The Secret Diary of a Bengali Newlywed by Halima Khatun

Author:Halima Khatun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: British chick-lit, funny women's fiction, women's fiction for woc, arranged marriage romance, muslim women's fiction
Publisher: halima khatun
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

I was on the way to the train station, in the small town where I used to work, to collect tickets for a trip to London the next day. As I was going up the steep hill to the station, someone threw something. I think it was a plastic bottle but I didn’t dare look. I didn’t have time to think. It was all so quick, yet car-crushingly slow at the same time.

It’s funny, in these circumstances you think you’ll behave differently. That you’ll stand up for yourself. Swear back. Be defiant. Many a movie and book has shown the wronged party stand up to the bigots. Big sis once recounted a story of how some kids started making fun of a German girl on the bus by repeating some of the words they overheard from her conversation with her friend. The girl, mortified, stopped talking, sat quietly and turned her attention to the window.

“She should have told them to fuck off,” I said at the time. “That’s what I’d do.”

“You wouldn’t!” said big sis.

“I would.”

“No, you wouldn’t. If you were in that situation and put on the spot like that, you’d probably just want them to stop. You’d want it to be over. You’re acting all hard now because you haven’t been in that situation. You don’t know what it’s like.”

Well, now I have. And now I do know what it’s like. And she was right.

For all my hypothetical bluster, when it happened in reality, I felt powerless and paralysed. The paralysis subsided once I realised what was happening.

Once the echoes of ‘paki’ became louder, once the direction of sound became clearer, once the verbal abuse threatened to become physical, my adrenaline kicked in and I went into survival mode.

Come on, get up that hill. Hurry the fuck up, I told myself as the steep incline I was leisurely scaling just moments before, now seemed vertiginously impossible. My feet felt like they were in danger of meeting my shins, so high was the hill and so fast I was walking.

I didn’t dare look back to see my tormentors. I didn’t dare put faces to the names they were calling me.

Finally, I’d reached the summit. I no longer heard any abuse. I’m not sure when the name-calling stopped. I think I’d muffled it out when I was climbing up the hill. I got into the safety of the station when I realised how fast my heart was racing. It was pounding through sheer exhaustion and fear.

Who do I tell? Who will help?

I joined the queue, waiting politely. Could I have jumped the queue? Probably not. That didn’t seem very British. After all, it’s not like I was bleeding, or hurt. Not physically. A minute lapsed, and the heat slowly faded off my face. I went to collect my ticket at the counter. I wasn’t going to mention anything but then I didn’t know who, if anyone, would be waiting for me outside the station. If they went to the effort

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