Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  ‘We can still sing at home – quietly, with the windows closed,’ Altaf said. ‘And there is your aunt’s money, which you could live on.’

  Amit’s aunt, the year before, had died in Cox’s Bazaar, leaving half her little all to Amit. Some division had come between her and her son, darkly hinted at in letters from Cox’s Bazaar, and the legacy, Amit and Altaf had concluded, was by way of a posthumous point-scoring. The money had not been touched: Amit believed that his cousin would come demanding its restitution.

  ‘No,’ Amit said. ‘Singing at home quietly with the windows closed, that is no good. That is shameful, Altaf.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ Altaf said.

  ‘I can travel to Calcutta,’ Amit said. ‘I can take my things and go to India. I still have relations there. They will find a corner of a room for me, and I can make a living of some sort. And there is my aunt’s money, as you say. It is safer for people of my sort there.’

  ‘It may not get any worse,’ Altaf said. ‘It may not get any worse at the school. This man may have achieved everything he set out to achieve, and now things will start to improve. Please, Amit, don’t do anything just yet. In six months things may be completely different.’

  ‘Yes,’ Amit said, in his lucid way. ‘That is what I am afraid of. And if I leave now, it will be possible to make my way to Calcutta. But in six months’ time, who knows? And who knows what the mob and their rulers will be doing to a poor Hindu musician? What they will be allowed, permitted by law, to be doing to a poor Hindu musician? Altaf, it is best if I leave now.’

  ‘Let me come with you,’ Altaf said. He was close to tears. He knew what Amit was like when he had decided something. At these moments, Amit’s practicality came to the surface. He saw things clearly. But for Altaf, being with his friend Amit would always come first. It hurt him that, for the reasons of Amit’s practicality, and not for the first time, it would be best if his own interests and wishes were neglected. Amit never had any suspicion, Altaf believed, that Altaf thought in any other way. Altaf had always hidden his vulnerability.

  But Amit now surprised Altaf. ‘Don’t say something which will pain both of us,’ he said. ‘I would rather stay with you. But it is dangerous, you understand. And it would be dangerous for you to come to Calcutta with me. What would you do?’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I will manage. And this is not going to last for ever. Perhaps only a few years. And then I can come back, and everything will be exactly as it was before, but Mr Khadim Hussain will be gone and never heard of. You will see.’

  ‘Only a few years,’ Altaf said. He really thought he would cry now.

  ‘I will come back, and you will have a beautiful wife, and as I come through the door with a box of sandesh, there will be small children butting their heads at my knees. And you will hardly remember your old friend, returning from Calcutta. You will see how it will be. Altaf, this must be.’

  ‘Don’t go—’ Altaf said, but his voice was choking. ‘Don’t go tomorrow, at least.’

  Amit stared at him. ‘But, Altaf – of course I am not talking about leaving tomorrow. Not this week, or next week.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. But not so very soon.’

  4.

  The next day, when Amit went into the staff quarters, he found his colleagues clustered around the notice board, peering through glass. He looked, too, and found that Mr D. B. Chakravarty, Headmaster, was taking indefinite leave, due to ill health. In his absence, which was expected to be lengthy, Mr Khadim Hussain, BA (Hons), had been appointed by the school governors and the Ministry of Education to take his place as Acting Headmaster.

  A separate notice to the side of this one indicated that a meeting would be held of all staff at the close of the school day in the staff quarters. It was signed Khadim Hussain, BA (Hons), Headmaster (Acting).

  Amit, with all his colleagues, attended that meeting and listened to what Mr Khadim Hussain had to say about the new laws emanating from the government about the public status of cultural products, and also about the lines along which this school must now be run. At the end of the meeting he concluded, without mentioning it to anyone at all, that he must leave for Calcutta without any further delay.

  5.

  When Amit left the apartment in the morning, one week later, it was still dark. Altaf must be still asleep. He would wake in two or three hours to discover that Amit had gone. Perhaps he would understand where Amit had gone. It had been made clear between them. It had proved necessary to leave earlier than he had promised, that was all. But in himself Amit knew what a betrayal this was.

  And Altaf would not notice at once that Amit had left. In his hand he had only a very small grip. He understood from the start that it was not going to be easy to cross the border at Jessore. There had been no train from Dacca to Calcutta for years, since the beginning of the war with India. The border was guarded by the East Pakistan Rifles. There was no possibility that they would let anyone through with a large suitcase. In his grip, Amit had placed a clean shirt and change of underwear, for the journey; there were two leaves of soap, for the journey; and for the journey, however long it would be, an envelope of photographs; photographs of Amit’s father, a photograph of Altaf and Amit performing together, caught unaware at a party. Was it at Begum Sufiya’s? Amit was not sure. He placed the photograph with the other important ones, in the envelope, in the grip. In five separate places about his person and in the bag Amit had placed sums of money. The smaller sums he had left conspicuous, in the hope that the border guards and the roaming soldiery would be satisfied with that; the larger he had sewn into the lining of the grip. And, impossible to leave behind, there was a single book: it was a collection of poetry in Bengali. Amit knew most of it by heart, and he took it with him. He did not know what else he could do.

  The rest of Amit’s poor possessions he had had to leave behind him. It must be thought that Altaf would only slowly realize that Amit had gone. Amit had thought of writing a letter to leave on the table, but that was impossible. He would write, at length, when he was safe in Calcutta. And behind him he left his shirts and trousers, neatly folded in the cupboard; his own kitchen possessions, his knives and two plates; his rough towels and bed linen; his thirty or forty books, some of which he had had for ever. Most painful was the leaving behind of his tabla. There were so many reasons for taking that – it would be the means of earning a new living in Calcutta. But he left it where it was, on the trunk at the end of his narrow bed, like a gift. It would attract attention to him at the borders and beyond. But more than that, Amit was leaving behind him something that would anchor him to the place he had been happiest. He was a citizen of this apartment, and here was his surety of return. At first Altaf would think he had not left. But then, seeing the tabla at the foot of his bed, Altaf would understand that Amit meant to return.

  Amit made his way through the before-dawn streets; the sleepers, shrunken bundles of humanity, buried in layers of blanket, paper, were wrapped in what they could gather from the street’s detritus against the cold of the night; lying like giant seedpods for the day to waken them. One against the other they slept, the prime places against a building’s wall where the warmth resided all through the night. The rest tucked up against each other, backs against each other, separated and sharing their night-coverings. Amit picked his way through their heavy tessellations. As he walked, he remained in the shadows under the trees where they slept. Once, at the T-junction of the main road, he saw, gathered together against the cold, a group of soldiers, manning a roadblock, stamping in the early-morning chill and yawning. They were on the other side of the road. Amit remained in the shadows under the trees, and walked confidently in the dark, knowing that he would not be seen if he did not want to be seen.

  The people began to rise, and thicken.

  The quiet air was disturbed with the honk and call of humanity waking, and moving, and, soon, beginning to pray. That would send him on his way. He
was nearing the bus station. Perhaps in normal times, there would be silence here, in the late small hours of the morning. But yesterday, a hundred Mr Khadim Hussains had gone into a hundred schools, and offices, and businesses, and explained how things were to be from now on. Amit was not the only person who had thought on going to bed that he would rise early, and go to see if he could find a life somewhere else. Tomorrow there would be hundreds more, and the day after that, still more. One day – Amit did not know when that day would be – many hundreds of people more than this would arrive at the bus station, and would discover, at some point in their journey, that they were too late. Weeks or months too late.

  Altaf, at ten, had left Calcutta with his family. He had fled from the city because of his religion and his family’s religion. He had told the story of how the train had stopped, and people bearing arms had entered, while he had been stuffed in hiding under the seat of the carriage. In fact, it had not been partisans seeking someone to murder, but soldiers. Amit had heard this exciting story many times from Altaf. Now he was making the opposite journey, for the same reason. Or perhaps an opposite reason. At some point in the journey, people bearing arms might again enter the bus, and this time they might not be soldiers trying to protect them. That was how history worked: a good thing balanced by a bad thing. Altaf still had relations living in Calcutta. If Amit ever reached Calcutta, he would visit them and make an offering afterwards, to his gods, that the day he had chosen to travel was not the day that had proved too late, just as they had stayed where they were, and been saved.

  6.

  In the dark of the night, Amit fought his way towards the small beacon of the ticket window; the struggle through the crowd in silence. It was like the dim-lit struggles in dreams, through dense and limb-clogging stuff. Those around him were heavy, heaving, weighted, mud-like, and through the dark of the night they pushed against each other in silence or with muffled groans. There were so many of Amit’s type, fighting to leave Dacca. At one point, the hips of two women closed on either side of his wrist, the hand holding the grip and all his money inside. The movement seemed choreographed, and he feared he was being expertly robbed. From somewhere, he found his foot, and went down heavily on a woman’s foot – he had no idea whether he had hit his target, but the women moved, so slightly, and his hand and the grip slipped back to his side of the wall of flesh. It took forty minutes to fight to the front and provide himself with a ticket for the first leg of the journey. Although it was possible to buy a single ticket for the whole journey, it would be much more expensive than getting a bus to the Padma ferry, and on the other side getting a local bus to his destination. He was heading to Jessore. That was where you could cross.

  And all the seats in the bus were taken when he reached it. He had no idea how long the journey to the ferry would take – sixteen, twenty hours – and it was with some relief that he saw that a seat by the window was not, after all, taken; a woman had placed a parcel in it, and as Amit forced his way past her, she was shrieking that it was her sister’s place, that her sister was coming, she had sworn she was coming. Amit was firm and, as the first light of day fell and the driver took his place, he shut out the woman’s shrieks and complaints into his right ear by closing his eyes and resting his head against the bars. He could have waited for the next bus to the Padma ferry. But he did not know if there would be a next bus to the Padma ferry, or Jessore, or anywhere.

  Later – he did not know how much later – the bus stopped by the side of a river, and all the passengers disembarked. It was the Padma. He had somehow slept most of the journey. The men went to piss in a ditch. The sky was hot and blunt with light. The riverbanks were wet clay cliffs, rawly torn off by the flood, and the same grey colour as the river’s turbulence. The women wandered off with their children to try to find some food, some sweets; one confided in another that she knew a perfect place for hilsha fish, the man who sold the best hilsha fish on the banks by the ferry wharf. But there was nobody. There was only a great queue of buses, waiting for the ferry to take them across. And there were no boats. Only one was now making its slow way from the wharf, for the long hours of the hot crossing. There was none at the wharf, and though the river was so wide the other bank could not be seen, there was no sign of another boat returning. That might be the only boat in service, making its laden way across the river as the hours came and went. And Amit could see that the bus he had travelled in would not be in the next boatload, or perhaps the one after that.

  He rested under the shadow of a tree all day long; the boat came, took on one load, and departed. Night fell, and a hundred small camps made themselves apparent as cooking broke out. A constellation of modest fires spread across the riverbank. Amit had no food with him. He had not planned for a journey of this length, and had thought that the vendors he remembered from previous journeys would supply his needs. But perhaps the vendors were fleeing, like everyone else. As there seemed to be no chance of leaving on a boat soon, he lay on the grass under the tree, his grip under his head.

  It was nearly dawn before a place was found for Amit’s bus on a ferry. Red-eyed and frail, his bones aching but his grip still in his fist, undisturbed, he leant out from the upper deck of the ferry as it pulled into the river. The sky was lightening from the east and, in an hour, the river’s midstream clarities of blue and silver were all that mattered. All at once, by the side of the ferry, a school of bottleneck river dolphins broke the surface, grey and plump and glistening. Mother Padma: Amit could have won a competition with his painting of it.

  A fog of suspicion and fear seemed to lift with the river crossing, and by the end of it, Amit was sharing rice and fish with a family of seven, sitting companionably on the upper deck in the brisk warm breeze. The father was a professor of physics at the college in Jessore, and knew Amit’s school. Indeed, they had acquaintances in common. That seemed to be a necessary condition before they – a Hindu and a Muslim family – could sit down together and share food. They were returning to Jessore from visiting relations in Dacca, and Amit? Oh, Amit was paying a short visit to an aunt in Calcutta, just for a very few days. Amit by now had the second-youngest child on his lap while the mother dealt with the baby; they were friends already. They laughed together about Amit’s neighbour on the bus. Her shrieks and complaints had spread through the bus, and this family had pitied Amit when they realized he had nothing to do with her. When, towards the end of the morning, they saw the far side of the river approached, the family invited Amit to join with them in finding the small local bus that would take them on their onwards journey. ‘After all,’ the professor of physics said, ‘we are colleagues in the same business, the trade of education, after all.’ Amit gratefully accepted, and, once on the bus, they made themselves a small encampment, the eight of them.

  ‘I do not know how the situation is at the border crossing,’ Amit said to the father of the family. ‘At Jessore.’

  ‘I heard it is very bad,’ the father said, his voice jolting. The road on this side of the Padma was terrible, unrepaired for years and perhaps decades. The bus banged and rattled into potholes, throwing the passengers about; cries of distress were coming from the front half of the seating. ‘It is hopeless to arrive there after the very early morning. The lines are enormous, and if you arrive at midday, you may queue all day and half the night.’

  ‘We have been travelling so long,’ Amit said. ‘I do not know when we are to reach Jessore.’

  ‘I think it is two hours from here,’ the father said. ‘Or a little more. And everything is so much slower these days.’ He joggled the child on his lap, who was sucking his thumb in his sleep, and smoothed the boy’s hair. ‘I do not think we will reach Jessore much before the sun sets.’

  ‘And then to wait at the border crossing. How long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the father said. ‘Well, it is much easier for us than for you. Our journey ends in Jessore, but you have about as far again to go. Why not come and stay with us? There is no problem. W
ith eight or nine in the house, one more will make not much difference. We will be glad to have you, if you don’t mind resting on a sofa. A tight squeeze, but it will be perfectly all right. Your best plan is to get up very early, to get to the border crossing before first light. Perhaps then we will not have so long to wait.’

  Amit was in no condition to refuse: he was dusty, dirty and sore after his night under the tree, and would welcome an opportunity to wash and change his shirt, at the very least. The second youngest child had taken a fancy to him, and Amit carried him on his shoulders from the bus station to the little house, twenty minutes’ walk away, feeling the child’s weight of tiredness fall from one side to the other, feeling that he, too, could welcome a shoulder to sit on, a great pair of arms to lift him into bed. Afterwards, he remembered nothing of this house in Jessore, or of washing or laying himself down or, like the others, of falling into sleep at once, even on this narrow and hard sofa.

  In the dark, he was being shaken awake, and all about him were children, like a nightmare of misplaced responsibility and duty. He had no idea where he was, or what had happened to him. He could not understand why Altaf’s apartment was filled with children in the dark. Then he understood where he was and what was happening. He was grateful for tea, but the owner of the house – who was he? – was waving him off, yawning, hiding his small-hours face. A professor of physics, Amit remembered too late, as he sat in the rickshaw. The border approached. For a moment he misconstrued the scene, and it seemed quiet, deserted. But then he understood what he was looking at. It was humanity, unmoving. At the front sauntered a pack of the East Pakistan Rifles, turning from side to side, assessing and ignoring the people before them.

  7.