Scenes From Early Life (25 page)

1.

Between March and December 1971, the war of independence continued. The course of that war has been told by other people, many times, and so has the story of the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed. In December, the Indian government came in on the side of Sheikh Mujib’s liberation fighters, and within a few days, an independent Bangla Desh was declared.

For those eight months, all Nana’s family lived in the house in Dhanmondi. The domestic arrangements were complex, but they worked quite efficiently. Boro-mama and his family had a room to themselves, as did we; the great-grandmothers shared with two aunts, and the doubling-up went on in quite a sensible way. There had been talk of abandoning Dacca to go into the country but, in fact, that proved much more dangerous for many people. Millions of people, especially Hindus, had fled to India at the outbreak of trouble. But we did not do that. My grandfather had great faith in the idea that the worst trouble would not happen if he was certain enough that it would not happen. He faced down catastrophe. And perhaps he felt that he and Nani had suffered enough when they were young, living in Calcutta, and their eldest boy had been killed at fifteen by a Japanese bomb in the air-raids. Nothing afterwards could ever be as bad as that. And, strangely enough, nothing afterwards ever was as bad. They came through that terrible time, when the violence and terror washed up against the gate of the house, but no further. They survived, and were still there at the other end.

Nani had a strong emotion afterwards about this time. She was not exactly nostalgic about it, but in later years, when I was old enough to be placed next to Nana at dinner and be called Churchill, she would often mention this time. ‘Do you remember,’ she would say, her leg resting on the teak footrest, ‘do you remember the steamed rui that Sharmin taught Ahmed how to make when everyone was living here, all through ’seventy-one? Do you remember, Bubbly? It was so good, that steamed rui, with lemon and ginger. And she taught him, and he never got it right afterwards. I don’t know why. But it was never so delicious ever again. He didn’t listen properly, or he made some changes of his own, wretched boy, and completely spoilt the dish. Oh, I loved to eat that steamed rui. I could have eaten it every day.’

‘It was so clever of her,’ Bubbly would say. She loved the details of food as much as Nani did – she could remember, years later, the exact sequence of dishes she had eaten at her sisters’ weddings, recalling them in loving detail. ‘Because of course there was not always a great choice of things to eat, that year, but you could often get rui when there was no other fish to be had. And we all simply loved it. I could eat it now, in fact.’ She turned to a brother-in-law and began to explain the details of the steamed fish. He was a journalist; he often expressed surprise when, unlike most families, his wife’s family’s memories of the 1971 war of independence revolved around the dishes they had eaten, all summer long. ‘I wish Sharmin would come back and teach Ahmed how to make it again, but she says she can’t remember, and she says she doesn’t know what’s wrong with the way Ahmed cooks it, so that would really be a fool’s errand.’

It was not a happy time, of course not. But it was the time when all Nana’s family were about him, and nobody in his family circle met their end that summer, through some miracle.

At the very end of the year, when Bangla Desh was declared, Nana gathered his family around him. Rustum came in from the garden, and he had been asked to bring a sledgehammer with him. Preceding my grandfather and grandmother and everyone, Rustum opened the cellar door – the one anyone would have thought was a cupboard in the hallway, no more than that, and went downstairs to the oddly small cellar. The whole family could not fit in the cellar as it had been reconstructed, and the aunts and some of the children crowded up the wooden staircase. Outside, the two great-grandmothers, Nana’s mothers, were asking each other what it was that could be going on, what he was up to now. At the top of the stairs, underneath the single lightbulb that illuminated the space, was my elder sister Sushmita, holding me up to watch Rustum’s dramatic gesture. I gazed, bewildered, not knowing what Sushmita was pointing at.

But Rustum raised his sledgehammer, and struck at exactly the right point in the wall. He knew exactly where he should strike. There was a crack; he raised the hammer again, and struck again, and the thin plaster gave way. Behind the half-inch-thick layer, crates of books, of paintings, a harmonium could be seen. It was three years since the library and other treasures had been sealed up. Nadira came forward and pulled at the plaster; now the wall had been broached, it could just be pulled apart with bare hands. And then Boro-mama joined in, and Pultoo; in no time the secret library was there, and everyone was choking in a cloud of plaster dust. There was a cry at the top of the stairs. It was my sister, Sushmita. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘I dropped Saadi.’ It was true. She had dropped me on my bottom, and I sat at the top of the stairs, wailing. It was a novel experience. For the first time, nobody rushed to stop me making that awful noise. ‘I just couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘He’s just – he’s just so
fat
.’ Everyone looked at me, and saw that she was quite right; Mary and Dahlia, at the bottom of the stairs, began to giggle helplessly. Months of feeding, of keeping me quiet with mishti doi, had produced a gargantuan infant. My eyes were deeply buried in fat rolls of cheek, like currants in a bun.

‘Something must be done about that,’ Nana said, quite seriously.

And then Nadira played a song.

2.

But other people had a different sort of time, during those months.

Mrs Khandekar’s sons were constant attenders at the student rallies, the protest meetings that were an almost daily occurrence in the first months of 1971. They came home only to eat, bringing friends and fellow revolutionaries. Mrs Khandekar took to ordering large quantities of food for dinner, knowing that twelve very hungry people might arrive without warning. They sat about the dinner table with their wild hair, bringing a new atmosphere into the house, having the kind of argument that consists of everyone agreeing very energetically. They would sleep – the boys in their old rooms, the others in spare rooms, or, if there were too many, on sofas, however they could manage themselves. And then, in the morning, they would be gone, off to make their feelings felt at another rally.

The younger of the sons of Mrs Khandekar had begun to smoke in this wild-eyed, impassioned company. She had once made him promise that he would never smoke. But there were other reasons for her to worry about him, these days.

The two boys came to her, and said that they were leaving Dacca to prepare for the struggle to come. She muted her feelings. She understood why she could not know where they were. But it was hard for her.

When my grandfather came to see the Khandekars, to ask their advice, he did not know that in the kitchen, waiting to see Mrs Khandekar, was a man called Altaf. Altaf sat with the Khandekar servants and Rustum, my grandfather’s driver, listening to their conversation but not contributing much. My grandfather left, and actually saw Altaf. But he did not recognize him as a musician who had played at many parties in the past, and he did not wonder what Altaf might be doing there.

When my grandfather had left, Mr Khandekar went to his study, and Altaf followed Mrs Khandekar into the pink sitting room with the chairs of green silk. It was the place he had first met Mrs Khandekar and talked to her about his problems, before she had solved them.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘I do hope there were no difficulties reaching us. Do put that down – I’m not expecting you to play today.’

Altaf put his harmonium in its case down. He wondered why Mrs Khandekar had asked him to bring it, if it were not to be played. And it could be the cause of suspicion, to carry a musical instrument through the streets, these days.

‘Mrs Khandekar-aunty,’ Altaf said boldly. ‘I thank you for your every kindness to me.’

‘We all live in hard times,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘I know that there was nothing you could have done about the change in circumstances. I could not take advantage of you because of something that you did not foresee.’

Since Amit’s departure, Mrs Khandekar had agreed to let Altaf stay in the apartment in Old Dacca on his own, only asking him to go on paying the half of the rent that he had been paying. She understood, she had said, the situation. She had suggested at first that Altaf would not need to pay the full amount until he had found somebody else to share the flat with. But – with a shrug – there was no particular hurry for that. ‘We are not,’ Mrs Khandekar had said, ‘living in normal times.’

Altaf was grateful for this. When Mrs Khandekar, a week later, sent him a note asking him to meet her in the English cemetery at a certain time, he did so. She had handed him a letter – a thick envelope, containing a long letter, and perhaps, Altaf thought, some wedges of banknotes, too. As they walked from one end of the cemetery to the other, they could have been a son and his mother. The decaying tombs, overgrown with creepers and grass, were little visited, and kept only by a sad old custodian at the gate, who did not care who they were. Most people were kept away by the fear of snakes breeding in the thick, undisturbed growth; a fear Altaf rather shared as Mrs Khandekar strode through the knee-deep vegetation. She had given him the address of a house in Azimpur. Altaf agreed to take the package there that afternoon.

He understood very well what Mrs Khandekar was asking of him, and he understood why it was him that she had asked. These days, Mrs Khandekar was followed when she left the house; if she had something to take to another address, that house would be watched, too. Altaf was not important enough to be watched. He was not an obvious part of Mrs Khandekar’s life. So she passed him an envelope containing hundreds of rupees, and asked him to deliver it to a house in Azimpur. He had no idea who the people in the house in Azimpur could be.

Since then, he had done the same thing twice more for Mrs Khandekar. Once she had asked him to bring a tiffin-pail – the ordinary steel three-tiered sort that everyone had – and on a bench in Baldha Gardens in the shade of a red-flowering tree, they had unobtrusively swapped. She walked off with his, and he took hers to another house, behind a wall in Minto Street. She had given him the address. It was strangely heavy, that tiffin pail. Something thudded about inside it, something weighty. It seemed to be padded with cotton wool, or wrapped in muslin, or something of that sort. Mrs Khandekar on the next occasion had been meticulous about giving him back his own pail, the one she had taken away with her, washed. But that had been two weeks afterwards, and Altaf had by then bought a replacement tiffin pail. They were not expensive items, and he was grateful to Mrs Khandekar for other things.

He was not a fool. He understood that the Khandekar boys had gone away, like many students of that age. He himself had been to a meeting of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, at the racecourse where Sheikh Mujib had read a speech, and Sufiya Kamal had recited a poem. He had felt pride that in the past he had played at her house, and had been listened to by him. Many people who had attended such meetings were preparing to fight. It was to those people that he was conveying Mrs Khandekar’s packages. Or, rather, it was to people who knew those people that his deliveries were being made. These houses were the first of a chain, in a sequence, and at the end of it, perhaps, were the Khandekar boys, who had responded to the times by retreating, and preparing to fight. Others, like Amit, were preparing for the war to come in their own way, by running away to India. He pushed the thought down as unworthy of himself. He had heard from Amit only once, in a letter that was not long, from Calcutta, where he was safe. There had been no return address: perhaps Amit had overlooked it, or perhaps he thought there was no point in giving one. He said he was moving from address to address at the moment, living on the kindness of friends.

In the pink-and-green sitting room, Mrs Khandekar made tense conversation of a neutral sort. Was it true that the Hindu family in the courtyard house across the road from Altaf’s had moved away? How sad. And the children who lived opposite, they must be quite large now – ten, the girl must be? Time went so quickly, it was as if it were yesterday that she was born. Time was not going quickly in Mrs Khandekar’s sitting room. She did not call for tea, perhaps because Altaf had already had his tea in the kitchen. Finally she stood up and went to the sideboard, bent down and pulled out a rosewood case from underneath. Altaf recognized it, in general terms: it was the case of a harmonium, another one. But it obviously contained much more than a harmonium, from the way Mrs Khandekar was struggling to lift it. She put it by his chair and sat down again on her sofa.

‘It would be so kind of you to take this to a dear friend of mine,’ she said. ‘He lent it to me, and I think I need to take it back to him. I would ask the servants, but . . .’