Scenes From Early Life (12 page)

The doctor greets Hosain, the lawyer. They live close to each other, and regularly take an afternoon walk around the lake in Dhanmondi. The doctor – capable, brief in conversation and intelligent – is in fact the man Hosain goes to for advice and help, even on family matters. He stands loose-limbed, his face defined by his small round glasses; he gleams like a health-conscious revolutionary.

‘I am glad to see you,’ Hosain says.

‘I thought I would see you here,’ the doctor says.

Then Hosain plunges straight in. ‘I am concerned about Pultoo,’ he says. ‘My youngest boy. He shows no aptitude for anything. He does not do well at his classes. All he does is draw, all day long. His teacher says he sits and dreams during mathematics, he gazes ahead without concentrating in all his other lessons, and if he seems to be working, he is really sketching something. He draws all the time. I do not know what to do with him.’

‘You say he has no aptitude for anything,’ the doctor says.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ the lawyer says.

‘But he draws all the time.’

‘Yes, he can’t be stopped – he draws in the notebook he is supposed to be working out sums in, during mathematics.’

‘Is he good at drawing?’ the doctor says.

‘Yes, I think so. He makes his classmates laugh by drawing them, and his teachers, and sometimes he draws the view from his classroom window. And he made a very good drawing of the gardener at home. Yes, I think he can draw.’

‘I don’t understand why you say he has no aptitude for anything,’ the doctor says. ‘It sounds as if he has an aptitude for art.’

‘Oh, for art,’ the lawyer says. ‘That is not a very useful aptitude.’

‘The world needs a good artist more than it needs an incompetent engineer,’ the doctor says.

‘I so agree,’ says Sufiya, passing. ‘Now, have you seen the art in the garden? I was so hoping that Zainul would come. He promised he would come early. I so wanted to show him some drawings of a young friend of mine, and Saeeda, my daughter, you know, she is painting so beautifully nowadays. I particularly wanted him to come early. It is really too bad.’

‘But there he is,’ the doctor says. He looks surprised. ‘There he is, talking to my brother’s daughter.’

‘Oh, that is too bad,’ Sufiya says again, but affectionately. ‘He always does that. He always sneaks in quietly, with no word of hello, and then finds a quiet corner. He really is too bad.’

You would never know that Zainul Abedin is who he is, if you saw him at a party. He arrives quietly, with nobody knowing; he finds a quiet corner, with nobody much in it, just an old friend. He would spend any gathering perfectly happily talking to small children or to somebody’s aunt, visiting from the country, talking about their concerns and small worries, listening about the failure of the crops or a pet chicken or a girl’s best friend, now her worst enemy. He listens with his full attention; sometimes only much later, years sometimes, does his new friend discover that this kindly gentleman, his fingers stained with paint and nicotine, was the great painter. Sometimes never; and once or twice Sufiya has found that her oldest friend Zainul Abedin has been to a party of hers, never said hello, sat on a stool in a dark corner, chatted to hardly anyone, and departed quietly, having had, he would tell her later, a very nice time.

He is sitting with a small girl, the niece of the doctor, in a party dress. Their full attention is on something Zainul Abedin is holding on his knee.

‘You see,’ he is saying, ‘I came on a bus today.’

She looks.

‘And this was my ticket,’ he says.

She looks at the small piece of paper he is holding on his knee.

‘And it has print on one side, but not so much on the other side,’ he says. ‘So here’s a pen, and here’s some paper’ – it is only one inch by two, the bus ticket, hardly that, even – ‘and the pen wants to draw something, but it doesn’t know what it wants to draw. What is it going to draw?’

The small girl looks at the pen, poised above the bus ticket resting on this gentleman’s knee, and says something into her fist, very shyly.

‘Is it going to draw Papa?’ the painter says. The girl nods, and quickly, with six, seven strokes, a scribble and some dabs, like the nib pecking at the paper, there he is; her father, a thin, serious fellow, leaning over to catch what his brother-in-law is saying, not at all aware that he has been caught for ever in this attitude on the back of a Dacca bus-ticket; his portrait, by Zainul Abedin, given to his daughter. The girl’s eyes grow wide – she reaches out with both hands. She recognizes her father in those few strokes. For a moment it had been just strokes of the pen, and then it was her father, all at once. ‘Do you want it?’ Zainul Abedin says. ‘You’re very welcome, but, just one moment.’ He waves the bus ticket around in the air, three times, to dry the ink. ‘And here you are.’

‘My dear old friend,’ Sufiya says. ‘Up to your old tricks again. Now,’ turning to the small girl, ‘let me get a little envelope for that. You must always keep that safe, you know. Have you been to see the drawings yet? And Saeeda would never ask herself, but she is painting so very interestingly these days, she would love to hear what you have to say.’

‘I was just about to get up to find her,’ Zainul Abedin says. ‘But she must be busy with your guests. I can come back tomorrow.’

Elsewhere in the party, Sultana has been waylaid by Mary, her friend.

‘So what happened?’ she says.

‘What do you mean?’ Sultana says.

‘You arrived at the university the other day in a large black car,’ Mary says. ‘I know it was Sheikh Mujib’s. How is it that he is turned into your chauffeur these days?’

‘He was not in the car,’ Sultana says. ‘He had got out earlier. All right, I’ll tell you. What happened was that I was late getting up, and it was almost a quarter to nine when I left the house. I had a class on Wordsworth at nine at the university, and you know what a stickler old Das is for punctuality. So I was really thinking about whether it would not be best to go back home and tell Professor Das that I had been ill when I next saw him – but then I thought about Ma, and how I could tell her that I had missed Das on poetry just because I slept late, and I saw that would not do either. So I was really on the horns of a dilemma when a car drew up alongside me, standing on the road like a hopeless case, and the window wound down, and it was Sheikh Mujib. He said, “You look a little late to me,” and I confessed that I was late, and that I had a class at the university. So he said, “I can easily give you a lift,” and I was so grateful, and I saw that it was really my only chance to get to university on time, that I accepted straight away. Never mind what Ma would say, I thought, when she heard that I was inconveniencing the Friend of Bengal. But it was much, much worse than I thought, because after five minutes of chatting about what I was up to, and whether I preferred Wordsworth to Keats, because Sheikh Mujib had read Keats when he was young, in Calcutta, and he was saying that, really, he thought there was no poetry in the world to touch the “Ode to the Nightingale”, and I was sticking up for the “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, because in my view—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Mary says. ‘But what was the inconvenience to the Friend of Bengal – the more than usual one?’

‘Well, after five minutes he said, “I am so sorry but I am going to have to leave you here – my driver will take you on to Curzon Hall, but you know, I must be punctual when I need to come here.” And it was at the courthouse he was being left. I felt such a fool because, of course, Pa and Ma were talking about Sheikh Mujib being prosecuted again, and having to go to the courthouse to answer an invented case the very next day. “They may send me to jail again, or they may not send me to jail,” he said to me, “but I know they will definitely send me to jail today if I don’t arrive on time, and call it contempt of court. I am so sorry, my young friend, to be so discourteous as to leave you here, but the driver will take you anywhere you want to go. Don’t be in a hurry, I may be here for some time.” And then he got out and there was a huge crowd to meet him, and I went on. All the faces were pressed up against the glass – they wanted to see who I was, and all of that. I don’t know what they thought.’

‘But they didn’t send him to jail,’ Mary said. ‘Pa was talking about it this morning, but Nadira and Dahlia were arguing about something else, and I don’t think I heard properly.’

‘No, he’s out on bail,’ Sultana said. ‘I am glad to see him here. He is so nice, really. And now Ma is going to read.’

Silence falls, and Sufiya stands, a piece of paper in her hand. She begins to speak.

‘“This is no time to be braiding your hair . . .”’

3.

Two days after her party, Sufiya receives some uninvited guests. They are two men. Not the two men who were seen loitering at her gates, staring insolently at her guests. But they may be assumed to have some connection with those men – perhaps their supervisors, their superiors. And these visitors have superiors, too. They come from a world where everyone has underlings and everyone has superiors, and they cannot conceive of any other existence.

Sufiya asks them in, perhaps unnecessarily. They refuse tea, and any other offering, and it is true that by the end of their conversation Sufiya would happily have slipped poison into any cup of tea she would offer them. Is it the case that she organized a gathering of individuals opposed to the government two days ago? No, it was a small meeting of friends, come together to drink tea and to listen to a little music. Nevertheless, among those attending were – one of the men, a moustachioed person with an unnerving, practised, direct gaze, extracts a clean typed sheet of names from his black leather briefcase – were well-known leaders of opposition and dissent. Who did they have in mind? The man begins to read out the names: he concludes with Sheikh Mujib’s. An old friend, Sufiya says. She is aware that her daughter Sultana has come downstairs and is standing discreetly in the door of the salon, listening. She wishes she would go away: she does not want these men from the security service to recognize either of her daughters at any point in the future.

Is it the case, the other man says, clipped and neat-looking in his blue blazer and English tie, that among the topics discussed at this gathering was the founding of a dissident cultural institute? Sufiya cannot think what they are talking about, and says so. The man goes into more detail, and soon she realizes that they are referring to the room that the university is making available to any practitioners of Bengali arts. She sets her face. The men at the gate did not hear that conversation. She wonders who it was who overheard it and, for a shameful moment, her mind settles on Mona, Salim’s Bihari wife. She dismisses the thought.

‘Do you know it is forbidden to hold gatherings of more than twelve people without permission?’ one of the men says. This may or may not be true, but is certainly one of the laws that would be applied only if the authorities wanted to stop a gathering taking place for other reasons. She does not believe that when the daughters of government ministers get married, official permission for the reception is applied for, or would ever be withheld. All the same, she acknowledges the statement, and after a few minutes, the two men run out of things to threaten her with. They stand to go. Sultana whisks herself off, out of the doorway and into the kitchen, where she cannot be seen. ‘I am sorry I cannot be of more help to you,’ Sufiya says sweetly, as she shows them to the door. She invited them in, after all, and they are, in some sense, guests of hers. They have the grace to look a little embarrassed at that. She shuts the door behind them, wanting to break a vase over their silly heads, and breathes deeply. Sultana comes out from the kitchen and, behind her, Hamida, the cook, both with deeply concerned expressions. No one says anything.

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.

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.