Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  About one thing my father was absolutely firm. He would not live at my grandfather’s house in Rankin Street, but would live in his own house.

  ‘Mahmood is so stubborn,’ Nana would say. ‘Here is this great house, with plenty of room for everyone.’

  There was a shuffling around the room, because quite often, Nana would comment in exactly the opposite way, on how crowded the house was, how impossible it was to live or do any work in it. My mother and father had heard him say this many times, and for this reason my father had insisted on finding a house of his own, in Elephant Road.

  The house in Elephant Road counted for my mother as her first proper home. It was the house in which both her daughters were born. It was a two-storey house of the British time, brick-built and with a small garden in front, a larger garden to the back. My parents lived on the upper floor. The house belonged to a friend of my father, who lived with his family on the ground floor. When the upper floor of the house was offered to my parents, they were very happy to take the opportunity. My father’s friend was, like him, a lawyer, from quite a distinguished family. His brother, for instance, was a senior officer in the Pakistan Air Force, one of a surprising number of Bengalis who at that time served in the forces, run from Karachi. Afterwards, his loyalty came to be tested.

  The services were inconveniently separate from the rest of the house, so that food was always arriving cold or sometimes rained-on. Nobody had replaced the windows since the British had built it, and the small opaque window in the bathroom was stuck in a half-open position. Somebody had opened it and left it in a half-open position all through the monsoon so the wood had swollen and it could not be forced back into a closed position. There was a terrible problem with bedbugs, and only the neighbours on one side could be spoken to at all. Still, my mother and my father loved the house, because it was theirs. Only years later, when they had moved out, did they ever speak about it in a critical way.

  Almost immediately after my mother and father moved to Elephant Road, Nana and Nani moved, as if to prove a point, to the house in Dhanmondi where they lived for the rest of their lives. That was the house I remembered them in; the house close to Nana’s friend Khandekar-nana, the house with the tamarind tree at the front and the mango tree at the back. It was a much larger house than Rankin Street, and I think Nana could not believe that my parents would go on living in their single-storey house in Elephant Road when they could have a couple of rooms in his courtyard house. But he was mistaken. They went on living in Elephant Road. Nana and Nani, and most of the aunts and Pultoo-mama moved to Dhanmondi, where they were all extremely happy, but my mother and father were much happier to be allowed to go on living in the house in Elephant Road, with bedbugs and the bathroom window that would never close properly.

  Nani came to see their house, with Pultoo and Bubbly in their best clothes, and Era and her new husband, living in Dhanmondi with the rest of the family, and Mary and Nadira, Mira and Dahlia. In the end, even Nana came, though his visiting was usually confined to those he had been visiting for years, and he generally expected his family to come to him. Nana enjoyed going round the house and pointing out problems. ‘That tree is too close to the house,’ he said. ‘The roots are growing under the foundation. You will have problems with that.’ Shiri shook her head, thanked Grandfather and afterwards, alone, said to Mahmood that the old man worried about everything, even things that were not his to worry about. And it was a pretty tree, which did no one any harm.

  They all came, but Boro-mama and his wife did not come. They were asked, and said they would come; but they did not come. A year went by; a year and six months. They did not come. And finally somebody must have had a word because they agreed to come. It may have been Nana, who had grown rather fond of Sharmin, and would often exchange a word or two with her in private when he wanted to get things achieved. The day they were supposed to come, my father came home early from his new offices, and put on a new shirt and tie; my mother had put the children in new clothes and forbidden them to eat the cakes she had brought from the confectioner’s; the house had been cleaned from top to bottom, because still they did not really know Sharmin, and were a little in awe of her. The ride from Boro-mama’s house to Elephant Road should not have taken more than twenty minutes. (Back then, you did not worry about traffic in Dacca.) But they waited, on the covered sofas, on their best behaviour, with the houseboy in a new white Panjabi waiting for the rattle of a rickshaw outside, and nothing came.

  In time nervousness gave way to slight crossness. They wondered what could have happened to them. My father said something rather dismissive about Boro-mama; my mother said that he had never been the same since he had married that woman from West Pakistan. My father said, on the contrary, he had always been exactly the same, had always taken advantage of people and never tried to fulfil his obligations. My mother said that it was only an invitation to tea, and it hardly mattered whether he came or not. He could always come another day, if something important had occurred to prevent them coming. My father said, sharply, that he could not conceive of anything of any importance ever occurring in the life of Laddu.

  And so my parents had one of their very rare arguments, although there was nothing in what either of them thought that would bring them to disagreement. Laddu and his wife never came, that afternoon. They were prevented.

  7.

  In Boro-mama’s house, everything was in a state of chaos. Sharmin had discovered that Laddu had been paying attention to a widow of the neighbourhood, a woman of only twenty-eight whose husband had been shot in the street. Laddu had been seen coming out of the block of flats where she lived when he was supposed to be on a domestic errand. For this, she had told him to sleep elsewhere. ‘Where should I sleep?’ Laddu said. The house had only three bedrooms, one Laddu and Sharmin’s, one each for their (now) two children. Downstairs, two rooms were Sharmin’s consulting room and a small waiting room for her patients, and there was only a small sitting room and dining room. ‘Where should I sleep?’ Laddu said again. ‘Should I ask Ahmed to move over and make room for me?’ He was referring to their cook. But in the end Sharmin made him sleep on the sofa in the sitting room, which was now filled with Laddu’s clothes and bedclothes, his film magazines and projects. A small lawnmower sat in the sitting room before the french windows. Laddu had thought he would repair it soon, and it was dripping oil on to the parquet.

  Because Laddu could not sleep on the thin upholstery and rigid slats of the sofas in the sitting room, he was in a constant bad mood; because the sitting room was uninhabitable, and all family life was happening in the dining room or Sharmin’s bedroom, Sharmin was in no less of a bad mood. The subject of the widow had not been raised since that first terrible argument.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Sharmin said, coming into the sitting room, ‘we are going to visit Mahmood and Shiri in their new house this afternoon.’

  ‘I remembered,’ Laddu said, sitting up, tousling his hair and yawning. ‘When are we leaving?’

  ‘My surgery finishes at half past three,’ Sharmin said, ‘so we leave at four. Make sure the children are ready. Their clothes are in the press. Have you a clean shirt? Good. Tell Ahmed to go to the confectioner’s for a box of something to take to Mahmood’s new house. Good. What else? What are you planning to do today? Try to – it doesn’t matter, Laddu.’

  Laddu had met the widow when she was outside her apartment block, struggling with an umbrella that the wind had turned inside out. For a moment, he had thought she was the sister of one of his friends, or had thought, with a scarf blown over her face, that she actually was one of his own sisters – his story varied. He was good with his hands, and had quickly turned the umbrella the right way round, fitting the spines back into their sockets, testing their firm hold in the shelter of the widow’s apartment block until the umbrella was as good as new and would be of use for years. It was shocking, Laddu said, how people could question the motives and behaviour of a respectable widowed woman and,
in any case, he had thought he knew her, or she was his sister – his story varied. But two weeks ago, Laddu had been seen coming out of the widow’s apartment block by his wife. She had been in a rickshaw, returning home. The thin scream of her displeasure had been carried past him, emerging from the caged and painted back of the rickshaw. He had wondered what that sound could be.

  ‘Are the children ready?’ Sharmin said, when she emerged from her consulting room, the last of her patients despatched with a prescription or a kindly word.

  The children were neatly dressed, or placed in a basket for carrying.

  ‘And the sweets?’

  ‘And the rickshaw?’

  Laddu had done everything, the motor-rickshaw and the driver already waiting outside. Between Laddu and Sharmin’s house in Rankin Street and my parents’ house in Elephant Road, it was not possible to walk. It was too far; there was a busy market area. These days, too, it was not always wise to walk in the streets of Dacca.

  With parcels and children, they piled into the back of the rickshaw. The elder child sat on his father’s lap, to the right; the younger, packed into a basket and firmly asleep, rested on his mother’s knees. A white cardboard box of sweets, leaking sugar syrup that turned the corners translucent, sat squarely between them. The two-stroke engine started up, and they began the short journey.

  On every street corner, there was a pair of soldiers, gripping their guns, staring contemptuously into car and rickshaw. Along Dalhousie Street, the soldiers were waving down traffic, or waving it past. On the side of the road, one small platoon had stopped an old woman on her way to market, and made her unload her baskets of vegetables; they were going through her brinjal, dropping them on the road as they went, paying no attention to her screams of protest. ‘Don’t stare,’ Sharmin said to her elder child. ‘Look – there’ – pointing at the other side of the road – ‘is that Mary-aunty? There, I’m sure that’s Mary-aunty, in the pretty pink frock.’

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ Laddu said. He was slow to catch on sometimes. ‘No, that definitely isn’t.’

  Sharmin paid no attention to him. But her attempt at distraction would have been unsuccessful in any case, because in another minute there was the sight of another pair of soldiers at work. They had stopped four country boys – probably brothers, and one of them could not have been more than eight years old – and had put them against the wall, their hands stretched out. The rickshaw was past before they could see what was going to happen to the brothers. Sharmin wondered whether something had happened; whether the army was responding to something. But she knew that this sort of thing had been happening for months. It was not safe to walk in the streets of Dacca, and the threats did not come from badmashes, thugs, mastans, but from the people in uniform. When anything happened in the streets, ever, a small crowd of onlookers with nothing better to do normally gathered, and stood, and stared. It was the natural order of things. Nowadays, when an old woman’s basket of brinjal was turned out on the street, when boys were forced to stand against a wall with their legs spread and wait for humiliation, these were not sights that Dacca wished to stand and stare at. News had reached the people in the streets that they were not safe; they had not, like Sharmin and Laddu, been able to travel in a rickshaw. The best they could do was to hurry past these interesting sights.

  ‘What is this?’ Laddu said, as the rickshaw turned off Elephant Road. There, at the end, was a group of six soldiers in uniform, standing across the road with their arms folded. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Roadblock, sahib,’ the rickshaw driver said. ‘Stay calm, please. Will all be fine.’

  Laddu tightened his grip on the child as the rickshaw driver pulled to one side. Roadblocks were appearing in unexpected places in Dacca. They were searching for weapons, propaganda, anti-state activism. Since the ban on Bengali poetry and music a few months earlier, the definition of these things had expanded. Nobody would leave the house carrying a volume of Tagore, or even the children’s magazine that bore the latest exciting adventures of Feluda the detective. Feluda the detective, who was just then taking all of Bengal by storm, was supposed to be all right to carry about, but you really never knew. Most people would not take written material of any sort in Bengali out of the house. My grandfather had gone as far as to seal up his library and hide it in the cellar of the house in Dhanmondi.

  The soldiers at the roadblock came over and peered into the back; one, two children, two adults, and a box. ‘Get out,’ he said. He had a broad, dark face, his expression betraying nothing. He was Bengali, in another’s uniform.

  Laddu and the elder child got out of the rickshaw one side; Sharmin, carrying her baby, placed her box of sweets on the seat of the rickshaw, and got out on the other side. A wave of the rifle, and the rickshaw driver, too, got out. He leant against his cab, fumbling for cheroots. His bored expression suggested this was not the first time this had happened to him today.

  ‘You – stay here,’ the man who seemed to be the commanding officer said, taking over from the soldier who had ordered them out. Bengali was not the first language of this officer, and it took Laddu a moment to understand that he was telling him to come over to the side of the road. ‘Here! Stay here!’ Laddu and Sharmin walked over. The elder child was holding tightly to his father’s hand. ‘What are you doing with this woman – you? Speak!’

  ‘This is my wife,’ Laddu said. He had said that with pride many times before. He was proud to be married to a beautiful and clever woman, and had often enjoyed introducing her to his friends, family, to his acquaintances when he met them in the park or the street. Now he said it not with pride but with amazement. Of course Sharmin was his wife.

  The commanding officer looked from Laddu, dark in the face, to pale Sharmin. ‘Wife?’ he said, with a jeer, and then broke into Urdu. Laddu spoke his wife’s language only a little – it was typical of him not to have paid attention in school, and not to have acquired much skill in it afterwards. Sharmin intervened. ‘Yes,’ she repeated, in her pretty Bengali, ‘this man is my husband. We are visiting his sister, who lives in this road.’

  Before Laddu could understand, a soldier had taken his small son away from him, leading him back to the rickshaw, bending down to say something kindly and reassuring to the little boy. The commanding officer said something in Urdu again; it sounded not like a question, but like a sardonic comment. Sharmin said nothing. Laddu looked at her, but she sternly shook her head, growing pink. Whatever the comment had been, she would not translate it for her husband.

  ‘Why do you marry this woman?’ the commanding officer said, in his learnt Bengali. ‘Tell me. Why do you not marry someone from your own sort?’

  ‘That is not your business,’ Laddu said.

  ‘You must stay with your own sort,’ the officer said. He smiled with bright, wet teeth. Laddu looked at his soldiers: they were all, like him, Bengali, and none made any sign of disapproval or shame.

  ‘My wife is a doctor,’ he said. ‘You are insulting her now.’

  ‘Laddu,’ Sharmin said in warning.

  ‘You must not speak to people like this with no reason,’ Laddu said, his voice growing in heat. His sense of his own worth was being jeered at by a stranger, a Lahore thug in uniform who could hardly understand what was said to him. ‘I will make a complaint about this treatment.’

  ‘A complaint,’ the commanding officer said wonderingly. Perhaps the word was unfamiliar to him. In a leisurely way, he walked over to the rickshaw. He reached into the back, ignoring the driver, and fetched the box of sweets. ‘What’s that?’ he said, presenting the box of sweets to Sharmin. She opened the ten-inch-square white box: Bengali sweets, twelve by twelve, alternating like a chessboard. ‘Give it to me,’ he said, and she handed it over. He took out one, two, three; he dropped them back into the box carelessly, having seen there was nothing beneath them, not even a confectioner’s invoice. He took a fourth, from the middle of the box, and bit into it. He grimaced, and spat the sweet out on to th
e road. Sharmin and Laddu said nothing, in indignation. The commanding officer handed the open box to his second in command. Not understanding, the soldier moved as if to hand it back to her, carelessly. But the officer in charge made an impatient move, and deliberately knocked the box and its contents to the street. The bright and glistening sweets scattered across the mud, and he stamped on them, three times.

  ‘How dare you?’ Laddu began, taking a step forward, but at the same time, the commanding officer gave a brief, certain nod. His second in command raised his rifle butt, and hit Laddu very hard on the side of his head. Laddu fell to his knees with a roar of pain, and the soldier, once more, hit him between the shoulder blades with the rifle butt. Laddu’s face was in the dirt of the street, pressed into the mud and the scattering of fine, delicious sweets, and he saw a boot descending as he shut his eyes.

  ‘That is not your wife,’ the officer in charge said in a level voice. ‘That must not be your wife.’ He looked at Sharmin, screaming, and, with a thoughtful air, called her a terrible name. The small platoon stood back from the scene, and shortly Laddu, with Sharmin’s help, stood up shakily and went back to the rickshaw. His beautiful, clean white shirt was smeared with mud and sugar and blood. Their small son had watched everything, and was burying his wailing head in a soldier’s thigh-muscle. All the time the rickshaw driver had not altered his position, and had continued to smoke his cheroot without comment or protest.

  8.

  My grandfather, about this time, believing that the ban on Bengali poetry and music would soon allow the soldiers of the Pakistani state to force their way into private homes and destroy private possessions had given orders for the library to be parcelled up, along with the best of the pictures, Nadira’s harmonium, the collection of music and even four or five bowls. Nana had a beautiful library; much of it went back to his student days in Calcutta when, he said, he would always prefer to buy a book he really wanted to read rather than eat dinner. (Mr Khandekar-nana said that he usually insisted on eating dinner anyway, sometimes at the expense of Mr Khandekar-nana, who was not so much of a bibliophile in youth.) Nana made sure the parcels were well sealed against damp and insects; he had them placed in wool-lined tea chests, and sealed again; he had them taken down to the cellar of the house in Dhanmondi, and when his books, and pictures, and bowls, and music, and his daughter’s instrument were safely stowed, he decided to have the door to the cellar plastered over, so that it would simply look like a single-roomed cellar beneath the house, with a few odds and ends that had been discarded, and a few broken chairs piled up against the false plaster wall. Rustum did all of this at my grandfather’s command. My grandfather did not carry out any of these precautions in secret, but asked the servants of the house to pack and parcel and plaster. When the task was done, the house looked bare and dull, with nothing but law books on the shelves of my grandfather’s study.