Scenes From Early Life (33 page)

‘And perhaps someone will be going to England, before too long,’ Nani said. ‘If they do, they can bring something with them.’

‘Oh, Ma,’ Nadira said. ‘If they come . . .’

‘I don’t know who is coming,’ Nani said.

‘And perhaps no one will come,’ my mother sensibly said. ‘Don’t take that for granted.’

‘But if they do,’ Nadira said, ‘they could bring my notebooks, they could bring my music – they could even bring my harmonium. Who is going to England?’

‘Well, it could be Omar-uncle,’ my mother said. (Omar was a remote uncle; he, too, was studying in England, and flitting to and fro like a bat; he had friends studying in England; their wives, too, came and went. It could be anyone who had a spare suitcase for everything Nadira could not take with her.) But then I had a bright idea.

‘Pumpkin-aunty,’ I said, ‘can I keep your notebooks safe?’

‘Don’t call me “Pumpkin”,’ Nadira said. ‘It is not polite. I know I am fatter than I was a month ago. It is not my fault. There was just so much to eat in the last month. People would be offended if you didn’t eat.’

‘Pumpkin-aunty,’ I said again.

‘Shiri, curb your child,’ Nadira said, but I pressed on.

‘I’ll keep your notebooks,’ I said. ‘I will keep them safe with my exercise books. They would never be lost there. I promise I won’t lose them.’

Nadira was not cross with me for calling her ‘Pumpkin’. She rubbed the back of her hand against my cheek; she would not pinch it as some grown-ups did. She gave me the most beautiful smile, and said, ‘Are you sure, Little-pumpkin?’

‘I promise,’ I said.

‘Then here you are,’ Nadira said. ‘They are yours. I trust you.’

The next day, we returned from the airport to our own house. By now Nadira would be in mid-air, with her clever, handsome husband. She would be above the clouds, high in the sky. This time tomorrow she would be in a completely different country, and she would be walking through it, cold and wet, but glowing in her beautiful navy blue sari. I could see her, as if in the illustrations to my English book. I went to my room, and to the shelf where my mother had placed all Nadira’s notebooks. Into them she had copied her favourite songs. The first in the book was ‘Amra Sobai Raja’. I smiled and held that notebook with one hand. I loved that song, ‘We Are All Kings’. I started humming it. ‘Amra Sobai Raja’.

1.

What happened to them?

After Nana died, the house in Dhanmondi was divided among his children. There was a lawsuit, which I am not going to go into. Boro-mama threw himself at the legal questions with all the energy he was capable of. It went on for some years, creating a good deal of bad blood. At the end of it, the house and its plot were divided between three – Boro-mama, Choto-mama and my mother. (The aunts were satisfied to take possession of some other property in the north of Dacca and in the countryside that my grandfather had been amassing over the years.) Boro-mama took over most of the land that went with the Dhanmondi house, and moved his family into the servants’ house in the garden. He did not enjoy it for very long. As often happens at the end of very long lawsuits, he died, quite suddenly, a month after its conclusion. His wife and children quickly sold the land to developers, as most of Dhanmondi was doing in the 1990s. Choto-mama and my mother divided the house, deprived of most of its land, between them, and did not sell it. Nowadays, half the house is lived in by my brother, his wife and children; the other half is Pultoo’s – he has a painting academy where my grandfather’s law library used to be. The last time I was in Dacca, the mothers of the district kept coming in with their shy and delighted children, each of them with a paintbox and a portfolio, and the sun shone through the leaves of the tamarind and mango trees, still just as they were in the front garden.

The end Sheikh Mujib came to is known to everyone. They were not so very far from us, so we heard the noise of his end, too. You will find in the history books the reason why some people were so very angry with him. I just remember being woken up, very early on an August morning, by the noise of demolition, the crackle, once more, of fire and gunshot. It was very close indeed. By then everybody knew what to do when this happened. My mother got us up and bustled us, still clutching our coverlets, into the salon, away from the road, far from any public windows. My father telephoned a friend, a government official who lived nearby – it was only six in the morning, but people in those days slept on their nerves, and woke quickly at the sound of gunfire. The friend said only this: ‘It’s happened.’

Somewhere around five in the morning, a tank was driven through the front wall of Sheikh Mujib’s house. Military officers entered the house. Sheikh Mujib did not live with much security. He had gone on walking to Sufiya’s all through his presidency. He must have had guns in the house, but that was all. All his family were there, apart from two daughters. One of those was Sheikh Hasina, the daughter who had so amused my mother with her meanness over a few sacks of chilli: she was in Germany. Sheikh Mujib’s sons and their wives and children, his wife and other family members were roused immediately. We know that the wives took their children to Sheikh Mujib’s wife’s bedroom as fast as they could. Perhaps they thought that there might be safety there. Or perhaps they wanted to die together. The soldiers shot them all. An adult son of Sheikh Mujib’s fled into his bathroom, where the killers found him, breaking down the door and shooting into the room, smashing the glass on the wall. Sheikh Mujib went to meet his murderers on the stairs. He was a very simple man, and said, ‘What do you want?’ to them. They are said to have spoken a brief arraignment, although this information only comes from them, years later, in the cause of their own propaganda and defence. They may, in reality, have shot straight away, killing Sheikh Mujib on the stairs of his own house. For many years, he had been known by his honorific title of Bangobandhu, a title awarded him by the students in the late 1960s: a Friend of Bengal. Nobody survived.

The house was not demolished afterwards, but simply shut up and abandoned. In later years, it was reopened as a museum, just as it had been left on that August morning when my father’s friend said, ‘It’s happened,’ to him over the telephone. Sheikh Mujib’s bedroom toiletries are exactly where they were, showing that his preferred brand of talcum was Johnson’s baby powder, and that, like most sophisticated men in the world at that particular time, his habitual cologne was the beautiful oriental scent, Old Spice. These remain on his dressing-table; also undisturbed are the shattered mirror in his son’s bathroom, his blood on the stairs, preserved by Perspex sheets, and, dried on to the ceiling of his wife’s bedroom, fragments of the brains of his daughters-in-law and grandchildren. You may visit the museum where the Friend of Bengal lived and died in Dhanmondi six days a week, between ten a.m. and five p.m.

‘He was a very simple man,’ Sufiya’s daughter Sultana will tell you. ‘Once, when I was very young, and of no purpose or use to anyone, I was very late for my class at the university, and Sheikh Mujib’s big black sedan drew up as I was hurrying along. He was not yet president of the country, but still, everyone in the country knew who he was. He popped his head out of the window and said, “Can I give you a lift?” Just as the daughter of his old friend, you understand. Well, I demurred, and he insisted, and so I got in, wondering how it would look when I was dropped off for my class at the university by Sheikh Mujib – you know how these things worry you when you are young. But he chatted away quite happily, about Hasina his daughter, who was in my class, of course, and asking how we all were, and before I knew it, we were at the courthouse. He apologized greatly, very simply, very sincerely, but he said he would have to get out before me. His driver would take me wherever I wanted to go, but he had to get out here, at the courthouse. “You see,” he said, “they want to send me to jail again.” You know, at this time, he was always being sent off to jail by the Pakistanis. “And I really must be on time to be prosecuted. If I am late, they are only going to send me to jail again for contempt of court, the scoundrels.” That is what he said. So he got out at the courthouse, and I had the very great embarrassment of drawing up at the university in this great black car, and everyone thinking it was my family’s car. I believe that Sheikh Mujib was as embarrassed by this splendour as I was. He had a nice sense of humour. He may have wanted me to know just how embarrassing it was to be driven about in this way.’

Sheikh Mujib himself was buried in his village, but the twenty members of his family and household who were killed on that August morning are buried together, in a line of sad, noble hummocks, in the cemetery in Dacca – Dhaka, the city is now called. The men who killed them afterwards became Members of Parliament, ministers, ambassadors; only many years later, three and a half decades, were they brought to trial for their crimes. The victims for whose death they were tried, and go on being tried, included the eight-year-old Sheikh Russell, who died pleading to be sent abroad to his sister in Germany, and two unborn children.

I went to see Sufiya in her beautiful house when she was very old. The house was just as it had been: people still came to visit her, to drink tea, to interest her in radical causes. Sometimes, she said, the people who came to see her did so out of mindless curiosity, and some of them even stole a book as a memento from the bookshelf on the terrace. ‘Everyone thinks I am a rich woman and can afford to replace anything,’ she complained mildly. ‘But I am not. And in any case, books are like people. You cannot replace them. I wish people would understand that.’ She had survived the announcement of her death on Calcutta radio by decades. By her extreme old age, the house she lived in was no longer surrounded by other houses: her neighbours had sold their land to developers, and all about her blocks of luxury flats had risen. In Dhanmondi, her house remained, its garden in the perpetual near darkness imposed on it by high-rises; Sheikh Mujib’s house remained, turned into a museum; and my grandfather’s house remained, just as it was. There were not many others. I felt this was a bond between me and Sufiya, and I went to see her to ask her to speak at a rally for the Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi. She received me very courteously; she gave me a cup of tea with sandesh and samosas; she said she would write a letter in support, but she was, alas, too old to leave the house to give a speech at the rally, as I asked. She did write a letter, a beautiful one, which the leader of the student movement read out at the rally, and that was the last time I saw her.

She died, full of honours, of nothing worse than old age; the state gave her a funeral, and many tens of thousands of people came. The offer was made to lay her in the field in front of the parliament building, that lovely grey fort by an American architect, begun by the Pakistanis, finished by the Bangladeshis. But she said she would prefer to be in the ordinary cemetery with everyone else. She liked other people, and I think she would have felt lonely in the field of honour with nobody but a president or two to keep her company. I have been told that almost her last words, in the hospice where she died, were ‘Has Tulsi eaten properly?’

Tulsi was the nurse who had been assigned to look after her in her last days.

2.

Many years later, I married a writer, who has listened to the story as I have told it to him. One of his books was translated into Romanian, and he was required to travel to that country, with the strange white palace, the largest in the world, at its useless centre. While he was there, he told me, he had dinner with his Romanian publisher and the publisher’s wife. The publisher’s wife was, it seemed, a well-known journalist in Romania, and many years before, she had been sent by the Romanian Bureau of Overseas Journalism to cover the conflict in East Pakistan. She had not thought – she said, lighting another cigarette over a half-full plate in the restaurant – she had not thought that she would be covering the birth of a new nation. She had not known that new nations were born in such a way. She had imagined, she said, that she would be covering the repression of a revolt, and the resumption of ordinary life under the previous political masters.

(I guess that she started telling this story because my husband explained who I was, and where I came from, and what stories about me he could remember, and dull things like that. He spared my feelings. He did not tell me so.)

But there, one day, was a new nation. No one knew what had happened to its new leader: Sheikh Mujib – the man whom Nana, and Khandekar, and Sultana had known and been neighbours to – was in prison in Pakistan, and would not be released for months. There did not seem much hope for the new country, if there was a new country. But the Pakistanis had left in mud and blood and smoke, leaving nothing much but informers behind them in their borrowed houses.

The publisher’s wife had left her hotel and walked towards the centre of Dacca, to see what there was to be seen. She had needed, after all, a story to write. There was nothing. Nobody was about at all. People had not heard. (This is what she said, though I have seen the newspaper of the first day of the new country many times since, and I think she was not quite correct in her memory.) They would, she assumed, come out of their houses in time. They preferred not to be the first one on the street. The first one on the street was, in fact, the Romanian publisher’s wife, who had no fear, and who trod the tank-torn highway with interest, listening for signs of life.

There was no sound, she said. A silence, which is unusual in Dacca; there were fewer cars and lorries in Dacca in 1971, but there were some, and there would always be the noises of the street. It was so quiet that she could hear the birds singing. She had no idea there were birds left alive to sing in the centre of Dacca. She had been walking for nearly ten minutes in this silent city when a sound drew her attention from a nearby quarter, a street or two into the warren. For one second she thought it must be the noise of a machine-gun, far off, but it was close and quiet and mechanical. She identified it: it was the sound of a sewing-machine, hard at work.

She made her way into the back-streets, and after a couple of turns, there was a tailor, sitting under the awning of his shop, his Panjabi shirt flapping as he worked the pedals of his old British sewing-machine. He smiled enormously, nodding as he fed what he was working under the needle. ‘I could not imagine what it was,’ the Romanian publisher’s wife said, retelling the story. ‘Then I saw – it was a flag. It was the flag you saw at demonstrations, but here it was, the flag of the new country, and he was making it as best he could. It is hard, you know, to cut out a circle accurately, but he had done quite a good job of making a red circle, and he had sewn it properly on his green flag, his green rectangle, you know, a little to the right of centre. He explained it all to me, as if I had never heard it before – the red was the blood shed in the struggle for independence, and the green . . . ah, I forget what the green was for. He finished it. I asked him what he was going to do now, and do you know what he said? He said, “I’m going to make another one.” He spoke quite good English, and I complimented him on it. His father had made suits in Calcutta, for Englishmen. But that day he was only going to make flags, until he ran out of the cloth he had dyed himself. So I asked him if I could buy one, on this special day, and he sold it to me for, I think, two dollars.’ She had folded up the flag, and taken it home to Romania, and had kept it ever since.