Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  ‘For Nadira, though . . .’ my mother said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who is marrying,’ my father said. ‘There must be an apology before anything can change. I said that before, and nothing has changed.’

  ‘You haven’t even asked who Nadira is marrying,’ my mother said, her voice slightly rising. But my father left the room, and went to sit in his chambers, to go on working.

  Great-uncle Lutfur was the first visitor. Afterwards, my mother wondered whether he was chosen by Grandfather as being the most insignificant member of the family to begin the campaign. Nana was cunning, and my father had the sort of rudimentary, lawyerly cunning that never imagines anyone else could operate on the same level of tactical planning. He saw himself as a fox in a coop of hens, never imagining that behind the blithe open gaze of those hens there might be teeth, and a thorough knowledge of vulpine habits. Nana knew where Father was vulnerable, and he proceeded to run rings round him.

  Two days later Mary and Era came, to offer the same invitation. The doors to the salon were closed again, but this time there was nothing but huge laughter from behind them. Mother had not seen any of her sisters for two years, and there was plenty to talk over. Mary and Era, too, must have been delighted to be liberated from Nana’s edict forbidding anyone to say anything rude about Bubbly’s new husband Alam. That must have been the main topic of conversation, too, when Pultoo visited, also offering an invitation to Nadira’s wedding. Pultoo had actually been to Srimongol to stay with Bubbly and Alam at their new house amid the tea-gardens – I had seen photographs, and they were very like the pictures of English houses among hedges I so enjoyed in my sisters’ book The Radiant Way, the English textbook. Pultoo was able to be very amusing on the subject of Bubbly’s new family. Alam had been Pultoo’s friend in the first place, but he knew exactly what the family were like. The grandmother’s lamentable attempts to explain not just how the family had come to Bangladesh but the history of events that had led up to their removal was brought out to delight his eldest sister. ‘No – wait – it was Gandhi-ji who was killed, and the English princess, she stayed, and she married a maharajah, and they say, in the end, the Englishman, he renounced the world. Oh dear, am I confusing matters? Alam, tell me, have I remembered things correctly?’ My mother laughed and laughed; it seemed she had almost forgotten how to.

  For some reason, both of these visits took place on days when my father was in court, and he came home to find my mother glowing, and happy, and free of any sense of resentment, her sisters or brother having just left. Still Father said no to the invitation. After all, it was only his wife’s younger sibling. Perhaps the campaign – the diplomatic démarche – planned by Nana moved into a graver stage in the next days, when a motor-rickshaw pulled up outside, and out stepped Nani herself, and Nadira in a beautiful silver-edged periwinkle sari. ‘You’ve made your new home lovely,’ Nani said. I remember that, because my mother, resigned to a sequence of visits with the same purpose, had made more elaborate preparations for the reception of guests in the afternoon. Those elaborate preparations for the reception of guests included putting me in my best clean shirt and red shorts, and my sister Sunchita in a pretty pink dress and ankle socks, and telling us that we were to sit up nicely, and not under any circumstances take more than one slice of cake. How children dressed in the 1970s on best occasions! I mostly remember how lovely Nadira looked; I was still quite small, though, I hope, well behaved. But afterwards, my father still said no.

  And that seemed to be that. Boro-mama would not be despatched. If my father said no when the bride and her mother came, what more could be done? My sisters and I were terribly upset. We had never been to a wedding. Sunchita longed to be a bridesmaid, about which she had read in novels. I had just heard about the food to be had. We begged and pulled and whined at my mother. But she said, ‘Your father says that we may not go. So that is the end of it.’ She walked away. I knew there was more she wanted to say.

  Of course there was something else Nana could do in his campaign. But nobody even imagined that he would do it. It was on a Saturday afternoon, some time after three, when the red Vauxhall pulled up outside the house. ‘It’s Nana,’ Sushmita called out – she was at the front of the house. And there he was: Rustum opened the door for him, and he got out of the car, dressed at his most irresistibly natty, his black shoes shining, a white handkerchief pressed and folded into a square in the top pocket of his jacket. Nana was barely known to pay calls on anyone, least of all his own family. They came to him, even after they were married and had families of their own. It was a standing joke to his children that, after a brief initial tour of inspection, he hardly knew where they lived. It was simply extraordinary that he should pay a visit, on his own, to our house. He had chosen a time when my father was at home – Nana knew, of course, the opening hours of the Bar library. And my father came to the gate, opening it himself, and welcomed Nana into the house.

  He stayed for half an hour, and afterwards, both my mother and father saw him out, walking him to the car and waving him off. It had been the friendliest visit imaginable. Just as he was about to get into the car, my mother said, ‘And Nadira, where is she going to live, after the marriage?’

  Nana looked surprised. ‘In Sheffield,’ he said, and seeing that the name meant little to my mother and father, he clarified. ‘In England. Her husband has a job, teaching in England. They are going to leave immediately after the wedding.’

  He got into the car, and Rustum drove him away. We all waved until they had gone quite out of sight. My mother turned to my father and said, ‘I’ve made my mind up. You don’t have to go. But I am going to Nadira’s wedding with the children. Enough,’ she said, ‘is enough.’

  My father’s eyes filled with admiration. He knew my mother had her limits, and he knew her strengths. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you go or not,’ she said. ‘But it’s my duty to go, and to take the children.’

  My father leant on the heavy iron gate; he pushed it shut. He wiped his hands on the sides of his cavalry twill trousers, and pushed the bolt to. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Chapter 12

  Nadira’s Wedding

  1.

  At the gates of the house, the beggars sat. They were so thin. Repeatedly, they raised one forearm to their faces, their mouths only half filled with teeth, their lips opening and shutting, saying something to the street. But there was nobody in the street. There was nobody but more beggars, clustering outside the gates of the Dhanmondi houses. We children had been forbidden, for many months now, to play in the streets, or to walk through them, even with our ayahs or each other. It was rumoured that children had been stolen away for ransom demands, that ordinary people had been set upon and robbed by the starving, that people had been crushed to death in riots in Gulistan. There was no food in Bangladesh, and we were going to a wedding feast. Some people blamed Sheikh Mujib, the president of the country. Others blamed farmers, for hoarding food in anticipation of profits to come. I can remember the famine in Bangladesh, and the look of the people dying on the streets. I can remember it remotely, through the pane of glass in the rear of the red Vauxhall. That is how I viewed it.

  As the gates of Nana’s house were opened, the beggars on the pavements struggled to rise. Some of them were strong enough to do so; others made an effort; some more simply lay there, their hands outstretched, splayed open waiting for alms, just as they had been for many days. Some of those last were unmoving. I looked at what might be out there. But the gates were opened, and quickly closed again behind the red Vauxhall. Inside, the engagement day was about to begin.

  2.

  As my mother got out of the car, her sisters came, all at once, to embrace her. ‘Oh – this is so nice,’ she said, smothered by them in their beautiful saris, the pink, the green, the blue.

  ‘And Mahmood,’ Mary said, coming round the car to greet my father. His head was held high.


  ‘And Mahmood – and the children, too,’ Era was saying. ‘How grown-up the girls look.’

  Sunchita was in a pretty red-and-white polka-dotted dress, Sushmita in a proper sari, pink and silver, like a beautiful fancy cake. Though my father had put on a suit and tie, I had been allowed to wear a Panjabi shirt and pyjama trousers.

  ‘How nice,’ my mother kept saying. ‘How nice . . .’ as if the people about her had returned from the dead, and not just been kept from her for two years by my father’s obstinacy. As she repeated her words, she reached out and touched her sisters’ faces, one after the other, and they touched her in the same way. ‘But where is Nadira?’

  ‘You must come and see,’ Mira said. ‘You couldn’t manage to see me on my wedding day, so you just have to accept we are going to make the most of you today.’

  In a bustle of apologies and regrets and hush-nows and more apologies, my mother was swept off by her sisters. I followed the women, as small boys may, tagging along with my sisters into the bridal chamber, strolling along with my hands in my pockets, thrust under my long shirt.

  Nadira had met her husband Iqtiar in the following way. Like her, he was a singer. He was a small man, very tidy in appearance, with deep black eyes and a humorous expression. They had met first of all at the famous music school, Chhayanat. It had undergone a popular revival after independence. He was an academic by profession, but was, like her, an enthusiastic performer, too. On the first day of the new year in 1973, the Pahela Boishak festival, Nadira and Iqtiar had met for the first time at the concert that Chhayanat had organized. ‘It is a true love match,’ Era said – she liked a romance in her family. But they had done everything properly, and Iqtiar had obtained the permission of Nadira’s family and of his own. It was not like the elopement of Bubbly or of Boro-mama.

  In the bedroom, Nadira sat on a chair, her body canted nervously forwards. She was dressed dramatically, her sari red and deep blue, ornamented in gold, her hair up like a film star’s. I remembered how wonderful she could look, knowing she would look wonderful in the future but never so wonderful as she did today at her wedding. ‘What is that child doing here?’ she said, referring to me. But I knew she did not mean it, and I went to embrace her. Her face was hedged about with gold, powdered and perfumed; she looked lovely, smelt like a goddess after a bath in rose and geranium petal oil, but, because of the complicated jewellery, it was like trying to kiss someone through a barbed-wire fence. I was first, but then she raised herself and put her arms around my mother.

  ‘And Mahmood is here, too,’ my mother said. But Nadira was exclaiming with excitement over my sisters’ appearance. She did not seem to hear that.

  3.

  Downstairs, in the first sitting room, the old men were sitting. Lutfur-chacha, Khandekar-nana, Nana’s friend the doctor, and others; Iqtiar, Nadira’s husband, was not there, just his brothers and an uncle. He and his brothers had come shortly before with gifts: a sari set for Nadira, boxes of sweets, carried shoulder high, box after box, and even gifts of paan. (My great-grandmother would not have approved of that, I am sure, and it still seems to me rather a private thing, not something to give as a present. You don’t know how people like their paan to be.) Then Iqtiar had departed in the proper way. In the first sitting room, they were talking about the mahr, the sum of money with which the groom buys the bride. Nobody had thought about it.

  ‘Well, I expect Nadira will want something,’ Iqtiar’s brother said, a little baffled. ‘I really don’t know what it should be.’

  ‘When I married my wife . . .’ Khandekar-nana said, but then he remembered it had been a long time ago, in Calcutta, in a different currency. ‘What do young people do nowadays?’

  ‘Oh, it depends,’ the doctor said. ‘Some people like to make a big fuss. But I don’t think it’s at all necessary.’

  ‘But,’ one of Iqtiar’s brothers said, ‘it is important not to insult your bride with a small sum of money.’

  ‘No one wants to be insulted,’ another brother said. ‘No one wants to insult anyone, I mean. Iqtiar told me that he just wants to do whatever Nadira expects. Surely someone can go and ask her what she is expecting.’

  It seemed as if everyone was about to agree that that would be a very good idea. But then Lutfur-chacha got hold of what Iqtiar’s brother had just said. ‘I don’t think her father would approve of that at all,’ he said. ‘There is a right and a wrong way to do everything. I never heard of a groom asking his bride what she wanted and then carrying out her orders. That is beginning the marriage on exactly the wrong foot, a husband asking a wife what he should do with his own money. Her father would be very cross if he heard what had been done there.’

  ‘It is true,’ the doctor said thoughtfully, ‘that if her father wanted things to be done in a certain way, then he would probably have let everyone know how things were to be done. Is it likely that he would let everybody proceed in the dark in a matter like this, if he thought it was at all proper to do anything differently?’

  (Both Nana and Iqtiar’s father had stayed away from this important discussion, just as they were supposed to. Some of those in the room had never had to come to a decision about a family matter without being instructed by Nana. They could have done with my father, but he was outside, embarrassedly talking to the gardeners as the many children outside raced about the flowerbeds.)

  ‘I still don’t see why we can’t ask Nadira,’ somebody said. ‘I don’t believe she’s expecting anything at all. She would have mentioned it.’

  ‘But you have to pay the mahr,’ Lutfur-chacha said, apparently deeply shocked.

  ‘Indeed you do,’ Khandekar-nana said gravely. So there seemed no further discussion to be had.

  4.

  On the veranda, watching the children run about in the garden, was Pultoo in his first moustache. About him were Iqtiar, Alam, his friends Kajol and Kanaq. Pultoo’s sister, Alam’s wife Bubbly, perched sociably on the edge of an armchair, plump and happy. At the edge of the group was my father. All he had said to any other guest since arriving had been ‘Is Laddu here?’ But his brother-in-law was not there. Nobody knew if he was intending to come.

  ‘There is nothing that anyone can do,’ Pultoo was saying. ‘Well, not nothing. We can open the gates, and we can go out and give those people rice. How many?’

  ‘Two hundred,’ Kajol said. ‘Maybe three hundred. How many guests come to a wedding? You could ask them all to forgo the food they would have eaten, and simply take it out on to the streets instead, to give it to those people outside the gates.’

  ‘So three hundred people eat today,’ Pultoo said. ‘But how many people are there beyond those three hundred people? How do we feed them?’

  ‘And if you go on giving away your food,’ Alam said, ‘then soon you join the ranks of the hungry, too. Until you decide to stop giving away your food. My father, in Srimongol, the other day some people came to his door. And they said—’

  ‘But if everyone did that,’ Kanaq said, ‘there would be food enough for everyone. It would be shared out equally, and everyone would have a little bit, but nobody would have too much, and nobody would starve.’

  ‘I have heard that idea somewhere before,’ Bubbly said dismissively. ‘It is all the fault of the government. There is plenty of food. It is just a question of getting it to the right people.’

  ‘The Friend of Bengal is doing his best,’ Pultoo said plaintively. ‘I believe the factors are against him.’

  They talked a little about Sheikh Mujib, their voices below a certain level. It was hard to think that the Sheikh Mujib whom the full streets and empty markets cursed was the same one that they had known, been with in the same room. There was no point in going out handing out bowls of rice and dal, they agreed – or, rather, there was a point, and all of them did it. A group of old ladies came to Nani every day, sometimes holding their huge-eyed grandchildren by the hand; they were country women, come to Dacca in the hope of food, walking a hundred miles or more.
Nani fed them every day. You saw them sitting in a corner of the garden, moulding the rice with their fingers, eating in silence. Others, very like them, you saw waiting around the dustbins at the back of the house. You could not feed everyone, Nani said. The house took on its duties, and it tried to tell those it could not help directly about the food-distribution centres on the university campus. You could not feed everyone, Nana accepted, when Nani raised the question with him, and the wedding of Nadira had to take its proper form.

  ‘The truth of the matter is,’ Kajol said to Kanaq, ‘that if the farmers in the country stopped hoarding, there would be no famine.’ He spoke in a low voice, so that Alam and Bubbly would not hear. They had been known to defend country farmers; to say that they had a right to make a living, to feed themselves and their families.

  ‘Everyone knows that,’ Kanaq said, in the same voice. ‘The fact is, they think there will be a proper shortage soon, and when that happens, they will make an enormous fortune. If Mujib would just requisition the land of the property owners, there would be no famine any more.’

  And then they went on to talk about mounting a concert of Tagore’s songs to raise funds for the famine victims. My father listened, his arms crossed, saying nothing.

  5.

  In Nadira’s room, they were talking about absent friends.

  ‘If only Shafi could be here,’ Mary-aunty said. ‘He would have enjoyed it so much.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Era-aunty said. ‘He would have loved it. ‘

  Shafi was not my own uncle, but an uncle nevertheless. He was my cousin Rubi’s uncle. When Rubi came, she and I would play a game we had invented in the garden. It was called churui vati, or picnic, and we ate pretend food and pretended to serve each other. She was very proud of her uncle Shafi, and often told stories about his bravery, and boasted of having an uncle in uniform, as I did not. He was the only man in the whole of my immense extended family who had been in the military. One day he had come to visit Nana, to talk about something very serious, with Nana, Papa and Mama, and Rubi’s mother and father, who were related to him and to me in ways I never quite worked out. Halwa and chanachur were produced for them to eat with the tea. I had seen that Shafi was shaking, nervous and afraid; he could hardly talk at all. I had heard of him before, and wondered why he was not wearing his military uniform. Then he went, and I never saw him again. And after a few days, my cousin Rubi told me that he had disappeared. For weeks, Rubi would cry. I did not know why the army had killed Rubi’s uncle Shafi. Afterwards, Rubi would not play the game of picnic we so often played together.