Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  7.

  When my father had waved goodbye to his wife and children, he went back inside the house. The neighbours downstairs were waiting for him. He had discussed the situation with them, and had agreed that he could help them to leave the city as quickly as possible. So when he went inside their house, he found them sitting in their chairs with fraught expressions, three suitcases in front of them. They had not managed to pack very much.

  The wife was crying, quite helplessly, and the children – two young men, thirteen and sixteen years old – were trying to comfort her. My father had already established, in conversations with their father, that nobody knew what had happened to their uncle, the distinguished air-force officer who had abruptly deserted three days before. It was clear that they would have to leave the house as quickly as possible. The house was being watched, and there was no possibility of them leaving on foot with suitcases without being arrested immediately. My father had agreed to help them to safety, before going to his father-in-law’s house in Dhanmondi.

  My father left the house, walking two hundred yards to the busy intersection where the cycle-rickshaws normally sat. He tried not to see what was to the left and to the right of him. Despite everything, there were two cycle-rickshaws sitting at their normal place, and he summoned both of them. Ignoring the four men on the opposite side of the road, hunched up and observant, he went back into the house. The younger child and the mother, veiling her face, came out and got into one rickshaw, which drove off northwards, towards Gulistan. Twenty minutes later, the father, alone, came out and took the second rickshaw in the opposite direction. Neither party had any luggage, and they were informally dressed. It was important to give the impression that they had gone out only for half an hour or an hour, perhaps to buy food, perhaps to ensure the safety of others. The second boy and my father stayed behind; the watchers would know something was happening if all the family left the house at the same time.

  In an hour, an unfamiliar car drew up outside, and my father, in the most casual way imaginable, came out to hail the driver. With the telephone wires cut, how had my father got a message to his old college friend, living half a mile away? Nobody knew – it must have been a note, delivered by a servant of ours or of the family downstairs. The watchers opposite did not move, even when my father came out with three suitcases, one, two, three, helped by the gardener’s boy in a grubby shirt and gloves, and loaded them into the boot of the car. My father was not their concern. They did not register when the gardener’s boy, having loaded the three suitcases into the boot and shut the door on my father’s side, went back to the gate of the house and shut it from the street side. The boy stepped into the car in the most natural way possible, and it drove off. It was only much later in the day, when the army officers came to discover what had been happening to the house of the traitor’s brother, that they reflected that the gardener in the house was, after all, a much older man who had not been seen for some time, and he had never had a boy to help him out at all. But by that time the family who lived downstairs had disappeared, and could not be traced.

  Their destination was a house in the quieter north of Dacca, away from the fighting and protests and the bodies in the streets, in Mohakhali. The three parties – the mother and younger son, the father, both in rickshaws, and my father and the elder son, looking like the gardener’s boy, in a car with the family’s luggage – reached the house in Mohakhali by different routes, some quite complicated. Everywhere, the streets were filled with rickshaws heavily laden with luggage; at the sides of the road, families were trying to hail private cars, begging to be taken away. In the course of their journey, my father heard about what had been done in the previous twenty-four hours – the monuments desecrated, the university buildings destroyed, the people shot. Anyone who had raised a flag of the Bengali Home above their house had been targeted. About him, sitting incongruously in the back of the car with a dirty and shivering teenage boy, my father could see the abandoned and charred results of a day of violence.

  My father’s first idea had been to go, in pretence, to my grandfather’s house in Dhanmondi, as if the suitcases really were his. But he saw how impossible that would be. He could trick my mother once, but not twice, and she would not let him go. So the car drove in a large circuit through Dacca, stopping once or twice as if on urgent errands. My father’s resourcefulness ran out: he found himself going into paper-merchants and butchers and a hardware store when he saw a rare one that was not looted or destroyed, and had opened today. The mother’s journey was similar: she left the cycle-rickshaw where it was, and went into shops and immediately out again; once she made a pretence of paying off the cycle-rickshaw and went into a large shoe emporium; the rickshaw cycled off, but in reality made a large circle through the streets and picked her and her son up at the shop’s other entrance, seven minutes later. From there, she made her way to the safe-house in Mohakhali. There were other tricks and dodges, though none of them knew if they were really being followed, many entrances into houses and shops and swift exits at other points, much bold innocent play-acting among the wreckage and bodies of Dacca on the morning of 26 March 1971.

  By twelve o’clock, the family from downstairs in Elephant Road were safe for the moment in their friend’s house in Mohakhali. My father had an hour to reach Dhanmondi, in a city where everyone was trying to flee in different directions for safety. After that, the curfew would begin and, promptly, the shooting.

  8.

  In my grandfather’s house, there had been some trouble in finding space for everyone. Most of the household had gathered and discussed, and proposed different arrangements. The servants had almost all been sent out to buy as much food as they possibly could. The curfew had been lifted for a few hours today, but might be reimposed for the whole day tomorrow; and shortly there might be no food left in the shops. The servants were despatched to different markets and shopping streets in different parts of Dacca to buy food to see the large household through a week or two.

  In making practical arrangements such as these, my mother, Shiri, generally took the lead. She was a well-organized and sensible person, who could be relied upon to give her sisters and the servants a task each that would contribute to a smooth-running machine. Her sisters were accustomed to ask her what they should do next and, despite his bluster and complaint, so was her elder brother Laddu. But today they were obliged to make the arrangements themselves, under the impatient direction of my grandmother. My mother had come into the house and collapsed on a sofa in the corner of the room, drawing her shawl about her head. There was nothing else she could do.

  In her lap was a baby wrapped in blankets. For the moment I was sleeping. There were plenty of children in the house now – Boro-mama’s children, my brother and sisters, and at least one aunt’s children, too. I was the youngest, and the only one who had no understanding at all of what was happening. The other children, even the quite young ones, were old enough to understand that they must be quiet, and stay in their room without making any disturbance. Mary-aunty was supervising them, from the eleven-year-olds, like my brother Zahid, down to the little but sensible ones, like my sister Sunchita. They were playing some very quiet game, like Dead Crocodiles, in which the player who can stay absolutely still for the longest time wins the game; or perhaps Mary-aunty was reading all the children a long, quiet fairy story. Downstairs, my mother sobbed into her shawl as quietly as she knew how.

  There was no word from my father. He had disappeared back inside the house in Elephant Road without any explanation, without even waving goodbye. Nobody could understand it. He had to be following shortly – there was nothing to keep him in the house, and he must understand how dangerous it would be to remain in the same place as the family of a deserting senior officer. His cousins, however, knew that Mahmood was stubborn, and that he would not be ordered around or threatened. ‘He must be helping them to safety,’ Nadira said to Dahlia, when she was sure my mother could not hear. ‘How like Mahmood.’
And it was like my father. But the morning turned into afternoon, and there was still no word. My mother continued to weep. She could not know that her husband had, three times, passed within two hundred yards of Nana’s house in his doubling-back attempts to confuse any informers and stool-pigeons who might be trailing him. If she had, she would have run out on to the streets, hurling herself on the bonnet of the car.

  Towards the middle of the afternoon, just as the family from downstairs was finally assembling at the safe-house in Mohakhali, the silent baby in its swaddling began to stir and warble, and to screw its ugly face up into a ball. My mother made no response, and soon I began to cry properly. It had been some hours since I was fed, and I probably needed to be changed as well. My mother, so sunk in herself, still made no response.

  ‘Shiri!’ my grandmother called. ‘Shiri, wake up and pay attention. Your baby is crying.’

  ‘Shall I take him?’ Mira said. ‘Shall I take dear little Saadi? He is only a little bit cross, and perhaps he could be hungry, too. He has been so good.’

  ‘No,’ my grandmother said. ‘Shiri, you must take care of him. Get up and make an effort, now – this is not like you at all.’

  ‘She thinks Mahmood will be caught out in the streets when the curfew falls,’ Era said, in a low voice.

  ‘How could he?’ Sharmin said. ‘Causing everyone such worry like this.’

  ‘Causing everyone such worry – oh, that is so much like Mahmood,’ Era said. ‘He would never consider what other people are thinking about, or worrying over. He just does what he thinks is the right thing to do.’

  ‘A very annoying trait in a person,’ Sharmin said, keeping her voice down.

  ‘What is that noise?’ said one of the great-grandmothers, awakening like me from her sleep.

  ‘Poor little Saadi,’ my grandmother said. She got up from her chair, shuffled and cast her shawl over her shoulder, and went over to my basket. She picked me up; with a baby’s instinct for the unexpected, I began to cry with new force. Finally, my mother roused herself; she sat up, uncovered her face, and took me from her mother. Soon, as if through the repetition of routine alone, I had quietened down, and was feeding contentedly.

  ‘What was that noise?’ Nana said. He had come through from his study at the front of the house. Even in the current state of overcrowding, it was understood that he must have his own undisturbed space. His daughters and grandchildren and mothers and cousins might colonize the rest of the house, invading even the servants’ annexe, resting the whole day in the salon, finding corners in which to pass the time with small-scale near-silent activities like paan-grinding, embroidery, sock-darning, pickle-bottling and the like. But Nana must have his retreat in his depleted library, and when he came out, the daughters and the little awestruck cousins busied themselves, knowing that something must have disturbed him.

  ‘It is dear little Saadi,’ Nani said. ‘He was just hungry and woke up. Poor little thing, he can’t tell us that he wants something other than by crying. But he’s quite all right now.’

  ‘Can’t he be kept quiet with the other children?’ Nana said.

  ‘Mary can’t keep him quiet with The Snow Queen,’ Shiri said. Her face was red with weeping; she did not turn to her father when she spoke, but kept herself hunched over the baby. ‘The other children will listen to stories or play games, but he’s too little to understand any of that. Poor little mite.’

  ‘Poor little mite,’ said Era.

  ‘He must keep quiet,’ Nana said. ‘We mustn’t be heard from the street by anyone who passes.’ His eyes went round the room, to his seven daughters, one upstairs, to his daughter-in-law and three female cousins; perhaps he thought, too, a dreadful thought, of a tableau; his wife and mothers and perhaps even the grand-daughters, too. The mind shrank from it. I was the youngest child in the house, and the only child of an age to cry incontinently, who could not understand what the situation was. My wails could be heard in the street, when I cried, and to the passing soldiery, it would be like the display of a rebel flag, a reason for forcing an entry.

  ‘Poor little Saadi,’ Mira said. ‘He can’t be expected to understand what’s happening. We can’t tell him not to cry, he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘That’s so,’ my grandfather said, considering. His lawyer’s logical brain went through various considerations. ‘He must never be left alone, that’s all. Carry him about with you – not just his mother, but the rest of you girls, too, take turns. If he wants to sleep, put him down but don’t leave him. And have cake to hand at all times. If it begins to look as if he might be thinking of crying – beginning to look like that, no more – then distract him, feed him, interest him, jiggle him. He mustn’t cry. Give him cake and mishti doi. Babies like that. He must be allowed to eat whatever he likes.’

  And that is how I was allowed to eat whatever I liked, without any restraint at all. There was no shortage of mishti doi, it being made in the kitchen rather than bought in from confectioners. From that moment onwards, my aunts took turns looking after me. I grew popular with them because a baby cared for at every minute, whose every need is anticipated and fulfilled before he has even begun to express it, is a placid and cheerful baby, as well as a very fat one. My aunts said they loved my chubby face; they loved my cheerful demeanour. They passed me from one to another with some regret, looking forward to their next turn looking after Saadi. Anyone who came into the house would have seen me being cradled in an aunt’s elbow as she crooned to me – Era, Sharmin, Mary, Nadira, Mira, Dahlia, even Bubbly, though she was no more than thirteen and, I was told in later years, not very good at it.

  On the table or the armrest of a chair by them was a terracotta pot of mishti doi, a teaspoon stuck in it, and from time to time, not interrupting her burble of conversation or under-the-breath song, the aunt of the moment would lean forward, dig into the pot and bring another half-teaspoon to my little wrinkled mouth. In the whole of that time, I hardly had the opportunity to cry. No sooner, day or night, had my face begun to move inwards and my brow to furrow than an aunt moved in and embarked on a well-established routine of Saadi-distracting, involving the pulling of funny faces, jogging up and down, a favourite knitted rabbit, tickling on the tummy (mine) and the regular administration of half-teaspoons of mishti doi.

  It is a sign of how desperate and serious those months of 1971 were that the other children in the house had no resentment or complaint against this exceptional treatment of a baby. They never produced, as far as I can discover, that universal childhood complaint, ‘It isn’t fair,’ when they saw the constant watching and concern that I was attracting. They knew that it wasn’t fair, none of it, even the very smallest of them. I slept contentedly, in an atmosphere of love, from the March curfew until the day in December that Bangla Desh was liberated, and I did not cry. The house in Dhanmondi was as quiet as a tomb, and no soldier was drawn by his curiosity in a baby crying to force the gates and enter.

  But this is to move ahead in the story.

  9.

  ‘What is that?’ my mother said.

  ‘What is what?’ Nadira said.

  ‘That sound,’ my mother said. They all listened. In the city, far away, a noise like a howl was rising. It was what they had all been dreading. Two days before, nobody had known what the sound had meant. It was a siren, driven about the streets of the old city, of Sadarghat, Gulistan, Dhanmondi, Mohakhali and the other parts of the city, in warning; it signified, a radio announcement had made clear, the beginning of a curfew. Now it was one o’clock, and the sirens were sounding. There had still been no word from my father. He was out there in the city somewhere. Nobody had the heart to tell my mother that he must have returned, in safety, to the house in Elephant Road – that her husband was a sensible man who would not risk his life in this way.

  ‘Put the radio on,’ Era said, and Nadira hastened to do so. The new audio cabinet, a stylish model in teak, included a radio. These days, it was kept permanently tuned to Radio Calcutta, which
could be trusted.

  The news ran through the events in Dacca and in the rest of the country. Universities had been burnt; intellectuals rounded up. There was no news of Sheikh Mujib. There were international condemnations. The curfew had been imposed and had been lifted for five hours during the day before being put in place again. Finally, the radio news regretted to announce the death of Begum Sufiya Kemal, in unknown circumstances—

  ‘Oh,’ Nani said.

  ‘How could they?’ Nadira said; her eyes began to fill with tears. Sufiya lived so close; the whole family knew her; they had been to her house many times. How could they?

  ‘But all she did was to write some poems,’ Mira said. ‘How can they shoot women for writing poems?’

  And Begum Sufiya would be remembered, above all, the radio continued, for poems that encouraged her countrymen and -women in the struggle for freedom. There was a brief pause, and another voice began to read a poem. It was Sufiya’s voice; the poem must have been recorded at some time, and the recording obtained somehow by Radio Calcutta. ‘“This is no time to be braiding your hair,”’ the poem began.