Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  The next morning they awoke to the sound of an air-raid siren. In front of the house, there were two tanks of the Pakistani Army, pointing the barrels of their guns over the wall and directly at the front bedrooms of the house.

  My mother hurried downstairs to try to understand what had happened. There, she learnt that the brother of their landlord, who had been serving in the Pakistani Air Force in a very senior capacity, had deserted on hearing that Sheikh Mujib had been arrested and the results of the election declared null and void. Where he was, nobody knew. He was what my father referred to when he said that the family downstairs had very good connections. It had turned out that they had very bad connections, or so it seemed, in those days. The military authorities had decided that the house in Elephant Road bore some sort of responsibility for the desertion, and the guns were pointed directly at them and, of course, at us.

  My mother screamed and fainted and revived herself. She accused my father of leaving them in terrible danger, when they could have left the day before, or the day before that; they could have been secure in her father’s house, where nobody could seriously discover a danger or a threat. Nobody would point a tank at her father’s house; nobody in their family was in a position to desert. In a spirit of pure terror, she picked up the telephone and tried to dial. But that was too late, also. There was no dialling tone. Looking out of the window, she saw that the telephone wires to the house had been cut. They hung like a mop from the telegraph pole.

  There was no means of getting out of the house, and soon a van with a loudspeaker went by, announcing a general curfew with immediate effect. That had been what the air-raid siren had warned of. When my parents listened to the radio, they discovered the detail of the general curfew called by the Pakistani Army. Not everyone was prevented from leaving their houses by the presence of a tank against the front wall. But everyone in Dacca was barred inside, on pain of death. It was 25 March. As that long day went on, the children bored and fractious and not understanding, the vengeance of the army on the rest of Dacca intruded on the street. Somewhere in the middle distance, a great plume of smoke was rising. Something was burning, or being burnt: something substantial, and rather nearer, from time to time, screams and shouts and the rattle of gunfire; very near, the metallic, clipped announcements through loud-hailers, announcing the penalty of death.

  The radio had nothing to say about any of that. It was only much later that people learnt the army had gone into the poor parts of Dacca and burnt them to the ground; that the university had been entered and set to the torch. Afterwards, the dead came to be reckoned, but at the time, there was only black smoke and, too near, fire and shots. My mother and father, my brothers and sisters and I went to the back room of the house and passed the time as best we could. From time to time the neighbours downstairs came up to see how we were. But they knew no more than anyone else, and they could not comfort or explain the situation.

  ‘They are going to blow up the house,’ my mother said, and, without meaning to, she started screaming. ‘If only we had gone to Papa’s – they are going to break in and kill us, they will, they will kill us all.’

  ‘We have done nothing wrong,’ my father said.

  ‘They are going to kill us,’ my mother said. ‘They will.’ My brother, eleven years old, understood, and looked at her with solemn, frightened eyes. He was not familiar with the display of fear by the adults of his family. Quietly, I slept on.

  The next day, the cook came into the salon early. ‘There are people on the streets,’ he said. It was around eight thirty. ‘On bicycles and in cars, moving around normally.’ The radio, when switched on, announced that the curfew would be lifted for a short time that day to allow people to fetch supplies and food. It would be reimposed, however, at one, and anyone found wandering the streets would be shot on sight. My father went into the front room of the house. Even after a day, it had the musty, miserable air of an uncared-for house returned to after a long holiday. Cautiously, he went to the windows. The street was empty; there was no one moving. More remarkably, the two tanks were gone. He tried not to look at what he saw at the end of the road, lying in the dirt.

  ‘Where are you going?’ my mother said, coming out of the back room with the baby in her arms. My father was going downstairs. ‘We have to get to Father’s house. We cannot stay here. They are going to kill us.’

  ‘No, you and the children mustn’t stay,’ my father said, carrying on his way downstairs, quite calmly. ‘You must go while you can.’

  ‘But how?’ my mother said. ‘How are we to get a message to them? There is no telephone.’

  From downstairs, my father’s voice drifted up. ‘You must pack a bag for you and the children,’ he called. ‘Do it quickly. Only what you need.’

  Nothing seemed clear to my mother, but she did what she was told. She quietened the children, pretending as best she could that this was all some great adventure, and told Zahid that he must make sure the others made no noise, and stayed exactly where they were, in the back rooms of the house. Her main terror was that a child of hers, standing at the front window of the upper storey, would be seen by a passing soldier and shot for no reason. And then a miracle happened: a familiar engine noise in the street outside. She hesitatingly went herself to the front window. There, below, in the street, was the red Vauxhall car. Rustum, my grandfather’s driver, got out hurriedly, looking quickly to left and right. He left the car’s engine running, and the driver’s door open. He banged on the gate of the house, but my mother was already taking her half-packed bags, one in each hand, and calling for the children. Behind her, Zahid and the girls were following, their faces pale. ‘Where is Saadi?’ my mother said. I had been left sleeping peacefully in the back bedroom. ‘Go, go, go,’ she said to Sushmita. ‘Go and pick up your little brother. Do you think you can carry him?’ Sushmita thought she could, and the five of us went swiftly downstairs. From the other flat, my father emerged and, sweeping us along, brought up the rear. My mother dropped the suitcase on the ground, and fumblingly opened the bolt of the front gate. ‘I never said goodbye,’ she said to my father, meaning to the neighbours downstairs.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ my father said impatiently, and between them, he and Rustum bundled my mother and the four children into the back of the red Vauxhall. Quite suddenly, the back door of the car was shut; Rustum got into the driver’s seat. ‘You go on,’ my father said. ‘I shall come along later today.’ From the outside, he banged on the roof to tell Rustum to go.

  ‘What is it? What are you doing?’ my mother mouthed from the back of the car, but it was too late. My father had turned and gone back inside the house in Elephant Road, shutting and bolting the gate behind him, and again my mother, secure in the back of the red Vauxhall, began to scream. This time I awoke and, responding to my mother’s screams, began to wail myself. She had had no idea my father would not come with us until he had shut the door of the car and banged a practical, necessary farewell on the roof.

  It had been only fifteen minutes since the lifting of the curfew for five hours was announced on the radio. At one o’clock it would fall again. Nana must have ordered Rustum to go straight out and fetch us.

  5.

  Elephant Road was only a ten-minute drive from my grandfather’s house. It was quite a different sort of place. There were small shops, selling groceries and household necessities; it was, in normal times, a pleasant, busy thoroughfare. There was a large Bata store, which acted as a landmark in Dacca, and other shoe shops, carpet sellers, hardware emporia, with rows of plastic bowls and aluminium pans hanging outside, tea stalls, confectioners, copper show-pieces, barbers, chemists and sherwani-merchants.

  I slept peacefully through the short journey from Elephant Road to Nana’s house in Dhanmondi. My mother, brother and sisters would never forget what they saw. The windows of Sushmita’s favourite confectioner, the one with the best jelapi, the one where she loved to hang around and watch the expert confectioner piping a map of the world,
a round Arabic signature, a piece of magical writing in the seething oil and let it rise; the windows of that shop were smashed. Inside, there was broken glass and spattered confectionery, milk and flour and sugar thrown like abstract fantasies across the oil-soaked floor. A house was on fire, its gates hanging from their hinges. The hardware shops had given up their contents, like great vomiting beasts. Across the street, pans and tools and plastic goods were strewn and crushed. And there was a rickshaw, turned over, lying in the street abandoned. ‘There’s blood on it – there’s blood on it!’ Sushmita screamed. There was; and underneath it was lying some kind of large packet, slumped and crushed.

  ‘Don’t look,’ Rustum said. ‘We’ll soon be nice and safe.’ But they had to look. Down a side-street, there was a platoon of the military, lounging against the cab of a lorry and paying no attention to the shop further down that was on fire, the gusts of flame and black smoke pouring into the street like great foul-fragrant blooms. It must have been one of the shops that made a good living renting out splendid garments in silver and thread-of-gold to guests at weddings; all that glitter and light, consumed in a moment. And one of the shop’s mannequins – no, more than one had been dragged out of the shop and thrown into the road, lying there in an awkward position. Perhaps the person who had done it had wanted to steal the outfits from the mannequins, because they were quite bare, the arms raised, waxlike in the mud of the street, and more blood covering one mannequin’s chest and running into a black stain on the road. But it was no mannequin. ‘Don’t look,’ Rustum said again. Sushmita would never forget that sight: a man lying in the road, his throat cut, his fat little legs raised as if in an attempt to run. And then she was sick.

  ‘Please, Rustum,’ my mother said, when they were drawing up outside Nana’s house. ‘Please, just leave us here and go back for my husband.’

  ‘It is too dangerous,’ Rustum said. ‘He would not come. He will come later. I can’t go and make him get in the car. If he didn’t come, it’s because he has important things that he has to do.’

  ‘He has to come,’ my mother said, but now Rustum was out of the car and opening the gate. There were no soldiers to be seen. ‘If you won’t go, I shall go myself.’

  Rustum ignored this, and between him, Nana, Nani and Boro-mama, who had all come out of the house, my mother and all of us were bundled together into safety. The children, Shiri and the baby came through the glass-framed porch at the side of the house, and were propelled by the servants and others along the passageway and into the large salon at the back of the house. My mother was screaming in terror, screaming for her husband, and Rustum explained how it was that my father had been left behind. Nana’s face seemed to age in a moment. ‘Have mercy,’ my grandmother said, and led my mother away.

  My sisters were handed over to Shibli’s ayah who took them upstairs to clean them up and make them respectable again. My brother Zahid, who had observed everything in silence, went over to his aunts, who greeted him politely, as if he were a grown-up and paying a visit. In twenty minutes, the noises of grief from Nani’s room had subsided a little; and Zahid had found an interesting book to occupy himself with in a corner. For the moment, I was sleeping peacefully, swaddled in my blanket, guarded by Dahlia-aunty. The gates were shut and bolted. Outside, in the Dhanmondi street, the noises of battle, the crackle that a house on fire makes began to return.

  6.

  Many people had taken the same decision that my family had, and gone to wherever they could be together. They felt that they could best sit out the curfew if they knew where everyone was, and could feel reassured. One of these families was in a house only two streets away from my grandfather’s. It was also a white courtyard house, very much in the same Bauhaus style, and there was, too, a large coconut palm at the front and a pair of green-painted gates against the street. In this house, which belonged to an important businessman, were living their children, two sons and two daughters, the eldest thirty-three, the youngest only nineteen. The two eldest were sons, and married, and their young wives were with them. There were also two grandchildren: a boy of four and a baby, which had been born only weeks before, to the younger son’s wife. All these people had moved to the same house by the first day of the curfew, the day that we had been in Elephant Road with the guns of the tanks pointing directly at us.

  All that day, the soldiery had roamed the street. They had not hesitated to shoot at anyone, even rickshaw drivers, who had been seen out, breaking the law. When they saw a shop with a Hindu proprietor, or one where they knew a grudge could be borne, they broke in. They threw the stock, whether sweets, or meat, or cloth, or paper, or books, or shirts, into the road. They poured petrol on to whatever they could find and set a match to it. Then they sat back and watched it burn. They drove to the university, and set fire to one of the main buildings. ‘Intellectuals,’ the soldiers said to each other. Another troop drove into the shanty town, where the buildings were made of wood and hardboard. There was no curfew observance here: the inhabitants lived half outside, and had no gates to close. The settlement burnt at the touch of a match.

  The soldiery had been given orders, but there were just too many of them. They kept meeting up with the same patrols, bellowing curfew orders into loudspeakers. And at some point, one tank patrol found its way into Dhanmondi, and outside the house with the green gates.

  Afterwards, my family always believed that these soldiers had not found their way by chance to this house. We believed that there were families living in Dhanmondi who believed in the unity of the state; who did not speak Bengali much, and thought of those who did as traitors. Some of those families were happy to tell the roaming soldiery the houses from which rebel songs could be heard; where the flag of an independent Bangla Home had been raised from the roof. Perhaps, too, houses where they might find traitors who could easily be punished in an immediate way; even young women.

  Some of these families who gave out such information, who directed the forces to particular houses during the war, went on living where they did after the war. Everyone knew who they were. They kept to themselves, and in after years, we children were not permitted to play with the children of such families.

  In any case, perhaps the soldiers found their way to this house by chance. Perhaps they just heard something within, without paying for advice. A sound was coming from the house, a thin, high crying. It was a hungry baby. The soldiers knew that where there was a baby crying, there were young women. This was a rich area, but that meant nothing any more. The patrol hammered on the green gates of the house, and, when no response came, they got in their tank and drove directly at it. The white walls of the house fell inwards, into the garden.

  ‘What is it?’ the businessman was shouting, as he came out of his house – even then, he continued believing that he was living in the world he knew from a week ago. He did not see how things had changed, or he would not have come out shouting in outrage. The commander pushed him aside and went into the house. Five women – four young, one middle-aged, one nursing the baby that had been making the noise – were in what seemed to be the salon. They stood up as eight of the soldiers stamped into the house; the mother made a gesture as if to draw her daughters to her. But one daughter – a plump-faced, pretty girl in a silver-edged sari – broke away and ran out of the french windows into the garden. Where was she thinking of going? There was no escape there. And if there had been an escape, that would have been breaking the curfew, and they could have shot her. Three soldiers followed her out, easily overtaking her and throwing her down on the ground. There was no difficulty in holding her shoulders to the earth while another soldier forced her legs apart, raising her sari. A fist went over her mouth, and a terrible stifled yell was all the protest she could make.

  In the house, there was a single shot. The women screamed, and went on screaming. In a few moments, the soldiers killed the other brother, too, with two shots, then a third, and then the father, in the same way. But they did not kill the women unti
l they had raped all of them. One of them, as she was borne down by the terrible weight of the men, tried to grasp and steal the pistol in the captain’s holster. But her arms were held down, and she could not reach. The captain took out the pistol and waved it in her face, before hitting her hard on one side, then on the other, then again; there was the sound and the strange sensation, like wooden bricks moving about in a soft bag, of her jaw breaking under the blow. Then they raped her again.

  They did not waste a bullet on the baby, but killed it with a knife they took from the kitchen. The howling child went the same way. Under the table, two manservants cowered, their hands over their heads, shaking, backwards and forwards, clutching at each other. What were the soldiery going to do with them? Nothing. They could spread the word. That was what would happen.

  For ever afterwards, my family wondered how it was that Nana knew what the soldiers had done, and what they were capable of. From the start of the curfew, he was determined that not only should nobody step outside the house but that the house should seem to be empty. Nadira-aunty believed and said that there was no need for such precautions. She did not believe that the Pakistani Army would enter any house if there was no threat and the inhabitants were obeying the curfew faithfully.

  ‘That is how it is to be,’ Nana said quietly. ‘Nobody is to make any noise, or light a lamp. This house is to seem empty, without interest, vacated. You are not to draw attention to this house. When night falls, we sit in the dark or we go to bed.’

  My grandfather would not share what he knew about what had happened in the businessman’s house, two streets away. There were many such stories in Dacca that day, and for weeks into the future. The rapes and murders of the businessman’s family was the one my grandfather knew about. The two manservants whom the soldiery had left cowering under the kitchen table had waited there, expecting their deaths, until the point where the platoon had driven away. They had emerged from their inadequate hiding place, slowly taking their hands off their heads. The curfew was still in force, and if they left the house and walked on the street, they would be shot. There was, however, a back way through the gardens of the houses that could take them to somewhere safe. They were, as it happens, friends or perhaps even relations of Rustum, my grandfather’s chauffeur, and they thought of going to him. They knew my grandfather was a powerful man; they might have known that he had had some dealings with the authorities, and they might have believed that he and his household were in some way protected from the worst of the events. They decided to make their way to my grandfather’s house. It would mean crossing two streets, out in the open. But only two. They could risk that. And there was no question of remaining in this house. The worst of the events lay, defiled, in the sitting room and the garden. There was only one way they could take, and they were obliged to start by going into the garden next door. For the two manservants, passing through those scenes was the worst thing either of them ever had to do.