Lajja — Taslima Nasreen
“Didn’t you always say that you would dig large ponds wherever there were temples and mosques, and let plump ducks play in those waters?”
“Did I stop there? I also said that let the edifices of religions crumble, let a blind fire consume all the bricks in temples, mosques, gurudwaras and churches, and on those ruins let us grow ebchanting gardens of sweet-smelling flowers and build schools and libraries.”
Lajja is not what it claims to be, it is not a work of fiction but a tapestry stitched together by series of blood-curdling actual events, etched in the Indian sub-continent’s modern history as one of its more brutal pages. Lajja is not a literary gem in the sense that the language doesn’t have the flourish which Asian writers are famous for, in fact the prose hits nadir once the descriptions of massacres and other damage to life and property turns into a litany of names and figures.
Lajja uses an uppercaste Hindu family — the Dattas as a microcosm of the plight of minorities in Bangladesh post the Babri Masjid demolition in India. The book follows this family of four each with their own share of demons from the past and a hope for future. The storyline, the characters and the ancillary environment does not seem ingenious in the twenty-first century and the recurrent drone of the list of damages loses the emotive value after the halfway mark, turning into a trite trope.
The characters, especially the father-son duo hold a strong patriotic sentiment; the father Sudamoy was part of the Bangladesh Liberation War and his son Suranjon is a member of the Communist Party of Bangladesh. These eccentricities aside the family stills bears the brunt of the ‘hindu’ tag in a muslim majority country and cascading effect of the actions of hindu nationalists in India. The prose oscillates between mental soliloquies of each character’s past and the present day in the aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid.
This is a story of a family who despite belonging to a minority hindu community refuses to leave Bangladesh and seek refuge in India even when their family and acquaintances have fled the turmoil. This is a story of a family whose world starts to fall apart when the waves of disturbance in a neighbouring country reaches their doorstep.
Lajja is less of a fiction and more an actual occurrence of a series of events through the lens of a woman author who was banished from her country for her strong progressive views. The story gets tedious but perhaps the whole objective behind the use of a list of damages akin to newspaper reports is to make the reader reflect on how tragedies just turn into statistics as it multiplies and loses its emotional moorings, settling for a factual foundation.
