Weeping Sores

Mastura Ibnat

When we were younger, my mother used to tell me and my older sister Naorin all the various ways she maintained her modesty. She told us that she never stripped naked in the bathroom, even while she was showering. She said that even if the bathroom was too impure for God to be present, it was not too impure for Satan. She had to be vigilant even if it seemed she had total privacy. When my sister and I laughed at her, she was completely shocked. 

“You actually strip naked in the shower?” My mother shook her head. “May God forgive you both.”

She told us this during one of our summer vacations in Bangladesh, and, for a moment, I thought it wasn’t completely outlandish. In those bathrooms, it never felt like I was showering alone. There was always a small open window near the ceiling that let in sounds of the street below, which was constantly bustling with noises of vendors and passersby and cars and loud arguments. 

The bathroom in my grandfather’s house, however, was an outdoor installment, so there was no need for a window. Instead, there was no ceiling at all. I could look up at any point and see the sky above, sometimes forfeiting my standing-bucket-bath if it began raining. One time, when I was eight, I heard some snickering above my head and, horrified, looked up to find my two cousins peering down at me. With one loud scream, they scattered, their gleeful laughter waning as they ran further and further away. My mother and aunt figured out exactly what had happened and I escaped to a different room, hoping to abandon the humiliation of it all. Much more shy in those days, I kept to myself my utter embarrassment and wondered why two boys who incessantly ridiculed my body wanted to see me naked.

Naorin and I went many years like this, listening to all the ways our mother dutifully followed the rules of a modest woman. She told us once that her older sister stopped riding her motorcycle in Bangladesh because even having her legs spread apart on it was too unsightly for a woman. Our aunt had swapped her motorcycle for a moped, on which she politely kept her legs shut and feet together.

I sometimes felt Naorin was too brazen when we were growing up. Every Saturday, we attended women’s halaqas with our mom. These were bone-dry Islamic lectures for the teenage girls in the community. As was my habit in all activities that were supposed to enrich my brain or make me thoughtful or curious, I stared off into space and retained little to no information. I thought Naorin was doing the same during these halaqas until I saw her furiously typing away on our downstairs computer one night. She had a stack of index cards, on which she would occasionally jot something down, using that same fastidious and angry dedication.

I asked her what she was researching. 

Incredulous at the question, she told me that if I had listened to the last halaqa, I’d be doing the same. Obviously, I was not doing the same because I had not listened, which I sheepishly admitted. She said she was tasking herself with researching all the various quotes from Islamic scholars and lines from the Quran that contradicted a big point in the most recent halaqa, which was led by the dogmatic Mehveen Auntie. Among us younger girls, she was thoroughly hated. However, we had no choice but to treat her with the utmost respect as our mothers and their friends believed her to be the most pious of the community. 

Apparently, Mehveen Auntie had argued that Muslim women were treated completely equally, as decreed by the religion. Naorin was adamant in her desire to prove her wrong. She showed me her collection of evidence: one of the index cards had a quote from a scholar stating that women are bound by duty to their husbands and their every command, even if it meant that she had to lick pus-filled sores from his body to cleanse him. Another index card had something written down about how a woman’s testimony in Islamic court is worth half of a man’s. Naorin shook the card in my face and asked how someone could possibly argue that this was equal.

Secretly, hours after she finished her research, I hopped on the computer to see if these were real quotes. I didn’t want her to think I doubted her but it was hard to believe that Mehveen Auntie could claim something so surely when there was evidence that readily disproved her. 

The next week, Mehveen Auntie began lecturing and Naorin immediately interrupted, “Didn’t we learn this last week?” The aunties were audibly impressed. Mehveen Auntie thanked Allah for giving young women like my sister such focus and dedication to their religion. At the moment, I was completely envious, but not enough to try as hard as Naorin. I assumed my regular halaqa position and began my hour of silent, absent sitting, opting to look out the window until the hour passed. Chai was passed around at the end of the hour. 

There was only one other time that a halaqa managed to capture my attention. Mehveen Auntie claimed that people who committed suicide were the most cowardly people on Earth. I remember feeling Naorin bristle at this statement next to me, and she began a heated back-and-forth with her. Other aunties started to chime in, offering their support to Mehveen Auntie and, eventually, it became too much of an uphill battle for Naorin. She was silent for the rest of the halaqa but I knew she had not really surrendered. 

        When COVID-19 shut down the world, my mother, sister, and I were in Bangladesh, living with my aunt’s family. After taking the semester off from college, my sister and I found ourselves with little to do except scroll on our phones and sometimes sit in the living room. Even our ventures into the living room did not last long—if we caught a movie that seemed interesting, the chances that we could actually finish it without being interrupted by our cousins were low. 

        I was bored. We weren’t allowed to leave the house, especially not without the company of a man. Unfortunately, the only man in the house, my uncle, was usually off at work. My mother and aunt were paranoid about going outside. Anything that required outdoor trips, like grocery shopping, were left to my uncle. After a few months, though, everyone was growing restless, and it was decided that us six girls could take short walks outside as long as we traveled in a group. 

        Eventually, I grew tired of the walks as well, begging my mother to please let me walk alone so I could have some privacy for at least a short period of the day. She was staunchly against it. “Why do you insist on being alone?”

In August, my father came to Bangladesh. I didn’t tell my sister or mother this, but I was secretly elated for one reason only. I knew that he, like me, could not stand to be locked indoors all hours of the day, every single day. Wherever he went, even to run a mindless errand, I always asked if I could come with. He was free and if I could not be free alone, I was free with him. 

Sometimes he humored me and took me to the zoo or a cafe to eat specialty food. Or, sometimes, knowing that I just wanted to be left alone and observe Dhaka in silence, he would pay a rickshaw driver to cycle wherever he wanted for an hour and we would sit side by side, watching the city, sometimes tittering at strangers who were arguing over something meaningless. When he approached a driver, they only asked his destination after we sat down. 

We did not speak much to each other, but sometimes he would comment on how hard the drivers in the city worked, using English so they wouldn’t know we were observing them out loud. Without asking their rates, he paid them well, and they silently took it. It was a stark difference from the ways the drivers would argue and haggle with my mother and aunt when they told them their destination, ignoring their requests to drop them off at a specific place, or driving recklessly despite hearing their desperate pleas to be more careful. 

The end of August marked my 20th birthday. My father was not one to remember birthdays, much less celebrate them, so I asked sheepishly if he could please gift me a bicycle.

My cousin Zareek had turned 13 a couple of days prior. My dad urged me to choose a bike that Zareek could use after we left Bangladesh. This was his way of asking me to choose a bike that was ostensibly boyish. I chose a red bike and the shop owner adjusted the seat so it would fit my height. 

That very afternoon, I rode around the neighborhood for an hour, waving goodbye to my little cousins who watched me on the balcony above. A few days later, they both dusted off their pink tricycles, determined to bike alongside me. 

Most afternoons, though, I biked alone. Some days I timed my schedule so I could minimize my time at home and maximize my time outside. There were days I biked in the scorching heat for two or three hours, totally unfazed and unbothered by the sweat that dripped into my eyes and on my phone screen. I wiped it clean so I could shuffle between the only two albums I listened to while biking: Isolation by Kali Uchis and Is This It? by The Strokes. 

Completely aware that I was the only girl cycling in the neighborhood, I provided onlookers with the unsightly vision of a woman with an unsavory amount of distance between her feet. I biked past girls who were walking home from school and old men who stood at corners chewing tobacco and rickshaw drivers parked on the roads waiting for customers. Everybody stared, all the time. And, truthfully, I cared. I hated being stared at and I tried to convince myself it wasn’t that obvious I was American. But everyone knew that only an American girl would feel brazen enough to bike in public. One day, a group of teenage boys yelled after me and I pedaled faster to avoid them, only to find that they were running after me. For a couple of days after that, I stayed inside. 

After my brief hiatus, I biked around with some caution, opting to begin in the hour before the evening prayer instead of the busy afternoon, hoping that the roads would be more sparsely populated. In the first few moments enacting my new plan, an older woman called after me, trying to get my attention. I cursed to myself, wondering if I was really in the mood to argue in Bangla about being the only girl on a bike, but I stopped anyway. She said I should tuck my kameez into my pants unless I wanted it to get caught on the gears. I did so and thanked her, riding off with a smile, noticing that the evening was indeed the perfect time to bike the neighborhood. In Bangladesh, it seemed like the late afternoon always ended in a brilliant lavender sky. It was finally quiet, and I would bike back home as the call to prayer rang, eager to avoid the throngs of men that would soon head towards the neighborhood mosque, so I could join the women at home.

Years later, I found that quote my sister researched: “The Prophet said: ‘It is not right for any human being to prostrate to another; if it were right for one human being to prostrate to another, I would have commanded women to prostrate to their husbands because of the great rights that they have over them. By the One in Whose hand is my soul, if a man were covered from head to foot with weeping sores oozing pus, and his wife were to come to him and lick his sores (to clean them), this would not fulfil the rights he has over her.” Scholars online proved that the last line was, indeed, fabricated.