Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  Now there are enough guests here, there is a commotion at the top of the stairs, and Sufiya, smiling in her owl-like glasses, gathering her simple white sari to her throat, is coming down. The guests gather at the entrance to the salon to greet her. ‘You have seen the paintings?’ she says, but nobody has: they did not know that there were to be paintings today. The art has been laid out in the courtyard of the house, on tables arranged into an L-shape. Sufiya leads the way through the back windows. There are views of Old Dacca by, she explains, a promising young artist from the university. They are done in charcoal and pencil. ‘I hope that Zainul is coming,’ Sufiya says; Zainul Abedin is her great friend from Calcutta days, a great painter. Everyone knows his ink drawings of the Calcutta famine; all Dacca, and all India, too. ‘I do so want to hear his opinion.’ These are pinned against board and, in the humid afternoon, are starting to curl up at the edges. Interspersed with the drawings, Sufiya has placed some folk art – pottery and small tapestry work. They are simple things, bearing images of farmers and milkmaids, but interesting. She gathered them on a trip last month into Jessore. The guests admire them, picking them up and turning them over. The peasant art is having more success than the skilful, elaborate drawings of corners of Old Dacca. Sufiya’s poetry, too, is simple and unadorned. She likes the simple statement, and the line that anyone can understand. Her poetry is like these white pottery jugs, simple, useful, but pleasant to handle.

  Now there are more guests: Sufiya goes back into the salon to greet them with tea and cakes and lemon water. It would not do if she were in the back room, fussing over cakes, when Sheikh Mujib arrived, or even Zainul Abedin. She keeps an eye on the degree of disruption at the gates, signalling an important guest, as one waiting for the monsoon to break.

  ‘Sufiya,’ a new guest says, after she has been welcomed – she is the wife of an architect, recently returned from Europe, ‘do you know those men?’

  ‘Everyone is welcome,’ Sufiya says. ‘The gates are open, you know.’

  ‘The men standing outside,’ the architect’s wife says, ‘I thought they must be . . .’ She gathers her shawl to her throat. She is not quite clear what she thought they were.

  Sufiya goes into the hallway, and out through the front door. There are, as the architect’s wife said, two men standing there. Their clothes distinguish them from Sufiya’s guests. They are standing there as people dismount from their rickshaw and come in. The guests lower their heads as they pass: the men stare insolently into the faces of the guests. She keeps open house, and sometimes people she does not know arrive, and are very welcome if they are interested in Bengali culture, take an interest in the pottery, sit quietly and appreciatively during poetry and music. These are not people of that sort. They are wearing salwaar kameez, the Bihari shirt with a collar and buttons; her other guests, if they are wearing traditional dress, are wearing the Bengali shirt without collar. Some, like the architect, are wearing quite glamorously embroidered shirts, but the people outside are wearing everyday, even rather dusty clothes. They are standing on either side of the gate without looking in at the party or at each other. They do not seem to have come to a party at all.

  ‘Karim,’ Sufiya says, not raising her voice, and her darowan, the gatekeeper, is next to her, ‘have you seen those men?’ She does not need to say who they are. Karim has been with her for twenty years, and he knows what to do. He walks out, just as three of Hosain’s daughters are piling out of a rickshaw, Nadira in the front. They know better than to linger, though the scene is interesting.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Karim is saying. ‘Why are you loitering here? You have no right to be threatening Madam’s guests like this. Be off with you.’

  ‘We’re not threatening anyone,’ one of the men says. ‘Got a perfect right to stand where we like.’

  ‘Go and stand somewhere else,’ the darowan says. ‘You’re not welcome here.’

  ‘If you don’t like it,’ the other says – he has broken teeth, stained from paan, and now cleans his mouth, spits on the ground, ‘if you don’t like it, you can complain. To the relevant authorities.’

  No one doubts that the relevant authorities are precisely the people who have sent these two men to stand outside Sufiya’s house. Mona, Salim’s Bihari wife, has turned decorously away; she has let herself be absorbed in greeting Nadira and her sisters, Dahlia and Mary. Salim has seen that the familiar debate is happening at Sufiya’s gates, and has come forward to add his weight of persuasion to Sufiya’s steward’s. When Sufiya next looks, the men have been talked into leaving. They had carried out their task, after all.

  As if waiting for the departure of the goons, the gates open, and in steps Sheikh Mujib, followed by one of his daughters. His famous simplicity is evident here: there is no car outside, and he has, as usual, walked the five hundred yards from his house to Sufiya’s. He smiles to right and left, and comes through the gate as Karim, the darowan, lowers his head and says, ‘Salaam.’ Sufiya comes forward to greet this most important of her guests. Behind her, on the veranda, the guests have risen from their seats, and inside, the chatter is ceasing as people come to the window. ‘Now the party can commence,’ she says. ‘I am so happy that you have come.’

  ‘I would not dream of missing it,’ he says. ‘Some wretched people tried to inconvenience me, to prevent my attendance. But I would not let them stand in the way of my old friend’s party.’ He presents his daughter.

  Everyone has stood up, and Sufiya takes Sheikh Mujib around the party, first to the veranda, then inside to the salon, presenting him to everyone – to her daughters, to Salim and his wife, who lowers her eyes, to Nadira and her sisters, to doctors and architects and poets and painters, even to the musicians. The Friend of Bengal is easy and approachable, and greets the musicians with particular kindness. ‘Now sit, sit,’ he says to Sufiya, almost forcing her into her chair; it is his usual gesture, to insist that Sufiya should sit before him and, after demurral, she does so. The other guests, however, wait for Sheikh Mujib and his daughter to sit before taking their seats again. On cue, Sufiya’s servants start to circulate with plates of sweets and cake, and cups of tea. Nadira, Altaf and Amit gather, and in a moment they start on a song, its long sweet lines over the tabla like rain on a river. In five minutes, Sheikh Mujib rises again, goes outside, and admires the pottery, taking a small crowd of guests with him, each with a cup in hand.

  The doctor greets Hosain, the lawyer. They live close to each other, and regularly take an afternoon walk around the lake in Dhanmondi. The doctor – capable, brief in conversation and intelligent – is in fact the man Hosain goes to for advice and help, even on family matters. He stands loose-limbed, his face defined by his small round glasses; he gleams like a health-conscious revolutionary.

  ‘I am glad to see you,’ Hosain says.

  ‘I thought I would see you here,’ the doctor says.

  Then Hosain plunges straight in. ‘I am concerned about Pultoo,’ he says. ‘My youngest boy. He shows no aptitude for anything. He does not do well at his classes. All he does is draw, all day long. His teacher says he sits and dreams during mathematics, he gazes ahead without concentrating in all his other lessons, and if he seems to be working, he is really sketching something. He draws all the time. I do not know what to do with him.’

  ‘You say he has no aptitude for anything,’ the doctor says.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ the lawyer says.

  ‘But he draws all the time.’

  ‘Yes, he can’t be stopped – he draws in the notebook he is supposed to be working out sums in, during mathematics.’

  ‘Is he good at drawing?’ the doctor says.

  ‘Yes, I think so. He makes his classmates laugh by drawing them, and his teachers, and sometimes he draws the view from his classroom window. And he made a very good drawing of the gardener at home. Yes, I think he can draw.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you say he has no aptitude for anything,’ the doctor says. ‘It sounds as if
he has an aptitude for art.’

  ‘Oh, for art,’ the lawyer says. ‘That is not a very useful aptitude.’

  ‘The world needs a good artist more than it needs an incompetent engineer,’ the doctor says.

  ‘I so agree,’ says Sufiya, passing. ‘Now, have you seen the art in the garden? I was so hoping that Zainul would come. He promised he would come early. I so wanted to show him some drawings of a young friend of mine, and Saeeda, my daughter, you know, she is painting so beautifully nowadays. I particularly wanted him to come early. It is really too bad.’

  ‘But there he is,’ the doctor says. He looks surprised. ‘There he is, talking to my brother’s daughter.’

  ‘Oh, that is too bad,’ Sufiya says again, but affectionately. ‘He always does that. He always sneaks in quietly, with no word of hello, and then finds a quiet corner. He really is too bad.’

  You would never know that Zainul Abedin is who he is, if you saw him at a party. He arrives quietly, with nobody knowing; he finds a quiet corner, with nobody much in it, just an old friend. He would spend any gathering perfectly happily talking to small children or to somebody’s aunt, visiting from the country, talking about their concerns and small worries, listening about the failure of the crops or a pet chicken or a girl’s best friend, now her worst enemy. He listens with his full attention; sometimes only much later, years sometimes, does his new friend discover that this kindly gentleman, his fingers stained with paint and nicotine, was the great painter. Sometimes never; and once or twice Sufiya has found that her oldest friend Zainul Abedin has been to a party of hers, never said hello, sat on a stool in a dark corner, chatted to hardly anyone, and departed quietly, having had, he would tell her later, a very nice time.

  He is sitting with a small girl, the niece of the doctor, in a party dress. Their full attention is on something Zainul Abedin is holding on his knee.

  ‘You see,’ he is saying, ‘I came on a bus today.’

  She looks.

  ‘And this was my ticket,’ he says.

  She looks at the small piece of paper he is holding on his knee.

  ‘And it has print on one side, but not so much on the other side,’ he says. ‘So here’s a pen, and here’s some paper’ – it is only one inch by two, the bus ticket, hardly that, even – ‘and the pen wants to draw something, but it doesn’t know what it wants to draw. What is it going to draw?’

  The small girl looks at the pen, poised above the bus ticket resting on this gentleman’s knee, and says something into her fist, very shyly.

  ‘Is it going to draw Papa?’ the painter says. The girl nods, and quickly, with six, seven strokes, a scribble and some dabs, like the nib pecking at the paper, there he is; her father, a thin, serious fellow, leaning over to catch what his brother-in-law is saying, not at all aware that he has been caught for ever in this attitude on the back of a Dacca bus-ticket; his portrait, by Zainul Abedin, given to his daughter. The girl’s eyes grow wide – she reaches out with both hands. She recognizes her father in those few strokes. For a moment it had been just strokes of the pen, and then it was her father, all at once. ‘Do you want it?’ Zainul Abedin says. ‘You’re very welcome, but, just one moment.’ He waves the bus ticket around in the air, three times, to dry the ink. ‘And here you are.’

  ‘My dear old friend,’ Sufiya says. ‘Up to your old tricks again. Now,’ turning to the small girl, ‘let me get a little envelope for that. You must always keep that safe, you know. Have you been to see the drawings yet? And Saeeda would never ask herself, but she is painting so very interestingly these days, she would love to hear what you have to say.’

  ‘I was just about to get up to find her,’ Zainul Abedin says. ‘But she must be busy with your guests. I can come back tomorrow.’

  Elsewhere in the party, Sultana has been waylaid by Mary, her friend.

  ‘So what happened?’ she says.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sultana says.

  ‘You arrived at the university the other day in a large black car,’ Mary says. ‘I know it was Sheikh Mujib’s. How is it that he is turned into your chauffeur these days?’

  ‘He was not in the car,’ Sultana says. ‘He had got out earlier. All right, I’ll tell you. What happened was that I was late getting up, and it was almost a quarter to nine when I left the house. I had a class on Wordsworth at nine at the university, and you know what a stickler old Das is for punctuality. So I was really thinking about whether it would not be best to go back home and tell Professor Das that I had been ill when I next saw him – but then I thought about Ma, and how I could tell her that I had missed Das on poetry just because I slept late, and I saw that would not do either. So I was really on the horns of a dilemma when a car drew up alongside me, standing on the road like a hopeless case, and the window wound down, and it was Sheikh Mujib. He said, “You look a little late to me,” and I confessed that I was late, and that I had a class at the university. So he said, “I can easily give you a lift,” and I was so grateful, and I saw that it was really my only chance to get to university on time, that I accepted straight away. Never mind what Ma would say, I thought, when she heard that I was inconveniencing the Friend of Bengal. But it was much, much worse than I thought, because after five minutes of chatting about what I was up to, and whether I preferred Wordsworth to Keats, because Sheikh Mujib had read Keats when he was young, in Calcutta, and he was saying that, really, he thought there was no poetry in the world to touch the “Ode to the Nightingale”, and I was sticking up for the “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, because in my view—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mary says. ‘But what was the inconvenience to the Friend of Bengal – the more than usual one?’

  ‘Well, after five minutes he said, “I am so sorry but I am going to have to leave you here – my driver will take you on to Curzon Hall, but you know, I must be punctual when I need to come here.” And it was at the courthouse he was being left. I felt such a fool because, of course, Pa and Ma were talking about Sheikh Mujib being prosecuted again, and having to go to the courthouse to answer an invented case the very next day. “They may send me to jail again, or they may not send me to jail,” he said to me, “but I know they will definitely send me to jail today if I don’t arrive on time, and call it contempt of court. I am so sorry, my young friend, to be so discourteous as to leave you here, but the driver will take you anywhere you want to go. Don’t be in a hurry, I may be here for some time.” And then he got out and there was a huge crowd to meet him, and I went on. All the faces were pressed up against the glass – they wanted to see who I was, and all of that. I don’t know what they thought.’

  ‘But they didn’t send him to jail,’ Mary said. ‘Pa was talking about it this morning, but Nadira and Dahlia were arguing about something else, and I don’t think I heard properly.’

  ‘No, he’s out on bail,’ Sultana said. ‘I am glad to see him here. He is so nice, really. And now Ma is going to read.’

  Silence falls, and Sufiya stands, a piece of paper in her hand. She begins to speak.

  ‘“This is no time to be braiding your hair . . .”’

  3.

  Two days after her party, Sufiya receives some uninvited guests. They are two men. Not the two men who were seen loitering at her gates, staring insolently at her guests. But they may be assumed to have some connection with those men – perhaps their supervisors, their superiors. And these visitors have superiors, too. They come from a world where everyone has underlings and everyone has superiors, and they cannot conceive of any other existence.

  Sufiya asks them in, perhaps unnecessarily. They refuse tea, and any other offering, and it is true that by the end of their conversation Sufiya would happily have slipped poison into any cup of tea she would offer them. Is it the case that she organized a gathering of individuals opposed to the government two days ago? No, it was a small meeting of friends, come together to drink tea and to listen to a little music. Nevertheless, among those attending were – one of the men, a moustachioed
person with an unnerving, practised, direct gaze, extracts a clean typed sheet of names from his black leather briefcase – were well-known leaders of opposition and dissent. Who did they have in mind? The man begins to read out the names: he concludes with Sheikh Mujib’s. An old friend, Sufiya says. She is aware that her daughter Sultana has come downstairs and is standing discreetly in the door of the salon, listening. She wishes she would go away: she does not want these men from the security service to recognize either of her daughters at any point in the future.

  Is it the case, the other man says, clipped and neat-looking in his blue blazer and English tie, that among the topics discussed at this gathering was the founding of a dissident cultural institute? Sufiya cannot think what they are talking about, and says so. The man goes into more detail, and soon she realizes that they are referring to the room that the university is making available to any practitioners of Bengali arts. She sets her face. The men at the gate did not hear that conversation. She wonders who it was who overheard it and, for a shameful moment, her mind settles on Mona, Salim’s Bihari wife. She dismisses the thought.

  ‘Do you know it is forbidden to hold gatherings of more than twelve people without permission?’ one of the men says. This may or may not be true, but is certainly one of the laws that would be applied only if the authorities wanted to stop a gathering taking place for other reasons. She does not believe that when the daughters of government ministers get married, official permission for the reception is applied for, or would ever be withheld. All the same, she acknowledges the statement, and after a few minutes, the two men run out of things to threaten her with. They stand to go. Sultana whisks herself off, out of the doorway and into the kitchen, where she cannot be seen. ‘I am sorry I cannot be of more help to you,’ Sufiya says sweetly, as she shows them to the door. She invited them in, after all, and they are, in some sense, guests of hers. They have the grace to look a little embarrassed at that. She shuts the door behind them, wanting to break a vase over their silly heads, and breathes deeply. Sultana comes out from the kitchen and, behind her, Hamida, the cook, both with deeply concerned expressions. No one says anything.