Darkness Within

The novel starts with the daily rituals of the women in brothel of Golapipatti one morning. Amidst the buzzing of curse words, arguments and yells coming from several rooms and those filling the lane, people responsible for bringing the water and supplies are doing their chores, and some customers from the night before still haven’t left. There are women who take in high paying customers, like Jahanara and Bokul, and have money to spend on meals, make-up and liquors, and there are some like Kusum, who are owned by pimps and goons, and go hungry for days if they don’t get enough customers¹. Jealousy and envy among the girls is quite common and sometimes it turns into bloody fight, like between Shanti and Bokul over a customer of the latter. Many of them live in shared rooms and take the customers, in the same room after the evening falls, in turn. The setting of the novel perfectly captures the minutiae of the brothel: drab, dark and dingy rooms getting feeble light, dirty drain running along the lane, the decrepit structures, flaking walls and broken utensils. And the idiosyncratic obscene language exemplifies the moods and mindset of the girls in such a place.

1.       Not getting a customer means heartless humiliation at the owner’s hands On top of which there’s fear and hunger – the same hunger which most of the girls here have fallen victim to and ended up, willingly or unwillingly, as nothing but bodies in the decrepit rooms in this lane where no sunlight or air gets in, eaten away by commercial deals every day, like slaves traded thousands of years ago, amidst cruel, ruthless, inhuman behavior, surviving as creatures of the night.

When a man with inexplicable interests comes to visit Jahanara – who unlike many others don’t have to pose on the lane and lure customers, and has her own pimp and a woman who works for her – and asks how happy she is and presents his doubts about her future, she throws him out; however he leaves a lasting impression which would later unsettle her. Yasmin, an educated girl who was once honored by the government as Birangona after the war of liberation, during which she was raped and her family was murdered, threw herself as a sex-worker, as a revolt against the atrocities which she had to suffer just after the liberation. She takes customers only when she wants and is pensive about the teenage girls and women who trade their bodies for living in the brothel and is revered by some and others are disgusted by her waywardness. In similar way, all the women and girls we come across have their own personal backstories, which led them to the brothel: girls who are castaways of the liberation war of 1971, victim of famine, abduction and Hindu-Muslim riots, sold off by the relatives, those who could find no means to live and support their family in ordinary ways…

There are people who own the girls, to whom they owe their earnings and their life depends on customers – it seems, they have nothing to call their own, certainly not their bodies, except a tormented, unhappy and famished life which they have to sustain somehow. All of them know what they are into and what might come out of this, still they have no option to get out of this entrap. Meanwhile, some ignorant and innocent girls have already started dreaming of becoming an elegant prostitute who would visit the customers in luxury cars. In the brothel, it doesn’t take long for things to settle, whether it is a quarrel, a fight, a girl being beaten by her owner, a girl being whipped by a customer; Mashi, who looks after the business and girls, knows ways of the men who visit the brothel and under what rules the girls must be kept under, so, girls have to take customers after the evening falls, must attract them with vulgar gestures and talks and keep paying the owners, room rent and go on living. Their life is restricted within the rooms and the lane; the shops are close by, from where they can buy daily necessities like birth-control pills which they must be able to afford anyhow if not food. Almost everyone is afraid of the future, when they might not get customers at all, or may die of disease or hunger, and are threatened by the fate of Rohimon and the old Golapjaan – hungry and retired old prostitutes – who roam around the brothel scavenging food and asking for money.

One day, a journalist named Delwar visits Yasmin, he is the same man who visited Jahanara before. But this time, he has long conversation² with Yasmin, who has many doubts and questions about their plight and unlike Jahanara, she is not offended. Yasmin tries to impart her revolting thoughts to other girls, nevertheless, they are confirmed that brothels aren’t going to close down and believe that they are never going to leave the profession³, for they’ll have no acceptance outside the place. When a heavy rain strikes the brothel, the roofs leak and the rooms are flooded. And in the meantime, it also brings a tragedy in the brothel which is soon forgotten amid the necessity of trading and bargaining the bodies without a moment to pity for personal miseries or dwell upon their collective suffering; even incidents of death are to be forgotten. The range of characters like Jahanara, Moyna, Kanchan, Bokul, Mashi, Zarina, Shanti, Kusum, Kalu, Parul, Piru, Hiru, Marjina, Huree and many others, depict harrowing and horrendous life of sex-workers. And, as the story progresses, we witness how fragile their lives are, with life and death of the girls resting under the choice and tyranny of the owners.

2.       Who are the people in this society? Are those who visit whores to buy their own arousal not part of the society? Are those who pay extra to take away beautiful prostitutes in their cars not part of society? Are those who extort money from us to get us our licenses not part of society either? What happens when that money is converted to government earnings and served on every plate?

3.       But they do not know where to find the unbarred door that will let them stand up for their rights as humans. They do not know how to pass through that door.

Inspired and urged both by the incidents the author witnessed as a child and later through the story featured in a magazine, and written in the time when she couldn’t visit the brothel herself firsthand, Letters of Blood is a daring and genuine work representing the bare and bottom truth behind the woes of the sex-workers in Bangladesh, who are under-represented in the mainstream of rights, acts and talks. The coarse realities of the prostitutes have been sharply portrayed without marring the emotional subtlety and sensitivity of the subject and characters, and some descriptions are visually so much appealing and transporting, as if the brothel has been laid inside out. Deftly translated by Arunava Sinha from the Bengali, Letters of Blood is a bold timeless classic that shows the prowess of Rizia Rahman.

The book is part of Library of Bangladesh series.

Author: Rizia Rahman

Translator: Arunava Sinha

Publisher: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Page Count: 116pp

Price: $11

Author Photo Credit: https://www.deshebideshe.com/wiw/details/392

Review Copy Courtesy: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)