East Pakistan period

The East Pakistan period appears here through a retrospective glimpse of married life in Dhaka rather than through political events. The passage remembers Hind before her later forceful manner: as a gentle, attentive wife whose household routines and developing tastes were shaped by her husband Muhammad Sufyan’s broad intellectual interests and by the many cultures of the subcontinent.

Domestic Life in Dhaka

Hind’s earlier life is recalled through specific acts of care. When Muhammad Sufyan stayed up late marking examination papers, she brought him cardamom-scented tea; at the school’s termly Staff Families Outing, she sought to ingratiate herself with the principal. She also struggled through the novels of Bibhutibhushan Banerji and the metaphysics of Tagore, hoping to become more worthy of a husband who could quote the Rig-Veda and Quran-Sharif, Julius Caesar’s military accounts, and the Revelations of St John the Divine. The portrait locates this remembered period in the intellectual and domestic setting of a Dhaka schoolteacher’s household.

A Household of Cultural Plurality

Hind admired Muhammad Sufyan’s openness to multiple traditions and tried to create a culinary counterpart to it. In her kitchen she learned to prepare South Indian dosas and uttapams as well as Kashmiri meatballs. Her interest in this varied cuisine grew into a passion, extending from Hyderabad’s highly spiced dishes to Lucknow’s elaborate yoghurt sauces. The passage thus presents cultural plurality not only as an idea discussed by Muhammad Sufyan but as a practice Hind takes up through cooking and eating.

The Body as a Map

The recollection links Hind’s expanding appetite to a bodily transformation: as she ate more of the subcontinent’s food, her body began to resemble its broad, rolling landmass. The comparison makes food a force that crosses boundaries, and casts her changing body as an image of a subcontinent without frontiers. Muhammad Sufyan, by contrast, gains no weight at all—not a tola or an ounce. This difference gives the domestic portrait its final contrast: the same plural world enters the couple’s lives through food, but registers differently in their bodies.