The Friendly Ones Read online

  The Friendly Ones: its membership was unknown to anyone. It was an organization of citizens who wanted peace with Pakistan. The Friendly Ones would work towards ending the outbreaks of violence and insurrection, and help to return things to how they had been before 25 March. There was one of the Friendly Ones directing this endeavour in every district of the city, and in every village of the nation. How they had come together, nobody knew. But their pamphlets were delivered and passed from hand to hand.

  Perhaps it was Khadr, the boy who waited at table, who first mentioned the Friendly Ones. Mother despaired of his intelligence: he could learn nothing and could understand nothing. Almost always, when he set out the chutneys and pickles and bowls of salt and jugs of water in front of each place, he was found to have mixed it all up, and Sharif’s preferred chutney sat alongside the slices of lemon that Mother liked to have to hand. Every dinner at table began with a sighing passing of dishes to left and right. One day Khadr was sweeping the floor and looked up to see Sharif. ‘It is so good that the war will soon be over!’ Khadr said.

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’ Sharif said.

  ‘Peace is coming,’ Khadr said. ‘The Friendly Ones are making sure of that.’

  ‘What?’ Sharif said.

  ‘Please, sir,’ Khadr said. ‘The citizens of the country, they are tired of the fighting and the traitors in our midst, and they have formed together to make a new beginning. They are calling themselves the Friendly Ones. Soon there will be peace again and we will be good friends with our brothers in the rest of the country.’

  ‘Where did you hear this?’ Sharif said.

  Khadr stopped brushing. He looked up at the ceiling; he hooked his thin forefinger and plunged it deep into his ear. He had become self-conscious because Father had heard him talking and had followed Sharif out into the hallway to listen.

  ‘I think I heard it,’ Khadr said in the end.

  ‘Yes, but where?’ Father asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, with relief. ‘Oh, Ghafur told me. He had it written down and he read it out to me. Ghafur is a scholar. It was this morning. I do not think Ghafur knew of the Friendly Ones before today. I had known about them for weeks. I said to Ghafur, “How is it that you do not know the Friendly Ones? Everyone knows of them and their good works.”’

  There was no contradiction in Khadr’s claim that he had only heard of the Friendly Ones from the cook that morning, and that he had been able to tell the cook that he had known of them for many weeks. Perhaps even in his own mind he could believe the two things, one after another. Father made no objection, and sent Khadr off to find the piece of paper. It was a pamphlet bearing a photograph of a smiling peasant. It was much-handled, stained, its ink smeared with thumb-prints and grease from the kitchen, but Father read it. There were citizens in this country, almost the whole, who believed that the people around them loved their bonds with the people of West Pakistan. They were not going to be held to ransom by a small group of thugs and badmashes. They were going to form together in a band of patriots, and would organize the people of their neighbourhood to stand firm in a time of anarchy and subversion. The band of patriots had named themselves the Friendly Ones.

  Father tore the paper across into two, four, then eight pieces. Khadr shrank back. He had not understood that he had got something so badly wrong. He loved peace! He wanted everyone to be happy! But then Father explained that there were people who hated their country, who wanted it to be forgotten and wiped out, and ruled by madmen from far away. He asked Khadr if he liked the song ‘Je rate mor duarguli’. Khadr stared. The master had never before asked him if he liked a song. But the master asked again and this time Khadr replied, stammering, that he did. The master explained. The Friendly Ones were men who wanted to make sure that no one ever sang ‘Je rate mor duarguli’ ever again. The only thing the Friendly Ones wanted to hear in the streets was the Holy Koran, being chanted for ever. The Friendly Ones –

  After that even Khadr understood that the Friendly Ones would kill you, and turn away with a regretful smile.

  In those days, news travelled from house to house in guarded ways. The telephone had not worked since the twenty-sixth. It had come to be known that the house could be left for a number of hours, but that everyone must return by a given time. Only Rafiq had gone out, returning to say that the body outside had been moved, taken away. It was there when he had left. It had been moved when he returned. He had not gone near it. He had seen many bodies during his excursion. Ghafur and Khadr had gone out, each in a different direction; they had spent two hours buying what food they could, according to Mother’s instructions.

  The streets were declared out of bounds during certain hours. The children and the women stayed inside. And yet they heard of events. Rafiq went out from time to time – they did not ask where. He returned with some news from his friends. The telephone was cut off but the radio still worked. Events came to them in fragments, often contradicting the last piece of information. For days and days, they heard different reports of the Friend of Bengal – some said he had been shot, others that he was in prison – and of other people. The deaths of writers were announced on the radio, then the fact that they were still alive. Ghafur went out into the markets and met someone he knew from another household and heard that the Pakistanis had killed thousands at the university – had herded them together, shot them. Professor Anisul was mute, for once. Ghafur did not know who had been killed. He might have been told, but the names meant nothing to him. Rafiq returned one day with certain confirmation of the Mukti Bahini’s success. That was what he was waiting for, the call for him to leave and join the fighters. From the radio, from an illicit radio station, they learnt that there was now a Government of Bangla Desh – formed in exile, stating policy on behalf of the new independent state. The Friend of Bengal was in prison: he had declared independence after the killings had started. One day they would know everything, but these days news filtered through to them incompletely, with rumours of the Friendly Ones.

  The Friendly Ones! Were they running everything? Who was in it? How many members did it have? Did it meet daily, the twenty neighbourhoods of Dacca coming together to talk about the subversives and the traitors on their streets? Did it even exist? The name had floated into the house by means of an ignorant servant, and now they talked about it by the hour. What would they have done, if they were the Pakistanis? They would – Father went on, thoughtfully – they would give themselves a kindly name. The Friendly Ones! The beasts that would watch the house opposite; that would take note of who came and who went; the ones who would pick up their telephone and inform the appropriate person, and then, an hour or two later, watch their neighbour be bundled into the back of a car from behind their windows. Their telephone wires would not be cut.

  But who was among the Friendly Ones? Nazia asked Sharif this, when they were alone together in their room. Aisha was sleeping at the foot of their bed. Nazia had managed to go to Gulshan that day. It was where the foreigners lived, and for that reason it had been left alone until now. On her way, she had seen that many of the businesses she had used all her life had chosen to change their signboards. They had been mostly in English until this week; now they were in Urdu. Had an order been issued? Or were they just anticipating matters? Where were the Friendly Ones? And what were their faces?

  ‘I don’t believe that we want to know,’ Sharif said. ‘If there is an organization called the Friendly Ones. And if anyone in Dacca belongs to it – then I know two people who will carry out its bidding.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Sharif’s eyes were big; he held his wife’s face there, on the pillow, like a trainer trying to calm an animal by gazing into its firm-held face. ‘Mahfouz could have written that rubbish about the Friendly Ones himself.’

  ‘I hope Sadia keeps her promise,’ Nazia said.

  There was a flash of evil across her face, startling to experience at close distance, horizontally, on the same pillow. He shifted; his unshaven chin scr
atched in a nice way against the clean cotton pillowcase. He did not want to ask.

  ‘She said to me that if the country gains independence – if Mujib makes good – if we find ourselves separated from Pakistan and with our own affairs, she said she promised to leave.’

  ‘Moving to Lahore,’ Sharif said, ‘with the rest of Mahfouz’s family, or just him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nazia said. ‘I had the impression that she was talking about giving up on this part of the world altogether.’

  ‘I don’t think we should have talked quite so much about Sheffield,’ Sharif said. ‘That will have put ideas in her head.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have an uncle in Britain?’ Nazia said. ‘I could have sworn my uncle Muqtadir came into it somewhere. Where was he? London? He has his own travel agency there, I think. Was it Muqtadir? Or something else?’

  ‘Those people!’ Sharif said. ‘Always making money with their own little shops and their own little corners and living as they do! How could she?’

  ‘It’s what she wanted,’ Nazia said primly. ‘Now I want to sleep.’

  ‘I want to read for five minutes. I am so bored with all of this, all this stuff that has nothing to do with engineering. I am so bored with talking to Professor Anisul about it, even. I don’t want to see them again. Perhaps just to wave them off on the steps of a plane, going far, far away. Let me read. I have a novel by Shahidullah Kaiser. I like him so much.’

  2.

  Professor Anisul appreciated what was being done for him. He had settled into a rhythm of behaviour in the house. He had not been able to bring everything he might have wanted from his own house. He had not realized before now what comfort he drew from the largest book in his collection, an American atlas of the world. He missed it, and in particular the cosy hour before bed tracing a route across the Soviet Union, or from one interestingly named village in Yorkshire to another. There were other books he had brought, and of course there was his hosts’ library, but he had to admit it to himself – the three weeks during which it was thought unsafe to go to his office had been a long and tedious period. At least he had taught young Sharif the complicated version of gin-rummy that he and big-sister had evolved over the course of years. Poor big-sister! She was spared this, at any rate. He had brought his toilet bag, a cycle of clothes lasting ten days, three pairs of shoes and a photograph of sister in a leather wallet, to be placed in a drawer, to be opened up and greeted whenever he felt he wanted to, and nobody was observing him. He had behaved badly towards sister. He had made her marry that man, so much older than her. The man had given her no children – he had only tied her down. And then he had died and her brother had tied her down in his turn. She should have had a life, not just looked after their laundry. She could have become a doctor.

  Professor Anisul handed his dirty laundry over every Monday to the housekeeper. He thought that the washing here was done to a higher standard than by his housekeeper. They were so kind to him. Young Sharif’s mother had noticed, for instance, that he left the bowl of karela untouched when it was served. He had never liked it. But he noticed that the next time it was served at table, there was an extra vegetable dish. Sharif’s wife, who was seated next to him, made what seemed to be a point of serving him with the extra vegetable dish, and asking how he liked it. He liked it very well: it was an aubergine dish, rich and slippery in the mouth.

  It was really only the boredom. He got up at eight, washed, shaved and dressed; made his bed. If the night had been noisy, it might be a little later, but he had discovered that he seemed to be able to sleep through what roused the rest of the household. He took his breakfast; then there was the rest of the day to fill. He liked to go round the house talking to his hosts, and often they had time to talk to him. Sharif was good to talk to about engineering and would play the occasional game of sister’s gin-rummy. His brother Rafiq was an impatient fellow! He wanted to be off. He was waiting for the summons to come, to leave the house to go off to fight, like a student who wanted to start building bridges on his very first day in the school of engineering. Sharif’s wife was kind to him, but her enquiries came to an end, and Sharif’s wife stood up and went about her business, satisfied that her obligations were now met. The other women in the house he was not sure about. Sometimes when he was at work at the table, he looked up to see Sharif’s mother assessing him. It was as if he might be concealing a secret of some sort. After his colleague and friend Sharif, he thought that the member of the family he liked the best was Sharif’s sister’s husband. His name had been Mahfouz. He had had a ready, open smile and his genuine interest in what an engineer did. It was a shame that he had not been able to visit again, since the events of 25 March.

  He had found an occupation that filled his mornings, at any rate. He had brought some reference books – Marks’s standard handbook and a big book about material science – and a notebook for sketches and making calculations. In Professor Anisul’s view, there was no really thorough, up-to-date book about material science. Someone with a lot of time left before them, someone at the beginning of their career, ought to set about writing one. He had been able to borrow a slide rule and some drafting paper of a good size from Sharif. In the mornings of this strange time, with teaching apparently suspended and with nothing to do, he was going to occupy himself with a useful speculative task. He was going to build a bridge.

  He said nothing to Sharif about it. It appeared to him that that young man, excellent as he was in many ways, had returned from his stint abroad with an idea of his profession that could be reliable, or could veer off into completely impracticable fantasy. It was important to have new ideas about the subject, and to come to the fundamental questions with a mind that was constantly being refreshed. He would indulge that impracticable fantasy for a few days.

  At first he drew an ordinary suspension bridge. That was what he did every day. Then he began to ask questions that, in other situations, from other people, he might dismiss as whimsical or foolish. Could the pillars of such a bridge be half a mile high? Could they be made of solid gold? The tensions, on paper, grew immense; the materials to support such a project extra-terrestrial. Then another question occurred to him. Buildings were made of glass, these days; he knew that whole sides of skyscrapers were glass. Could a bridge be made of glass? What would the issues be, and could such a bridge ever be constructed to look invisible, or at any rate transparent, without a steel skeleton?

  He worked away at it, chuckling. Young Sharif saw him at work, and clearly longed to ask him what the project was; but he said nothing; he continued to calculate, and to make rough sketches of what such a bridge might look like. There was a paradox, or so it seemed to Professor Anisul. The more transparent a bridge was, the more massive did its materials have to be. But how to manufacture a glass block of adequate scale? Could it be made with layers of glass? These things exercised Professor Anisul. In the end, he thought he would take his project of a glass bridge over the Padma by surprise. He designed and built a glass bridge of a size that would be natural for the material. It turned out to be three feet long and two feet high. After that special measures started to be necessary. It was so interesting! Sometimes he looked up with surprise as the servants started setting the table for luncheon. A whole morning had passed.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ the younger son said. He was standing by the side of the table. A friend or something of that sort behind him was standing in the dimness of the hallway. There were two green canvas bags by his feet. Perhaps he was waiting for Professor Anisul’s indication that it would be acceptable to introduce him; but Professor Anisul made a general welcoming gesture and, if anything, the friend drew back slightly into the gloom.

  ‘Good morning,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘You discover me building castles in the air. Or bridges, rather – I am entertaining myself by discovering whether it is possible –’

  ‘Sir,’ the young man said. His name was Rafiq, Professor Anisul said to himself – an impetuous, fiery young
man He was used to this sort of person. Not everyone would have been so patient at being interrupted like this. ‘Sir, where are my parents? I must say something, a word –’

  There was Rafiq’s mother, emerging from what Professor Anisul knew was the kitchen of the house. It took a lot of organizing, a household like this one. The mother laid her hand on Rafiq’s forearm. It was like a gesture of silencing. She glanced at the friend of the boy, but did not greet him; he lowered his head, and that could mean anything – greeting, submission, a formal pretence that she had not been seen and could not be acknowledged. Professor Anisul found the ways that people behaved so strange and inexplicable.

  ‘I have to go,’ Rafiq said to his mother. ‘It’s time.’

  ‘It’s time,’ his mother said. Professor Anisul did not move. His pencil hovered above the sheet of drawing paper. There was a bridge of glass beneath the point of his pencil; a bridge that could never be built and perhaps would not bear the strains.

  Rafiq turned to the friend, there in the gloom. His mother walked to the window and there covered her face with her two hands. The two boys were hoisting their canvas bags onto their shoulders. They opened the door. For some reason he had taken the unknown man to be older than the young Rafiq. But light fell on his face from outside. He could not be more than nineteen or twenty. Rafiq did not turn back. After a second the door was closed behind them.

  ‘Dear lady,’ Professor Anisul said.

  She gave a heavy gasp, a throttling noise, and walked with swift intent out of the dining room, shutting the door behind her. In five minutes the door was reopened. It was the housekeeper, who made a deep acknowledgement of Professor Anisul. The mistress would appreciate it if Professor Anisul would not inform the master when he returned home that Rafiq had been taken off by the freedom fighters to join the armed struggle. ‘You understand,’ he said. ‘The Friendly Ones may be everywhere. The mistress said she will tell those who need to know, and the others – they do not need to know.’