Making A Difference

No Tears In Paktika

Sushmita Banerjee’s family gropes for closure as they examine her grisly end

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No Tears In Paktika
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Who really killed Sushmita Banerjee? At the Calcutta house of the Bengali author who was murdered in Afghanistan last week, the question haunts her ang­uished family members. Latest police reports from Afghanistan after the arr­est of two men suspected to be inv­olved in the crime suggest that probably the Pak­istan-bac­ked Haqqani network, and not the Tal­iban as was initially sus­pected, eng­­i­neered the murder of the woman whose autobiographical account of her marriage to an Afghan moneylender and her audacious escape from the clutches of the Taliban catapulted her to international fame. But Sushmita’s family and friends are not so sure. They suspect that it could have been her own husband, Jaanbaaz, and his family who killed her. “We will never get her back but it is important for us to know, because we want justice,” says Sushmita’s brother Gopal Banerjee, who is also trying to get her body back to Calcutta.

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Gopal lets on that though the family initially believed reports that the Taliban was to blame, their suspicion gradually turned towards her husband and in-laws. “First of all, I found it strange that my brother-in-law did not call me. I heard the news from the media,” Gopal says. “When I tried to call him on his cellphone repeatedly, I found it switched off. Then, when I contacted the Indian embassy in Kabul, asking why we hadn’t been informed, we were told that Jaanbaaz told them he did not have our phone numbers. That was a total lie, because if you go through last July’s phone records, when Sushmita was here, you will see the number of times he contacted me when he couldn’t get in touch with my sister.” In fact, according to Gopal, it was during this last visit of his sister to Calcutta that he and his family realised that things had really soured between Sushmita and Jaanbaaz. “She would refuse to speak to him, so she wouldn’t answer his calls. But then, he would call on my phone and say, ‘Pagli (as he used to call her affectionately) ko phone doh’. I couldn’t understand why he wanted her to go back to their village in Paktika province when, clearly, he did not love her anymore, nor why she eventually decided to return even when she had had enough.”

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But it was not always like this. Nearly three decades ago, when Sushmita was 27, she was, in her brother’s words, “head over heels in love with him”. “They were more or less the same age and got along very well, but their different backgrounds and religions became a major problem.” Gopal, who was then studying in Class XI, remembers the domestic tension over the romance, as their parents abhorred the idea of her marrying Jaanbaaz. “My parents were strict Bra­hmins and he was Muslim. So as far as they were concerned it was an unthinkable match.” Sushmita, the second child of four children and the only daughter, found in Gopal, who is ten years you­nger, her only support. “It’s not that I entirely encouraged her, as I was too young to really know what was going on. Also, she was quite a bully; so I had to do her bidding. She was also ext­remely stubborn, and once she made up her mind no one could dissuade her.” It was Gopal who accompanied her to the marriage registrar’s office as the only witness from the family when she eloped with Jaanbaaz in 1984. “They went off to Kabul and I found myself explaining to my angry, agg­rieved parents what had happened.”

The picture that slowly emerges of Sushmita when you speak to her family, friends and those who came to know her later as a courageous crusader for women’s rights in her own country and in faraway Afghanistan—where she dared to challenge its fearsomely staunch patriarchal norms—is one of a friendly and vivacious woman who was as compassionate as she was committed to her cause. “But she was also extremely secretive,” her brother Gopal reveals. “She kept the plan of her elopement to herself until the very last day when she confided in me. To her dying day, she never told us how she met Jaanbaaz.” In fact, a great many myths have sprung up around their meeting in their locality. “The Banerjees started a real estate business, so maybe she used to visit him because he was a moneylender,” says one neighbour. The other popular neighbourhood theory was that “these Afghan men are considered very handsome so she must have been smitten by his good looks”. It was to one of her close friends, Shalini Naskar, whom Sushmita met at the annual Calcutta Book Fair after the release of her autobiography, that she revealed the real story. Speaking to Outlook, Shalini said, “Sushmita used to work as a nurse in a Calcutta nursing home back then. Jaanbaaz had been admitted with a broken leg. Sushmita nursed him back to health. That was the beginning of the love story.”

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Man from a different world Jaanbaaz Khan, Sushmita’s moneylender Afghan husband

The ordeal that Sushmita was to face after her elopement and subsequent migration to Afghanistan with her husband is documented in her book Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou (Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife). This included the discovery that he was already married. She writes in her book, “When I went to their house in the village, a woman was speaking angrily to him. In a language I could not understand. At first I thought she was not happy because he had married without informing them. Then I realised she was his first wife. The first night we all slept in the same bed. He was in the middle and we were on either side of him. Then I couldn’t take it anymore. So I went and slept on the floor.”

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Sushmita, who had started working for women’s rights in Afganistan, found herself in the black book of the Taliban. Her first attempt to escape was aborted and she was sent back to her in-laws. She finally managed to return to India in 1995, and subsequently wrote her famous autobiography. “When she decided to return to Afghanistan last year (2012) after 17 years, we were all shocked,” Gopal says. “We all tried to dissuade her, but she didn’t listen to anyone.” In fact, Gopal feels that it was no longer love that drove her to take that decision. “This time she was driven by the need to tell the story of the women of Afghanistan. She told me she wanted to write ano­ther book. She said she needed to go back to get more information. When I reminded her of the dangers she told me, ‘It’s been 17 years. Thi­ngs have changed. The Taliban has lost interest in me.’ She refused to see the logic about vendetta. And the last thing she could imagine was that Jaanbaaz was capable of taking her life.”

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The other cruel fact that Gopal says his sister kept from him was that Jaanbaaz was planning to marry again. This, too, was something Sushmita apparently revealed to her friend Shalini. “Jaanbaaz’s brother, who was also a moneylender, was murdered in Calcutta. Jaanbaaz had grown close to his wife in Sushmita’s absence and had decided to marry her.” In her Facebook chat with Shalini the night before she was murdered, Sush­mita had told her about her plans of returning to India. “Tomorrow to Kabul. Day after India,” she wrote.

“That tomorrow never came,” sighs Debolina Banerjee, Gopal’s wife. “Ever­yone is a suspect in her murder,” she says. “Whether it is her husband, the Taliban or the Haqqani network, everyone seems to have a motive. We just want the Indian government to get to the truth.” The Banerjees have appealed for the return of Sushmita’s body to India. They have been informed, however, that it wasn’t possible as she has already been given a burial. This further arouses the family’s suspicion. “It’s an unnatural death. How can they bury her without a proper post-mortem?” Sush­mita’s grief-stricken family is still grappling with many such unans­wered questions. Probable answ­ers materialise, then cede ground to oth­ers that seem more logical, leading her bro­ther to sadly reminisce: “Sushmita always had a definite answer for eve­rything.”

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