Scenes From Early Life (16 page)

‘Simply perfect,’ Dahlia echoed.

Nadira turned round from the harmonium, breaking off her song. ‘But very pale. Look how pale Sharmin is, even sitting next to Era.’

‘Yes, she’s sitting next to me, and still looks pale, it’s true,’ Era said complacently. ‘Until Sharmin came, I really was the palest of everyone. It must be so strange, everyone in West Pakistan being so pale, even paler than I am.’

‘And Laddu has always been dark,’ Mary said. ‘Mama thought he was a monster when he was born, she told me once.’

‘But he’s very handsome now,’ Mira said.

Era patted Sharmin’s arm encouragingly. ‘Even if he is dark. No one thought he was a monster.’

‘But, Mira,’ Dahlia said, ‘you weren’t there at the time. How could you possibly know?’

‘Yes, they will have such dark little babies,’ Nadira said. ‘They will take after Laddu, I am sure of it. Such dear, dear, black little babies.’

‘That’s enough,’ Mary said, looking up; she pulled the thread tight, held it up to her teeth, and bit to sever it. ‘Sharmin, don’t listen to them. They are all very silly and rude.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ Sharmin said. ‘And it may well be true – Laddu is dark, and we say, you know, that the first baby takes after its father, and if it is a boy, it takes still more after its father. So the baby is bound to be dark, poor little thing. Dark babies are always full of energy, and I know this one will be – I can feel him kicking me all the time.’

‘Doesn’t that feel strange?’ Dahlia said. ‘A little stranger kicking you from the inside?’

‘We can kick you from the outside, if you want to know what it feels like,’ Nadira said. ‘There is no problem whatsoever about that.’

5.

My father stayed in Rankin Street until my brother Zahid was born. He was born upstairs, in my grandparents’ bedroom. My aunts sat downstairs in a line, handing cups of tea and biscuits to my father, who was quite calm. He was always quite calm. My mother’s sisters reacted in different ways to the noises coming from upstairs, the hurrying up and down of the midwife and the house servants.

‘I remember when you were born, Dahlia,’ Era said. ‘You were so quick arriving, the doctors had hardly got here when there you were, crying.’

‘But Pultoo – what an age he took!’ Mary said. Pultoo, who was five, had been hustled away for the day with his father, taken to the law chambers to sit in a corner and play quietly with pen nibs and paper. He could always be distracted in this way: and it was thought it was not good for small boys to overhear the noises of childbirth. Whether because it would distress and frighten them, or because they would prove themselves nuisances, I do not know. But Pultoo reached his teenage years, as I did and my brother too, believing that babies were what happened after you were taken as a great treat to Nani’s law chambers, playing all afternoon with stationery, inkwells and the junior clerks. With five married sisters and a sister-in-law by the time Pultoo was in his teenage years, the day-at-Papa’s followed by a return home to find a new tight-swaddled and squashed-face niece-or-nephew became a regular, sometimes twice-annual event, like a festival.

‘Pultoo surprised Mama, even,’ Era said. ‘She said she grew bored with waiting for him.’

‘But it was so cold,’ Nadira said. ‘It was December, and we were all sitting over the fire in sweaters and coats, remember? Papa said he had never known it so cold. Pultoo was nice and warm, and he didn’t want to come out.’

All her sisters hid their laughter behind their hands. ‘Don’t talk such nonsense,’ Mary said, on account of my father. But my father paid no attention to anything his sisters-in-law said on any occasion, and he just passed his cup to Mary, who poured him another cup of tea.

‘What are you going to do, Mahmood, after the baby is born?’ Nadira said.

‘Well, I shall be the baby’s father, I suppose,’ my father said. ‘But that is not a full-time occupation. I expect I shall go on doing just what I have been doing, but with the addition of a small extra person.’

‘What did you mean?’ Mira asked Nadira.

‘I meant whether he and Shiri and the dear little baby are going to stay in Dacca,’ Nadira said. ‘I so want to see the dear little baby every day.’

‘You can see dear little baby Bubbly every day,’ Mira said. ‘And you never seem all that interested in her.’

‘Oh, baby Bubbly,’ Nadira said. ‘Bubbly is getting old and fat and argumentative. One of these days, she is going to go to school, you mark my words. She’s no fun at all.’

‘Well, there’s Sharmin’s baby,’ Mira said. ‘We go to see pretty little Ejaj once a week. Won’t he do?’

‘Laddu’s child,’ Nadira said, superfluously. ‘I don’t count that the same at all.’

‘Can I help you to anything, Mahmood?’ Mary said.

‘I would like some rosogollai, please,’ my father said, and my aunt passed him the plate.

‘Did Shiri ever succeed in finding a replacement cook, after you had to get rid of the old one?’ Mary said. She set the plate down on the yellow teak table and, with a symmetrical gesture of her two forefingers, smoothed the two black wings of her hair behind her large, pointed, elfin ears.

‘Well, she was obliged to take on a boy as a temporary replacement,’ my father said, continuing very equably with social conversation while his younger sisters-in-law tried to settle his future. ‘You see, when they heard that we were returning to Dacca for four months shortly—’

‘But I just don’t see,’ Nadira said, ‘why Shiri and Mahmood can’t return to Dacca, now that they are going to have a baby.’

‘Well, people don’t stop having babies simply because they have to live in Barisal,’ Era said. ‘And that is where Mahmood’s job is. He has to be there.’

‘But I want them to come back,’ Nadira said. ‘I want to see the dear little baby every day. Mahmood, can’t you leave Shiri here? I’m sure it’s bad for her to travel with a baby.’

‘Travel with a baby?’ Era said, alarmed.

‘What is that noise?’ Mary said, and it was true: the quality of the noise from upstairs had changed. At the foot of the stairs, a woman stood, smiling: it was the midwife, and though she saw this every day, hundreds of times a year, she had not forgotten that this might be the most important day of the family’s lives. And my father’s composure now proved itself as thin as a wafer, because he rose with a look of transcendence and anxiety on his face. The midwife said that he had a son: she asked him to come upstairs to his wife and child.

‘Is that the baby?’ Nadira said. ‘Has he really come? Am I an aunt now?’

6.

A week after my brother Zahid was born, my father went back to Barisal. My grandfather in person went down with him to the Dacca port at Sadarghat, where the tottering white four-storeyed launches to Barisal and other river towns departed. This was not a common thing to happen. My grandfather left his daughter and baby grandson at home and ceremonially escorted Mahmood to the port. There was something in his behaviour that expressed some retrospective dissatisfaction with his first grandson, Laddu’s child. But my grandfather was always the sort of person who would enjoy the children of his daughters more. And Laddu had married a woman from West Pakistan in secret, even though the child was born when they had been admitted once more to the family. In time my grandfather would be reconciled to Laddu and Sharmin and their children, and would actually take their youngest son, Shibli, into his house to be raised entirely by himself and Nani. But for the moment, Nana would not have walked Laddu to the end of the road to get a rickshaw. There was a grand and beneficent quality about his taking my father to the Barisal launch on this occasion. It was something to do with the new baby Zahid, sucking contentedly in the warmth of his grandfather’s house in Rankin Street, turning his face with interest to the light falling through the mango leaves, or just idly basking with cross-faced assurance in the constant love, curiosity and excitement of his six aunts. The six aunts, particularly the smaller ones, were constantly waking him up from sleep to try to make him give them a smile and a kiss at this time of his life. They wanted him to confirm their belief that he was very dark and very clever, which Zahid did by blowing a bubble on his own and giving them a stern look at being woken up.

The aunts and my grandmother and mother assumed that Nana’s surprising offer meant that he had something he needed to say to my father, perhaps shortly before saying goodbye to him. This was my grandfather’s way on occasion: to give out a firm instruction to someone when he knew they would not have time to think anything over and respond to it. If this was so, no one knew what Nana said to Mahmood, in the cool high back of the Morris Oxford he drove at the time. I can see my father’s face between the arches on the ferry’s upper deck, thoughtful to the point of puzzlement; I can see Nana, the best-dressed man on the quay in his white shirt and charcoal-grey suit, giving a single confident wave upwards and turning back between earth-scented bales of jute and tea, walking through the noise of the crowd. There he goes; stepping among the squashed fruit of the market at the gates of the old pink waterfront palace, past the line of hole-in-the-wall barbers’ shops, the paper-bag manufacturers with their antique scales, the small engine shops that so frightened me as a child with their glimpse into a world of black oil and obscured metal intricacies. He walks among noise and filth, ignoring the blandishments of the rickshaw-wallahs with the unimpeded step of someone who knows he has given clear and easy instructions.

If there were, in fact, any instructions, nobody knew. But in three months, when Zahid was smiling, my mother broke her sisters’ hearts by following her husband back to Barisal. There was no unwillingness in her departure, though everyone had heard her complaints about the place. It became clear that my grandfather had extracted a promise from Mahmood to come back to Dacca within the year, with their baby.

That is what happened, but when they came back, the excitement of my aunts over Zahid had subsided. And soon they themselves began to marry; and Boro-mama’s wife Sharmin had another child; and the children of aunts began to be born; and sons-in-law started to move in, because Nani liked to have her daughters about her, and even the daughters who had their own houses tended to come back for dinner and weekends; and soon Nana began to complain that the house in Rankin Street was no longer big enough.

By that time my mother and father had returned to Dacca; my mother was pregnant again with my elder sister. Perhaps under instruction from my grandfather, my father had given up working for the government service. He had, instead, started to study to be a lawyer, which was the profession he held for the rest of his life. My grandfather took him under his wing, as the saying goes. He introduced him to his colleagues and friends, to people like Mr Khandekar-nana and the rest; he found him a set of chambers and passed on clients to my father, shaking his head when Father took on pro bono work; he gave him useful professional advice, which my father took with a good grace. And soon my father’s name began to be known, and my mother no longer had to live in Barisal, but lived among the people she had always known and within walking distance of her sisters. My mother was very happy about this.

About one thing my father was absolutely firm. He would not live at my grandfather’s house in Rankin Street, but would live in his own house.

‘Mahmood is so stubborn,’ Nana would say. ‘Here is this great house, with plenty of room for everyone.’

There was a shuffling around the room, because quite often, Nana would comment in exactly the opposite way, on how crowded the house was, how impossible it was to live or do any work in it. My mother and father had heard him say this many times, and for this reason my father had insisted on finding a house of his own, in Elephant Road.

The house in Elephant Road counted for my mother as her first proper home. It was the house in which both her daughters were born. It was a two-storey house of the British time, brick-built and with a small garden in front, a larger garden to the back. My parents lived on the upper floor. The house belonged to a friend of my father, who lived with his family on the ground floor. When the upper floor of the house was offered to my parents, they were very happy to take the opportunity. My father’s friend was, like him, a lawyer, from quite a distinguished family. His brother, for instance, was a senior officer in the Pakistan Air Force, one of a surprising number of Bengalis who at that time served in the forces, run from Karachi. Afterwards, his loyalty came to be tested.

The services were inconveniently separate from the rest of the house, so that food was always arriving cold or sometimes rained-on. Nobody had replaced the windows since the British had built it, and the small opaque window in the bathroom was stuck in a half-open position. Somebody had opened it and left it in a half-open position all through the monsoon so the wood had swollen and it could not be forced back into a closed position. There was a terrible problem with bedbugs, and only the neighbours on one side could be spoken to at all. Still, my mother and my father loved the house, because it was theirs. Only years later, when they had moved out, did they ever speak about it in a critical way.

Almost immediately after my mother and father moved to Elephant Road, Nana and Nani moved, as if to prove a point, to the house in Dhanmondi where they lived for the rest of their lives. That was the house I remembered them in; the house close to Nana’s friend Khandekar-nana, the house with the tamarind tree at the front and the mango tree at the back. It was a much larger house than Rankin Street, and I think Nana could not believe that my parents would go on living in their single-storey house in Elephant Road when they could have a couple of rooms in his courtyard house. But he was mistaken. They went on living in Elephant Road. Nana and Nani, and most of the aunts and Pultoo-mama moved to Dhanmondi, where they were all extremely happy, but my mother and father were much happier to be allowed to go on living in the house in Elephant Road, with bedbugs and the bathroom window that would never close properly.