....ergo Ershad!

We don't know how Ershad met Bidisha, but they sure looked lovey-dovey and made-for-each-other in public appearance. Only recently Ershad talked about his two wives on Channel I and there was no sign of the brewing storm. He said he was glad to see both his wives on his party presidium and looked confident like a juggler dangling two women from the two ends of his string of charm.

Then something hit them like tsunami and washed away all romance. What we hear is the Harold Robbins version of thrill and suspense. Bidisha did not divorce her first husband before she married Ershad. She had several passports, a house in

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London, bank accounts where money came from dubious sources, and may have been involved in activities subversive of the state. Phew! So much for a wayward girl turned a social butterfly turned the young wife of an old man who happens to be a former head of state!

But respectable people do not bring domestic squabbles out of their bedrooms, definitely not out of their living rooms. Then Ershad has done it with political astuteness, perhaps for political reasons, cherrypicking what was convenient and throwing out what was redundant. He kept the son and let the mother go. This is how he treats a woman, nothing but a mistress between man and mattress!

Ershad will go down in history perhaps as an amusing footnote, the most libidinous of our presidents. God moves in mysterious ways, often planting a weakling inside a strongman, who sows his wild oats like crazy and begets nothing. All said and done, you feel sorry for someone who has scandalously enjoyed his life, sex, power, longevity, money and all the trappings of a privileged man. He had the fortune of having those and then the energy to exploit them, going strong even when pushing eighty, still in the thick of juicy stories when most men of his age either died or ended up in geriatric wards.

To sum up that long life, it has been spent mostly grabbing power and women, like a long summer day spent looking at dirty magazines. May be there is a pathological connection between sex and politics, since both require quite a bit of wooing and chasing. Bidisha chased Ershad for power and Ershad wooed Bidisha for his prurient fantasies, politics somehow coming between them as connecting tissue of convenience.

There is also another connection between sex and politics. One stokes the appetite for another, basic instinct feeding on basic instinct, until one does not know one's own limit. Ershad did not know that an old man marrying a young woman, given all his money, power and virility, is also called a marriage like a brand new buggy on rusted wheels is also called a carriage. Bidisha had her own blind spot as well. She forgot to learn the punctuations in her grammar of ambition. The gift of flesh can give only so much lift, but then life is a rude awakening after a certain point.

It was a rude awakening for all of us that an apparently healthy relationship was hiding a sewer of hatred. A leader, who claims to care for his people, dumped his woman like a hot potato and then went to hide behind medical check-up and pilgrimage. We hear about political compulsions, about how he must have been constrained to save his political future by giving up one of his women. He has dumped his women in the past also, and he has done it again. We have heard about compulsive gamblers who settle gambling debt by giving their wives to the winning hands.

In so much as Bidisha deserved her comeuppance, it was a sad sight to watch her being shoved between prison and court, crushed in the crowd of police, reporters and onlookers, often carried like a deadweight of shame when she fainted or felt unwell. At times it looked very obscene, the freshly divorced wife of a former president pushed around like a common criminal. But it was also a sobering sight to see that nobody was above the law, that ambition was like a bird that could be shot down if it winged beyond acceptable norms.

Then we also know that much of it is politics, and Bidisha is but a sordid example of the shifting tectonic plates in our political landscape. It is an irony that politics has to exploit the coquetry of a woman so much as a woman tried to exploit the coquetry of politics. It is amazing that we still have law and order, courthouses, police and government, that we still talk about right and wrong, punishment and justice when moral turpitude afflicts us like an epidemic.

Let me say it before anyone gets upset that wrongdoing is now a common practice in our country. Morality is but a musical chair to see who gets caught when the music stops. If Bidisha has been caught, the surprise is not that she has done anything wrong.

She has been doing everything wrong from the beginning, and the surprise is that it worked so long.

It is also working for others, people who are abusing power, taking bribes, keeping mistresses, patronising musclemen, pandering favours, and turning a blind eye to the corruption of their children. One powerful man I hear is terminally ill, but keeps seventeen cars in his house, mostly acquired through questionable means. Bidisha is young and ambitious, and she has only followed the footsteps of older people, until she made the mistake of getting married to one of them.

Someday the whole thing is going to fizzle out like it happened in the past, because we are late to remember and quick to forget. Then Bidisha should bring a class action for defamation on behalf of the corrupt and the debauched people of this country. She will find Ershad on her side again. She will also find many of those who are oppressing her now, since politics is a self-serving business in the name of the people.

I have one thing to say before I go. It is the most despicable thing to use a woman for private gains. There are many names to call a man who is engaged in this trade. I hope the stolen mobile will ring one day to tell Ershad that honourable former president is not one of them!

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.