Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Well, that is just what Shiri says,’ my grandmother said.

  ‘I could very easily look up the mother-and-child mortality rates in Barisal,’ Sharmin said.

  There was a general sucking of teeth, and Mary even made a warding-off sign. Sharmin was a practical, intelligent scientist: she sometimes forgot that she was not talking to other practical, intelligent scientists, but to my aunts.

  ‘Shiri is in no doubt,’ my grandmother said. ‘She is going to come back and live here before the baby is born. So that is settled. She says that Mahmood will come when the baby is born, and then go back to Barisal, and she and the baby will go back and join them later. I wonder what they will call the dear dark little thing? I am sure it is going to be terribly clever. It will be doing sums in its crib.’

  And that was insightful and prophetic of my grandmother, because, indeed, my brother Zahid was to grow up to be a scientist, and to be famous in the family for being able to do very complicated long division in his head before he was ten, and for asking his teachers if they could give him some more sums and equations to do, and sucking his pencil sagely, and for explaining to Nani how she should find out the height of the tamarind tree in front of her house with a protractor and a piece of weighted string, and so on and so forth in the way of very clever children of clever parents, which my parents certainly were.

  ‘A very clever baby, however dark it is going to be. Once Shiri comes back to Dacca,’ Era said, ‘she is never going to go back to Barisal. She will make Mahmood come and work in Dacca, too. She loves the bright lights too much.’

  At this absurdity of Era’s, all her sisters giggled behind their hands until Sharmin, who had never met my mother, had to ask what was so amusing. My mother was certainly a modern, capable person, who took charge of business. In that sense she was the product of a city. But she was not someone who could be thought of as loving the bright lights, as Era put it. However, Era was right in her diagnosis, and after the birth of my brother, Ma only briefly went back to Barisal, and for ever afterwards talked about it with a shudder. At six months pregnant, she endured the rattle and shake of the journey back home on those terrible rust-and-steel launches, banging along the rivers like empty biscuit tins, the stench of their black smoke and the foul stink of the water as the boat ran by the tanneries turning her green and making her puke discreetly into a bucket constantly for twenty hours. But, in the event, no harm came to her or to my brother Zahid.

  4.

  I know what the wooing-and-courtship-and-engagement of my mother and father was like: it must have been very much like the way they behaved to each other when they had been married for decades. They never lost the air of formal respect for each other. My mother had respect for my father because he was so hardworking and ambitious a man. When he attained his ambitions, it did not increase her respect, since she had always had trust in him. My father had respect for my mother because of whose daughter she was: he always felt himself, to some degree, the poor cousin. To the end of their lives, they never used affectionate names for each other. They always addressed each other with the word ‘you’.

  But I do not know what the wooing-and-courtship-and engagement of Boro-mama and Sharmin was like. It was carried on away from the eyes of his family, and of hers; under umbrellas, in the rain, during walks in the public gardens and in cinemas, where they would arrive separately and then sit together. They married in secret, and went to live with Sharmin’s sister, whom none of us ever really knew, while Sharmin was finishing her medical degree. So I do not know what they were like at the beginning of their marriage either. All I know is what they were like when my mother returned from Barisal.

  ‘Sometimes a baby is born with two heads,’ Nadira said, in the salon at Rankin Street.

  ‘That must be useful,’ Dahlia said.

  ‘Useful, how?’ Sharmin said. She hooked her fingers underneath the blouse of her sari, tugged and straightened, pulled a swatch of loose sari material, the anchal, as we call it, across her belly. All her sisters-in-law were there, apart from Bubbly, who was having her afternoon nap upstairs. ‘How can it be useful to have two heads?’

  ‘You could use one to look forward, and the other to look back,’ Nadira said. ‘Or you could talk with one head and read with the other one. Or, in the train, you could look out of the window and read the map at the same time. It would be wonderful to have two heads.’

  ‘Your baby is going to be so lucky,’ Era said.

  ‘Lucky, how?’ Sharmin said.

  ‘Why, if it is born with two heads,’ Nadira said, straightfacedly, ‘it would really be a gift, if you think about it.’

  ‘We saw a calf born with two heads,’ Dahlia said, meaning herself and Nadira. ‘It was in the village. Nobody thought that was very useful. They killed it.’

  ‘Pay attention, now,’ Mira said to Dahlia seriously. They were both sitting on the sofa, Mira showing Dahlia a stitching trick in needlework. ‘Look – you see, I make a kind of loop here, and leave it, not too tight-tight, not too slack, and then – ah – yes. That’s it. You see? Now you try.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Nadira said. ‘They did kill it, didn’t they? But nobody would kill a dear little baby just because it had two heads.’

  ‘My baby isn’t going to have two heads,’ Sharmin said composedly. ‘Of that I can be sure.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ Mary said. ‘There is a picture in the encyclopedia of the famous Siamese twins. They were born linked together, at the chest, and they married a pair of sisters and died within three hours of each other at the end of a long life.’

  ‘The end of two long lives, you mean,’ Nadira said.

  ‘The end of two long lives, I suppose,’ Mary said. ‘Well, they had two heads.’

  ‘Two heads? But that is not the same, Mary,’ Dahlia said. ‘I don’t think you quite understand. Those were twins who were joined together. They had two bodies as well as two heads. That is not the same thing at all as Sharmin’s baby, if it is born with two heads. That is more like the calf in the village that had to be killed.’

  ‘Babies are never born with two heads,’ Sharmin said, without raising her voice. ‘Or hardly ever. And I am sure that my baby is not going to be born with two heads.’

  ‘Well,’ Nadira said, ‘it would be awfully sad if that happened.’ And she cast a dramatic sigh. She got up, a graceful, glowing twelve-year-old in a floral, aquamarine cotton frock with puffed sleeves, and went over to the harmonium. She doodled a few notes, then sang a few more. She had a sweet, tuneful voice: her father, in company, would often ask her to perform, her sisters more rarely.

  ‘Sing the song about the flower,’ Era said. Nadira ignored her, doodling on the keyboard and singing in a half-voice, as if thinking through the music.

  ‘The thing about a baby – an unusual baby –’ Nadira said.

  ‘Stop teasing poor Sharmin,’ Mira said. She had been occupied, her head down over the embroidery, letting Dahlia follow the sequence of steps with the needle and the bobbin, wrapped tightly with pale blue thread. ‘Really, Nadira – stop it. There will be no baby with two heads. Sharmin’s baby will be simply perfect, you wait and see.’

  ‘Simply perfect,’ Dahlia echoed.

  Nadira turned round from the harmonium, breaking off her song. ‘But very pale. Look how pale Sharmin is, even sitting next to Era.’

  ‘Yes, she’s sitting next to me, and still looks pale, it’s true,’ Era said complacently. ‘Until Sharmin came, I really was the palest of everyone. It must be so strange, everyone in West Pakistan being so pale, even paler than I am.’

  ‘And Laddu has always been dark,’ Mary said. ‘Mama thought he was a monster when he was born, she told me once.’

  ‘But he’s very handsome now,’ Mira said.

  Era patted Sharmin’s arm encouragingly. ‘Even if he is dark. No one thought he was a monster.’

  ‘But, Mira,’ Dahlia said, ‘you weren’t there at the time. How could you possib
ly know?’

  ‘Yes, they will have such dark little babies,’ Nadira said. ‘They will take after Laddu, I am sure of it. Such dear, dear, black little babies.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Mary said, looking up; she pulled the thread tight, held it up to her teeth, and bit to sever it. ‘Sharmin, don’t listen to them. They are all very silly and rude.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ Sharmin said. ‘And it may well be true – Laddu is dark, and we say, you know, that the first baby takes after its father, and if it is a boy, it takes still more after its father. So the baby is bound to be dark, poor little thing. Dark babies are always full of energy, and I know this one will be – I can feel him kicking me all the time.’

  ‘Doesn’t that feel strange?’ Dahlia said. ‘A little stranger kicking you from the inside?’

  ‘We can kick you from the outside, if you want to know what it feels like,’ Nadira said. ‘There is no problem whatsoever about that.’

  5.

  My father stayed in Rankin Street until my brother Zahid was born. He was born upstairs, in my grandparents’ bedroom. My aunts sat downstairs in a line, handing cups of tea and biscuits to my father, who was quite calm. He was always quite calm. My mother’s sisters reacted in different ways to the noises coming from upstairs, the hurrying up and down of the midwife and the house servants.

  ‘I remember when you were born, Dahlia,’ Era said. ‘You were so quick arriving, the doctors had hardly got here when there you were, crying.’

  ‘But Pultoo – what an age he took!’ Mary said. Pultoo, who was five, had been hustled away for the day with his father, taken to the law chambers to sit in a corner and play quietly with pen nibs and paper. He could always be distracted in this way: and it was thought it was not good for small boys to overhear the noises of childbirth. Whether because it would distress and frighten them, or because they would prove themselves nuisances, I do not know. But Pultoo reached his teenage years, as I did and my brother too, believing that babies were what happened after you were taken as a great treat to Nani’s law chambers, playing all afternoon with stationery, inkwells and the junior clerks. With five married sisters and a sister-in-law by the time Pultoo was in his teenage years, the day-at-Papa’s followed by a return home to find a new tight-swaddled and squashed-face niece-or-nephew became a regular, sometimes twice-annual event, like a festival.

  ‘Pultoo surprised Mama, even,’ Era said. ‘She said she grew bored with waiting for him.’

  ‘But it was so cold,’ Nadira said. ‘It was December, and we were all sitting over the fire in sweaters and coats, remember? Papa said he had never known it so cold. Pultoo was nice and warm, and he didn’t want to come out.’

  All her sisters hid their laughter behind their hands. ‘Don’t talk such nonsense,’ Mary said, on account of my father. But my father paid no attention to anything his sisters-in-law said on any occasion, and he just passed his cup to Mary, who poured him another cup of tea.

  ‘What are you going to do, Mahmood, after the baby is born?’ Nadira said.

  ‘Well, I shall be the baby’s father, I suppose,’ my father said. ‘But that is not a full-time occupation. I expect I shall go on doing just what I have been doing, but with the addition of a small extra person.’

  ‘What did you mean?’ Mira asked Nadira.

  ‘I meant whether he and Shiri and the dear little baby are going to stay in Dacca,’ Nadira said. ‘I so want to see the dear little baby every day.’

  ‘You can see dear little baby Bubbly every day,’ Mira said. ‘And you never seem all that interested in her.’

  ‘Oh, baby Bubbly,’ Nadira said. ‘Bubbly is getting old and fat and argumentative. One of these days, she is going to go to school, you mark my words. She’s no fun at all.’

  ‘Well, there’s Sharmin’s baby,’ Mira said. ‘We go to see pretty little Ejaj once a week. Won’t he do?’

  ‘Laddu’s child,’ Nadira said, superfluously. ‘I don’t count that the same at all.’

  ‘Can I help you to anything, Mahmood?’ Mary said.

  ‘I would like some rosogollai, please,’ my father said, and my aunt passed him the plate.

  ‘Did Shiri ever succeed in finding a replacement cook, after you had to get rid of the old one?’ Mary said. She set the plate down on the yellow teak table and, with a symmetrical gesture of her two forefingers, smoothed the two black wings of her hair behind her large, pointed, elfin ears.

  ‘Well, she was obliged to take on a boy as a temporary replacement,’ my father said, continuing very equably with social conversation while his younger sisters-in-law tried to settle his future. ‘You see, when they heard that we were returning to Dacca for four months shortly—’

  ‘But I just don’t see,’ Nadira said, ‘why Shiri and Mahmood can’t return to Dacca, now that they are going to have a baby.’

  ‘Well, people don’t stop having babies simply because they have to live in Barisal,’ Era said. ‘And that is where Mahmood’s job is. He has to be there.’

  ‘But I want them to come back,’ Nadira said. ‘I want to see the dear little baby every day. Mahmood, can’t you leave Shiri here? I’m sure it’s bad for her to travel with a baby.’

  ‘Travel with a baby?’ Era said, alarmed.

  ‘What is that noise?’ Mary said, and it was true: the quality of the noise from upstairs had changed. At the foot of the stairs, a woman stood, smiling: it was the midwife, and though she saw this every day, hundreds of times a year, she had not forgotten that this might be the most important day of the family’s lives. And my father’s composure now proved itself as thin as a wafer, because he rose with a look of transcendence and anxiety on his face. The midwife said that he had a son: she asked him to come upstairs to his wife and child.

  ‘Is that the baby?’ Nadira said. ‘Has he really come? Am I an aunt now?’

  6.

  A week after my brother Zahid was born, my father went back to Barisal. My grandfather in person went down with him to the Dacca port at Sadarghat, where the tottering white four-storeyed launches to Barisal and other river towns departed. This was not a common thing to happen. My grandfather left his daughter and baby grandson at home and ceremonially escorted Mahmood to the port. There was something in his behaviour that expressed some retrospective dissatisfaction with his first grandson, Laddu’s child. But my grandfather was always the sort of person who would enjoy the children of his daughters more. And Laddu had married a woman from West Pakistan in secret, even though the child was born when they had been admitted once more to the family. In time my grandfather would be reconciled to Laddu and Sharmin and their children, and would actually take their youngest son, Shibli, into his house to be raised entirely by himself and Nani. But for the moment, Nana would not have walked Laddu to the end of the road to get a rickshaw. There was a grand and beneficent quality about his taking my father to the Barisal launch on this occasion. It was something to do with the new baby Zahid, sucking contentedly in the warmth of his grandfather’s house in Rankin Street, turning his face with interest to the light falling through the mango leaves, or just idly basking with cross-faced assurance in the constant love, curiosity and excitement of his six aunts. The six aunts, particularly the smaller ones, were constantly waking him up from sleep to try to make him give them a smile and a kiss at this time of his life. They wanted him to confirm their belief that he was very dark and very clever, which Zahid did by blowing a bubble on his own and giving them a stern look at being woken up.

  The aunts and my grandmother and mother assumed that Nana’s surprising offer meant that he had something he needed to say to my father, perhaps shortly before saying goodbye to him. This was my grandfather’s way on occasion: to give out a firm instruction to someone when he knew they would not have time to think anything over and respond to it. If this was so, no one knew what Nana said to Mahmood, in the cool high back of the Morris Oxford he drove at the time. I can see my father’s face between the arches on the ferry�
�s upper deck, thoughtful to the point of puzzlement; I can see Nana, the best-dressed man on the quay in his white shirt and charcoal-grey suit, giving a single confident wave upwards and turning back between earth-scented bales of jute and tea, walking through the noise of the crowd. There he goes; stepping among the squashed fruit of the market at the gates of the old pink waterfront palace, past the line of hole-in-the-wall barbers’ shops, the paper-bag manufacturers with their antique scales, the small engine shops that so frightened me as a child with their glimpse into a world of black oil and obscured metal intricacies. He walks among noise and filth, ignoring the blandishments of the rickshaw-wallahs with the unimpeded step of someone who knows he has given clear and easy instructions.

  If there were, in fact, any instructions, nobody knew. But in three months, when Zahid was smiling, my mother broke her sisters’ hearts by following her husband back to Barisal. There was no unwillingness in her departure, though everyone had heard her complaints about the place. It became clear that my grandfather had extracted a promise from Mahmood to come back to Dacca within the year, with their baby.

  That is what happened, but when they came back, the excitement of my aunts over Zahid had subsided. And soon they themselves began to marry; and Boro-mama’s wife Sharmin had another child; and the children of aunts began to be born; and sons-in-law started to move in, because Nani liked to have her daughters about her, and even the daughters who had their own houses tended to come back for dinner and weekends; and soon Nana began to complain that the house in Rankin Street was no longer big enough.

  By that time my mother and father had returned to Dacca; my mother was pregnant again with my elder sister. Perhaps under instruction from my grandfather, my father had given up working for the government service. He had, instead, started to study to be a lawyer, which was the profession he held for the rest of his life. My grandfather took him under his wing, as the saying goes. He introduced him to his colleagues and friends, to people like Mr Khandekar-nana and the rest; he found him a set of chambers and passed on clients to my father, shaking his head when Father took on pro bono work; he gave him useful professional advice, which my father took with a good grace. And soon my father’s name began to be known, and my mother no longer had to live in Barisal, but lived among the people she had always known and within walking distance of her sisters. My mother was very happy about this.