Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  Somewhere in the picture of my father with his male relations there is the dark face of Boro-mama, Big-uncle. My grandfather had sent Laddu and his new wife Sharmin an invitation. It had been discovered, after my father had made an approach to them, that the two were living with Sharmin’s sister while Sharmin completed her medical degree. Nani was indignant that her eldest son had, apparently, absconded from her house, not to make his own way in life but to go to live off somebody else; not even his wife, since she was studying, but his wife’s sister, of whom nothing was known. She kept her comments to herself, and to her daughters, her women friends and neighbours; Nana, who may have thought some of the same things, said nothing whatever against Laddu’s domestic circumstances. My parents’ wedding would be the perfect opportunity for Laddu to introduce his new wife into the family circle, and to allow himself to be forgiven.

  Laddu apologized, but his wife Sharmin was expecting a child, and would not be able to come. However, he was happy to come. Looking at the photograph, in which Boro-mama stands in a charcoal suit between grandfathers, I try to distinguish some awkwardness, resentment or embarrassment in his face. But he has exactly the same formal, sober, puzzled expression that every Bengali seems to have assumed whenever he was faced with a camera in the 1950s.

  2.

  After the wedding, my mother and father travelled to Barisal, and my father began his professional life.

  The experience was harder for my mother than for my father. My father had grown up in the country. He was used to a quiet existence, and an unsophisticated one. He did not mind a small circle of acquaintances, and did not long for novelty or excitement. He had, too, while studying in Dacca, learnt about self-reliance. These were the characteristics that my mother had admired in her cousin when she agreed to marry him. She was the least extrovert of her sisters, and had never thought of herself as the product of a big city, fashionable or forward in any way. But when she found herself living in a district like Barisal, she discovered that she had, after all, the imprint of some metropolitan habits.

  Barisal was a port town, sleepy and remote. Much of it was built of red brick, flushed and rather angry-looking; the largest building in the city was the post office, a palace of almost military grandeur, which in more important towns the British would have faced with marble. The estuary front was busy with rusting launches and fishing boats, coming to and fro, puffing black smoke into the air, the water made slick by their discharges of oil. The ferry port was a constant host to those families, their luggage piled up like great clusters of grapes on the quayside, who are always and will always be transporting themselves from one side of Bengal to the other, as long as Bengal exists. There was something greasy and rusting about the whole town.

  In those days, you travelled by rocket launch from Dacca. The government accommodation provided for assistant district commissioners was furnished, so my mother and father travelled with only a few things to begin their married life. A case, between a suitcase and a trunk in size, took my mother’s clothing – she knew she would never be able to buy good-quality silk in a place like Barisal – with a box of jewellery buried deep inside. Another case held their books – they had packed separately, but Mahmood had left his books at Nana’s house when he moved out, so it seemed sensible to combine his small professional library with my mother’s books, a few novels and anthologies of poetry, and pack them all together. My father’s clothes and possessions filled a single brown suitcase, and on top of the pile on the back of the porter’s wagon, lumbering towards the port and the rocket launch that would take them to their new home in Barisal, was my grandparents’ wedding gift: a fine pier-glass in a gold frame, wrapped in layers of cardboard to survive the journey. Other gifts, such as the dining table and chairs, which the uncles had clubbed together to provide, had stayed in Dacca for the time being. Nobody thought that my mother and father would remain in a place like Barisal for very long.

  The area was remote and rudimentary. There were, it was said, tigers still roaming the countryside, and one nearby had taken a villager only months before. My mother had only ever seen a tiger in the Calcutta zoo. Many towns in the district were cut off by road from civilization for weeks on end during the rainy season. As the roads that ran along ridges between paddy-fields could be washed away, even when the waters receded there could remain weeks more of isolation while they were rebuilt. Of course, as my father said, during the rainy season, Dacca was often cut off as well. My mother wondered what Dacca was cut off from. It seemed quite sufficient in itself. Whether it was raining or not, Barisal seemed far away and strange, connected only by the water that, for much of the year, isolated other settlements. Shiri regularly thought, during the three years she and my father spent in Barisal, of the heroines of Chekhov, longing for Moscow: he was a writer she had often read without ever quite understanding before.

  My mother had expected to live more simply in Barisal than she had in her father’s house in Rankin Street. When the porters drew up in front of the ill-kept red-brick bungalow in a line of similar bungalows, however, she realized she had made a mistake in her mind. Her notion of simplicity was of a quality opposed to ornateness or, she realized, the processes of accretion, which had happened in her father’s house. Despite moves, war and forced emigration, her father’s house had comfortably acquired possessions, furniture, adornments in large numbers. But so, too, it seemed, had the furnished semi-detached bungalow. The caretaker, once found and hailed by the carter, let them in, and the pair of them carried in their three cases.

  Once the cases had been deposited in the hallway, and the brownish, flickering electric light had been turned on, it was clear that no preparations had been made for a newly-wed couple. The house was filled with furniture – the rejected, colossal mahogany sideboards, caryatid-supported sofas and tallboys, polished brown and malevolent as giant horrid beetles – that had been out of fashion for forty years at least. Every piece would, on its own, have been too large for the modest rooms; three or four of the hardwood behemoths made an impassable labyrinth. The sad, unchosen selection was very different from her father’s warm, mismatched rooms. In the weeks to come, they would discover that the bungalow had been left uninhabited for a year and a half. It had slowly become the repository, among all their neighbours, of any inherited furniture, perfectly good in itself but no longer needed, especially those pieces of giant furniture, which had an aura of evil, rendered in mahogany. Mahmood had lived very simply, with no real attention to comfort or elegance, all his life. But even he seemed dismayed by the bungalow; even he could tell the difference between the warm, damp garden smell of his father-in-law’s house, with its easy comfort and soothing lights, and this low, dank place, green mould covering half the back wall and sharp carved mahogany ornamentation, deliberately barking your shins at every turn.

  The next morning Shiri woke, and went in the early-morning light through her overcrowded rooms. Outside, in what she thought was her garden, a man was squatting, folded up like a fan, gazing down the muddy road as if at the dawn, waiting for something to happen.

  The neighbours soon made themselves known. Like Mahmood, they all worked for the government in Islamabad, filing reports in Urdu and supplying information at their remote superiors’ requests. There was little variety. Shiri had never had much of a taste for society; her social life was led among her sisters, a few friends and the daughters of neighbours. In her family, she was a byword for her reluctance to leave home and pay a call. She had never loved the passing of compliments over the tea table and, before her marriage, had never felt concern that Mahmood might deprive her of her very ordinary social life.

  But, very soon, she felt first a vague dissatisfaction and then a positive dismay at the limits of the world in which she found herself. Around her was no social variety but the families of her husband’s new colleagues. They had come to Barisal from all parts of Pakistan – not just from the Bengali-speaking side, from Dacca and the surrounding provinces, but some,
too, from the Urdu-speaking part of the country, the western segment. The men had been posted here, and brought their families. Those families, living for the most part in the bungalows around, were the only society to be had. It did not seem possible to gain access to people who had been born, had grown up and remained in Barisal. And so my mother, who had never felt addicted to social variety, found herself in a world too restricted even for her.

  At tea parties, among the mothers and wives of Mahmood’s colleagues, Shiri sat quietly. ‘We have had to let our girl go,’ one woman said. ‘When I counted the sacks of rice, she had been feeding her whole family on our supplies for months.’

  ‘They are so dishonest,’ another woman, a Pakistani, said, ‘these people. One took an entire bag of chillies – he thought I would not notice. It is really extraordinary.’

  Shiri thought she would contribute. ‘At home,’ she said, ‘my friend is great friends with Sheikh Mujib’s daughter, Hasina, and she tells a story about a tremendous fuss Hasina made once about the very same thing. She was expecting fifteen sacks of chilli from their estate, and what arrived were only thirteen. She made such a fuss – as if she did not have other things to interest herself in than two missing sacks of chilli.’

  But there was a shuffling, an inspection, and a moving on. What was it? Did they not know who Sheikh Mujib was? Did they think there was nothing so very funny in a complaint about servants’ honesty? Shiri looked about her, at the young mothers and wives, three of them pregnant; she heard herself beginning to tell the story again, but this time as a story of motherhood, disloyal servants, and the difficulties of living in Barisal. She had not married Mahmood for this.

  My father had got to know his colleagues first and, when he returned home at night, he was able to tell her the names and habits of those colleagues. It was like an interesting story to his new wife. And as the weeks passed, she found herself meeting the families of the people that Mahmood had talked about and, in the end, meeting them at home, or in their homes. But now she had got there, everything seemed so hierarchical, and she had to learn who could invite whom first. But in time she got the hang of it, just as the walls were scrubbed and repainted, and most of the furniture cleared out. She and my father made a go of it. It would not be for ever. Four months after they had moved to Barisal, my mother was pregnant. It would be with my elder brother, Zahid.

  3.

  Even in 1960 it was possible to write a letter from Barisal to Dacca. It was not a swift process. To travel there oneself meant a long journey in rusty old ferries. Even with the best organization and a purposeful will, it would take days rather than hours. And the same was true of a letter, which in any case had to travel in precisely the same way.

  When the letter from my mother to Nani turned up in Rankin Street, probably nobody considered how it had had to travel. If they had thought of the ferry, and the heavy plummeting and plunging of its journey, the request would not have been made; the answer would have been different. There was, too, the question of travelling along the roads of the town, in vehicles that probably had iron-rimmed wheels. It was reckless of my mother to think of travelling over such roads in such a way while pregnant. But in the end all was well: my brother Zahid was born at the normal time. Life is full of such decisions, and turns that come to no harm; moments of normality, where no story springs and nothing goes wrong.

  The letters were laid out on my grandfather’s desk each morning. My grandmother liked to go through them, and separate them into correspondence from clients, and personal family letters. The letters came in one bundle, and Grandmother had to pick out her private correspondence from the general pile. That morning’s pile included my mother’s weekly letter: she was a punctual correspondent.

  My grandmother opened the letter at the desk with the creamy old ivory paperknife, and stood in the study, reading in the slatted light. Alone, she smiled, smoothed out the page on the green leather surface of the desk; she let herself be alone with the knowledge for just one moment. Her other daughters were downstairs: Mary was minding little Bubbly; Era and Mira could be heard talking quietly, intermittently – they were both reading and passing comments as they went.

  My grandmother opened the study door carefully. Her chappals clapped against her feet as she carefully went downstairs. She measured her tread. There was no reason to hurry with her news. In the salon, playing with little Bubbly, along with Mary, was Laddu’s wife Sharmin. When she did not have classes, she quite often came round to her mother-in-law’s house, these days. She made herself useful, and welcome.

  ‘There is a letter from Shiri, from Barisal,’ Nani said, to the room in general. ‘She says she is having a baby.’

  ‘Shiri, a mother,’ Mira said, jumping up and dropping her work on the floor. ‘She was only married six months ago. How can someone have a baby when she is only just married?’

  ‘Just married! Don’t be such a baby yourself,’ Era said, setting her book down. ‘Such exciting news. Is Mahmood excited too?’

  ‘It is so strange to think of them being mother and father,’ Nadira said. She had been upstairs, and had followed her mother down; she stood, posing, at the foot of the stairs, her arm outstretched along the banister. ‘They will be so strict. What clever, dark little babies they are going to have. Sharmin, you have never met my sister Shiri. You don’t know what they are like. I can’t imagine her having a baby.’

  ‘No,’ Sharmin said. She had a charming, unusual accent; it had made her sisters-in-law smile at first, and then, of course, it was just Sharmin’s way of talking. ‘No, I have never met her. But of course I have heard you all talk about her, and I have met Mahmood. I know what he is like. I would have thought that he would make a very good father, Nadira. Do you think that you are going to make a good aunt?’ She heaved herself upwards; she herself was heavily pregnant, and her own confinement could only be days or weeks away.

  Nadira’s eyes grew big. Taking small, graceful, half-running steps, she went to the mirror in the hallway to inspect herself. ‘I had not thought of that,’ she said. ‘Me – an aunt.’

  ‘But you will be an aunt,’ my grandmother said. ‘And so will Mira, and so will Dahlia, and even baby Bubbly will be an aunt.’

  ‘How can Bubbly be anyone’s aunt?’ Nadira said. ‘She is only just born herself. She can hardly walk. She is no use to anyone. How can she possibly be allowed to be an aunt?’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Nani said, ‘she is going to be the baby’s aunt. Now, are you going to sit quietly and listen to what else your sister has to say in her letter?’

  It may seem strange that my aunts grew excited at the news that they were about to become aunts at the birth of my brother when, by their side, their sister-in-law was also heavily pregnant. They were not being rude. The reason for this was that in Bengali, there is one word for an aunt of a brother’s child – the aunt of Laddu’s son, who when he was born was called Ejaj – and there is another word for the aunt of your sister’s child, such as my brother Zahid, whose impending birth was causing so much excitement (khala and fupu). And, of course, to be the aunt of Sharmin’s child was quite a different excitement and a different name altogether, which had been got over with and forgotten about. We like to have as many family excitements as possible, we Bengalis.

  My grandmother read the letter out loud. In it, my mother complained rather about Barisal; she said that she did not much like the house they were in, which she had said before, and that Mahmood was getting on well at work with his colleagues, where he was much respected, but that it was difficult to find good servants and that the arguments with the cook had continued, and they had had to find a new maid-of-all-work when the old one had proved dirty. (The cook had turned out to be the master of only three dishes, which came about with terrible monotony, and resisted any suggestion from my mother about a fourth dish – her eventual departure in a rage, an hour before my father’s superior and his wife arrived for dinner, was another of my mother’s few stories of their l
ife in Barisal. Not that the cook’s three dishes were very delicious – the food, my mother said, in Barisal, was simply inedible.) None of these complaints was new. Still, she went on, with all these difficulties, they did have some good news, which she would not hold back from them further: she and Mahmood were to have a baby, in six months’ time. And this was fresh to my mother’s sisters.

  (‘You see?’ Era said to Mira. ‘She is not having her baby now. It is coming in six months’ time. Now do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I think I understand,’ Mira said.)

  They were very happy at this news, my mother wrote, but it was impossible to imagine having the baby in Barisal. The facilities were so wretched, the local doctor old and ignorant and set in his ways. And my mother could not imagine having her first baby without her mother and father and sisters around.

  ‘Sharmin, do you think . . . ?’ my grandmother said.

  ‘I think,’ Sharmin said slowly, ‘I think she might not exaggerate. Some of these country doctors! And perhaps the hospital in Barisal has not been renovated since the British time – since it was built, even. I am afraid that the government in Karachi does not always think of hospitals in East Pakistan when they have money to spend on improving matters. Sometimes mothers-to-be worry needlessly. There is no doubt about that. For myself’ – she gestured downwards generally – ‘I would not want to have my baby in Barisal.’