The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I have heard him speak before,’ Sharif said. ‘And I admire him as much as you do, but I wish he would not speak always of himself, how his own rights have been trodden over, how his people and his nation –’

  ‘He is a modest man, Rafiq,’ Mother said reprovingly. ‘He is not a puffed-up politician.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Rafiq said. ‘Today he was dressed in a white shirt and trousers and an ordinary waistcoat. It was almost what anyone in the crowd was wearing. He is an ordinary simple modest man – you can see that just by looking at him.’

  Mother listened carefully, with feelings she could not quite suppress. Tonight – or tomorrow night or the night after that – she would go up to the roof of the house, and order the flag of Bangla Desh to be flown. Like Rafiq, she had wanted to be sure that only elder-brother was here, and not elder-sister, not elder-sister’s husband Mahfouz.

  3.

  There was talk out there of collaboration and defiance, of standing firm or standing against. In the house there was no talk of it. ‘It is all the same,’ Sharif said, and turned to talk of the engineering students’ projects with Professor Anisul, who was there for dinner. ‘A sort of cantilevered bus shelter, sir,’ he said. ‘Of course the great issue is floor area, which would be absurd, but a clever project. He is thinking through the possibilities.’

  ‘But, my dear Sharif,’ Professor Anisul said, ‘what may be achieved in the real world, not in persuading them to impossibilities?’

  ‘This is not an impossibility,’ Sharif said. ‘Merely an impracticable suggestion. I believe he knows it is impracticable.’

  ‘Without someone dreaming in a fanciful way,’ Mother said, ‘what would ever be achieved, Professor?’

  She had intended to open up the conversation between Sharif and Anisul, but Professor Anisul merely said, ‘My dear lady,’ as if no woman could ever have any opinion about engineering projects, ‘I do not encourage them in this.’

  Bina and Dolly had been looking awestruck at Professor Anisul. They were seated on either side of their father, who had started by reading a story, but now they leaned forward rudely, Dolly whispering in her sister’s ear and making her titter.

  ‘In the EPUET,’ Professor Anisul said, ‘formerly part of Dacca University, we are constantly concerned with the creation of the possible and the practical. When I began as a student, many years ago, at the University of Dacca, in a very similar faculty to where you and I now labour …’

  Professor Anisul regretted, everyone knew, the formation of the East Pakistan University of Engineering and Technology, and the scything off of the Engineering Faculty of Dacca University where he had spent the happiest days of his life. Nazia, who had studied English literature at university, described the topic as his King Charles’s Head. How had Professor Anisul come to be such a presence in the house? He had taught Sharif as an undergraduate and for his first postgraduate degree – Nazia imagined sleek, wonderful Sharif swimming out of an indistinguishable cloud of identical fish, Professor Anisul’s attention first drawn by a brilliant paper, first realizing who Sharif was, then developing a regard for him, forgetting all the rest of the cloud of fish looking up with pained incomprehension. At the end Professor Anisul advised Sharif that he hoped he would ultimately take up a job teaching at the University of Dacca – ‘I think you would maintain the high standards of the existing faculty,’ he said morosely – but now, he advised, Sharif should go to the West to study for his PhD. He would arrange a scholarship. This was strange advice from Professor Anisul, who had never studied outside the boundaries of the city of Dacca, but Sharif took it. Professor Anisul suggested the University of Michigan, an institution that had produced an individual whom Anisul had met and got on with like a house on fire. That would have been in 1958, at a conference in Bombay, and possibly the last time such a meeting of minds had taken place. Instead, Sharif looked into the matter seriously, and decided to take a place at the University of Sheffield in England. He married Nazia and they set off in August 1965. They were not entirely without connections there – Sharif’s cousin had moved to England, to Manchester, which was not far away. They would be able to see a lot of each other. At the beginning of 1969 they returned with a good job for Sharif at what was now EPUET. The very first task he set for his second-year students was a design for a cot for the baby they had brought with them. The best of them Sharif kept, or at any rate the oddest.

  A thought had come to Mother, and now she kindly asked, ‘Your poor sister, Professor – I know she lives with you. You must ask her to join us for dinner one day.’

  ‘She died, dear lady,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘I am surprised you did not know. She died a year and a half ago, quite suddenly and painlessly. It was nearly five years after the death of her husband.’

  The grandmothers, sitting almost opposite him, a pair in white, had been munching and listening brightly, their eyes flicking across the table. Now they lowered their gazes; the elder muttered to the younger, the younger to the elder in return. Professor Anisul leant forward and, with all the appearance of cheerfulness, lifted a slice of fish from the serving platter to his own plate.

  ‘Professor,’ Father said, ‘we had no idea. You must have thought us very remiss for never mentioning her.’

  ‘Professor Anisul has an excellent housekeeper,’ Sharif put in, but this was a mistake: it made his mother realize that he had known all about Anisul’s sister, and had never thought of mentioning it.

  ‘Excellent and thorough,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘I wish she would not disappear for days on end, but when she is there, she manages all those important matters such as a clean shirt to wear, food on the table. The mysteries of these things!’

  ‘And when she is not there?’ Mother said. ‘She should not disappear without a word for days on end, as you put it.’

  ‘That is the curious thing,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘Eight days ago, she announced that she was going to Gazipur to pay a visit to her sister, and left. In the most extraordinary manner, that is the absolute last I have seen of her. I must confess – in two days’ time I am going to run out of clean shirts.’

  ‘You must get somebody new,’ Mother said, in a rush – she could see Father concentrating on the matter at hand, and coming close to suggesting an awful solution. ‘It must be possible to acquire a new housekeeper at short notice. Or your housekeeper may return tomorrow. Let us not be pessimistic.’

  ‘These are strange days,’ Father said, ruminating. ‘Rafiq goes to the rally – he hears the Friend of Bengal – he is thrilled. But Rafiq is seventeen years old. There are some who do not care about the country being born, who perhaps see that a city is not a safe place to be in the days to come.’

  ‘It is our duty to stay here, in Dacca!’ Rafiq called, his attention drawn by his own name.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Father said. ‘And perhaps discretion is the better part of valour. If a single woman prefers to remove herself to the safety of her sister’s village until things calm down, who am I to condemn her?’

  ‘And yet Professor Anisul has no one to look after him,’ Mother said. She seemed resigned to what was about to be said, but it was the child Bina, unexpectedly, who said it.

  ‘Papa,’ she said, looking very pleased with herself. ‘Could not Professor Anisul-sir come to live here, if there is a war coming? It would be safer and there would be plenty of room.’

  ‘That would be very agreeable,’ Professor Anisul said quickly.

  4.

  ‘The laces in my shoes are broken,’ Sharif said later, to Nazia, when they were on their own. He saw an amused gleam of pleasure in her eye.

  ‘Take your daughter out in her push-chair,’ she said. ‘She would like a nice walk in the fresh air. It’s chilly, mind, out there in the March wind straight off the moors. Take the number fifty-one bus.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the fifty-one bus,’ Sharif said, in a sort of ecstasy. ‘Is that the one that goes through Broomhill and past the university and down to the tow
n hall? And is the ticket still threepence, a threepenny bit?’

  ‘That one,’ Nazia said. When they were alone, they liked to talk about how their lives would be, if they were back in Sheffield. The four years of Sharif’s life there, working in the engineering faculty, making easy friends, going about with Nazia on the top deck of buses, to the countryside and the rolling high purple moors, the great granite boulders tossed about the mountain, which was not, they learnt, a mountain but only a hill, the snow, the solid bland food, the little flat above the newsagent’s, and kind Mrs White and her husband, who asked them for dinner up in Ranmoor, and the City Hall, and the Whites’ daughter Eileen, who babysat for Aisha and said every time that she had been as good as gold, and the carol service they had been to in gloves and coats, and everyone knowing the songs, and Dr Pennyfoot crying, holding her pink angora scarf up to her sweet, fat-cheeked face to hide the tears when she said goodbye to Nazia and Sharif and especially to little Aisha, wrapped up in a padded one-piece, only her dear face emerging stolidly from the construction – Sharif and Nazia liked to talk about the four years they had spent in Sheffield. Sometimes when a really awful prospect emerged, such as the likelihood that one of them was going to have to take a rickshaw to Elephant Road and try to match a pair of shoelaces, they liked to pretend they were still there. ‘I’ll catch the bus,’ Nazia said, ‘and then I’ll go to Rackham’s, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know about Rackham’s,’ Sharif said. ‘If I were you I would stick to reliable quality and buy the shoelaces from Cole Brothers. And then you could pop into Marks & Spencer while you were out.’

  ‘Oh,’ Nazia said. ‘Marks & Spencer. Marks & Spencer. Marks & Spencer.’

  There was a devout and amused silence. Nazia reached out her hand and stroked the back of her husband’s arm. Their game was funny, and they both enjoyed it, but it had a knack of falling into a hole of disappointment. It was what Nazia most cherished about Sharif, his spark of comedy, the way his eyes lit up when someone in the room was making himself into a spectacle, even on a minor scale. The night before he had sat and quietly observed as Dolly fashioned her plate of rice into a hill, two hills, making a lake of gravy to go with it, and all the time a serious humming of her favourite song. No one at Father’s table had paid any attention, apart from Sharif – the argument between Rafiq and Father about the coming declaration of independence was too energetic. Sharif’s bored little sister sculpted and hummed, and waited for all this talking to finish. Sharif had sparkled with silent delight at it.

  ‘Your father is going to regret his munificent offer,’ Nazia said.

  ‘I don’t see what else he could have done, once the conversation reached that point.’

  ‘We could have offered to house him,’ Nazia said. ‘Here, in the flat above Dr Matin’s, where we are returning soon, Sharif.’

  ‘And yet we have not offered to house him,’ Sharif said. ‘I have heard him observe out loud that he did not know what he was going to do, where he was going to live, three or four times. And somehow I did not offer to house him.’

  ‘It may come to nothing,’ Nazia said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Sharif said. ‘It will not come to nothing. Professor Anisul must be packing his bags at this moment. I expect Mother is clearing out the room that used to be big-sister’s.’

  ‘No, I meant that events may come to nothing,’ Nazia said. ‘We may walk up to the brink, and then walk away from it. The Friend of Bengal may come to an agreement. Professor Anisul’s housekeeper may return from her village near Gazipur, and Professor Anisul return to his house where she can look after him.’

  ‘I don’t think that is going to happen,’ Sharif said.

  They were talking in the salon of their flat, upstairs in a two-storey house in Dhanmondi. For all purposes, they had moved back to Father and Mother’s house. From time to time, they visited their flat, and sat, and talked, and once in a while slept there. Downstairs lived a tall and sarcastic surgeon at the hospital, his wife and two children, who let the first floor as a flat; they had modified the building so that an outside staircase now led up to an unassuming door. Nothing about their door made it look like a residence; Dr Matin, almost certainly, was pulling a fast one by pretending it was a storage space, or where his servants lived. But the flat was perfect, with a big sitting room, solid walls, enough bedrooms for Aisha and the next child and the cook, when she was needed, and their bedroom at the back was shaded by a eucalyptus, casting a medicinal tang into the room. It was five minutes’ walk to Father and Mother’s house, and the five minutes’ distance was, Nazia had found, quite perfect. She looked forward to the time when the five minutes’ distance was reinstated as a permanent fact of their existence. Her own parents were in Chittagong, and their welfare and interest largely taken on trust.

  5.

  There had been no word from Sadia for some time now, since the city had been cast into uproar by their leader’s speech at the racecourse that Rafiq had heard. But two weeks after Professor Anisul had moved into Father’s house, she sent a postcard with one of her servants to say that she and Mahfouz were coming to visit that night. It must have been 23 March.

  Sadia had never been like any of the other children – not like Sharif and certainly not like Rafiq. She never argued or spoke back; she lowered her eyes and did what she was told. Mother found it agreeable but disconcerting; she was more at home with her elder boy’s losing himself at the bottom of the garden, ignoring all calls for help, or with her younger boy’s passionate and enraged responses to authority, stamping his feet as soon as he could stand. She did not believe that Sadia’s behaviour was innate. As a baby, she had cried and fist-pumped as much as any child Mother had ever seen. It was as if, afterwards, she had made a decision that it was right to obey authority without question. She was not quite convincing in the role, and the sweet smile she tried to assume was often pursed and pressed in what, deep down, must be rage. Religion was for everyone, and yet, when Sadia took it on with fervour and some commitment, she looked to everyone like a miscast actress in an unsuitable role, making the best of things. Gently Mother remonstrated. The important thing, after all, was for women to gain an education, and to regard the world with interest and curiosity. Sadia had been good at mathematics and physics. They had expected her to be a scientist in a laboratory, not a village mullah’s wife. It was only Sadia’s age, Father said when they were alone. It took some children like this.

  But the fervour did not diminish, and Sadia asked Mother if, when she left school, Father and she could find her a husband. She was not interested in going to university. Mother would always remember that moment like the infliction of a wound, there in the sitting room of the house, the sun shining through the windows onto her daughter, headscarved and round-faced. When the children made impossible requests, Mother normally said, ‘Let’s see,’ or ‘I must ask Father what he thinks’, but to this she only said, ‘No. Impossible.’ It took six months and a number of visits from some of Sadia’s aunts to persuade Mother to listen to the proposal. The aunts took the view that Sadia would not shift; she would go on insisting; that at any rate if her parents took charge of finding a husband, as Sadia was requesting, they would have some measure of protection against a really offensively orthodox family. In the end Mother had to agree. She went to Father, and endured his shock, disgust and outrage in turn. In three months they had both come to accept it as inevitable. Sadia was only eighteen when a visit took place, in pomp, from a family doctor Father knew and his friend, a supplier of medical goods with his own shop. Father would have preferred the doctor, but it was the supplier of medical goods who brought his elder son with him, a boy called Mahfouz.

  Tonight Mahfouz and Sadia were coming to dinner. It was unexpected. For the previous days, there had been regular outbreaks of shouting and even gunfire outside in the streets. Mother had noticed that some of the houses nearby which had been flying the new flag of Bangla Desh had, earlier this week, removed it; they looked bare,
solitary, sad as a site cleaned up after a festivity. She had gone up this morning and removed theirs. It would be flown again later.

  When Mahfouz and Sadia arrived, they found a household that had been warned to stay off significant topics of conversation. They talked about Professor Anisul’s poor sister; they talked about Mahfouz’s sister’s pregnancy; they talked about the delicious fish that Mother used to cook for them. Professor Anisul embarked on a long explanation of the difficulties of bridge-building over the Padma; Mahfouz did his bit, and listened carefully to the explanation, interjecting occasional well-considered questions. If they passed the conversational baton one to another, there need be no reason ever to embark on an argument with Sadia and her husband. The children watched, bored now that voices at the dinner table were lowered and they knew everyone round it; they knew all about good behaviour, and if Bina did her showy best to inhabit it, smiling to left and right graciously as she was handed dishes, Dolly scowled and kicked and slid with her whole body underneath the table, until spoken to sharply, just because she could.

  The evening came to an end: Father went out with them to hail a rickshaw, as if they were the most distinguished guests ever to have come through the door.

  ‘An intelligent young man, your son-in-law,’ Professor Anisul said to Mother. ‘I don’t remember having met him before. He was talking to me about the new projects to increase road capacity across the country. What use are we if we can’t move material from one side of the country to another, whether this is a separate country or half of one?’

  ‘They can’t know anything about what’s being planned,’ Rafiq said, at the far end of the salon. ‘They wouldn’t have come otherwise.’

  ‘Maybe nothing’s going to start,’ Sharif said.

  ‘The planes from West Pakistan have been full for weeks,’ Rafiq said. ‘Full of soldiers in mufti. The East Pakistan regiments, they’ve all been sent off on exercises in the country. Why? Because they don’t trust them to follow orders and shoot Bengalis. They’re being replaced by Pakistani officers. It’s going to start.’