Extract: The First Jasmines by Saima Begum
Read an extract from Saima Begum's forthcoming debut, The First Jasmines. The novel centres two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, who – around the dawn of Bangladesh as a nation – are captured by Pakistani soldiers and forced to waste their days in a makeshift prison.
The waste bucket was potent at night. It drove away birds and foxes, leaving only the static of festive flies. Cockroaches and rats competed with mosquitoes to pierce flesh and feast on the women who lay motionless, sleeping, knitted together, limbs touching, neither dying nor living.
Most stayed silent during the day. Once night fell, some wept loudly, some softly. Some sang a wordless song that came from the gut, a mournful a cappella.
A lone window was squished between several patched-up panels, nothing visible from the outside but the thick black threads of hair of the women inside, shimmering liquid under moonlight. Some nights, even the moon deserted them. Nights so dark Lucky could not see her hand in front of her face. Only hear the thump, thump, thump of the ants marching on.
The mud floor was a patchwork of browns. Pistachio shells from a life long ago peeked between the network of dried, connecting rivers that ran between them. A chalk grey-brown river where the soil cracked. A moist orange-brown river where their warm bodies lay. A deep fertile brown river where their tears landed, creating a pit stop of plenty, an oasis for travelling insects and flower seeds to reawaken. From this land rose green stalks that walked with black boots.
The soldiers never took off their uniforms. Khaki hung from the sharp edges of their shoulders, rested on their pointed ears and gathered loose around their hips. A jagged khaki trail of mountainous ravine for the women’s attention to drift into while their bodies left the world. They remained silent, watching, clawing, tasting, while the women listened to the violent clanging of gold and silver medals beating on their chests, smiling down at them. A smile that lingered in the women’s stomachs, like a gathering storm, long after the soldiers left.
Now, you are pure, they whispered once they were done.
When the sky lightened to a deep-sea blue, the soldiers left the room long enough for the women to reach for their hearts under their torn blouses. In the room, young girls yet to grow into their breasts learnt to scream without moving their lips. Lucky and Jamila watched as they clutched at their chests in their sleep, fingers clawing to reach inside and hold their hearts with their hands. To soothe. To make sure their heart was still beating, and if it wasn’t, to squeeze it with their fists. Pump their veins with their fingertips. To scatter the fear that it would betray them, enticed by whispers to surrender its duties to the flesh and make it all go away.
At night, under the soft glow of the lantern, Lucky counted twenty-two heartbeats rising and falling. The tin roof shook with each murmur of the wind and bellowed with each patter of rain, until their bones echoed with its nocturnal melody. A tangled sea of tired limbs stretched across the floor, each drop of sweat spreading like ink onto another. In the room, if you saw a woman, you saw them all, and if you saw them all, you saw a woman. A gathering of souls in a single body. The room swayed with the rhythm of their weak, limp bodies and after a while in the darkness she no longer remembered where she began or where she ended. Her hands, her feet, her flesh belonged to all. Each night, she feared she would soon wake up to see herself with someone else’s eyes.
‘Stop thinking terrible things.’
Lucky turned to Jamila. ‘There’s nothing else to think about.’
‘You’re forgetting I’m here with you,’ Jamila said, winding their hands together. They sat for a moment feeling the warmth of the other’s grasp, enjoying the welcome embrace between palms that had never lied to each other. Its softness felt like summer, of fields heavy with wheat and vegetables, of trees dropping gifts into the hands of two sisters drowning out the yells of chasing farmers with their girlish laughter. Sunrise filled the room and Jamila’s fingers became thoughtful around Lucky’s. Small strokes circling the joints. A loving, considerate heat. The slow crawl of light over their bodies, up the walls and into the roof confirmed to Jamila what she had been debating. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you,’ she vowed.
The soldiers came every day. In the reflection of their black eyes, Lucky saw herself shrunken. She discerned a slight figure, with downcast eyes that tilted sad; an undefined nose, good for measuring sweetness and spice, now shrivelled and crusted over with a layer of dried blood; thin lips, a musky berry, crumbled and parched grey; a dark complexion made darker by their darkness; and long, wavy hair, the only beauty about her, afraid that one day soon it might be knotted in clumps beneath a soldier’s fist, as if he had the power to stretch and shrink the ocean with his hands.
If only you were your mother’s colour. Family and friends had lamented her dark complexion her whole life, and even here, a woman’s worst crime was to be ugly. But today, the reminder that she was no great beauty comforted her. There was nothing to be mistaken. No invitation. No sultry smiles. No longing looks. When the time came, no one could say she had invited the ocean to drown her.
‘Close your eyes,’ Jamila said. ‘The longer they stay open, the more you’ll remember when you leave.’
‘What I see with my eyes closed is worse than what I see with them open,’ Lucky replied. Terror possessed her body once again. ‘What will happen to Rayan if I don’t return?’
‘You will return, heaven couldn’t stop you from getting back to him.’
‘What am I against the heavens?’
‘A praying mother.’
In the morning, when soldiers arrived refreshed, some women showed determination. They stood up as soon as a soldier entered, a mango in his hand, chewing loudly, sucking on the seed, letting the juice drip down his chin and onto the small, colourful square accolades on his lapel. The women smiled a smile they rested all night to raise, took his outstretched hand, and walked out with purpose. Those women didn’t return for days. When they did, they returned carrying a plate of ruti and daal for all to share. Food that went down Lucky’s throat like thorns.
Lucky neither stretched out her hand nor pulled it back. She remained a migrating bird, in search of seeds, soaring between shelter and predator, without a place to land. Jamila took food for them both, forcing Lucky to eat from her hand when she had missed so many meals she could no longer sit upright. When Lucky pushed Jamila’s hand away, Jamila reminded her, ‘You’re no good to your son starved.’
‘How does it go down your throat?’ Lucky asked.
‘Easily, this food is ours, not theirs.’
Whenever a new woman came, the old ones asked her about the outside. Which side was gaining? Did she know of so-and-so of such-and-such district? Was help travelling their way? Silence, clear for all to understand, was the reply.
Once again, night fell. Clouds drifted through Lucky’s heart as she watched a shadow fist pull a shadow girl through a shadow door. Strange questions entered her mind at rest. If she touched the candlelight in the room’s corner with her eyes, would it melt like ghee under the sun or shine like glazed sugar on jilapi? If she rested her forehead on the mouth of a soldier’s gun, would he shoot her or take it as an invitation to have her for the night? The questions haunted her until sunrise.
The women were of different ages, the youngest of them still on the edges of girlhood. Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, upper, middle and lower classes and castes. Most of them, like Mohini, Rabia, Chanda and Suhana, the camp cook, came from villages. A handful came from towns, like Rokeya, a university student, and Sumayyah and Noori, secondary school friends.
Zoleyka, the oldest of them, somewhere in her thirties, never spoke. Each day, her fingers creaking with the smallest movement, she braided her hair in different patterns. Plait braid, single braid, lace braid, ladder braid, fishtail braid. When the soldiers came, they grabbed at the end and pulled her head like fishermen pulling a net full of bounty back from the sea.
Each morning tears pooled in her sockets, swished side to side, settled in even puddles and fell silently from both corners. Two streams from each eye. As if she had four eyes, feeling twice as much pain as the rest of them.
The only time Lucky had seen Ammu cry, she also cried in four streams.
The day was stripping away into the night and baby frogs pounced onto their veranda, peeking inside for shelter. Ammu shooed them away, but not before Lucky had placed the smallest into her frilly pocket, just as Abbu returned from the cauliflower fields with muddy sandals, a sweat-soaked shirt, and a lungi in need of patching up.
Ammu and Abbu’s routine was as follows. First, Ammu followed Abbu into their room and laid out clothes for him on their bed while he washed from a bucket that she had dipped her fingers into exactly four times to make sure it was warm-hot like he liked. They discussed how many men had come to work that day, how many cauliflowers Abbu and his employees had picked, how big the leaves were, how many snakes and rats had got to them first, how many had gone bad, how much it had rained the night before, how much rain would be best, if they had more or less to sell than last year, how much they would sell for in the struggling market. Ammu listened until Abbu was clean and happy in a fresh shirt and lungi. Then she dried his hair before they joined the dinner table, where an impatient Lucky pinched rice from the bowl into her mouth one grain at a time.
One Tuesday, and Lucky knew it was Tuesday, because Abbu always came home with a roll of money from the week’s sales on Tuesdays, Ammu and Abbu remained in their room for a long time. So long that she released her baby frog at the door herself instead of waiting for Ammu to scold her, then set the remaining dishes on the table, walking snail-slow to and from the kitchen so as not to spill anything.
Under the buzzing lantern light, for the current had gone off across town at lunch time, Lucky heard thuds through the thin walls between the kitchen and Ammu and Abbu’s bedroom. When tapping the sticky rice had lost its appeal and licking the paisley patterns around the bowl was complete, she slid her feet along the tile lines without lifting them and looked into her parents’ bedroom, her eyes level with the keyhole. Abbu stood in front of the keyhole, his back covering half the room. The door hadn’t closed fully and only rested against its frame. Lucky slid her fingers up and down the gap, feeling the coolness of the room on her fingertips. Somehow, she knew not to pull it open. Or close it shut.
The First Jasmines by Saima Begum is forthcoming with Hajar Press on 31 July, 2025.
