true account my father told me about his time as a young struggling father and husband in Dhaka, Bangladesh in the early 1960s. The story really upset me and made me cry when I first heard it. I was between jobs and about five employers had told me at 34 years old and as an ex primary school teacher, I was too old to change careers. The story made me realise how lucky I was to be suffering only a minor blip in my career. I took the basic story line of my father's experience and made it even more desperate and melancholy. However the parts about my sister being wrapped in newspaper, my mother's anaemia and my father falling into the rain water are all true accounts. In real life my father wasn't a journalist he was a biochemist and won a scholarship to work in New Zealand. He actually ended up in Manchester UK and studied pharmacy at the local Uni. He paid his fees by working in a restaurant during a time when weekly rents were just £1. He went on to be a dad to four very independent arty daughters. He was a very successful pharmacist in Warrington and was really respected and loved by all his staff and customers. My unborn sister did survive my mother's bout of anaemia and went on to be a Spanish/French teacher but now works as college lecturer in EAL. The story is narrated by his surviving daughter - me, who is supposed to be an English Literature teacher in the story. I am in fact in the real world an ex primary school teacher and now work in policing and crime reduction. My father died in 2010 and is now buried in his beloved Manchester.
Sometimes I think of my father’s life and I wonder whether he really ever got a break. My parents’ marriage was arranged but they had a deep regard and love for one another. My father studied English Literature. He was a great fan of the works of TS Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Work in Dhaka was hard to come by in the late1960’s. He was sometimes offered journalistic work, writing pieces for a local English language newspaper. It was just enough money to pay the rent and buy my pregnant mother food. They rented a shared room in a widow’s house in Dhaka. It was crowded, dirty and full of cockroaches. Perhaps my mother could have returned to the village to convalesce but my father would not be allowed to live in the house of the widow without my mother presence so they had no choice but to stay where they were.
My mother was heavily pregnant and underweight. She was not eating the right nutrients and diet to keep herself and the baby healthy. One night her pregnant belly began to ache. She was seven months pregnant and bleeding heavily so my father took her to Dhaka hospital in a rickshaw. The doctor diagnosed her as dangerously anaemic. If the unborn baby didn’t survive the night, then neither would she. Thank god she did survive the night, as did her unborn baby. My father begged and borrowed money from friends and relatives and at the cost of five-taka per day my mother was able to convalesce in hospital. She was pumped with iron tablets, lentils and rice. Within two months the baby was born. My father didn’t even possess clothes to put on his baby’s body, so he took her home, in his arms wrapped in newspaper. My father was just glad to see this tiny baby and his wife were healthy and alive.
My father was good writer, and through a combination of hard work diligence and sheer damn talent he managed to win a paid scholarship to research Bengali literature for a professor at a top university in America. It would have solved all my parents’ financial problems. My father’s boat passage was paid and my mother was now living in the countryside with her father in-law. My father would regularly send her money from Dhaka, to pay for powered milk and clothes for the baby. It broke my father’s heart that he would have to leave behind the two people he loved most in the world and brave a new country and culture but he knew deep in his soul it was for the best. It was just two days before he was due to catch his boat, his boss wanted to meet with him before he left for America. He was called in to the office.
“You are not the man I thought you were. I have reason to believe you are not an honest man.” As he went on as my father sat listening in dumb bewilderment.
“Obviously, I am a man of honour and I can not reveal my sources. What I am about to do I do not do willingly. A man must learn from his mistakes and only then will he truly be on the path to repentance and redemption.”
“Please tell me what I have done and I can defend myself and prove my honour and worth to you.” My father pleaded.
“I could never go to America and start a new life knowing in my heart that you think badly of me. You are my mentor and I have great respect for you.”
“You will not be going to America, I have informed your sponsors of your disgrace and I have no alternative but to ask you to leave this honourable office and not return.”
My father new exactly what had happened and he knew deep down in his heart that there was no use pleading, his boss’s mind was made up. He possessed the level of power and influence that could make or break any man in Dhaka. But my father knew and God knew, that he was a man of integrity. My father had been accused of stealing his writing ideas from another undisclosed writer. The boss’s son would now to travel to America in place of my father. All the doors were now closed to him. It was rainy season and all the streets and drains of Dhaka were over flowing with rainwater. God had spared him one last humiliation; at least the rainwater disguised his tears. As he fell into a drain and swallowed the disgusting sewer water my father cried out loud. “Oh God if this is to be my life, useless to everyone, then take me now and show mercy on my wife and new born child.”
Two months later he was offered a voucher to work in England, there was a huge shortage of unskilled labour. He worked in an umbrella factory in a dusty town north of Manchester. Eventually through contacts and friends he managed to find a job in a restaurant and pay my mother a monthly sum in Bangladesh. Sadly the baby who would have been my older sister did not live for very long. For the two months when my parents had lived in abject poverty, my sister’s tiny body had not been strong enough to survive. My mother had even sent her wedding ring to Feni, in order that she could buy milk for the baby but alas it had been too late.
I sit reading passages of Eliot and Hardy to my pupils in my classroom and then my mind wanders back to a time long forgotten, my father’s young adult life. I think back to all the suffering that brave young man went through in order that I might have a better chance in life and seize all the opportunities that were never open to him. I suppose life is a journey in which there are winners and losers. My father lost in order that my younger sisters and I might win. You can spend your whole life running from what you don’t want and that you don’t like, but sooner or later you have to come face to face with those fears and that’s when the true test of your strength begins.
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