Scenes From Early Life (27 page)

Bubbly was different. Even when she was small, her friends had been what Nana dismissively referred to as ‘silly little girls’. He did not like to see small girls sitting about for hours dressing each other up and talking about love, he said; there was a fearful row when Bubbly, aged nine, was found to have borrowed her mother’s scent and sprayed it all over herself and her friends in the course of some game of femininity. His objection, really, was to the fact that he did not know the parents of the children whom Bubbly made friends with. His other children, mostly, had played well with Khandekar’s children, the doctor’s children, the children of Sufiya Kamal the poet, of painters and scientists and lawyers. Those were the sorts of people that Nana knew; their children came plainly, sensibly dressed, had nice manners, and Nana liked to see them. Bubbly’s friends came from people Nana did not know, and whose world was quite unfamiliar to him. Some of them kept shops, or factories, or import-export. Their children arrived like large glittering insects, in pink and diamanté; they wore party dresses on all occasions; they were called Polly and Rita Chatterji, Anita and Jolly and Molly and Milly, and they called each other Sweetie, and enquired about the source of each other’s hairbands, all afternoon long. Nana was almost indignant when he saw them arriving, and morosely quoted Michael Dutta in their hearing. Bubbly wept and begged to be allowed to dress in such a way; she was refused, but found ways to ornament herself through judicious use of pocket money. It was a challenge to Nana and his family.

The parents of his other children’s friends would draw up, come in, pass the time of day, make themselves agreeable. Sometimes, when the time came for Bubbly’s friends to be collected, a car would draw up outside, and a rude hooting of the horn would indicate that it was time to go. Nobody would step out; the child would merely say, ‘Oh, I must dash,’ and head off, without saying goodbye properly to her hosts.

There had been the occasional unexpected friend before. Pultoo’s friend Alam was one of those – he was not somebody who showed much interest in poetry or law or politics. He would often begin an observation by saying, ‘My father always says . . .’ followed by some trite and reactionary observation from the world of tea, hardly applicable to real circumstances at all. ‘What I detest about that boy,’ Nana said, ‘is that he is quite incapable of listening to anyone else’s experience, however interesting. Something more interesting always happened to his family, and he rushes to share it with us.’

Nobody could understand why Pultoo was friends with him. But he came, and his presence, over the years, was tolerated because the rest of Pultoo’s friends were so different, so much more normal. Bubbly’s friends were all very much the same: they were silly, and adorned, and rich, and not as charmingly well mannered as they thought they were. ‘I think they are rather fun,’ Nani would say, after Nana had finished quoting Nazrul on the subject. She was an expert at that favourite Bengali occupation, making the best of it.

Bubbly sidled out of the house and stood behind Pultoo for a minute or two. She observed Alam, and then the painting. Then she bent down and put her face almost against the painting, imitating in a ridiculous way the manner of connoisseurs. ‘I see,’ she said, in the imitation of a deep voice. ‘But you’ve made his nose too big.’

‘He has a big nose,’ Pultoo said judiciously.

‘Not as big as that,’ Bubbly said. ‘People will look at that and say that they don’t see how he could reasonably have a nose as big as that one.’

‘Well, the shading will moderate it a little,’ Pultoo said. ‘I have to give a sense of it, though – I want it to look big.’

‘I don’t think you should talk about me as if I am not here,’ Alam said. ‘My aunt once had her portrait painted. She has it hanging in her drawing room. Of course, that was by a famous artist, when she was travelling in Paris. She always says—’

‘The fact of the matter is,’ Pultoo said, ‘once you sit down in front of a painter, and have your appearance rendered by brush and pencil, you become no more than an arrangement of planes and volume. Light and shade falling on a surface. I don’t think of it even as a nose. It is just a geometrical problem.’

‘Well, it is not a geometrical problem to me,’ Alam said. ‘It is what I use to smell things with.’

‘That was surprisingly witty,’ Bubbly said. ‘I like your friend. He can stay, if he likes.’

‘You should see the portrait of my aunt,’ Alam said to Bubbly. ‘It really is a remarkable painting. She visited every painter in Paris before she decided on which one to commission. You see, the fact is . . .’

But then it was that the gate was pushed open, and through it came Pinky Chowdhury, or someone similar, her sister Sonia, or perhaps just a friend, and two or three others, Milly, Mishti, Tina, coming to the door chattering like birds, and Bubbly spread her arms wide in greeting, and Alam stood up, too, smiling, as if he had anything to do with it. The portrait session was over for the day.

4.

Around this time, the tension started to surface between Boro-mama’s family downstairs in Rankin Street, and our family upstairs in the same house.

‘Sunchita,’ my mother said, ‘you are keeping us waiting now. What is it?’

‘I don’t know what book to take,’ my sister said. ‘I just can’t decide.’

‘It really doesn’t matter,’ my mother said. ‘We are only going to Nana’s for the afternoon. I don’t know why you want to take a book at all.’

‘But I have almost finished my book,’ Sunchita said, not paying any attention. ‘I am going to finish it in half an hour, and then I won’t have anything else to read. But I can’t start another book before I’ve finished this one. I am just going to have to take both books.’

‘Sunchita,’ my father said, tapping his umbrella on the parquet, ‘you are going to take one book, and one book only. It doesn’t matter which one. Now. Have you decided?’

‘I can’t decide,’ Sunchita said. ‘Why can’t I take both?’

‘Because I say you can’t,’ my mother said. ‘You can take one book, or neither. You’re keeping us waiting now, and you’re keeping Rustum waiting downstairs.’

The rest of us – my elder sister, my brother and I – were sitting on the bench in the hallway, clean and scrubbed, in our best visiting clothes. It was only Sunchita who, every week, indulged in this indecisiveness, and it was always over a book. The thought of finishing a book and having no other to hand was terrible to her.

Downstairs, there was the sound of the red Vauxhall starting up. ‘You see?’ my father said. ‘Rustum is losing his patience now. He is running his engine to show what a hurry he is in.’

My father said this to hurry Sunchita up, but he was not serious. Five minutes later, however, when we finally got to the gate, Rustum and the red Vauxhall were nowhere to be seen. The boy downstairs, when asked, said in a puzzled way that Advocate-sahib’s car had come, indeed it had, lent by Advocate-sahib, and had taken master and mistress to visit friends in Azimpur. Boro-mama had seen an opportunity, and for his own purposes had swiped the car that Nana had sent to fetch us. We had to go in a pair of rickshaws, to Nana’s astonishment when we arrived.

On that occasion, nobody said anything to Boro-mama. The breach could almost have been designed to make anyone complaining about it sound small-minded. After all, why should not Boro-mama use his father’s car as much as my parents, for whom it had been despatched? The same might be true of a peculiar incident in which their cook was found to have borrowed six wooden spoons from the upstairs family without asking. Who complains about the loss of a wooden spoon or six? It was beneath the dignity even of our cook to complain about the inconvenience.

‘Madam,’ Majeda said, coming in the next day, ‘there is no water in the house to bathe the children. Is there a problem with the pipes?’

My mother did not know, but went downstairs to discover. The water in the house flowed from a large underground tank that supplied both our house and Mr Khan’s house next door. Downstairs, she found Mr Khan already talking to Laddu; his water, too, had dried up without warning or reason. Her brother was saying that he could not understand it, but my mother went with their gardener to the pump that controlled the flow of water, and discovered that there was plenty of water in the tank, but that somebody had closed off the flow. There was no reason for anyone to do this. It must have been Laddu or Sharmin, both of whom denied knowing anything about it. It was a puzzle to them, as well. My mother returned upstairs in a temper.

Such small inconveniences arrived almost every day. ‘You see,’ my father said, ‘your brother simply wants to make us think that it is at his behest that we live here at all. One of these days he will go too far. I’d like to see the look on his face when he realizes that we’re not there any longer to keep him in funds.’

‘He asked me for ten taka yesterday for replacement lightbulbs,’ my mother said.

‘Lightbulbs for downstairs, I expect,’ my father said.

My father did not work at home, in the chambers, every day. Quite often he went to court. I used to like to go with him. The atmosphere of the courthouse was special to me; a grand white building, in broad, flat grounds. Often you would see old men congregating there, reading newspapers leaning against a tree, talking with energy. Inside, as you walked through the cloisters, the rooms of the court officials were open; dusty, brown, dim-lit rooms, high-piled with papers, all tied with ribbon, and between, the small, beetling men, their heads down between their shoulders, noting one thing after another. Around each doorway, a penumbra of red spattering as paan-chewers had cleaned their mouths before entering the inner rooms. I liked to go there. It was like nowhere else.

When my father came home one day from appearing in court, he found to his surprise that the house was covered with a web of bamboo scaffolding. Boro-mama was outside, inspecting the structure from the front gate of the house. ‘What is this?’ my father said. ‘What is happening?’

‘Structural repairs,’ Boro-mama said, gazing upwards with his hand shading his eyes from the sun. ‘It’s necessary, I’m afraid.’

Upstairs, my mother was almost hysterical. Two workmen had gained access to the house and had walked in without a by-your-leave. All day, they had been erecting scaffolding, and had finished only half an hour before. My mother had sent all four of us to a back room with Majeda. She had not been able to extract from the workmen any kind of description of the work they were supposed to be carrying out, and when Laddu appeared after lunch, he flatly insisted that he had told her, months before, that the work was going to commence, and when it was going to commence, and why it was necessary. My mother had gone upstairs in a rage. She had gone to the salon, pulled a pillow over her head, and waited for it to come to a conclusion.

‘That’s enough,’ my father said. ‘We can’t allow that. Have you given Laddu any money for the work yet?’ My mother had not. ‘Good. We’re leaving tonight.’

5.

A feud is an ineffective way of removing the hated one from your life. The face and behaviour present themselves ceaselessly. It would be nice to say that the months during which my mother and father saw nothing of the family were peaceful ones. They removed themselves not just from Boro-mama and his family, and his attempts to get them to supplement his family existence. My father blamed Nana for insisting that we live in his old house – for trying to place us under an obligation, as he put it. So he would not visit Nana, or allow my mother to see her sisters, or allow his children to play with their cousins. All the stubbornness of my father came out on this occasion.

His law practice was a successful one. As long as I can remember, there were waiting rooms full of clients – country men, grizzled old disgruntlements filling the antechamber with smoke, men hobbling off, fumbling for wads of notes, knotted up deep in the waistbands of their lungis. There was always a clerk explaining to the waiting clients that Advocate-sahib was very busy this morning, and that he would only ask for a small amount of patience. There was always Majeda, impressing on us children that we must play quietly, and not disturb Papa. Perhaps, at first, some of this business had come to my father through Nana, who liked to help out his family – he valued the obligations that such help imposed. But that had been a long time ago. An obligation only remains so if it may be taken back by the giver. After some time it becomes a possession of the recipient. And if Nana had once passed on some of these clients to Father’s early practice, he could not have taken them back now. Those old country families – merchants, landlords, entrepreneurs, income-tax lawyers, politicians, some merely respectable, some so very grand that, a century before, one would have called them zamindars, and some with backgrounds and history best not examined too closely – they all valued my father’s skill and discipline. I daresay Nana made them feel somewhat shy, as if they were begging for favours, and my father would take years to become as grand as that.

Father had every reason to think he was making his own way in the world. Any obligation he had once possessed had slid away. Long before, he had refused to live with Nana when they had returned from Barisal, when Boro-mama had run away. He preferred to find somewhere to live that was his own. Only the strange circumstances after the end of the war could have persuaded him to live in a house owned by Nana. He would always find an excuse to bring the arrangement to an end. Boro-mama’s behaviour was a useful excuse of this sort.

For the next months, though we removed ourselves from the lives of our aunts, and cousins, and grandparents, they were always present in our own. Father was easily capable of saying, following on from nothing at all, ‘Mary has always been under the thumb,’ or, on a Sunday night, ‘I wonder what idiocies they are all sharing at this exact moment,’ or ‘I hope Bubbly is getting enough to eat – I would hate to think that the circumstances were affecting her dinners,’ or there would be a quarter of an hour of examination and re-examination of Boro-mama’s character and the history of his bad behaviour. When he was not talking about our relations in this way, I believe that he was often thinking about them. I think Boro-mama’s face and name were the first that came to him on waking in the morning, and the last that kept him from sleep at night. My very early childhood is paced out by my father, going back and forth in the sitting room; is lit by the lamp going on in the small hours in the office as my father, sleepless and resentful, goes to his books to blot out the faces he will not see, the faces he cannot get rid of.