Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  That was the sort of encounter which happened, with increasing frequency, in Dacca during this time, when Sheikh Mujib, the Friend of Bengal, was either writing impassioned articles and giving speeches to huge crowds, or was in jail on trumped-up charges, or in front of a court or, sometimes, was visiting his old friends, and drinking tea, and laughing as if nothing was happening to him, nothing at all.

  Chapter 6

  How Big-uncle Left Home

  1.

  My father never got on with Laddu, my big-uncle, Boro-mama. And Boro-mama never liked my father. It was a difference of temperament, first, but their temperaments had led them to lead their lives in quite different ways. They were always going to fall out in a terrible way.

  Of course, they were cousins before they were brothers-in-law. My father’s mother was Nana’s sister.

  Boro-mama was not the eldest son. The eldest son had been killed in the Japanese air-raids during the war. Laddu was not used to the new burden of being eldest son when he and his sisters set off with Nana and Nani from Calcutta to Dacca, in 1947, and he probably never got used to it. His clever sister married their cousin, my father. But what was Boro-mama to do?

  Boro-mama did not go on demonstrations in favour of the Bengali language. He did not end up in prison cells with intellectuals. When Dacca was burning with intellectual fervour and Tagore, Boro-mama was a plump boy of twenty, living at home with his mother and father without any occupation or interests.

  Nana conspired to conceal this fact, and to keep his son Laddu busy with household tasks. Boro-mama was quite good with his hands, and it was surprising how many small jobs needed doing about the house. ‘I noticed that the bath tap upstairs was dripping yesterday,’ Nana said, over breakfast. ‘If you have nothing else to do, you could see if it can be fixed.’

  ‘It’s probably the washer,’ Boro-mama said knowledgeably.

  ‘Well, perhaps you could mend it,’ Nana said. ‘If you have nothing else to do today.’

  Round the breakfast table, Mary, Era, Nadira and Mira giggled at the thought that elder-brother might have anything else to do. Without a task, he would lie on the sofa from breakfast to dinner with his sandals off, listening to the radio or reading the newspaper. The nearest thing he had to action was to go out to the general store, where his neighbourhood cronies would sit all day long, deciding how they would improve the world over endless cups of tea. It was hilarious to his sisters that Laddu might have anything else to do. His youngest sister did not giggle: Dahlia sat in her high chair, looking from face to face with a cloth napkin about her chin, as her ayah spooned pap into her mouth. And his eldest sister did not giggle; my mother looked at her stern cousin, my father with a tie around his neck and a notebook and a frayed textbook by his plate, ready to go to his economics lectures at Dacca University. Neither of them saw this as very funny.

  ‘No,’ Boro-mama said slowly. ‘I can do that this morning.’

  So Nana set off to his chambers. Boro-mama’s sisters, and his cousin, my father, went to university or to their different schools; Dahlia was carried off to her nursery. Boro-mama cut his newspaper-reading down to an hour or an hour and a quarter. He asked Nani for money for a cycle-rickshaw, and came back at the end of the morning with a small paper bag. After a cup of tea and some buns, he went in search of my grandfather’s driver to borrow a small spanner from him; he returned in twenty minutes or slightly more. Finally, Boro-mama went upstairs and replaced the washer on the tap.

  ‘There,’ he said, coming down, glowing. ‘That tap won’t drip for years to come.’

  Nani did not share Nana’s view that it was better for Boro-mama to be doing small jobs around the house than nothing at all. She would have preferred it if Boro-mama had stayed at school until matriculation, and left with at least one or two qualifications. She also did not agree that Boro-mama’s small occupations around the house would amount, in the end, to a life’s work. She wondered who would ask Boro-mama to mend a tap if his father did not. So when Boro-mama announced, with an air of pride, that the tap he had fixed would not drip for years to come, she gave a small, tap-like sniff, and passed on.

  When Nana came home from his chambers, Boro-mama announced the same thing.

  ‘Excellent, excellent,’ Nana said, rubbing his hands together. My father, coming in with Nana, with his notebook and textbook, made no comment. He went past to greet his cousin, my mother. They were in different faculties – my father in the economics faculty, and my mother in the political-science faculty. They often did not see each other all day between breakfast and their return.

  ‘So that was one taka for the cycle-rickshaw to the ironmonger’s,’ Boro-mama said. ‘And one for the washer – and I had to buy a new spanner, that was three more – and for the labour as well . . .’ He totted it up in his head, his eyes going to the ceiling, then to the floor, then all around the hallway. ‘That makes seven taka,’ he said eventually.

  ‘That sounds about right,’ Nana said, and took out three notes, which he handed to Boro-mama. Behind him, Nani, my father and my mother, who had been listening to this, walked away in silent indignation. As Nani was accustomed to say, Lord Curzon himself would come back to mend your tap, in person, if you paid him that much.

  2.

  Nana and Nani lived, in the 1950s, in a house in Rankin Street. It was a handsome, two-storey house, with plenty of room for them, their son and their four daughters. There was space, too, for other relations to come and live from time to time, for months or even years. The longest-term resident was, of course, my father.

  My father had come to Dacca to study economics, and it was sensible for him to stay with his uncle, my Nana. Nana took it for granted that my father would live in a bedroom-cum-study for the whole of his course; he also took it for granted that one of his daughters would marry my father. Both these things happened. I doubt, however, that my father had any notion that he was fulfilling Nana’s will by doing either of them, and if he had suspected it, he would have withdrawn immediately. As it happened, my mother and my father were great friends, and went together to a demonstration against the suppression of the Bengali language by the government. They were thrown into a prison cell together, with dozens of other protesters, and spent the night singing Bengali songs and shouting slogans. My father had grown up in a small village where his father was the teacher at the small mosque. The most exciting thing that had happened to him all his youth was catching a larger-than-usual fish out of a ditch with a twig, a string and a worm on a hook. Being thrown into jail was the most enjoyable night of my father’s young life. In the morning, when he and my mother had been released, he went home with her, still singing Bengali songs about national rivers being dammed by the Pakistani yoke. He took a bath and put on a clean white shirt. He oiled and combed his hair. He grew sober. Then he went downstairs and asked my grandfather if he could marry my mother when he had graduated and had found a job in the government service. That would be some years in the future. My grandfather approved in general terms of a respectable young man who worked hard and could think of his life five years in the future, even of one who had spent the previous night in a prison cell.

  Then he sent for my mother. He called her to his chambers in the court building, to make the matter as serious as he knew how. My mother walked nervously through the building’s white Saracenic arches framing the arcades, each of the arches spattered at ground level with fans of red spit where paan-chewers had cleaned their mouths. Through the open doors, under slowly moving fans, men with great beards and sorrowful expressions draped themselves over ribbon-tied piles of paper in the dusty sunlight, like old bearded mothers in the nurseries where lawsuits are bred and weaned. My mother came finally to her father’s chambers, and her father’s boy asked her to wait, then showed her in, as if she were a client. My grandfather’s methods worked almost too well. He said that her cousin Mahmood was a rascal who had no business taking her to demonstrations, and confined her to the house for the next
ten days, sending her home in a rickshaw. My mother wept all through the rickshaw ride, not realizing that her future had been decided in accordance with her wishes.

  The future of the household seemed obvious. The daughters, one by one, would grow up, take some education, marry and move out. There would be more sons-in-law like Mahmood, though probably not all of them cousins. There might even, in time, be more children for Nana and Nani. And Laddu would stay at home, taking care of the house, organizing repairs, rebuilding and repainting, perhaps some day taking responsibility for paying bills and supervising the gardeners, the driver, the household staff. Nana supported any number of dependants, hardly any of whom were related to him. There was no reason to suppose that Boro-mama would ever have a reason to leave the house.

  3.

  One day in the monsoon season, Nana came home from his chambers, and slipped on the wet leaves on the path in the front garden of Rankin Street. There was nothing remarkable about this, apart from the fact that Nana had also slipped on the wet leaves on his way out of the house in the morning. He came into the house with his hands smeared and muddy where he had fallen, calling out for a towel.

  ‘I thought I asked somebody to clear the path,’ he said, as he wiped his hands and threw the towel at Mary, who had brought it to him. That was his way: never to refer to demands made of Boro-mama, but just to say, ‘I asked somebody’. ‘Has the path been cleared?’

  ‘The path?’ Era said, coming out of the kitchen.

  ‘No, Papa,’ Mary said. ‘I don’t think it has.’

  ‘That’s really too much,’ Nana said. ‘Where is Laddu?’

  There was a certain amount of household bustling in response. Era picked up Dahlia, who had toddled into the hallway to greet her father, and cluckingly carried her off. Mary suddenly found it very urgent to take the towel her father had used upstairs to the laundry basket. My mother and father were bewildered.

  ‘Mira,’ Nana said. ‘Go and find your brother.’

  ‘Your brother,’ Era said. She looked immediately guilty, and walked quickly away upstairs.

  Mira, only seven, watched her go with a puzzled expression. She did not know how to conceal a fact convincingly. ‘I don’t think elder-brother is here, Father,’ she said.

  ‘What is this?’ Nana said, as my grandmother appeared. ‘Where is he? He was supposed to carry out one small household chore – I simply asked him to sweep the garden path – and he hasn’t done it. That really isn’t like him at all.’

  ‘No,’ my grandmother said, though she certainly thought that failure to carry out a task to the end was very much like Boro-mama. ‘I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him all day. Mira – where is Laddu?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mira said, and then she burst into tears.

  ‘What is this?’ Nana said. ‘Is this some kind of madhouse? Why won’t anybody answer my question?’

  ‘Ask – ask – ask –’ Mira said, through her tears ‘– ask Era. She knows.’

  ‘Era!’ Nana shouted. ‘Come back here!’ My grandfather never shouted. It was one of the things his family admired about him. He never had to raise his voice to get his way. For years afterwards, the time when he shouted for Era-aunty was a favourite family story. The disappearance of Boro-mama was the only occasion when he really yelled. The family would recount this story, with amusement, and if anyone was there who did not know my grandfather, they would pause and look in puzzlement, wondering why it was a story that somebody should shout a name. ‘Era!’ my grandfather shouted. About him, everyone looked in wonderment, and Era came slowly out of the salon with the burden of what she knew.

  ‘Me?’ she said.

  Of course it was Era who had been entrusted with the story. Era was a great reader of romantic fiction, and had cast her elder brother in the role of a Heathcliff, the man whom all the world is against, who has every disadvantage but who wins the beautiful heroine at last. Alone among her sisters, she actually looked up to Boro-mama. Even little Dahlia took him for granted, pummelling him and tugging her possessions rudely away from him, as if he were a nursery servant. Those long walks, those lengthy afternoons when Era and her brother were sequestered away, deep in conversation, they had discussed, it turned out, only one topic. Boro-mama loved to talk about himself; Era-aunty loved to listen and, no doubt, to echo the last thing he had said. He was wrong to think that she was a safe repository of secrets – as it turned out, she had been dropping hints to all of her sisters, apart from my mother, for weeks. They all knew where to point the finger on the day that my grandfather shouted. But she was the only one who had kept the entire story secret loyally.

  ‘I think he has run off to marry Sharmin,’ Era said, when they were all seated in the salon and some tea had been brought.

  Nana looked at Nani, bewildered.

  ‘You should never – never – have asked him to sweep the garden path,’ she went on. ‘That’s why he’s run away. You treat him like a servant. You would never ask Mahmood to sweep the garden path.’ Era pointed dramatically at my father, punctilious in his white shirt and tie. ‘You ask elder-brother to do all these things, and he does them without complaint. Just because he didn’t go to university, like Mahmood.’

  ‘But who is Sharmin?’ Nana said.

  Now it was Nani’s turn to look shifty. ‘I had no idea he was serious,’ she said. And then the whole story came out.

  Among Boro-mama’s neighbourhood cronies was a man he had been to school with, Nawshad. Nawshad’s family was not Bengali but Urdu-speaking: they came from Bihar. Nawshad was very much the same sort of wastrel as Boro-mama. He had grand schemes for making money – to open a cinema, to start importing American cigarettes into Dacca, to open a smart restaurant. None of these ever came to anything, because Nawshad had no money to invest, and none of the gang who spent their days smoking in the neighbourhood store had any money either.

  Nawshad had a sister, however, called Sharmin. Sharmin was hard-working and academic, and was now studying at Mitford Medical College. She would be a doctor in a year or two. No, she was not beautiful, but she was clever and interesting, and would get on in life.

  She worked too hard, Nawshad said, and it was difficult to persuade her to go out, even to the cinema, once a month. But he did persuade her to come out to the cinema that Friday. It was a hot night, and wet; the cinema smelt of mould and bodies, and the film was an old one that broke down for ten minutes after the first reel. Sharmin had come out with her brother, and his friend Laddu had joined them. They had found plenty to talk about. He had made her laugh.

  ‘Am I the only person in this family who didn’t know about any of this?’ Nana said.

  It seemed that he was. Boro-mama had kept Era up to date with the details of their meetings, and their plans. Sharmin’s family lived near Rankin Street, and were in fact known to Nana in general terms. Boro-mama had found opportunities to sneak out of the house and to meet Sharmin in quiet corners, underneath umbrellas, shaded by trees in the street, in the back corners of shops. It all sounded – to Era, and even retold bluntly when the story was over – terribly romantic. In time, Boro-mama had told Era that he wanted to marry Sharmin. He had asked her to explain the whole matter to their father.

  ‘To Papa? I don’t think I can, elder-brother,’ Era said, alarmed. She had enjoyed the stories, and relished the monsoon-kisses, hopeless-doomed-passion aspect of her brother’s life. But it had not occurred to her that the story might have possibilities for development. She had had noble renunciation in mind. It was not really credible to her that her brother would want to marry this Bihari girl, rather than take her tear-stained photograph from a secret drawer once a year, and kiss it.

  ‘Well, I certainly can’t,’ Boro-mama said. ‘He would throw me out of the house.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Mahmood?’ Era said. ‘Papa likes him. He would make him listen.’

  A dark expression passed over Boro-mama’s features. ‘I could never do that,’ he said. ‘I don
’t want to be in Mahmood’s debt for anything.’

  ‘In Mahmood’s debt? Well,’ Era said, quite briskly, ‘I don’t see anything else for it. You will just have to go and talk to Ma. If she can’t explain it to Pa, then I don’t think anyone will be able to.’

  No one knew what the outcome was of the conversation between Boro-mama and his mother, the day when he told her that he wanted to marry an Urdu-speaking Bihari girl called Sharmin. Nobody even knew when or where it took place, this conversation. They were both at home in Rankin Street all day long, with nothing very much to occupy them. It was to be supposed that Boro-mama wandered into his mother’s sitting room one morning and stayed there until the outcome was clear. Neither of them shared the details of the conversation with anyone else afterwards. Boro-mama told his sister Era about every detail of his courtship of Sharmin – the meetings under trees, the snatched five minutes, the outings to the park or the walks along the muddy Buriganga river with Nawshad, who knew to remove himself to a distance of fifteen yards. But when the conversation with Nani took place, nobody knew, nor what had been exchanged during it. Only when it was too late for anyone to do anything did it become clear that the conversation had taken place: that both of them had agreed never to mention anything about Sharmin, ever again; that Nani believed that whatever she had said had put an end to the whole business. She had seen no reason to mention any of it to my grandfather.