Scenes From Early Life (6 page)

At Nana’s house, everything was in a state of confusion. The gardener’s boy was cleaning the car with a bucket of water; Atish was weeding the flowerbed. In the upper windows, great white birds appeared to be plunging in the half-light; beds were being changed and aired. My great-grandmother had arrived, and had found fault. The servants, who were used to their own ways, did not look forward to her visits any more than I did. Attention fell on her in unwelcome ways; attention was simultaneously taken from me, and neither of us enjoyed it.

We were led upstairs in our best clothes, and there in her room was my great-grandmother. The maid who always served her was already hard at work, brushing her hair; it was absolutely white – ‘As white as snow,’ I dreamily said to myself, a comparison from English books and not from experience. She could keep her maid hard at it all day long, going from one intimate task to another. While her hair was being brushed, she was at work preparing paan. She had her own pestle and mortar for this, and would prepare paan to chew; sometimes Nani took some, out of politeness, to give her mother-in-law some company. She pounded away at the tiny red rubble in her wooden bowl, the wooden pestle long since stained as if with blood. Her task was like that of the woman stone-breaker outside her house, but fragrant, elegant, clean and beautiful. She did not trust or like preparations of paan that had been made by anyone else. She carried the ingredients round in small pouches, making it out of dried leaves, pebble-like substances, samples of mysterious red matter, all just as she liked it. Her pestle and mortar, as well as the wooden clogs she always wore that gave you warning of her approach, were somehow carried over from the senior wife. She seemed to be carrying out a dead woman’s wishes, and she scared the life out of me.

We submitted to being kissed by a paan-smelling old mouth, and my mother reminded her who we were, and how old we were now. She seemed to take it all in, nodding over her stained moustaches. But then she immediately started explaining who had done what to whom in the village. She lived in a large property, given to both women by my grandfather, and she was the centre of village complaint and litigation. Everyone had always come to the pair of them with disputes, and nowadays she passed down the law without hesitation.

(Nana had a story about his mothers’ intrusions. He told it endlessly. It seemed that a village couple had decided to give their new baby daughter a Western name, and had somehow heard of ‘Irene’. Unexpectedly, the mother gave birth not to one daughter, but to a pair of twins, and the couple could not think of a suitable second name for some time. Then they were struck by inspiration, and decided to call the second daughter ‘Urine’. This was one of the many occasions on which my great-grandmothers descended into the private lives of the villagers, and told them what they could not do, brooking no contradiction. Nana could never remember what the daughters were called in the end, with the agreement of his father’s two wives.)

The stories of litigation and irritation reached their first pause, and the enquiries had run their course into how Zahid was growing up into a fine young man, and I would be a lawyer like my father and grandfather. My mother had gently reminded her that Sushmita and Sunchita would have their own professions, too. We were permitted to go downstairs, but only to sit quietly and to read a book, not to turn on the television, not to trouble the servants, and certainly not to go out and run in the garden, just underneath the window of Great-grandmother’s room.

I wanted to see Piklu, my chicken, but I knew better than to disobey my mother when the witch was there. We filed downstairs and took up our books in the salon, sitting on two cream-and-brown sofas at right angles to each other, Sunchita reading a long sentimental novel, Sushmita a Feluda detective story, and my brother Zahid a physics textbook, which seemed to give him as much pleasure as anything. From time to time, Sunchita would sigh affectedly at some occurrence in her book, and even remark on an event that had moved her. I had my book, too, but I could not stay still. I thought of Piklu, out there; I did not know if he would come to greet me, or whether I would remain unforgiven for what Assad had done to him the previous weekend. Piklu changed from week to week, although now he was a proper, grown-up chicken, as big as his mother, and I did not want to be separated from him. From time to time I leapt up from the scratchy wool sofa, going to the window to see if I could see Piklu. But I could not. The other chickens were pottering about, pecking at the dirt as usual, but Piklu must have been inside the chicken coop, waiting for me to come.

8.

‘Ah, children,’ Mary-aunty said, coming into the salon. She, too, was wearing her best clothes, with a gold band down the edge of her sari. ‘I hope you’re all being good. Oh dear.’ She fluttered, and left. In a moment Dahlia came in. She came straight to me, picked up the book I was reading from my lap and looked at the title. Ignoring the others, she gave me a kiss on my nose; she shook her head, and hurried out again.

The aunts came in, singly and in pairs, and found some reason to address me before leaving in an absent way. I could not account for it. My aunts had different favourites, and sometimes our own gestures of fondness were not returned; Sushmita had thought Nadira, with her dramatic entrances and her immaculate appearance, was marvellous, but Nadira, before she got married and went to Sheffield, was at best indifferent to the small, impressed offerings of gaze and giggle that Sushmita laid at her feet. Today every aunt came in and, one after another, stroked my head or called me a little sweetie. It was as if they wanted something from me. It was unusual in any circumstance: when Great-grandmother was there, making demands and criticizing the household, calling for people to brush her hair and listen to her stories, we children were used to being ushered into a quiet corner and expected to remain silent. The attention I was getting was pleasing, but unnerving. I wondered whether I was about to get a present.

‘And he is studying at college now,’ Great-grandmother said at table. She was talking about the son of a neighbour of theirs, a neighbour in the country. ‘Studying to be an engineer. He has made a good success of his life. When you consider who his father is. There was constant trouble with his father. Running wild. And now he is going to Libya,’ she finished, hunching over her plate.

‘Fateh is going to Libya?’ Nana said, puzzled. He remembered the farmer, his youth, running wild.

‘Libya?’ Era said.

‘Not Fateh,’ Great-grandmother said, her brilliant white hair combed back now. ‘Fateh could never go to Libya. Fateh stays where he was born. His son, he is going to Libya. He is studying at college. Studying to be an engineer. And afterwards, he is going to Libya.’

There was a satisfied pause. The dining-room door swung open, and in came a succession of dishes, steaming hot. All at once, the table broke into conversation.

‘Were you at your college today?’ Dahlia called across to Pultoo-uncle.

‘No, because—’

‘And Mahmood had a great success today,’ my mother called across to Nani, gesturing at my father who, in honour of a great-grandparent, had come, for once, to dinner on Friday.

‘I’m so pleased for him,’ Nani said. ‘Era, did you hear what your sister was saying?’

‘Yes, Mama,’ Era said. ‘A success, today . . . I was just about to say . . .’

It was mystifying. The lids of the dishes were taken off, in a shining line down the long table; the richest of the dishes before Nana. ‘Good, good,’ he said, poking in it with the serving spoon in his usual way; it was as if he suspected the most delicious parts to be always hidden deep in the dish. ‘Good. Chicken.’

Around the table, there was a nervous little spasm of conversation, and I had the sense of aunt turning to aunt, and smiling shamefully at me. ‘Do have some, Saadi,’ Mary-aunty said. ‘It’s especially for your great-grandmother, since she has come all this way to see us.’

A horrible thought came to me. ‘Where did the chicken come from?’ I said to Nana. ‘Nana, what is this chicken?’

But I had been shunted down a place by the arrival of my Great-grandmother, and he affected not to hear my shrill demand. ‘Nana,’ I said. ‘Nana.’

‘Quiet, Saadi,’ Bubbly-aunty said, next to me. ‘Don’t scream in people’s ears. It’s a chicken from the garden, as usual.’

‘Which one?’ I said. ‘Which chicken are we eating?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Bubbly said. ‘I really don’t know the difference between one chicken and another. They’d be very happy, I’m sure, if they knew they were going to make such a lovely dinner for all of us. Now, I’m sure you’re not going to be a bad little boy. I’m sure you’re going to be a good little boy, and eat your dinner, aren’t you?’

In my family, we did not leap up and push our chairs over; we did not scream and denounce our relations; we did not punch and pummel the servants, even the ones who had seized our pet chickens and put them in the pot without a second thought. We did not run howling out into the garden in search of our lost chickens. What we did was push the dish away when it came to us, and say, with murder in our voices, ‘No, thank you. I don’t care to eat a friend of mine.’

‘What did he say?’ Great-grandmother said.

‘I didn’t hear,’ Nana said. ‘Pay no attention, and everything will be quite all right.’

9.

I sat in mutinous silence all through dinner. I would not look at or answer my great-grandmother, for whose sake Piklu had been killed and eaten. I promised myself I would never speak to her again, not until she died like the other one, which would be soon. And when dinner was over, I gabbled out the formula asking for permission to get down from the table, and went swiftly out of the front door into the street. It was still light, and my shadow went before me as I walked, shivering and dancing like a puppet, making its own dance, as I tried to walk like a big man down the Dhanmondi street, trying my best to walk like a slave-owner, to walk as a talking car would walk, to walk down my grandfather’s street like Hungry Bear.

1.

The best place to watch what was happening in the street was from my grandfather’s first-floor balcony. The houses in the street were fronted by high walls, dusted with green lichen, for security. But the balcony on the first floor was high enough to see over. From there, you could see visitors approaching. It might be a family member returning: Nana in his red Vauxhall, driven by Rustum, or my father in a cycle-rickshaw, laden with papers, or some aunts returning from a visit in the neighbourhood. As you negotiated your way between heavy jars of pickles, or slices of mango laid out on kula to dry, you could see if there was a war going on in the street between children of the neighbourhood. Sometimes, when I was very young I would see Sheikh Mujib sweep by in his big official car, with a policeman on a motorbike driving just before. And you knew that he was the prime minister of the country. I never forgot that sight.

Or there might be visitors. Mr Khandekar-nana came sometimes, simply, on foot, with his wife and a son or two. Pultoo-uncle’s friends Kajol and Kanaq would arrive with their folders of art under their arms, sticking out from either side of a cycle-rickshaw. You could hear them arguing from a hundred yards away: they always turned up in a towering passion, appealing to anyone in the house to settle the dispute by taking one side or the other. From Nana’s balcony, through the branches of the tamarind tree, you could see all the way down the street to the left, and all the way down the street to the right. I spent hours up there, in the odour of spice and fruit drying in the open air, in the shade of the tamarind tree.

Some days, a sweet-seller would set up shop opposite Nana’s house. He would make those yellow calligraphic sweets that look like a circular signature in Arabic; I loved to watch. First, he would take a bag of wet dough, then write quickly, a round and a squiggle and a zigzag, directly in the boiling yellow oil, then another one, then another. The sweets would coagulate, then bob to the surface. He would know exactly when to fish them out to drain on newspaper. And then he would start again. It was a little marvel of the street, across the wall at the front of Nana’s house. I could have watched him all day.

I craned out, observing neighbours and guests and street-wallahs and unfamiliar figures; I got to know them from the way they walked, their usual belongings, the way they arrived in a rickshaw or a car or on foot. The most familiar of relatives looked unsure of themselves when surprised from up here, making their way down the public highway in Dhanmondi. Dahlia-aunty, for instance, so confident and cosy when going between Nana’s salon and the kitchen, looked fretful, nervous, and unsure of herself when making her way out of the gate to walk a hundred yards to visit a neighbour. She revealed a different side of herself. Or perhaps that was just the way she looked from Nana’s balcony.

On Saturday morning the cleaner came. You watched him approach from the far end of the street. He did not look at ease, or in the right street; he cringed as he walked even in the empty street, the walk of a man who had been hit too often. He came to do the heavy work that no one in the house would do, to clean the drains and the toilets. He was not Bengali, but Bihari; many of his type had left for Pakistan after 1971, but he was a poor Bihari, and had stayed to clean our drains. If you spoke to him, he answered in Urdu, the Pakistani language, cringing. ‘Chota-sahib’, he called me: little sir. It did not make me like him, though I understood that he wanted to make me his friend by abasing himself in that way. Years later I understood that I actually despised him. It was not a feeling I had had before, and I did not understand it when I was tiny. If you did not speak to him, he sang continuously: he always knew the latest Urdu pop song. As I say, I did not like him. On Saturdays, we got up early, before eight o’clock, because he was coming, and then there was nothing to do but go on to Nana’s balcony and wait for his obsequious walk – he swayed from side to side, ready to bow to anyone.

But there were more welcome visitors, and ones I looked forward to. It was not always obvious why we would impatiently await their turn into the corner of road six, or what they had done to deserve our excitement. When we saw Nadira, after lunch, going to her room to fetch the harmonium, the tabla, and sometimes the sitar, we knew who was coming, and I went up to Nana’s balcony to sit and stare at the corner of the road. Two figures turned the corner. One was very tall and thin, his head bald on top. Under his arm he carried two notebooks, and in the other hand, a black umbrella for when the sun grew too strong in the summer or against the rain in the wet season. The other was very short; he wore plenty of oil on his hair, and it would glint in the light. It was brushed close, immaculately.

These were Nadira’s music teachers. They were not very well paid, and the trousers, long shirt and sandals that the shorter of the two wore were the only clothes I ever saw him in. They were soft and worn, and, if you looked closely, frayed at cuff and hem. All the same, they were both very clean – the short one very strikingly so, his white shirt brilliant in the sunlight from as far away as the corner of the street. I think he washed his shirt every night, pummelling away with soap and water and a stone, hanging it up to dry until the morning. He was the player of tabla. His colleague played the harmonium while Nadira sang. You could not help but think, as they hurried towards Nana’s house, talking quietly and with a professorial air of respect to each other, that they were glad to be coming to teach her. And this was true. They were glad.

I was permitted to sit in on Nadira’s lessons. She was a beautiful singer, and the two instrumentalists took more instruction from her than the other way round. She sang songs by Tagore, and more recent songs about the countryside in Bangladesh, too; they accompanied her on the fluting harmonium, the pattering little song of the tabla and if you looked out of the window, you could see that even the gardener was slowing his work and listening. The tabla player would often ask me to fetch him a glass of water before he began, and as a reward would let me try to play on his small tuned drums, to fetch a melody from them. But I never could, and quickly started to bang on them with my fists. Nadira would never put up with that. ‘You’re making a horrible noise. You can leave, or you can sit on the sofa and listen.’ The harmonium player would never invite me to play on his instrument, with its odd flapping front; balding, tall and serious, he made no effort to befriend small boys. He would never say ‘Chota-sahib’ to a child, and I utterly respected him for it.

They would stay for two hours, accompanying Nadira. They would perform five or six songs. First they would play one through, then return and repeat a section. This was very dull. I would have preferred it if they had just performed their six songs, and then gone away, like a concert. But I understood that they had to practise. My aunt had the loveliest voice I ever heard, and she sang Bengali songs, by Nazrul as well as Tagore. She was quite a different person in these lessons, humble, respectful; she took comments and advice from the two musicians very easily. They seemed more like honoured guests in our house than people who were paid to teach my aunt. I always hoped that they would sing the song about the flower. It was my favourite.

The flower says,

‘Blessed am I,

Blessed am I

On the earth . . .’

The flower says,

‘I was born from the dust,

Kindly, kindly,

Let me forget it,

Let me forget it,

Let me forget.

There is nothing of dust inside me,

There is no dust inside me,’

So says the flower.

They would come to the end of their two hours. Once I had settled, I could listen very happily for all that time, so long as there was more playing than rehearsing, as I thought of it. Nadira would offer them a cup of tea, or a glass of water, and they would accept. If there were other people in the house, at this point they came to greet them. My family knew and respected both of the musicians, from many years back, and so did Khandekar-nana’s family. The tall musician would give an imperceptible sign to the short tabla player. They would get up and go. That was the end of their lesson. The whole family came to the door to say goodbye to them.

2.

In 1965 Altaf Ali was twenty-nine years old, and Amit Mukhopadhyay was twenty-eight. They shared a flat in a block owned by Mrs Khandekar, the wife of my grandfather’s best friend.

They had met in the following way. The radio station in Dacca held concerts of Bengali music every Saturday night. The programme was very popular, and had resisted all attempts so far to remove it from the air. A large roster of Dacca musicians supplied the regular basis of the listeners’ pleasure. It was not always possible for musicians to play, however, in established pairings and groupings. Listeners would find their admired musicians combining in unfamiliar and unprecedented ways. This was one of the appealing things of the programme: the sense, like Bengali street life, that you never knew who you might hear talking together.

Sometimes a sitar player would arrive without his regular partner on tabla. Sometimes a tabla player would say he had no idea what had happened to a harmonium player. Musicians are not the most reliable class of people, and if at worst they could be drunkards and gamblers by inclination, at best they were always open to a better offer from others. When a musician failed to turn up at the recording studio, he had often been offered a well-paid job at the wedding of a rich man’s daughter. The radio programme commanded a large audience. But it could not compete with the fees possible when accompanying a famous singer at a lavish Dacca wedding. The producers understood this. They were always ready to match up instrumentalists and singers who had only a small acquaintance. The musicians were ready, in their turn, not to make difficulties about this, although in practice the performances that were broadcast sometimes came close to catastrophe.

Altaf and Amit met each other in just such a way. Altaf was expecting to see the same tabla player he had been playing with for the previous three years. But the producer came into the musicians’ room – a crowded, cramped room in the old British barracks that the radio station used. (The recording studio next door had its windows muffled with blankets and the door reinforced; still, some noises and voices of the city tended to seep into the programmes that were broadcast.) He hailed Altaf, and looked about the room. ‘This is Amit Mukhopadhyay,’ he said wildly. He was always in a hurry, referring frequently to the big black-bound book in which the logistical details of bookings and commitments were entered. ‘He’ll be playing with you today.’ Then the producer disappeared, without once looking up from the bound volume, or even over the top of his half-moon glasses.

Altaf had not noticed the man. Now he looked at him: he was short but well turned out. His shirt and trousers were very clean, and his hair was neatly brushed, with a tidy parting that drew a white line on his scalp. His face gave the impression of liveliness, without actually engaging to the point of saying anything. Altaf greeted him; the short man greeted him back. They quickly discussed the music. Altaf explained the mode he would be using, and two or three other details about how he liked things to begin, and how to conclude. If the tabla player was good, that would be enough for him. It was all a matter of quick-wittedness, improvisation and response. A bad musician simply played. A good one listened as he played. A very good one would anticipate.

Sometimes a new friend slips into your life unobtrusively, as if you have been walking quietly along when out from a doorway steps a familiar easy presence. He makes a brief remark in greeting, and falls companionably into the rhythm of your stride, so that you hardly remember what it was like to walk alone. So it was with Altaf and Amit. Once they were in the studio, and they started to play the evening song, with Altaf leading, they were attuned to and easy in each other’s musical company. There were none of those false starts and assertive blunders that unfamiliar pairings often made, and practised musicians knew how to conceal. Instead, there was a considerate listening presence. Amit’s playing was, as it were, full of himself: not in a bumptious or assertive way, just as an egg holds meat. It was simply full of a strong flavour, which was Amit’s personality. His playing was free and lucid, complicated, but easy and interesting to follow. There was now a little hesitation, like the lyric breath at the brink of a sneeze, as Amit hung fire before plunging into a decisive monsoon-patter; then there was a rapturous run between tones, without hesitation. All the time Amit’s playing was full of pensive thought and possibility. Altaf felt that those pauses and falterings, like a bird cocking its head and waiting between flourishes of flight, came from Amit’s listening to Altaf’s harmonium. A musician as good as Amit would have been as good with most competent partners. But Altaf could not help taking their broadcast that afternoon as a compliment. And performing to the ear of so good and attentive a partner, Altaf could hear his own musical lines grow more flexible, inward and fantastic. He could not imagine, after ten minutes, how he had ever endured such a thudding banger as Mohammed, his usual partner, which, apparently, he had done week after week until now. After the recording, Amit was flushed and cheerful, although not much more talkative. They found themselves walking in the same direction.

3.

Altaf had five younger brothers still living at home. He had to share a bedroom with the thirteen-year-old and the seven-year-old. He could not remember ever having had a room of his own, although when he was born, for the three years when he was not just the eldest but the only one, he must have lived in such a way. Now, the bedroom had to serve for everything – not just for his brothers’ homework, which they did kneeling on the floor before an old gateleg table intended to support a teacup or two, but his harmonium practice, too. He kept his instrument on a high shelf where his brothers could not get at it. His brothers regarded his harmonium as a toy, and not as the tool of his trade. He practised when they were at school, and put it away out of reach before their return. Every Saturday, he polished the rosewood case with beeswax. He believed it improved the tone.