1. Before BEFORE Before Kusum, our days began as they always had, sometime after dawn, when our mothers returned to us. As the sun rose over the island and the gulls circled above, our mothers lifted the mosquito net and coiled around us like snakes, holding us from behind, their knees softening against our bodies, sighing at the end of a long night. We pretended to be asleep, but we were always awake, waiting for this moment, for the sighs of our mothers, the brief hour in the day when we were not alone. We would rise, careful not to wake them. We would wait at the tap for the water to trickle through, and we would rub our teeth with charcoal and spit into the open drain. Our mothers remained still until the afternoon, when they rose, and when they did, we would greet them with smiles and warm rice. We were always surprised to see them, as if they had just returned from a long journey. At first they were happy to see us. O Ma go, they would say. (Because mothers, in a tender moment, sometimes called their children Ma.) Love will appear, and when it does, we will turn our backs on the island and never return. There is a whole world on the other side of the water--the river that leads to villages and cities and people who don't know where we came from. Yes, you will leave this place. By the time the meal was over, their moods had soured. Maybe it was the pills that Amma gave them to make them forget who they were. Maybe it was knowing that every day would be like the day before. As they swallowed their final fistfuls of rice, they would say, O Ma go, you will never leave this place, you will grow up and become just like us, waking in the middle of the afternoon with a roaring stomach. They would say: Love? You should forget love exists, because you will grow old and die here, mourned by no one, because you are nothing more than the children of the island. And then, even though we already knew, they told us how they came to be here. They told us about the men who arrived at their villages with the promise of a job. They said it was their cousin or brother or uncle. They told us about the backs of trucks and rickshaws and finally the small boat that sputtered across the river and banked at the jetty. They told us about the cheap wedding saris they had worn because the men had promised to marry them. They told us they had left their villages with smiles, hoping for a life of rice and shoes. They told us they were brought with their hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded, drowsy with pills. And though they had arrived by accident, by misunderstanding, by sheer ignorance, or by an abundance of optimism, they had never gone home. They had allowed their mothers and fathers to search for them forever, imagining them dead, because that would be better. By the time we were born, their memories had faded like paint in the sun, and they lived here, tied to us. We were the children of the island. They called us chorer-bacha. Only briefly the children, because any moment now, we would grow up, and we would become them, waking late and hungry and with a job that had no name. We did not go to school because we already knew everything there was to know. We knew about the work. We knew the sounds, the shrieks and screams of it, we knew the smells. We knew the false notes of pleasure. These were our childhood rhymes, the grunting and howling and laughter and shouting and the thunderous clap of men hitting our mothers. We knew that the work was something paid for in money and also in bodies. We knew that the women sold the work and the men bought it. We knew that the people doing the selling were our mothers. We knew that the people doing the buying were our fathers. We searched the men for our own faces, for hair that was our hair and smiles that were our smiles. We imagined we saw a tenderness in the way one looked at us, the way he might pause for a moment before he entered our mother's hut. But he never made himself known, never said, You are mine. Our mothers were from Mymensingh and Noakhali and Sreepur and Trishal. Our mothers were from Chittagong and the Hill Tracts and the Sundarbans and the forests and fields and river islands. Our mothers were Bengali and Garo and Chakma and Santal. Our mothers were from slums and villages. They had always been poor, always one of many children, always the girl no one wanted, their lives lived on the edges of other people's lives, out of sight, barely visible among the tall rice and the counting of debts and the cold nights, until they disappeared altogether, never to be seen in the paddy or the alley outside the house or by the pond, beating the clothes. Never again to light a fire under a pot of rice or dry the chilies or pick the tea or thresh the sesame. Now, at last, they were seen. People--men--stared straight into their eyes, at their breasts. They sized them up and they looked. They saw their lips, lined in black and colored in red. They saw their eyes, darkened with kajol. They saw their soft, pliant bodies, made fat by the medicine Amma gave them. Our mothers consoled themselves with the thought that at least now they were no longer invisible. The island was at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea. It was twenty huts long but only four huts wide. Through the middle was an alleyway where we would run up and down the length of the land, from the southern tip, which pointed toward the sea, to the northern, which faced the rest of the country. On the western side was the embankment, where the men landed and were greeted by our mothers, prancing as if they had no cares in the world. A thin bamboo jetty protruded from this side like a crooked finger, and that was where the boats unloaded their passengers. From the eastern side, we could see the village. It was close enough to swim to, if we ever chose to, if any village would have us. We knew numbers. For instance, a man would pay three hundred taka to our mothers. Our mothers would give one hundred to Amma, and they would give us ten to buy a sweet at the shop where they already owed thousands, and they would put the rest under a mattress or in a tin trunk only for it to be spent the next day, on food, debts to the boatman, debts to Amma, who bought us things like shoes and blankets and little packets of shampoo. She wrote it all down and made our mothers pay for everything later, even the tiny candies she carried around and put in the mouths of babies to keep them quiet. Amma was the mother of our mothers. She had brought our mothers to the island, just as she was brought long ago. She knew every story--of the villages they had left behind, the fathers whose names they whispered in their sleep, the brothers and sisters and mothers they dreamed of but would never see again. She beat them when they disobeyed her; she cajoled them when they were too tired to work. She put their heads in her lap and whispered loving words to them when they told her they wanted to die. When our mothers turned on us, when they chased us onto the jetty threatening to drown us, we ran to Amma and hid behind her sari, and she would stand between us and our mothers, forbidding them to hit us, because everything on the island, even the flesh on our bones, belonged to her. That was before Kusum. And after? After, there was a girl who washed up onshore. After, there were songs and lessons and sweet water from a well and dirt and pain and photographs and a fire that raged and a storm that roared. After, there was Bon Bibi, a force so great we became powerless before her. Excerpted from Uprising: A Novel by Tahmima Anam All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
