The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

‘According to the usual division,’ Sharif said. He would not say that he was proposing to give his share directly to Dolly, if she wanted to go on living here.

  ‘Quite so,’ Sadia said. ‘But what does the usual division mean here? Is it divided between four of us, or among five? Do you see my difficulty?’

  ‘I had not thought of it,’ Sharif said.

  ‘What happened when Father died? You see, I was not here – we were not able to come. Was a share set aside for Rafiq?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sharif said. He hardened his heart. ‘I see your point, sister. You want to know if little-brother has been declared dead. It is true – his body was never found. Unless I am mistaken, Mother went on hoping to the end of her life that he somehow survived, perhaps in a Pakistani jail. She would not have applied to have him declared dead. So in 1974 he would have been assigned two parts of Father’s estate, held in trust. I see your point. If he has not, in the meantime, been declared dead, then I quite see. You would be entitled to one seventh of the estate. But if it is accepted by the law that your brother – that Rafiq – came to his end some time in 1971, then you and your husband will be entitled to one fifth. A significant difference. I see why this is important for you, sister. By all means. Go and establish the death of your brother in the eyes of the law, and go and profit from it. He was seventeen years old, sister. He was seventeen. He was seventeen when he met his end.’

  ‘I know how old he was,’ Sadia said. She looked terribly old, and ill, and it now struck Sharif that he might never see this sister of his again. He could spare her now, or he could say the thing that needed to be said. She had brought it up. Mahfouz, the coward, had wiped what he had done from his mind. If it was safe for them to return to Bangladesh, it was safe for them to be met by the family. And perhaps – Sharif could hear Mahfouz’s voice explaining patiently, over the long night unwinding at thirty-three thousand feet – the time had come for his wife to raise this question with her brother.

  ‘Where are your children?’ Sharif said. ‘Are they here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sadia said. ‘A boy and a girl. They are good children. They are with Mahfouz’s mother and father today. They hardly speak Bengali at all! Do you know how it is, brother? We try so hard, and yet –’

  ‘I know how it is,’ Sharif said. ‘As to the other matter –’

  ‘I’m sorry if what I said upset you, brother,’ Sadia said.

  ‘No,’ Sharif said. ‘I am not upset. My emotions are quite in order. I will look at the question with the lawyers. Perhaps we can lay Rafiq to rest, and then the financial consequences will follow. He was tortured to death. That must be the truth of it. I do see that you and your husband would be anxious to draw the financial benefit from the death you brought about, after all.’

  ‘How can you –’

  ‘And if I ever see you or your husband again, after these days, I promise I will strike you upon your face with the flat of my hand. If you ever try to interfere with the lives of my sisters, I will find you and strike you upon your face. I promise you that on the grave of my brother, on the place his body rests.’

  9.

  Against his sister’s protests he finished what he was saying, and closed the door in her face. The salon, to his surprise, was now nearly empty. At one end, there was Dolly, sitting with the twins, he was glad to see, talking earnestly and with some evident pleasure. The only other person in the room was a boy of sixteen or seventeen in a white robe. He had been lifting a small silver box from the sideboard, a little treasure of Mother’s. Now he put it down again and began to walk out of the room.

  ‘Who are you?’ Sharif said. ‘Brother, can I offer you anything?’

  The boy kept on walking, saying something over his shoulder that Sharif could not catch or, perhaps, understand. In a moment he was out of the open front door of the house and away.

  ‘Did you see that, Dolly?’ Sharif said. ‘I think he was about to steal Mother’s silver snuffbox. Boys, go and find Mummy, straight away.’

  The twins got up, good as gold, and made their way towards the dining room – they seemed to know exactly what was where in the house.

  ‘I thought he was one of the readers Mahfouz arranged,’ Dolly said. ‘But there are so many people turning up. I should have put all the valuables away. Where is big-sister?’

  ‘She’s gone, I believe,’ Sharif said drily, hoping that this was so.

  ‘I expect she’ll come back before much longer,’ Dolly said. ‘I’ve been making friends with the boys! I have to say – I simply adore Omith, he is my favourite relation of all, I believe.’

  Dolly had always amused him, and he focused all his trembling attention on the sister he still loved and cared for. The boys had been taken off by Ghafur to see the workings of the kitchen, and the others were asleep upstairs, exhausted by the flight.

  ‘What is this?’ Nazia said, coming back. ‘Do you have favourites between my boys, Dolly?’

  ‘I must say I do,’ Dolly said. ‘Omith is especially sweet. Raja, he thinks he’s in charge, doesn’t he? But I think it’s Omith you would like to trust and to rely on in the end.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ Sharif said, pleased. ‘They are only seven years old, Dolly.’ To the world outside, Raja and Omith must seem like two halves of an apple, different only in the way that halves of a symmetrical form were different. He never understood the confusion others sometimes had about them: he thought it showed only a lack of time spent with them, or a lack of observation. Even when they stomped, chanting a rhyme, about the house, one was doing the stomping, the other was imitating the movement. Omith never ran first; he always waited half a second after his brother had started. In the end, like him and Sadia, one boy would turn left, and the other would turn right.

  ‘They’re quite different,’ Nazia was saying. ‘If one of them’s been naughty, I know which of them to interrogate. It’s useless asking Raja. He always says, “Omith did it.”’

  ‘The flowerpot that got kicked over,’ Sharif said. ‘They still haven’t had their punishment for that.’

  ‘If Mahfouz and Sadia have gone,’ Nazia said, ‘I really don’t think I can carry on with this noise, and it must be even worse from outside.’

  ‘Oh, we can’t stop it,’ Dolly said. ‘It would upset sister so much. Brother went to such lengths to arrange it all, and he was so shocked to hear that there was no amplification last time.’

  ‘Well,’ Sharif said, ‘I think if we just left one pair of loudspeakers working, people would still hear it and still think it was very nice that we are doing our duty by Mother as they walked past.’

  ‘Sharif will do it so neatly, everyone will think most of the loudspeakers failed,’ Nazia said.

  ‘If they think anything,’ Sharif said. ‘At least we will be able to get some sleep tonight. Now. Before I do that, let us talk about your future, little-sister.’

  At the end of the three days, Nazia and the children flew back to England with Bina and Tinku. Sharif stayed in Bangladesh with Dolly. What happened to Mahfouz and Sadia, they never knew. Those three days, they expected to see him come through the front door, already complaining that there was something wrong with the loudspeakers. The readers themselves made this complaint, and were ignored. Sharif regretted that nobody would see the very neat job he had done of making the connections look frayed and, in the first place, incompetent. No one would suspect industrial sabotage, as he remarked to Dolly, once it was all over. On the second day, a letter came for Dolly in Mahfouz’s handwriting, among all the other letters. She set that one aside from the letters of condolence, and some time later Sharif saw it unopened in the polished brass wastepaper basket underneath Father’s old leather-topped desk.

  He had a number of tasks to carry out before he could come home, and the faculty had given him two months’ compassionate leave. First there was the question of Rafiq’s death. He had to concede that his existence had to be left as it was. There was no ‘Captain Qayyum’ on record, though Sharif was ce
rtain he had remembered the name the officer had given as he took his brother away. There was no Mohammed Rafiqullah recorded as a prisoner anywhere. In the circumstances, he set about agreeing the provisions of the will and the distribution of the estate. It was straightforward: Father had left his possessions in good order – he had sorted it all out at the same time as selling the house in Old Dhaka for Sharif’s sake. Mother had preserved what she had, not touching Rafiq’s share, not really needing what Sharif had made over to her. The remains of the estate – Mother’s property, the house in Dhanmondi, some land in the village and more savings than they expected – could be divided into seven. Two parts for Sharif, two nominally for Rafiq, one each for Dolly, Bina and Sadia. It was the law. Sharif proposed to divide his second part into three, and hand two of the parts to Dolly and Bina, so that they had the same as him. If Sadia and Mahfouz wanted to claim a fifth of Rafiq’s inheritance, now sitting in trust as far back as Father’s death, they would have to take steps to prove his death, and they would have to accept that they would enrich her brother and two sisters, too.

  ‘I am so glad that my children are growing up in England,’ Sharif said to Dolly one night. ‘I promise you, when I die, Aisha is going to get one third, and Raja one third, and Omith one third. Absolute equality. This one-part-two-parts for the daughters and the sons is such nonsense.’

  ‘Poor Sadia,’ Dolly said – she was so soft-hearted. ‘I wish things were a little easier for her. She must have loved Rafiq too, in her way.’

  Sharif snorted. He quite enjoyed these evenings with little-sister. She had been so small when he left, her favourite reading was Feluda and the comics at the back of Daddy’s newspaper. It was pleasant to sit with her, nearly adult, and talk seriously without a pair of small thugs kicking the back of the armchair, without the phone going constantly with requests for his daughter. They were safely back in Hillsborough.

  All this might have been achieved much more quickly than it was. There were constant hartals, general strikes, in the city, and during those days, it was impossible to get anywhere. The lawyers’ offices were closed, and no taxi driver or rickshaw-wallah would have risked the wrath of the mob that had demanded a general withdrawal of labour. The only way to get about, Samu said, was to persuade a friend with medical connections to lend them an ambulance. But Sharif was priggishly shocked at this. An ambulance that could have saved Mother might have been occupied by a Mrs Rahman, using it to visit her widowed sister for tea.

  Samu was a clever chap, who was not at all troubled by the way Dolly blushed and ran for her brother’s cover whenever he entered. He cajoled her, made flattering references to her, smiled in her general direction, and finally asked her a very easy question. He was good at drawing her out. Sharif liked him a great deal, but he was proving a tiresome difficulty. Dolly was not, for any reason, to marry before she had finished her degree, but it had taken her three years to finish the first year of study, what with the university being constantly closed down by the government. She could hardly live here alone with Ghafur cooking for her. But would she leave Bangladesh without Samu? Sharif embarked on his project, and instructed a lawyer to undertake the measures that would enable him to travel back to England with his unmarried sister. There was no reason why she could not do her degree at the University of Sheffield. Furthermore, if Samu was serious, he would wait for two years, and then he could join her and marry in England, or she could return to Bangladesh.

  He rehearsed these arguments in the back of taxis and rickshaws, travelling from government office to lawyers’ chambers and solicitors’ rooms before speaking about it with his sister.

  ‘How can you say that?’ Samu said, towards the end of one evening. He had been their guest for dinner and had enjoyed the chicken curry, the bitter gourd and the little fried fishes they sometimes had; they knew now what pickles and garnishes he liked, and a small array of dishes was set out by his place on the table – the long, dark mahogany table had sometimes seated sixteen, and the three of them clustered now at one end. After dinner, Samu had requested a record of Beethoven, the ‘Archduke’ trio. It had been one of Father’s favourites; the record had been bought, with several others, on Father’s last trip to England in 1968, and Samu had heard it, and loved it, on many evenings here. ‘There is nothing in our music to compare with Beethoven. We just have to accept that our music never advanced to that level of sophistication, that degree of ambition.’

  ‘I disagree, my dear fellow,’ Sharif said. He leant back in his armchair, scratching his chin as he talked. ‘A work of art is not like a piece of engineering, subject to certain immutable physical laws. It carries the conditions for its own judgement with it. The standards by which Beethoven is judged are the standards that Beethoven created. If you tried to judge a song by Tagore by those standards, it is regarded as inferior. But the excellence of a song by Tagore is to be judged by the standards that the song created. By those standards, Beethoven must be regarded as full of errors and ugly of proportion.’

  ‘But, brother!’ Samu said. ‘This is all cultural relativism. If we are to claim that we deserve the first prize in some areas, worldwide –’

  ‘Such as?’ Dolly put in. She and Samu sat side by side on the long oatmeal-coloured sofa, she knitting a blue-and-green sleeveless pullover in a complicated pattern; the four balls of different-coloured wool orderly in her lap. She was shy at first, and then, as her Samu engaged her and confronted her with things she could not agree with, she spoke up like her mother’s direct daughter.

  ‘Such as film. We are agreed, are we not, that the Bengali film is the highest utterance of the art? Even Western prize juries have accepted this, handing their prizes to Satyajit Ray humbly. Why not accept that Beethoven is at the pinnacle of that particular art form? Why must we suggest that a little song by Tagore is the equal of the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the – the “Archduke” trio?’

  ‘This is abject nonsense,’ Sharif said, with some energy. ‘This is what your grandfather the babu would have said to gratify the Englishman, to pretend to admire the German dead a century ago.’

  ‘Ah, but we are not talking, are we, about what is truly loved?’ Samu burst out. ‘We are talking about what is truly great. Take the “Grosse Fuge”. It is universally admired but considered harsh, difficult to love. Should we therefore dismiss it in favour of a popular hit?’

  They enjoyed Samu’s company immensely, Sharif as much as Dolly. They had not half done with Beethoven when Samu declared that it was midnight, and he must be off. Sharif walked the dear fellow down to the gate of the house. It was a beautiful night, and Samu said he would walk the short distance home. Dolly was still in her chair when Sharif came back into the house. He dismissed Ghafur, busy tidying up, and sat down again.

  ‘There is no question of Mahfouz’s gentleman any more,’ he said. ‘The one who owned a laundry.’

  ‘Ah!’ Dolly said. ‘Is my sister so little to be trusted? There is no question of such a gentleman. There never was.’

  ‘But I think we must talk of Samu,’ Sharif said. ‘He is a splendid chap.’

  Sharif went on to explain the difficulty, and made his proposal. It was hard for Dolly to listen to. She had envisaged only a world with her and Samu in it. Like an inept novelist, she had set out only the meeting of twin minds, the beautiful things the two of them would say to each other, and not given any thought to where such things would take place. From time to time Dolly said, ‘But he will forget all about me!’ and her eyes started to shine with tears. Sharif had a single, unchanging point: if Dolly abandoned her education for the sake of love, she would come to blame the man she had married. This country – Sharif had to make the point – it was what they had all fought for, but now, it was a country more like one in terminal decline than one at the beginning of its life. The education would only eventually be provided by Dhaka. Education; or Bangladesh. Samu was not in doubt. ‘Samu will not wait,’ Dolly said. She hunched forward at one end of the oat
meal sofa. ‘He will marry someone else, and I – I – I will be stuck with the man that Mahfouz found for me, in England somewhere. Oh, brother, please …’

  In the morning, Sharif put on his best clothes – a blue jacket, a white shirt, a decorous, restrained tie in a dark orange with circles on it – and went to call on Samir. They took a rickshaw to the gardens around the Lalbagh Fort, and walked around that interesting historical monument seven times. The rickshaw-wallah waited patiently for them for over an hour. The little flowers that bloomed in the beds around the park were a lovely cloud of pink and white; in the corners, in the niches on the old red stone walls, pairs of lovers sat, discreetly exchanging their promises. Sharif and Samir walked amicably, like two old gentlemen with walking sticks. Sharif started by saying that he had reconsidered, and that perhaps Samir was right to praise the ambition of the Western classical tradition. Samu responded by saying that Sharif, too, was right, that they had no means of judging a work of art other than by the standards established by a particular culture. Which, for instance – to take another example – was the best fish? Hilsa, koi, pabda, rui, bhetki – how to decide? Or the English halibut and plaice and mackerel? They began in high good humour with each other, and after they had gone on to talk of other matters, bought each other a bag of chotpoti from the roadside vendor who waited outside the iron gates to the Fort, and ate, sitting companionably next to each other on a wall. They had turned in the previous hour into a pair of students, irresponsible and hungry.

  10.

  At the end of that summer, Sharif returned to England with his youngest sister, Dolly. A bond that he would support her had been supplied to the British High Consulate in Dhaka, along with statements of his income and professional standing.

  With some negotiation, Dolly began her degree at the University of Sheffield. She thought it best to start from the beginning, so patchy had her course in Dhaka proved. In three years, she finished, and was thought unlucky to have missed out on a First. She lived all that time in the spare bedroom in Hillsborough, with a trip once every six weeks to visit her sister Bina in Cardiff, along with her husband Tinku and their clever baby Bulu. She made three friends at the university, girls called Farna and Karen from London, and another with very bright red hair called Annie, who was Welsh.