Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  But of course it would suit them. Altaf thought of his bedroom at home, with the rosewood harmonium placed beyond his brothers’ reach, the noise and the stolen half-hours between hours of chaos. He thought of a door that he could close and a life of his own. Amit’s face showed that, from the beginning, he had considered Altaf a part of his plans for living. Altaf’s heart swelled at the kindness of his friend, and at the degree of understanding between them that went without words.

  7.

  ‘I’ve been to see the hall at the university,’ Altaf said.

  It was a year later, and they had been very happily ensconced in Mrs Khandekar’s apartment, just the two of them. It suited them perfectly. It was on the third floor of an old building, and the streets that ran in front of and to the side of it were quiet ones. This was in the furniture-makers’ quarter, and all day long the streets were crowded with bed frames, like brown grazing cows. The smell of wood-shavings perfumed the air; the day was filled with the sounds of honest labour. In the corner of the sitting room, Amit’s mattress was rolled up and tied: he unrolled it every night when Altaf went to the bedroom. The flat was quite dark, with its small windows, but it suited them both and they were happy there. The musical instruments and the copies of music, including ‘Githo Bitan’ by Tagore, were on a shelf in the bedroom. In the sitting room there was a radio they had bought together, which they referred to as ‘our radio’. They had always battened on to the radios of others – an aunt’s, a mother’s – and it was a pleasure to share one instead. There was a portrait of Tagore tacked to the wall of the sitting room, and in each room, a kerosene lamp for when, as now, the electricity failed. Altaf and Amit were sitting by the light of the kerosene lamp on the floor of their small apartment. Mrs Khandekar’s apartment had a table, but they often preferred to sit on the floor to eat. Before them, lay plates of rice, fish and dal, cooked by Amit on the kerosene stove. Altaf and Amit were steadily rolling up the food into balls with the fingers of one hand, and eating them in one gulp. Their dark fingers glistened in the warm light with grains of rice.

  ‘What hall?’ Amit said, after a pause.

  ‘It will be for singers, for writers, for scholars like the professor, and for musicians. It can be a place for everyone to meet, and for people to share their knowledge of the Bengali traditions. It will be wonderful, Amit. There are so many people who are interested.’

  Amit stopped. ‘They won’t permit it,’ he said. ‘The government.’

  ‘They won’t have any choice,’ Altaf said.

  ‘They tried to make everyone write in their script,’ Amit said. ‘They’ll try again. They don’t like us singing our own songs. They’ll respond if Bengalis start gathering to sing their songs and read their poetry and show their paintings.’

  ‘They needn’t know anything about it,’ Altaf said, with bravado.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Amit said, quite mildly. ‘Do you think there’s nobody at the university in the pay of the police? They probably already know about the whole plan.’

  ‘Well,’ Altaf said, ‘if they already know, we might as well continue with it.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Amit said. ‘We might as well continue.’

  This conversation took place just when memories of previous suppressions were fading, and people like Altaf and Amit were making their plans.

  Nadira, who was my Nadira-aunty, had been taking music lessons from them for a year, ever since they had met her at Mrs Khandekar’s house. There was even talk of Nadira going on the radio and singing with them, on a Saturday afternoon. They sang classic songs, and read Bengali poetry together, and loaned each other novels in Bengali. There were classics, and new novels: everyone adored Sangshaptak when it came out, and soon Shahidullah Kaiser was a regular presence at the little group. After a few weeks, Nadira had introduced the two musicians to her sisters and even to her smallest brother, the eight-year-old Pultoo; after a few weeks more, her father – my nana – came in and greeted them. There was always a great respect for culture in my family, and from the beginning, Nana and Nani treated Nadira’s music teachers not as servants and lowly tutors, although of course they were paid to come, but as honoured guests.

  In time, friends of Nadira asked if Altaf and Amit could come to teach them music, too. There was soon almost more teaching than they could cope with, and they grew to know the numbered streets of Dhanmondi very well, and wondered how they could ever have got so lost that first morning, when they had tried to find their way to Mr Khandekar’s house. There was even talk, at one point, of them being introduced to the household of Sheikh Mujib himself: Sheikh Hasina, his daughter, was said to have enquired about them of a friend. Nothing came of that, though they did see Sheikh Mujib and his daughter occasionally at the sort of gatherings in Dhanmondi where they sometimes played to an audience. They did have half a dozen regular visits to pay, and that was more or less the limit of what they could achieve.

  The respectable and quiet streets of Dhanmondi had become fervently enthusiastic about the culture of the Bengalis. Behind the walls of many houses, conversations continued late into the night. Conversations about writers, artists, musicians, poets. Once the gates were shut against the outside world, against neighbours who could not be trusted, against the policemen in the streets and the laws of an alien people, households in Dhanmondi relaxed, and started to talk, and to listen to girls like Nadira-aunty singing a song as Altaf played the harmonium and sang too, and Amit’s palms and fingers pattered like rain on the tabla next to them.

  The flower says,

  ‘Blessed am I,

  Blessed am I

  On the earth . . .’

  Institutions started to open up. A school might decide to hold an exhibition of paintings on Bengali themes by its pupils – Pultoo was, at ten, the star of one of these exhibitions. At parties, the girls of the family might dance to the sitar and the harmonium; in other households, a member of the family might recite their own poetry. In Dhanmondi, on summer afternoons, families went from household to household, taking their music with them. Fifteen years before, the occupying Pakistani forces had tried to suppress the language of Bengal, and to force all in the province to write in an unfamiliar and alien script. (My own parents had demonstrated against this, in 1952, and had been thrown together into police cells; it was a happy and a romantic memory for them.) Now, in the last years of the 1960s, the Pakistani policemen stood around menacingly, and everyone knew who, in the neighbourhood, had been an informer, and probably still was one. Nothing seemed to matter. The Bengalis went from house to house with joyous abandon.

  Among them were Altaf and Amit, who were universally welcome, and Nadira and her sisters; there were Nana and Nani and Mr and Mrs Khandekar; there was, too, Sheikh Mujib, whom you could see everywhere, on his way to forging a new country in the fires of his soul. He was the leader of a political party; his daughter was the one who had fretted and raged to my mother about the two missing bags of chilli. He lived under the constant threat of imprisonment, and sometimes he was trailed for days by the police, who sat endlessly in a car outside his house, a hundred yards away from Mr Khandekar. Sheikh Mujib came to these parties when he could; he said it made him glad to hear the songs of the Bengali. He made no particular fuss when he entered a room as a guest; still, he was who he was, and the room was drawn towards his big glossy hair, his plump, humorous look. The room stood up at his entrance: he would force a friend, perhaps a distinguished poet, to sit down again, before him. A special place was made for him, and perhaps for his daughter, Hasina, too. He would accept the special place while, all the time, protesting mildly with his hands. You never knew who you would meet at one of these parties. The gates stood open, and almost everyone was welcome.

  It was after one of these parties that the idea had been raised for a school that would teach the Bengali arts; not just gatherings, but an institution. Sheikh Mujib had heard, and said it was a wonderful idea, and so it had to be done. Khandekar, who could speak to Sheikh Muji
b quite naturally, as an equal, volunteered to discover whether the university could find some place or other for it. Speaking, again quite naturally, as an equal, to Altaf, he asked him quietly if he could talk to a professor of Bengali he named to discuss the matter. ‘Quite hush-hush for the moment,’ he said. ‘I know I can trust you, Altaf.’

  Altaf did not feel he was in a position to refuse Khandekar anything. The parties they played at were so nice. You had a feeling of something quite new starting up in everyone’s lives, as afternoon faded into evening and the tea-lights in the garden were lit, the manservants going silently with their tapers from lantern to lantern. Altaf made a small gesture with his head. He would go and ask the professor for the loan, once a week, of some rooms in the Curzon Hall at the university, and make himself useful to Khandekar.

  In the early evening, in a crowded room, the song began. The room fell silent.

  Chapter 4

  A Journey in the Dry Season

  1.

  My father lived where he worked. His chambers were attached to the flat where we – my parents, my sisters, my brother and I – lived. The flat was even more crowded than my grandfather’s house. In both of them, transitory residents gave them the air of slight chaos, but at Nana’s house, at least Nana always knew who they all were – cousins from the village, brothers of his driver or gardener, dependants of his two mothers – and could explain who any stranger was. My father had strangers of this sort and, like Nana, employed vulnerable people – my ayah and the boy who served his chambers. He put up with their dependants in turn. But most of the crowds in our flat were clients: belligerent, impatient, wronged and sometimes rather smelly.

  The antechamber to my father’s chambers was quite full. It was a dark room, with only one window looking out on to a blank wall where a building had been put up a year ago; it had been painted a light yellow colour in a not very successful attempt to lighten the mood. Outside office hours, it was not a place to linger: there were twenty mismatched chairs about a central table, a desk and a seat for the clerk, and nothing much else, except some files and a short bookcase, a black cashbox on the top shelf behind the clerk underneath the Supreme Court Calendar. In office hours, there was nothing to do but linger, and most of the time it was full. The first noise of the morning was the ring on the doorbell by the first client: it almost always woke us. Soon after that, the sick chatter of the clerk’s typewriter would begin, and continue all day. My father worked hard, at any aspect of law he could think of – criminal law, property law, tax law, family law – and his clients kept him busy.

  It was not always as full as it was that afternoon. The clients, as usual, would have been what I thought of as ‘poor people’ – people who came to a lawyer’s office in long shirts and loose pyjama trousers, or with lungis wrapped about their middle and their legs. They were people who did not even think of putting on shoes other than sandals or chappals. Their disputes and feuds were endless, and a steady source of income for my father. They were not, in fact, as I thought of them, poor. When the time came to pay, they would delve meditatively into the depths of their lungis, brightly eyeing the clerk as he turned, with his invoice before him, for the cashbox; what they produced was a fist solid with banknotes, held by a rubber band or a bulldog clip, as thick as a cream roll. Somehow all this money had been concealed in their lungis’ waistband, in some miracle of knotting known only to country landlords. They knew what they were about, those landlords and rentiers and farmers from the country, wearing their dusty sandals to their lawyer’s chambers. They respected my father, who had no snobbery about the clients he would take. He respected them too, treating them with an honour that might have been due to zamindars, and not just for the thick roll of banknotes they brought out to pay his fees.

  The waiting room was quite full, and three clients were standing in the doorway of the chambers. The boy had brought round cups of tea on a tray, several times. ‘How long now?’ one man with a huge dyed-red beard called out to the clerk, sitting behind his desk, cowering a little at his typewriter. By this time of the day, the room was dense with smoke – the waiting clients and, between invoices and briefs, the clerk smoked steadily through the day their strong-smelling K2 and Captain’s cigarettes.

  ‘Advocate-sahib is busy,’ the clerk said. ‘But he will see everybody today. It may take a little longer than usual, gentlemen. But a little patience, a little patience.’

  Somewhere outside the room, in the domestic parts of the flat, a noise: a door slamming, a child shouting, another child calling for its mother, quickly silenced.

  ‘We have been waiting for over two hours,’ a client said.

  ‘Three hours, three and a half,’ another put in.

  ‘I would prefer to return tomorrow rather than wait a further two hours,’ the first said. ‘I could return tomorrow at first light.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ the clerk said. He was a small, slight man with uneven dark patches on his cheeks and neck, and broken stained teeth from his habit of smoking and of chewing paan. ‘I am truly sorry. But Advocate-sahib leaves town very early tomorrow for a family holiday, for some weeks. He leaves Dacca for the country, and will not return soon. He undertakes to see every one of you today, however long it takes. You will not be turned away dissatisfied. All I ask in return is a little patience from you, gentlemen.’

  In the corridor, somewhat closer, the same child’s voice was raised in complaint. ‘But he always—’ the always in Bengali a sibilant, carrying objection. A low woman’s voice, urgent and silencing; again the girl, louder now, saying, ‘Always—’ and then the noise of tears, a foot stamping, the girl’s voice almost screaming with rage. The Advocate-sahib’s door opened, and my father came out. With his glasses in hand, he walked straight through the waiting room and past the clients at the door; they shrank back respectfully.

  ‘That’s quite enough,’ he could be heard saying. ‘Go back to your room immediately, Sunchita. I don’t expect to hear these noises during office hours. Go back straight away.’

  ‘But, Daddy, he always—’

  ‘That’s quite enough,’ my father said. ‘I have very many important clients to see this afternoon. Tomorrow we go to the village, and everything can be play and noise in the fields, if you choose. Today has to be business, and I expect you to be quiet in the flat. Is that clear?’

  My sister agreed. My father returned to his office; Sunchita, her eyes red with frustrated tears, came back to her room, where I was sitting on her bed, her possessions cast on to the floor. In the suitcase on the bed, there was one wooden pistol.

  2.

  It was always the same, the afternoon before we set off on our long journey to the village. My father had a lot of work, a lot of disgruntled clients to get through – his appointments system extended to asking people to come on a particular day, and if they asked to come on a day when we would be on holiday, he could not resist asking them to come on the last day before we left, rather than putting them off until we returned. The last day was always as overcrowded as this, and sometimes he did not finish with his clients until one in the morning.

  My mother and the ayah, Majeda, would go to the kitchen and prepare the food we would be taking with us on the journey the next day – parathas, dry masala chicken, vegetable bhaji, aloo, papaya, potol, the Bengali pod-like vegetable that looks, when raw and piled, like a heap of big green eyes. My mother and father liked their own food, and took it with them when they travelled. While my mother and Majeda were preparing the food, my sisters and I were set a simple, useful task: packing our own suitcases.

  Sunchita and I shared a large suitcase. We had already successfully laid out all the clothes we were to be taking – or, rather, Majeda had helped us to choose them, earlier, and we placed them in the suitcase, like a good little boy and girl, taking half the suitcase each. Sunchita’s idea of a holiday in the country was to take as many books as she possibly could; she put in a thick, almost geological, layer of books she was now readin
g and others she hoped to get round to reading, as well as two or three favourites, which she thought she could do with in the country. This was a good number of books: Sunchita always had three or four on the go simultaneously. I insisted on having my own book, as well, pushing aside one of Sunchita’s favourites.

  ‘That’s babyish,’ she said. ‘I finished reading Shukumur Roy years ago. That’s a book for babies.’

  ‘Look at what you are reading,’ I said, picking up her book. It was an adult novel by Shahidullah Kaiser. I remembered the immensely cutting remark my grandfather had made about my sister’s reading. It seemed the cruellest and most witty thing I could say. ‘This book is not for you,’ I said, with an echo of Nana’s grand sweeping gesture. ‘What are you doing, reading such a book?’

  Sunchita grabbed it from me, and walked out of the room. I knew she was going to the kitchen to complain about the way I was treating her. I saw my chance. Not everything I had demanded be put in had been agreed to. One of these was my wooden pistol. It was a key part of the Roots game – I loved to stand, my legs apart, before the cowering slaves and wave my pistol menacingly about my head. I felt sure that I would find a use for it in the village, among the farmers’ children. It would add greatly to my own prestige. Quickly, I removed the layer of books, throwing them on the floor, then pulled out my shirts, trousers, Sunchita’s clothes. I got to the very bottom of the suitcase, and put the wooden pistol there, exactly where it would never be discovered.

  ‘Saadi,’ my ayah said. She was standing in the doorway. ‘Saadi! What have you done? You have destroyed the packing. I’m very cross with you.’