Scenes From Early Life Read online

  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 s
aid. ‘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.

  Bubbly was different. Even when she was small, her friends had been what Nana dismissively referred to as ‘silly little girls’. He did not like to see small girls sitting about for hours dressing each other up and talking about love, he said; there was a fearful row when Bubbly, aged nine, was found to have borrowed her mother’s scent and sprayed it all over herself and her friends in the course of some game of femininity. His objection, really, was to the fact that he did not know the parents of the children whom Bubbly made friends with. His other children, mostly, had played well with Khandekar’s children, the doctor’s children, the children of Sufiya Kamal the poet, of painters and scientists and lawyers. Those were the sorts of people that Nana knew; their children came plainly, sensibly dressed, had nice manners, and Nana liked to see them. Bubbly’s friends came from people Nana did not know, and whose world was quite unfamiliar to him. Some of them kept shops, or factories, or import-export. Their children arrived like large glittering insects, in pink and diamanté; they wore party dresses on all occasions; they were called Polly and Rita Chatterji, Anita and Jolly and Molly and Milly, and they called each other Sweetie, and enquired about the source of each other’s hairbands, all afternoon long. Nana was almost indignant when he saw them arriving, and morosely quoted Michael Dutta in their hearing. Bubbly wept and begged to be allowed to dress in such a way; she was refused, but found ways to ornament herself through judicious use of pocket money. It was a challenge to Nana and his family.

  The parents of his other children’s friends would draw up, come in, pass the time of day, make themselves agreeable. Sometimes, when the time came for Bubbly’s friends to be collected, a car would draw up outside, and a rude hooting of the horn would indicate that it was time to go. Nobody would step out; the child would merely say, ‘Oh, I must dash,’ and head off, without saying goodbye properly to her hosts.

  There had been the occasional unexpected friend before. Pultoo’s friend Alam was one of those – he was not somebody who showed much interest in poetry or law or politics. He would often begin an observation by saying, ‘My father always says . . .’ followed by some trite and reactionary observation from the world of tea, hardly applicable to real circumstances at all. ‘What I detest about that boy,’ Nana said, ‘is that he is quite incapable of listening to anyone else’s experience, however interesting. Something more interesting always happened to his family, and he rushes to share it with us.’

  Nobody could understand why Pultoo was friends with him. But he came, and his presence, over the years, was tolerated because the rest of Pultoo’s friends were so different, so much more normal. Bubbly’s friends were all very much the same: they were silly, and adorned, and rich, and not as charmingly well mannered as they thought they were. ‘I think they are rather fun,’ Nani would say, after Nana had finished quoting Nazrul on the subject. She was an expert at that favourite Bengali occupation, making the best of it.

  Bubbly sidled out of the house and stood behind Pultoo for a minute or two. She observed Alam, and then the painting. Then she bent down and put her face almost against the painting, imitating in a ridiculous way the manner of connoisseurs. ‘I see,’ she said, in the imitation of a deep voice. ‘But you’ve made his nose too big.’

  ‘He has a big nose,’ Pultoo said judiciously.

  ‘Not as big as that,’ Bubbly said. ‘People will look at that and say that they don’t see how he could reasonably have a nose as big as that one.’

  ‘Well, the shading will moderate it a little,’ Pultoo said. ‘I have to give a sense of it, though – I want it to look big.’

  ‘I don’t think you should talk about me as if I am not here,’ Alam said. ‘My aunt once had her portrait painted. She has it hanging in her drawing room. Of course, that was by a famous artist, when she was travelling in Paris. She always says—’

  ‘The fact of the matter is,’ Pultoo said, ‘once you sit down in front of a painter, and have your appearance rendered by brush and pencil, you become no more than an arrangement of planes and volume. Light and shade falling on a surface. I don’t think of it even as a nose. It is just a geometrical problem.’

  ‘Well, it is not a geometrical problem to me,’ Alam said. ‘It is what I use to smell things with.’

  ‘That was surprisingly witty,’ Bubbly said. ‘I like your friend. He can stay, if he likes.’

  ‘You should see the portrait of my aunt,’ Alam said to Bubbly. ‘It really is a remarkable painting. She visited every painter in Paris before she decided on which one to commission. You see, the fact is . . .’

  But then it was that the gate was pushed open, and through it came Pinky Chowdhury, or someone similar, her sister Sonia, or perhaps just a friend, and two or three others, Milly, Mishti, Tina, coming to the door chattering like birds, and Bubbly spread her arms wide in greeting, and Alam stood up, too, smiling, as if he had anything to do with it. The portrait session was over for the day.

  4.

  Around this time, the tension started to surface between Boro-mama’s family downstairs in Rankin Street, and our family upstairs in the same house.

  ‘Sunchita,’ my mother said, ‘you are keeping us waiting now. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what book to take,’ my sister said. ‘I just can’t decide.’

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ my mother said. ‘We are only going to Nana’s for the afternoon. I don’t know why you want to take a book at all.’

  ‘But I have almost finished my book,’ Sunchita said, not paying any attention. ‘I am going to finish it in half an hour, and then I won’t have anything else to read. But I can’t start another book before I’ve finished this one. I am just going to have to take both books.’

  ‘Sunchita,’ my father said, tapping his umbrella on the parquet, ‘you are going to take one book, and one book only. It doesn’t matter which one. Now. Have you decided?’

  ‘I can’t decide,’ Sunchita said. ‘Why can’t I take both?’

  ‘Because I say you can’t,’ my mother said. ‘You can take one book, or neither. You’re keeping us waiting now, and you’re keeping Rustum waiting downstairs.’

  The rest of us – my elder sister, my brother and I – were sitting on the bench in the hallway, clean and scrubbed, in our best visiting clothes. It was only Sunchita who, every week, indulged in this indecisiveness, and it was always over a book. The thought of finishing a book and having no other to hand was terrible to her.

  Downstairs, there was the sound of the red Vauxhall starting up. ‘You see?’ my father said. ‘Rustum is losing his patience now. He is running his engine to show what a hurry he is in.’

  My father said this to hurry Sunchita up, but he was not serious. Five minutes
later, however, when we finally got to the gate, Rustum and the red Vauxhall were nowhere to be seen. The boy downstairs, when asked, said in a puzzled way that Advocate-sahib’s car had come, indeed it had, lent by Advocate-sahib, and had taken master and mistress to visit friends in Azimpur. Boro-mama had seen an opportunity, and for his own purposes had swiped the car that Nana had sent to fetch us. We had to go in a pair of rickshaws, to Nana’s astonishment when we arrived.

  On that occasion, nobody said anything to Boro-mama. The breach could almost have been designed to make anyone complaining about it sound small-minded. After all, why should not Boro-mama use his father’s car as much as my parents, for whom it had been despatched? The same might be true of a peculiar incident in which their cook was found to have borrowed six wooden spoons from the upstairs family without asking. Who complains about the loss of a wooden spoon or six? It was beneath the dignity even of our cook to complain about the inconvenience.

  ‘Madam,’ Majeda said, coming in the next day, ‘there is no water in the house to bathe the children. Is there a problem with the pipes?’

  My mother did not know, but went downstairs to discover. The water in the house flowed from a large underground tank that supplied both our house and Mr Khan’s house next door. Downstairs, she found Mr Khan already talking to Laddu; his water, too, had dried up without warning or reason. Her brother was saying that he could not understand it, but my mother went with their gardener to the pump that controlled the flow of water, and discovered that there was plenty of water in the tank, but that somebody had closed off the flow. There was no reason for anyone to do this. It must have been Laddu or Sharmin, both of whom denied knowing anything about it. It was a puzzle to them, as well. My mother returned upstairs in a temper.