Scenes From Early Life (18 page)

‘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.’

1.

At the school where Amit taught, there was a new teacher. He was a man in early middle age called Khadim Hussain. He was said to be an English master although, as far as Amit knew, no English master had left and none needed replacing.

The headmaster, Mr D. B. Chakravarty, introduced Khadim Hussain at a short meeting of all the staff. Mr D. B. Chakravarty usually did this but always before, when introducing a new member of staff, he had taken the opportunity to talk about the ethos of the school, the high standards it had maintained, and his hopes for its future. The school had been set up in the British time, and Mr D. B. Chakravarty was very keen on the idea that it had managed to maintain the best standards of the past to build a better nation for the future.

Amit had heard this speech several times before. It had been made when he himself had been introduced to the rest of the staff. He had wondered at the time what application it had to him personally, but had been flattered by such fine-sounding phrases. On subsequent occasions, Mr D. B. Chakravarty had made very much the same speech over the head of a series of different new teachers. Mr D. B. Chakravarty’s speeches at Founder’s Day, when the boys placed a garland of orange blossom around the marble neck of the bust in the great hall, were not intended for the boys whom they seemed to address. They were intended for the parents of the boys, who would understand what a good-quality education their sons were receiving. In the same way, when Mr D. B. Chakravarty made these speeches on the arrival of a new member of staff, they were intended to remind the rest of the staff of how they should behave, and the standards they were expected to keep up. The school was a good one, and the headmaster had succeeded, during his twenty years in post, in maintaining the standards he regularly proclaimed.

Khadim Hussain entered the staff quarters with Mr D. B. Chakravarty. They made a small kind of pantomime of politeness at the door: Mr D. B. Chakravarty offered to give way to this unfamiliar face. The unfamiliar face, a thin, alert face with hair divided down the middle, a large nose, thin eyebrows and not very good, rather broken teeth as he smiled, gave a generally not very trustworthy impression. The person insisted, as Mr D. B. Chakravarty offered to follow him into the room, on giving way to the headmaster. But he did so in a smiling, insincerely respectful way. It was not the way of a junior teacher. Amit had the impression, watching this performance, that this person was a government inspector of some sort.

And Mr D. B. Chakravarty did not make his normal speech of welcome and exhortation, but merely said, in a brief way, that this was Mr Khadim Hussain; that he was joining the school from a post in a different part of the country; that his particular area of expertise was poetry and drama, especially in English. He would also be moving about the school in the weeks to come, discovering ‘how things are done here,’ Mr D. B. Chakravarty said. But he turned to the assured man seated by his side, whose eyes were roaming brightly round the room, smiling with his bad teeth as he fixed on any member of the staff. It was as if Mr D. B. Chakravarty was enquiring of the newcomer how things were done here. ‘I appeal to every member of staff to give Mr Khadim Hussain every aid and assistance in their power,’ the headmaster finished. Without waiting to introduce himself to the other members of staff assembled, Mr Khadim Hussain nodded generally around the room. Without speaking, he left the room before the headmaster, holding the door open for him. The headmaster followed.

2.

For six years now, Amit had been teaching at the high school. He taught the boys the Bengali language, poetry and music. At first, he had found them a challenge to teach. Their liveliness had, in Amit’s first year or two, spilled over into chaos. Once, an older master had stepped in from the next room to enquire what this unholy bedlam could be. Amit had believed, after his first year, that Mr D. B. Chakravarty would call him in and ask him to find another position in different circumstances.

But that had not happened and, in time, these matters had improved. In teaching these subjects, he had eventually discovered within himself an authority he had not suspected. He looked with interest, these days, at those of his colleagues who had difficulty maintaining discipline in their classes; he even gave advice to them from time to time. It was not a matter of shouting, he believed, but of a sort of strength within – a sort of stillness or perhaps attentiveness or . . . It had to be said that when you tried to express that sort of thing in words, it always sounded remarkably silly. But Amit, now, had no difficulty keeping the boys’ attention. A firm look would quell the beginnings of rebellion. In reality, he believed that his classes were orderly and he was successful with the boys because the subject was beautiful and they could understand that. Of course they would pay attention, and Amit believed that his contribution to the school’s reputation was generally respected and valued. When he went home to the flat belonging to Mrs Khandekar, which he shared with his friend Altaf, he was cheerful at the end of the day’s work, even exhilarated, and had funny stories to tell his friend about the day’s events.

It was two weeks before Amit came across Mr Khadim Hussain again. The boys were studying a poem by Jibananda Das. It was an advanced class, full of clever boys, and one of them, as Mr Khadim Hussain came into the room without knocking, was standing at the blackboard and reading the difficult but interesting poem:

Nevertheless, the owl stays wide awake;

The rotten still frog begs two more moments

in the hope of another dawn in conceivable warmth.

We feel in the deep tracelessness of flocking darkness

the unforgiving enmity of the mosquito-net all around . . .

The boys looked round as the door opened and Mr Khadim Hussain came in. The boys, surprisingly, stood up in an almost military way. Amit had, from the beginning, excused this class from standing up when he entered. They were nearly adults, and, besides, most of them were taller than him. But they stood up for Mr Khadim Hussain, who came into the room without saying anything. A boy at the back offered Mr Khadim Hussain his chair, and he took it. ‘Sit down, boys,’ Amit said. It occurred to him that the class were more likely to have come across Mr Khadim Hussain in the course of their day than he was. They knew what he expected. In the staff quarters, no one had discussed the newcomer, even when everyone knew that he had inspected a colleague’s classes.

The class went on, in a more awkward way. ‘What does this line mean?’ Amit said, and the boys inspected their textbooks closely, not catching anyone’s eye. ‘Does the poet literally mean an owl when he speaks of an owl? Is there an owl before the poet’s eye?’ Amit was aware that he was rambling and blustering, and the boys had no response to make to him.

‘Does the owl symbolize the world of nature?’ a boy finally suggested.

Amit continued. Mr Khadim Hussain’s piercing eye, at the back of the class, was on him. From time to time, he wrote something in his notebook. His pen jabbed and stabbed at the page.

At the end of the class, Mr Khadim Hussain closed his notebook and placed his pen carefully in the upper pocket of his white shirt. He smiled with his broken teeth at Amit. ‘I believe we must vacate this room,’ he said. Amit had seen his shape going to and fro in the school, and had grown to recognize his sharp, fussy, haste-filled walk in the corridors. He had never before heard his voice, which was deep and slightly lisping. ‘We will talk while we walk.’

Amit put his books together in a pile, and together they left the classroom, leaving the boys to await their next teacher.

‘That was an interesting poem you were teaching,’ Hussain said. ‘What was it?’

Amit explained.

‘You did not ask the boys to explain the moral and religious aspects of the poem,’ Hussain said. ‘Or had you discussed that first of all, before I arrived?’

‘I do not think the poem has a religious aspect,’ Amit said. ‘It did not occur to me to ask the boys to find a religious meaning in the poem.’

They were walking side by side as they talked; they might have been taken for two colleagues undertaking a serious, good-natured, scholarly conversation. Hussain gave a small, disappointed hiss. ‘Have you not thought of teaching poetry first of all if it refers to the Prophet, peace be upon him? Surely that must be the best poetry to teach to our pupils.’

Amit thought that if Hussain taught English literature, he would find it hard to base his teaching exclusively upon writing of that description, but did not say so. ‘Jibananda Das is a very beautiful poet,’ he said. ‘He is one of the best poets in Bengali.’

‘There are other very beautiful poets who write on more elevated themes,’ Hussain said. ‘Owls and frogs, making their noises in the swamp. It does not seem a very elevated subject for poetry.’ He pushed open the double doors that led to the staff quarters. By the headmaster’s study, four boys were waiting on cane chairs to receive punishment for that morning’s misdemeanours. ‘And poetry on religious themes should take first place in education, do you not agree?’

‘Jibananda Das may have written poetry with a religious aspect,’ Amit said, aware that he was treading on dangerous ground here. ‘But he was not a Muslim, so it would not have been the sort of religious poetry you have in mind.’

Mr Khadim Hussain turned and looked at Amit. Amit knew what he meant to convey: that in this school, Hindu poetry was being taught by Hindu schoolmasters, and this was going to come to an end. ‘I think you teach music, too,’ he said.

‘Yes, I do,’ Amit said.

‘And the literature you teach, it seems to be the sort of literature, poetry, that men and women sing in whorehouses,’ Mr Khadim Hussain said. There was no rage in his voice; he seemed perfectly calm, as if establishing a point. Amit could not respond to this. ‘That is what I understood from this morning’s – ah – display. Well, let us see how things develop in the next few weeks and months. We are shaping a new generation here, I believe. It would be a pity if their knowledge was made up exclusively of the ditties sung in the foulest back-streets of Gulistan. I’m sure you agree.’

He opened the door to the staff quarters, indicating that Amit should go in before him. But when Amit was through the door, it swung to behind him. Mr Khadim Hussain had gone on, without saying goodbye, to his next task.

At the end of that week, a typed notice, signed by Mr D. B. Chakravarty, Headmaster, went up on the notice board in the staff quarters, to the effect that Mr Khadim Hussain, BA (Hons) had been appointed deputy headmaster with responsibility for curriculum, with immediate effect.

3.

‘The exhibition has been cancelled,’ Amit said, at home, to Altaf.

‘What exhibition is that?’ Altaf said.

Amit poured out water from the jug into the blue china bowl; he splashed water on his face, then, cupping water in his hands, snorted it up his nose and spurted it out again. Once more, he took a handful of water and splashed it all over his face. When he was done and the dust of the street washed clean, he reached out for his towel. Altaf passed it to him before returning to his cooking.

‘What exhibition were you talking about?’ Altaf said.

‘The boys’ painting exhibition,’ Amit said. ‘It has been going on every year since anyone can remember, even the headmaster. Every January, there is keen competition to be included in the exhibition. There is no prize, but there is a plaque in the art room listing the people who have been declared the best three painters of the year, and the boys like it. “Mother Padma”.’

‘Yes?’ Altaf said.

‘That was the theme set for the exhibition this year. Mr D. B. Chakravarty likes to set the topic himself. He says it enables the visitor to the exhibition to compare like with like, and not have to worry about whether a drawing of tomatoes is better than a painting of the Maidan at Calcutta. And this year he set the topic of Mother Padma. It was a popular topic, I understand. The boys like to paint the river. They find it a challenge, and it requires a trip away from the art room, which of course they enjoy.’

‘But the exhibition has been cancelled.’

‘Mr D. B. Chakravarty set the topic six months ago. And that was really a long while back. It was certainly before the advent of Mr Khadim Hussain.’

‘I take it that Mr Khadim Hussain does not approve.’

‘He discovered about the art prize and the exhibition when he paid a visit to the art room last week, and found it filled with paintings of the Padma river. He does not believe that the school should be teaching art at all, of course.’

‘Of course. Does he aim to turn the school into a madrasa?’

‘And that afternoon, a letter appeared on the notice board saying that the annual art competition and exhibition would not now take place. It was signed by Mr D. B. Chakravarty himself but, then, all the letters that appear in this way are signed by him. I believe that they are written by Mr Khadim Hussain. His power waxes terrible within the school.’

‘Who is he?’ Altaf asked, at length.

Amit considered. ‘He is the new deputy headmaster,’ he said.

‘I understand that,’ Altaf said.

‘But when he arrived, two weeks ago, he was introduced as a new teacher of English. That I do not understand. I would be very surprised to discover that he has taught a single class in English since he arrived, and there are other aspects of his conversation which lead me to think that he does not have a great deal of interest in English as a subject. I cannot understand why Mr D. B. Chakravarty would mislead us in such a way.’

Altaf placed the bowls of dal, fish and rice on the floor between them, and sat down, crossing his legs. ‘I understand that,’ he said. ‘I understand how this man was introduced. But do you think that is who he really is?’

‘No,’ Amit said. ‘I am sorry to say so. But I do not think he is a teacher at all.’

It was six months now since Altaf and Amit had last been to the school of the Bengali arts they had helped to start up. For three years it had been a success. The hall which the university had made available had become a public meeting place, and readings of poetry, exhibitions of art, tapestry and pottery, as well as musical performances and other matters, had taken place there with some popularity. If nothing else, people came there to talk. There was a sense of defiance. Sometimes when the people attending the school of the Bengali arts left the university, they found that there were police officers at the gate, or sometimes merely a group of badmashes lounging in a threatening way. But that had not discouraged the many people who came – the weekly attenders, the occasional regulars, and those who were just drawn in by an interesting subject, or out of a mild, unfocused curiosity. Only a year ago did the numbers begin to fall, until nobody was left but the founders and a pair of undissuadables. Something had changed. No longer did people leaving the Bengali academy sing as they left, as they walked past the police officers at the gate. They hurried out as if they might have been attending anything at the university. And then one day Altaf said to Amit that there was no point in attending the academy any longer; that they could achieve as much by performing at home, at Sufiya’s, at Mr Khandekar’s, at one of a dozen houses in Dhanmondi where they were welcome guests. But those evenings were happening less and less frequently, too.