Scenes From Early Life (2 page)

‘Do you remember?’ Nani would say, her leg resting on the teak footrest. ‘Do you remember the steamed rui that Sharmin taught Ahmed how to make when everyone was living here? Do you remember, Bubbly? It was so good, that steamed rui with lemon and ginger. And she taught him, and he never got it right afterwards. I don’t know why. But it was never so delicious ever again. He didn’t listen properly, or he made some changes of his own, wretched boy, and completely spoiled the dish. Oh, I loved to eat that steamed rui. I could have eaten it every day.’

‘It was so clever of her,’ Dahlia would say, calling from half a table away. ‘It is so strange that it was her to be so clever with fish, being Bihari, and not liking fish as much as we do.’

‘Well, Dahlia,’ Nani said. ‘She didn’t like fish at the beginning. But she came to like it because your big brother likes it so much. And now she likes it as much as anyone, and she has such clever ways with it.’

‘Because, of course,’ Bubbly said, taking no notice of her mother, ‘there was not always a great choice of things to eat, that year, but you could often get rui when there was no other fish to be had. I wish Sharmin would come back and teach Ahmed how to make it again, but she says she can’t remember, and she says she doesn’t know what’s wrong with the way Ahmed cooks it, so that would really be a fool’s errand.’

Nani and Nana had the best view of the television, which was at the far end of the table, on the sideboard next to a little fridge for all sorts of odds and ends. Dinner took place at eight, because that was when the television news was on.

Next to my grandmother sat Mary-aunty. She was the eldest of the sisters, after my mother. It was her job to keep the children under control, but she could often be tearful when faced with determined opposition, and I wonder if she was very good at her household task.

Next to her sat Shibli, who was Boro-mama’s son. I was very jealous of Shibli. Whereas we only came to visit Nani and Nana at weekends, Shibli lived with them all the time, and visited Boro-mama, his father, only occasionally. This seemed to me the height of glamour, and it made me sick to see the ways in which Shibli was spoilt by my grandparents.

Choto-mama, Little-uncle, came next. His name was Pultoo. He was not much older than the bigger children, and was still at college. He was not a lawyer; he was an artist. In an odd way, my grandfather was rather proud of that: he used to say, ‘If Pultoo wants to, he wants to.’ Some people assumed that Choto-mama had to sit next to Shibli, with his spoilt ways, as a punishment from my grandfather. But that was not true: my grandfather had given Pultoo a large room with sunny windows on the ground floor of his house as a studio. He was rather proud of him, as I say.

Then his sister, Bubbly-aunty, the youngest of my aunts, and then Sunchita and Sushmita, my sisters. They sat at the end of the table, next to the television, which they could not see very well, and the fridge, which they often had to open and fetch something from for my grandfather.

The far end of the table was not a good place to sit, and there might be placed a village aunt or uncle, a cousin travelling to Dacca on business. And next to them, working back on the other side of the table, might be Dahlia-aunty, my favourite, and Era-aunty. And I was between them and my mother. My grandfather called me Churchill; the rest of the family called me Saadi. Dahlia would lean over and encourage me to eat, especially delicious little things; she would talk to me about pickles in her memory. Nadira I loved, because she was such a good singer, though, of course, not at the dinner table. And my mother sat by my grandfather, as the eldest daughter.

Two uncles, Boro-mama and Choto-mama, Big-uncle and Little-uncle; six aunts, Mary, Era, Mira, Nadira, Dahlia, Bubbly. Dahlia was my favourite and I was hers.

6.

Once, Pultoo-uncle was late for dinner. He was expected, but had gone out in the afternoon and had not returned by the time my grandfather came back. Pultoo had a wide circle of friends at the college of art, and occasionally he was seen in a café or ambling through a park, gesticulating and talking in the middle of ten friends. He was the only one in the family to wear traditional dress all the time, a long shirt and pyjama trousers. The rest of the family were proud of him, and thought that he could dress as he chose. He was thin and dark, with hair that swept back like a film star’s and big eyes set deep in his face. When he was excited, as, in conversation, he often was, his hands chopped the air, like a cook’s at work.

It was understood that Pultoo-uncle had gone out to a class at the college of art that morning.. My sister Sunchita and I had been allowed to watch the television in the dining room. We had seen
Double Deckers
, and
Tom and Jerry
, and a new programme made in Bangladesh. My sister, who liked to lie on her stomach on the dining-table when she watched television, had been shooed off when the table was set; the children’s programmes had come to an end, and the adults’ programmes begun. Soon it would be the news and dinnertime. About the house there was the sense that the kitchen was ready and waiting, the dishes now being kept warm. My grandfather was not a stickler about mealtimes, but he liked to know if someone was going to be late.

‘I hope nothing is wrong,’ Mary-aunty said.

‘Wrong?’ Era said, alarmed.

‘Nonsense, nothing could be wrong,’ Dahlia-aunty said, although everyone remembered the time, not so long before, when young men had failed to come home and were never seen again. That possibility lingered for many years, and people did their families the kindness of being punctual, on the whole, to save their nerves.

But Pultoo-uncle came in, as the clock in the hall struck eight, brushing his hair back with his hand and depositing a table-top-sized folder by the front door, apologizing as he came. Warm, he smelt of geraniums, and his long shirt was dusty with the red dust of the street. He had two friends with him, two other artists. Their names were Kajol and Kanaq. Kanaq fascinated me and my sisters because she came from a tribe; her appearance was highly exotic, with her slanted eyes and sleepy air. It was not unusual for Pultoo to bring friends for dinner, and these two often arrived at my grandfather’s house in the late afternoon on a Friday, and stayed for dinner with only a little urging, only one diffident invitation. They lived in lodgings, and I believe they enjoyed the chance of a family dinner. My grandfather did not really care who came for dinner; my grandmother, on the other hand, liked to be given the chance to offer an invitation.

‘Can we find space for these two?’ Pultoo said, when he came back from washing, his face wet and glistening, his white teeth shining. ‘I’m sure there is space.’

My grandmother muttered something, and went off to the kitchen with the bare appearance of graciousness.

‘I do like them,’ my sister Sunchita said, in her adult, mature, book-reading way about the guests, as we went back to the dining room to catch the rest of the television before the news started. ‘But their painting is awful.’

7.

When the news was finished, my grandmother asked Pultoo what he had been doing at the art college that morning. He asked her permission to get out the drawings from his life class, which he had left in the folder. He passed them round the table; they were charcoal drawings of a naked man sitting on a box. ‘I think this one is the best,’ my grandfather said simply, when they got to him.

‘And we were late because we were planning something,’ Pultoo said.

‘Yes,’ Mary-aunty said. ‘You certainly were late.’

‘Late, yes,’ Era said. She often agreed with her sisters, in an echo; she was shy and did not venture her own opinions easily. Even her echoes of opinions were often given first in the direction of her plate.

‘We really got carried away,’ Kanaq said, her slanting eyes looking at the biriani. ‘It is such a good idea.’

‘We are going to produce greetings cards,’ Kajol said. ‘People always like greetings cards – we are going to give them something special.’

My uncle went on to explain that their plan was for hand-made cards, sketches in pen and ink, in watercolours and in pencil, and to sell them on a stall in Ramana field in the first instance. ‘After that, if it is successful, we can think about opening a shop,’ Pultoo said. ‘It is such a good idea, I don’t know why no one has thought of it before.’

The cards would be for the new year. In Bangladesh, Choto-mama said, people were always sending cards for any reason; but they were mass-produced, the same cards that were sold anywhere, and did not speak to the sender or to the recipient. ‘I saw a birthday card,’ my uncle’s friend Kajol said. ‘It was a photograph of a mountainside in the Himalaya, I expect, and the message inside was “This is what I dream of . . .” It means nothing, that kind of thing. Produced in factories, designed by slaves.’

‘Yes,’ Pultoo said, in his excitable way. ‘People would not buy that if they could buy the sort of thing we are going to make for them.’

‘What sort of thing?’ my grandmother said.

I wondered whether their idea was to make cards with pictures of naked people on them. I did not think people would want to buy those. But Pultoo-uncle explained that they would be drawing and painting famous views in Bangladesh, typical scenes of Bangladesh, such as a village house or a tea plantation, perhaps even well-known corners of Dacca. ‘I would much prefer to see a hand-drawn picture like that,’ Pultoo said.

‘When are your teachers coming?’ Shibli called to Dahlia-aunty. ‘The musicians.’

‘Quiet, Shibli,’ Nani said, in her stagy way. ‘Don’t you have any respect? Your uncle is talking about your country.’

‘Your country, yes,’ Era said.

8.

The servants in my grandfather’s house held a fascination for me. I never knew how many there were. After Mary-aunty had put my sister and me to bed in the afternoons, we would often start up a row, a pillow fight, a shouting match, and soon she would come to see what the noise was. But she was somebody who could not pass another human being known to her in any degree without greeting them. So we could hear the passage of Mary-aunty through the house from her slapping chappals, and from a constant stream of greetings, and expressions of concern and interest: ‘Good afternoon, Rustum’; ‘how are your children, Timur; is your daughter happy with Mr Khandekar . . .’ That sort of thing. There were enough servants to slow her progress, to warn us and allow us to calm down and pretend to be asleep by the time she opened the door to shout at us.

My grandfather had a gardener called Atish. Over the years, he had become both an inside servant and an outside servant, according to need. I was not allowed to follow Atish about when he was inside, cleaning and polishing. When he was gardening, there were no objections to my walking about with him and asking him any number of questions. There was plenty to occupy him: the huge bougainvillaeas that poured out of pots and formed a blazing arch, the way that the terrace and entrance needed to be swept of dead leaves and flowers. He trimmed back the flowers in the flowerbeds; he carried out mysterious surgical operations with saw and secateurs on the fruit trees – the guava tree, the mango tree, the jackfruit tree, the banana tree, the tamarind tree, with its neatly diagrammatic leaves and its extravagant flower. There was plenty of digging and pruning and planting to do, with a small boy gazing and a chicken or two following round in the hope of an upturned worm.

Atish was a poor Hindu who was left behind in 1947. Grandfather and Grandmother had had to leave Calcutta in a great hurry and come to Dacca. Nana had bought a house in Rankin Street from a rich Hindu, who had had to leave Dacca in a great hurry and go to Calcutta. I wondered why they had not simply swapped their houses, but they had not. Atish had not gone like the rich Hindus to Calcutta: he had stayed where he was, and Grandfather had taken pity on him and employed him in the garden. It suited him.

Nana liked to employ poor and vulnerable people. All of them stayed for ever. And Nana’s relations with them sometimes surprised his friends, since he encouraged the people he employed to speak their minds to him. Sometimes they developed independent habits, which could prove inconvenient to the rest of the household. Rustum, Nana’s driver, was another of these vulnerable people, but after a while, he developed the habit of taking the car out on his own, or of ignoring instructions. Sometimes my grandmother would come out after lunch, expecting Rustum to be there to drive her to a friend’s house, and would find that he had gone out with the car, and no one knew where he had gone. When he came back, I had heard him blame Dahlia-aunty, saying that she had told him to go and fetch something from a shop on the other side of Dacca. She had demanded, he would say, a particular sort of sandesh, one that could only be got in a confectioner’s shop on Sadarghat. He knew the sort of blame that could be convincingly put on Dahlia. But if this got back to Dahlia-aunty, she would fly into a furious passion. It was the first thing that came into Rustum’s mind, it seemed, and it did not occur to him that anyone might ask Dahlia whether there was any truth in his story.

‘How could he? How could he? How could he?’ Dahlia would shout, sometimes audibly from outside the gates of the house. To passers-by and neighbours, it did not seem obvious that these screams were caused only by a servant’s unreliable events; surely, they must have thought, a husband or father must have threatened a beating to the victim, at the very least. But nobody beat anyone in Nana’s house, and Dahlia screamed because Rustum had pretended she had ordered him about.

Finally there came the terrible day when Rustum had a fight with Nana himself. It occurred in the week. When we arrived that Friday, Rustum was not there. This was not unusual, but it was strange that the red Vauxhall was in the garage when both Nana and Rustum were out of the house. When Nana came home, he came home in a cycle-rickshaw, and I understood that something atrocious had happened. Rustum had been asked to leave. ‘I could forgive him for taking the car without permission,’ my grandfather said, a week or two later when he could bring himself to talk about it. ‘But it was the lying afterwards I could not put up with.’ My grandfather, however, immediately felt guilty about evicting Rustum and his family from the flat in the servants’ block, and made it his business to find Rustum another place to live and even another job. When, five years later, Rustum was diagnosed with tuberculosis, my grandfather paid for his treatment.