Scenes From Early Life Read online

  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 . . .’

  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 b
ig 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.

  Chapter 11

  Structural Repairs

  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 a
s 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.