Scenes From Early Life (24 page)

‘Shiri!’ my grandmother called. ‘Shiri, wake up and pay attention. Your baby is crying.’

‘Shall I take him?’ Mira said. ‘Shall I take dear little Saadi? He is only a little bit cross, and perhaps he could be hungry, too. He has been so good.’

‘No,’ my grandmother said. ‘Shiri, you must take care of him. Get up and make an effort, now – this is not like you at all.’

‘She thinks Mahmood will be caught out in the streets when the curfew falls,’ Era said, in a low voice.

‘How could he?’ Sharmin said. ‘Causing everyone such worry like this.’

‘Causing everyone such worry – oh, that is so much like Mahmood,’ Era said. ‘He would never consider what other people are thinking about, or worrying over. He just does what he thinks is the right thing to do.’

‘A very annoying trait in a person,’ Sharmin said, keeping her voice down.

‘What is that noise?’ said one of the great-grandmothers, awakening like me from her sleep.

‘Poor little Saadi,’ my grandmother said. She got up from her chair, shuffled and cast her shawl over her shoulder, and went over to my basket. She picked me up; with a baby’s instinct for the unexpected, I began to cry with new force. Finally, my mother roused herself; she sat up, uncovered her face, and took me from her mother. Soon, as if through the repetition of routine alone, I had quietened down, and was feeding contentedly.

‘What was that noise?’ Nana said. He had come through from his study at the front of the house. Even in the current state of overcrowding, it was understood that he must have his own undisturbed space. His daughters and grandchildren and mothers and cousins might colonize the rest of the house, invading even the servants’ annexe, resting the whole day in the salon, finding corners in which to pass the time with small-scale near-silent activities like paan-grinding, embroidery, sock-darning, pickle-bottling and the like. But Nana must have his retreat in his depleted library, and when he came out, the daughters and the little awestruck cousins busied themselves, knowing that something must have disturbed him.

‘It is dear little Saadi,’ Nani said. ‘He was just hungry and woke up. Poor little thing, he can’t tell us that he wants something other than by crying. But he’s quite all right now.’

‘Can’t he be kept quiet with the other children?’ Nana said.

‘Mary can’t keep him quiet with
The Snow Queen
,’ Shiri said. Her face was red with weeping; she did not turn to her father when she spoke, but kept herself hunched over the baby. ‘The other children will listen to stories or play games, but he’s too little to understand any of that. Poor little mite.’

‘Poor little mite,’ said Era.

‘He must keep quiet,’ Nana said. ‘We mustn’t be heard from the street by anyone who passes.’ His eyes went round the room, to his seven daughters, one upstairs, to his daughter-in-law and three female cousins; perhaps he thought, too, a dreadful thought, of a tableau; his wife and mothers and perhaps even the grand-daughters, too. The mind shrank from it. I was the youngest child in the house, and the only child of an age to cry incontinently, who could not understand what the situation was. My wails could be heard in the street, when I cried, and to the passing soldiery, it would be like the display of a rebel flag, a reason for forcing an entry.

‘Poor little Saadi,’ Mira said. ‘He can’t be expected to understand what’s happening. We can’t tell him not to cry, he wouldn’t listen.’

‘That’s so,’ my grandfather said, considering. His lawyer’s logical brain went through various considerations. ‘He must never be left alone, that’s all. Carry him about with you – not just his mother, but the rest of you girls, too, take turns. If he wants to sleep, put him down but don’t leave him. And have cake to hand at all times. If it begins to look as if he might be thinking of crying – beginning to look like that, no more – then distract him, feed him, interest him, jiggle him. He mustn’t cry. Give him cake and mishti doi. Babies like that. He must be allowed to eat whatever he likes.’

And that is how I was allowed to eat whatever I liked, without any restraint at all. There was no shortage of mishti doi, it being made in the kitchen rather than bought in from confectioners. From that moment onwards, my aunts took turns looking after me. I grew popular with them because a baby cared for at every minute, whose every need is anticipated and fulfilled before he has even begun to express it, is a placid and cheerful baby, as well as a very fat one. My aunts said they loved my chubby face; they loved my cheerful demeanour. They passed me from one to another with some regret, looking forward to their next turn looking after Saadi. Anyone who came into the house would have seen me being cradled in an aunt’s elbow as she crooned to me – Era, Sharmin, Mary, Nadira, Mira, Dahlia, even Bubbly, though she was no more than thirteen and, I was told in later years, not very good at it.

On the table or the armrest of a chair by them was a terracotta pot of mishti doi, a teaspoon stuck in it, and from time to time, not interrupting her burble of conversation or under-the-breath song, the aunt of the moment would lean forward, dig into the pot and bring another half-teaspoon to my little wrinkled mouth. In the whole of that time, I hardly had the opportunity to cry. No sooner, day or night, had my face begun to move inwards and my brow to furrow than an aunt moved in and embarked on a well-established routine of Saadi-distracting, involving the pulling of funny faces, jogging up and down, a favourite knitted rabbit, tickling on the tummy (mine) and the regular administration of half-teaspoons of mishti doi.

It is a sign of how desperate and serious those months of 1971 were that the other children in the house had no resentment or complaint against this exceptional treatment of a baby. They never produced, as far as I can discover, that universal childhood complaint, ‘It isn’t fair,’ when they saw the constant watching and concern that I was attracting. They knew that it wasn’t fair, none of it, even the very smallest of them. I slept contentedly, in an atmosphere of love, from the March curfew until the day in December that Bangla Desh was liberated, and I did not cry. The house in Dhanmondi was as quiet as a tomb, and no soldier was drawn by his curiosity in a baby crying to force the gates and enter.

But this is to move ahead in the story.

9.

‘What is that?’ my mother said.

‘What is what?’ Nadira said.

‘That sound,’ my mother said. They all listened. In the city, far away, a noise like a howl was rising. It was what they had all been dreading. Two days before, nobody had known what the sound had meant. It was a siren, driven about the streets of the old city, of Sadarghat, Gulistan, Dhanmondi, Mohakhali and the other parts of the city, in warning; it signified, a radio announcement had made clear, the beginning of a curfew. Now it was one o’clock, and the sirens were sounding. There had still been no word from my father. He was out there in the city somewhere. Nobody had the heart to tell my mother that he must have returned, in safety, to the house in Elephant Road – that her husband was a sensible man who would not risk his life in this way.

‘Put the radio on,’ Era said, and Nadira hastened to do so. The new audio cabinet, a stylish model in teak, included a radio. These days, it was kept permanently tuned to Radio Calcutta, which could be trusted.

The news ran through the events in Dacca and in the rest of the country. Universities had been burnt; intellectuals rounded up. There was no news of Sheikh Mujib. There were international condemnations. The curfew had been imposed and had been lifted for five hours during the day before being put in place again. Finally, the radio news regretted to announce the death of Begum Sufiya Kemal, in unknown circumstances—

‘Oh,’ Nani said.

‘How could they?’ Nadira said; her eyes began to fill with tears. Sufiya lived so close; the whole family knew her; they had been to her house many times. How could they?

‘But all she did was to write some poems,’ Mira said. ‘How can they shoot women for writing poems?’

And Begum Sufiya would be remembered, above all, the radio continued, for poems that encouraged her countrymen and -women in the struggle for freedom. There was a brief pause, and another voice began to read a poem. It was Sufiya’s voice; the poem must have been recorded at some time, and the recording obtained somehow by Radio Calcutta. ‘“This is no time to be braiding your hair,”’ the poem began.

‘My friend’s poem,’ Nana said. ‘I am glad they are letting her read this.’ He had been called through from his study by the sound of poetry, or by the sound of his friend’s voice on the radio. But he had not heard the news.

‘She has been killed, Papa,’ Nadira said.

‘How has she been killed?’ Nana said.

‘They didn’t say,’ Nani said. ‘Only that she has died. How could they?’

‘They wouldn’t,’ Nana said. ‘They wouldn’t dare. We would have heard if she had been killed. This is a mistake, I know. She could not be dead.’

‘The radio said that she is dead,’ Nani said, with surprise.

‘The radio is mistaken,’ Nana said. ‘Where is Mahmood? The curfew has begun now.’

And the strange thing was that Nana was right. Sufiya was not dead at all. The announcement on Radio Calcutta of her passing was mistaken, and taken from unreliable information. A street or two away, Sufiya and her daughters were sitting, just as my family was, inside, waiting for news, and she had the shock of hearing her own death announced, and then of listening to her own voice reading her famous poem. Three days later, my grandfather had the pleasure of reading an advertisement in the newspaper, placed there by Sufiya herself, in which she announced to all her friends that, contrary to reports, she was alive and well, and hoping to be listened to for many years to come. There was something steely and full of reprimand about the tone of the advert. Nobody could doubt that it was Sufiya herself who had written it, and there were no rumours about her having met her death from that point onwards.

In the street, the sirens howled like cats. Beyond that, there was no sound. ‘Mahmood must be safely inside,’ Era said. ‘He has taken shelter. He will come tomorrow. Shiri, he is sensible, your husband.’

‘I know he is dead,’ my mother said. She gulped and clutched the gold hem of her sari. ‘How could he – how could he go to the help of those people downstairs? We hardly know them.’

‘He did what he had to do,’ my grandfather said. It was so conclusive, the tone in which he said it, that the music of its serious finality drew the children from upstairs; they stood, lined up along the banisters, and gazed, shocked, at the adults giving way.

My sisters were the last to take their positions: they had been concealing themselves on the front balcony of the house, watching from behind a chair the distant fires of the city and the silent, empty street. They wondered, as they stood, why the aunts and cousins and the rest of the grown-ups were crying and silent. Surely their father would put things to rights when he came, as he would come. As he was coming, in fact. They had seen him hurrying along from a hundred yards away, hunched under the trees, swift and surreptitious, but, to his children, an unmistakable walk and silhouette. It was strange that he had not made an effort to arrive before the sirens started sounding but, after all, he was not so very late. In the past, he had often arrived twenty or thirty minutes late for dinner at Nana’s house, kept behind at the office. It was ridiculous to make such a fuss when he was only five or ten minutes late for lunch. And before Sushmita, in her practical way, could say something to point this out, the gates at the front of the house were clanging open and shut; the grown-ups were rising to their feet; the light footfalls of Pa were heard in the glass-fronted side porch of the house, and there he was.

He looked tired and untidy; his jacket was over the crook of his arm. He was a little late, but he had had things to do all day, and sometimes things take longer to achieve than people anticipate and, after all, he was only six or seven minutes late. Sushmita and Sunchita were glad to see their father, but not excessively so. After all, everyone had been expecting his arrival, all morning, and here he was.

It was a surprise to them when Nana strode forward out of his chair, took their father by his thin shoulders and shook him hard. There were not many occasions on which Grandfather raised his voice; perhaps this one was the first one they would remember. He shouted into my father’s face: ‘Do not do that! Never again do that to my daughter! Never, ever, do that to my wife, or to me, or to my daughters! Never, ever, do that to my grandchildren!’ My grandfather went on through the table of affinities. It was as if he were attempting to run through all the possibilities of insult and offence and the vulnerable. His rage took three or four sentences to lower from its highest pitch, as he remembered the need to remain quiet; after twenty seconds, the rage continued at a lower volume. Into my father’s face my grandfather shouted, a mute in his throat but no restraint on his rage.

Sunchita and Sushmita watched, horrified and appalled, at the unknown sight of their grandfather shouting; the still less imaginable sight of their father taking the abuse. From any unjustified display of power their father, they knew, would walk away. Now he had arrived ten minutes later than he should have, and not only was Grandfather shouting at him, but Father was standing there accepting the abuse, as long as it seemed to go on.

My aunts and my mother, drying her tears and coming to her husband, found this a less unfamiliar sight than the children. They remembered the last time Nana had burst out shouting. It had been thirteen years before. It had been the day that Boro-mama had run away, leaving the garden path unswept; the day he had run away to marry Sharmin, who was now sitting in a placid way in a corner of the salon, keeping an eye on their four children. (She was glad to see her brother-in-law Mahmood: she had never really doubted that he would get here safely, and she went on knitting.) That was the last time Nana had shouted, when he had raised his voice and demanded the immediate attendance of Era, who had known all about it. My grandfather never lost his temper, and never raised his voice. He must have shouted as a boy, though it was hard to imagine. But in family stories, these were the two occasions when he raised his voice: to Era, when she knew all about Laddu’s elopement; and to Mahmood, the day he came in after the curfew had been declared, making his wife cry. For the rest of his life, my grandfather never saw anything to make him shout. But that day, he did shout, and my father knew he was right to.