Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

As he saw the posture and stance of the East Pakistan Rifles before the people they had subjected, were subjecting, were about to subject, Amit saw all at once his future. He saw himself manhandled and ordered about by the authorities; he saw the struggle to pass through the smallest of gates with a crowd pressing down upon him. He saw his bag being searched, its lining slit. He saw his money being docketed and counted and taken away from him, with nothing but a few rupees left to his name. He saw his life in India, arriving at his cousin’s house with nothing but a small grip with a slashed lining and an apologetic face. He saw himself working at what he could get, sleeping in the corners of rooms, negotiating and explaining with Indian officials, getting nowhere in the course of weeks. He thought of Altaf, and what lay ahead of him, too. He saw no end to the war that was coming. He saw old women thrown to the street, and a boot crushing the face of a boy as he lay prone in a concrete-floored prison cell.

  Amit stepped down from the rickshaw. He said to himself that what must be done must not be shrunk from. He took his place at the back of the gigantic crowd, fighting for admission to India. On the other side of the border, he knew, the train for Calcutta was standing.

  8.

  It would be five years before Amit returned to Dacca. Before anything else at all, he went back to Altaf’s apartment, the one they had rented from Mrs Khandekar. He still thought of it as his apartment. He had not said goodbye, after all.

  Amit seemed to be banging hard at the door of the apartment for minutes. He had concluded that Altaf must have gone out; he made this conclusion to ward off the worse conclusion that Altaf had moved away or, worse, was no longer of the world. He dismissed those from his mind. He would have heard. But how would he have heard? Who would have told him? Nobody knew where he had been living. The chain of acquaintance between him and his family, and his family and his life with Altaf, had been separated, long before the war. He would have heard, nevertheless. Some wound would have opened in the depths of him, and he would have felt that Altaf had given up on him.

  There was no response to his knocking. He knew that when he had left, years ago, he would not have left without taking the keys to the apartment. But somewhere in the intervening five years of moving about and asking friends for space for a week or two, of living out of bags, the keys had been mislaid and lost. Amit felt this betrayal, but it was right that, having left Altaf in such a way, he could not in any case have reached for his keys and let himself in. Amit bent to his bag, to find a piece of paper to leave some sort of note for Altaf – he could say that he would return at the same time the next day. But then the door to the apartment opened. It was Altaf. In the five years since Amit had left the apartment without saying goodbye, Altaf had changed. He was thinner; older; his face was lined. Some pleasure lit up in his face on seeing Amit, but it was veiled, confused. Altaf’s eyes were red-rimmed and exhausted. It was almost with a gesture of falling that he put his arms around Amit, and almost with a need for support that he stayed there, leaning on his short friend.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said.

  ‘So, you see,’ Amit said. ‘I returned. I did return. I promised you I should. But there does not seem to be a wife in our flat. I thought I would return to find a wife and children, Altaf. I think I said I would. But there is no wife, and no children, unless they are out for the afternoon.’

  Amit was aware he was babbling, and Altaf was calm and undisturbed by his arrival. It was not the way things had been before, he was sure.

  ‘No,’ Altaf said. ‘There is no wife.’

  ‘I was sure you would marry, once I had gone,’ Amit said, sitting down in exactly his old space. Nothing at all seemed to have changed. It was with a small shock that he saw that the teak box was still in the place he had left it. He had brought it from his aunt’s house, the box she had given him and which had been too large for him to carry away with him in his precipitate flight. He had given it not one thought in the previous five years, and Altaf had not moved it; had seen it every day.

  ‘No, I did not marry,’ Altaf said. ‘There didn’t seem to be a wife to be had. I looked for one, after you went. But there wasn’t one to be had. Perhaps it was the war, and women having to stay inside. They did not want to meet a husband, and I am not much of a prospect as a husband, even if all the women of Bangladesh now decide to marry at once and have to find husbands. Yes, it must have been the war – the war that you ran away to avoid, before it started, remember, Amit? And of course I was doing work for Mrs Khandekar.’

  ‘How is Mrs Khandekar?’ Amit said. He wanted to ask how Altaf was. He wanted to ask how Altaf’s war had been, and how he had been left at the end of it. But Altaf had made that impossible, and he said, ‘And Mr Khandekar, how is he?’

  ‘They are still fine, very well,’ Altaf said. ‘One of their sons is no longer with us, however. He was shot by the Pakistanis, retreating.’

  ‘We Bengalis,’ Amit said, experimenting with the sound of it. He hardly ever said that, nowadays. There was only Altaf he had ever wanted to say it to. As for Amit, he had perhaps saved the word up for his friend to hear first. He did not know whether Altaf had done the same.

  ‘We Bengalis,’ Altaf said, and smiled. He raised his glass of water from the table where it had been sitting. Amit recognized the glass – a dark blue glass, bubbles blown in the side. Altaf took a deep drink from it, and set it back down. Amit, without asking, took it in turn. Altaf watched him raise it to his mouth without saying anything; a moment later Amit was spluttering. It was not water that Altaf had in his glass, but some sort of back-street firewater. Amit went to the kitchen, and spat out what he had in his mouth. The kitchen was unchanged, mostly, but bleak. When Amit had lived here, there had always been an onion and an aubergine in the vegetable basket, a small sack of rice and a tin of oil to hand. But there was nothing of that here. The basket was empty. There was only an unlabelled dark green bottle in the open cupboard. Amit believed that that was what Altaf had been drinking. When he had rinsed out the taste from his mouth, he came back in, slowly. Altaf already had the glass again in his hand, and did not look up.

  ‘Is this how it has been?’ Amit said.

  ‘It was mostly like this,’ Altaf said.

  ‘I wish . . .’ Amit said. But there was nothing to wish for.

  ‘How did you think it would be?’ Altaf said. ‘How did you think it would be, when you returned? Do you know how life has been for us, since you went without saying goodbye? I don’t believe you can know.’

  ‘No,’ Amit said. ‘But I had to leave. You know that.’

  It was at some point in the next few days that Amit reached up and, from the top shelf, brought down his tabla. That he had left here. Altaf had wrapped it in oilcloth, and the creases were thick with dust. The tabla was quite all right, however, and Amit next brought down what was in its place next to it, Altaf’s harmonium. He had expected that the harmonium would be dusty, the wood of the case cracked, the instrument’s tone gone through neglect and abandon. But it had been cared for, and regularly handled. Amit still had to master his understanding of the parts of Altaf’s life that had been abandoned, fallen into disuse, and the parts, such as breathing, that had continued nevertheless. When Altaf came back in from his short walk – it was something Amit had told him to start doing – he saw the harmonium, out of its place, and the tabla, too, by it, and he understood. He smiled at Amit, and shook his head slightly before going back to his room to lie down and rest. The gesture was theatrical, kindly, and unconvincing; it meant to convey to Amit that music was over for Altaf, and he would never be able to explain quite why.

  Amit smiled too, however, alone in the room; smiled to himself. Altaf did not fool him as easily as all that.

  Chapter 9

  How I Was Allowed to Eat As Much As I Liked

  1.

  ‘What is all of this?’ Nana was saying. He was upstairs in his house. He had come home a half-hour before; had greeted Nani, his daughters, his two mothers, his young
er son, the elder son and his wife and children, another husband or two and a few more children of his daughters, such as Zahid, my brother, and my sisters Sushmita and Sunchita and his grandson, or adopted child Shibli, who appeared to be wailing for some reason. He had given a more distant greeting to the cousins from the village who had arrived the week before, asking for accommodation. All this greeting and enquiries after people’s health had taken some time. When it was done, and Nana saw that the boy was preparing his tray of tea, he went upstairs. The cook, Ahmed, came to the kitchen door, and a veiled, warning expression passed between him and Nani, sitting on the couch reading the newspaper to my mother. Dahlia and Nadira exchanged a questioning glance; Nadira tightly shook her head to discourage comment. The cook went back into the kitchen. A question came from upstairs. My grandfather never needed to raise his voice. In that house, he was listened to.

  ‘What is all this?’ Nana said, coming downstairs with his barrister’s stock in his hand.

  ‘What is all what?’ Nani said. ‘You know quite well what everything is. Your question makes no sense to me whatsoever. You must speak more clearly.’

  ‘On my balcony,’ Nana said. ‘My balcony is full of rubbish and detritus. What is all of that?’

  ‘That is not rubbish and detritus,’ Nani said, quite calmly. ‘The chillis and tomatoes and mangoes and all of that are being dried, and will be preserved and pickled. It will be out of your way in a day or two.’ Nana made a gesture of impatience, and retreated back up to his bedroom. ‘Your father is quite right,’ Nani said to her daughters. ‘We should not simply have occupied his balcony without asking for permission first. But where else are Ahmed and I supposed to lay fruit out for pickling where no one will walk over it and the animals won’t steal it? I don’t think he has considered that. And if there is no pickling and preserving, what does he think we are all going to eat the next time we can’t leave the house? We have no idea how long it will go on for, next time.’

  When Nana moved from the house in Rankin Street to the larger house in Dhanmondi, the courtyard house that I remembered from my own childhood, he must have anticipated having more space at his disposal. Most of all, he wanted to have a balcony on which to rest at the end of his day’s labours, where the servants would bring him tea and biscuits, and he could call, perhaps, for one clean and well-behaved grandchild to pay their dutiful respects. He had envied his friend Khandekar, who had exactly this arrangement, and a civilized habit of receiving guests in his private space. Within months of the move, however, the balcony in Dhanmondi was claimed by the alliance of Nani and Ahmed, the cook. They had discovered that it was the perfect space for drying chillis and tamarind and other things, for pickles. It faced the right way; it was secluded from the raids of children and animals; it had just the right extent for the load of pickles that could be dealt with in an afternoon, which is about as much time as anyone wants to devote to pickling.

  In the same way, Nana had believed that his larger, more orderly house would only gain in gracious space in time. Boro-mama had left home, and had set up his own household with his wife and, now, three children. My mother and father had insisted on doing the same, and had been living in Elephant Road. Era-aunty had followed suit, and though Mary-aunty had so far not married, most of the younger aunts and, in time, Pultoo-mama as well would make homes of their own.

  The normal process began to be reversed with Boro-mama’s fourth child. Sharmin had been determined that she would have only two children, one to replace her in the world, the other to replace her husband. She firmly believed that it was wrong to go on populating the world in this way. But her husband, Laddu, held no such conviction. He hardly thought about his relations with his wife in terms even of whether they could afford to raise another child, let alone in terms of their responsibility to mankind. Sharmin believed that he had taken personal responsibility for not giving her a third child, who came as a surprise. When she found that she was pregnant with a fourth, she blamed Laddu entirely.

  ‘Well,’ Mira said at the time, ‘I don’t think it could have been completely big-brother’s doing.’

  ‘Sharmin must have played a necessary role,’ Nadira said. ‘Big-brother didn’t bring it about all on his own.’

  But that seemed to be Sharmin’s belief, and she went about saying quite openly to Laddu’s sisters that the only possible action for her to take was to abort the baby. Soft-hearted Dahlia overheard this – at thirteen, she would weep over the death of a baby bird or the fate of an old beggar, bent double over a stick in the street. She reported it, in tears, to Nani, who talked it over with Nana. So Shibli was born, and not aborted for the sake of his mother’s principles. But almost as soon as he was born, he came to live in my grandfather’s house, and was brought up by them as their own youngest son. At first a wet-nurse came in, and then Shibli provided employment for the same ayah who had brought up most of his aunts and his uncle. After all, my grandmother used to say, Shibli was only eight years younger than her own youngest child, Bubbly. It was a pleasure to have a baby in the house again after a short break. ‘Come and see what little Shibli is doing!’ Nani would call from her room, hanging entranced over his cradle. It was as if she had never had children of her own; or as if Shibli and the condition of grandmotherhood had returned her to her first moment of motherhood, looking after that son whom only she really remembered, killed in Calcutta during the war by Japanese bombs. There was something new and girlish about this stately, sharp woman in the company of Sharmin’s baby.

  (When we were children, this history of Shibli’s was well known to us and, in particular, how Shibli should have been aborted. I do not know who told us the story in the first place, and it seems a harsh, ruthless fact to share with children. But for the most part it only confirmed my opinion that Shibli had been horribly spoilt and indulged by everyone, not just since the moment of his birth but well before that. His characteristic simper was that of someone who knew he had survived against terrible odds.)

  Shibli, however, was just one small child. Shortly afterwards, Nana’s two mothers arrived for a stay of three weeks. They were the two wives of Nana’s father, the last man in my family to marry polygamously, and though only one of them was his real mother, he treated them both in exactly the same way, with an ostentatious courtesy of the door-opening, standing-up, rice-serving, deferential kind. He would perform these conspicuous gestures individually, and not to them as a pair; when he did so, the mother who had his attention would beam, her old face screwing up into a smiling pucker, as if she had never been so well treated.

  The stay of three weeks was supposed to be a short visit, but they arrived with a substantial volume of luggage following behind in a cart. It was clear that they were unhappy about living in the country apart from the rest of the family. Things, they said, were not as easy as they had once been. So Nana invited them to stay as long as they liked. Perhaps that was what they had been hoping for. They made themselves useful about the house, minding Bubbly, mending socks, fetching clean jars of water for Pultoo when he was at the easel painting, or even cleaning his brushes for him – they were great admirers of Pultoo’s early work. Their limit came only with baby Shibli, whom they were prepared to coo over but not to bear responsibility for. Most of all, they made themselves useful by being pleasant and humble about the house, never intruding or making noise. The room they shared made no extra work for the servants. Nani might have disliked their constant grinding of paan with a pestle, the two of them sitting quietly in a corner muttering trivialities. They were keen observers, from their window, of the comings and goings of the neighbourhood, and always wanted to know when they glimpsed a child who he or she could possibly be. But, on the whole, nobody minded them being there, and it was with some surprise that Pultoo remarked one day that it must be a year since his two grandmothers had come to stay in Dhanmondi.

  2.

  The house of Khandekar, Nana’s great friend, was quite different. When the roadblocks allowe
d, and there were fewer soldiers on the streets making a nuisance of themselves, Nana often went round there for some civilized company. There were only two sons, both students at the university, both clever, respectful, well-read boys, who would be a credit to their parents and to the legal profession. Khandekar and his wife had their home to themselves. There were never great crowds of daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren demanding attention; never a party of cousins from the village muttering among themselves and asking to help with the preparation of food. Nobody threatened to dry mangoes on Khandekar’s balcony. It was pleasant to visit for an hour or two, take a cup of tea; to continue the argument about a law suit, to chat quietly about the state of affairs, to drift back under the portico, with the rich, jam-like scent of mimosa and jasmine, to the pleasant subject of their student days in Calcutta. It was good to laugh and banter and forget the world altogether, as much as they could.

  Nana would have gone to Khandekar’s house every day if he could. But all too often, however, it proved impossible to get from one house to another, even though they were separated by only a ten-minute journey. Roadblocks sprang up overnight; bands of soldiers loitered at corners; men who in other times would have been the refuse of the street appeared out of nowhere, demanding papers with threats and refusing to state the source of their authority. There were many such people, these days, and they were especially evident about Khandekar’s house. Many of them were Bihari, who had never felt at home, had always been dissatisfied among the Bengalis. It was impossible to know in advance whether one would get to the end of one’s journey unmolested. My grandfather was not accustomed to put up with the impudence of soldiers and badmashes demanding papers. But he saw that there was no point in fighting it. He gloomily observed over the dinner table that, like an old-fashioned Munshi, he would soon have to forbid the women of his family to leave the house. The women of his family objected. But he laid down the law, and none of them, not even Nani, was ever allowed to go on a visit, or to the market, without taking Rustum to sit by them and stare down the soldiery. To Khandekar’s house, they could not go at all, not unless they went with him. Just by there the roadblocks shifted, repositioned, multiplied. Across the road, from side to side, mysterious and unproductive workmen spread, making the way impassable. Once, a huge demonstration appeared from nowhere, blocking the roads in that quarter for hours. It turned out to be a demonstration of loyalty to the government in West Pakistan, and therefore hired for this specific occasion. Sometimes it was possible to reach Khandekar’s house, so very few streets away, by ingenious means. But often those ingenious means failed; no resourceful improvisation on Rustum’s part could circumvent protesters, roadblocks, security checks, puffed-up and paid-for Biharis, or ersatz roadworks. The authorities were bending all their ingenuity on blocking these streets, because a few houses away from Khandekar lived Sheikh Mujib.