Scenes From Early Life Page 20

  These days, Sheikh Mujib’s face was everywhere in Dacca. His candidacy to become prime minister had spread and spread, and his face was on every wall. His thick glasses, his open, trustworthy, intelligent face promised that things would change. He was no longer seen at Sufiya’s, and his usual enjoyment of walking in the street had come to an end. Occasionally there was a genuine demonstration outside Sheikh Mujib’s house in support of him. Several times, Sheikh Mujib had made an appearance before bigger crowds, calling for some measure of independence. It was two years since the government had clamped down on statements of Bengal nationhood – meaning poetry, music, images. What would happen, people started to ask, if a Bengali were elected president of the whole country – if the capital of Pakistan were moved to Dacca, the first language of the nation became Bengali, and the national anthem became a song of Tagore’s? It was unthinkable. But there was no obvious reason why it should not happen – Nana and Khandekar agreed on this. There were more voters in East Pakistan than in West Pakistan, and they were less divided. There might be no democratic reason why Sheikh Mujib should not be elected president of the divided country, and make his first presidential speech in the language of Dacca, to an immense crowd of Bengalis, on the banks of the Padma. Was there any reason why not? What would happen if it came to pass? The authorities did not propose to find out. Hence the fake roadworks and the hired demonstrators and the security checks, blocking in Sheikh Mujib’s house. They often prevented visitors to his near neighbours, too, such as Khandekar, to my grandfather’s immense irritation, as I said.

  ‘I am astonished you reached us,’ Khandekar said, coming to the door himself as my grandfather came in. ‘Astonished. We were waiting yesterday all day for my wife’s brother to visit, and the day before that, and the day before that, but nothing. He was turned back three, four times. What is your secret, my dear fellow?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Nana said. ‘I have not the foggiest idea. This is a very strange situation. Some days you cannot leave your house before being harassed; others you sail through without the smallest disturbance. I did see that the goons were drawn up the road somewhat, besieging your distinguished neighbour. Rustum said, “If I drive this way and that way, and double back, and then through and across and in between – then we shall reach our destination without the smallest trouble.” And so it proved.’

  ‘Ah, Rustum, resourceful fellow,’ Khandekar said. ‘Ask him to take his tea in the kitchen – we are lucky to have such people by us. My wife is joining us.’

  My grandfather greeted Mrs Khandekar, neat and shining, something like excitement in her face.

  ‘I was just saying,’ Khandekar said to her, in a loud voice, ‘how lucky it is to have a driver like Rustum, a clever, resourceful fellow like that. We will have tea in the study today. There. The truth is –’ Mr Khandekar said, in a lower voice, having shut the door to his study and invited my grandfather to sit on the beige sofa underneath the bookcase ‘– the truth is that last week, my wife and I were talking on the upper veranda, quite innocuously, when I observed, over the wall, a pair of official goons standing in the street. They were evidently listening to what we were saying. Here, we will not be listened to.’

  ‘If it were just the goons in the street!’ Mrs Khandekar burst out. ‘But when the listeners are within one’s own house . . .’

  ‘Surely—’

  ‘I am afraid so,’ Khandekar said. ‘We strongly suspect that one or more of the servants are listening to our conversations. We could hardly believe it at first.’

  ‘They have been with us for decades,’ Mrs Khandekar said, ‘every one of them. But I see that money and threats are greater things than loyalty in this world.’

  ‘We cannot trust anyone,’ Khandekar said. ‘Do not trust anyone, my dear friend – not Rustum, not the gardener. Perhaps especially not Laddu’s wife.’

  ‘Oh, surely not Sharmin,’ my grandfather said. ‘She is quite one of the family now. I cannot believe—’

  ‘Perhaps she is to be trusted,’ Khandekar said. ‘But what about her family? Are you sure that no cousin of hers, no uncle in Lahore ever asks her friendly questions about her husband’s family? How could she not answer such questions, and how could she know what use the answers would be put to?’

  ‘My dear Khandekar,’ my grandfather said, ‘if there were anything whatsoever that would interest the authorities in my family’s—’ He stopped. Evidently he thought at this moment about his beautiful library, concealed behind a plaster wall in the cellar. He had heard his daughters speak about it as a great joke among themselves. It had never occurred to him that Sharmin should be excluded from such conversations, and it would never have occurred to his daughters. But how simple for a cousin or uncle of Sharmin to ask a question or two, to discover so interesting and comment-worthy a fact! ‘My dear Khandekar,’ he began again, in a lower voice, ‘surely you don’t have anything to conceal. You lead so blameless a life. No authority could concoct a case against you on any grounds. It would be making bricks without straw.’

  Khandekar and his wife exchanged looks. They were unreadable looks. My grandfather, horrified, came to an easy conclusion. His oldest friend was consulting his wife to discover whether he could be trusted. For a moment, he thought of getting up and leaving. But then he observed to himself that the situation would pass. The suspicion shadowing Khandekar’s mind was unworthy, but perhaps nothing could be ruled out, with the soldiery rampaging through the street, unchecked. What pressures had been brought to bear, and what obligations called in – one never knew that about the oldest of old friends. So my grandfather forgave Khandekar, and Khandekar never knew that he had been forgiven for anything in particular.

  And then the look between Khandekar and his wife proved a responsible one, because Khandekar’s wife gave a small, tight, satisfied smile. ‘The boys,’ Khandekar said in a low voice. ‘They have gone. No one knows. The servants all believe that they have gone to stay with their uncle, my wife’s brother the civil engineer, in Chittagong.’

  ‘But they have not,’ my grandfather said.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘No, they have not.’

  The tea was brought, and for some moments they talked of trivialities. There were few trivialities to be had in those days. Future plans, current activities, social life, mutual friends – all seemed to be tinged with disaster. We Bengalis, we love to talk, on any subject and on none, but the men in the street, the stench of their breath had entered Khandekar’s study, and silence fell, unaccountably, between the three of them. The boy who brought the tea was familiar to my grandfather, his face politely lowered behind the tea tray. He had been with Khandekar’s family for ten years, at the very least. How could such a man be suspected of anything, of deserving silence?

  At length, the boy withdrew, leaving the tea things. Mrs Khandekar poured it out herself, as she liked to. After a decent pause, listening to the boy’s noisy retreat in the hallway, she said, ‘The boys have gone, you see.’

  ‘Next week,’ Khandekar said, ‘Mujib will win this election. No one can doubt it. He will win it fair and square.’

  ‘There is no doubt about that,’ my grandfather said.

  ‘And then what happens?’ Khandekar said, his voice lowered. ‘Of course, it is clear what will not happen. Mujib will not become Prime Minister of this country. He will not be invited to take up his position. How could that happen? Those people over there, they have gone to the effort of suppressing songs – songs, my dear old friend. What efforts do you suppose they will go to to suppress the result of something important, like an election, to make sure that the result is to their taste?’

  ‘I have seen the soldiers outside,’ my grandfather said. ‘I know what you say is right.’

  ‘The boys have gone,’ Mrs Khandekar said again. ‘It is best if they leave now, not after the election. We do not know what will happen once the election takes place. They have gone somewhere in readiness for any eventuality. I do not know w
here. It was best not to know.’

  My grandfather nodded. He understood. They were good, brave boys, the Khandekar sons. One of them would be killed in due course, fighting against the Pakistanis for the independence of Bangla Desh. Vulgar people afterwards tried to describe that son as a martyr, but in later years, Khandekar and Mrs Khandekar would have no truck with such comments. They kept his photograph on the sideboard in their house, the one that I came to be familiar with when I made a visit with my grandfather in later years. The other, the younger of the two, returned after the war and continued with his studies, becoming, in the end, a very senior public administrator whom I always found cold and frightening to deal with. But all that lay far in the future. For the moment, the two boys had gone, and were preparing to fight for the freedom of their country in the struggle to come, though the expression ‘freedom-fighter’ was not yet coined. Where they were, the Khandekars did not know, or were not saying.

  ‘If I may give my old friend some firm advice,’ Khandekar said.

  My grandfather nodded.

  ‘Have your family around you. Ask them to come and stay in your house. Nobody knows how bad things may get. You will want to have them around you, to know that they are safe.’

  At that moment, outside, as if to confirm Khandekar’s advice, there was a shriek of brakes and a short burst of gunfire. There had been gunfire in the streets before, but remote, and possible to mistake for fireworks. This was close. There was no possibility of thinking that it was anything else. ‘Rustum!’ my grandfather called. ‘Rustum!’

  It was difficult to express what my grandfather might have been fearing, but he got up and opened the door into the hallway, and Rustum was emerging from the kitchen, wiping his mouth, with a puzzled expression. Behind him was a tall, thin man with neatly combed hair and a very clean white shirt.

  ‘We are nearly finished in here,’ said Mrs Khandekar, to this second man. ‘Thank you for your patience.’

  My grandfather did not know it – he did not recognize this man, though he had been in the same room as him a dozen times and he must have been faintly familiar. He did not recognize him, even though he was carrying his well-polished harmonium. It was Altaf, visiting at the suggestion of Mrs Khandekar, who had a particular task she wanted him to carry out.

  3.

  Nana wasted no time. As soon as he got home, again succeeding in avoiding the roadblocks, he went upstairs to his office and wrote three well-argued letters. He sealed them, addressed them, and sent Rustum out to deliver them to Laddu; to Mahmood and Shiri; and to Era, newly married and living twenty minutes’ drive away. Rustum told them that Advocate-sahib had told him to wait for a response, so he sat in the kitchen of each house, and waited for the discussion to finish, and a reply to be written. Finally, he returned home. It was very late at night by the time his task was done. And it was a good day that my grandfather chose to send these messages round by hand. It would not be long before a curfew was imposed by the military authorities, and Rustum, driving about Dacca after dark, would have been shot on sight.

  In my grandfather’s house, there were already living Nana and Nani, of course. The unmarried daughters were there, Mary, Mira, Nadira, Dahlia, and ten-year-old Bubbly, in that house without books, without the harmonium, where the possessions were spaced out in ways that had grown familiar in the last year or so. Pultoo was also still there, a thoughtful, quiet boy, good at occupying himself, and Boro-mama’s son Shibli, who was a sturdy child, walking and talking now. There were also the two great-grandmothers, Nana’s two mothers, and some cousins who had come in the last month from the village, and were remaining there. Now the other children, the ones married and away from home, read Nana’s letters. They all decided that they must follow his instructions, and come back home for the sake of safety.

  Era and her new husband were the first to arrive, the very next morning; they came with suitcases, as if for a very few days. And then Boro-mama and Sharmin came the next day with their other three children, wan and puzzled. Their possessions were innumerable and small, and several journeys back and forth were needed before all of them were piled up in the hallway of Grandfather’s house. ‘Look, it’s daddy,’ Dahlia said to Shibli, but he clung to her legs. For him, his mother and father were glamorous visitors, seen at weekends, and though he would play with his brothers and sister when asked to, he always gave the impression of playing alongside them, rather than with, always happier to retreat into his world of wooden blocks, singing a small song to himself. His father came to him and lifted him up into the air, making a puffing noise. Boro-mama’s sisters could have told him that, of all things, Shibli hated being lifted from the ground. His cries filled the house, and eventually, when his father set him back down again and let him run back to his aunt Dahlia, they coagulated into words. ‘Do not do that!’ he cried. ‘Do not do that! I am absolutely frightened when you do that to me!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Nani said.

  But in an hour Shibli, comforted with a sweet, was sitting quite contentedly by the side of his sister – his brothers, five and seven years older than him, considered themselves men like their father, and Shibli was unmistakably a child happiest when surrounded and pampered by ladies. His sister, resigned to her task, was nearer his age, and imbued with the duty of being a good little girl – her aunts privately thought her dull. She had recently learnt to read, and was turning the pages of her picture book for Shibli’s benefit. His eyes, however, went round the crowded room.

  ‘I don’t see how we are to manage,’ Boro-mama said.

  ‘It is better that you are here,’ Nani said briskly. These arrangements would not be for so very long, she assured him, wondering whether this was, in fact, the case. She looked about the room. Not everyone staying, or living in the house was there. Some of the girls were in their rooms, occupying themselves in privacy. But even so, it seemed very crowded already. Outside, in the street, there was a shout, followed by another shout, further away. Men’s voices in this quiet street were not that common. It could not be understood what the voices had called. But the tone of command and acknowledgement was unmistakable; the tone of military command. Nana, retreating from the sitting room to go and sit in quiet upstairs, paused and gave a questioning look to Nani.

  ‘Are the gates shut and bolted?’ she said, to nobody in particular.

  ‘Bolted?’ said one of the great-grandmothers – they were both sitting on the two-seater sofa, upright and occupied with darning. ‘Bolted?’

  ‘What did she say?’ the other great-grandmother said, the bigger, more assertive one. ‘Bolted? What for? It’s the middle of the afternoon.’

  ‘Rustum shut the gates,’ Boro-mama said. ‘I don’t know if he bolted them.’

  ‘He bolted them,’ Era said. ‘Did he bolt them?’

  ‘And Shiri has not yet come,’ Nana said. ‘She must not arrive to find herself bolted out.’

  ‘Those were soldiers,’ Mary said, in a low voice to Era. ‘Those were soldiers, in the street. They were right outside the gate, just in the street, just there.’

  ‘I wish Shiri would come,’ Era said. ‘And then we could bolt the gates and feel safe.’

  4.

  Sheikh Mujib won the election. For the first time since the founding of the two-part country, the leader of the country would represent the eastern half. But nothing happened; he was arrested; he was released; and then he made a speech announcing the independence of the Bengalis, and was arrested again. For many days, the sounds from the streets were of student protests, of shouting and chanting and the noise of official warnings, made over the loudspeakers. Finally, the Pakistanis came over, and began to have discussions with Mujib about his demands. But nobody believed in any of these discussions, and the protests continued and grew. People said – Khandekar, for instance, told my grandfather – that the commercial flights from West Pakistan to Dacca were full these days. Full of young, fit men with short hair, moving with purpose. Many people believed that these men
were Pakistani soldiers in mufti, coming in large numbers to prepare for a crackdown.

  My father, in the sitting room in Elephant Road, read his father-in-law’s letter, requesting that they up sticks and go to stay with him for the time being, and his brow furrowed.

  ‘How many are they, living there?’ he asked my mother. She did not know.

  ‘A lot,’ he said. ‘We are better off here.’ It was true that the six of us had our own space, there in Elephant Road. The house was as secure as my grandfather’s, which was only a short distance away, and even if the storm broke, they could stay where they were, communicating with my mother’s family by telephone. So, for the moment, my mother and father decided that we would not move, and my mother tried to calm Nana down in a telephone call. My brother had his own room; my sisters shared a room; and the baby slept at the foot of my parents’ bed. That baby was me: I had been born only a very few months before, and everybody called me Saadi. In any case, my father went on to say, there was the family downstairs, who were well connected and would see to our safety, whatever happened.