Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  Such small inconveniences arrived almost every day. ‘You see,’ my father said, ‘your brother simply wants to make us think that it is at his behest that we live here at all. One of these days he will go too far. I’d like to see the look on his face when he realizes that we’re not there any longer to keep him in funds.’

  ‘He asked me for ten taka yesterday for replacement lightbulbs,’ my mother said.

  ‘Lightbulbs for downstairs, I expect,’ my father said.

  My father did not work at home, in the chambers, every day. Quite often he went to court. I used to like to go with him. The atmosphere of the courthouse was special to me; a grand white building, in broad, flat grounds. Often you would see old men congregating there, reading newspapers leaning against a tree, talking with energy. Inside, as you walked through the cloisters, the rooms of the court officials were open; dusty, brown, dim-lit rooms, high-piled with papers, all tied with ribbon, and between, the small, beetling men, their heads down between their shoulders, noting one thing after another. Around each doorway, a penumbra of red spattering as paan-chewers had cleaned their mouths before entering the inner rooms. I liked to go there. It was like nowhere else.

  When my father came home one day from appearing in court, he found to his surprise that the house was covered with a web of bamboo scaffolding. Boro-mama was outside, inspecting the structure from the front gate of the house. ‘What is this?’ my father said. ‘What is happening?’

  ‘Structural repairs,’ Boro-mama said, gazing upwards with his hand shading his eyes from the sun. ‘It’s necessary, I’m afraid.’

  Upstairs, my mother was almost hysterical. Two workmen had gained access to the house and had walked in without a by-your-leave. All day, they had been erecting scaffolding, and had finished only half an hour before. My mother had sent all four of us to a back room with Majeda. She had not been able to extract from the workmen any kind of description of the work they were supposed to be carrying out, and when Laddu appeared after lunch, he flatly insisted that he had told her, months before, that the work was going to commence, and when it was going to commence, and why it was necessary. My mother had gone upstairs in a rage. She had gone to the salon, pulled a pillow over her head, and waited for it to come to a conclusion.

  ‘That’s enough,’ my father said. ‘We can’t allow that. Have you given Laddu any money for the work yet?’ My mother had not. ‘Good. We’re leaving tonight.’

  5.

  A feud is an ineffective way of removing the hated one from your life. The face and behaviour present themselves ceaselessly. It would be nice to say that the months during which my mother and father saw nothing of the family were peaceful ones. They removed themselves not just from Boro-mama and his family, and his attempts to get them to supplement his family existence. My father blamed Nana for insisting that we live in his old house – for trying to place us under an obligation, as he put it. So he would not visit Nana, or allow my mother to see her sisters, or allow his children to play with their cousins. All the stubbornness of my father came out on this occasion.

  His law practice was a successful one. As long as I can remember, there were waiting rooms full of clients – country men, grizzled old disgruntlements filling the antechamber with smoke, men hobbling off, fumbling for wads of notes, knotted up deep in the waistbands of their lungis. There was always a clerk explaining to the waiting clients that Advocate-sahib was very busy this morning, and that he would only ask for a small amount of patience. There was always Majeda, impressing on us children that we must play quietly, and not disturb Papa. Perhaps, at first, some of this business had come to my father through Nana, who liked to help out his family – he valued the obligations that such help imposed. But that had been a long time ago. An obligation only remains so if it may be taken back by the giver. After some time it becomes a possession of the recipient. And if Nana had once passed on some of these clients to Father’s early practice, he could not have taken them back now. Those old country families – merchants, landlords, entrepreneurs, income-tax lawyers, politicians, some merely respectable, some so very grand that, a century before, one would have called them zamindars, and some with backgrounds and history best not examined too closely – they all valued my father’s skill and discipline. I daresay Nana made them feel somewhat shy, as if they were begging for favours, and my father would take years to become as grand as that.

  Father had every reason to think he was making his own way in the world. Any obligation he had once possessed had slid away. Long before, he had refused to live with Nana when they had returned from Barisal, when Boro-mama had run away. He preferred to find somewhere to live that was his own. Only the strange circumstances after the end of the war could have persuaded him to live in a house owned by Nana. He would always find an excuse to bring the arrangement to an end. Boro-mama’s behaviour was a useful excuse of this sort.

  For the next months, though we removed ourselves from the lives of our aunts, and cousins, and grandparents, they were always present in our own. Father was easily capable of saying, following on from nothing at all, ‘Mary has always been under the thumb,’ or, on a Sunday night, ‘I wonder what idiocies they are all sharing at this exact moment,’ or ‘I hope Bubbly is getting enough to eat – I would hate to think that the circumstances were affecting her dinners,’ or there would be a quarter of an hour of examination and re-examination of Boro-mama’s character and the history of his bad behaviour. When he was not talking about our relations in this way, I believe that he was often thinking about them. I think Boro-mama’s face and name were the first that came to him on waking in the morning, and the last that kept him from sleep at night. My very early childhood is paced out by my father, going back and forth in the sitting room; is lit by the lamp going on in the small hours in the office as my father, sleepless and resentful, goes to his books to blot out the faces he will not see, the faces he cannot get rid of.

  The drawing room and office were in a new house. After our precipitate departure with nothing more than suitcases in a brace of taxis, we were taken in for six weeks by a family friend – a bemused, cheerful old lawyer with a big empty house in Dhanmondi. He could easily spare us three rooms while Mother and Father looked for somewhere more permanent. I believe he was something of an old gossip – he was in the process of winding down his practice in his sixties, and when lawyers lose the professional occasion of talking, an amateur habit tends to rise up in its place. He was forever dropping in to hear the latest about Boro-mama, encouraging denunciations and the dragging up of ancient resentments. ‘But what really rankles . . .’ my father would say, and his friend, his legs up in the planter’s chair opposite, would nod and shake his head, his big eyes begging for more. His name was Tunu; we were encouraged to call him Tunu-chacha, but it seemed immensely clever and hilarious to call him Nunu-chacha instead. That means ‘Penis-uncle’, which was what my sisters and I called the old gossip when we were alone. Nunu-chacha! I could laugh even now.

  I believe that he would have been perfectly happy if we had stayed for months. It was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to him, I believe, the old tittle-tattler. But after six weeks, a new house had been found, and we moved in. Workmen visited the house in Rankin Street and emptied the upper storey, delivering it all to the new home. My father swore that he would never go near the old house again.

  From time to time, by chance, one of my parents happened to encounter one of the family, and the meeting was awkward, brief and evasive. They moved in the same circles, and we could not avoid being at Sufiya’s, for instance, at the same time. My father would pass a greeting with whichever one of his wife’s sisters it happened to be, before thanking his hostess and leaving without too much delay. The family accepted this; my mother did not enjoy it at all. And friends of the family did not really understand.

  It was during the wedding season, almost between parties, that my mother met Pultoo’s friend Alam. She was leaving, or arriving, an
d he was arriving, or leaving. At first she could not place him, but he greeted her, and there was something familiar about him.

  ‘Such a busy day,’ she said.

  ‘Irrational, for everyone to marry all at once,’ he said. ‘My mother says that once, ten years ago, she went to eleven weddings in the same day . . .’

  Then, of course, my mother remembered him. ‘How is my brother?’ she said. ‘Did he ever finish the portrait he was making of you?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Alam said. ‘Why? When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Not so recently,’ she said. ‘We moved out of the house in Rankin Street, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I remember hearing something about that,’ Alam said. ‘These things happen, I dare say.’

  My mother did not really want to be discussing the matter with a worldly boy she hardly knew, but Alam continued.

  ‘There was a dispute in my family, over some land in Srimongol, and two of my uncles, people say they hardly spoke to each other for years on end. It must have been twenty or thirty years ago. So sad for everyone when that happens. But the curious thing was that, after a year or two, neither brother could recall what on earth had been the initial cause of the disagreement. It was something to do with who said what to whom, and who had the better right to some land, which was really of no importance, but the argument continued for years, with them not speaking to each other, and so on. It was really very peculiar.’

  ‘I see,’ my mother said. ‘I must be going.’

  Perhaps she was going into a wedding, but she turned round and left, taking a cycle-rickshaw all the way home. She could not bear the thought that such people – mere boys called Alam, hangers-on, the son of nothing but plantation owners who had never read a book or admired a painting in their lives, the sort of people who cared only for how much per pound this year’s tea would fetch – that such people were not only discussing relations between her husband and her family, but thought nothing of talking to her face about it. And comparing it to squabbles over commerce. My mother had agreed not to visit, or spend time with, her sisters and brothers, but this did not seem to have removed them from her thoughts. She thought hard about them all the way home, and for a long time after that.

  6.

  Over the next few months, Boro-mama in some way changed physically. Afterwards, everyone said that it was for the lack of anything to do, or anything to pass the time. Since what had occupied Laddu’s time had been dreaming up money-making enterprises that his brother-in-law upstairs would fund, no one really regretted this. Boro-mama’s family was supposed to stay downstairs in Rankin Street, but with time they spread upstairs, colonizing first a couple of rooms so that the girls could have a room each, then a sitting room for Laddu himself.

  Laddu spent all his time in his sitting room upstairs, and in some way this changed him physically. How, exactly? I do not know. He could not have grown fat; I do not think he grew thinner, or lost his hair, or aged prematurely, or took on a spiritual air with long solitary contemplation. The exact nature of Boro-mama’s physical change is a mystery to me, though everyone insists on it. Perhaps, like many men in the middle of the 1970s, he decided to make a sharp reversal in the direction of his haircut, losing four inches from all over his head.

  It is one of those mysteries that arise in the telling of a family story. ‘You see,’ an aunt will say, ‘when I next saw him, I hardly recognized him, he had changed so much . . .’

  ‘Changed how?’ I will say. Because of course when I see my sisters and brother, they seem just the same people I always knew, hardly changed since we were children together, although now they are nearly fifty. How could a brother change so much that his sister could hardly recognize him?

  ‘I don’t know how he had changed,’ my aunt will say. ‘He had changed, that is all. Changed so much I didn’t know who he was.’ Aunts are not keen observers, and all they knew was that in the next year and a half, Boro-mama’s alteration was undisputed. They all agreed on it.

  Certainly, when the gate of our new house opened, a year and a half after we had moved into it, my mother saw the visitor but did not immediately identify the shape as her elder brother’s. There were many visitors to the house, mostly clients of my father’s, and she assumed that it was one of those. It was unexpected that with him was a small boy, but sometimes clients did bring their children, for whatever reason, and they were made to sit quietly in the smoke-filled waiting room while their fathers talked business. Shibli, too, had changed in outward appearance: he was a fifth larger than the last time any of us had seen him, living with Nana and Nani. It was not to be expected that my mother would identify him from an upper room, either.

  The office clerk let them in. He had never seen his employer’s brother-in-law, and naturally showed them to the waiting room. Boro-mama always thought everyone knew exactly who he was – he was the eldest son, after all – and, since he had not told the office clerk who he wanted to visit and for what reason, a moment of confusion followed. Something of the story must have filtered through to the office workers and the domestic servants, because with a little doubt in his eye, the office clerk asked Boro-mama to wait with Shibli, not in the waiting room but in the hallway, while he went to see if my mother was in. ‘I know she’s in,’ Boro-mama said. ‘I saw her shadow in the windows on to the balcony, upstairs.’ The office clerk asked him to wait, and went to see my mother.

  I was sitting with her, being read to, though my sister Sunchita was paying more attention to the story than I was, curled up in my mother’s lap, following the text as my mother’s finger travelled over it.

  My mother broke off when she heard what the office clerk had to say. ‘My brother? Here?’ She set the book down and stood up, brushing my sister to one side; Sunchita took the book from her, and started to read herself, not interested in this interruption.

  Our manners were not as formal as my grandparents’, and my mother expected that Laddu would have come through with the office clerk. So when the office clerk said, ‘Shall I ask him to come through?’ she was nervous, her intentions all shattered and unclear.

  ‘Yes – no, wait, one moment. Give me a pen,’ she said, and on the blank back of the Dacca Book Fair postcard that lay on the table by the sofa, she quickly wrote in blue ink with the clerk’s fountain pen, ‘My brother is here – please come as soon as you can. Two minutes will be enough.’ She fanned it to dry it, and folded it in three. There was no other paper to hand. ‘Give this to Advocate-sahib,’ she said. ‘And ask my brother to come through.’

  ‘Is it Boro-mama or Choto-mama?’ I said. I knew the difference between Big-uncle and Little-uncle; my sisters had told me all about them. The one who painted, the clever, nice one, and the frightening one with the awful son called Shibli, who lived with Nana. But a year and a half is a long time in early childhood, and though my sisters remembered them, to me they were like characters in my sister Sunchita’s story-books, ogres and dwarfs and beautiful princesses, lying just out of reach, at the end of a quest still not undertaken.

  ‘It’s Big-uncle,’ my mother said. ‘And I think that must be Shibli with him – you remember Shibli, your cousin . . . Come in, brother!’ she said, as he came into the room. ‘How are you? You’re looking . . .’ And she trailed off because, again, there was that change in his appearance, and whether it was an improvement or just one of those alterations that time and decisions bring, she could not say. ‘Well, I would hardly have known him,’ she said in later years. But why? Was his faced puffed out with mumps? Had he dyed his hair blond with peroxide? Had he arrived wearing glasses for the first time, or concealed his face behind a monkey-mask? I do not think any of these.

  ‘Yes,’ Laddu said, not ungraciously. ‘Everyone says that. How are you, Shiri?’

  ‘Sunchita, Saadi,’ my mother said. ‘Say hello to your uncle, and to your cousin Shibli.’

  But that was too much for us: we took one look at Shibli and Boro-mama, and went entwined into safety, bu
rying our faces in each other’s shoulders so as not to look at the strangers, to make them disappear with our not-seeing. Shibli, on his part, did exactly the same thing, burying his face in his father’s legs, clutching him as the safest adult in the room. We were all merely visitors to each other.

  ‘Where are your manners, Shibli?’ Boro-mama said. ‘Really, I am quite ashamed. He is only a little bit shy – in a moment he will be perfectly friendly, but sometimes he doesn’t like to meet new people.’

  ‘Sunchita and Saadi are just the same,’ my mother said, delighted to have found something to talk about so readily. ‘I think it must be some fear of being abandoned they have in their little heads.’

  ‘And goodness knows why,’ Boro-mama said. ‘No one could live more secure lives than they do, surely.’

  My mother might have retorted that Shibli had, in fact, been taken from his parents to live with his grandparents without consultation, and that perhaps he did not think he lived a very secure life at all. This fate of Shibli’s, in later years, seemed terribly glamorous to us, his cousins, but when we were very young, who knows? It might have been terrifying, and the reason why we shrank into each other when visitors came. If our unknown uncle could give away his youngest child to Nana and Nani, then there seemed no reason why our parents might not decide on a whim to give us away to any visiting person – to one of the rather smelly men who clustered in the smoke-filled vestibule downstairs, to one of the grand old ladies who came to drink tea and eat sandesh and rosogollai. Or even to Boro-mama now that he had turned up, to make up for the son he had given away. Perhaps we thought some or all of this, and so we tried to hide when attention was brought to us.

  The office clerk came back into the room, and handed my mother the postcard on which she had sent my father a message. She unfolded it in her lap. At the bottom, in thick HB pencil, he had angrily written, ‘No. Under no circumstances,’ and his initials. Then he had evidently had a second thought, and written, ‘Send for me when your brother has gone,’ and initialled again.