Scenes From Early Life (15 page)

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.’