Scenes From Early Life (26 page)

No reason seemed to come to Mrs Khandekar’s mind for not asking the servants to deliver it. But Altaf understood perfectly well.

‘Take a motor-rickshaw,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘Take two, one after the other. You know what I mean. You can leave your instrument here. It will be quite safe, and I will ask someone to bring it back to you this afternoon – no, tomorrow, if that isn’t an inconvenience. Here is some money – I do hope it isn’t inconvenient.’

She gave him the address – a place deep in Armanitola, not far from where Altaf lived – and she stood up to say goodbye. He lifted the case: it was heavy. There was no harmonium inside it, he believed. He left the house, trying to carry the harmonium as if it were of normal weight; as if it were the case he had arrived with. He did not see anyone observing him, and certainly it would be hard for them to be sure whether Altaf had entered the house with a harmonium or not. He wondered if Mrs Khandekar had decided on a harmonium because she thought Altaf would carry it naturally, being accustomed to it; or perhaps she had not given the matter that degree of thought, and it was simply something conveniently to hand, very much like an object that she could ask him to bring, like the tiffin-pails they had swapped on a previous meeting. In any case, he walked down the leafy Dhanmondi street in a brisk way. The pavement cobbler with his last and his tools, settled in the shade of a tree, looked up as he passed; the security guard outside another house, sitting on a chipped wooden chair, fanning himself with a newspaper, greeted him in a bored manner, saying, ‘Good morning, brother.’ It was hard to know whether anyone else was observing or following him, but Altaf thought not. For some years, it had been deemed suspicious to walk the streets of Dacca with a musical instrument. Mrs Khandekar had overlooked that, and the harmonium case must have been exactly the right size for whatever it now contained.

At the corner of the street, he hailed a green motor-rickshaw. He told the driver to go to Armanitola, and the driver unhooked the cage that closed in the passenger seat. Altaf would not haggle over the fare today. ‘Musician, are you?’ the driver said, as they set off, and Altaf agreed that he was. ‘You know my favourite song?’ the driver said, and began to hum ‘Amar Shonar Bangla’, the Tagore song. You could be arrested for that, but neither of them seemed to care, and in a moment Altaf joined in. Around them the sound of the traffic rose, and the leaden scents of the busy street. Through the noise of hooting and the grinding sound of gear changes, none of the patriotic song could be heard. ‘My golden Bengal,’ Altaf and the driver sang quietly, and they could have been holding a conversation about anything, there in the motor-rickshaw.

The rickshaw dropped him two streets away from the address Mrs Khandekar had given him – in the end, the driver abandoned his brotherly gesture and, since Altaf had not named his price at the beginning, charged him twice over. Altaf walked in the opposite direction to the address he was seeking; dived inside a shop and then immediately out again; cut down an alley, and another, emerging in the main street; crossed the road and back again; and finally, through making reversals and cut-throughs, delaying and hurrying, he found himself at the blue-painted, rusty gate of the house. He banged on the gate, and quickly it was opened by a young man, his hair wild, his chin stubbled with a dusting of white; he wore round, wire-framed spectacles. To Altaf’s surprise, the stranger embraced him before pulling him inside and closing the gate. ‘We are old friends, you see, brother,’ the man said. ‘Now come inside. You need to wait for an hour before leaving.’

That was the fourth time Altaf had taken something at Mrs Khandekar’s request to another part of the city. There were half a dozen addresses he made these deliveries to. He never knew where these packages went after he had passed them on, or who had given Mrs Khandekar six hand-guns and boxes of ammunition in a harmonium case – for example – to pass on to the freedom fighters who were already taking their positions by the beginning of March 1971.

3.

The rains were heavy that year. Mrs Khandekar’s younger son was in the country in August, with a small group of commandos. He did not know exactly where – it was somewhere near Tangail. The country was quiet, undeveloped, and very wet. It came to them as grey, through a dense veil of monsoon.

Somewhere about there were Pakistani troops. A week before, and forty miles away, the commandos had had a success. Word had reached them that a Pakistani convoy would arrive in the district on a certain day. They had taken up positions in a ditch by the side of the road. They had endured three hours of rain and knee-high water, but then the convoy had come. They had hurled grenades into the lorries, and fired on the fleeing Pakistani soldiers. It was a successful operation. The commandos had swiftly moved south.

None of the commandos knew whether there were any Pakistani troops in the district. The villagers said there were. But they had rarely met anyone in their lives who did not come from the vicinity of Tangail. That might just have meant that they had met friendly commandos who talked Bengali with a Dacca accent. But the order had come to move southwards after the successful assault on the Pakistani convoy, and to reconnoitre the situation there. So they stayed where they were, in the country east of Tangail, until further orders.

The elder son of Mrs Khandekar had known of better platoons. Manju, who had joined them three weeks before to direct the operation, had made it clear. His previous body of men had had enough tents, straw mattresses, plates to eat off, and even, he said, pillows. They had erected bamboo cottages to sleep in, with dry floors even in the monsoon. This platoon had only three tents for ten men, slept on the ground and ate off leaves or even fragments of artillery shells. Added to that was the discomfort of the monsoon. The elder son of Mrs Khandekar had not worn dry clothes for weeks. His skin itched constantly, all over. On his forearms, the sparks from the sten gun had raised blisters, which had become infected. Manju pointed out that they were Bengalis. They knew about the monsoon. They could live in rain for weeks on end, and it would be helping troops elsewhere to travel by boat and to swim. The Pakistani soldiers came from a dry country, and would be suffering far more than they were. They did not know what to do with water.

The elder son of Mrs Khandekar was the platoon’s quartermaster. He obtained food for the men. For weeks now, they had eaten nothing but vegetables, lentils and rice. It was what villagers lived on, and what they could supply. Sometimes, for breakfast, there was nothing to be had but jackfruit. The elder son of Mrs Khandekar had half a dozen farmers and merchants in the district from whom he bought food; he circulated around them irregularly, coming at different times of day. He did not believe that his contacts would have informed on him to the Pakistanis, if there were any in the district. But there was no point in taking risks. Like all the others, he ate the vegetables, rice and lentils. They drank water from the ponds when they could find no well, and cooked the food in old, battered pots which made everything taste of mud. Once, he had eaten chicken from clean white plates, inside, in a warm room.

One of the farmers had told him that there was a big old house a mile or so beyond the ponds. He had never gone so far, but in the interests of making his movements unpredictable, had set off there one day, shortly before dawn. Those old houses where the zamindars had lived often had substantial stores of food. If the owner was sympathetic, they might even be able to move into a room or two. He trudged along the roads, the water coming down hard. It muted everything but the smells of the country, rich and earthy; the colours of the early morning dulled in the downpour, and there was no sound but the steady hiss of rain. Underfoot, the roads were brown and soft. The stream of water down the back of his neck was constant, as it had been for weeks.

The zamindar’s house loomed up like a mirage in the rain. ‘The first thing you’ll see,’ the farmer had said, ‘is the mosque on the zamindar’s land.’ It was an old pink-and-white building, on the far side of a fishing lake. It was small, even for a village mosque, no more than twenty feet long, set against the walls of the zamindar’s land. The elder son of Mrs Khandekar walked round the lake. In the gardens of the house, he could see an enormous rain tree – it must have been hundreds of years old. In the branches, the shrieks of parakeets were audible over the sound of the rain, and there was the nest of some huge bird, perhaps a fish eagle. There seemed to be nobody about. The gate to the property was hanging open, as if the house had been abandoned. He went inside the grounds. By the mosque was a walled graveyard – the final resting places of the zamindar’s family. He knew these places: it was where the family came home to, in the end.

The house was a single long building, painted red, and had not been lived in for some time. The windows were hanging open, and the curtains soaked with the rain. The front entrance had no door. But there were signs of habitation – a window frame at the left side of the house was blackened, suggesting that a fire had been lit within without care, probably just on the floor of the house. The elder son of Mrs Khandekar decided not to approach the house from the front. He scuttled along the inside of the garden wall, underneath the great tree, and quickly he was behind the house. He could see now that it had once been larger: the stone flags running at a right angle from the main body of the house suggested it had once had two wings. Behind the house there was a pretty old gazebo. It was properly roofed, and its pillars were covered with blue-and-white porcelain mosaics. The elder son of Mrs Khandekar looked at the solid brick flooring with envy. After weeks of sleeping in a tent in the mud, he had not yet allowed himself to consider a bed with soft, clean white sheets. But the idea of sleeping on solid, clean dry bricks filled him with longing. Beyond the gazebo, there was an orchard; two lines of old fruit trees. They were huge old mango trees, guava trees and, the elder son of Mrs Khandekar could see, a lychee tree. That last one was covered with a net against bats – he knew that the bats always get to lychees first, unless you shield them. But the net was ripped and full of holes: it must have been abandoned for two, perhaps three years.

In the rain, the orchard seemed enchanted, hanging weightlessly behind a veil. The elder son of Mrs Khandekar forgot his errand; he did not care that there was no food to be had in an abandoned palace. He gave himself up to the rapture of the monsoon, and to the perfumes of the fruit grove.

In the obscurity of the heavy rain, he was not alone in the mango orchard. Not thirty yards away, against the outer wall, a soldier was folded up, hip to ankle, shoulder to knee, compressed and, like the elder son of Mrs Khandekar, contemplating the orchard. He, too, had escaped from his platoon, because the zamindar’s house was filled with soldiers. They had commandeered it, and most of them were sleeping inside still. The soldier had not seen the approach of the Bengali guerrilla in the heavy rain. Some sound of metal on brick must have penetrated, and he saw the guerrilla in the gazebo laying his rifle on the ground.

The soldier against the wall knew exactly what he had to do. He raised his rifle and shot, once, and then again. The noise of gunfire fetched the platoon of Pakistani soldiers running from inside the house.

4.

Mrs Khandekar did not know for years how her son had met his end. When she discovered, it came as a great relief to her. Her great terror was that he had been tortured to death over the course of weeks and months.

And at the end of it, there was a girl with a lovely voice, playing a harmonium by herself. The harmonium still had plaster dust on it; her long fingers cleaned the keys as they played in their languid way. The room was full of her family, and she sang:

The flower says,

‘Blessed am I,

Blessed am I

On the earth . . .’

The flower says,

‘I was born from the dust.

Kindly, kindly,

Let me forget it,

Let me forget it,

Let me forget.

There is nothing of dust inside me,

There is no dust inside me,’

So says the flower.

1.

Nana’s two mothers returned to where they had come from, in time. They often liked to come to visit in later years. We called them ‘the witches’, which was unfair of us – they were only old and white-haired, and not very good with children. But by now they were very old, and each winter Nana wondered if they would come through the season of colds and flu and other infections. The end came for the elder one in a tranquil way. She caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia; she took to her bed, and never got up again. My mother nursed her with beef tea until her appetite left her; Nana’s other mother, his father’s second wife, sat with her, talking softly, as did Nani, her daughter-in-law. It was strange to think of Nani, by now nearly sixty, coming to her new mother’s house in Calcutta as a young bride, so many years ago. The old woman dozed, and woke, and asked for small things, and dozed again. Once she said, ‘Is he all right? Has he eaten?’ But it was difficult to know whether she was asking the other mother or her daughter-in-law; it was impossible to know whether she was talking of her husband, dead these thirty years, or of her son, my grandfather, who came up to see her every evening. And one day she dozed, and slept, and did not wake up. It was an ending without disturbance, just as she would have wanted to go.

The funeral was a large one. By the time you worked it out, there were many daughters and sons, and their many children; and the children of cousins, and nephews and nieces and their children, many from the country, whom we had never seen before. That was only the family. Because of who my grandfather was, many people wanted to come to pay their respects to his mother. There were so many people who wanted to come to my great-grandmother’s funeral that many mourners had to be told they could not come to the house.

It was not the saddest funeral. Even for Nana’s other mother, who had spent more of her life with the dead woman than she had with her husband, it was only a parting and the end of a long friendship. The hearse came – a shiny black vehicle, quite magical to a small boy – and the little shroud was lifted inside while the small crowd of select, intimate mourners stood behind Nana. Nani had placed her arm around the shoulders of the surviving great-grandmother. The mourners were silent as the back of the hearse was closed. All at once, Nadira-aunty broke out from the crowd, howling. She hurled herself at the back of the hearse, banging on it with her fists. ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No! No!’

‘Nadira, stop that at once,’ Nana said. My father came forward and pulled Nadira away from the car. She stood, tottered for a moment, then fainted, clinging on to the trunk of the mango tree as she fell to the ground. It was a highly impressive sight. I enjoyed it greatly, for one. Not many of the family would have thought that Nadira was so close to her grandmother that she would give way to hysterical grief in this way.

‘The fact of the matter is,’ my mother said afterwards, ‘that no one asked Nadira to sing. And you know how she is. She does like to have an audience.’

But my father thought that was unfair: that Nadira, after all, had not had funerals in her life as often as many people. She would naturally be shocked and appalled by the first death of someone close to her.

‘I still think she wanted to sing,’ my mother said.

2.

Downstairs, in Rankin Street, the argument was reaching a furious pitch.

‘And you have done nothing – nothing – about that tree in the backyard,’ Sharmin was shouting. ‘I told you to uproot it three weeks ago. And what have you done? Nothing. There are bats roosting in that tree. They will get in my hair, I know they will. You don’t care about that. All you do is lie about all day long making plans. You Bengalis!’

We could not help listening to these arguments between Sharmin and her husband, Boro-mama, though naturally we never commented on them. My mother’s only response to them, when Sharmin got to the point of making generalizations about the Bengali race, as she did, was to suck her teeth. My father would observe mildly, to his children, that he wished Sharmin-aunty would not say these things in places where anyone could hear her.

After the end of the war, some of the family found it difficult to see how they would make money. Many Pakistanis returned to their place of birth. Both Nana and my father discovered that their law practices had had many pale Bihari clients; many of those had now disappeared. It was more troublesome for Boro-mama, who did no work, and who relied on the medical practice of Sharmin. But Sharmin’s professional future looked insecure. In the years after independence, not every sick person wished to be treated by a doctor from Pakistan.

Nana’s solution to this was, as often, tied up with his property. When he had moved from the house in Rankin Street to the one in Dhanmondi, he had not sold the old one, but kept it as an investment. Now he told my father that we should move into the courtyard house in Rankin Street, living on the first floor, and that Boro-mama and his family should live on the ground floor. My father offered to pay Nana rent, but Nana said that we should pay Boro-mama directly. In return he would look after all the household tasks, pay the bills, and so on.

My father was not very pleased with this. He did not particularly want to divide a house with Boro-mama. He particularly did not want to live with him in the position of landlord and tenant. But the house just off Elephant Road, in which we had been living, had been destroyed by the military during the war. He agreed to move into Rankin Street as a temporary measure. But soon he found it was easier to have his chambers on the first floor of Rankin Street, just as Sharmin found there was plenty of space to have her clinic downstairs.

‘I wish she would not shout like that,’ my father was saying. ‘It is quite wrong. My clients can hear her insulting Bengalis, and the children – I don’t want the children to hear that sort of sentiment. And I expect her children hear it all the time. What must they think? And her patients, too. She seems to have no restraint whatsoever.’

‘The strange thing is,’ my mother said, ‘that every Friday she takes a great pan of biriani down to Sadarghat, and hands it out to the poor. They could not think her more saintly.’

‘That is just because she likes to get praise for her cooking,’ my father said. They were talking in low voices. The conversation downstairs carried, though it seemed to have stopped for the moment. There was no reason to suppose that Laddu and Sharmin could not hear their upstairs neighbours. ‘It is excellent biriani. I don’t suppose Laddu ever tells her so, when she cooks it for him.’

‘No,’ my mother said. She laid down her book, placing a marker between the pages, on the arm of the sofa. ‘They think of her as a saint. She is a good woman. I cannot understand why she says these things in front of her children, and where we can hear it – where any passer-by could hear it. It beggars belief.’

‘If you want to know what I think . . .’ my father said. He was about to say that living with Laddu would certainly put a strain on the patience of a saint, but a knock came on the interior door of the flat. My mother opened it. It was Laddu.

‘Come in,’ my mother said. ‘We were just about to make tea. Where is Sharmin?’

Laddu indicated by a gesture that he hardly knew or cared. ‘I have been making repairs to the back wall,’ he said.

‘I didn’t notice,’ my father said sardonically. ‘When were you doing that?’

‘Oh, this week,’ Laddu said, not sitting down.

‘I didn’t know anything was wrong with the wall,’ my father said, in his most clipped and abrupt voice. ‘What seemed to be the problem?’

‘Structural weakness,’ Laddu said. It was not the first time he had cited this important principle. The structural weakness of bookcases, of paintwork, of stairs, even of the red Tajik carpet in their salon had been cited in exactly this way in the past year. ‘It was rather a bigger job than I had anticipated.’

‘I see,’ my father said.

‘If we divide the costs of it on an equal basis,’ Laddu said, in his most reasonable way, ‘then that will mean you pay me – let me see – one hundred – no, two hundred and thirty – forty-seven taka. It was the outlay on equipment, you see,’ Laddu went on, seeing something in his brother-in-law’s eye. ‘Everything is so much more expensive, these days.’

‘Well, let’s go and have a look at the job,’ my father said. ‘I want to make sure it’s been done well, before I pay for – pay for
half
of it.’

‘It’s been done well,’ Laddu said. My mother came into the salon with a tray of tea, samosas and sweet things. ‘No, thank you, Shiri, I can’t stay at all. If you could just give me some money towards the repair – if you don’t have it all, that’s quite all right. I can wait until tomorrow for the remainder. The trouble is the cost of materials and tools, it’s quite shocking.’

‘Well, let’s go and look at what you’ve done,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know why you didn’t mention that you were about to undertake structural work. It might not have been at all convenient.’

‘Convenient?’ Laddu said. ‘It needed to be done. Listen, Mahmood. You are living in my father’s house. Do you understand? It’s my father’s house. You’re living here because I said it was all right, on my father’s agreement. Now you need to pay for it. It’s my family’s house, and it’s time for you to pay when I need – when I need to make some small repairs. Do you understand?’

No one ever shouted at my father. Perhaps, in all Nana’s family, only Laddu had inherited his capacity for shouting. Unlike Nana, who shouted, as far as anyone knew, only twice in his life, Laddu not only had the capacity to shout but indulged it often. Sometimes an argument would begin downstairs, and would continue upstairs, Laddu having abandoned Sharmin to come to start another one with his sister and brother-in-law.

‘Yes, I understand very well,’ my mother said. ‘It is not just your father’s house. It is my father’s house as well. Mahmood will go and look at the work you have done on the wall when he has a moment.’

3.

There was nobody in the house but Bubbly and Pultoo. Bubbly was inside; Pultoo was painting a picture in the half-lit glass-sided porch to the side. It was a task from the art school. He was painting a portrait and had chosen this unusual place to paint in because the light was filtered, diffused and full of shadows. For years, Pultoo had known that shadows were not black, but took on the colour of the object they fell on, a notch or two down. He had known that since he was eleven, eight years ago. It had come with the force of a revelation. He wondered who had first noticed that fact. Since then, the painting of shadows had been an especial treat for him. It was true that shadows clarified the structures of an object – a still-life under candle-light, painted in the near dark, became a matter of highlights and glints, possible to place exactly on the paper and then conjure up the whole ensemble. His friend Alam sat in the twilight shadows of the porch, his face tense and worried. Pultoo worked in watercolours, steadily, scrupulously, with the minimum of underdrawing to guide his brush. It was going to be good: Pultoo could see that he had caught the likeness.

‘What are you doing here?’ Bubbly said, coming out. ‘Everyone will trip over you. Don’t you have a room to paint in on the other side of the house?’

‘I wanted to paint this here,’ Pultoo said. ‘Now be a good girl and leave us in peace.’

‘Why do you want to paint here?’ Bubbly said. ‘There’s nothing here but a plain wall. That is boring to paint.’

‘The light falls through the glass in an interesting way,’ Alam said. He was a friend of Pultoo’s from school, not artistic at all, and was now studying something practical at Dacca University. It was strange that Pultoo had been such friends with him at school, and Bubbly did not know that they had remained friends. His family were the owners of a tea plantation near Srimongol, only now coming back into business, but formerly very extensive, and not artistic at all. When he spoke, his voice was deep and memorable for so slight a person, but some inner fire had broken out unpredictably on his surface, resulting in a thick moustache and huge hands, nose, ears and feet.

‘Did my brother say that?’ Bubbly said.

‘Why?’ Pultoo said. ‘Why shouldn’t Alam say it first?’

‘It sounds like the sort of thing you would say,’ Bubbly said. ‘I could make this much more interesting and attractive to paint. For instance, I could bring a table, and place a flower in a vase – just one flower, it wouldn’t be a whole arrangement. That would be so much nicer than a blank brick wall, wouldn’t it?’

Pultoo ignored his younger sister. His brush dipped, raised, applied; he dipped it in the cloudy water, knocked it on the side, continued.

‘You’ve moved,’ he observed to Alam. ‘Try not to move your position.’

‘Sorry,’ Alam said. ‘Was it more like that?’

‘In any case,’ Bubbly said, ‘you’ve got to move soon, because people are going to start coming round. I don’t want them having to tread all around you. I told you my friends were going to come round this afternoon. Can’t you start again in the other room, out of the way?’

‘Who is coming round?’ Pultoo said. ‘I’m sorry, I missed that.’

‘Oh, just the old gang,’ Bubbly said. ‘Pinky and Milly, you know.’

‘Pinky Chowdhury?’ Alam said. ‘I know her brother awfully well. How is he? He was talking of travelling, the little brother, the last time I saw him, but that must be six months ago.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Bubbly said. ‘He had a divine time in Bombay. He said he really never wished to return. But he did return,’ she finished lamely.

‘Don’t say you know my sister’s friends,’ Pultoo said.

‘Of course I do,’ Alam said. ‘Everyone knows them.’

Pultoo made a hmphing sort of noise. Bubbly’s friends were a trial to the family. Apart from Boro-mama, almost all of Nana and Nani’s children were intellectual in some way: they sang, or they wrote poetry, or took an interest in music or the Bengali crafts. When they were old enough, they took up distinguished professions, like the law or medicine, or became academics. Their friends had come round, one after the other, and discussed political freedoms, and poetry, and Bengali film around the dinner table or on the couch. It had been so since Boro-mama had left home and taken his badmash friends with him. The family had hatched out like chicks from an egg, and Nana found them congenial company, and most of their friends too.