Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  Somewhere around five in the morning, a tank was driven through the front wall of Sheikh Mujib’s house. Military officers entered the house. Sheikh Mujib did not live with much security. He had gone on walking to Sufiya’s all through his presidency. He must have had guns in the house, but that was all. All his family were there, apart from two daughters. One of those was Sheikh Hasina, the daughter who had so amused my mother with her meanness over a few sacks of chilli: she was in Germany. Sheikh Mujib’s sons and their wives and children, his wife and other family members were roused immediately. We know that the wives took their children to Sheikh Mujib’s wife’s bedroom as fast as they could. Perhaps they thought that there might be safety there. Or perhaps they wanted to die together. The soldiers shot them all. An adult son of Sheikh Mujib’s fled into his bathroom, where the killers found him, breaking down the door and shooting into the room, smashing the glass on the wall. Sheikh Mujib went to meet his murderers on the stairs. He was a very simple man, and said, ‘What do you want?’ to them. They are said to have spoken a brief arraignment, although this information only comes from them, years later, in the cause of their own propaganda and defence. They may, in reality, have shot straight away, killing Sheikh Mujib on the stairs of his own house. For many years, he had been known by his honorific title of Bangobandhu, a title awarded him by the students in the late 1960s: a Friend of Bengal. Nobody survived.

  The house was not demolished afterwards, but simply shut up and abandoned. In later years, it was reopened as a museum, just as it had been left on that August morning when my father’s friend said, ‘It’s happened,’ to him over the telephone. Sheikh Mujib’s bedroom toiletries are exactly where they were, showing that his preferred brand of talcum was Johnson’s baby powder, and that, like most sophisticated men in the world at that particular time, his habitual cologne was the beautiful oriental scent, Old Spice. These remain on his dressing-table; also undisturbed are the shattered mirror in his son’s bathroom, his blood on the stairs, preserved by Perspex sheets, and, dried on to the ceiling of his wife’s bedroom, fragments of the brains of his daughters-in-law and grandchildren. You may visit the museum where the Friend of Bengal lived and died in Dhanmondi six days a week, between ten a.m. and five p.m.

  ‘He was a very simple man,’ Sufiya’s daughter Sultana will tell you. ‘Once, when I was very young, and of no purpose or use to anyone, I was very late for my class at the university, and Sheikh Mujib’s big black sedan drew up as I was hurrying along. He was not yet president of the country, but still, everyone in the country knew who he was. He popped his head out of the window and said, “Can I give you a lift?” Just as the daughter of his old friend, you understand. Well, I demurred, and he insisted, and so I got in, wondering how it would look when I was dropped off for my class at the university by Sheikh Mujib – you know how these things worry you when you are young. But he chatted away quite happily, about Hasina his daughter, who was in my class, of course, and asking how we all were, and before I knew it, we were at the courthouse. He apologized greatly, very simply, very sincerely, but he said he would have to get out before me. His driver would take me wherever I wanted to go, but he had to get out here, at the courthouse. “You see,” he said, “they want to send me to jail again.” You know, at this time, he was always being sent off to jail by the Pakistanis. “And I really must be on time to be prosecuted. If I am late, they are only going to send me to jail again for contempt of court, the scoundrels.” That is what he said. So he got out at the courthouse, and I had the very great embarrassment of drawing up at the university in this great black car, and everyone thinking it was my family’s car. I believe that Sheikh Mujib was as embarrassed by this splendour as I was. He had a nice sense of humour. He may have wanted me to know just how embarrassing it was to be driven about in this way.’

  Sheikh Mujib himself was buried in his village, but the twenty members of his family and household who were killed on that August morning are buried together, in a line of sad, noble hummocks, in the cemetery in Dacca – Dhaka, the city is now called. The men who killed them afterwards became Members of Parliament, ministers, ambassadors; only many years later, three and a half decades, were they brought to trial for their crimes. The victims for whose death they were tried, and go on being tried, included the eight-year-old Sheikh Russell, who died pleading to be sent abroad to his sister in Germany, and two unborn children.

  I went to see Sufiya in her beautiful house when she was very old. The house was just as it had been: people still came to visit her, to drink tea, to interest her in radical causes. Sometimes, she said, the people who came to see her did so out of mindless curiosity, and some of them even stole a book as a memento from the bookshelf on the terrace. ‘Everyone thinks I am a rich woman and can afford to replace anything,’ she complained mildly. ‘But I am not. And in any case, books are like people. You cannot replace them. I wish people would understand that.’ She had survived the announcement of her death on Calcutta radio by decades. By her extreme old age, the house she lived in was no longer surrounded by other houses: her neighbours had sold their land to developers, and all about her blocks of luxury flats had risen. In Dhanmondi, her house remained, its garden in the perpetual near darkness imposed on it by high-rises; Sheikh Mujib’s house remained, turned into a museum; and my grandfather’s house remained, just as it was. There were not many others. I felt this was a bond between me and Sufiya, and I went to see her to ask her to speak at a rally for the Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi. She received me very courteously; she gave me a cup of tea with sandesh and samosas; she said she would write a letter in support, but she was, alas, too old to leave the house to give a speech at the rally, as I asked. She did write a letter, a beautiful one, which the leader of the student movement read out at the rally, and that was the last time I saw her.

  She died, full of honours, of nothing worse than old age; the state gave her a funeral, and many tens of thousands of people came. The offer was made to lay her in the field in front of the parliament building, that lovely grey fort by an American architect, begun by the Pakistanis, finished by the Bangladeshis. But she said she would prefer to be in the ordinary cemetery with everyone else. She liked other people, and I think she would have felt lonely in the field of honour with nobody but a president or two to keep her company. I have been told that almost her last words, in the hospice where she died, were ‘Has Tulsi eaten properly?’

  Tulsi was the nurse who had been assigned to look after her in her last days.

  2.

  Many years later, I married a writer, who has listened to the story as I have told it to him. One of his books was translated into Romanian, and he was required to travel to that country, with the strange white palace, the largest in the world, at its useless centre. While he was there, he told me, he had dinner with his Romanian publisher and the publisher’s wife. The publisher’s wife was, it seemed, a well-known journalist in Romania, and many years before, she had been sent by the Romanian Bureau of Overseas Journalism to cover the conflict in East Pakistan. She had not thought – she said, lighting another cigarette over a half-full plate in the restaurant – she had not thought that she would be covering the birth of a new nation. She had not known that new nations were born in such a way. She had imagined, she said, that she would be covering the repression of a revolt, and the resumption of ordinary life under the previous political masters.

  (I guess that she started telling this story because my husband explained who I was, and where I came from, and what stories about me he could remember, and dull things like that. He spared my feelings. He did not tell me so.)

  But there, one day, was a new nation. No one knew what had happened to its new leader: Sheikh Mujib – the man whom Nana, and Khandekar, and Sultana had known and been neighbours to – was in prison in Pakistan, and would not be released for months. There did not seem much hope for the new country, if there was a new country. But the Pakistanis had left in mud and blood and smoke,
leaving nothing much but informers behind them in their borrowed houses.

  The publisher’s wife had left her hotel and walked towards the centre of Dacca, to see what there was to be seen. She had needed, after all, a story to write. There was nothing. Nobody was about at all. People had not heard. (This is what she said, though I have seen the newspaper of the first day of the new country many times since, and I think she was not quite correct in her memory.) They would, she assumed, come out of their houses in time. They preferred not to be the first one on the street. The first one on the street was, in fact, the Romanian publisher’s wife, who had no fear, and who trod the tank-torn highway with interest, listening for signs of life.

  There was no sound, she said. A silence, which is unusual in Dacca; there were fewer cars and lorries in Dacca in 1971, but there were some, and there would always be the noises of the street. It was so quiet that she could hear the birds singing. She had no idea there were birds left alive to sing in the centre of Dacca. She had been walking for nearly ten minutes in this silent city when a sound drew her attention from a nearby quarter, a street or two into the warren. For one second she thought it must be the noise of a machine-gun, far off, but it was close and quiet and mechanical. She identified it: it was the sound of a sewing-machine, hard at work.

  She made her way into the back-streets, and after a couple of turns, there was a tailor, sitting under the awning of his shop, his Panjabi shirt flapping as he worked the pedals of his old British sewing-machine. He smiled enormously, nodding as he fed what he was working under the needle. ‘I could not imagine what it was,’ the Romanian publisher’s wife said, retelling the story. ‘Then I saw – it was a flag. It was the flag you saw at demonstrations, but here it was, the flag of the new country, and he was making it as best he could. It is hard, you know, to cut out a circle accurately, but he had done quite a good job of making a red circle, and he had sewn it properly on his green flag, his green rectangle, you know, a little to the right of centre. He explained it all to me, as if I had never heard it before – the red was the blood shed in the struggle for independence, and the green . . . ah, I forget what the green was for. He finished it. I asked him what he was going to do now, and do you know what he said? He said, “I’m going to make another one.” He spoke quite good English, and I complimented him on it. His father had made suits in Calcutta, for Englishmen. But that day he was only going to make flags, until he ran out of the cloth he had dyed himself. So I asked him if I could buy one, on this special day, and he sold it to me for, I think, two dollars.’ She had folded up the flag, and taken it home to Romania, and had kept it ever since.

  Two years after that, her journalistic privileges of travel were revoked, and for twenty years, she never again left her country, and had never been back to mine. That was what my husband’s Romanian publisher told him, and I think she believed it, having told it many times, though the streets of Dacca were certainly not empty on the morning of independence, but crowded with celebrants, letting off firecrackers. Still, that was the story as she told it, and the story she liked to tell, so I have told it too, however untruthfully.

  This has been the story of my early life. I have tried not to invent anything, and to tell everything as I was told it. I have tried to be as good a storyteller as my mother was. In later years, my mother’s girlhood acquaintance Sheikh Hasina came to be prime minister of the country. She was Sheikh Mujib’s daughter. My mother would sometimes say, ‘Was it Hasina who liked that dish that Sharmin used to cook – you remember, the way she steamed rui with ginger and lemon? Do you remember? I know we used to cook it when we were all living in Papa’s house, all through that summer. Don’t you remember? It was so simple, but very good. We never tired of it, remember? And afterwards I’m sure that Hasina came to dinner once at somebody’s house, and they’d had Sharmin’s rui recipe, and so they asked us for the recipe to cook for Hasina, and Hasina liked it so much we gave the recipe to her as well, and she said she would always cook rui like that in future. I’m almost sure. I can’t think who it was who was having Hasina round for dinner. Could it have been Kamal? I really can’t think. Of course, Hasina has always been peculiar about food. I remember, when we were both girls, I went round to their house with Sultana, and she was in a fury. It was for no reason at all. You see, she had ordered up thirteen sacks of chillis from the country. Was it thirteen sacks? I’m almost sure it was. But what would Hasina be doing with thirteen sacks of chillis? And when the sacks had arrived, the very morning that Sultana and I were visiting her, she had gone to the kitchen to count them, and there were only eleven. A whole two sacks had gone missing on the way. Imagine. You see . . .’

  And my father would tuck his napkin into his collar in his dry way. He would cough reprovingly at this point in the story, and smile at my mother to show that he was not serious. He would say, ‘Not Hasina and her sacks of chillis again. We must have heard this story so many times.’

  London-Geneva-Dhaka

  January 2011

  Acknowledgments

  A word about names. All Bengalis have a proper, formal name which they often acquire when they first go to school, or on another early encounter with officialdom. These are not much used in this story. Then most of them have a pet name, used by family and close friends – this is the way in which most of the characters are referred to here. Bengalis are much more ready than Europeans to refer to their relations by the degree of the relationship. Here, the ones most commonly used are mama and mami, meaning (maternal) uncle and aunt, nana and nani, meaning (maternal) grandparents, bhai, brother, and appa, sister. Where necessary, these are qualified by boro, meaning big, or choto, meaning small. Hence the narrator’s two maternal uncles are referred to as Boro-mama, Big-uncle, or Laddu, and the younger as Choto-mama, Small-uncle, or Pultoo. That is what their family tends to call them, although neither is a formal name that would be entered on a government form.

  Mujibur Rahman, the first president of Bangladesh, was much more frequently referred to as Sheikh Mujib, which is the name I have preferred to use, but also by the splendid honorific Bangobandhu, the Friend of Bengal, a name you will still hear on Bangladeshi lips. I have reserved this for very elevated circumstances, although for many Bangladeshis it seems quite ordinary.

  This is not a history of the struggle for Bangladesh’s independence, but the rendering of a family’s passionately held memories. It does not pretend to be an account of the millions who died in the war and the famines that followed. These are the emphases of my husband’s memories, and they may coincide with others’ or flatly contradict them. But in any case, this is not the full story, which could never be told.

  I would like to thank the many friends and family in Bangladesh who welcomed me into their houses and shared their memories of this time. Sultana and Sayeeda Kamal invited me into the beautiful house of their mother, Begum Sufiya Kamal, and shared memories of her and of Zainul Abedin, showing me many treasures. The house in Dhanmondi still stands, alone where all its neighbours have been replaced by high-rises, and I would like to thank its current occupants, Syed Hasan Mahmud (Choto-mama) and my brother-in-law Zahid for their welcome. Also miraculously preserved in a fast-developing city is the house in Rankin Street, along with its neighbour; Mr A. R. Khan welcomed us in, and shared his vivid memories of the time of Zaved’s childhood. I would also like to thank the Hossain family, especially Sara Hossain and David Bergman, Mr Helal of the Bangladeshi Parliament, for sparing time from his crowded schedule to show me around Louis Kahn’s wonderful building, Farah Ghuznavi for her hospitality at her family’s enchanted rajbari, and many other friends in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Particular thanks go to my poet brother-in-law Jahir Hasan for generously finding me translations of several important and near-unobtainable classics from the mainstream of the Bengali literary arts, including Shahidullah Kaiser’s Sangshaptak, the work of one of the intellectuals targeted and murdered by Pakistani forces in the course of the genocide. A deep debt of literary
gratitude is acknowledged in the last sentence of the novel.

  As is clear, this account, with its gaps and wilfully ahistorical emphases, has not been shaped by systematic research. But among the books I found most useful and helpful in complementing my vivid interlocutors were Jahanara Imam’s diary of her 1971 experiences, the harrowing and passionate Of Blood and Fire, and Archer K. Blood’s outsider’s account, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh (both the University Press, Dhaka).

  About the Author

  Philip Hensher is a columnist for the Independent, arts critic for the Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British novelist. He has written seven novels, including The Mulberry Empire, King of the Badgers and the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, and one collection of short stories. He lives in South London and Geneva.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Also by Philip Hensher

  King of the Badgers

  The Northern Clemency

  The Fit

  The Mulberry Empire

  The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife

  Pleasured

  Kitchen Venom

  Other Lulus

  Credits

  Jacket photograph © Chandan

  Robert Rebeiro/Still Pictures

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 8JB

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  Copyright © Philip Hensher 2012

  1

  The right of Philip Hensher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988