The last letter

This is not going to be a long letter, and I am sorry for that. My husband Hani would not let me

write, speak or talk to anyone. I have sneaked out to our little garden to get some piece.

I miss you.

I am scared, my dear sister, so scared. When I lay alone at night, I dream ungrateful dreams.

Do you do that too? The dreams are mostly my inner call for something better, a search for a life worth living.

I am a housekeeper for him, you see, not a wife.

The awareness of you maybe living the same life is making me sick, and I cannot do anything about it. I have my life here, in Jamalpur, and you have yours in London.

My husband’s name is Hani Masouriha, and his relatives are known for their good look and their prosperity.

This does not include him, unfortunately. He has the look of a pig.

As I wrote earlier I am sitting in the little garden behind the little, yellow house that we are living in. This is my place for thinking, and my place for crying. He does not like me crying in front of him, so I hide in the shed when it is too hard to handle. This especially after he has beaten me. I hate him for it, but he says it is for the best. I have to learn, but in his mind, it is by beating me to bloods.

I hide the scars under my sari because I am ashamed of them. They show the disobedience of a woman, who is too afraid to say what she really mean.

I hear the steps of him now, and the letter has to stop. If he sees that, I am writing a letter to someone he does not know he will be furious.

Goodbye my dear sister, may your life bring more happiness than mine.

I love you.

PS: I will try to write to you as much as I can, I have a new one planned already.

(This was a school project. Our task were to imagine that we were Hasina, Nazneen’s sister. We were writing the letter Nazneen keeps in the shoebox at the bottom of her wardrobe)