The headline in The Statesman stared at me. Big, bold and black, the two-inch letters proclaimed "Bangladesh Declares Independence."
It was March 27, 1971. In the dining room of their Calcutta house, my parents and I silently looked at one another before gazing again at those ominous letters. The same thought, I knew, haunted each of us. This headline was not just history in the making; it could also spell tragedy for me.
The political convulsion in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) and its violent consequences entered deeply into my personal life because of my marriage, in 1968, to a Bengali Muslim from that region. We had met as graduate students at Harvard. When I announced that I intended to marry him, my orthodox Hindu Brahmin family was horrified. I had been the first girl in our family allowed to go abroad for higher education, alone and unmarried. Everyone now regretted it. In a family where even intercaste marriages raised eyebrows, marrying a Muslim would bring unbearable social stigma. Worse, the Muslim I wanted to marry was a citizen of Pakistan, a country hostile to India. If war broke out, I might be cut off from my parents. And since Muslims could have four wives, what if this young man had one or more tucked away back home?
Would I be forced to convert to Islam? they asked. The gods must have shuddered at the prospect. Eating beef, absolutely forbidden to Hindus, is common among Muslims. Would my palate, too, be so defiled? The mere possibility seemed to cast a shadow of pollution over the daily offerings set before the family gods.
Blithely dismissing such considerations, we got married in the dusty offices of an American justice of the peace. My husband was a nonbeliever. His family at home consisted of older married siblings, all of whom appeared thrilled at the prospect of meeting their baby brother's exotic wife. None expected me to convert. On my side, after an appalled and deafening silence, we received a reluctant acceptance of the marriage from my parents. But my devout grandmother amazed me with a letter of joyful congratulation, unmarred by misgivings about our future.
We left the U.S. in October 1970. After meeting my in-laws and spending a month with them in Dhaka, I went to Calcutta alone—the prodigal daughter in search of forgiveness and love. I think by the time my first delectable dinner at home was over—my favorite items lovingly cooked by my mother—much of the hurt had been set aside. I was to stay for three months, while my husband joined his office in Dhaka and found an apartment. But before he could come and meet my parents, political events overtook us. Normal travel between Calcutta and Dhaka became impossible. And then came the declaration of independence.
For three nights and four days, we had no news of my husband. The papers reported on the terror unleashed by the Pakistani military, especially its systematic elimination of Bengali intellectuals—such as my husband. We also knew that his marriage to a Hindu woman from enemy India made him even more of a target for reprisal.
Panic-stricken refugees streamed across the border into Calcutta. Train stations were jam-packed with huddled figures. Newspaper photos showed people hunkering over bowls containing pathetic handfuls of rice. Our house became deathly quiet—my father and I remaining glued to newspapers and radio but afraid to discuss anything we heard, my mother seeking haven with the gods in her worshiping room.
When my husband turned up on the fourth evening, after an escape across the border and a two-day train journey, my parents welcomed him with unrestrained joy and relief. No shadow of resentment and suspicion toward the Muslim son-in-law was evident. Their only daughter was not a widow—that was all they cared about.
My mother cheerfully bustled around in the kitchen, fixing an impromptu dinner. Oppressed by fear in the past few days, we had neglected to shop, and our larder and refrigerator were almost bare. But her culinary genius transcended such limitations.
Later, I watched my husband eat his first meal in our house. Instead of rice, my mother served luchis—puffy, disk-shaped fried breads that Bengalis love. As he picked up the first luchi and punctured the top layer with his finger to let out the hot, fragrant air, a smile of almost childlike pleasure illuminated his face, erasing the tensions of his traumatic journey. When I saw that smile mirrored in my parents' faces, I began to hope that he would really become the son they never had.
The luchis came with eggplant fritters, a tangy potato dish, a dal made from yellow split peas, and a chilled dessert of evaporated milk infused with tangerine pulp. Afterward, we decided to walk to my widowed grandmother's house and give her the good news in person. She was eating her solitary supper but came out when she heard my voice. The instant she saw my husband, she rushed forward and hugged him tightly, unaware that her hand, smeared with the spiced vegetables she had been eating with chapatis, left turmeric-yellow fingerprints on his white silk kurta. The signature of true love, I thought.
The honeymoon, however, was brief. Being a penniless, statusless refugee in his in-laws' home seemed to bring out the most prickly and acerbic aspects of my husband's character. Those traits collided head-on with my mother's natural propensity to impose her way of doing things—even on people accustomed to independence from an early age. The "house rules," which I no longer noticed because I had grown up with them, were numerous and intrusive. No breakfast until you had eaten a morsel of the offerings made to the gods during morning worship. No leaving the house without putting one grain of the "holy rice" (from the Jagannatha Temple, in Puri) in your mouth. My husband, who never fasted during Ramadan as his fellow Muslims did, who never went to a mosque to pray, found it absurd and irritating to be subjected to these Hindu rituals.
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