My father's physical intensity was so high that it ate away his sense of shame. We were three children of my father, despite our very obedient mother, my father would do things that made our survival hell.
Every few days, news would come that my father was being locked up in a room in such and such an area.
He was being beaten. He was going to marry the woman he had been caught with.
My mother would cry and say, "Oh, Motaleb, come and free your father."
I no longer paid much attention to my mother's crying. Our younger brother Harun would go to get my father. He would not say anything. He would stand quietly and watch my father being beaten. Finally, Harun would catch my father, whose eyes and face were swollen, and bring him home.
Seeing my father's bloody and swollen face, my mother would forget her anger from the whole day and bathe my father with hot water. Once, in a fit of rage, I threw a bottle of kerosene oil at my father, calling him a 'swine'.
When my father's whole body was covered in kerosene, I wanted to throw a matchstick at this scumbag. I couldn't. I don't know the answer to why I couldn't.
Maina gave up going to college.
She was ashamed to go to college. Many people asked her directly, 'Why is your father like this? Is it right for you to do this at your age?'
Maina replied, 'Our father is a very bad man. A lecher.'
I know, Maina turned black with shame. Her eyes welled up with tears like the ocean. Do I feel less ashamed? Because of shame, I would grab my father's collar and slap him wherever I found him on the street.
The money my father earned by selling raw vegetables in the shop, he tied in a knot in his lungi and went out to do dirty things on his black body.
Once my father returned home in the middle of the night with a very young girl.
The girl was about twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Fair. Wearing a cotton sari. My father married the girl. My body was shaking with shame and hatred. I could not control my anger. I ran and pulled the girl's hand and threw her out onto the street.
My father called me a 'scumbag' and started fighting with me. I punched him a few times. Maina, Harun, and mother brought me home. Being the child of such an ugly father, I started to struggle all night with anger, resentment, and shame.
In the morning, I don't know where my father left the girl.
Mother and Maina went to my grandmother's house.
I don't know what they would do there. Harun and I stayed somewhere. After a few days, when I returned home one evening, I saw that my father had brought my mother and Maina back home.
Despite all this, we could not stop these physiological actions of my father. Is human birth on earth only for the needs of the body?
The body has such power to destroy a family, a few impossibly humble minds? Don't humans have such power to stop the body?
I'm thinking a lot in the middle of the night.
I buried my father at ten o'clock at night. A fresh body was crushed by a freight truck.
I left the body lying in the mud house.
My father's body has eaten our family for so long. My mother. My sister. My brother. Me. My father himself.
And today the insignificant soil will eat my father's body! ::
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