The Friendly Ones Read online

  ‘No, Mother,’ Rafiq said, laughing.

  ‘Very well. It should be done on the veranda, as always,’ Mother said. But then she remembered that there could be not the slightest possibility of glimpsing Rafiq. He had to stay inside. Nazia went to fetch a sheet, and placed it underneath a wooden upright chair. Mother fetched her pinking shears. The girls drew up with fascination. They had never seen their brother’s hair cut before.

  But Rafiq sat down confidently, saying, ‘Mother, my head is in your hands,’ and she draped a towel around his shoulders and began work. His hair was so long! All that she needed to do, in the first instance, was to go round the bottom of his dear head, cutting two-three inches off the bottom of his hair. The girls shrieked as the clumps fell to the floor, clapping their hands to their mouths so as not to make much sound. His hair was still very long, so she chopped off clumps, higher up, all over his head. When she had finished it looked slashed off, the cuts unrelated and random, as if everyone in a crowd had had a go. But Mother thought she knew what she was doing. Now she took a comb and, working from the bottom of Rafiq’s head placed her scissors, snip snip, against the back of the comb. The girls shrieked again.

  ‘It is going to be so short!’ Bina said. ‘I can see his scalp!’

  ‘This may not be a very good haircut,’ Father said. ‘We will try to salvage what we can, when Mother has finished. But we may need to shave your head with a razor. There may not be very much to salvage.’

  ‘I go to my fate,’ Rafiq said.

  ‘I remember when I was a law student in Calcutta,’ Father said, ‘I was so poor. I only had ten annas a month to spend on a haircut, and that was not very much. I never saved on laundry and I never saved on soap and I never saved on haircuts or razors by doing without. But I could not afford a good barber. When I was very poor, I had to go to a pavement barber, a man who has only a fragment of a mirror, and the man cuts your hair without your being able to see what he is doing. The thing I most disliked about it was that people would gather round – ne’er-do-wells, stragglers, loiterers – for some free entertainment. I went to a pavement barber called Manzoor. He was a terrible man. I think he was addicted to drink – his hands shook in a way that you never want to see in a barber. I never saw anyone else having their hair cut on his little stool. I knew if I went to him rather than the other pavement barber on the other side of the road I would be able to have rice and dhal for my dinner. But every time I went there, the next friend I saw from Calcutta University, he would always without fail ask what in the name of heaven I had allowed to happen to my hair. It would take ten days at least for it to grow out enough to look less than a public spectacle. Now I look at my son, and I see that Mr Manzoor has a rival.’

  ‘Do not open the door,’ the smaller grandmother said.

  ‘This is an awful haircut,’ Father said, laughing. ‘I’m glad he’s going where no ladies are going to see him.’

  ‘Do not open the door,’ the grandmother said again.

  ‘What did she say?’ Nazia asked her husband, but he had not heard anything.

  ‘Do not open the door,’ the grandmother said.

  ‘What is it?’ Mother said. It was not often that the grandmothers made a remark for all of them to hear. Now she looked. She laid her scissors and her comb down on the towel she had placed on the table. The grandmother seemed to be in distress. She was plucking away at the shawl of the other grandmother, her little face screwed up like a walnut, in tears. Mother wondered whether she urgently needed to use the bathroom, but it seemed worse than that.

  ‘Do not open the door,’ she said again. This time Mother heard her. Rafiq turned his head to look at her. Behind her, through the windows, a bright light shone. It was dusk now, surely, but a fierce light was shining in the street.

  ‘Turn the radio off,’ Father said. It had been talking in a low voice, an illegal radio station, but probably harmless. ‘Turn it off. Spin the dial.’

  Afterwards, they disagreed on some things, but one thing they all agreed on was that the grandmother had said, ‘Do not open the door,’ long before the sound of hammering had started. They agreed, too, that it was then Rafiq had said, ‘I go to my fate,’ and had laughed, not knowing what was about to happen.

  ‘Do not open the door,’ Mother said to Father. The noise of hammering on the door of the house shook the floors.

  ‘I have to,’ Father said. ‘They can see that we are here.’

  There were faces at the windows of the salon, peering in. Father was right. There was nothing that could be done. Sharif went to the door, his face set.

  There were two men at the door of the house. A bright set of lights blazed in the street behind the open gates, and more men. The two men were in uniform. One was a subedar; the other, who took charge, was a young man with pale skin, shy-looking and scholarly, his hands delicate around a baton of some sort. His uniform was very clean and pressed. He and the older subedar both stepped into the house.

  ‘I am Captain Qayyum,’ the officer said. ‘I am here to search your house.’

  ‘You can see who is here,’ Sharif said. ‘My mother and father; my daughter; my wife; my two younger sisters and my younger brother; my colleague and superior; my grandmothers.’

  ‘And who else?’ Captain Qayyum spoke in Bengali; his language was hoarse and stumbling. The subedar by him paid no attention when he or Sharif spoke. It was clear he did not understand or speak the language.

  Mother stepped forward and enumerated the servants in the house at present – the cook, the houseboy, the housekeeper, the gardener and the gatekeeper, whom they had dealt with and brushed aside. Captain Qayyum’s eyes went over each of them in turn. He seemed bored and uninterested in Sharif, in Father, even in Professor Anisul, who was sitting at the back of the room reading a dull book. He came finally to Rafiq. He looked so innocent, his head roughly shorn, his hair fallen about him on the towel and onto the white sheet on the floor. He looked like a child; the blisters on his neck could have come from anywhere.

  ‘He is your son,’ Captain Qayyum said to Mother. ‘You are washing his hair.’

  ‘No,’ Mother said. ‘I am cutting his hair.’

  ‘Yes, cutting – cutting – his hair. You are cutting his hair. Why?’

  ‘It is not safe for a boy to go out on his own in Dacca these days,’ Mother said. ‘His hair needed cutting and so I am cutting it. I cut my daughters’ hair, too.’

  It was not clear that Captain Qayyum understood what Mother had said, although she had taken the trouble to speak clearly and slowly. The subedar stepped forward and said something. He spoke in Urdu. Father shuddered. He had always said that he would never have that language spoken in his house. Both grandmothers looked up, their attention caught by strangeness. They had known what would happen.

  ‘I am taking him into custody,’ Captain Qayyum said. ‘It is just a routine questioning. He will return to you within an hour. Come along.’

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ Mother said.

  ‘To a police station,’ Captain Qayyum said. ‘It is nothing serious.’

  ‘Which police station?’ Mother said. She stopped herself adding more; she could see that if she suggested a police station, for instance the one in Dhanmondi, this thin and nervous Pakistani officer would agree.

  Captain Qayyum hesitated. ‘We are returning to the Ramna police station,’ he said finally. ‘Madam, please do not worry. He will be returned to you in no time at all.’

  For a moment nobody moved. Then the subedar took some action. Engaging the suspect’s father with his eyes, he moved forward briskly, taking the pinking shears from the dining-room table. He seized Rafiq’s head in a firm grip, and there, in four movements, sliced off some chunks of hair, randomly, from four places on Rafiq’s head. His littlest sister screamed and was silenced. The subedar dropped the scissors without troubling to close them, on the floor. Rafiq stood up. There was no question what these people could do. The four places on his head where the
subedar had applied the scissors were bare, ugly, and at one point the scissors’ blades had cut into his skin; a shine of blood was beginning to gather along a line on his scalp.

  ‘Come along,’ Captain Qayyum said. His face remained kindly, polite, sympathetic. ‘There is no need to bring anything. He will not be with us long enough.’

  They took Rafiq firmly, marching him between them. Mother half ran towards the door, but there, in the hallway, collapsed. The Pakistanis shut the door of the house and, with a final tocsin and clang, the steel gate of the house on the street. Sharif came for his mother, lifting her up and taking her back to the sofa. She was moaning and making a noise of weeping, her sounds of grief still suppressed after a month of enforced silence.

  ‘No,’ she was saying. ‘No, no, no …’

  ‘It may be as they say,’ Father said. ‘It may be that Rafiq is back with us within an hour. He has the strength to say nothing. They don’t know where he was.’

  ‘They know he was away,’ Mother said. ‘They know that he was returned. You,’ she pointed at Professor Anisul. ‘Who have you told? You cuckoo.’

  ‘Professor Anisul has been here all day,’ Father said. ‘I am sorry, my old friend. She does not know what she is saying.’

  ‘Someone has told them. One of the Friendly Ones. You – you said you had to go out on your own. Who was it you were telling Rafiq had returned?’

  She was pointing at Sharif. He had no words.

  ‘Mother, Rafiq is my brother. I went to the flat. I saw nobody.’

  ‘Why did they not take you for questioning? Did they know that you are on their side, the Friendly Ones?’

  ‘Mother,’ Nazia said. She went up to her and laid a hand on her arm. ‘Mother. Sharif did not betray his brother. He could not.’

  ‘Who else?’ Mother said, moaning. ‘There is no one else.’

  But Bina looked up at the door of the salon. They were standing with Ghafur and the housekeeper. Bina had known. Dolly should have known, too. Feluda would have worked it out in a moment! Ghafur and the housekeeper and Khadr, too, they had worked out that little-brother was back when they had got up and started work, and discovered that in the night somebody had needed to eat eight eggs, and that now little-brother’s door was closed and the room darkened. Khadr not being there – it was like an admission of guilt. He knew who he had told. Bina whispered to Dolly, and Dolly’s eyes grew large. In the market Khadr had said – oh, you poor stupid Khadr with your smiling clever friend from another kitchen – had said how nice it was now that little-master was back from his adventures. Had said, Oh I mustn’t say more. The smiling clever friend had gone back; had said to his master that someone was returned from the war, was going to go on to the war. That master had been a Friendly One, to inform Captain Qayyum. Bina felt quite proud of herself for this piece of Feluda-like deduction. It was lucky that Captain Qayyum had promised to return little-brother from questioning in an hour. When he came back, Bina would be absolutely sure to advise him to leave the house and not come back until he had won the war, and not to trust Khadr with any important secret. Everyone would definitely realize that now.

  6.

  Mother went out in the morning with a tiffin-pail of food and a change of clothes for Rafiq. She needed some persuading, but Khoka the night-watchman went with her for her own safety. She refused to let Father go with her. This was a task for a mother to undertake. When she came back it was after seven at night. She called for tea.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘This is what happened. I went with Khoka to the police station that Captain Qayyum indicated to us. He told us that my son was being questioned at the Ramna police station. Khoka and I went there in a rickshaw. We saw so much on the way. Half the city is destroyed. We saw bodies lying in the street, and everywhere signs in Urdu, buildings burnt out. Outside the Ramna police station there were women, seated, their faces covered with veils. I thought they were cleaners and domestic servants. I went up the steps into the police station and there at the front desk was a Pakistani army officer. He did not look up as I came to him. I said to him that I wanted to speak to Captain Qayyum. He said that Captain Qayyum was not there and he would not be there.

  ‘I could not know what next to say. Captain Qayyum had said to me that he was taking my son to Ramna police station for one hour. That was not true. I dreaded to ask the next question – is my son here. The officer asked me why I was asking. “Mother, why concern yourself?” he said. “Look what I have for him,” I said. The officer said that if I handed over the food I had brought, and the razors and the shirts and the soap, he would ensure that they reached my son.

  ‘Another officer came up and said, more briskly, yes, my son was in the building and he was being very well looked after. I did not believe that this second officer had heard me enquire about my son by his name. I asked him who I was talking about. He responded by saying that no one was being held there for a long time, that my son would be returned to me soon. I turned to the first officer and handed over the food and the parcel of razors and soap and the packet of shirts, and I said that I would return tomorrow if my son had not been released by then. He seemed confused by this. “Madam,” he said. “There is no need for you to come back here. He will be released soon.”

  ‘Khoka took me away, and I covered my face. My son would be very ashamed if he knew I had cried in public. We went down the stairs outside the police station and I saw that the women, some of them, were dressed in good clothes, one or two had even a handbag. They were women like me. I stopped – Khoka almost pulled me away – and I said to one, “What are you doing here, sister?” She looked at me and said, “Where else should I go, sister? My husband was brought here and my three sons. And this is the only place I know to go to.”

  ‘I saw the terrible future for me. I am going to sit on the stairs outside the Ramna police station and wait for Rafiq. But he is not there. Is he in the cantonment, or in some house behind high walls? And all the way back we saw houses which have been burnt. The tailor Father uses, it is burnt out and destroyed; the bookshop where Rafiq was such friends with the owner, destroyed, burnt to the ground with all its neighbours; and I could see down the street where Murtaza’s house is, where my oldest friend’s husband lived, and it is not there. Against the walls there is blood, as if people were lined up against them and shot. I saw seven-eight bodies in a heap. Tomorrow I am going out again and I will ask again where my son is, and I will take more food for him.’

  7.

  ‘Mother,’ Nazia said, one day in August, ‘yesterday, Khadr asked me if there were any news about Professor Anisul’s housekeeper.’

  Mother stopped what she was doing. She was sorting through the scraps of cloth and lengths of thread in the mending drawer. She liked to do this from time to time; everyone reached into the drawer and took out what they needed without leaving it in an orderly situation. Very soon the drawer was in a mess. Mother liked to sort it out twice a year or so, and afterwards she would say to Nazia and the girls that that was how it should stay. The pieces of silk and cotton that had such a lot of use were in neat piles, separated by colour, by Mother on the sofa.

  ‘I haven’t heard any news,’ Mother said.

  ‘He asked me if she had gone to Gazipur,’ Nazia said. ‘He said he thought that she had been wise to return to her family in these circumstances.’

  Mother laid her hands down, palm upwards, on her knees. She raised her head and looked, despairingly, at Nazia. ‘He can’t go,’ she said. ‘We can’t go on without servants.’

  But at the end of the conversation, Mother and Nazia decided that, if he wanted to leave them, he would be allowed to leave them without anyone complaining.

  It must have been September, months after Rafiq was taken. Mother had continued going to the Ramna police station, to the gates of the cantonment, and demanding news of her son. She did this every day, accompanied by Khoka. Father said nothing. He would not go with her. Hope, according to Father, was what would drive
a man insane. He watched her go in the mornings, and sat down in his chair to read a book, or he went to his study to prepare, he said, a case that had been suspended. The door to the study was shut and Father was left to be alone with his thoughts.

  Seven times the Pakistani police had visited, demanding to search the house. They had only once taken anyone away. On that occasion, they had taken an interest in Professor Anisul’s elaborate drawing of a bridge, and had taken it away, and him with it. On this occasion, they returned Professor Anisul within three hours, unharmed. They kept the drawing of the bridge, to Professor Anisul’s disgust and anger. ‘They seemed to think I was a spy, or a saboteur,’ he said. ‘But how could I spy or sabotage something that does not exist, that I drew on paper?’

  Sometimes, these days, women came to the gate to beg for food. They were those who had lost their homes, their families, their livelihoods. Father said that what could be done for them should be done for them. They did not ask for anything much: they asked for the water that rice had been boiled in. Father said that if more was given to them, then they would be giving more than their neighbours; if they gave more, the gates would be broken down and the house ransacked by a mob. The eight widows who came to the gate every day were given the water that rice had been boiled in, and sometimes a spoonful of dhal.

  Nazia came back one day from a walk to the lake. She needed to be out in the last of the monsoon; the catastrophe of the falling water made her feel again, made her conceptions reach out in a different direction. The grandmothers sat inside, but they had chosen chairs close to the window onto the garden. As the rain fell, they looked up often from their small tasks, from grinding paan in their little bowls, from sewing or mending, from the occasional secret needlework they practised and gave as presents. Out there the monsoon was roaring; through the window the smells of grass and earth and trees and clean water poured. Their faces shone; they had nothing to say. Nazia knew what they were feeling. When she walked to the lake under her father-in-law’s second-best black umbrella, her skirts decorously hitched out of the mud, she could have sung. Once, she had been a small girl who had run through the rain, soaked and splashing in puddles halfway up to her knees, screaming with ragamuffins. She could have jumped into the puddles even now. The Pakistanis were said to hate it, didn’t know how to fight in it.