Scenes From Early Life (23 page)

Some of these families who gave out such information, who directed the forces to particular houses during the war, went on living where they did after the war. Everyone knew who they were. They kept to themselves, and in after years, we children were not permitted to play with the children of such families.

In any case, perhaps the soldiers found their way to this house by chance. Perhaps they just heard something within, without paying for advice. A sound was coming from the house, a thin, high crying. It was a hungry baby. The soldiers knew that where there was a baby crying, there were young women. This was a rich area, but that meant nothing any more. The patrol hammered on the green gates of the house, and, when no response came, they got in their tank and drove directly at it. The white walls of the house fell inwards, into the garden.

‘What is it?’ the businessman was shouting, as he came out of his house – even then, he continued believing that he was living in the world he knew from a week ago. He did not see how things had changed, or he would not have come out shouting in outrage. The commander pushed him aside and went into the house. Five women – four young, one middle-aged, one nursing the baby that had been making the noise – were in what seemed to be the salon. They stood up as eight of the soldiers stamped into the house; the mother made a gesture as if to draw her daughters to her. But one daughter – a plump-faced, pretty girl in a silver-edged sari – broke away and ran out of the french windows into the garden. Where was she thinking of going? There was no escape there. And if there had been an escape, that would have been breaking the curfew, and they could have shot her. Three soldiers followed her out, easily overtaking her and throwing her down on the ground. There was no difficulty in holding her shoulders to the earth while another soldier forced her legs apart, raising her sari. A fist went over her mouth, and a terrible stifled yell was all the protest she could make.

In the house, there was a single shot. The women screamed, and went on screaming. In a few moments, the soldiers killed the other brother, too, with two shots, then a third, and then the father, in the same way. But they did not kill the women until they had raped all of them. One of them, as she was borne down by the terrible weight of the men, tried to grasp and steal the pistol in the captain’s holster. But her arms were held down, and she could not reach. The captain took out the pistol and waved it in her face, before hitting her hard on one side, then on the other, then again; there was the sound and the strange sensation, like wooden bricks moving about in a soft bag, of her jaw breaking under the blow. Then they raped her again.

They did not waste a bullet on the baby, but killed it with a knife they took from the kitchen. The howling child went the same way. Under the table, two manservants cowered, their hands over their heads, shaking, backwards and forwards, clutching at each other. What were the soldiery going to do with them? Nothing. They could spread the word. That was what would happen.

For ever afterwards, my family wondered how it was that Nana knew what the soldiers had done, and what they were capable of. From the start of the curfew, he was determined that not only should nobody step outside the house but that the house should seem to be empty. Nadira-aunty believed and said that there was no need for such precautions. She did not believe that the Pakistani Army would enter any house if there was no threat and the inhabitants were obeying the curfew faithfully.

‘That is how it is to be,’ Nana said quietly. ‘Nobody is to make any noise, or light a lamp. This house is to seem empty, without interest, vacated. You are not to draw attention to this house. When night falls, we sit in the dark or we go to bed.’

My grandfather would not share what he knew about what had happened in the businessman’s house, two streets away. There were many such stories in Dacca that day, and for weeks into the future. The rapes and murders of the businessman’s family was the one my grandfather knew about. The two manservants whom the soldiery had left cowering under the kitchen table had waited there, expecting their deaths, until the point where the platoon had driven away. They had emerged from their inadequate hiding place, slowly taking their hands off their heads. The curfew was still in force, and if they left the house and walked on the street, they would be shot. There was, however, a back way through the gardens of the houses that could take them to somewhere safe. They were, as it happens, friends or perhaps even relations of Rustum, my grandfather’s chauffeur, and they thought of going to him. They knew my grandfather was a powerful man; they might have known that he had had some dealings with the authorities, and they might have believed that he and his household were in some way protected from the worst of the events. They decided to make their way to my grandfather’s house. It would mean crossing two streets, out in the open. But only two. They could risk that. And there was no question of remaining in this house. The worst of the events lay, defiled, in the sitting room and the garden. There was only one way they could take, and they were obliged to start by going into the garden next door. For the two manservants, passing through those scenes was the worst thing either of them ever had to do.

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.