CHAPTER 7
Nana’s Faith in Rustum
1.
In the autumn of 1959, my father and mother married in Dacca. Immediately after their marriage, they went to Barisal, where my father took up his government post as an assistant district commissioner.
There is a large album of photographs of their wedding; formal, well mounted, in a solid volume. Nana used to collect the albums of all his children’s weddings, a long line of them in the sitting room; nowadays, I believe my sister has them. In one of the photographs, my mother sits among her sisters. They are solemn-faced: being photographed was still a novelty in the 1950s. The photographs, now, do not seem very festive to us. People lined up and faced the camera. Still, in their lovely pale saris and their wide eyes against the dark wall, my mother and her sisters look like a floating grove of water-lilies. Nani, to one side, still looks young; interested; responsible. I never thought of her as beautiful in her old age, when I knew her, or as one of those women of whom one says, ‘How beautiful she must have been when she was young.’ But here, just short of fifty, surrounded by her daughters and one son, with one white streak in her hair, just that, she seems at the confident peak of her looks and health. The bright-eyed boy at her feet, her competent hand resting on his head, is Pultoo; the baby in her arms must be Bubbly-aunty. And my mother? Well, that is just my mother. My aunts and the rest of the family may have called her Shiri, but to me she will always be just my mother. The photographs of my father, with his father, his father-in-law, and other male relations seem by comparison tense and wary; my father has somehow been pushed unwillingly to the front of the picture, where he would rather not be. Both sets of photographs seem posed, but only my aunts give the impression that they have been looking forward to posing for the photographer.
They are very different from the photographs of my wedding, as I suppose my wedding was very different from my parents’. Among my wedding photographs, there are images of my new husband feeding me cake; of some rather drunk guests dancing in globes of disco-lighting; of serried ranks of canapés waiting for the party to begin; of many other things that did not happen at my parents’ wedding, exactly fifty years before mine, and many things, including the fact of my wedding itself, which were not thought of in 1959, in a country that did not yet exist. But my parents’ wedding was a happy day.
Somewhere in the picture of my father with his male relations there is the dark face of Boro-mama, Big-uncle. My grandfather had sent Laddu and his new wife Sharmin an invitation. It had been discovered, after my father had made an approach to them, that the two were living with Sharmin’s sister while Sharmin completed her medical degree. Nani was indignant that her eldest son had, apparently, absconded from her house, not to make his own way in life but to go to live off somebody else; not even his wife, since she was studying, but his wife’s sister, of whom nothing was known. She kept her comments to herself, and to her daughters, her women friends and neighbours; Nana, who may have thought some of the same things, said nothing whatever against Laddu’s domestic circumstances. My parents’ wedding would be the perfect opportunity for Laddu to introduce his new wife into the family circle, and to allow himself to be forgiven.
Laddu apologized, but his wife Sharmin was expecting a child, and would not be able to come. However, he was happy to come. Looking at the photograph, in which Boro-mama stands in a charcoal suit between grandfathers, I try to distinguish some awkwardness, resentment or embarrassment in his face. But he has exactly the same formal, sober, puzzled expression that every Bengali seems to have assumed whenever he was faced with a camera in the 1950s.
2.
After the wedding, my mother and father travelled to Barisal, and my father began his professional life.
The experience was harder for my mother than for my father. My father had grown up in the country. He was used to a quiet existence, and an unsophisticated one. He did not mind a small circle of acquaintances, and did not long for novelty or excitement. He had, too, while studying in Dacca, learnt about self-reliance. These were the characteristics that my mother had admired in her cousin when she agreed to marry him. She was the least extrovert of her sisters, and had never thought of herself as the product of a big city, fashionable or forward in any way. But when she found herself living in a district like Barisal, she discovered that she had, after all, the imprint of some metropolitan habits.
Barisal was a port town, sleepy and remote. Much of it was built of red brick, flushed and rather angry-looking; the largest building in the city was the post office, a palace of almost military grandeur, which in more important towns the British would have faced with marble. The estuary front was busy with rusting launches and fishing boats, coming to and fro, puffing black smoke into the air, the water made slick by their discharges of oil. The ferry port was a constant host to those families, their luggage piled up like great clusters of grapes on the quayside, who are always and will always be transporting themselves from one side of Bengal to the other, as long as Bengal exists. There was something greasy and rusting about the whole town.
In those days, you travelled by rocket launch from Dacca. The government accommodation provided for assistant district commissioners was furnished, so my mother and father travelled with only a few things to begin their married life. A case, between a suitcase and a trunk in size, took my mother’s clothing – she knew she would never be able to buy good-quality silk in a place like Barisal – with a box of jewellery buried deep inside. Another case held their books – they had packed separately, but Mahmood had left his books at Nana’s house when he moved out, so it seemed sensible to combine his small professional library with my mother’s books, a few novels and anthologies of poetry, and pack them all together. My father’s clothes and possessions filled a single brown suitcase, and on top of the pile on the back of the porter’s wagon, lumbering towards the port and the rocket launch that would take them to their new home in Barisal, was my grandparents’ wedding gift: a fine pier-glass in a gold frame, wrapped in layers of cardboard to survive the journey. Other gifts, such as the dining table and chairs, which the uncles had clubbed together to provide, had stayed in Dacca for the time being. Nobody thought that my mother and father would remain in a place like Barisal for very long.
The area was remote and rudimentary. There were, it was said, tigers still roaming the countryside, and one nearby had taken a villager only months before. My mother had only ever seen a tiger in the Calcutta zoo. Many towns in the district were cut off by road from civilization for weeks on end during the rainy season. As the roads that ran along ridges between paddy-fields could be washed away, even when the waters receded there could remain weeks more of isolation while they were rebuilt. Of course, as my father said, during the rainy season, Dacca was often cut off as well. My mother wondered what Dacca was cut off from. It seemed quite sufficient in itself. Whether it was raining or not, Barisal seemed far away and strange, connected only by the water that, for much of the year, isolated other settlements. Shiri regularly thought, during the three years she and my father spent in Barisal, of the heroines of Chekhov, longing for Moscow: he was a writer she had often read without ever quite understanding before.
My mother had expected to live more simply in Barisal than she had in her father’s house in Rankin Street. When the porters drew up in front of the ill-kept red-brick bungalow in a line of similar bungalows, however, she realized she had made a mistake in her mind. Her notion of simplicity was of a quality opposed to ornateness or, she realized, the processes of accretion, which had happened in her father’s house. Despite moves, war and forced emigration, her father’s house had comfortably acquired possessions, furniture, adornments in large numbers. But so, too, it seemed, had the furnished semi-detached bungalow. The caretaker, once found and hailed by the carter, let them in, and the pair of them carried in their three cases.
Once the cases had been deposited in the hallway, and the brownish, flickering electric light had been turned on, it was clear that no preparations had been made for a newly-wed couple. The house was filled with furniture – the rejected, colossal mahogany sideboards, caryatid-supported sofas and tallboys, polished brown and malevolent as giant horrid beetles – that had been out of fashion for forty years at least. Every piece would, on its own, have been too large for the modest rooms; three or four of the hardwood behemoths made an impassable labyrinth. The sad, unchosen selection was very different from her father’s warm, mismatched rooms. In the weeks to come, they would discover that the bungalow had been left uninhabited for a year and a half. It had slowly become the repository, among all their neighbours, of any inherited furniture, perfectly good in itself but no longer needed, especially those pieces of giant furniture, which had an aura of evil, rendered in mahogany. Mahmood had lived very simply, with no real attention to comfort or elegance, all his life. But even he seemed dismayed by the bungalow; even he could tell the difference between the warm, damp garden smell of his father-in-law’s house, with its easy comfort and soothing lights, and this low, dank place, green mould covering half the back wall and sharp carved mahogany ornamentation, deliberately barking your shins at every turn.
The next morning Shiri woke, and went in the early-morning light through her overcrowded rooms. Outside, in what she thought was her garden, a man was squatting, folded up like a fan, gazing down the muddy road as if at the dawn, waiting for something to happen.
The neighbours soon made themselves known. Like Mahmood, they all worked for the government in Islamabad, filing reports in Urdu and supplying information at their remote superiors’ requests. There was little variety. Shiri had never had much of a taste for society; her social life was led among her sisters, a few friends and the daughters of neighbours. In her family, she was a byword for her reluctance to leave home and pay a call. She had never loved the passing of compliments over the tea table and, before her marriage, had never felt concern that Mahmood might deprive her of her very ordinary social life.
But, very soon, she felt first a vague dissatisfaction and then a positive dismay at the limits of the world in which she found herself. Around her was no social variety but the families of her husband’s new colleagues. They had come to Barisal from all parts of Pakistan – not just from the Bengali-speaking side, from Dacca and the surrounding provinces, but some, too, from the Urdu-speaking part of the country, the western segment. The men had been posted here, and brought their families. Those families, living for the most part in the bungalows around, were the only society to be had. It did not seem possible to gain access to people who had been born, had grown up and remained in Barisal. And so my mother, who had never felt addicted to social variety, found herself in a world too restricted even for her.
At tea parties, among the mothers and wives of Mahmood’s colleagues, Shiri sat quietly. ‘We have had to let our girl go,’ one woman said. ‘When I counted the sacks of rice, she had been feeding her whole family on our supplies for months.’
‘They are so dishonest,’ another woman, a Pakistani, said, ‘these people. One took an entire bag of chillies – he thought I would not notice. It is really extraordinary.’
Shiri thought she would contribute. ‘At home,’ she said, ‘my friend is great friends with Sheikh Mujib’s daughter, Hasina, and she tells a story about a tremendous fuss Hasina made once about the very same thing. She was expecting fifteen sacks of chilli from their estate, and what arrived were only thirteen. She made such a fuss – as if she did not have other things to interest herself in than two missing sacks of chilli.’
But there was a shuffling, an inspection, and a moving on. What was it? Did they not know who Sheikh Mujib was? Did they think there was nothing so very funny in a complaint about servants’ honesty? Shiri looked about her, at the young mothers and wives, three of them pregnant; she heard herself beginning to tell the story again, but this time as a story of motherhood, disloyal servants, and the difficulties of living in Barisal. She had not married Mahmood for this.
My father had got to know his colleagues first and, when he returned home at night, he was able to tell her the names and habits of those colleagues. It was like an interesting story to his new wife. And as the weeks passed, she found herself meeting the families of the people that Mahmood had talked about and, in the end, meeting them at home, or in their homes. But now she had got there, everything seemed so hierarchical, and she had to learn who could invite whom first. But in time she got the hang of it, just as the walls were scrubbed and repainted, and most of the furniture cleared out. She and my father made a go of it. It would not be for ever. Four months after they had moved to Barisal, my mother was pregnant. It would be with my elder brother, Zahid.
3.
Even in 1960 it was possible to write a letter from Barisal to Dacca. It was not a swift process. To travel there oneself meant a long journey in rusty old ferries. Even with the best organization and a purposeful will, it would take days rather than hours. And the same was true of a letter, which in any case had to travel in precisely the same way.
When the letter from my mother to Nani turned up in Rankin Street, probably nobody considered how it had had to travel. If they had thought of the ferry, and the heavy plummeting and plunging of its journey, the request would not have been made; the answer would have been different. There was, too, the question of travelling along the roads of the town, in vehicles that probably had iron-rimmed wheels. It was reckless of my mother to think of travelling over such roads in such a way while pregnant. But in the end all was well: my brother Zahid was born at the normal time. Life is full of such decisions, and turns that come to no harm; moments of normality, where no story springs and nothing goes wrong.
The letters were laid out on my grandfather’s desk each morning. My grandmother liked to go through them, and separate them into correspondence from clients, and personal family letters. The letters came in one bundle, and Grandmother had to pick out her private correspondence from the general pile. That morning’s pile included my mother’s weekly letter: she was a punctual correspondent.
My grandmother opened the letter at the desk with the creamy old ivory paperknife, and stood in the study, reading in the slatted light. Alone, she smiled, smoothed out the page on the green leather surface of the desk; she let herself be alone with the knowledge for just one moment. Her other daughters were downstairs: Mary was minding little Bubbly; Era and Mira could be heard talking quietly, intermittently – they were both reading and passing comments as they went.
My grandmother opened the study door carefully. Her chappals clapped against her feet as she carefully went downstairs. She measured her tread. There was no reason to hurry with her news. In the salon, playing with little Bubbly, along with Mary, was Laddu’s wife Sharmin. When she did not have classes, she quite often came round to her mother-in-law’s house, these days. She made herself useful, and welcome.
‘There is a letter from Shiri, from Barisal,’ Nani said, to the room in general. ‘She says she is having a baby.’
‘Shiri, a mother,’ Mira said, jumping up and dropping her work on the floor. ‘She was only married six months ago. How can someone have a baby when she is only just married?’
‘Just married! Don’t be such a baby yourself,’ Era said, setting her book down. ‘Such exciting news. Is Mahmood excited too?’
‘It is so strange to think of them being mother and father,’ Nadira said. She had been upstairs, and had followed her mother down; she stood, posing, at the foot of the stairs, her arm outstretched along the banister. ‘They will be so strict. What clever, dark little babies they are going to have. Sharmin, you have never met my sister Shiri. You don’t know what they are like. I can’t imagine her having a baby.’
‘No,’ Sharmin said. She had a charming, unusual accent; it had made her sisters-in-law smile at first, and then, of course, it was just Sharmin’s way of talking. ‘No, I have never met her. But of course I have heard you all talk about her, and I have met Mahmood. I know what he is like. I would have thought that he would make a very good father, Nadira. Do you think that you are going to make a good aunt?’ She heaved herself upwards; she herself was heavily pregnant, and her own confinement could only be days or weeks away.
Nadira’s eyes grew big. Taking small, graceful, half-running steps, she went to the mirror in the hallway to inspect herself. ‘I had not thought of that,’ she said. ‘Me – an aunt.’
‘But you will be an aunt,’ my grandmother said. ‘And so will Mira, and so will Dahlia, and even baby Bubbly will be an aunt.’
‘How can Bubbly be anyone’s aunt?’ Nadira said. ‘She is only just born herself. She can hardly walk. She is no use to anyone. How can she possibly be allowed to be an aunt?’
‘Nevertheless,’ Nani said, ‘she is going to be the baby’s aunt. Now, are you going to sit quietly and listen to what else your sister has to say in her letter?’
It may seem strange that my aunts grew excited at the news that they were about to become aunts at the birth of my brother when, by their side, their sister-in-law was also heavily pregnant. They were not being rude. The reason for this was that in Bengali, there is one word for an aunt of a brother’s child – the aunt of Laddu’s son, who when he was born was called Ejaj – and there is another word for the aunt of your sister’s child, such as my brother Zahid, whose impending birth was causing so much excitement (khala and fupu). And, of course, to be the aunt of Sharmin’s child was quite a different excitement and a different name altogether, which had been got over with and forgotten about. We like to have as many family excitements as possible, we Bengalis.
My grandmother read the letter out loud. In it, my mother complained rather about Barisal; she said that she did not much like the house they were in, which she had said before, and that Mahmood was getting on well at work with his colleagues, where he was much respected, but that it was difficult to find good servants and that the arguments with the cook had continued, and they had had to find a new maid-of-all-work when the old one had proved dirty. (The cook had turned out to be the master of only three dishes, which came about with terrible monotony, and resisted any suggestion from my mother about a fourth dish – her eventual departure in a rage, an hour before my father’s superior and his wife arrived for dinner, was another of my mother’s few stories of their life in Barisal. Not that the cook’s three dishes were very delicious – the food, my mother said, in Barisal, was simply inedible.) None of these complaints was new. Still, she went on, with all these difficulties, they did have some good news, which she would not hold back from them further: she and Mahmood were to have a baby, in six months’ time. And this was fresh to my mother’s sisters.
(‘You see?’ Era said to Mira. ‘She is not having her baby now. It is coming in six months’ time. Now do you understand?’
‘Yes, I think I understand,’ Mira said.)
They were very happy at this news, my mother wrote, but it was impossible to imagine having the baby in Barisal. The facilities were so wretched, the local doctor old and ignorant and set in his ways. And my mother could not imagine having her first baby without her mother and father and sisters around.
‘Sharmin, do you think . . . ?’ my grandmother said.
‘I think,’ Sharmin said slowly, ‘I think she might not exaggerate. Some of these country doctors! And perhaps the hospital in Barisal has not been renovated since the British time – since it was built, even. I am afraid that the government in Karachi does not always think of hospitals in East Pakistan when they have money to spend on improving matters. Sometimes mothers-to-be worry needlessly. There is no doubt about that. For myself’ – she gestured downwards generally – ‘I would not want to have my baby in Barisal.’
‘Well, that is just what Shiri says,’ my grandmother said.
‘I could very easily look up the mother-and-child mortality rates in Barisal,’ Sharmin said.
There was a general sucking of teeth, and Mary even made a warding-off sign. Sharmin was a practical, intelligent scientist: she sometimes forgot that she was not talking to other practical, intelligent scientists, but to my aunts.
‘Shiri is in no doubt,’ my grandmother said. ‘She is going to come back and live here before the baby is born. So that is settled. She says that Mahmood will come when the baby is born, and then go back to Barisal, and she and the baby will go back and join them later. I wonder what they will call the dear dark little thing? I am sure it is going to be terribly clever. It will be doing sums in its crib.’
And that was insightful and prophetic of my grandmother, because, indeed, my brother Zahid was to grow up to be a scientist, and to be famous in the family for being able to do very complicated long division in his head before he was ten, and for asking his teachers if they could give him some more sums and equations to do, and sucking his pencil sagely, and for explaining to Nani how she should find out the height of the tamarind tree in front of her house with a protractor and a piece of weighted string, and so on and so forth in the way of very clever children of clever parents, which my parents certainly were.
‘A very clever baby, however dark it is going to be. Once Shiri comes back to Dacca,’ Era said, ‘she is never going to go back to Barisal. She will make Mahmood come and work in Dacca, too. She loves the bright lights too much.’
At this absurdity of Era’s, all her sisters giggled behind their hands until Sharmin, who had never met my mother, had to ask what was so amusing. My mother was certainly a modern, capable person, who took charge of business. In that sense she was the product of a city. But she was not someone who could be thought of as loving the bright lights, as Era put it. However, Era was right in her diagnosis, and after the birth of my brother, Ma only briefly went back to Barisal, and for ever afterwards talked about it with a shudder. At six months pregnant, she endured the rattle and shake of the journey back home on those terrible rust-and-steel launches, banging along the rivers like empty biscuit tins, the stench of their black smoke and the foul stink of the water as the boat ran by the tanneries turning her green and making her puke discreetly into a bucket constantly for twenty hours. But, in the event, no harm came to her or to my brother Zahid.
4.
I know what the wooing-and-courtship-and-engagement of my mother and father was like: it must have been very much like the way they behaved to each other when they had been married for decades. They never lost the air of formal respect for each other. My mother had respect for my father because he was so hardworking and ambitious a man. When he attained his ambitions, it did not increase her respect, since she had always had trust in him. My father had respect for my mother because of whose daughter she was: he always felt himself, to some degree, the poor cousin. To the end of their lives, they never used affectionate names for each other. They always addressed each other with the word ‘you’.
But I do not know what the wooing-and-courtship-and engagement of Boro-mama and Sharmin was like. It was carried on away from the eyes of his family, and of hers; under umbrellas, in the rain, during walks in the public gardens and in cinemas, where they would arrive separately and then sit together. They married in secret, and went to live with Sharmin’s sister, whom none of us ever really knew, while Sharmin was finishing her medical degree. So I do not know what they were like at the beginning of their marriage either. All I know is what they were like when my mother returned from Barisal.
‘Sometimes a baby is born with two heads,’ Nadira said, in the salon at Rankin Street.
‘That must be useful,’ Dahlia said.
‘Useful, how?’ Sharmin said. She hooked her fingers underneath the blouse of her sari, tugged and straightened, pulled a swatch of loose sari material, the anchal, as we call it, across her belly. All her sisters-in-law were there, apart from Bubbly, who was having her afternoon nap upstairs. ‘How can it be useful to have two heads?’
‘You could use one to look forward, and the other to look back,’ Nadira said. ‘Or you could talk with one head and read with the other one. Or, in the train, you could look out of the window and read the map at the same time. It would be wonderful to have two heads.’
‘Your baby is going to be so lucky,’ Era said.
‘Lucky, how?’ Sharmin said.
‘Why, if it is born with two heads,’ Nadira said, straightfacedly, ‘it would really be a gift, if you think about it.’
‘We saw a calf born with two heads,’ Dahlia said, meaning herself and Nadira. ‘It was in the village. Nobody thought that was very useful. They killed it.’
‘Pay attention, now,’ Mira said to Dahlia seriously. They were both sitting on the sofa, Mira showing Dahlia a stitching trick in needlework. ‘Look – you see, I make a kind of loop here, and leave it, not too tight-tight, not too slack, and then – ah – yes. That’s it. You see? Now you try.’
‘That’s right,’ Nadira said. ‘They did kill it, didn’t they? But nobody would kill a dear little baby just because it had two heads.’
‘My baby isn’t going to have two heads,’ Sharmin said composedly. ‘Of that I can be sure.’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ Mary said. ‘There is a picture in the encyclopedia of the famous Siamese twins. They were born linked together, at the chest, and they married a pair of sisters and died within three hours of each other at the end of a long life.’
‘The end of two long lives, you mean,’ Nadira said.
‘The end of two long lives, I suppose,’ Mary said. ‘Well, they had two heads.’
‘Two heads? But that is not the same, Mary,’ Dahlia said. ‘I don’t think you quite understand. Those were twins who were joined together. They had two bodies as well as two heads. That is not the same thing at all as Sharmin’s baby, if it is born with two heads. That is more like the calf in the village that had to be killed.’
‘Babies are never born with two heads,’ Sharmin said, without raising her voice. ‘Or hardly ever. And I am sure that my baby is not going to be born with two heads.’
‘Well,’ Nadira said, ‘it would be awfully sad if that happened.’ And she cast a dramatic sigh. She got up, a graceful, glowing twelve-year-old in a floral, aquamarine cotton frock with puffed sleeves, and went over to the harmonium. She doodled a few notes, then sang a few more. She had a sweet, tuneful voice: her father, in company, would often ask her to perform, her sisters more rarely.
‘Sing the song about the flower,’ Era said. Nadira ignored her, doodling on the keyboard and singing in a half-voice, as if thinking through the music.
‘The thing about a baby – an unusual baby –’ Nadira said.
‘Stop teasing poor Sharmin,’ Mira said. She had been occupied, her head down over the embroidery, letting Dahlia follow the sequence of steps with the needle and the bobbin, wrapped tightly with pale blue thread. ‘Really, Nadira – stop it. There will be no baby with two heads. Sharmin’s baby will be simply perfect, you wait and see.’
‘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.
Nani came to see their house, with Pultoo and Bubbly in their best clothes, and Era and her new husband, living in Dhanmondi with the rest of the family, and Mary and Nadira, Mira and Dahlia. In the end, even Nana came, though his visiting was usually confined to those he had been visiting for years, and he generally expected his family to come to him. Nana enjoyed going round the house and pointing out problems. ‘That tree is too close to the house,’ he said. ‘The roots are growing under the foundation. You will have problems with that.’ Shiri shook her head, thanked Grandfather and afterwards, alone, said to Mahmood that the old man worried about everything, even things that were not his to worry about. And it was a pretty tree, which did no one any harm.
They all came, but Boro-mama and his wife did not come. They were asked, and said they would come; but they did not come. A year went by; a year and six months. They did not come. And finally somebody must have had a word because they agreed to come. It may have been Nana, who had grown rather fond of Sharmin, and would often exchange a word or two with her in private when he wanted to get things achieved. The day they were supposed to come, my father came home early from his new offices, and put on a new shirt and tie; my mother had put the children in new clothes and forbidden them to eat the cakes she had brought from the confectioner’s; the house had been cleaned from top to bottom, because still they did not really know Sharmin, and were a little in awe of her. The ride from Boro-mama’s house to Elephant Road should not have taken more than twenty minutes. (Back then, you did not worry about traffic in Dacca.) But they waited, on the covered sofas, on their best behaviour, with the houseboy in a new white Panjabi waiting for the rattle of a rickshaw outside, and nothing came.
In time nervousness gave way to slight crossness. They wondered what could have happened to them. My father said something rather dismissive about Boro-mama; my mother said that he had never been the same since he had married that woman from West Pakistan. My father said, on the contrary, he had always been exactly the same, had always taken advantage of people and never tried to fulfil his obligations. My mother said that it was only an invitation to tea, and it hardly mattered whether he came or not. He could always come another day, if something important had occurred to prevent them coming. My father said, sharply, that he could not conceive of anything of any importance ever occurring in the life of Laddu.
And so my parents had one of their very rare arguments, although there was nothing in what either of them thought that would bring them to disagreement. Laddu and his wife never came, that afternoon. They were prevented.
7.
In Boro-mama’s house, everything was in a state of chaos. Sharmin had discovered that Laddu had been paying attention to a widow of the neighbourhood, a woman of only twenty-eight whose husband had been shot in the street. Laddu had been seen coming out of the block of flats where she lived when he was supposed to be on a domestic errand. For this, she had told him to sleep elsewhere. ‘Where should I sleep?’ Laddu said. The house had only three bedrooms, one Laddu and Sharmin’s, one each for their (now) two children. Downstairs, two rooms were Sharmin’s consulting room and a small waiting room for her patients, and there was only a small sitting room and dining room. ‘Where should I sleep?’ Laddu said again. ‘Should I ask Ahmed to move over and make room for me?’ He was referring to their cook. But in the end Sharmin made him sleep on the sofa in the sitting room, which was now filled with Laddu’s clothes and bedclothes, his film magazines and projects. A small lawnmower sat in the sitting room before the french windows. Laddu had thought he would repair it soon, and it was dripping oil on to the parquet.
Because Laddu could not sleep on the thin upholstery and rigid slats of the sofas in the sitting room, he was in a constant bad mood; because the sitting room was uninhabitable, and all family life was happening in the dining room or Sharmin’s bedroom, Sharmin was in no less of a bad mood. The subject of the widow had not been raised since that first terrible argument.
‘Don’t forget,’ Sharmin said, coming into the sitting room, ‘we are going to visit Mahmood and Shiri in their new house this afternoon.’
‘I remembered,’ Laddu said, sitting up, tousling his hair and yawning. ‘When are we leaving?’
‘My surgery finishes at half past three,’ Sharmin said, ‘so we leave at four. Make sure the children are ready. Their clothes are in the press. Have you a clean shirt? Good. Tell Ahmed to go to the confectioner’s for a box of something to take to Mahmood’s new house. Good. What else? What are you planning to do today? Try to – it doesn’t matter, Laddu.’
Laddu had met the widow when she was outside her apartment block, struggling with an umbrella that the wind had turned inside out. For a moment, he had thought she was the sister of one of his friends, or had thought, with a scarf blown over her face, that she actually was one of his own sisters – his story varied. He was good with his hands, and had quickly turned the umbrella the right way round, fitting the spines back into their sockets, testing their firm hold in the shelter of the widow’s apartment block until the umbrella was as good as new and would be of use for years. It was shocking, Laddu said, how people could question the motives and behaviour of a respectable widowed woman and, in any case, he had thought he knew her, or she was his sister – his story varied. But two weeks ago, Laddu had been seen coming out of the widow’s apartment block by his wife. She had been in a rickshaw, returning home. The thin scream of her displeasure had been carried past him, emerging from the caged and painted back of the rickshaw. He had wondered what that sound could be.
‘Are the children ready?’ Sharmin said, when she emerged from her consulting room, the last of her patients despatched with a prescription or a kindly word.
The children were neatly dressed, or placed in a basket for carrying.
‘And the sweets?’
‘And the rickshaw?’
Laddu had done everything, the motor-rickshaw and the driver already waiting outside. Between Laddu and Sharmin’s house in Rankin Street and my parents’ house in Elephant Road, it was not possible to walk. It was too far; there was a busy market area. These days, too, it was not always wise to walk in the streets of Dacca.
With parcels and children, they piled into the back of the rickshaw. The elder child sat on his father’s lap, to the right; the younger, packed into a basket and firmly asleep, rested on his mother’s knees. A white cardboard box of sweets, leaking sugar syrup that turned the corners translucent, sat squarely between them. The two-stroke engine started up, and they began the short journey.
On every street corner, there was a pair of soldiers, gripping their guns, staring contemptuously into car and rickshaw. Along Dalhousie Street, the soldiers were waving down traffic, or waving it past. On the side of the road, one small platoon had stopped an old woman on her way to market, and made her unload her baskets of vegetables; they were going through her brinjal, dropping them on the road as they went, paying no attention to her screams of protest. ‘Don’t stare,’ Sharmin said to her elder child. ‘Look – there’ – pointing at the other side of the road – ‘is that Mary-aunty? There, I’m sure that’s Mary-aunty, in the pretty pink frock.’
‘I don’t think it is,’ Laddu said. He was slow to catch on sometimes. ‘No, that definitely isn’t.’
Sharmin paid no attention to him. But her attempt at distraction would have been unsuccessful in any case, because in another minute there was the sight of another pair of soldiers at work. They had stopped four country boys – probably brothers, and one of them could not have been more than eight years old – and had put them against the wall, their hands stretched out. The rickshaw was past before they could see what was going to happen to the brothers. Sharmin wondered whether something had happened; whether the army was responding to something. But she knew that this sort of thing had been happening for months. It was not safe to walk in the streets of Dacca, and the threats did not come from badmashes, thugs, mastans, but from the people in uniform. When anything happened in the streets, ever, a small crowd of onlookers with nothing better to do normally gathered, and stood, and stared. It was the natural order of things. Nowadays, when an old woman’s basket of brinjal was turned out on the street, when boys were forced to stand against a wall with their legs spread and wait for humiliation, these were not sights that Dacca wished to stand and stare at. News had reached the people in the streets that they were not safe; they had not, like Sharmin and Laddu, been able to travel in a rickshaw. The best they could do was to hurry past these interesting sights.
‘What is this?’ Laddu said, as the rickshaw turned off Elephant Road. There, at the end, was a group of six soldiers in uniform, standing across the road with their arms folded. ‘What is this?’
‘Roadblock, sahib,’ the rickshaw driver said. ‘Stay calm, please. Will all be fine.’
Laddu tightened his grip on the child as the rickshaw driver pulled to one side. Roadblocks were appearing in unexpected places in Dacca. They were searching for weapons, propaganda, anti-state activism. Since the ban on Bengali poetry and music a few months earlier, the definition of these things had expanded. Nobody would leave the house carrying a volume of Tagore, or even the children’s magazine that bore the latest exciting adventures of Feluda the detective. Feluda the detective, who was just then taking all of Bengal by storm, was supposed to be all right to carry about, but you really never knew. Most people would not take written material of any sort in Bengali out of the house. My grandfather had gone as far as to seal up his library and hide it in the cellar of the house in Dhanmondi.
The soldiers at the roadblock came over and peered into the back; one, two children, two adults, and a box. ‘Get out,’ he said. He had a broad, dark face, his expression betraying nothing. He was Bengali, in another’s uniform.
Laddu and the elder child got out of the rickshaw one side; Sharmin, carrying her baby, placed her box of sweets on the seat of the rickshaw, and got out on the other side. A wave of the rifle, and the rickshaw driver, too, got out. He leant against his cab, fumbling for cheroots. His bored expression suggested this was not the first time this had happened to him today.
‘You – stay here,’ the man who seemed to be the commanding officer said, taking over from the soldier who had ordered them out. Bengali was not the first language of this officer, and it took Laddu a moment to understand that he was telling him to come over to the side of the road. ‘Here! Stay here!’ Laddu and Sharmin walked over. The elder child was holding tightly to his father’s hand. ‘What are you doing with this woman – you? Speak!’
‘This is my wife,’ Laddu said. He had said that with pride many times before. He was proud to be married to a beautiful and clever woman, and had often enjoyed introducing her to his friends, family, to his acquaintances when he met them in the park or the street. Now he said it not with pride but with amazement. Of course Sharmin was his wife.
The commanding officer looked from Laddu, dark in the face, to pale Sharmin. ‘Wife?’ he said, with a jeer, and then broke into Urdu. Laddu spoke his wife’s language only a little – it was typical of him not to have paid attention in school, and not to have acquired much skill in it afterwards. Sharmin intervened. ‘Yes,’ she repeated, in her pretty Bengali, ‘this man is my husband. We are visiting his sister, who lives in this road.’
Before Laddu could understand, a soldier had taken his small son away from him, leading him back to the rickshaw, bending down to say something kindly and reassuring to the little boy. The commanding officer said something in Urdu again; it sounded not like a question, but like a sardonic comment. Sharmin said nothing. Laddu looked at her, but she sternly shook her head, growing pink. Whatever the comment had been, she would not translate it for her husband.
‘Why do you marry this woman?’ the commanding officer said, in his learnt Bengali. ‘Tell me. Why do you not marry someone from your own sort?’
‘That is not your business,’ Laddu said.
‘You must stay with your own sort,’ the officer said. He smiled with bright, wet teeth. Laddu looked at his soldiers: they were all, like him, Bengali, and none made any sign of disapproval or shame.
‘My wife is a doctor,’ he said. ‘You are insulting her now.’
‘Laddu,’ Sharmin said in warning.
‘You must not speak to people like this with no reason,’ Laddu said, his voice growing in heat. His sense of his own worth was being jeered at by a stranger, a Lahore thug in uniform who could hardly understand what was said to him. ‘I will make a complaint about this treatment.’
‘A complaint,’ the commanding officer said wonderingly. Perhaps the word was unfamiliar to him. In a leisurely way, he walked over to the rickshaw. He reached into the back, ignoring the driver, and fetched the box of sweets. ‘What’s that?’ he said, presenting the box of sweets to Sharmin. She opened the ten-inch-square white box: Bengali sweets, twelve by twelve, alternating like a chessboard. ‘Give it to me,’ he said, and she handed it over. He took out one, two, three; he dropped them back into the box carelessly, having seen there was nothing beneath them, not even a confectioner’s invoice. He took a fourth, from the middle of the box, and bit into it. He grimaced, and spat the sweet out on to the road. Sharmin and Laddu said nothing, in indignation. The commanding officer handed the open box to his second in command. Not understanding, the soldier moved as if to hand it back to her, carelessly. But the officer in charge made an impatient move, and deliberately knocked the box and its contents to the street. The bright and glistening sweets scattered across the mud, and he stamped on them, three times.
‘How dare you?’ Laddu began, taking a step forward, but at the same time, the commanding officer gave a brief, certain nod. His second in command raised his rifle butt, and hit Laddu very hard on the side of his head. Laddu fell to his knees with a roar of pain, and the soldier, once more, hit him between the shoulder blades with the rifle butt. Laddu’s face was in the dirt of the street, pressed into the mud and the scattering of fine, delicious sweets, and he saw a boot descending as he shut his eyes.
‘That is not your wife,’ the officer in charge said in a level voice. ‘That must not be your wife.’ He looked at Sharmin, screaming, and, with a thoughtful air, called her a terrible name. The small platoon stood back from the scene, and shortly Laddu, with Sharmin’s help, stood up shakily and went back to the rickshaw. His beautiful, clean white shirt was smeared with mud and sugar and blood. Their small son had watched everything, and was burying his wailing head in a soldier’s thigh-muscle. All the time the rickshaw driver had not altered his position, and had continued to smoke his cheroot without comment or protest.
8.
My grandfather, about this time, believing that the ban on Bengali poetry and music would soon allow the soldiers of the Pakistani state to force their way into private homes and destroy private possessions had given orders for the library to be parcelled up, along with the best of the pictures, Nadira’s harmonium, the collection of music and even four or five bowls. Nana had a beautiful library; much of it went back to his student days in Calcutta when, he said, he would always prefer to buy a book he really wanted to read rather than eat dinner. (Mr Khandekar-nana said that he usually insisted on eating dinner anyway, sometimes at the expense of Mr Khandekar-nana, who was not so much of a bibliophile in youth.) Nana made sure the parcels were well sealed against damp and insects; he had them placed in wool-lined tea chests, and sealed again; he had them taken down to the cellar of the house in Dhanmondi, and when his books, and pictures, and bowls, and music, and his daughter’s instrument were safely stowed, he decided to have the door to the cellar plastered over, so that it would simply look like a single-roomed cellar beneath the house, with a few odds and ends that had been discarded, and a few broken chairs piled up against the false plaster wall. Rustum did all of this at my grandfather’s command. My grandfather did not carry out any of these precautions in secret, but asked the servants of the house to pack and parcel and plaster. When the task was done, the house looked bare and dull, with nothing but law books on the shelves of my grandfather’s study.
‘It’s just until things improve,’ my grandfather said, and it was very unlike him to plead or cajole, in any circumstances. ‘Think of it as packing for a long sea voyage. Imagine we’re travelling to England, and won’t be able to unpack any books for months, or even years.’
‘You will never be able to remember, never, never, never,’ my grandmother said. ‘You have forgotten already what the wall was that you put everything behind. You will try to knock down the wrong wall and the house will collapse.’
‘Rustum remembers,’ Nana said. ‘I have faith in Rustum. He remembers where the door used to be.’