The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  She tried to explain to him how it was, that a solid feature of the room she lived in had been removed at a stroke, and one felt first of all that the room would collapse – it was a structural feature, surely a load-bearing one – and then saw that it was holding up together for the moment. It was more than she could bear to hear anyone, even Jeremy, talk about religion, in any context. In those first days of love you could find yourself talking with intensity and commitment on almost any subject, gazing into the face of the loved one. It would have been the same if Jeremy had been a microbiologist. Now it was gone. Lavinia almost collapsed, however, when, eight months after the attacks, in a grim February, a card came through the post, neatly marked with a once-familiar hand. It was Leo, offering his sympathy and saying that he was thinking of her. But there was no address on it. The postmark showed only that it had been posted in London W1. Then her other brother was gone again. Poor stupid Russell – bovine, fire-engine obsessed, solidly repetitive, a stranger from the moment of his birth – was bewildered by his mummy. Jeremy knew too well what to do. He had no mood of crumpled grief himself; he had gone into the kind, sad, supportive figure that he impersonated once a week for near-strangers. He had never met Hugh and he had no grief, only concern for his wife; he could not feel the wind that was tearing through the hole left in the universe by violent design. She wanted to apologize.

  Most of all she could not stop constructing the minutes before it had happened. Hugh running for the bus, then seeing that there were a lot of people shoving to get on. Something must have happened to the tube that morning. It was always happening. He must have been one of the last on a very full bus. Just by him a man was sitting in one of the disabled seats with a rucksack on his knees. That rucksack would really get on people’s nerves in a crowded bus or tube. Was he a tourist, that poor man? He was sitting and muttering into his phone and perspiring there in his seat. The rucksack had been a mistake, the man was coming to understand, during a London morning rush-hour. He was clutching it tight, trying to stop it spilling over onto his neighbour’s knees. Hugh had raised his head. He had caught the eye of a girl, a pretty girl from a Chinese family, her hair scrunched up in a sort of perm, and her eyes dropped – she had recognized him from an advert. The muttering from the man in the seat just by him was continuing. It had a fierce quality, the sound under the breath. Hugh couldn’t see, but he wasn’t quite certain that the man was talking into a mobile phone, after all. The bus was turning off Euston Road, down towards Tavistock Square. Travelling in the morning on public transport in London, you quickly learnt the importance of treating other people with respect and consideration. Hugh very much hoped he wasn’t going to be late for the ten o’clock start of rehearsals. He told himself firmly that there was all the time in the world.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1.

  So there we are, small-wife said.

  Yes, here we are, big-wife said.

  They were in their room. It was the good room that son had assigned them. This was their nice nice room with two beds and it was on the ground floor of the house. Big-wife she had the bed by the wall and small-wife she had the bed by the window. The window it had mango by it. Then it had tamarind by it, in the garden too. Then it had other trees in it, palm and date and tamarind again and another mango and birds in the trees. The wall it had picture on it. Out there beyond the trees and the birds and the garden was the street the district the city of Dacca but they did not go there, the big wife and the small wife. This was their house now and they stayed in it.

  Picture said it was river and field and grass and sky. Picture was blue and green and sun. Picture was on clean white wall. So kind of son and wife to them, no need to climb stairs.

  So there we are, big-wife said.

  So there we are, yes here we are, small-wife said.

  This was their morning talk before the light came. Outside the servants worked quietly because they did not wake those who slept. The wives they were awake and they were washed and their white clothes were ready for the day. When they spoke they spoke quietly. It was secret that they were awake and waiting for son’s voice, outside in the house.

  ‘Husband says –’ small-wife said, her eyes cast down.

  ‘Sister,’ big-wife said, suggesting caution.

  ‘Husband said he hopes everything, for everyone …’

  The house belonged to son.

  ‘Sister!’ small-wife would sometimes say in her quiet voice. ‘I remember … there was the day when I married husband, and I had to leave the house, the beautiful big white house by the rice fields a half a mile from the riverbank.’

  ‘Beautiful house of father, more beautiful house of husband,’ big-wife said.

  ‘And I cried in my gold sari. And husband was so kind in the car. I had never been in a car before. He brought box of sweets from the wedding and when I cried I ate from the box of sweets. And we came to the house of husband and it was in Dacca, a beautiful house with a high wall, and there was big-wife, waiting there to greet me.’

  ‘That was me, sister,’ big-wife said.

  ‘And now guns are shooting in the street again,’ small-wife said.

  ‘I remember the day you came,’ big-wife said. ‘Your new son had a bicycle, a bicycle because of it.’ She shook her head and said nothing more.

  ‘And now husband says …’ small-wife said. She looked at the corner of the room where the chair was. Dark corner of room, chair in the dark and the dark shadows. Husband had died long back, long long back. But some morning when they woke in the dark husband was. Looked from small-wife to big-wife, back again. Sat there. Once light came to the room then husband faded away slowly.

  ‘Listen,’ big-wife said, and she tipped her head on one side.

  ‘It is still dark,’ small-wife said. Son could not be up and busy. The day does not start in the dark!

  ‘Listen!’ big-wife said, and reached out and slapped small-wife across the face. They sat. Big-wife was silent and small-wife was silent. The noise came again. It was not near but it might get nearer. Gun was firing and another gun and another, out there in the dark last of the dark. Night was thinning and soon the dark would be a shadow cast by the mango tree by the window and soon the sound of son moving about would be heard. Day was coming. They listened.

  2.

  Dhanmondi, as a district of Dacca, was a quiet, pleasant place to live in 1971. The houses were single-storey, occasionally with a two-storey house for some important family. The streets were peaceful and dusty, with only a few street hawkers and security guards seated outside each gate, falling asleep against the white-painted plaster walls. Some of the guards against strict instructions, would get up to pass the time of day with their colleagues a house or two away before an impatient pip on the horn of a motor would summon them back, scurrying, to open the painted iron gate of the house for a master returning from work.

  The white houses were flat-roofed. When they had been built in the 1950s, the developers had had an eye on the future, and on modernity. Modern, too, was the grid pattern of the streets, and the systematic rather than picturesque names. Other people might live in an Indo-Saracenic villa called Rosebud in the Minto Road, but Dhanmondi streets were not named after viceroys. Dhanmondi families lived in houses rationally named, number 14, street 19, Dhanmondi. The houses were of severe angularity, wide-windowed and shuttered without frames, the pillars iron joists, the roofs without ornamental tiles, the gutters without softening curves, the colours white or terracotta. The streets ran parallel to each other or turned at a rigid angle of 90 degrees, forming absolutely regular blocks of eight houses each. It was easy to go from house to house systematically – postmen or canvassers – and be sure that nobody had been overlooked or omitted. Only in the gardens was there some kind of ornament, as trees grew large and shady after fifteen years, with fruit trees, tamarind, mango, fig, as well as bilimbi and the strangling banyan. Flowers in neatly arrayed pots flooded the trees’ shades with colour and filled the
beds. Ornamental, too, was the lake at the edge of Dhanmondi, delightful for a long circulating walk in the evening, an agreeable argument with an old friend, a gossip, an adda to catch up and listen to the latest. It was an item of faith with the Dhanmondians that their lake, unlike all other lakes, never bred mosquitoes to annoy them.

  The house in Dhanmondi had been commissioned and bought by Sharif’s grandfather, who had had some ideas of modernity, but whose life had nevertheless been rather different from his son’s, or from what his grandchildren’s would have become. Grandfather had been the last man in the family to marry two women. He had died ten years ago, having enjoyed only three years in his house. Nowadays his two wives lived together in a room with two single beds on the ground floor, and treated each other like elderly sisters, dressing in white, rising at dawn.

  Father was the master of the house. He returned from his chambers or from court, dropping his legal bands on the floor for the houseboy to pick up, went to pay his respects to his mothers, to Mother, and then to speak to the children. These days there were a lot of them, and some had children of their own. Sharif had gone to England with his wife Nazia to finish his PhD; he had returned with a baby, Aisha, who was now three years old. They had a flat of their own, but often dined at Sharif’s father’s house and, in recent weeks, seemed to have moved back home semi-permanently. It was only five minutes’ walk away. Rafiq was seventeen, and studying at school. He would go to Dacca University to study political theory in the autumn, if Dacca University still existed in the autumn. He was a good boy. Then there were the girls: Bina and Dolly were children, and sharing a room because they liked to. The household was interestingly book-ended, as Mother drily observed, with the grandmothers sharing a girlish room at one extremity of the ménage, the girls sharing a more enthusiastically readerly one at the other edge. Sadia was not living at home. She had married over a year ago, in December of 1969, and now lived in the unfamiliar atmosphere of her husband Mahfouz’s household, where prayers were said five times a day. It was what she had wanted and what she had got.

  It was at the beginning of March that the housekeeping threatened to collapse in a spirit of chaos. It was impossible to be absolutely clear from one day to the next how many people would be sitting down for dinner. Some days it was six or eight; the next it might be twenty. The grandmothers were always there, and the master and the mistress; the two girls were there, too. But Sharif and Nazia were not always there to dinner; they took tiny Aisha with them, they accepted invitations on the spur of the moment. These were exciting times, and they went out with Aisha hidden underneath a large shawl, to sit at a colleague’s dinner table or in their salon, to argue and sing and speechify. Sometimes they brought a colleague back to the Dhanmondi house, but only a colleague in some kind of need – Nazia was thoughtful in that way. It was often Professor Anisul Ahmed, who was an old bachelor, married to his subject. His parents Father remembered fondly. Sometimes there was the married daughter, Sadia, and sometimes she came with her new husband, Mahfouz. And then there could be many more, friends and associates of Rafiq. You did not see him from dawn to bedtime some days; other days he would burst in with five or six glowing revolutionaries, all noise and happiness, demanding dinner. Some days stools had to be brought in and the children asked to sit on the floor on cushions. One day Mother gave up and required Nazia and Sharif to wait to eat with Rafiq’s noisy fellow students in an hour or so. Professor Anisul had to eat now: he had to be treated with respect. But …

  It was an evening when Sadia had come, and her husband, Mahfouz. Mahfouz had talked about the rallies, about the Movement. His eyes had flickered from face to face. He should not be asked to sit down at the table with Rafiq’s friends, but peaceably, with grandmothers and with his parents-in-law, to talk about other things.

  Mother smoothed things over daily with Ghafur, the cook. She usually ordered a vast chicken curry, something that could be expanded and thinned out with extra rice if three more guests appeared, and bowls of simple vegetable dishes, gourds and beans and lentils that would stay good for two or three days. Ghafur was under constant instructions to be prepared to make half a dozen omelettes.

  Only Sharif and Nazia were at home for dinner, meaning with the girls there were only eight at table. For once this was certain, and Mother had taken the opportunity to send Ghafur out to buy some fish. Ghafur, wonderful resourceful Ghafur, had found some beautiful rui, who knew where from – they would feast tonight. The delicious smell was filling the house. Mother went upstairs to wash and brush her hair, to change into something a little bit elegant.

  There was a rally going on today. Everyone knew of it: a summons had come from the political leaders to assemble at the racecourse. Something important was to be said. Rafiq had bolted his breakfast and shot out of the house before eight. That evening, the family had got up and were filing into the dining room at the back of the house, where it overlooked the flowerbed and the mango tree, when there was a rumpus from the front door. Rafiq had returned in time for dinner. Father and the grandmothers paused before carrying on; the girls were shooed onwards by Nazia. Mother detached herself and went to greet her younger son.

  He was pulling the old shawl from his face where he had bound and wrapped it. His clothes were dusty and his shirt had a tear in it, but at least he was alone.

  ‘I don’t know what we are supposed to do,’ Mother said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want food,’ Rafiq said. ‘If there is food I will eat it, but if there is none – Mother, do you know what happened today? Listen.’

  ‘Wash your face and hands and come into the dining room. You can tell us all.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Wait – who is here tonight? Elder-brother? Is that all? I will wash and come through. Stay with me.’

  He dashed into the downstairs cloakroom, shutting the door, but going on talking. Khadr, the boy serving at table, emerged and stood by the door to the dining room, his dark small head on one side waiting for a command. With a fierce gesture of her hands, Mother ushered him back to his place at the table. Rafiq’s voice continued, but what it was saying was not clear through the door. His head was wrapped in a towel.

  ‘… to hear that voice, those words,’ Rafiq said, emerging. His face was pink and fresh; his hands, at least, seemed clean.

  ‘And your shirt,’ Mother said. ‘At least go to change your shirt.’

  ‘Must I?’ said Rafiq, but he bounded off, and was back from his room in twenty seconds with a clean white shirt on, still talking. ‘I thought the day would never –’

  ‘Come along,’ Mother said. ‘Your father and everyone must be impatient at waiting. Now. Start again.’

  ‘I was at the rally,’ Rafiq said, sitting down. ‘I went to the racecourse with everyone – we grew in size, the closer we got. We had to walk for an hour and a half, and we thought we would be early, we thought there would be few people there, but –’

  ‘I heard of it,’ Father said. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Everything in its proper order,’ Mother said.

  ‘When we arrived, we thought it was the largest crowd any of us had ever seen, and so early, hours before anything was supposed to happen. We thought we would be on the very outskirts of the crowd, but then we realized, there were people arriving behind us, a sea of people going on arriving, and in half an hour it seemed to us that we were in the middle of a crowd, we were even quite near to where the speakers would stand. We had food to eat when we were hungry and water to drink and we settled down, young and old, and we talked of what we hoped for. The women and the VIPs were at the front – they had their own enclosure. But the nation! The nation that does not exist yet, it was there! It was there on the racecourse. Father, Mother, the hopes of us all – you cannot imagine.’

  ‘Rafiq, child …’ Mother said. She covered her feelings. She stood to give him fish from the plate, a movement of grateful servitude. This was not the moment to speak her fears. Around the table, everyone was quiet, listening to Rafiq.<
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  ‘He came in the end,’ Rafiq said. ‘The Friend of Bengal. He came in his white car – it had to carve a way through the crowd. For an hour he was coming through the crowd, we were getting up and trying to see. But then he was there. I thought we would hear nothing but he spoke so clearly and everyone was so silent. It was so important to hear what he had to say.’

  ‘Is it true?’ Nazia said. ‘Are we a country of our own? Did the Friend of Bengal say that we are ourselves now?’

  ‘No,’ Rafiq said. ‘No, he did not. And that was a disappointment. But he is making us stand on our own two feet. I think we all know that will come. Remember – it was only two days ago that they raised the flag at the university. The flag of Bangla Desh, flying over the university! Those four men of ours who raised the flag – you know their names. I wish the Friend of Bengal had declared independence, I do, but he is who he is. There are things that must be done first. Father, Mother, I wish you could have heard the speech – I wish you could have heard how he talked of what we have come through and what must be done – I had never ever felt like this before. I heard it, I heard every word. There will be a home for us. He told us that every home must be a fortress in the months to come. Oh, I was there today.’

  Rafiq’s excitement had stilled the table – even the grandmothers were silent; even Bina and Dolly sat with their eyes wide, taking in their brave brother, his curly hair rumpled, his face pink, almost shouting what he had seen while shovelling food into his mouth. At the other end of the table, Sharif. He had not gone to the rally at the racecourse. He ate sedately, listening.

  ‘And then?’ Sharif said. ‘The Friend of Bengal will take charge. Yes? Tell me, how much did he talk of us, and how much did he talk of himself? In this famous speech, I mean.’

  ‘What are you asking me, brother?’ Rafiq said.