New Delhi:
Sushmita Banerjee was all of 25 when she met Jambaaz Khan, an Afghan moneylender, at a theatre rehearsal in Kolkata, West Bengal. It was 1986. Sushmita’s friend played Cupid. Sushmita and Jaambaz met once a week, for an hour, at Flury’s in the city. Over coffee and a pastry shared between the two of them, they got to “know” each other.
It wasn’t enough, lamented Banerjee later, when she found herself in Kharana, deep inside Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where Jaambaz took her after their secret wedding under the Special Marriage Act on July 2, 1988. Sushmita was a “Bengali Brahmin” girl. She married “Afghan Muslim” Jaambaz against her parents’ wishes. When her parents discovered the marriage, they tried to get them divorced; but in vain. Sushmita left Kolkata for Kabul with Jaambaz.
Sushmita was 27 when she married Jaambaz. She did not convert to Islam.
Less than three years after she arrived in Afghanistan, Jaambaz was gone. He had left Afghanistan to go back to India, where he had his moneylending business. Sushmita wasn’t informed. He was gone.; just like that; as she wondered if the Taliban had done away with his head for marrying a Hindu woman.
“He left of his own accord.”
Sushmita stayed behind in the province of Paktika, living a nightmare, as the Taliban combed the streets and executed any woman who dared to defy orders.
That was many years before Indian woman Uzma Ahmed found herself living a similar nightmare in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan; and the story of whose escape is on the big screen in the John Abraham and Sadia Khateeb-starrer The Diplomat this week.
Uzma called herself lucky to have got back to India.
For Sushmita, life played out a little differently.
Kabuliwala’s Bengali Bride
Sushmita Banerjee shot to fame in 1995, when the memoir of her daring escape from the clutches of the Taliban made headlines in Bengal and the country. In Kabuliwala’s Bengali Bride (Kabuliwala’s Bangali Bou, Bengali, 1995), Banerjee recounted in detail how her days in the mountains of Afghanistan were measured out in screams and torture by her in-laws once Jaambaz was gone. Khan would record audio cassettes from Kolkata and post them to Banerjee every couple of months. “When the war is over, you will come to India,” was the refrain in them.
When Sushmita reached her husband’s home, she found that he had a first wife, Gulgutti, whom he married 10 years before her. Sushmita was stunned, but made peace with it.
“Gulgutti was very quiet, shy, and nice. She used to call me Sahib Kamal,” Banerjee told Rediff.com in 2003. In her book, she wrote that “Sahib Kamal” probably meant “Sahib ka Maal” (Sahib’s Object/Woman). Banerjee lived with Gulgutti, her three brothers-in-law and their wives, and her husband Jaambaz in Kharana till Khan left for India.
Things soon took a turn for the worse as the Taliban’s powers and insanity grew unchecked in Afghanistan. They made beards mandatory for men and made women invisible save for with their men. Newspapers were tossed, radio was banned, and books were made bonfires of. Men had to attend the mosque five times a day. Women could not go to the hospital lest a man touched them.
In Khan’s home, Banerjee’s days were all about “no sleep, starvation, and physical assault”. The abuse by her brothers-in-law ranged from physical to mental. There was no end to it. “They weren’t human,” wrote Banerjee in her memoir, “I’m an unofficial prisoner here. Because this entire country is a jail.”
The Village Doctor In The Eye Of The Taliban
Afghanistan barely had any women doctors. This usually meant no treatment for women. If they fell ill, they had to die at home since hospitals meant male doctors and no woman was authorised by the Taliban to be touched by anyone except her husband.
Sushmita had basic training in nursing. She had also read up a few books on gynaecology that came handy in those unreachable reaches of Afghanistan, where women depended on luck and limericks in the name of treatment. The Taliban had shut down all colleges. No one could study medicine.
It was under these circumstances that Banerjee opened her clinic and under that cover, spoke to women to make them aware of the injustice meted out to them. Her clinic was discovered by some men in May 1995. They beat her dead… well, almost.
This attack on Banerjee prompted her to make up her mind about escaping Afghanistan and returning to Kolkata, where her family lived.
She was planning an escape from the Taliban. It wasn’t going to be easy.
Escape From The Taliban
First Attempt: Sushmita, with the help of a few well-wishers that she had in the village, got herself a Jeep that took her to Islamabad in Pakistan. She knocked on the doors of the Indian High Commission; but, much to her shock and agony, was “handed back to the Taliban”.
Second Attempt: Banerjee did not lose hope. She tried escaping the Taliban once again. “This time, I ran all night,” Banerjee wrote in her book. She was arrested again.
After her second attempt to escape, the Taliban decided they had had enough of this woman. A fatwa was issued. She was to die on July 22, 1995.
Third Attempt: The village headman, Dranai chacha, liked Sushmita for her social work. This man’s son had been killed by the Taliban, so he had turned against them. On the day that Sushmita wanted to escape the Taliban for the third time, she grabbed an AK-47 “and shot three Taliban men”, she recounted in her memoir. The headman helped her on to a Jeep and took her to Kabul.
“Close to Kabul, I was arrested. A 15-member group of the Taliban interrogated me. Many of them said that since I had fled my husband’s home, I should be executed. However, I was able to convince them that since I was an Indian, I had every right to go back to my country,” Banerjee wrote in an article for the Outlook in 1998.
“The interrogation continued through the night. The next morning, I was taken to the Indian embassy, from where I was given a safe passage,” she wrote.
She was handed a visa and passport, and she took off for Delhi.
It was raining when her flight landed in the Indian capital. From there, she left for Kolkata, where she arrived on August 12, 1995. Less than three months since the day she made up her mind to leave Afghanistan, she was in Kolkata.
“Back in Calcutta, I was re-united with my husband. I don’t think he will ever be able to go back to his family,” wrote Banerjee.
Back To Afghanistan
For the next 18 years, Sushmita Banerjee lived in India with her husband Jaambaz and worked on her books, a Bollywood film that starred Manisha Koirala (Escape From Taliban, 2003), and wanted to do something for the women under the Taliban. She hoped her film would make it to the United Nations and they would intervene.
In 2013, Banerjee celebrated Eid for a week in Kolkata and went back to her husband’s home in Afghanistan. Khan had moved back home in Afghanistan and Banerjee wanted to live with him. She had also converted to Islam by then and taken on a new name, “Sayed Kamala”.
25 Bullets And A Silent Burial
After Banerjee’s return to Afghanistan, she resumed work as a health worker in the Paktika province. She was also filming the lives of the local women as part of her work.
The Taliban got whiff of it. They showed up at Jaambaz’s family home in Kharana, the provincial capital of Paktika on the night of September 4, 2013, and bound him up. Sushmita was dragged out and shot dead. They pumped 25 bullets into her body, as per a report, and dumped it near a madrassa.
Banerjee’s in-laws in Afghanistan buried her body as her brother in Kolkata wondered, “Why did she have to die like this?”