The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  The seven of them were out of the building, finally, and in the hot blaze of Dhaka. They would need two taxis, and Tinku and Bina took Aisha with them so that the twins would have one parent each to entertain them. It was needed, because after half an hour, the traffic, which had been heavy and slow, came to a complete halt. The air was thick with black smoke from exhaust fumes; Sharif shut the window against a BRTC bus – battered, its side flaking patches of paint and showing whole stretches of rust – whose exhaust fumes were being directed into the car.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Sharif said.

  ‘Perhaps an accident, brother,’ the driver said. ‘Always an accident, the traffic stops. And then the other days, if there is a hartal, you daren’t go out, you lose a day. The strike, the big strike. The hartals! Where have you been? They hold the city to ransom. Every week, twice a week. And the other days an accident stops the city. Look at this.’

  ‘What can we do?’ Sharif said.

  The driver spread his hands in a gesture meaning ‘nothing’. It was so hot, there in the back of the car. Raja was raising and lowering his whole arm to his face, theatrically, letting himself tense, then flop down again. His twin was showing interest and in a moment, Sharif knew, would start to imitate him. By the side of the road there was a large sign, it was –

  ‘That sign, it’s in Bengali. What’s happened?’

  ‘What else should it be in?’ Nazia said.

  ‘The signs – they were all in English,’ Sharif said. ‘Weren’t they?’

  The car was stationary. Somewhere, probably only twenty yards ahead, was the car with Tinku and Bina and Aisha. The heat inside the car was immense, and the smell of the traffic fumes choking.

  ‘Omith wants to go to the toilet, Mummy,’ Raja said.

  ‘Omith wants to be a very good boy, and sit and wait for a very short time,’ Nazia said, with evident exasperation. ‘I wish he wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘What? Mussolini?’

  ‘He just says something that his satrap is supposed to want, and then before you know it, the satrap’s taken it on board and he confirms the statement.’

  ‘I want to go to the toilet, Mummy,’ Omith said.

  ‘As if on cue,’ Sharif said. ‘But there are strange mystical facts about sets of twins, you know. Who is to say that the satrap’s desire to micturate could not have conveyed itself through telepathy to the mind genetically nearest?’

  ‘I want to go to the toilet, Mummy,’ Omith said.

  ‘I’m really not in the mood for this,’ Nazia said. ‘It’s not even funny any more – there are just orders in the form of suggestion and then the satrap obeys. A distraction is called for. Look, Omith, look, Raja – I spy with my little eye something beginning with C.’

  ‘Car,’ Raja said. ‘I want to go to the toilet, Mummy.’

  ‘Your turn, Omith,’ Sharif said. ‘Look, we’re moving!’

  The driver started the car; took the handbrake off with a crunching groan; drove forwards eighteen inches; stopped again. He turned the engine off.

  ‘It’s your turn, Omith,’ Sharif said commandingly.

  ‘I spy,’ Omith said. ‘I spy … I don’t know.’ Raja turned to look at his twin, leant over and whispered something to him. ‘I spy something beginning with L.’

  ‘Lorry!’ Raja said immediately.

  ‘That doesn’t count,’ Nazia said. She had always, as long as anyone could remember, been a great one for fairness, the one given the task of dividing a dish into fourteen.

  ‘This is bad,’ the driver announced. ‘When an accident like this happens, it could stop us here all afternoon.’

  ‘What are the police doing?’ Nazia said.

  ‘The police,’ the driver said neutrally, dismissing the comment.

  ‘Mummy, I want to go to the toilet,’ Omith said.

  ‘He really does,’ Raja said.

  ‘You can’t go now,’ Nazia said sharply. ‘You’ll just have to wait.’

  And all around them was the country that had started them off. Sharif tried not to look at it in any particular way. The old beggar making his way between the stationary cars, a filthy white rag round his head, bent over his stick, his arms thin as biros, his bloodshot eyes weary with their asks being refused; the rust on the side of the bus in great patches; the thick stench of petrol fumes clogging the air; the new signs in Bengali by the side of the road that had somehow already sustained dents in the metal and smears in the painted letters. This was a new country, Sharif told himself, and things would not go right immediately. He had looked at things like that for many years and had found nothing so very wrong in them. His eyes were trained by the neat streets of Hillsborough and Lodge Moor and by the clean surroundings of Sheffield University’s faculty of engineering. They were places where people would stare if you scrunched up a piece of paper and dropped it. Once, he had seen a lady walking her dog pause behind it, drop to her knees and scoop up what must be a log of excrement in a plastic bag, to carry away, rather than soil the public environment. And the English did not think of Sheffield as a beautiful city, either.

  ‘If the boys want to wee,’ he said, ‘I don’t see why they shouldn’t get out to wee. The traffic isn’t going anywhere. No one is going to care.’

  ‘I don’t want to wee,’ Raja said. ‘It’s Omith who wants to wee.’

  ‘You can do your very best to wee if your brother’s going to,’ Sharif said judiciously. ‘We aren’t going to stop more than once. This is your one opportunity.’ He explained to the driver.

  ‘They mustn’t go against the side of my taxi,’ the driver said.

  ‘Of course not,’ Sharif said, and then, performing a fine degree of contempt for the country he had come from, he took first the Herr Kommandant outside to piss, and then the Rural Proletarian. The Kommandant wanted to piss after all. There was a hole in the road, just there, that would do to piss in, so nobody’s paintwork was affected. Above them, the passengers on the BRTC bus behind the open grille looked down with interest at the little group. For a moment Sharif thought he might piss, too, to give them some more entertainment. From the moment they could talk, the boys had been referred to by him and Nazia after their roles, Raja to command and Omith to obey, and the names changed daily: Caesar, Mussolini, Bose the Great, Mrs Thatcher, Colonel Reginald Dyer, the Last Viceroy of India, the Managing Director, the Zamindar with the Whip: the Unknown Soldier, the Rani of Jhansi, the Urban (or Rural) Proletarian, the Prussian Army, Poor Winston Smith and the Backbench Rebellion. One day they would catch on, and their vocabularies and points of reference, Nazia observed, would be colossal. In the meantime they could be talked about without their recognizing what was happening. It took something like three hours to clear the blockage and arrive at the house in Dhanmondi – a rate of about two miles an hour. What the accident was that had stopped them like that, they never discovered.

  8.

  Bina and Tinku and Aisha were standing outside the house. They had clearly just dismissed the driver, and their suitcases were being dealt with by the houseboy and the security guard. The house had a dozen loudspeakers on its roof at least, a pair of silver metallic lilies at each corner, and from them a crackling voice was trumpeting in Arabic. Something from the Koran. Sharif had not been to the mosque in years, but he recognized the holy scriptures when he heard them.

  ‘This isn’t Dolly,’ Bina said. ‘Dolly wouldn’t put up loudspeakers that you can hear four streets away.’

  ‘At Daddy’s funeral,’ Sharif said, ‘we just had two boys from the mosque reading in the grandmothers’ room with the door open. You could go and listen if you wanted to. That was very nice.’

  ‘That was lovely,’ Nazia said. ‘Who’s done this?’

  ‘Mummy would never …’ Bina was saying, and Tinku was encouraging her not to go on. It was a funeral, after all. They had turned up from England and would not start complaining about the arrangements. But Sharif knew, with some dread, who it was who had made these arrangemen
ts, had ordered a dozen loudspeakers to chant the scriptures from the roof. Those people had, like him, just landed from London before taking the arrangements away from poor Dolly, insisting that what Mother would have wanted was to amplify the Koran all over Dhanmondi for three days. And now his intuition was confirmed because through the gates came a plump, prosperous-looking Mahfouz: older, greyer, fatter, and with false teeth glittering like confident lies, his mouth spit-wet shining out of a full long grizzled beard. His arms were spread wide as if to embark on an embrace. Behind him was what must be Sadia, but her head covered, only her face emerging from the tight-wrapped scarf. She was pale, thin and very old-looking, as if she had not eaten properly for many years. She stood back, her eyes lowered. Bina and Tinku, then Sharif submitted to the embrace. He approached Nazia. She bundled the children behind her, and something in her eye kept Mahfouz’s embrace very short.

  ‘Dear brothers, sisters,’ Mahfouz said. He had a smoker’s voice, croaky and breaking, though he and his beard did not smell like a smoker. ‘How good to see you, though – you will want to change as soon as possible, of course.’

  ‘Where is Dolly?’ Nazia said, ignoring the reproach that they had not travelled in white. ‘I want to see Dolly.’

  ‘She is inside,’ Mahfouz said, but addressing his comment to Sharif. ‘Dolly and I – we have already been talking about her future. There is so much to settle.’ But there was Dolly, just coming out in her plain white sari, her arms held high for her brother and sister. It had been ten years since Sharif and Nazia had seen her, and she was now twenty. They embraced quickly, and with Nazia holding her in grateful affection, they went inside for the children to meet her. Above, the loudspeakers spoke of gardens in a harsh, syrupy, cracked, Chittagong voice, the voice that Mahfouz had hired for this particular afternoon.

  ‘They turned up yesterday,’ Dolly said, in an urgent whisper, to Nazia. They had found a quiet corner of the familiar sitting room, unchanged for twenty years, apart from the touching little detail that Mother had framed the photograph of the twins that Nazia had sent last year and added it to the collection on the sideboard, in pride of place next to the photograph of Rafiq. Mahfouz had made himself scarce, not trusting things to go beyond a regretful greeting and a performance of loving kindness. Sadia, however, was still in the kitchen, making demands. ‘Samu said that I must inform Sadia at least. Mother was still going every week to the ministry to ask what the news of Rafiq’s story was. Mother would never have agreed to have Sadia’s husband in the house again. But Samu said, quite rightly, that he and she had been informed when Father died, and they had not responded and they did not come. So this time I thought there was no harm in it. But they arrived and straight away …’

  Dolly gestured upwards at the noise of amplified prayer.

  ‘Straight away Mahfouz has been talking to me about what I should do. He said within ten minutes of stepping into the house that he knows a very nice man in England who would make a very good husband for me.’

  ‘Oh, Dolly,’ Nazia said. ‘I don’t want to think of Mahfouz’s idea of a good husband for you.’

  ‘He said he was a little older than me, but that he had a good business, that his family was well respected, that they came from Sylhet but were decent people, very religious – Nazia, don’t let me marry someone like that.’

  ‘There is no question,’ Nazia said. ‘You will not have to marry anyone Mahfouz chooses for you.’

  ‘I think it was a dry-cleaning business, what they call a launderette, that this man owns. I haven’t seen Mahfouz since I was eight years old. I don’t want his choice.’

  ‘Has Samir been helpful? Samir – he’s the Khondkar son who informed us, isn’t he?’

  Dolly brightened. ‘Oh, so helpful – he is so kind. I didn’t know if you would remember him, he was so little when you went. Well, no littler than I was, but still.’

  ‘I remember Khondkar-nana’s fat little son. Is he still so fat?’

  ‘No, no,’ Dolly said. ‘Samu was never so very fat and he certainly isn’t fat now. When it happened I ran out of the house, not knowing where I should go or who I should speak to. Ghafur came after me, saying, “Madam, madam” – he could not endure that I should run in the street looking for people. He sent his boy to the Khondkars’, and Samu was at home. I do not know what I would have done without him.’

  ‘Dolly-aunty,’ Aisha said. She had been sitting with the twins but now wandered over in her brilliant white mourning sari to listen. ‘When did Nani die? When exactly?’

  ‘Aisha, please,’ Nazia said. ‘This is not an adventure from Feluda for you to interrogate poor kind Dolly-aunty.’

  ‘It’s important, Mummy,’ Aisha said. ‘When was it?’

  ‘Well, it was in the morning,’ Dolly said. ‘Aisha-darling-child, you can ask your Dolly-aunty anything you like. I am so happy to see you again. It would have been two days ago now. It must have been about half past nine, certainly after breakfast. There was a sound from downstairs – a noise Mummy was making without meaning to. And I came down without delay, but she was gone, just like that. Quickly, like when Daddy went.’

  ‘Just like Daddy,’ Nazia said, dazed with mystery.

  ‘She had keeled over on the sofa. It was so fast. I can’t even remember the last thing I said to poor Mummy. It was probably something like “I wish Ghafur would learn how to make toast properly,” because, you know, he still has such a habit of burning it and not even scraping it afterwards. When I saw her like that I thought for a moment she was looking for something down the back of the sofa.’

  Aisha had been working something out. ‘Is that – that would have been half past three in the morning in England? Is that right? Mummy?’

  Nazia batted away the irrelevant question. It was not like Aisha to be so inconsiderate.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Nazia said. ‘Where will you live while you finish your degree?’

  ‘Oh, the degree,’ Dolly said. ‘I haven’t been to the university for weeks. It’s been closed down, temporarily, and it will soon be back to normal, or so they say.’

  ‘Dolly, that can’t be right,’ Nazia said. ‘What are you going to do? Where will you live?’

  ‘I thought perhaps I could go on living here,’ Dolly said bravely. ‘I don’t need to keep on all the servants, perhaps just Ghafur.’

  ‘Oh, Dolly,’ Nazia said. ‘Sister.’

  ‘I don’t know what the alternative is, unless I marry the man Mahfouz has in mind for me. Look, we need to greet people.’

  Some people had come through the door; a married pair, as young as Nazia and Sharif. Dolly said it was Mummy’s dentist – her new dentist, not old Raychaudhuri, a nice man. Sadia emerged to greet them, and after a moment’s hesitation Nazia and Dolly went forward, encouraging Aisha to come with them. The dentist had heard about it, and wanted to say what a very charming and elegant lady she had been, what a sad loss it was. In a while they were offered tea and sweets and other things, and they stayed for half an hour. By that time there were other people – the Khondkars, with Samir, a brother of Mahfouz and his wife, a poet Mother had known and liked, and others. All this time Sharif was tensely aware of his sister Sadia. She had not gone when her husband had gone. She was decisively talking to those who had come to pay their respects, looking them levelly in the eye. She had not come when Mother died. Now things had changed in this country, and she and her husband felt they could come back, and talk. She looked very ill. He watched her as he talked to a retired civil servant, a keen amateur of folk art, whom Mother had always liked to see on her lakeside walks.

  After an hour he went outside onto the veranda at the back of the house. The noise out there was tremendous. There were six men, he had established, in the upper rooms, taking turns with the verses from the Koran, and their devout utterances were being amplified from every corner of the house by the pairs of silver trumpets. He waited. In two minutes, the back door was opened: Ghafur, cowed, stood there holding
the door in a servile way; Sadia sailed through in her brilliant white headscarf.

  ‘Brother,’ she said. ‘How was your journey?’

  Sharif bowed his head.

  ‘Your boys are so charming,’ Sadia said. ‘And Aisha, so grown-up. We have two children now, you know. They are so clever and hardworking, I am sure they will do well.’

  ‘You must be very proud of them,’ Sharif said dismissively, rattling it off.

  ‘And I am told you don’t live in Dhaka any more,’ Sadia said. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘We left the country nearly ten years ago,’ Sharif said. ‘We live in England now, like you.’

  ‘We must –’ Sadia said, but Sharif looked at her directly. He made his eyes go blank as paint. He could feel them freezing over as if they were looking at nothing, at a blank white wall. Within the house there was a clashing of dishes in the kitchen, the sound of cutlery being washed. No food was to be cooked, but neighbours had brought round dishes, and Ghafur and the other boys were serving the contents to the guests, as discreetly as possible.

  ‘I must go in,’ Sharif said.

  ‘Brother,’ Sadia said. She gathered: she came to the point. ‘We are only here for four days, then we must return to England. There is a matter we must discuss while we are here. I am sorry to bring it up directly.’

  ‘Go on,’ Sharif said.

  ‘It is the estate,’ Sadia said. ‘How is it to be divided?’