Scenes From Early Life Read online

  My sister pushed past her; she had left her books and clothes neatly packed in her half of the suitcase, and now they were lying anyhow on the floor. She broke the rule about keeping her voice down during office hours. She ran at me, cuffing me about the head. ‘But he always—’ she shouted, then turned about, pushed past Majeda, and into the corridor. ‘He always—’ she went on.

  We heard the professional click of Father’s office door opening.

  3.

  A word about Majeda. She came to us in the following way.

  She was from a family of six daughters and one son, in a village near Faridpur. She was the eldest, and beautiful from quite a young age. Her father was a farmer on a small scale. In the way of things, she attracted the attention of the son of the shopkeeper in the village. The shopkeepers made a good living. They could charge what they liked, and if a villager fell out with them for whatever reason, they could refuse to give him any service. Sometimes they would wilfully charge someone they disliked twice as much; if they thought they could get away with it, they would double the price of a bag of rice. In popular films of the time, the shopkeeper of the town is almost always villainous, and there was a good reason for that.

  The shopkeeper’s family was well off, by village standards. The eldest son would not normally have been allowed to marry the daughter of a small village farmer. But the son saw Majeda, scattering rice seed to the chickens, and fell in love with her. He insisted that he only wanted to marry Majeda, and finally his family agreed to it. They insisted that her family put up a substantial dowry, however. That was the way they could save face in the village, by demonstrating that the new bride’s family had more substance than people knew. Or perhaps they were just keen on money, and believed in squeezing new wives. Majeda’s father lost his head, and promised a much larger dowry than he could really afford. With six daughters to marry, he could spare only a small amount.

  After the marriage, Majeda’s father could not pay the dowry he had promised. Majeda’s husband, who was a decent man, was prepared to forget all about it. Perhaps he looked at the situation and thought that his family had enough to support Majeda, whom he genuinely loved. But his parents did not see it in that light. They thought that Majeda and her father had defrauded them by pretending to be much richer than they were. They were furious, and after a time, they turned Majeda out of the house.

  In later years, the demanding of a dowry became illegal because of cases like Majeda’s. In some extreme cases, brides whose families defaulted on their dowries were actually murdered. But Majeda was merely forced to leave her husband. Instead of returning to her family, in the village where she would have had to face her in-laws every day, she came to Dacca. She had a connection of some sort who was a near neighbour of ours, and my mother came to hear about her situation. Zahid, my brother, was a toddler at the time, and my mother needed a nurse. She met Majeda, who was a nice, modest girl with a pleasant manner, and decided to employ her.

  She was still there fifteen years later, and was still quite beautiful. My parents did not pay her well, I believe: she got fifty taka a month. But she had her room and board, and my parents paid for her to return home to see her family at least once a year. They also bought her good-quality and even elegant clothes to wear. I am sure they would have done just the same if Majeda had not been beautiful at all, but as it was, when she came to meet me from school, I always thought that my ayah was much more beautiful and well-dressed than anyone else’s. It may have been, too, that my mother, with six sisters herself, felt the uncomfortable situation Majeda’s father had been placed in with some sympathy. Of course, Nana would not have found himself obliged to provide large dowries, so the situation was not really very similar.

  Majeda had an air of romantic sadness in her eyes – they were so black that there was no distinction between iris and pupil, just a deep circle of black. She had a quiet, musical voice. I never heard her regret her life, though my mother often told me that she greatly missed her husband. She believed that he had always loved her and never remarried, even though he had had some good opportunities. I do not know how my mother knew this. But that is the story of how Majeda, my ayah, came to live with our family.

  4.

  Our suitcase had been repacked, and we had been put to bed. At the far end of the flat, there was still the grumble of the waiting clients, and the smell of their cigarette smoke. Father would continue to see them until he was done. We were in our beds, side by side, and Sunchita and I were talking about all the things we were going to do when we got to the village.

  ‘I want to go to the sugar-cane field,’ I said.

  ‘And cut down sugar cane, and eat it,’ Sunchita said.

  ‘I want to find that tree, the one with the seeds,’ I said. ‘The big red seeds, the hard ones.’

  ‘I’m going to collect the seeds and make a necklace out of them, like I did last year,’ Sunchita said.

  ‘I’m going to bring back a big bag of seeds,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll make two, three necklaces,’ she said. ‘So they’ll last all the time until we get to go again.’

  ‘I’m going to teach the cousins about Roots,’ I said. ‘They don’t know about Roots. They haven’t got a television. And I’m going to make a fishing rod, and go down to the river to climb into the tree, and sit, and wait until I catch a great big fish.’

  ‘I’m going to go into the mango orchard,’ Sunchita said, her voice growing heavy and slow, pausing between one word and the next, ‘and I’m going to climb up into a mango tree, and I’m going to take a book, and I’ll sit there, and I’ll pick a mango, and I’ll suck at a mango, and I’ll read my book, and no one will find me . . .’

  My sister was in my mind, in the low branches of a mango tree in the mango orchard, hidden behind leaves, her book resting on her knees. She turned a page, and her face was down and she was absorbed in her book. And I was lying underneath the tree, looking up into its dark and light, and losing my dappled sister the more I tried to find her.

  5.

  My father had a terrible fear of being late for the bus to the village. Even if he had not finished with his last client until after one in the morning, he would insist on everybody being woken at half past four for a bus that did not leave until after seven. My mother complained, every year, at this imposition. Father said that it was important to get there early, to get the best seats; my mother would point out that the seats had been reserved, weeks before. My father would then say that it was not a question of the seats on the bus, but of the best place to put our luggage, in the cage on the roof, so that it should not fall off and be lost. The conversation ran the same course every year, and my father always had his way.

  The suitcases and the food for the journey were in a neat pile in the hallway. The boy who worked in the chambers was woken and sent out to the nearby main road to wake three cycle-rickshaw drivers in their turn, sleeping in their cabs. The rickshaws would be loaded up with our luggage, and Mother would inspect us all: father, Majeda, my brother Zahid, my sisters Sunchita and Sushmita, and me. We were in our best travelling clothes; I wore a short-sleeved shirt and short trousers. The rickshaws took us in twos and threes through the streets of Dacca, rattling past whole families under temporary roadside shelter, and only the very occasional figure standing on an unknown, solitary task at a junction. We travelled to the village at the same time each year, the mango season. It was quite dark when we got up; by the time we were in the rickshaws and on the way to the bus station, light was painting the sky in pale streaks.

  Later, the bus station would be crowded and noisy, with passengers pushing and shoving, hawkers selling toys, labour-saving devices for the home as well as snacks and whole meals. Later still, the noise would be overwhelming, and the mass of humanity holding up the corner of a sari or a handkerchief to get through the black, belching smoke from the back of the hundreds of buses. But if you arrived, like us, before six, the crowds were on a smaller scale. There were still
boys going from bus to bus, calling out, ‘Chai, chai,’ with their trays of glasses of milky tea; I admired their skill in balancing a tray on one hand and with the other scratching themselves under their lungi or under their grubby white singlets. I never knew anyone who bought a cup of tea from the bus-station boys. There were families like ours, sitting on piles of luggage, and there were buses being loaded up.

  My father had no difficulty in identifying the bus that would take us across seven rivers to Jhenaidah sub-district, then to Shailkupa-thana, and to Mirzapur village. I could recite it. My father’s skill in tracking down the bus in Komlapur bus station in Dacca, among the dozens of identical idling buses, all brick-red BRTC buses with the same open caged windows, was prodigious to me. It seemed on the same level of skill as the bus drivers’ in tracing the route away from the knot of roads that wound up into Dacca. Anyone could find their way to Dacca, it seemed to me, but only a BRTC driver with his cigarette and his jaunty manner and, in later years, his cassette player firmly wedged under his seat, could find his way to a given place, starting from the capital.

  Quickly and inexplicably, my father found our bus; the suitcases were loaded on to the roof, in a spot where they could not fall off, and we took our reserved seats. ‘You can’t sit there,’ my father said to me. ‘It isn’t safe for little boys.’ I was moved from the place next to the window, and we sat and waited for the station to wake up, for the bus to fill over the next hour, for it to depart.

  We set off, and the streets of Dacca had come to life. Those sleeping families were awake, and washing underneath the street-corner taps; men rubbing their faces and glistening torsos, snorting in and spurting out water from their nostrils, women trudging along with their baskets, and people hurrying to their daily tasks. The sun was up, and the first wave of traffic in the city was immense. It took hours before we reached the first river to cross, and most of those hours were spent, it always seemed, getting through Dacca. The road was humped and rough; the bus banged and hurtled through the air as it hit each bump. ‘Ai – ai – ai,’ my sister Sushmita cried, on the other side of the aisle. She hated to travel; she grew pale, sweaty and sick in the heat and petrol-smell, and the hammering leaps of the bus over the humps in the road were painful to her.

  ‘Slow down, slow down,’ the passengers yodelled to the driver.

  The conductor, an efficient man whose job was never clear to me, came to tell us that if the driver slowed down, he would never reach his destination in time. The families of doctors, lawyers, university professors about us remonstrated, and the conductor repeated what he had said.

  I greatly enjoyed the cross exchanges between the passengers and the conductor. They got worse as the journey progressed. ‘Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai,’ a passenger shouted. ‘Stop, stop, stop – my fruit, my fruit.’ We had seen the whole drama. He must have arrived at the bus station long after us and placed a basket of oranges, packed in hay, on the very top, where the loading was unstable. With some pleasure and excitement, an hour on the road out of Dacca, we had seen the basket fall heavily behind the bus with a crash. Before anyone could do anything, the bus behind had driven right over it; behind us, the squashed oranges were a catastrophe of mud, juice and hay, and the passenger wailing his bad fortune and the carelessness of the BRTC. Once, the bus had a puncture six hours into the journey. ‘Why didn’t you check the tyres on the ferry?’ my father shouted at the conductor. ‘That’s your job, to check that the tyres are in perfect condition before you set off, and again on the ferry.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do against a nail on the road,’ the conductor retorted, and my father made his own objection to this. The bus had juddered to a halt between paddy-fields, and in the midday heat, we all got off. ‘Don’t wander too far off, Saadi,’ my mother said. She had a great fear of kidnappers, and felt that at any moment I might be grabbed by criminals, disguised perhaps as rice-farmers. So I had to stay close to Majeda.

  We got off, and with great fascination watched the conductor and the driver prise the burst tyre off its axle, jacking the bus up off the ground. The conductor went to the back and fetched the spare tyre. ‘What happens if there is another nail on the ground?’ I said, but Majeda didn’t know. She was the only woman in the small crowd of men and boys, standing about watching the interesting act of a wheel being changed. All about us, other men from the bus were taking an opportunity, and peeing in a ragged line into the ditch at the side of the road; the mothers and sisters were fanning themselves in the shade cast by the bus, taking no interest in the mechanical doings.

  6.

  The first river was crossed by means of a bridge, but the second was the Padma river. That was what we in Bangladesh called the Ganges as it came towards the Bay of Bengal, the open sea. My father, who admired the British almost as much as Nana did, always said, as we approached the Padma on our summer journey, ‘I will never understand why the British did not build a bridge over the Padma, and save us from all this kerfuffle.’

  My brother, who was literal-minded and interested in engineering, explained at this point that it was not possible to build a bridge over the Padma, because the river constantly washed away the mud of the bank. The ground was too soft and sifting to support the huge piles that a bridge over the Padma would require.

  The Padma was an enormous river, and coming to it impressed us with the scale and drama of our nation. From one bank, it was impossible to see the far bank; it was like a great sea. The banks were uneven cliffs of clay and, as Zahid said, the river constantly tore away at it. You could see great bites of clay and grass collapsing into the flood.

  There was no bridge: you crossed on a ferry. However big the ferries were, they could not meet demand. There were always at least two hundred buses waiting at the ferry ghat to embark, and it could be a long wait. It was my favourite part of the whole journey. I got off the bus with my sisters, Zahid and Majeda, and Majeda took me to a place where I could pee into the river. She turned her head decorously, as I could not go while anyone was watching me, but she stood not far off. A temporary encampment, a middle-sized town, had sprung up. Like the mud banks, it slid from time to time into the river and was carried off; constantly, from the back, it was renewed with more buses, more people, more hawkers, more of everything.

  The food my mother and my ayah had prepared was brought out. They had made all sorts of dry cooked food, nothing that would add to the pungent smell of the hot bus, and nothing that could not be eaten with a napkin and fingers. We knew a place nearby, in the shade, away from the worst of the noise and the confusion. We referred to it as ‘our place’, a little hollow underneath a tree, and resented it if, when we got there, another family had set up their picnic. We never considered that they, too, might think of it as ‘their place’. I grew tense as the time of the picnic approached. The riverbank was lined with men selling freshly cooked hilsha fish; the smell was almost unendurably delicious. More than anything, I longed for my mother to augment her already lavish picnic with a pair of hot bought hilsha fish. My mother and father did not like to buy and eat other people’s cooked food. They hardly ever went to a restaurant if they could help it, and certainly never bought food from a stall in the street. For my father, to do such things was the habit of a poor law student without his own cooking facilities, wife, servants or children. He thought it a waste of money, and he did not believe it was safe to eat from the stove of a stranger. Certainly, we children were expressly forbidden ever to buy anything from the street, except an unpeeled banana or the water of a green coconut, freshly opened. The sweet stalls that had sprung up on the bank of the Padma were not, we understood, for us, and the children who were permitted to buy a bag of lozenges from them would, we knew priggishly, be in agonizing pain and perhaps even dead before the end of their journey today.

  The sweet stalls were one matter, and we filed past them with our eyes decorously low. But the piles of hilsha fish smelt so good that we could not help looking longingly at them, and then at Mothe
r. In the past, she had spontaneously pulled at Father’s shirt-sleeves, and once or twice before on this journey, we had found that she, too, could not resist the sweet nutty smell of freshly fried hilsha fish. It would do no good to beg; my sisters and I simply tried to catch my mother’s eye. But this year, it did not work. She continued on past the fish stalls, carrying, with Majeda, the cold picnic. She was following my father and my serious, ungreedy brother, as the two of them went on discussing the many difficulties that would have to be resolved, if Bangladesh were ever to construct a bridge across the great span of the Padma river. Into the huge flood of the river, the ferry boats continued to launch themselves, like floating seed-pods, heavy with their burdens.

  7.

  It took two or three hours to cross the Padma on the ferry. The river was thick with mud at its edges, and as the ferry slipped its bonds and set off into the flood, it churned behind grey and brown. We were on the deck of the boat. Behind us, the land sank back, with its load of trucks and coaches, and the stevedores preparing for the next ferry.

  There was so much to watch out for in the river: the storks picking elegantly, like rich ladies in white draped saris, through the mud, and the river dolphins. Long-nosed, they threw themselves out of the flood in gangs, their wet flanks flashing in the sun. They seemed to have no reason to do it but their own pleasure. We lost count of the river dolphins, there were so many. River birds followed, shrieking, in the wake of the boat, hoping for waste food to be tossed overboard. Life on the river had its own rhythm, and the men who crewed the ferry from one bank of the Padma to the other, four times a day, were practical, hard-faced, but somehow light in spirit. They did not give the impression of being proper sailors, but to have settled for this particular rank in life as they strolled the decks and talked out of the corners of their mouths. They had their own ways of speaking. And by the time we reached the middle of the Padma, busy and torn by dolphins, the muddy water of the banks had clarified. The river, just there in the middle of the stream before it started to thicken and obscure again, was a translucent, veiled blue, like the sky.