The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  3.

  At first Nazia did not know what she had been woken by. It was some time in the afternoon. She was extended, fully dressed, on their bed. She had got into the habit. There was so little to do in someone else’s house, and Mother took charge of everything. If it was possible to go out to the market, she would offer to do that with Ghafur, but it had not been necessary today or yesterday. Now something had woken her up. She swung her legs to the floor where the chappals sat neatly, and gave her hair a cursory brush in the mirror of the old dressing-table.

  Professor Anisul was sitting at the table with a calculator and a broad sheet of paper unrolled and spread out, its corners held down by small stones. At the other end of the salon Mother was talking to Sharif’s elder-sister. That was what had woken her – the sound of Sadia actually laughing. She didn’t think that Sadia had been to the house since the night of 25 March. Sadia and Mother were sitting looking at a photograph album – the one in which Mother kept all photographs of the family, of her father standing stiffly, of Grandfather in his robes and court bands. She was turning the pages for Sadia with absorption.

  Sadia looked up, her scarf-wrapped face full of joy. ‘Sister!’ she said. ‘I am so happy to see you.’

  ‘We were so worried about you,’ Nazia said. ‘We had the note that Mahfouz sent round, two weeks ago, and that was a relief, but –’

  ‘We heard that everything was well,’ Sadia said, ‘I think from Khadr or Ghafur to someone next door and so on until Mohammed in our kitchen heard you were safe.’

  ‘A great relief,’ Mother said formally. But she had just now been turning the pages and laughing with Sadia. It must have been the sight of Nazia that made her think of what she was doing.

  ‘My husband had to come to Dhanmondi,’ Sadia said. ‘Things seem to be calming down a little – it was terrible in the Elephant Road, the hooligans running riot. My father-in-law locked the gates and we stayed inside and prayed.’

  ‘And that seems to have worked,’ Nazia said. She could not help herself.

  ‘My father-in-law says that he has seen this before, and things must go on as normal,’ Sadia said. ‘So husband today was travelling to Dhanmondi, and he is so kind! He would drop me at Father’s house for an hour, and I should stay and drink tea with Mother. Sister, did you ever see this photograph? Of Grandfather? I think this must be of him at Oxford, so many many years ago, before independence, before anything – look.’

  Nazia knew the photograph she meant, as indeed Sadia must do, but she came and sat by her on the sofa. In it, Father was standing with a pole at the end of a flat-bottomed boat. The sun dappled through a tree hanging over the river – dappled black and white and grey. She thought it must be a willow. Grandfather and his friends were wearing shirt sleeves, rolled up to above the elbow, and were smiling broadly. They looked so young. Grandfather had said once that he had met only three or four Englishmen as friends in all his time in Oxford; he had remained in the company of other Indians for those years. (Of course they were Indians then and thought of themselves as that.) Grandmother now was explaining to Sadia that the Sikh in the photograph was another lawyer, and he married an Englishwoman and stayed in England, in Manchester where her family came from. Hardeep – he called himself Harry afterwards, or so Grandmother believed. ‘An unusual thing to happen, fifty years ago,’ Mother said. ‘But there are plenty of brown Englishmen now.’

  ‘My husband’s Muqtadir-uncle!’ Sadia said, clapping her hands. ‘He went to England twenty years ago, he lives in London, he has a restaurant and fifteen people working for him! Sister, do you not have any photographs of your time in Sheffield?’

  Of course Nazia did. The album was kept with Mother’s other albums in the downstairs study, she wasn’t quite sure why, and Mother got up to fetch it. Sadia and Nazia were left alone.

  ‘Oh, sister,’ Sadia said, ‘it is so good to see you. I missed you so much.’

  ‘We all missed you,’ Nazia said, melting. It was true: she had always liked Sadia, despite the decision she had taken in life. ‘But your husband’s family – they are all very kind to you, aren’t they?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Sadia said. ‘They are lovely. But that old man – is he living here? He would drive me crazy, the way he talks.’

  ‘I find something very urgent that needs to be done,’ Nazia said, ‘if he starts explaining things to us. He needed shelter – he was not looking after himself very well.’

  ‘And Aisha? She was so pretty when I saw her last. In her room? And little-sisters? Sleeping too? I insist that Bina, at least, be woken up to say hello to her sister. And Sharif, I am so sorry to miss Sharif. He must stay safe. I really miss everyone. I wish I had been able to tell you that I was coming. And Rafiq? Where is Rafiq? I miss him so much.’

  There was nothing in Sadia’s demeanour or voice to indicate that she had now reached the commanded purpose of her visit, but Nazia understood it all the same. She would not tell Sadia what she had come to find out, that Rafiq had left the house to join the fighters. She believed that he was probably a few hundred miles away by now, undergoing training somewhere near the Indian border, or over it. Everyone knew that. Sadia had come to confirm this news.

  She was saved from answering, however, by Mother returning with the photograph album covered in a brown woven-cloth binding – it was different from the other photograph albums, and that was because she and Sharif had bought it in Sheffield. They had bought it at W. H. Smith’s – what an ordinary shop that had seemed after a while in Sheffield! Of course there were shops in Dacca they loved and had been going to all their lives. But W. H. Smith’s would be so perfect for Aisha now, with its perfect little presents, just interesting enough for tiny hands when she had been good – a rubber in the shape of a rabbit’s head, a bright orange pencil sharpener, a lovely little picture book with an interesting story about Ant and Bee discovering a rainbow that was really a bicycle tyre. Nazia felt she remembered all of it, and everything always in stock. Mother sat down with a cry of pleasure, and together they began to look at the book. The photographs were not in sequence; the very first one was the most important thing that happened while they were in Sheffield, a pretty little girl in a white fur hood, tied up with reins on her back, her flushed face so pretty in the padded jacket against the white of the snow. It was only on the next page that there was a picture of Sharif in his doctoral robes with Nazia in a beautiful sari, gold-edged and blue. The colours throughout had faded, become a little yellow and sepia; the park they stood in, the grass was as dry and yellow and dead as a desert, the same colour as their happy yellow faces.

  They spent a nice hour, and suddenly there was Mahfouz, smiling, to fetch his wife away. Professor Anisul had paid no attention to Sadia and Nazia and Mother talking over the photograph album. But when Mahfouz was shown into the room, Professor Anisul rose, delighted, with the three of them.

  ‘A pleasure to see you,’ Professor Anisul said.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Mahfouz said. ‘I’m here to collect my wife. Is everything well with you?’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Professor Anisul said. ‘Everyone is being most kind. After that first night – it was so worrying. But now we all have our lives, not the life we want. We hardly know what dangers lie outside.’

  ‘The dangers are lessening,’ Mahfouz said.

  Nazia looked at his familiar mercantile face, as if for the first time. His fresh, open complexion; his wide eyes; his wavy hair brushed back, thick and luxuriant; his open hands and his (for the moment) half-puzzled smile. She made herself think one thing: that is what a murderer looks like.

  ‘It is so hard,’ Professor Anisul said forgivingly, ‘to keep track of all these threatened dangers. Young Rafiq used to explain them to us, but now he has heard the call of duty, left us –’

  ‘Is Rafiq not at home?’ Mahfouz said quickly.

  ‘Why, now,’ Professor Anisul said, ‘he hasn’t been –’

  ‘And your father?’ Mother said firmly to
Mahfouz. ‘He is well, I hope? I hope his business isn’t suffering with the protests and hartals? Not too much? I do hope …’

  She was ushering Mahfouz and Sadia out. But Professor Anisul had managed to tell them that Rafiq had left home to fight. Two of the Friendly Ones, Nazia believed of Mahfouz and Sadia. She could feel the lazy hot gaze of their brother-in-law turning ineluctably in Sharif’s direction, too.

  4.

  And then all at once it was four o’clock in the morning and the whole house, or almost the whole house, was clustered in the hallway in darkness, the door just shutting behind Rafiq and them all embracing him and calling out as silently as they could manage. Mother was even crying, and she was saying she knew he would be back. He smelt terrible, his clothes stiff with old sweat and dirt, his hair thick and encrusted, a great beard spreading out like wildfire, but everyone embraced him – Father and Mother and Sharif, and now Nazia and even Bina and Dolly, giving muted little squeaks. Dolly was saying that Bina thought he had gone for ever when he was gone for two weeks, but she, she knew he would come back, and where had he been? Brother, what is that, those marks, those blisters on your face, your hands?

  Mother stopped him replying, and gave Dolly a light slap. No one must know where Rafiq had been or what he had done. Did she want to have to keep a secret when the Pakistanis came?

  ‘I’ve dreamt so much about a hammering on the door in the middle of the night,’ Sharif said. ‘And then there it was. I was terrified. But I woke up, and it wasn’t a hammering, it was a tap-tap-tap at the window frame.’

  ‘And there you were at the window, returned,’ Nazia said, ‘safe, asking to be let in. I am so happy.’

  ‘Before anything else, you must have a bath,’ Mother said. ‘Are you hungry? Have you eaten?’

  ‘I am so hungry, Mother,’ Rafiq said. Here was something she could do for him. Ghafur and Khadr and the housekeeper lived in the little annexe at the bottom of the garden; they would not be disturbed if she now went and cooked some eggs and rice for her younger son. ‘I want you to wash – you are so dirty! You smell so much! So bad! How did you get here? No, don’t say. You walked, or you came with people as dirty as yourself. I am so proud of you. Later, when you are clean and your hair is clean, I will cut your hair.’

  ‘No, Mother,’ Rafiq said. ‘Are there no barbers in Dacca any more? I will go to them.’

  ‘Oh, Rafiq,’ Mother said. ‘He is so nice, so, so nice, his face like a cat, his hand going up like that when he yawns. Now it is time for him to wash and then to eat. And then I will cut his hair.’

  ‘But a barber,’ Rafiq said. ‘Barbers are good people! I will go to a barber far, far away, in Gulshan, a barber who speaks only English and keeps his customers’ secrets. Please, Father, I beg you, not a haircut by my mother, not that. Leave it as it is. Is it so bad? Is it so very bad? Cannot Khadr cut hair? Or my brother? He is a structural engineer! Cannot you do this simple thing, big-brother? Then I bow to my terrible fate. Mother, take the scissors in your hands. I bid you, cut my hair.’

  A bath was filled, and Rafiq went to it, splashing in the hot water, washing (he afterwards said) his hair four times before it began to feel like hair and not like dry, sticky twigs. He combed and combed his hair under the water until the comb would go through and not stick like a plough in deep mud; he washed himself in the tub, then stood up and soaped himself all over, then took a jug of clean water and rinsed himself off. He dried himself with the two rough towels; the first bore black marks afterwards, the second was clean. He must have gone for two weeks without washing between the neck and the wrists. But he put on the clean shirt and trousers that Mother had laid out for him, and, as his little sisters had begged, let them look at the colour of the bathwater before he emptied it. Bina told Dolly afterwards that as long as she lived she would never see water so black and filthy. If little-brother had had to lie in a ditch, he would not have been made dirtier by the experience; much later, when she studied English literature at university, she read in Antony and Cleopatra of Antony drinking from the gilded puddle which beasts would cough at, and she thought of her brother’s last bath.

  And then Mother had boiled rice and there was bread to eat and some of the chicken dish from last night, she warmed it in a pan, more than anyone could eat, and she fried eggs as well, giving her son three, then three more, and just let him eat. In the kitchen there was little light; just an oil lamp hanging above the kitchen table where Rafiq sat. At first he was silent, eating and eating, pushing the food into his mouth. Father sat by him, watching him with interest and amusement, and Mother standing behind Father when she judged there was food enough before him for the moment. After a while Rafiq began to talk.

  ‘Mother, I have blisters on my hands and my neck,’ he said. ‘Some are infected. I must clean them before I set off again. It was the Sten guns, firing off sparks. Afterwards, you are deaf, almost deaf for minutes. And the lying in the water! We know about fighting in the monsoon, we know about water, but they don’t know anything. It is then that we are going to defeat them.’

  ‘Don’t tell us,’ Mother said, pleading. But she would never have any information taken from her.

  ‘We were in India!’ Rafiq said. ‘We have been training, no more. I have killed nobody yet. I picked up guns and I fired them and I held hand grenades and I hurled hand grenades. And all the time we ate what there was to eat – Mother, I am so happy to eat and eat – and we ate off broken shells with our hands, and – Are there more eggs, Mother?

  ‘And tomorrow or the day after we go off to fight. I will stay in my room and draw the curtain and sleep for two days, because soon it is the monsoon, and then it will be the Pakistanis’ turn to run and hide. The Friend of Bengal knows it. Our time is coming.’

  ‘Pitter-patter,’ Sharif said, from behind him in the kitchen gloom; the small oil lamp over the plate of food half illuminated his brother’s blister-scarred face. ‘Pitter-patter.’

  ‘Brother, this is not a child’s game,’ Rafiq said.

  ‘I know,’ Sharif said. Then he began to say the poem. They all knew it. Any one of them from Father down to Dolly at eight years old could have recited it. It was what everyone remembered, the days that the rains came, every year. You could smell, from outside, the quality of the air when rain was building up. Soon the rain would fall and the Pakistanis would be gone. Now Sharif started to recite, in his dry, practical, engineer’s voice. You would not have thought that such a voice knew very much poetry.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s extraordinary to see

  All those different games the clouds play

  Like hide and seek, we used so many holes and corners!

  And there’s that song

  Pitter patter drip drop rain and the river overflows –

  There was a light in our house

  Mother smiling

  Thunder and my beating heart

  A little boy, a mother’s worry, sleeping on his side

  Now jumping and the thunder outside in the world’s sky

  Mother is singing, singing from far away

  Pitter patter drip drop rain and the river overflows.’

  ‘It’s time to go to bed,’ Father said. His voice was thickened. He turned away from the dim light the oil lamp threw. ‘Don’t let anyone go into his room, for any reason.’

  5.

  Of course there had to be a celebration. It would have to be very quiet. Nobody but they would know that they were marking Rafiq’s brief return from training, his imminent departure for war. Mother thought that the best thing would be a grand biryani. She sent Khadr out to buy mutton in the market, explaining that everyone was so bored with chicken and fish, she thought she would do what she could. They had tidied up after the night’s feast and were all safely in bed long before six when the servants got up, but still Ghafur had commented that there were fewer eggs than he remembered – he could not explain it – and Khadr should buy three dozen more. She thought she could not conceal Rafiq’s
return from the servants indefinitely; she would not mention it until he got up from his long sleep.

  He was sleeping so deeply! He must have been exhausted. Once or twice she went into the room, very quietly, just to listen to his breathing under the sheet. From early boyhood, he had liked to pull the top sheet over his mouth and nose, bandit fashion, before he slept. His hair spilled over the pillow like Rapunzel’s. It was really too bad. She would cut it when he woke up. She had never cut any man’s hair in her life, but she was sure she could do it.

  The house helped out with the biryani. The grandmothers were patiently shelling nuts, and the girls were sorting through the new bag of rice for stones and dirt. Ghafur was slicing onions and mixing up the paste for the meat to soak in. Together with Nazia, Mother directed the carpets to be taken out to the back garden, hung and beaten. She even thought about taking the covers off the sofas and cushions to wash. She wished she had known Rafiq was coming when he came. But it was best that she had not.

  He finally made a movement around half past six in the afternoon. He had slept for at least twelve hours. He emerged looking rested and clean, his too-long hair combed and falling to his shoulders. Somehow he had managed to shave his beard off. He wore a clean white shirt and trousers, taken from the drawer in his room. There was no way of keeping him from the servants now, and the family, seated or busy around the salon, made discreet and excited noises of welcome. Bina and Dolly ran up to him, embracing their brave brother, and after them, Aisha did the same. She clung to his legs.

  ‘Mother, I have come for my ordeal,’ Rafiq said. ‘Fetch the scissors.’

  ‘You look so dear,’ Mother said. ‘I shall take a photograph of you with your long hair. I wish I had taken one before you had a chance to shave your beard away.’