Fiza : A True Story

My mother had named me Fiza. Such a beautiful name! Isn’t it? I loved my mother very much. I loved the name that she had given me. I called my mother Ammi. I loved everything about Ammi and the love was reciprocated. But I couldn’t pronounce my name. No, I was not suffering from autism as you might have started thinking. I was just not old enough to say anything. Well, how can you expect a not-even-two-year-old girl to talk? My age was just of lying in my cradle and keep rocking my limbs. Yes, I was just one and a half year old at that time – and forever after.

***

Let’s begin it from the beginning. My family constituted just three of us – me, Ammi and Papa. We lived in Patna, Bihar in our old and extremely small house. Our house was situated on the bank of river Ganga. Life was good and all were happy. Since I was a new member in the family, everyone loved me – or at least it seemed so. I was very happy. Ours was a poor family. My father was a fisherman and my mother was a house wife. She was suffering from some serious disease. I didn’t know what disease she was suffering from. However, life was simple and happy. No miasma of tragedy or conspiracy was there – or at least it seemed so.

Then the catastrophe commenced. The beginning of my end started. One dark winter night, fate left me in the lurch. Doom descended over my mother. When the town was asleep and poor people like us were shivering in the cold, my mother passed away in the dead of the night. I cried like never before. I was kept away from her body, I don’t know why. I never took milk the whole day, even after being offered more than enough number of times. They thought I didn’t understand all that but I did. I knew my mother was no more. When one of my aunts was walking, taking me with her in her lap, I caught a glance of my mother lying silently, surrounded by all the people I knew and so many people whom I didn’t know. She looked much more beautiful at that time. Ammi looked fairer and photogenic. It seemed to me as if she were smiling when I looked at her. That was the last time I saw my mother. She left me in the house and went away in a coffin on the shoulders of Papa and other gents.

***

Days passed. I started feeling lonelier day by day. My father worked and ate and slept and very seldom fed me – that was all that he did after the death of Ammi. It is awkward for a house not to have any female adult to take care of it. Isn’t it? So, it felt very unpleasant and bitter for me and more for my father – that I came to know later. I felt very depressed and Papa would shout at me whenever I cried.

***

For my surprise, my father married another woman. She was not as beautiful as Ammi, neither was she more kind and intelligent than her. I don’t know what had led my father to marry her. But it was good to have a woman in the house to take care of us. Something was better than nothing. Or was it?

When she came out of her bridal phase and became regular in the house, I found that she had developed a distaste towards me. She would slap me when alone, she would pinch me, and curse me and what not. Things had changed a great deal and the changes were full of agony. But this was not as painful as the other change that had occurred. The most hurting one. Yes, my father too had started disliking me. And day by day, their distaste towards me grew more intense. I still loved my father and to a great extent my stepmother too. After all they were my own. They were my parents. Yes, she could never take my mother’s place in my heart. Still I loved them both – but they did not. Well, I don’t really understand what leads one to cook dislike for a child who can’t even walk and talk thus far. No, poverty – the excuse that my father gave after committing the crime – cannot cultivate hatred towards one’s own child, I believe. There must be something else. There must be something very devilish to lead one to do what my father did to me. What more shall I tell you in my story? It all ended just a few months after the arrival of my stepmother in the house.

***

It was a scorching summer night. Electricity was gone and it was very common during summer. That night I had slept without getting fed.

I was woken up in the dead of the night. Sun had not risen yet. The mohalla was still asleep. But my father had woke up and he woke me too. That night was the night when his hatred towards me had reached its peak. I woke up crying. He looked at me. His face was expressionless as if the love and hatred towards me, all had died in him. I was just a waste now. I was of no use. It didn’t matter for him whether I existed or not. Or maybe it sounded even better to him if I had never existed.

He wrapped me in the sheets on which I was lying. I shrieked and began crying. He heard my wailing but didn’t reply. Then he went out of the room and brought a gunnysack. I kept looking at him and I let out one louder scream. He put me – who was wrapped in the sheets – inside the jute bag. I couldn’t believe my father was doing this to me. The weather was hot, and in that weather being wrapped in clothes and packed in a jute bag felt like – oh! You cannot imagine. I was choking inside as he walked. He took the bag and walked towards the main door. It was darker than never before. I was peering through the spaces in the jute and crying at the same time. Whenever I cried a little louder than his expectation, he would press my mouth from above the sack. He had taken a stick too – a long and strong one – which he would use later. He tiptoed out from the house and walked fast – nearly ran. I could hear some dogs’ howling. Then after some more jumping and thumping inside the bag, finally he stopped. A wave of cool breeze washed me, even inside the bag. I knew this breeze. I had felt it before. It was the ghat of the Ganga. He had reached the Ganga and was standing where the steps stood – the steps that led downwards to the water. The kind of breeze was typical to Ganga ghats. I still was not sure what he was going to do. Then he started climbing down the steps and so many times I was hit by the hard steps from below. He was walking very hastily. He didn’t care that I was getting hurt. ‘Had he cared a bit, he would not have brought me here,’ I thought. And he stopped again. He had reached the destination. I heard the waves of the flowing water. I heard a koel cooing in an up-down-then-up manner. It kept singing in his only tone. The sun was about to rise I think, because things were becoming clearer to see through the jute. I saw the water flowing pleasantly. And then he stepped forward further. The sack became wet with the Ganga water from below. I quivered and let out a powerful yet painful cry. Then before I could think anything, in a jerk he took me in his arms, the way people usually used to take me for pampering. The way Ammi and Papa used to take me for coddling and loving. They both were dead now. My mother was dead physically too and was lying in the graveyard near the house but my father was not physically dead yet, but emotionally – yes. The father in him had died. My heart ached with sorrow. Oh! What an accursed morrow!

He took me in the similar fashion in his arms as he used to do during earlier days. The only difference this time was that I was inside the jute bag which was tied with a rope at the opening. He was probably holding the stick in his underarms. Then he walked some more, ahead in the water and reached a place where I – in his arms – started feeling the water touching me from below. I shivered. I felt gooseflesh. And then after a minute or too, his hands were gone from below me. All that I could feel was water. Water from below and water from the sides trying to eat me up.

I was floating on the mild waves. And then… I was hit with the stick that he had brought with him. He was pushing me down in the water. I wailed and tried to fight back but could not do anything effective. With a powerful push he drowned me in the water. Water filled the sack and now I couldn’t even cry. He was drowning me down with the stick with all his might. My feet rose up and my head started reaching further down in water. Down and down and some more down. After a while – which seemed like years – my feet lost sensation and so did my hands and torso. The only part that was not numb yet was my head. I vaguely recalled Ammi loving me in her arms and Papa brushing his hands through my thin hairs. I remembered myself in lap of my aunt standing at the door of a room in my house and Ammi smiling at me with her dead lips. Now I was going to meet her. It felt better. At least I didn’t have to face those pinches and curses of my stepmother. I was going to live with Ammi forever. The only pain that wasn’t letting me die with ease was the thought what led my Papa to forsake me. It would not have been that painful if my stepmother had done this. But it was my father who brutalised me. Why did he do this to me? ‘What was my fault?’ I thought in my mind as water began entering through my nose and mouth and eyes and ears……

The last sound I heard was of my head banging against a rock in the river bed and the last seen I saw was water becoming lighter in colour – maybe the sun had risen. And with the rise of the sun, the boat of my life drowned. I was not as lucky as Moses was.

© Asif Uzzaman 

Also read :  PUPPETS OF THE MAGICIAN