Scenes From Early Life Read online

  ‘My friend’s poem,’ Nana said. ‘I am glad they are letting her read this.’ He had been called through from his study by the sound of poetry, or by the sound of his friend’s voice on the radio. But he had not heard the news.

  ‘She has been killed, Papa,’ Nadira said.

  ‘How has she been killed?’ Nana said.

  ‘They didn’t say,’ Nani said. ‘Only that she has died. How could they?’

  ‘They wouldn’t,’ Nana said. ‘They wouldn’t dare. We would have heard if she had been killed. This is a mistake, I know. She could not be dead.’

  ‘The radio said that she is dead,’ Nani said, with surprise.

  ‘The radio is mistaken,’ Nana said. ‘Where is Mahmood? The curfew has begun now.’

  And the strange thing was that Nana was right. Sufiya was not dead at all. The announcement on Radio Calcutta of her passing was mistaken, and taken from unreliable information. A street or two away, Sufiya and her daughters were sitting, just as my family was, inside, waiting for news, and she had the shock of hearing her own death announced, and then of listening to her own voice reading her famous poem. Three days later, my grandfather had the pleasure of reading an advertisement in the newspaper, placed there by Sufiya herself, in which she announced to all her friends that, contrary to reports, she was alive and well, and hoping to be listened to for many years to come. There was something steely and full of reprimand about the tone of the advert. Nobody could doubt that it was Sufiya herself who had written it, and there were no rumours about her having met her death from that point onwards.

  In the street, the sirens howled like cats. Beyond that, there was no sound. ‘Mahmood must be safely inside,’ Era said. ‘He has taken shelter. He will come tomorrow. Shiri, he is sensible, your husband.’

  ‘I know he is dead,’ my mother said. She gulped and clutched the gold hem of her sari. ‘How could he – how could he go to the help of those people downstairs? We hardly know them.’

  ‘He did what he had to do,’ my grandfather said. It was so conclusive, the tone in which he said it, that the music of its serious finality drew the children from upstairs; they stood, lined up along the banisters, and gazed, shocked, at the adults giving way.

  My sisters were the last to take their positions: they had been concealing themselves on the front balcony of the house, watching from behind a chair the distant fires of the city and the silent, empty street. They wondered, as they stood, why the aunts and cousins and the rest of the grown-ups were crying and silent. Surely their father would put things to rights when he came, as he would come. As he was coming, in fact. They had seen him hurrying along from a hundred yards away, hunched under the trees, swift and surreptitious, but, to his children, an unmistakable walk and silhouette. It was strange that he had not made an effort to arrive before the sirens started sounding but, after all, he was not so very late. In the past, he had often arrived twenty or thirty minutes late for dinner at Nana’s house, kept behind at the office. It was ridiculous to make such a fuss when he was only five or ten minutes late for lunch. And before Sushmita, in her practical way, could say something to point this out, the gates at the front of the house were clanging open and shut; the grown-ups were rising to their feet; the light footfalls of Pa were heard in the glass-fronted side porch of the house, and there he was.

  He looked tired and untidy; his jacket was over the crook of his arm. He was a little late, but he had had things to do all day, and sometimes things take longer to achieve than people anticipate and, after all, he was only six or seven minutes late. Sushmita and Sunchita were glad to see their father, but not excessively so. After all, everyone had been expecting his arrival, all morning, and here he was.

  It was a surprise to them when Nana strode forward out of his chair, took their father by his thin shoulders and shook him hard. There were not many occasions on which Grandfather raised his voice; perhaps this one was the first one they would remember. He shouted into my father’s face: ‘Do not do that! Never again do that to my daughter! Never, ever, do that to my wife, or to me, or to my daughters! Never, ever, do that to my grandchildren!’ My grandfather went on through the table of affinities. It was as if he were attempting to run through all the possibilities of insult and offence and the vulnerable. His rage took three or four sentences to lower from its highest pitch, as he remembered the need to remain quiet; after twenty seconds, the rage continued at a lower volume. Into my father’s face my grandfather shouted, a mute in his throat but no restraint on his rage.

  Sunchita and Sushmita watched, horrified and appalled, at the unknown sight of their grandfather shouting; the still less imaginable sight of their father taking the abuse. From any unjustified display of power their father, they knew, would walk away. Now he had arrived ten minutes later than he should have, and not only was Grandfather shouting at him, but Father was standing there accepting the abuse, as long as it seemed to go on.

  My aunts and my mother, drying her tears and coming to her husband, found this a less unfamiliar sight than the children. They remembered the last time Nana had burst out shouting. It had been thirteen years before. It had been the day that Boro-mama had run away, leaving the garden path unswept; the day he had run away to marry Sharmin, who was now sitting in a placid way in a corner of the salon, keeping an eye on their four children. (She was glad to see her brother-in-law Mahmood: she had never really doubted that he would get here safely, and she went on knitting.) That was the last time Nana had shouted, when he had raised his voice and demanded the immediate attendance of Era, who had known all about it. My grandfather never lost his temper, and never raised his voice. He must have shouted as a boy, though it was hard to imagine. But in family stories, these were the two occasions when he raised his voice: to Era, when she knew all about Laddu’s elopement; and to Mahmood, the day he came in after the curfew had been declared, making his wife cry. For the rest of his life, my grandfather never saw anything to make him shout. But that day, he did shout, and my father knew he was right to.

  Chapter 10

  The Song the Flower Sang

  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 a
nd 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 – t
he 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.