Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Era,’ my grandfather said, quite calmly, ‘I am not going to punish you. Do you know when it was that Laddu decided to run away and marry this woman?’

  Era looked about her helplessly; she gripped her pink scarf to her neck. ‘I don’t know when he decided,’ she said.

  ‘What I mean,’ my grandfather said, in his most dispassionate and lawyerly way, ‘is when was it that you knew for certain that he was going to run away?’

  ‘To run away? Last night,’ Era said. ‘He told me last night that he was going to do it today. I should have told everyone. I could have stopped it altogether.’

  ‘Very well,’ my grandfather said. ‘So I think we can all stop saying that Laddu ran away because I happened to ask him if he would see that the paths were cleared this morning. Clearly, he had made his decision before I mentioned that. Are we all agreed on that point?’

  ‘Yes, Pa,’ Mira, Mary, my mother and Era said, and Nana left the room.

  ‘Am I in trouble?’ Era said. ‘I’m not going to be punished, Ma, am I?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nani said. ‘You are in serious trouble. I am sure that when your father comes out of his chambers, he will tell me what your punishment is going to be.’

  4.

  For the next two years, nobody saw or heard of Boro-mama. The only fact that filtered back to Grandfather’s house in Rankin Street was that he had, indeed, married a Bihari woman named Sharmin. Incomprehensibly, her family were as deeply opposed to her marriage as our family was. They did not see the apparent honour involved in her marrying Boro-mama, a man without profession, character or education, whose entire prospects had been torn away by the severing of relations with his father. ‘I hope his father-in-law finds small jobs for him to do about the house,’ my father said caustically. He had endured enough insults from Laddu about cuckoos in the nest, over-educated clowns worming their way into the bosoms of other people’s fathers, and other mixed metaphors. He saw no reason to hold back when there was nobody but his cousins about.

  Curiously, once Laddu had left the house, my father did not find it a more comfortable berth. It might have been thought that, with the departure of his only male cousin, my father would find life in Rankin Street very easy. My aunts were fond of their cousin, in general terms, although they did not pretend to understand the esteem in which my mother held him; my grandfather greatly respected him, and was forever holding him up as an example of hard work, discipline and moral rectitude to anyone who would listen and to a few who would not. But perhaps my grandfather needed to berate somebody; perhaps my father feared that he would soon find himself being given the sorts of household tasks that Boro-mama had found so profitable. I don’t know this for sure, but perhaps once – just once – Nana asked my father if he could possibly spare the time from his economics studies to have a look at the tap that seemed to be dripping in the downstairs bathroom.

  My father was an independent-minded sort of person. Two months after Boro-mama’s sudden departure, and a couple of weeks after news had reached Rankin Street that he was irrevocably married to a woman who barely spoke Bengali, my father had moved out too, to a university hall. The gossips exaggerated: Sharmin, even then, spoke perfectly serviceable Bengali, though it was not her first language.

  In the next two years, my father finished his economics degree, and then his MA in the same subject. He applied for the government service, and finished almost at the top of his cohort. He was appointed to a job as assistant district commissioner in Barisal, a middle-sized town twelve hours’ journey by rocket launch from Dacca. It was decided between him and my mother that they could get married in the middle of 1959. My grandfather and grandmother were very pleased. There seemed no reason to think that Mahmood would disappear from their lives in the way that Boro-mama had done.

  During the British time, a space had been cleared in Dacca for a park. It was not made by the British, but it nevertheless had the air of pallid pleasure of the sort that the British enjoyed so much. It was called Balda Garden. As often with the British, it had an educational, almost museum quality. There were collections of botanical specimens from all over the world, some in the open air and some in a few rather crumbling hothouses. There were lawns and flowerbeds, and to that the British had added their own rather limp notions of enjoyment – a lake that had perhaps once been intended for boating parties, but was now just a kidney-shaped lake, and a picturesque Joy House, a combination of Swiss rest-house and Greek amphitheatre to one side. These joyless festival sites had now been taken over and colonized by my nation and its sense of fun. Constant supervision could keep Bengalis on their best behaviour for only so long. There were vendors of sweets and of tea; there were large families spread out comfortably on the lawns; there were picnics that took an entire afternoon to reach the end of; there were balloon-sellers and even, once, an acrobat. Under the trees, where it was quiet and shady, couples sat in peace and quiet, feeding each other from their picnic boxes, blushing, and laughing under their breath. It was a favourite place to visit on a Sunday, which was then the day of rest and pleasure in Dacca, as Friday is now.

  My mother and father, before their marriage, regularly met at the Joy House on a Sunday evening. They would walk around the park, talking in the sort of privacy you can only have on the street or in crowds in Dacca.

  Both of them were highly punctual people, and when they agreed to meet at the Joy House at six, both of them would be there at six. My father, however, was still more punctual than my mother – in fact, he often regarded her as a poor time-keeper. This was unfair, since she generally arrived at the time specified; my father would arrive a good fifteen or twenty minutes in advance, and pace up and down, inspecting his watch.

  At twenty to six, my father was already standing at the Joy House, waiting impatiently. It was a favourite place for meetings, and he stood among people who had made arrangements to meet at half past five as well as a few early arrivals for six, like himself. Along the path came couples, families and small groups of young men, out for a Sunday-afternoon walk. The sun was in my father’s eyes, and the groups approaching from his left were mere silhouettes. When a figure greeted him, hesitantly, my father did not know immediately who it was, and greeted him back without hesitation. When he realized that it was Laddu, who would not have realized that my father was standing in a blinding light, it was too late to withdraw the greeting.

  ‘We often come here,’ Laddu said. ‘It is so pleasant. I wonder – could I introduce my wife to you?’

  Boro-mama’s wife was, it appeared, the small, sweet, round person by his side. She was not a beauty, but had a pleasant, open face and pale, rather yellowish colouring. Her name was Sharmin, and my father greeted her politely. In the heat, the pre-monsoon congestion in the air, she fanned herself with curt and efficient gestures. Boro-mama asked after everyone, and was surprised to learn that my father no longer lived at the house in Rankin Street. My father thought that Laddu gave him a look of near-respect on hearing this. Like many habitual dependants, Boro-mama made a point of denouncing and disapproving of other people’s sponging, as he often called it.

  They talked, quite cheerfully, for ten minutes, until my father mentioned that he was waiting for my mother. A look of doubt crossed Boro-mama’s face, and he seemed almost on the verge of running away. ‘Oh, Laddu,’ Sharmin said, taking hold of his arm. To my father’s surprise, Laddu suggested that they meet later in the week, perhaps to see a film. My father said – I am sure he said – that he was very busy with work, and with preparations to go to Barisal to take up his post as assistant district commissioner. But Boro-mama pressed him, and eventually he agreed. It was five to six: Boro-mama and Sharmin said their goodbyes and left. It was obvious that they would not risk an encounter with my mother, or with any of the rest of Laddu’s family, just yet.

  5.

  The night after my father and Laddu went to the cinema together, my father was invited round to Nana’s house to have dinner. He had a regular weekly e
vening there as the guest of my mother. While he was waiting to take up his appointment in Barisal, my father had continued living in the university residence. It had its disadvantages. The price he paid for the independence of living there was perpetual hunger. In the residence, food was provided as part of the living expenses. But there were hundreds of other hungry young economists living in the same place, and the food was basic, dull and prepared in great vats. Like all male students, at any time, at any place, my father was appallingly hungry from one end of the week to the other. His evening at Nana’s would set him up for the barren remainder of the week, eking out the institution’s thin dal and rice, the meagre pickings of its birianis with memories of Nana’s dinner and the occasional bought treat. He was punctilious about waiting for an invitation, and would not have come if he were not asked; fortunately, my mother was just as punctilious about asking him, once a week.

  The monsoon rains had broken that week. My father, the aunts and Nani sat inside the house, looking out on the veranda. The garden was already soaked with mud; the rains made a deep, resonant trill on the flat surfaces of the house, made the trees spatter and slap. Because of the sound of the rain, nobody heard Nana’s car approaching, and the first anyone knew of him was his voice in the hall. ‘Is nobody here?’ he called, and then they heard his umbrella being rapidly opened and shut, two or three times. His daughters came out to the hall to meet him behind Nani; my father following somewhere in the back.

  ‘What is that sound?’ Nana said, after he had greeted them all and handed his raincoat and umbrella to the boy.

  ‘What sound?’ Nani said.

  ‘That sound of dripping,’ he said. ‘It kept me awake all last night. Can you hear?’

  The aunts compared notes, discovered that they could not hear any particular dripping. Mira asked if he meant the sound of the rain on the terrace, and was asked if she thought he was a fool, and not to be so pert, child.

  ‘I asked for something to be done about it,’ Nana said. ‘I distinctly asked for something to be done.’

  Nani asked, and it became clear that my grandfather was talking about the tap in the upstairs bathroom. It had started dripping the day before. My grandfather could not endure the sound of a dripping tap in the house, and in the end, he said, he had got up in the middle of the night and placed a towel in the hand-basin to mute the sound. As was his way, he must have said, as he left the house in the morning, ‘Somebody ought to do something about that dripping tap.’ What had happened was that the towel had been removed from the basin, and nothing else had been attempted. My grandfather gave my father, as the only other man in the house, a long, assessing, unfair look, as if he had been there to overhear the suggestion in the morning, and should have done something about the dripping tap. My father looked back.

  Once they were seated at table, and my father’s first brutish hunger had been satisfied – my mother’s sisters used to watch him, stifling giggles, as he laid into the mutton curry – he sat back in his chair and began a conversation.

  ‘It is interesting, this new film,’ he said.

  ‘What film are you talking about, Mahmood?’ my mother said. He was not a great cinema-goer. Normally he barely listened when my mother’s sisters talked about a film they had seen, or some other entertainment.

  ‘There is a film in the cinemas that was shot near Dacca, on the delta,’ he said, in a measured way. He stretched his neck, rotated his shoulders, took another mouthful of curry.

  It was like my father to assume that nobody else could have known about this film. It had been discussed during its filming by the intelligentsia. A film-maker had gone into the delta and shot the ordinary people at their tasks of fishing and working. It had been said in advance that this would herald a new age of film-making in the region. But Jago Hua Savera had come out and nobody had gone to see it at all. Apart from my grandfather, who referred to the cinema scornfully as ‘the flicks’, everyone in the family was a keen film-goer. But in this case, Era and Mira had gone to see it and returned with big yawns, saying that they had never suffered so much in their lives as at the hands of Jago Hua Savera and its fisherfolk.

  ‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘It is an interesting film.’

  ‘Did you stay to the end, Mahmood?’ Era said.

  ‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘I stayed to the end.’ My mother took a large spoonful of rice, poised it above his plate, gave it a good shake, and then offered him a bowl of dal. ‘It is only playing in one cinema, I believe.’

  ‘Which cinema is that, Mahmood?’ my grandfather said.

  ‘The Shabistan,’ my father said. ‘It is a very old cinema.’

  ‘I never saw a film as wonderful as Pyaasa,’ my grandmother said. ‘Did you see Pyaasa, Mahmood?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Pyaasa, that was a film,’ Era said. She started singing at the dinner table, a thing my grandfather utterly detested. ‘And so sad! One could have cried.’

  My grandmother and aunts started comparing their favourite scenes in Pyaasa, a film that had taken Dacca by storm two years ago, and was still being talked about. Probably there were cinemas, even then, which were still playing it to faithful audiences. When they had finished, my father said, ‘That sounds quite different from Jago Hua Savera. I liked it, but Laddu found it dull, just as you did, Era.’

  ‘Who found it dull, Mahmood?’ my grandfather said.

  ‘Laddu,’ my father said.

  ‘Laddu, did you say?’ my grandmother said.

  My father went on to explain – he had the attention of the table now. There was no question that not all his sisters-in-law-to-be held him in the great esteem that my mother did, and my grandfather did. For some of them, he was a not very exciting country cousin who, by means of hard work and honesty, had made his way in the world, and was to be the man their eldest sister would marry. They were not rude to him, but they were not accustomed to give him their full attention at the dinner table. They had never spent a night with him in the police cells, singing songs of resistance and independence, and had always found it tricky to visualize the story when my mother told it to them, as she quite frequently did. But once or twice in his life, my father successfully dropped a bombshell, and made people listen to what he had to say. This was one of those times. The whole family listened to him, explaining that he had met not just Laddu, but Laddu’s wife Sharmin. At first by chance, in the Balda Gardens, by the Joy House, but afterwards by arrangement: the three of them had gone to see Jago Hua Savera only the day before.

  ‘You met her, Mahmood?’ Mira said. ‘What is she like?’

  ‘Laddu was full of plans,’ my father said. ‘He kept talking about the cinema, all through the film – he kept saying that nobody had done anything to this cinema for years except change its name. He kept saying that if he had some money, he could run the cinema, transform it into a wonderful place, that it could hardly fail. I don’t think the film really held his attention. But I enjoyed it.’

  ‘But what is she like?’ Mary said. ‘Is she tall or short, fat, thin, is she pretty?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say she was pretty,’ my father said. ‘Not pretty, exactly. But there is something quite agreeable about her face.’

  There was a long pause; the whole table sat waiting for my father to continue, but he just went on eating. That seemed to be all he had observed about Laddu’s wife.

  ‘And is she sensible, or is she a fool?’ Nani said finally. ‘How could she marry Laddu in such a hole-and-corner way?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ my father said. ‘We didn’t go into all that.’

  ‘I suppose we could ask Laddu and his wife to come here for dinner,’ my grandfather said. ‘It seems ridiculous never to see him. And I should meet his wife, before she decides to give us grandchildren. Yes, on the whole, I think Mahmood is right. We should ask Laddu and his wife round here for dinner next week. Not next week – ask them to come as soon as they may. Tomorrow. Push the boat out.’

  My father had not, in fact, suggeste
d asking Laddu and Sharmin round for dinner at all. But my grandfather was thinking about the dripping tap in the bathroom next to his bedroom.

  Chapter 7

  Nana’s Faith in Rustum

  1.

  In the autumn of 1959, my father and mother married in Dacca. Immediately after their marriage, they went to Barisal, where my father took up his government post as an assistant district commissioner.

  There is a large album of photographs of their wedding; formal, well mounted, in a solid volume. Nana used to collect the albums of all his children’s weddings, a long line of them in the sitting room; nowadays, I believe my sister has them. In one of the photographs, my mother sits among her sisters. They are solemn-faced: being photographed was still a novelty in the 1950s. The photographs, now, do not seem very festive to us. People lined up and faced the camera. Still, in their lovely pale saris and their wide eyes against the dark wall, my mother and her sisters look like a floating grove of water-lilies. Nani, to one side, still looks young; interested; responsible. I never thought of her as beautiful in her old age, when I knew her, or as one of those women of whom one says, ‘How beautiful she must have been when she was young.’ But here, just short of fifty, surrounded by her daughters and one son, with one white streak in her hair, just that, she seems at the confident peak of her looks and health. The bright-eyed boy at her feet, her competent hand resting on his head, is Pultoo; the baby in her arms must be Bubbly-aunty. And my mother? Well, that is just my mother. My aunts and the rest of the family may have called her Shiri, but to me she will always be just my mother. The photographs of my father, with his father, his father-in-law, and other male relations seem by comparison tense and wary; my father has somehow been pushed unwillingly to the front of the picture, where he would rather not be. Both sets of photographs seem posed, but only my aunts give the impression that they have been looking forward to posing for the photographer.

  They are very different from the photographs of my wedding, as I suppose my wedding was very different from my parents’. Among my wedding photographs, there are images of my new husband feeding me cake; of some rather drunk guests dancing in globes of disco-lighting; of serried ranks of canapés waiting for the party to begin; of many other things that did not happen at my parents’ wedding, exactly fifty years before mine, and many things, including the fact of my wedding itself, which were not thought of in 1959, in a country that did not yet exist. But my parents’ wedding was a happy day.