Muhammed Zafar Iqbal Translated by Arunava Sinha

Rasha LITTLE GIRL, BIG HEART

‘Evocative and empowering, with a surprising strain of wisdom’ TA H M I M A A N A M

PUFFIN BOOKS

RASHA Muhammed Zafar Iqbal is the best-known writer of science fiction and children’s literature from Bangladesh. An educationist, a professor of physics, computer science and engineering, and a social activist—Iqbal is a pioneer in popularizing science and mathematics among the children of Bangladesh. Author of more than 181 books, he is a prolific writer. His books have earned him numerous awards, including the prestigious national Bangla Academy Literary Award. Arunava Sinha has thirty-five Bengali-to-English published translations in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature. He is a two-time winner of the Crossword Prize for translated books.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK ‘Incredibly moving story of a young girl whose personal transformation sparks off changes in her surroundings with some amazing results’—Andaleeb Wajid ‘A big war, a young country and a little girl who has a big voice and a bigger heart. Rasha is not a tale of abandonment, but one of overcoming and prevailing, and the empowerment of young people. A big shout-out to children to say, “If you don’t like it, speak up, do something, change wrong to right”’—Paro Anand

Rasha LITTLE GIRL, BIG HEART

Muhammed Zafar Iqbal Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha

PUFFIN BOOKS USA Canada UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China Puffin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com Published by Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd 4th Floor, Capital Tower 1, MG Road, Gurugram 122 002, Haryana, India

First published in Bengali as Rashed Amar Bondhu by Tamralipi, Dhaka 2010 First published in Puffin Books by Penguin Random House India 2016 Copyright © Md Zafar Iqbal 2010 English translation copyright © Arunava Sinha 2016 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. ISBN 9780143334149 Not for sale in Bangladesh Typeset in Dante MT Std by Manipal Digital Systems, Manipal

Printed at Repro India Limited

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.penguin.co.in

In memory of Faraaz Hossain, who died in a terrorist attack in Dhaka because he wouldn’t desert his friends –—Arunava Sinha

Contents Translator’s Note When Abbu and Ammu Turned Weird A Remote Village Mad Nani Getting to Know Everyone The Ramshackle School The First Punishment Taught a Lesson—and What a Lesson! Motku Mian and Others When Sanjida Was the Bride Gourango Nana And so by Boat Makku Chora’s Wife The Science Olympiad Ahad Ali, Razakar The Last Word

ix 1 16 27 43 61 79 94 111 127 146 162 178 195 218 237

Translator’s Note

P

icture this. Like Marty in Back to the Future, you have gone back in time to when your parents were young. Very young. Led by you—or one of your friends—this journey to the past is going to be to the city of Calcutta. It’s 1971. Schoolchildren in Calcutta are afraid of many things. There’s full-blown guerrilla action on the streets, with boys and girls taking up bombs and handmade guns in a bid to usher in a violent leftist revolution. And barely a few hundred miles away, a country named East Pakistan—the eastern half of Pakistan, which was carved out of undivided India in 1947 by the British rulers before leaving—is fighting a war of independence against West Pakistan. With the Indian Army joining the war against West Pakistan, there are often air-raid sirens and calls for blackouts. But your parents—and their parents—are not as afraid of these as they are of a mysterious disease that seems to be affecting everyone’s eyes. Try telling them that it’s only conjunctivitis—an infection that inflames the eyes, which in turn stream continuously. They won’t pay attention. Because

ix

Translator’s Note

this affliction has been given a different name, in response to the war of independence being waged by a people with whom most of the inhabitants of Calcutta share a language. Jai Bangla. Victory to Bangla. This could variously mean either the region or the language. But it’s definitely not meant as a cry of celebration. Thousands of people from East Pakistan are fleeing to India—a second wave, after the first one during the Partition in 1947—and many inhabitants of Calcutta are convinced that they’ve brought the disease over with them. But once your parents—who were obviously not your parents then—and their parents have explained all this to you, ask them some more questions. Tell them that you’re reading a book about a girl named Rasha from Dhaka, whose grandfather was a freedom fighter in the Bangladesh Liberation War. You will immediately hear your now-grandparents talk of how they—or maybe their closest friends—belonged to families who had actually lived in what is now Bangladesh, having migrated during the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. Ask your parents how they felt about the Muktijuddho, the war of liberation, and their response will be—Jai Bangla! And if you see a tear in their eyes, it might not be conjunctivitis alone. It might be the thought of boys and girls their own age across the border, trying to cope with the war and with the loss of their loved ones. Ask them, too, about the razakars—the people of East Pakistan who chose not to side with the freedom movement and opted to support the

x

Translator’s Note

Pakistan Army and Government instead. You may not get an answer, though. It’s hard for young adults to wrap their heads around betrayal. And you can tell them a few things too—about the novel that you’re reading. It’s not set in the time of the Muktijuddho, but in the early 2000s. However, it shows us how the largehearted Rasha is connected to her family’s and her country’s past—a past that saw an extraordinary struggle being waged for freedom, a past that—it is so feared—many people, both in Bangladesh and India, are beginning to forget. You can tell them that fourteen-year-old Rasha’s parents are divorced and that she lives with her mother, who meets a man whom she wants to marry. That he wants to take Rasha’s mother away to Australia, but doesn’t want Rasha to join them. And that Rasha’s mother decides to leave her daughter with her own mother, who lives in a village. An unhappy Rasha moves to her grandmother’s home, where she discovers a whole new world and a series of adventures. Making friends with a group of boys and girls her own age, and learning from them a novel way of life that involves no modern amenities, such as mobiles, computers, the Internet, movies or even electricity—Rasha plunges into a series of exploits. Thus, she embarks on her own freedom movement—from the tyranny of bad teachers, bad administrators, bad politicians and bad people. Tell them you wish that they could read this book too. July 2016

Arunava Sinha

xi

When Abbu and Ammu Turned Weird

W

hen Raisa was ten, a cocky boy in her class had made up a rhyme about her. It began— Raisa Eats her fish with rice-a

It wasn’t funny at all, nor had any of Raisa’s classmates paid any attention to the cheeky poet or his creation—but she had burst into tears. Back home she announced that she would change her name. Her mother’s eyebrows shot into her hair. ‘What do you mean change your name? Do you think a name is like a bedspread that can be changed if you don’t like it?’ Instead of getting into an argument with her mother, Raisa calmly proceeded to think up alternative names for herself. She really liked the name Anushka, but since a reckless leap from Raisa to Anushka was ruled out, she chose a name that sounded similar to her own. Dropping the ‘i’ and adding an ‘h’, she changed her name to Rasha.

1

Muhammed Zafar Iqbal

Everyone thought of it as a joke at first, but Raisa did not let up. It didn’t happen in a day, or even two, but it was three years later—by the time she was thirteen—that she did, in fact, come to be known as Rasha. Everyone forgot that she had once been called Raisa. By the time the ten-year-old Raisa had transformed into the thirteen-year-old Rasha, she discovered that the world around her had changed too. At ten she had thought of her parents as the most wonderful people in the world. At thirteen, Rasha discovered that she had been completely mistaken. Her Abbu and Ammu were not nice at all—they had all sorts of problems. Her father was bad-tempered and selfish, caring for nothing but his own interests. Not only that, he lied fluently—even when there was no need to. Gradually Rasha also discovered that her mother was small-minded, an altogether mean kind of woman. She would flare up easily and take to beating the young girl who worked as a domestic help. Rasha felt so ashamed of the two that she wished for the earth to swallow her whole. Slowly things went from bad to worse, and her parents began to have ugly quarrels all the time. At first they would lower their voices so that she couldn’t hear them argue, but eventually they stopped caring and began to fight fiercely even in her presence. Their hostility was so awful and their language so atrocious, that Rasha wanted to die. Then, one day, Rasha’s Abbu and Ammu split up. Since Rasha was already aware that something like this was about to happen, she wasn’t remotely surprised, although

2

Rasha

her heart broke with grief. She concluded that her father would move out and, with no one for her mother to quarrel with, there would be some peace at home. Abbu did rent a new house for himself and the arguments died down, but peace did not return. Ammu, who worked in a bank, was fine as long as she was at work but, as soon as she came back home, began to bad-mouth Abbu. And later at night, she whined tearfully. Rasha didn’t know what to do. Once or twice she tried to console her mother, but it had just the opposite effect—Ammu blamed Rasha instead, abusing her in the foulest language. A year passed this way; Rasha turned fourteen. But she felt more like forty. A great deal had happened during this period. Her father had found a middle-aged woman from nowhere, married her and taken off to Canada. Rasha assumed that, with her father out of the country, her mother might now calm down and turn her mind to something else. But that wasn’t exactly what happened. Ammu seemed to get even angrier, and the things she said made it seem like it was all Rasha’s fault. One day, when Rasha returned from school, she found her mother sitting sullenly in the living room. ‘What’s the matter, Ammu?’ she asked apprehensively. When her mother didn’t answer, Rasha asked again, ‘What is it, Ammu?’ Now Ammu exploded with rage, shaking her fist and screaming, ‘IS IT ALL MY RESPONSIBILITY? Doesn’t your father have any?’

3

The breathtaking story of a feisty young girl Fourteen-year-old Rasha is abandoned by her mother in a village with her aged—and probably mad—grandmother. Uprooted from her school and her friends back in cosmopolitan Dhaka, a disgruntled Rasha has to start life afresh in a faraway place with no electricity, incessant rains, nosy neighbours and a primitive school. Refusing to resign to circumstances, however, Rasha rises above them and turns indomitable. Learning to take a boat to school and teaching her classmates how to use computers are only a couple of this young girl’s incredible exploits! But just as Rasha settles into her new life, new friends in tow, she is confronted by a nightmarish past that once ravaged her family. Will Rasha survive this daunting and astounding adventure?

Fiction

Cover illustration by Aditya Shirke Cover design by Devangana Dash

MRP `299 (incl. of all taxes)

Not for sale in Bangladesh