Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  8.

  There were seven rivers to cross. The Padma was the biggest. It was only the second we came to. After that, there were rivers with bridges, and then ones with ferries. After the Padma, the buses went off in different directions, like rolling coconuts. When our bus reached the next ferry-crossing, there were many fewer buses waiting. The ferries were much smaller, however, and could only take four or five buses at a time. These smaller ferry ghats still had life, and boys went between the waiting buses with fruit and sweets and tea.

  After the Padma, it was easy to fall asleep. I would wake up and ask how many rivers we had now crossed. It would outrage me that nobody woke me up at each river bridge; I liked to count the rivers out. My sister Sushmita never slept: she could not. During the long journey, as she followed us on or off of the bus, she complained ceaselessly about the discomfort and the unpleasantness. My mother said, quite mildly, that she was not very good to complain so much about a journey. She should remember the journey that Nana and Nani took, when they were thrown out of Calcutta in 1947 and had to go to Dacca without any idea of what they would find there. There were no bandits on the road today, waiting to kill Sushmita and the rest of us. There was only a lovely journey, with some exciting rides on ferries, and at the end of it, everyone in the village would be excited to see Sushmita, and disappointed to see such a grumpy face.

  My sister Sushmita’s stomach felt as if it was going to explode when it travelled over bumps in the road. She hated the strong smell of the river. She longed for her own chair, her own bed, her own things. It was no consolation to her to remember that the older members of her family had undergone a much worse journey thirty years before. When she reached the village – she could be heard to mumble under the noise of the bus’s engine – she would go straight to bed and stay there all night and all day the next day. That was what she was looking forward to doing.

  After seven rivers, three ferries and four bridges, the bus pulled into the station at the main town of Jhenaidah. Here we got off. The station was the centre of the town. Baggage bobbed about on the heads of porters above the crowd, like flotsam after a shipwreck, and all the time the hawkers were crying out their offers of tea, hot food and sweets. A chain of porters swiftly assembled to take the luggage down from the roof. I held tight to my mother’s hand, and she pulled me after her down the bus’s rotting tin steps; Sushmita and Sunchita were trusted to stay and look after each other, hand in hand. Behind all of us, Majeda hovered, making vague shepherding gestures with both hands. ‘That’s ours – that’s ours – that’s ours – four – five,’ my mother called, as the porters handed down our suitcases. The country porters were in awe of women like my mother, capable city women used to organizing others and raising their voices when it was absolutely required. She got her way.

  My father was already elsewhere. He relished the moment of arrival in the main town of Jhenaidah. It was here that he would start to be recognized. In the mass of Dacca, he was not known by more than one person in a thousand, and he passed through the crowded streets with his head borne down by anonymity. As soon as he returned to the district where he had grown up, he knew he became an object of pride. He was a popular man in his profession and society; it was only the numbers of Dacca that concealed this from him. Here, his popularity was made apparent to everyone by the way he could simply stand there and wait for people in the main square of the town to greet him. This they did by hailing his name in a familiar way, by saying, ‘Advocate-sahib,’ or by abasing themselves. My father’s head was high in the crowd; he was talking with confidence and fluency to a small circle, already in place. He was making an effort not to look too overcome with joy; his expression was even a little irritable. But he loved being greeted and surrounded. For once, it corresponded with the valuation he held of himself in the world.

  ‘There is the bus,’ my mother said, referring to the bus that we were to transfer everything on to, the small country bus that would take us all the way to the village. ‘It is waiting. We should get on to it.’

  ‘There is no hurry,’ my father said, from the middle of his crowd of acquaintances, friends, acolytes and cronies. ‘There will be another bus along in fifteen minutes. They go constantly.’

  After some time, Zahid and I would be called over and exhibited to the friends of his youth. After hours of travelling, we did not look as fine and elegant as we had at the beginning of the journey. But we were conscious that we still looked like the children of a Dacca advocate. The children of the small town gazed at us from behind a thicket of adult legs, clutching to what they knew. We talked to each other loudly, making sure our voices could be heard. All about, the tones and music of the town’s speech were strange and even comical to us; the country accent was not the same as ours. My father’s courtroom voice, his lecturing voice, carried on, explaining that Zahid was to become an engineer, and had done very well in all his exams this year, and was top of his class, and that I was to become a lawyer, ‘like his father and like his grandfather’; explaining all of this to people he was friends with, people whom he just about knew, people whom he did not know at all.

  It could take an hour before we finally detached ourselves from the group, assembled our luggage again and got on to the small, local bus that would take us the remaining part of the journey. It was much less comfortable than the big bus: its seats were wooden slats, and the people on it were local people, going back to their small villages from the large market town. They held wicker baskets of mangoes and oranges in hay, chickens, eggs in straw, sleeping or crying babies; they looked at us with curiosity, and sometimes with recognition. To either side of the narrow road, the fields were green with growing rice, with sugar cane, wet fields of grass, with jute, or with the brilliant yellow of the mustard plant. Orchards of mango trees, of jackfruit, tamarind, palms bearing bananas and dates rippled off into the middle distance. Every five minutes the bus stopped, and a passenger or two got off, heaving their burden from underneath the seat, walking off across the field towards a cracked mud house.

  9.

  My father had grown up in these fields, in this village. His father was a teacher at the village mosque, and many of his brothers and sisters were much more religious than my Dacca relations. Some of my father’s sisters wore the veil, and his brothers went to the mosque at least once a day. My father had escaped from all that. He had come to Dacca to study law, and had stayed with my mother’s father, Nana, who had married an aunt of my father’s. So my mother and father were first cousins. When he was a child, he had run in these fields with his brothers and sisters and the boys from the village. He had studied hard, and was the pride of the place. Even some of our relations called him ‘Advocate-sahib’ now, though not the close ones. Some of them remembered the boy who, as I did now on our visits, took a long twig, a piece of string, a hook and a worm from the earth, and then sat over the river, waiting for the fish to bite. But they did not mention it until my father did – he liked to share these memories with me, and a trip to the village meant a relaxation of his stern ways.

  When the bus stopped for us, there were three relations waiting; a brother of Father’s, and two of his sons, between Zahid’s age and mine. Behind them was a cart, pulled by a waiting cow. The heat of the late afternoon was still high, making the surface of the farm’s ponds a beaten bronze. We dismounted, the driver helping us to unload our suitcases and parcels from the roof of the bus. We stood, and the uncle and his two sons respectfully went down, and touched my father’s feet, my mother’s, my brother’s, my two sisters’, and even mine, in greeting. The bus pulled away, leaving us with a pile of luggage in the dusty road. Behind the roadside ditch, a wall of jute, twice a man’s height, fine and green. There was a path cut in the jute, and from this, a small man emerged in a lungi, carrying an immense machete. ‘Who is this? Who’s arrived?’ he called, in his yawning, singing country accent.

  ‘It’s Mahmood and his family, come from Dacca,’ my father’s brother called
back, and the farmer made a great certain wave in the air, a greeting with his machete, before going back into the dark sylvan depths of the crop, its top stretching wildly above the farmer’s head. My father had remembered him.

  From the back of the cart, behind the cow’s backside lumbering to left and right, like a piece of furniture being laboriously moved, we saw farmers raising themselves from their crop, ambling along the road, smallholders and rice-growers. They saw the familiar cow, lumbering from side to side, pulling a cart with unfamiliar children, and they called out exactly the same thing: ‘Who is that? Who is arriving?’ We felt like royalty. We imitated our father and waved back, and then he would tell us who they were, and my father’s brother would explain what had happened to them in the last year; who had married, who had died, who had had children, whose crops and chickens had done well and whose had failed, leading them into debt. And then there was the family house, and Grandfather in his beard coming out to meet us. Now the day was beginning to fade; soon it would be night; soon we would be fed, and put to bed.

  But tomorrow I would run out into the fields, to the brook, with a rod I had made myself from a thin branch, a string, a hook and with a worm I had found myself. There would be the friends from last summer, the boys from the village and the cousins in the country. We would fish, and get into the sugar-cane field and eat as much as we could. My sister Sushmita would stay inside, not getting up the whole day, complaining about her headache and her exhaustion, lying in the dark as awed country aunts brought her tea and soft, white, affectionate things on small plates to tempt her appetite.

  And Sunchita would pick her moment. She would run out into the mango orchard, a book and a stolen red silk pillow from the dusty salon under her arm. She would find a tree with low-lying branches, and jump on to the lowest, gripping the trunk of the tree. She would climb up into the dark foliage where the red mangoes hung like Chinese lanterns. She would find a place to rest her back, and then reach forward from time to time in the dappled interior light, plucking a ripe mango from its long stalk. She would pummel the fruit, and pinch a hole at the bottom, and suck the flesh out whole. All the time, in this light-and-dark-strewn hiding place, her concentration would be on the book she held. Wedged into a tree in a mango orchard, the red silk cushion behind her back, she could read for hours, the distant shouts of farmers and cousins not disturbing her, hardly noticing the song of the birds sitting at rest, like her, in the trees.

  Chapter 5

  A Party at Sufiya’s

  1.

  First, some history.

  In 1947, the British left India, and it was split in two: India and Pakistan.

  Pakistan was to be for the Muslims, and India for the rest. Many people died making their way to their new homeland, killed by gangs on the railways or on the roads.

  Pakistan was a single nation, but anyone could see that it was split in two. To the left was West Pakistan, where they ruled, and spoke Urdu, and wrote in an alphabet that flowed like water under wind.

  To the right was East Pakistan, where the Bengalis lived. They spoke Bengali, which chatters like a falling xylophone, and is written in an alphabet that looks like a madman trying to remember a table’s shape.

  The two new countries – India and Pakistan, East and West – they looked on the map like a broad-shouldered ape with two coconuts, one on its right shoulder, one under its left armpit.

  The new government wanted to make Bengal speak and write in its language, Urdu. They also wanted to change Bengali so that it would, in future, be written in the flowing script of Urdu.

  There were riots in Bengal, and in 1952 some students from the Bengal Language Movement were killed in Dacca. My parents were among those protesting, and were placed in jail overnight, to their subsequent great happiness.

  In the years afterwards, the Bengali language, Bengali poetry, music and culture became important for those who wanted independence for the Bengali nation. It also became a point of honour for the government in Pakistan to observe and suppress the Bengali language wherever possible. Governments went on trying to persuade Bengalis to write their language in the Urdu script.

  The situation could not continue, for one reason. There were very many more speakers of Bengali in the whole nation of Pakistan than there were speakers of Urdu. And yet Bengali culture was suppressed and its language occupied an insecure position. In the 1960s Mujibur Rahman, who was the head of a political party, the Awami League, looked forward to a day when the Bengali majority might vote for a Bengali leader of Pakistan as a whole. There seemed no reason why this should not happen. It would be interesting to see what would happen in the Pakistani capital when this came about.

  In the meantime, in the respectable houses of Dhanmondi and elsewhere in Dacca, it was considered patriotic and, indeed, very enjoyable to hold parties in which Bengali music was played and Bengali poetry recited. The daughters of the houses walked openly past policemen in their Pakistani uniforms, holding sheaves of music, chattering boldly like singing birds. Sometimes Sheikh Mujib came, too, when he was not being sent to prison.

  2.

  This afternoon, for instance, there is to be a party at Sufiya’s house. Sufiya is a good-hearted woman, and very popular in Dacca. She is friends with everyone, from Syed Hosain, the advocate, and Khandekar, the lawyer, to Sheikh Mujib himself, poets and painters and folklore specialists; she has a word to say to the musicians, always knows a kind word to settle the children and stop them running around too violently. Her daughters, Sultana and Saeeda, do much of the hard work of hospitality, welcoming people, arranging the food, making sure everyone is seated with someone they will have something to say to. At every party of Sufiya’s, everyone must meet somebody new to them, as well as greet their old friends. The hard work is her daughters’, because Sufiya’s role at the party is to read her poetry. She is a famous poet, and people labour to secure invitations to her open house. They do not have to labour hard. Sufiya likes to meet new people, of every sort.

  It is four o’clock. The weather is oppressive and steamy, the air thick and still. In the salon, Sultana and Saeeda sit, fanning themselves with broad leaves from the garden. The plain terracotta pots about the sitting room are filled with simple white flowers. Sultana, at eighteen, has just started her English degree; her younger sister is a gifted artist. They will welcome the artists and the musicians, the politicians, too, between them. Sufiya does not like to be found waiting for the first of her guests: she thinks it makes a better party if she descends when a few guests have already gathered. At the moment she is in the kitchen, checking the Bengali cakes the cooks have made: pati shaptha, pancake roll stuffed with coconut halwa, the fudge-like borfi, puli pitha, the dumplings. She likes to be sure of everything in advance, and is going over everything at the last moment. If she leaves it any longer, Sultana remarks to her sister, she is going to be caught out by the first guests, and will be deprived of her entrance. But there are still the bought sweets to go over and count, the things the confectioner supplies: chumchum dusted with icing sugar, black gulab-jamun with a secret interior of brilliant pink, the rolled yellow balls of laddu, sandesh like toy bricks, some with a coat of silver. ‘Is there enough chanachur?’ Sufiya’s voice can be heard from the kitchen. She has, surely, asked after this before, and is now going over old ground. Now there is the sound of a cycle-rickshaw outside the gates: the first guest is here, and Sufiya must hurry herself upstairs to hide for the first half-hour. She hurries through the house in her simple white cotton sari. The house has french windows to the front. The terrace at the front has two sofas, and a bookcase. More bookcases in the hall can be seen from the path through the front garden, and even, through the openwork iron gates, from the road, as the french windows are open. Sufiya’s disappearance upstairs must be noticed.

  In the hallway, the maid is occupied dusting the shelves as the first guests come up the stone path, between flowerbeds, under the coconut palms and lychee trees to either side. They come i
n through the half-open door. It is Salim, his wife and his three children. He is a schoolmaster. His daughters are pretty little things, in white party dresses puffed out with ribbons, but very noisy. Salim’s wife is a nice woman, though she is Bihari; born speaking Urdu, she prides herself – prides herself perhaps too much – on the way she has transformed herself into a Bengali. ‘You are quite one of us,’ Sufiya had once said generously, and something in the way Mona has dressed herself today makes Sultana say the same thing now. Still, she hopes that Mona will not try to emphasize her acquired Bengali-ness by offering to sing a Nazrul song later in the party. She has never lost her foreign accent, and the last time she did it, the audience giggled until Mona could no longer pretend not to hear, her hands clenched to the grim end of the song. ‘Would the girls like to play in the garden?’ Sultana asks. ‘My mother will be down soon.’ And there is the young doctor, a new friend of Sufiya’s – she collects young doctors; he is with his new wife, only six months married. Salim and his wife Mona stand with the doctor and his wife. They do not know each other, but they talk very easily, and in a moment, one of them suggests sitting down. Salim hands his wife to a chair, and Sultana sees from his solicitude that Mona, again, is pregnant. She wonders whether to say anything.

  The guests come promptly. Sultana does not immediately recognize the two young men who arrive next, both very clean and innocent-looking, but they announce themselves as the musicians, and then of course she remembers. ‘Is Nadira here yet?’ the tall one asks. ‘She asked us to come at the same time as her, but I am not sure we know what time she was planning to arrive.’ Saeeda assures them that they are very welcome, whether Nadira has arrived yet or not, and makes a special point of calling for tea for the pair of them – they seem to have walked to the party. And then there is Khandekar and his wife; they greet Sultana and Saeeda quickly, circumspectly, before going over to make a point of greeting the two musicians. Everyone knows that the musicians are tenants of Mrs Khandekar. In Dacca in 1968, that is of not much concern.