It is the third day in a row of me trying to console her by saying everything will be alright. My sister is going through a rough patch in her life, a seven-year-long rough patch which it seems will exist for another similar juncture, if not more. The state of affairs is so complex that, as her brother, all I could do was say stuff like how everything will be alright, the sun shines after the clouds get chased away by the winds that carry good times and all that. Then, slowly, suddenly, but swiftly the realization had set in that it would not be alright. It never does.
In this country of mine, the lands I love so much, there remains a phenomenon of systematic abuse all around me. From an outside eye, it would seem like a pretty harmless land of the apparently poor who are full of naivete and innocence. A populous who are open to ideas and innovation. They just lack the means to pull themselves up from the gutter, but still, they are trying.
Yet, in reality, it is the complete opposite. If you look closely, you'll see how our sharp teeth and claws come out without any notice. And how we are just waiting to devour everything in an all you can eat buffet and sell our souls to the demons posted at the crossroads. This is mutual to every gender, class, religion and every other type of label that we put on ourselves to feel exclusive.
Enough ranting. Let me give some context to all that I said by telling some short real-life stories I have been thinking about. they may come as random and very extreme, but if I start listing every single one I've witnessed, the maleficence of it in writing would be an arduous task and emotionally overbearing. No point torturing myself on god knows whose behest. I am just a tiny bit distressed, and this is proving to be quite therapeutic.
One of our tenants, a man in his 40s, used to live in the middle east. Back in his twenties, one morning, he woke up, saw the state of his house and decided he needed to earn a shit tonne of money. To change his luck and through many brokers, he had invested all he had to get a job as a construction worker in Dubai.
Throughout the next half of his life, he earned a lot and gave every penny that he could save to his wife. He had dreams of owning a multistoried house with a rooftop garden one day, a dream he chased after while carrying the expenses for his siblings along with it.
At the age of 52, when he came back home for the final time, he found the house's doors to be locked for him. His wife forged his signature and wrote everything to her own name instead, along with a signed divorce paper.
Over the years, he knocked on the doors of many lawyers and government officials and got rejected every time. Nowadays, he lives in a tin shed room we own with one tungsten bulb hanging above.
And I think I can safely say nothing will be alright for him ever again.
During my time roaming around in residential halls of JU in search of that perfect high, I met a kid a bit older than me. His step-father used to beat him on a daily basis. Being an imam of a local mosque, the father was quite concerned about the son's religious education. And the kid from a very early age was a wanderer. His madrasah was only a short distance from where he lived, but instead of attending, half of the days, he would wander about in the trees or play marbles with other kids. He would do what all the other kids his age from his locality would do, and his father would beat him mercilessly for being a kid.
During one such beating, he had picked up a stick with a rusty nail in it. The description of this particular beating became more vivid with each word he spoke, even with me being damned high. In half-understood shock, I had asked if his father unknowingly had picked it up. And he had said he wasn't so sure if it was unintentional.
The nail had entered an inch below his right hip, and a few months later, his leg needed to be amputated. The beating had started again after a short while. It would originate from His father arguing with his mother and end with him in many bruises and an everlasting PTSD.
In his instance too, I can safely say nothing will be alright ever again.
And now comes the story of my sister and the reason behind me writing all this crap. My sister is a housewife. A love/arranged marriage gone tediously wrong had landed her the job she had never wanted. Yet an unavoidable circumstance and a heart oozing out of love resulted in her being a homemaker. And her biggest mistake was probably betting her own financial freedom on a hedge with love.
It isn't a downright awful thing, to be honest. But only within a few years, it has become her worst nightmare. The issue isn't the marriage and her kid, but her in-laws. In Bangladesh, arranged marriage usually lands girls in extended families, and the same too had happened the same in her case.
She loves her husband and kid with all that she has, but in exchange, she gets mentally tortured by her mother in law every other day of the week.
The toxicity, at times, knows no bounds. And at times, some of it inevitably results in a feedback loop while backlashing on her husband, who, like a fulcrum, is trying to keep the family together. Being the only earner in the family, his parents have nowhere else to go. The love he has for his parents and them having no other options isn't allowing him to leave them. And so, it has become a situation dire in nature.
A solution could be a divorce, but as it seems, my sister doesn't want to leave her other half and the kid behind. Another solution could be her being financially free. But that path till now hasn't progressed much due to unusual complications. And like that, almost all the other courses of solution are tied up. And when both of them become desperate and abusive towards each other, I come in trying to help them get their sanity back. While saying all will be well. Will it ever be, though? Will all become well in the end? I don't want to chase after the answer anymore; my brain hurts now.
