Revenge by Taslima Nasrin Read Free Book Online Page B

one Haroon had given me for my birthday before we were married. I tied my hair with golden ribbons, rouged my lips, and applied kohl to my eyes. Seeing me all dressed up, Ranu joked, “Going somewhere?”
    “No.”
    “Why are you all dressed up then?”
    “Just for fun,” I said quickly. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I had dressed so that Haroon would be pleased with me. So that my husband would talk and eat. And take me into his arms. But later, when Habib asked, I was emboldened to tell a happy lie. “Haroon and I are going to the theater.”
    Honestly I was getting ready to entice my husband into joyfulness. I had been moping for the past weeks, sick with my pregnancy, hardly worth talking to. Perhaps if he saw me dressed beautifully, he would take my hand again and we would go out on the town. After all, this was the husband who had taken me to the Swiss, the same man who had pulled me toward the best sari shop in Dhaka when I would have been content to visit a bookstore. How poignant it was now to think of those afternoons on the riverbank
when he listened as I sang Tagore. Tonight, under the light of the full moon . . .
    “Where have you been?” Haroon barked when he stomped in from work.
    “Nowhere.”
    “Why are you dressed up?” I felt sheepish. Now that he had spoken so harshly, how could I say that I wished to dazzle him with my beauty, to remind him that he had not been cheated in his choice of a wife. I said nothing as he began to change into the pyjama he always wore at home.
    “Let’s go somewhere!” I urged. “Like old times! Those were happy days!”
    “Happy days!” Haroon said. He staggered back as if I’d struck him.
    “We ought to be happy for the baby’s sake,” I said.
    “Baby!” He turned his face away with a jerk.
    Haroon left the room in a huff. I followed and found him stretched out on Amma’s bed.
    “Are you ill?” I asked him as Amma hovered nearby.
    “Maybe,” he said. Amma was immediately anxious. She ordered Dolon to sit near her brother, dispatched Ranu to fetch him a glass of water with fresh lime, and suggested firmly that I stroke his hand. But Haroon refused all attention. He didn’t need any drink, he repeated, and he didn’t want the women of the house fussing. He wanted to be left alone.
    I left Amma’s room and climbed slowly upstairs to our room and my window. My face was still made up and I was still wearing my Kancheepuram sari. Looking up, I considered how close to me the sky was. It was this blue strip of
sky that was my confidante. What might that blueness say about my husband’s mysterious condition? Had he fallen in love with someone else? Or was he thinking of Lipi, the girl he had once loved? Haroon always insisted that old romance was finished, but hadn’t I seen love rekindle, bloom again from dried up roots like a dahlia in July? It had happened to my childhood playmate Arzu. He had been in love with a girl when he was very young and barely remembered her when a chance meeting revived his passion, causing him to abandon a current girlfriend for that old love.
    Standing next to the open window, I was desolate. My husband’s house where I lived with his family had turned into a place where my most reliable companion was the blue sky and a quiet bedroom.
    But soon I heard Haroon shouting. I found him, still on his mother’s bed, screaming at Dolon who had done no more than offer to massage his temples. “ Bouma ,” Amma said, addressing me as daughter-in-law, “where did you disappear to? Will you please find out what’s bothering him?” Again Haroon insisted there was nothing wrong and that he didn’t want me around. In fact, he said, he’d be really relieved if I left the room and got busy doing something else. But I had already prepared dinner and all the rooms were swept clean. Even Rosuni and Sakhina had finished their chores; I could hear them through the window, chatting on Hasan’s balcony above.
    “Would you like to