Sushmita Banerjee and the fatal attraction of Afghanistan

In death, Sushmita Banerjee has become brisk business. At a roadside bookstall on College Street, steps away from a memorial to the slain author, a vendor lustily shouts “You can get Sushmita Banerjee’s Kabuliwallar Bangali Bou here. Get your copy here.” He has a few copies of Sushmita’s sensational memoir about her travails in Afghanistan prominently displayed. When asked if they are pirated, he just says piously he is not selling them at blackmarket prices. Her publishing house, Bhasha o Sahitya, hardly has any copies left. Swapan Biswas, the publisher, has a cell phone strapped to his ear, trying to guide a pick-up car from a television studio through the narrow congested streets of North Kolkata. He has to go on a TV program about Sushmita right after lighting a candle for her at the memorial. He says he brought whatever copies he had lying around, still wrapped in old browning newsprint, to the bookstore while they wait for the new print run to arrive. [caption id=“attachment_1100697” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Sushmita Banerjee. Reuters.[/caption] “But this gives me no pleasure,” he says. “I miss her laugh. She had such a hearty laugh.” The poster put up by the publishers’ association screams Kabuliwallar Bangali Bou Khoon (Kabuliwala’s Bengali bride murdered). It is dramatically spattered with splashes of red like the cover of some lurid crime thriller. But the office bearers of the association are very circumspect, sticking to careful platitudes about “untimely death”, acutely aware that this outspoken woman has become quite the political hot potato. The BJP has claimed her as a party member which her family denies. Mamata Banerjee, a leader Sushmita openly idolized, has said she is trying to get the body back although she has already been buried in Afghanistan. The family wants a post-mortem. But with warm relations between Hamid Karzai’s government and New Delhi, it’s unclear how much India wants to rock the boat beyond Manmohan Singh’s statement of commiseration for her as “a victim of Taliban’s wrath”. Police in Afghanistan are now pointing the finger at Pakistan’s Haqqani network. Meanwhile the rumour mills are running over time. A friend has surfaced telling The Telegraph, Banerjee was ready to return to India for good before she was killed. A man in Gurgaon, himself married, is claiming to be a Facebook fiancé. “Everyone wants to capitalize on it,” sighs Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, Sushmita’s cousin, an associate professor in San Jose, California, now at his parents’ home in Rupnarayanpur, 200 Km from Kolkata. Ranjan says he’s trying to hold on to the larger-than-life Didi he adored. The one who took him to Flury’s patisserie in Kolkata for the first time. The one he watched on stage doing jatra folk theater, once defeating the reigning jatra queen Bina Dasgupta to win the coveted Uttam Kumar award. The one who was over the moon when he got his Ph.D because she herself never studied beyond XIIth grade. “She used to exaggerate my achievements,” he says, his voice breaking. “She would tell people my brother teaches at Harvard!” Once the big mystery was how a girl from a Bengali middle-class Brahmin family, daughter of a public servant in the Ministry of Defence, could fall in love with an Afghan moneylender and defy everyone to marry him. Now the bigger mystery is why she went back to Afghanistan again after all she had endured there. “I told her, Didi, don’t go. Sit here and write,” says Swapan Biswas. “It does not sound safe based on what you yourself have written.” A senior Kolkata journalist, also named Ranjan Bandyapadhyay concurs. “You really don’t go there after what you had written about the Taliban. And generally about Afghan society. And the men there, ” says Bandyapadhyay who had serialized the first three chapters of Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou for the Bengali newspaper, Ananda Bazar Patrika. “She was a bold woman. She was a desperate woman.” Sushmita’s experience in Afghanistan was harrowing. But it was also an adrenaline rush. The eighteen years in Kolkata after that quickly became “monotonous and repetitive” says her cousin Ranjan. Her neighbours did not know the woman they saw bringing groceries home in a cycle rickshaw once had to move with bodyguards. The Bengali movie based on her memoir never happened. The Hindi version, starring Manisha Koirala flopped. She complained she had been too quick to agree to the director, that she had not been paid fully. Her husband’s business in Kolkata had ground to a halt says Ranjan. The city’s Afghan community cold-shouldered him because of the way his wife had depicted their homeland. Her parents had died. The books that followed the sensational Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou didn’t make any waves. “Her prose was rustic. She was not a writer,” says Bandyapadhyay who says he rewrote much of what was serialized in Ananda Bazar Patrika. “She had the stuff but didn’t know how to handle it.” Biswas says fellow publishers, many of whom had rejected her, warned him against publishing someone so raw and unsophisticated. They regretted it after the book’s runaway success. [caption id=“attachment_1100707” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A memorial service in Kolkata. Sandip roy/Firstpost[/caption] But the success was a double-edged sword. Like many creative people, Sushmita was frustrated, struggling to find something new that could live up to the sensational triumph of her debut. When the idea of doing another first-hand book or documentary on Afghanistan came up, comparing the country she lived in then with the situation now, she jumped at it. Biswas says she told him, “Dada, I will write a good novel. Otherwise you won’t publish it.” “Possibly she wanted to be another Taslima Nasrin but that’s not possible without her talent,” says journalist Bandyapadhyay. Nasrin herself has been tweeting her conspiracy theories about Sushmita’s death. Her family is more guarded but not convinced with the accounts her husband and his family have given. His family was not happy with her social work says Ranjan. They were angry at the depiction of sex life and private matters in her book. She had written some of them had a “soft corner for the Taliban” as well. She had claimed her in-laws had treated her “like a stray dog”. Ranjan says he was not stunned Sushmita went back. “She is a tiger,” he says. “She was always looking for something new. To make a difference in this world.” Fearless she might have been but Sushmita could not have imagined she would be welcomed back with open arms by a society she described as “a dungeon of darkness” where even the food tasted like “mucky dollops” where parents thought it was more “practical to show (the children) how to fire guns than help them to read and write”. “After the film especially people knew her,” rues Ranjan. “We told her not to go. All those bad things she portrayed could turn out to be dangerous for her. It turned out to be true.” He says, as a brother, his heart breaks every time he thinks about her or sees some “friend” gossiping about her on television. But he says he also feels really proud. “We are leading a life full of compromises. I wish I could live like Didi and die bravely and fight to make a difference in this world.” Sushmita Banerjee, in death, achieved what she was so desperate to do in life – becoming a household name again. Whether it makes a difference for the women of Afghanistan, whose cause she cared so much about, is far more uncertain.