CHAPTER 6
How Big-uncle Left Home
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.
Among Boro-mama’s neighbourhood cronies was a man he had been to school with, Nawshad. Nawshad’s family was not Bengali but Urdu-speaking: they came from Bihar. Nawshad was very much the same sort of wastrel as Boro-mama. He had grand schemes for making money – to open a cinema, to start importing American cigarettes into Dacca, to open a smart restaurant. None of these ever came to anything, because Nawshad had no money to invest, and none of the gang who spent their days smoking in the neighbourhood store had any money either.
Nawshad had a sister, however, called Sharmin. Sharmin was hard-working and academic, and was now studying at Mitford Medical College. She would be a doctor in a year or two. No, she was not beautiful, but she was clever and interesting, and would get on in life.
She worked too hard, Nawshad said, and it was difficult to persuade her to go out, even to the cinema, once a month. But he did persuade her to come out to the cinema that Friday. It was a hot night, and wet; the cinema smelt of mould and bodies, and the film was an old one that broke down for ten minutes after the first reel. Sharmin had come out with her brother, and his friend Laddu had joined them. They had found plenty to talk about. He had made her laugh.
‘Am I the only person in this family who didn’t know about any of this?’ Nana said.
It seemed that he was. Boro-mama had kept Era up to date with the details of their meetings, and their plans. Sharmin’s family lived near Rankin Street, and were in fact known to Nana in general terms. Boro-mama had found opportunities to sneak out of the house and to meet Sharmin in quiet corners, underneath umbrellas, shaded by trees in the street, in the back corners of shops. It all sounded – to Era, and even retold bluntly when the story was over – terribly romantic. In time, Boro-mama had told Era that he wanted to marry Sharmin. He had asked her to explain the whole matter to their father.
‘To Papa? I don’t think I can, elder-brother,’ Era said, alarmed. She had enjoyed the stories, and relished the monsoon-kisses, hopeless-doomed-passion aspect of her brother’s life. But it had not occurred to her that the story might have possibilities for development. She had had noble renunciation in mind. It was not really credible to her that her brother would want to marry this Bihari girl, rather than take her tear-stained photograph from a secret drawer once a year, and kiss it.
‘Well, I certainly can’t,’ Boro-mama said. ‘He would throw me out of the house.’
‘Why don’t you ask Mahmood?’ Era said. ‘Papa likes him. He would make him listen.’
A dark expression passed over Boro-mama’s features. ‘I could never do that,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be in Mahmood’s debt for anything.’
‘In Mahmood’s debt? Well,’ Era said, quite briskly, ‘I don’t see anything else for it. You will just have to go and talk to Ma. If she can’t explain it to Pa, then I don’t think anyone will be able to.’
No one knew what the outcome was of the conversation between Boro-mama and his mother, the day when he told her that he wanted to marry an Urdu-speaking Bihari girl called Sharmin. Nobody even knew when or where it took place, this conversation. They were both at home in Rankin Street all day long, with nothing very much to occupy them. It was to be supposed that Boro-mama wandered into his mother’s sitting room one morning and stayed there until the outcome was clear. Neither of them shared the details of the conversation with anyone else afterwards. Boro-mama told his sister Era about every detail of his courtship of Sharmin – the meetings under trees, the snatched five minutes, the outings to the park or the walks along the muddy Buriganga river with Nawshad, who knew to remove himself to a distance of fifteen yards. But when the conversation with Nani took place, nobody knew, nor what had been exchanged during it. Only when it was too late for anyone to do anything did it become clear that the conversation had taken place: that both of them had agreed never to mention anything about Sharmin, ever again; that Nani believed that whatever she had said had put an end to the whole business. She had seen no reason to mention any of it to my grandfather.
‘Era,’ my grandfather said, quite calmly, ‘I am not going to punish you. Do you know when it was that Laddu decided to run away and marry this woman?’
Era looked about her helplessly; she gripped her pink scarf to her neck. ‘I don’t know when he decided,’ she said.
‘What I mean,’ my grandfather said, in his most dispassionate and lawyerly way, ‘is when was it that you knew for certain that he was going to run away?’
‘To run away? Last night,’ Era said. ‘He told me last night that he was going to do it today. I should have told everyone. I could have stopped it altogether.’
‘Very well,’ my grandfather said. ‘So I think we can all stop saying that Laddu ran away because I happened to ask him if he would see that the paths were cleared this morning. Clearly, he had made his decision before I mentioned that. Are we all agreed on that point?’
‘Yes, Pa,’ Mira, Mary, my mother and Era said, and Nana left the room.
‘Am I in trouble?’ Era said. ‘I’m not going to be punished, Ma, am I?’
‘Yes,’ Nani said. ‘You are in serious trouble. I am sure that when your father comes out of his chambers, he will tell me what your punishment is going to be.’
4.
For the next two years, nobody saw or heard of Boro-mama. The only fact that filtered back to Grandfather’s house in Rankin Street was that he had, indeed, married a Bihari woman named Sharmin. Incomprehensibly, her family were as deeply opposed to her marriage as our family was. They did not see the apparent honour involved in her marrying Boro-mama, a man without profession, character or education, whose entire prospects had been torn away by the severing of relations with his father. ‘I hope his father-in-law finds small jobs for him to do about the house,’ my father said caustically. He had endured enough insults from Laddu about cuckoos in the nest, over-educated clowns worming their way into the bosoms of other people’s fathers, and other mixed metaphors. He saw no reason to hold back when there was nobody but his cousins about.
Curiously, once Laddu had left the house, my father did not find it a more comfortable berth. It might have been thought that, with the departure of his only male cousin, my father would find life in Rankin Street very easy. My aunts were fond of their cousin, in general terms, although they did not pretend to understand the esteem in which my mother held him; my grandfather greatly respected him, and was forever holding him up as an example of hard work, discipline and moral rectitude to anyone who would listen and to a few who would not. But perhaps my grandfather needed to berate somebody; perhaps my father feared that he would soon find himself being given the sorts of household tasks that Boro-mama had found so profitable. I don’t know this for sure, but perhaps once – just once – Nana asked my father if he could possibly spare the time from his economics studies to have a look at the tap that seemed to be dripping in the downstairs bathroom.
My father was an independent-minded sort of person. Two months after Boro-mama’s sudden departure, and a couple of weeks after news had reached Rankin Street that he was irrevocably married to a woman who barely spoke Bengali, my father had moved out too, to a university hall. The gossips exaggerated: Sharmin, even then, spoke perfectly serviceable Bengali, though it was not her first language.
In the next two years, my father finished his economics degree, and then his MA in the same subject. He applied for the government service, and finished almost at the top of his cohort. He was appointed to a job as assistant district commissioner in Barisal, a middle-sized town twelve hours’ journey by rocket launch from Dacca. It was decided between him and my mother that they could get married in the middle of 1959. My grandfather and grandmother were very pleased. There seemed no reason to think that Mahmood would disappear from their lives in the way that Boro-mama had done.
During the British time, a space had been cleared in Dacca for a park. It was not made by the British, but it nevertheless had the air of pallid pleasure of the sort that the British enjoyed so much. It was called Balda Garden. As often with the British, it had an educational, almost museum quality. There were collections of botanical specimens from all over the world, some in the open air and some in a few rather crumbling hothouses. There were lawns and flowerbeds, and to that the British had added their own rather limp notions of enjoyment – a lake that had perhaps once been intended for boating parties, but was now just a kidney-shaped lake, and a picturesque Joy House, a combination of Swiss rest-house and Greek amphitheatre to one side. These joyless festival sites had now been taken over and colonized by my nation and its sense of fun. Constant supervision could keep Bengalis on their best behaviour for only so long. There were vendors of sweets and of tea; there were large families spread out comfortably on the lawns; there were picnics that took an entire afternoon to reach the end of; there were balloon-sellers and even, once, an acrobat. Under the trees, where it was quiet and shady, couples sat in peace and quiet, feeding each other from their picnic boxes, blushing, and laughing under their breath. It was a favourite place to visit on a Sunday, which was then the day of rest and pleasure in Dacca, as Friday is now.
My mother and father, before their marriage, regularly met at the Joy House on a Sunday evening. They would walk around the park, talking in the sort of privacy you can only have on the street or in crowds in Dacca.
Both of them were highly punctual people, and when they agreed to meet at the Joy House at six, both of them would be there at six. My father, however, was still more punctual than my mother – in fact, he often regarded her as a poor time-keeper. This was unfair, since she generally arrived at the time specified; my father would arrive a good fifteen or twenty minutes in advance, and pace up and down, inspecting his watch.
At twenty to six, my father was already standing at the Joy House, waiting impatiently. It was a favourite place for meetings, and he stood among people who had made arrangements to meet at half past five as well as a few early arrivals for six, like himself. Along the path came couples, families and small groups of young men, out for a Sunday-afternoon walk. The sun was in my father’s eyes, and the groups approaching from his left were mere silhouettes. When a figure greeted him, hesitantly, my father did not know immediately who it was, and greeted him back without hesitation. When he realized that it was Laddu, who would not have realized that my father was standing in a blinding light, it was too late to withdraw the greeting.
‘We often come here,’ Laddu said. ‘It is so pleasant. I wonder – could I introduce my wife to you?’
Boro-mama’s wife was, it appeared, the small, sweet, round person by his side. She was not a beauty, but had a pleasant, open face and pale, rather yellowish colouring. Her name was Sharmin, and my father greeted her politely. In the heat, the pre-monsoon congestion in the air, she fanned herself with curt and efficient gestures. Boro-mama asked after everyone, and was surprised to learn that my father no longer lived at the house in Rankin Street. My father thought that Laddu gave him a look of near-respect on hearing this. Like many habitual dependants, Boro-mama made a point of denouncing and disapproving of other people’s sponging, as he often called it.
They talked, quite cheerfully, for ten minutes, until my father mentioned that he was waiting for my mother. A look of doubt crossed Boro-mama’s face, and he seemed almost on the verge of running away. ‘Oh, Laddu,’ Sharmin said, taking hold of his arm. To my father’s surprise, Laddu suggested that they meet later in the week, perhaps to see a film. My father said – I am sure he said – that he was very busy with work, and with preparations to go to Barisal to take up his post as assistant district commissioner. But Boro-mama pressed him, and eventually he agreed. It was five to six: Boro-mama and Sharmin said their goodbyes and left. It was obvious that they would not risk an encounter with my mother, or with any of the rest of Laddu’s family, just yet.
5.
The night after my father and Laddu went to the cinema together, my father was invited round to Nana’s house to have dinner. He had a regular weekly evening there as the guest of my mother. While he was waiting to take up his appointment in Barisal, my father had continued living in the university residence. It had its disadvantages. The price he paid for the independence of living there was perpetual hunger. In the residence, food was provided as part of the living expenses. But there were hundreds of other hungry young economists living in the same place, and the food was basic, dull and prepared in great vats. Like all male students, at any time, at any place, my father was appallingly hungry from one end of the week to the other. His evening at Nana’s would set him up for the barren remainder of the week, eking out the institution’s thin dal and rice, the meagre pickings of its birianis with memories of Nana’s dinner and the occasional bought treat. He was punctilious about waiting for an invitation, and would not have come if he were not asked; fortunately, my mother was just as punctilious about asking him, once a week.
The monsoon rains had broken that week. My father, the aunts and Nani sat inside the house, looking out on the veranda. The garden was already soaked with mud; the rains made a deep, resonant trill on the flat surfaces of the house, made the trees spatter and slap. Because of the sound of the rain, nobody heard Nana’s car approaching, and the first anyone knew of him was his voice in the hall. ‘Is nobody here?’ he called, and then they heard his umbrella being rapidly opened and shut, two or three times. His daughters came out to the hall to meet him behind Nani; my father following somewhere in the back.
‘What is that sound?’ Nana said, after he had greeted them all and handed his raincoat and umbrella to the boy.
‘What sound?’ Nani said.
‘That sound of dripping,’ he said. ‘It kept me awake all last night. Can you hear?’
The aunts compared notes, discovered that they could not hear any particular dripping. Mira asked if he meant the sound of the rain on the terrace, and was asked if she thought he was a fool, and not to be so pert, child.
‘I asked for something to be done about it,’ Nana said. ‘I distinctly asked for something to be done.’
Nani asked, and it became clear that my grandfather was talking about the tap in the upstairs bathroom. It had started dripping the day before. My grandfather could not endure the sound of a dripping tap in the house, and in the end, he said, he had got up in the middle of the night and placed a towel in the hand-basin to mute the sound. As was his way, he must have said, as he left the house in the morning, ‘Somebody ought to do something about that dripping tap.’ What had happened was that the towel had been removed from the basin, and nothing else had been attempted. My grandfather gave my father, as the only other man in the house, a long, assessing, unfair look, as if he had been there to overhear the suggestion in the morning, and should have done something about the dripping tap. My father looked back.
Once they were seated at table, and my father’s first brutish hunger had been satisfied – my mother’s sisters used to watch him, stifling giggles, as he laid into the mutton curry – he sat back in his chair and began a conversation.
‘It is interesting, this new film,’ he said.
‘What film are you talking about, Mahmood?’ my mother said. He was not a great cinema-goer. Normally he barely listened when my mother’s sisters talked about a film they had seen, or some other entertainment.
‘There is a film in the cinemas that was shot near Dacca, on the delta,’ he said, in a measured way. He stretched his neck, rotated his shoulders, took another mouthful of curry.
It was like my father to assume that nobody else could have known about this film. It had been discussed during its filming by the intelligentsia. A film-maker had gone into the delta and shot the ordinary people at their tasks of fishing and working. It had been said in advance that this would herald a new age of film-making in the region. But Jago Hua Savera had come out and nobody had gone to see it at all. Apart from my grandfather, who referred to the cinema scornfully as ‘the flicks’, everyone in the family was a keen film-goer. But in this case, Era and Mira had gone to see it and returned with big yawns, saying that they had never suffered so much in their lives as at the hands of Jago Hua Savera and its fisherfolk.
‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘It is an interesting film.’
‘Did you stay to the end, Mahmood?’ Era said.
‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘I stayed to the end.’ My mother took a large spoonful of rice, poised it above his plate, gave it a good shake, and then offered him a bowl of dal. ‘It is only playing in one cinema, I believe.’
‘Which cinema is that, Mahmood?’ my grandfather said.
‘The Shabistan,’ my father said. ‘It is a very old cinema.’
‘I never saw a film as wonderful as Pyaasa,’ my grandmother said. ‘Did you see Pyaasa, Mahmood?’
‘Oh, yes, Pyaasa, that was a film,’ Era said. She started singing at the dinner table, a thing my grandfather utterly detested. ‘And so sad! One could have cried.’
My grandmother and aunts started comparing their favourite scenes in Pyaasa, a film that had taken Dacca by storm two years ago, and was still being talked about. Probably there were cinemas, even then, which were still playing it to faithful audiences. When they had finished, my father said, ‘That sounds quite different from Jago Hua Savera. I liked it, but Laddu found it dull, just as you did, Era.’
‘Who found it dull, Mahmood?’ my grandfather said.
‘Laddu,’ my father said.
‘Laddu, did you say?’ my grandmother said.
My father went on to explain – he had the attention of the table now. There was no question that not all his sisters-in-law-to-be held him in the great esteem that my mother did, and my grandfather did. For some of them, he was a not very exciting country cousin who, by means of hard work and honesty, had made his way in the world, and was to be the man their eldest sister would marry. They were not rude to him, but they were not accustomed to give him their full attention at the dinner table. They had never spent a night with him in the police cells, singing songs of resistance and independence, and had always found it tricky to visualize the story when my mother told it to them, as she quite frequently did. But once or twice in his life, my father successfully dropped a bombshell, and made people listen to what he had to say. This was one of those times. The whole family listened to him, explaining that he had met not just Laddu, but Laddu’s wife Sharmin. At first by chance, in the Balda Gardens, by the Joy House, but afterwards by arrangement: the three of them had gone to see Jago Hua Savera only the day before.
‘You met her, Mahmood?’ Mira said. ‘What is she like?’
‘Laddu was full of plans,’ my father said. ‘He kept talking about the cinema, all through the film – he kept saying that nobody had done anything to this cinema for years except change its name. He kept saying that if he had some money, he could run the cinema, transform it into a wonderful place, that it could hardly fail. I don’t think the film really held his attention. But I enjoyed it.’
‘But what is she like?’ Mary said. ‘Is she tall or short, fat, thin, is she pretty?’
‘I wouldn’t say she was pretty,’ my father said. ‘Not pretty, exactly. But there is something quite agreeable about her face.’
There was a long pause; the whole table sat waiting for my father to continue, but he just went on eating. That seemed to be all he had observed about Laddu’s wife.
‘And is she sensible, or is she a fool?’ Nani said finally. ‘How could she marry Laddu in such a hole-and-corner way?’
‘I don’t know,’ my father said. ‘We didn’t go into all that.’
‘I suppose we could ask Laddu and his wife to come here for dinner,’ my grandfather said. ‘It seems ridiculous never to see him. And I should meet his wife, before she decides to give us grandchildren. Yes, on the whole, I think Mahmood is right. We should ask Laddu and his wife round here for dinner next week. Not next week – ask them to come as soon as they may. Tomorrow. Push the boat out.’
My father had not, in fact, suggested asking Laddu and Sharmin round for dinner at all. But my grandfather was thinking about the dripping tap in the bathroom next to his bedroom.