CHAPTER 11
Structural Repairs
1.
Nana’s two mothers returned to where they had come from, in time. They often liked to come to visit in later years. We called them ‘the witches’, which was unfair of us – they were only old and white-haired, and not very good with children. But by now they were very old, and each winter Nana wondered if they would come through the season of colds and flu and other infections. The end came for the elder one in a tranquil way. She caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia; she took to her bed, and never got up again. My mother nursed her with beef tea until her appetite left her; Nana’s other mother, his father’s second wife, sat with her, talking softly, as did Nani, her daughter-in-law. It was strange to think of Nani, by now nearly sixty, coming to her new mother’s house in Calcutta as a young bride, so many years ago. The old woman dozed, and woke, and asked for small things, and dozed again. Once she said, ‘Is he all right? Has he eaten?’ But it was difficult to know whether she was asking the other mother or her daughter-in-law; it was impossible to know whether she was talking of her husband, dead these thirty years, or of her son, my grandfather, who came up to see her every evening. And one day she dozed, and slept, and did not wake up. It was an ending without disturbance, just as she would have wanted to go.
The funeral was a large one. By the time you worked it out, there were many daughters and sons, and their many children; and the children of cousins, and nephews and nieces and their children, many from the country, whom we had never seen before. That was only the family. Because of who my grandfather was, many people wanted to come to pay their respects to his mother. There were so many people who wanted to come to my great-grandmother’s funeral that many mourners had to be told they could not come to the house.
It was not the saddest funeral. Even for Nana’s other mother, who had spent more of her life with the dead woman than she had with her husband, it was only a parting and the end of a long friendship. The hearse came – a shiny black vehicle, quite magical to a small boy – and the little shroud was lifted inside while the small crowd of select, intimate mourners stood behind Nana. Nani had placed her arm around the shoulders of the surviving great-grandmother. The mourners were silent as the back of the hearse was closed. All at once, Nadira-aunty broke out from the crowd, howling. She hurled herself at the back of the hearse, banging on it with her fists. ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No! No!’
‘Nadira, stop that at once,’ Nana said. My father came forward and pulled Nadira away from the car. She stood, tottered for a moment, then fainted, clinging on to the trunk of the mango tree as she fell to the ground. It was a highly impressive sight. I enjoyed it greatly, for one. Not many of the family would have thought that Nadira was so close to her grandmother that she would give way to hysterical grief in this way.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ my mother said afterwards, ‘that no one asked Nadira to sing. And you know how she is. She does like to have an audience.’
But my father thought that was unfair: that Nadira, after all, had not had funerals in her life as often as many people. She would naturally be shocked and appalled by the first death of someone close to her.
‘I still think she wanted to sing,’ my mother said.
2.
Downstairs, in Rankin Street, the argument was reaching a furious pitch.
‘And you have done nothing – nothing – about that tree in the backyard,’ Sharmin was shouting. ‘I told you to uproot it three weeks ago. And what have you done? Nothing. There are bats roosting in that tree. They will get in my hair, I know they will. You don’t care about that. All you do is lie about all day long making plans. You Bengalis!’
We could not help listening to these arguments between Sharmin and her husband, Boro-mama, though naturally we never commented on them. My mother’s only response to them, when Sharmin got to the point of making generalizations about the Bengali race, as she did, was to suck her teeth. My father would observe mildly, to his children, that he wished Sharmin-aunty would not say these things in places where anyone could hear her.
After the end of the war, some of the family found it difficult to see how they would make money. Many Pakistanis returned to their place of birth. Both Nana and my father discovered that their law practices had had many pale Bihari clients; many of those had now disappeared. It was more troublesome for Boro-mama, who did no work, and who relied on the medical practice of Sharmin. But Sharmin’s professional future looked insecure. In the years after independence, not every sick person wished to be treated by a doctor from Pakistan.
Nana’s solution to this was, as often, tied up with his property. When he had moved from the house in Rankin Street to the one in Dhanmondi, he had not sold the old one, but kept it as an investment. Now he told my father that we should move into the courtyard house in Rankin Street, living on the first floor, and that Boro-mama and his family should live on the ground floor. My father offered to pay Nana rent, but Nana said that we should pay Boro-mama directly. In return he would look after all the household tasks, pay the bills, and so on.
My father was not very pleased with this. He did not particularly want to divide a house with Boro-mama. He particularly did not want to live with him in the position of landlord and tenant. But the house just off Elephant Road, in which we had been living, had been destroyed by the military during the war. He agreed to move into Rankin Street as a temporary measure. But soon he found it was easier to have his chambers on the first floor of Rankin Street, just as Sharmin found there was plenty of space to have her clinic downstairs.
‘I wish she would not shout like that,’ my father was saying. ‘It is quite wrong. My clients can hear her insulting Bengalis, and the children – I don’t want the children to hear that sort of sentiment. And I expect her children hear it all the time. What must they think? And her patients, too. She seems to have no restraint whatsoever.’
‘The strange thing is,’ my mother said, ‘that every Friday she takes a great pan of biriani down to Sadarghat, and hands it out to the poor. They could not think her more saintly.’
‘That is just because she likes to get praise for her cooking,’ my father said. They were talking in low voices. The conversation downstairs carried, though it seemed to have stopped for the moment. There was no reason to suppose that Laddu and Sharmin could not hear their upstairs neighbours. ‘It is excellent biriani. I don’t suppose Laddu ever tells her so, when she cooks it for him.’
‘No,’ my mother said. She laid down her book, placing a marker between the pages, on the arm of the sofa. ‘They think of her as a saint. She is a good woman. I cannot understand why she says these things in front of her children, and where we can hear it – where any passer-by could hear it. It beggars belief.’
‘If you want to know what I think . . .’ my father said. He was about to say that living with Laddu would certainly put a strain on the patience of a saint, but a knock came on the interior door of the flat. My mother opened it. It was Laddu.
‘Come in,’ my mother said. ‘We were just about to make tea. Where is Sharmin?’
Laddu indicated by a gesture that he hardly knew or cared. ‘I have been making repairs to the back wall,’ he said.
‘I didn’t notice,’ my father said sardonically. ‘When were you doing that?’
‘Oh, this week,’ Laddu said, not sitting down.
‘I didn’t know anything was wrong with the wall,’ my father said, in his most clipped and abrupt voice. ‘What seemed to be the problem?’
‘Structural weakness,’ Laddu said. It was not the first time he had cited this important principle. The structural weakness of bookcases, of paintwork, of stairs, even of the red Tajik carpet in their salon had been cited in exactly this way in the past year. ‘It was rather a bigger job than I had anticipated.’
‘I see,’ my father said.
‘If we divide the costs of it on an equal basis,’ Laddu said, in his most reasonable way, ‘then that will mean you pay me – let me see – one hundred – no, two hundred and thirty – forty-seven taka. It was the outlay on equipment, you see,’ Laddu went on, seeing something in his brother-in-law’s eye. ‘Everything is so much more expensive, these days.’
‘Well, let’s go and have a look at the job,’ my father said. ‘I want to make sure it’s been done well, before I pay for – pay for half of it.’
‘It’s been done well,’ Laddu said. My mother came into the salon with a tray of tea, samosas and sweet things. ‘No, thank you, Shiri, I can’t stay at all. If you could just give me some money towards the repair – if you don’t have it all, that’s quite all right. I can wait until tomorrow for the remainder. The trouble is the cost of materials and tools, it’s quite shocking.’
‘Well, let’s go and look at what you’ve done,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know why you didn’t mention that you were about to undertake structural work. It might not have been at all convenient.’
‘Convenient?’ Laddu said. ‘It needed to be done. Listen, Mahmood. You are living in my father’s house. Do you understand? It’s my father’s house. You’re living here because I said it was all right, on my father’s agreement. Now you need to pay for it. It’s my family’s house, and it’s time for you to pay when I need – when I need to make some small repairs. Do you understand?’
No one ever shouted at my father. Perhaps, in all Nana’s family, only Laddu had inherited his capacity for shouting. Unlike Nana, who shouted, as far as anyone knew, only twice in his life, Laddu not only had the capacity to shout but indulged it often. Sometimes an argument would begin downstairs, and would continue upstairs, Laddu having abandoned Sharmin to come to start another one with his sister and brother-in-law.
‘Yes, I understand very well,’ my mother said. ‘It is not just your father’s house. It is my father’s house as well. Mahmood will go and look at the work you have done on the wall when he has a moment.’
3.
There was nobody in the house but Bubbly and Pultoo. Bubbly was inside; Pultoo was painting a picture in the half-lit glass-sided porch to the side. It was a task from the art school. He was painting a portrait and had chosen this unusual place to paint in because the light was filtered, diffused and full of shadows. For years, Pultoo had known that shadows were not black, but took on the colour of the object they fell on, a notch or two down. He had known that since he was eleven, eight years ago. It had come with the force of a revelation. He wondered who had first noticed that fact. Since then, the painting of shadows had been an especial treat for him. It was true that shadows clarified the structures of an object – a still-life under candle-light, painted in the near dark, became a matter of highlights and glints, possible to place exactly on the paper and then conjure up the whole ensemble. His friend Alam sat in the twilight shadows of the porch, his face tense and worried. Pultoo worked in watercolours, steadily, scrupulously, with the minimum of underdrawing to guide his brush. It was going to be good: Pultoo could see that he had caught the likeness.
‘What are you doing here?’ Bubbly said, coming out. ‘Everyone will trip over you. Don’t you have a room to paint in on the other side of the house?’
‘I wanted to paint this here,’ Pultoo said. ‘Now be a good girl and leave us in peace.’
‘Why do you want to paint here?’ Bubbly said. ‘There’s nothing here but a plain wall. That is boring to paint.’
‘The light falls through the glass in an interesting way,’ Alam said. He was a friend of Pultoo’s from school, not artistic at all, and was now studying something practical at Dacca University. It was strange that Pultoo had been such friends with him at school, and Bubbly did not know that they had remained friends. His family were the owners of a tea plantation near Srimongol, only now coming back into business, but formerly very extensive, and not artistic at all. When he spoke, his voice was deep and memorable for so slight a person, but some inner fire had broken out unpredictably on his surface, resulting in a thick moustache and huge hands, nose, ears and feet.
‘Did my brother say that?’ Bubbly said.
‘Why?’ Pultoo said. ‘Why shouldn’t Alam say it first?’
‘It sounds like the sort of thing you would say,’ Bubbly said. ‘I could make this much more interesting and attractive to paint. For instance, I could bring a table, and place a flower in a vase – just one flower, it wouldn’t be a whole arrangement. That would be so much nicer than a blank brick wall, wouldn’t it?’
Pultoo ignored his younger sister. His brush dipped, raised, applied; he dipped it in the cloudy water, knocked it on the side, continued.
‘You’ve moved,’ he observed to Alam. ‘Try not to move your position.’
‘Sorry,’ Alam said. ‘Was it more like that?’
‘In any case,’ Bubbly said, ‘you’ve got to move soon, because people are going to start coming round. I don’t want them having to tread all around you. I told you my friends were going to come round this afternoon. Can’t you start again in the other room, out of the way?’
‘Who is coming round?’ Pultoo said. ‘I’m sorry, I missed that.’
‘Oh, just the old gang,’ Bubbly said. ‘Pinky and Milly, you know.’
‘Pinky Chowdhury?’ Alam said. ‘I know her brother awfully well. How is he? He was talking of travelling, the little brother, the last time I saw him, but that must be six months ago.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Bubbly said. ‘He had a divine time in Bombay. He said he really never wished to return. But he did return,’ she finished lamely.
‘Don’t say you know my sister’s friends,’ Pultoo said.
‘Of course I do,’ Alam said. ‘Everyone knows them.’
Pultoo made a hmphing sort of noise. Bubbly’s friends were a trial to the family. Apart from Boro-mama, almost all of Nana and Nani’s children were intellectual in some way: they sang, or they wrote poetry, or took an interest in music or the Bengali crafts. When they were old enough, they took up distinguished professions, like the law or medicine, or became academics. Their friends had come round, one after the other, and discussed political freedoms, and poetry, and Bengali film around the dinner table or on the couch. It had been so since Boro-mama had left home and taken his badmash friends with him. The family had hatched out like chicks from an egg, and Nana found them congenial company, and most of their friends too.
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.
The drawing room and office were in a new house. After our precipitate departure with nothing more than suitcases in a brace of taxis, we were taken in for six weeks by a family friend – a bemused, cheerful old lawyer with a big empty house in Dhanmondi. He could easily spare us three rooms while Mother and Father looked for somewhere more permanent. I believe he was something of an old gossip – he was in the process of winding down his practice in his sixties, and when lawyers lose the professional occasion of talking, an amateur habit tends to rise up in its place. He was forever dropping in to hear the latest about Boro-mama, encouraging denunciations and the dragging up of ancient resentments. ‘But what really rankles . . .’ my father would say, and his friend, his legs up in the planter’s chair opposite, would nod and shake his head, his big eyes begging for more. His name was Tunu; we were encouraged to call him Tunu-chacha, but it seemed immensely clever and hilarious to call him Nunu-chacha instead. That means ‘Penis-uncle’, which was what my sisters and I called the old gossip when we were alone. Nunu-chacha! I could laugh even now.
I believe that he would have been perfectly happy if we had stayed for months. It was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to him, I believe, the old tittle-tattler. But after six weeks, a new house had been found, and we moved in. Workmen visited the house in Rankin Street and emptied the upper storey, delivering it all to the new home. My father swore that he would never go near the old house again.
From time to time, by chance, one of my parents happened to encounter one of the family, and the meeting was awkward, brief and evasive. They moved in the same circles, and we could not avoid being at Sufiya’s, for instance, at the same time. My father would pass a greeting with whichever one of his wife’s sisters it happened to be, before thanking his hostess and leaving without too much delay. The family accepted this; my mother did not enjoy it at all. And friends of the family did not really understand.
It was during the wedding season, almost between parties, that my mother met Pultoo’s friend Alam. She was leaving, or arriving, and he was arriving, or leaving. At first she could not place him, but he greeted her, and there was something familiar about him.
‘Such a busy day,’ she said.
‘Irrational, for everyone to marry all at once,’ he said. ‘My mother says that once, ten years ago, she went to eleven weddings in the same day . . .’
Then, of course, my mother remembered him. ‘How is my brother?’ she said. ‘Did he ever finish the portrait he was making of you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Alam said. ‘Why? When was the last time you saw him?’
‘Not so recently,’ she said. ‘We moved out of the house in Rankin Street, you know.’
‘Yes, I remember hearing something about that,’ Alam said. ‘These things happen, I dare say.’
My mother did not really want to be discussing the matter with a worldly boy she hardly knew, but Alam continued.
‘There was a dispute in my family, over some land in Srimongol, and two of my uncles, people say they hardly spoke to each other for years on end. It must have been twenty or thirty years ago. So sad for everyone when that happens. But the curious thing was that, after a year or two, neither brother could recall what on earth had been the initial cause of the disagreement. It was something to do with who said what to whom, and who had the better right to some land, which was really of no importance, but the argument continued for years, with them not speaking to each other, and so on. It was really very peculiar.’
‘I see,’ my mother said. ‘I must be going.’
Perhaps she was going into a wedding, but she turned round and left, taking a cycle-rickshaw all the way home. She could not bear the thought that such people – mere boys called Alam, hangers-on, the son of nothing but plantation owners who had never read a book or admired a painting in their lives, the sort of people who cared only for how much per pound this year’s tea would fetch – that such people were not only discussing relations between her husband and her family, but thought nothing of talking to her face about it. And comparing it to squabbles over commerce. My mother had agreed not to visit, or spend time with, her sisters and brothers, but this did not seem to have removed them from her thoughts. She thought hard about them all the way home, and for a long time after that.
6.
Over the next few months, Boro-mama in some way changed physically. Afterwards, everyone said that it was for the lack of anything to do, or anything to pass the time. Since what had occupied Laddu’s time had been dreaming up money-making enterprises that his brother-in-law upstairs would fund, no one really regretted this. Boro-mama’s family was supposed to stay downstairs in Rankin Street, but with time they spread upstairs, colonizing first a couple of rooms so that the girls could have a room each, then a sitting room for Laddu himself.
Laddu spent all his time in his sitting room upstairs, and in some way this changed him physically. How, exactly? I do not know. He could not have grown fat; I do not think he grew thinner, or lost his hair, or aged prematurely, or took on a spiritual air with long solitary contemplation. The exact nature of Boro-mama’s physical change is a mystery to me, though everyone insists on it. Perhaps, like many men in the middle of the 1970s, he decided to make a sharp reversal in the direction of his haircut, losing four inches from all over his head.
It is one of those mysteries that arise in the telling of a family story. ‘You see,’ an aunt will say, ‘when I next saw him, I hardly recognized him, he had changed so much . . .’
‘Changed how?’ I will say. Because of course when I see my sisters and brother, they seem just the same people I always knew, hardly changed since we were children together, although now they are nearly fifty. How could a brother change so much that his sister could hardly recognize him?
‘I don’t know how he had changed,’ my aunt will say. ‘He had changed, that is all. Changed so much I didn’t know who he was.’ Aunts are not keen observers, and all they knew was that in the next year and a half, Boro-mama’s alteration was undisputed. They all agreed on it.
Certainly, when the gate of our new house opened, a year and a half after we had moved into it, my mother saw the visitor but did not immediately identify the shape as her elder brother’s. There were many visitors to the house, mostly clients of my father’s, and she assumed that it was one of those. It was unexpected that with him was a small boy, but sometimes clients did bring their children, for whatever reason, and they were made to sit quietly in the smoke-filled waiting room while their fathers talked business. Shibli, too, had changed in outward appearance: he was a fifth larger than the last time any of us had seen him, living with Nana and Nani. It was not to be expected that my mother would identify him from an upper room, either.
The office clerk let them in. He had never seen his employer’s brother-in-law, and naturally showed them to the waiting room. Boro-mama always thought everyone knew exactly who he was – he was the eldest son, after all – and, since he had not told the office clerk who he wanted to visit and for what reason, a moment of confusion followed. Something of the story must have filtered through to the office workers and the domestic servants, because with a little doubt in his eye, the office clerk asked Boro-mama to wait with Shibli, not in the waiting room but in the hallway, while he went to see if my mother was in. ‘I know she’s in,’ Boro-mama said. ‘I saw her shadow in the windows on to the balcony, upstairs.’ The office clerk asked him to wait, and went to see my mother.
I was sitting with her, being read to, though my sister Sunchita was paying more attention to the story than I was, curled up in my mother’s lap, following the text as my mother’s finger travelled over it.
My mother broke off when she heard what the office clerk had to say. ‘My brother? Here?’ She set the book down and stood up, brushing my sister to one side; Sunchita took the book from her, and started to read herself, not interested in this interruption.
Our manners were not as formal as my grandparents’, and my mother expected that Laddu would have come through with the office clerk. So when the office clerk said, ‘Shall I ask him to come through?’ she was nervous, her intentions all shattered and unclear.
‘Yes – no, wait, one moment. Give me a pen,’ she said, and on the blank back of the Dacca Book Fair postcard that lay on the table by the sofa, she quickly wrote in blue ink with the clerk’s fountain pen, ‘My brother is here – please come as soon as you can. Two minutes will be enough.’ She fanned it to dry it, and folded it in three. There was no other paper to hand. ‘Give this to Advocate-sahib,’ she said. ‘And ask my brother to come through.’
‘Is it Boro-mama or Choto-mama?’ I said. I knew the difference between Big-uncle and Little-uncle; my sisters had told me all about them. The one who painted, the clever, nice one, and the frightening one with the awful son called Shibli, who lived with Nana. But a year and a half is a long time in early childhood, and though my sisters remembered them, to me they were like characters in my sister Sunchita’s story-books, ogres and dwarfs and beautiful princesses, lying just out of reach, at the end of a quest still not undertaken.
‘It’s Big-uncle,’ my mother said. ‘And I think that must be Shibli with him – you remember Shibli, your cousin . . . Come in, brother!’ she said, as he came into the room. ‘How are you? You’re looking . . .’ And she trailed off because, again, there was that change in his appearance, and whether it was an improvement or just one of those alterations that time and decisions bring, she could not say. ‘Well, I would hardly have known him,’ she said in later years. But why? Was his faced puffed out with mumps? Had he dyed his hair blond with peroxide? Had he arrived wearing glasses for the first time, or concealed his face behind a monkey-mask? I do not think any of these.
‘Yes,’ Laddu said, not ungraciously. ‘Everyone says that. How are you, Shiri?’
‘Sunchita, Saadi,’ my mother said. ‘Say hello to your uncle, and to your cousin Shibli.’
But that was too much for us: we took one look at Shibli and Boro-mama, and went entwined into safety, burying our faces in each other’s shoulders so as not to look at the strangers, to make them disappear with our not-seeing. Shibli, on his part, did exactly the same thing, burying his face in his father’s legs, clutching him as the safest adult in the room. We were all merely visitors to each other.
‘Where are your manners, Shibli?’ Boro-mama said. ‘Really, I am quite ashamed. He is only a little bit shy – in a moment he will be perfectly friendly, but sometimes he doesn’t like to meet new people.’
‘Sunchita and Saadi are just the same,’ my mother said, delighted to have found something to talk about so readily. ‘I think it must be some fear of being abandoned they have in their little heads.’
‘And goodness knows why,’ Boro-mama said. ‘No one could live more secure lives than they do, surely.’
My mother might have retorted that Shibli had, in fact, been taken from his parents to live with his grandparents without consultation, and that perhaps he did not think he lived a very secure life at all. This fate of Shibli’s, in later years, seemed terribly glamorous to us, his cousins, but when we were very young, who knows? It might have been terrifying, and the reason why we shrank into each other when visitors came. If our unknown uncle could give away his youngest child to Nana and Nani, then there seemed no reason why our parents might not decide on a whim to give us away to any visiting person – to one of the rather smelly men who clustered in the smoke-filled vestibule downstairs, to one of the grand old ladies who came to drink tea and eat sandesh and rosogollai. Or even to Boro-mama now that he had turned up, to make up for the son he had given away. Perhaps we thought some or all of this, and so we tried to hide when attention was brought to us.
The office clerk came back into the room, and handed my mother the postcard on which she had sent my father a message. She unfolded it in her lap. At the bottom, in thick HB pencil, he had angrily written, ‘No. Under no circumstances,’ and his initials. Then he had evidently had a second thought, and written, ‘Send for me when your brother has gone,’ and initialled again.
‘I am very sorry,’ my mother said. ‘But Mahmood is caught up with an important client – he won’t be able to extricate himself this afternoon, he says, with regrets. Could you,’ she called to the office clerk, now leaving the room, ‘could you ask the kitchen to send up some tea?’
The office clerk agreed, with rather bad grace.
‘I see your little Saadi has grown a lot,’ Boro-mama said.
‘Yes, indeed,’ my mother said. ‘He is really too heavy to lift, now.’
‘Well, he was always too heavy to lift,’ Boro-mama said, laughing heartily. ‘Does he still like his food as much as he always did?’
‘Sunchita is the great reader in the family,’ my mother said. ‘She reads so well for her age! She is always asking me to read to her, and then I can’t read quickly enough for her, and she complains, and takes the book away, and before I know it, she is in a corner, reading some quite difficult book by herself. She is so far ahead of all the other children at her school. Her teacher does not know what to do with her. Papa would be so proud.’
‘Good, good,’ Boro-mama said. Sunchita, who had been emerging somewhat, now buried her face in a cushion. But she liked being praised in this way, I knew she did: I could tell from the set of her shoulders.
There was a stiff pause.
‘What does Shibli most enjoy doing?’ my mother asked. ‘Don’t be shy, Shibli. Tell me – what are your favourite things?’
‘Oh, he likes to play in the garden, to run about, to jump, that sort of thing,’ Boro-mama said impatiently. ‘All little boys like to do that, don’t they?’
My mother nodded. Fortunately, at this point, the tea arrived, and for five minutes they could talk about whether the children could have a very milky tea, really just milk in a cup, whether it was strong enough for Boro-mama, whether he would have a pakora or a spoonful of chaat or a piece of the special cake, made only that morning in the kitchen, a speciality of Majeda’s, the children’s ayah.
‘Had you heard that Mira is marrying?’ Boro-mama finally said, when the demands of tea had been established and finished with.
‘Oh, how wonderful!’ my mother said. ‘I am so happy. When? Tell me everything.’
Boro-mama was not her ideal choice of person within the family to tell her about her younger sister’s marriage – anyone else would have been better. But he was here, and he told her.
‘He is a young lecturer at the university – in physics. They think very highly of him down there, in everything he does. He studied abroad for two years, in Britain. They tell me what he studied, but you don’t expect me to understand what it is he has set his mind to. My wife understands it, or some of it, or so she says. Anyway, he seems a solid sort of young man and Mira is very happy. It is really a love-match. Mira would have come herself, but she particularly asked me to come.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ my mother said, overcome with embarrassment.
‘I know there have been difficulties between us in the past,’ Boro-mama said, ‘but I think we should try to set these things on one side.’
‘Well . . .’ my mother began. She was thinking of what my father would say, if he were there in the room. She did not think that ‘difficulties’ was the word for his rage with Boro-mama. In her hand she clutched the postcard with its angry scribble from my father. He was refusing to see his brother-in-law at all. It did not seem likely that he would try to set these difficulties on one side.
‘Mira is getting married on the twenty-sixth of this month,’ Boro-mama said. ‘Papa has sent me to ask you and Mahmood to come to her wedding, even if just for half an hour. It would make her so happy. Papa thinks you should come.’
‘Well, that is very good of Mira to think of us,’ my mother said. ‘I will have to speak to my husband, of course, and I will let Father know.’
They talked a little more – about the troubles in the country, about the famine, about the neighbours in Rankin Street, and then, before they knew it, it was time for Boro-mama and Shibli to go. ‘Say goodbye to your cousins, Shibli,’ Boro-mama said, but the boy clung on, and would not be detached. ‘Say goodbye,’ he said, now becoming a little irritated, and he pulled Shibli loose, and pushed him firmly against us. There was nothing of an embrace or the regard of fond cousins in that nearness; it was just Shibli’s howling face, pushed up against our own, then pulled impatiently away. My mother smiled weakly, her hands one in the other, saying goodbye in an ineffectual, benevolent, unspecific manner.
7.
‘Laddu has changed so much,’ my mother said. My father had heard the gate shut behind the visitors, and had not waited for my mother to send a note. He had come out immediately, abandoning his client. ‘I would hardly have known him.’
‘Changed in what way?’ my father said.
‘Well . . .’ my mother said. ‘It is quite hard to put your finger on it.’
My father made a remark to the effect that it was not very likely that Boro-mama had changed in any important, useful or significant way, then said that it was surely time the children were having their tea. We had had our tea, but my father’s intentions were clear, and Majeda came to carry us away.
‘Mira-aunty is getting married,’ Sunchita informed her.
‘Oh, how lovely,’ Majeda said.
‘On the twenty-sixth, Boro-mama said. I do hope that I am allowed to have a salwaar kameez. When Fatima’s sister got married, in the village, she wore a beautiful salwaar kameez, all in purple, and it shone like the sun.’
‘Who is Fatima, child?’
‘Fatima!’ my sister said. ‘In my book. You were reading it to me only last week. She travelled all the way to the village, and her sister cried for joy when she saw her, because she thought that she had been lost for ever in the jungle, eaten up by wild animals, and then a wise woman, her didi ma, saved her and gave her the beautiful new clothes and came with her to the village on the very day and at the very hour that her poor sister was getting married, and her sister cried and cried when she saw her, in her beautiful new salwaar kameez, in purple, remember. Don’t you remember? I want a salwaar kameez just like that for Mira-aunty’s wedding.’
‘Do you think anyone is going to cry for joy when they see you?’ I said scornfully.
‘Saadi, don’t be rude to your sister,’ Majeda said. ‘No little gentleman is rude to his sister – remember what Papa told you?’
‘In any case,’ Sunchita said, not caring one bit what I had said, ‘they will cry when they see me, I’m sure of it. They don’t know what has happened to us. You don’t remember them, but I remember them all. There was Boro-mama and Choto-mama, there was Era-aunty, and Mary-aunty, and Dahlia-aunty, and Nadira-aunty—’
‘I remember them all,’ I said. ‘You aren’t the only one who can remember them. I remember them all, too. And if they cry when they see you, they will cry when they see me, too. They will cry so much, crying and crying and crying, they’ll never be able to stop.’
‘No one is going to cry,’ Majeda said. ‘Don’t wish for people to cry. There is enough crying in the world.’
And that was true to a point, because we did not, after all, go to Mira’s wedding. It was said among the servants to be a shame for the children’s sake, because children always love a wedding. I do not know what Mira and her new husband thought, or the other aunts and uncles, or Nana and Nani. But the day of Mira-aunty’s wedding, my mother stayed in her room, and I know that she cried almost all day long. For her, on that occasion, there was not enough weeping in the world.
8.
My brother and my sister Sushmita talked, too.
‘Other people have aunts and uncles,’ Sushmita said, ‘but we only have parents.’
‘We have aunts and uncles,’ Zahid said sensibly. ‘It is just that we never see them. But one day we will see them.’
‘Where are you going to put my article?’ Sushmita said. ‘Is it going to be on the cover of the magazine?’
At this time, Zahid at his school was the editor of the school magazine. He was very involved with it: he instructed people what they should write. For the rest of us, it was clear that Zahid’s magazine would be full of nothing but articles about how things were made, how a steam engine worked, how you could make a simple radio, the invention of the steam engine by James Watt. The teachers at the school liked and admired Zahid’s magazine, much of which he wrote himself, and all of it he rewrote to his own taste. But he did not write it to please the teachers. He wrote it because he thought that was what everyone should be interested in, the most interesting subjects in the world.
‘I have almost finished my article,’ Sushmita said. ‘But I want to know where you are going to put it in your magazine.’
‘That depends,’ Zahid said dismissively. Under some pressure from my mother, he had asked Sushmita to write an article for his magazine. Sushmita did not go to the same school as Zahid; she went to a girls’ school, as he went to a boys’ school. He had been told by my mother that it would be interesting for his readers to discover what it was like at a girls’ school, and that he should ask Sushmita to write such an article. She had spent a week writing the article: ‘A Day in the Life of a School for Girls’. She was proud of it; she had been reading parts out to all of us. Zahid puffed and sighed when he heard any of it. He could not think that it would be of general interest.
‘My article will be dynamite,’ Sushmita said. ‘It is quite an ordinary story, but the implications are tremendous.’
‘How can the implications be tremendous?’ Zahid said, bursting into a rage. ‘You are talking nonsense.’
‘The education of women is a subject that everyone should be concerned with,’ Sushmita said. ‘Even your reading public. They will have daughters one day, too. They should know what the education of women in this country is like.’
‘I am sure it is nothing but silliness,’ Zahid said. ‘I will tell you what I think of your article when it is finished. I make no promises.’
‘You promised to print it,’ Sushmita said.
‘I will print it if it meets our required standard,’ Zahid said.
9.
My parents did not go to Mira’s wedding, but nobody went to the next wedding in the family. One morning, Nana came down to breakfast; he hurriedly ate a roti, drank some hot tea, and was out of the house. More slowly, the rest of the family came down, dawdled about the breakfast table, went about their day calmly. Some went to work; some stayed inside and read, or worked at their household tasks; Nani was supervising the cleaning of the silver, an annual task she always rather enjoyed. Some of the others, the younger ones, went to school or college for the day. Among the ones who should have been going to college was Bubbly, but she was not seen by anyone during the day. Because of the long-drawn-out nature of the family’s breakfast, which could go on for hours as one or another came down and asked for tea, nobody expected to see anyone else at any particular time. It was really only the servants who knew that Bubbly had not been seen all day.
When she did not appear in the evening as dinner was served, Nana asked where she was. Nobody knew. ‘Have you seen her today?’ Nana asked, but not even Pultoo had – he had the least to do.
‘Sir, please,’ Nana’s houseboy said, stepping forward. Nana looked at him with surprise: they were not supposed to listen to conversations within the family. But he went on, and explained that Bubbly had left the house the previous night. She had not, in fact, slept at home. Where had she gone? He did not know. Nani rose to her feet, the tablecloth crushed between her two hands. The hubbub in the little room was immense. Nana asked Nadira to go up to Bubbly’s room, and she returned saying that all Bubbly’s best clothes were gone, and a suitcase, and so was Bubbly’s favourite possession, the porcelain figurine of a ballerina she had had since she was eight, glimpsed in an advertisement in a girls’ magazine, obtained after begging for it from all her sisters. She would not go anywhere for good without her china ballerina, everyone knew. In Nadira’s hand was an envelope, addressed in Bubbly’s loose, dramatic hand to her mother.
Of course Bubbly had run away to marry Pultoo’s friend Alam. She knew, she said, that her father would never give consent for her to marry Alam. They were very much in love. He was from a very good family. Bubbly did not want to live with people whose idea of entertainment was to sit and listen to old poems and songs. She wanted to live in a place where there was a television in every room, washing-machines and other labour-saving devices, and no one talking about politics. She hoped that her family would come to like Alam, since he was her choice of husband, and in the meantime she hoped that her family, if she met them, would refrain from making the kind of remarks about Alam and his family that she had had to put up with silently for years. She was sorry, but there it was.
She was the second of Nana’s children to marry by eloping. They forgave her and him, and the remarks about Alam and his family stopped abruptly. People made their living in all sorts of different ways, after all, Nana remarked, and Nani would chime in that it would be a dull world if we were all the same. Word was passed to Bubbly through Alam’s plantation-owning parents that there was no reason for Bubbly and Alam to hide themselves away. No word came for two weeks, and then a stiff little note with only formal expressions of warmth, saying that the plantation owners were delighted to welcome little Bubbly into their family. The marriage had taken place two weeks before.
Pultoo took it hardest – he could not understand why he had had no idea what had been happening between his closest sister Bubbly and his friend Alam. But Nana kept reflecting about the wedding: how had he offended them? What did his children think about him that they could marry in such a sly James-Bond, secret-service manner? Of course he would have wanted to be there. He would not have cared if his daughter had wanted to marry a street-sweeper, if she truly loved him. It was perfectly acceptable to be in trade, to make your living by thinking of nothing but taka-per-pound, and currency fluctuations, and the future value of tea. A lot of people did so. It was true that they were not necessarily the most interesting people in the world, but that was only a personal opinion, after all. Some people might enjoy the company of tea-merchants, night after night in the remote hills as darkness fell and there was nothing to do until bedtime except eat, and play cards, and talk about the tea crop, and not a book in the house. It was easy to imagine some people enjoying that sort of thing. What, really, had he done to offend them?
Nana had long ago determined that he would never require a child of his to marry anybody in particular. (That was one of the things that was held against him by his friends and contemporaries when two of his children eloped with unsuitable people.) All his children in the end married out of love, or as a consequence of their own decisions. But on the whole, most of them, unlike Bubbly, did marry somebody whom they must have known their father would approve of. When they finally returned, Bubbly was bold and forward, Alam was cringing and embarrassed, as if suppressing a snigger, but Nana seemed painfully anxious to please, showing his new son-in-law to a chair, asking him what he preferred to eat, insisting that Rustum should drive them home – Alam’s parents’ house, where they were living for the time being, was only a half hour’s walk away but Nana insisted. He could not understand, as he began to say, where he had gone wrong.
10.
So that was why, not very long afterwards, an old man appeared at the gate of our new house. He was shown in, and ascended with a ceremonious, pompous manner. He allowed his arm to be taken as he was guided into the salon where my mother sat. She shooed my sisters away, and the door into the world of adults was closed against them. Nobody knew who he was.
‘You were early back from court today,’ my mother said to my father, as he came down from changing in the evening.
‘Yes, the case collapsed,’ my father said. ‘I knew it would. There was no case to answer. It was all perfect nonsense.’
‘That was the land case?’ my mother said.
‘Yes. You see . . .’ my father said, and went on to explain the ins and outs of the case, his hands working in the air, though it had amounted to nothing in the end.
When he had finished, and was in a thoroughly good mood, my mother said, tentatively, ‘Lutfur-chacha was here today.’
‘Who?’ my father said.
‘Lutfur-uncle,’ mother said. ‘My uncle, your uncle. From Jhenaidah.’
‘Little-uncle Lutfur!’ father said. ‘It has been years since we saw him – he came to visit once, when we were in Barisal, didn’t he? I had quite forgotten about Lutfur-uncle.’
(This was not surprising. There were many uncles in the country, some my father’s relations, some my mother’s, some both, and some not really the uncle of either of them, but just nominated as members of the immense crowd of uncles. I have no idea, really, whether Lutfur-uncle was any relation by blood to any of us. He would have been my great-uncle, as always afterwards he was described, but in fact it is quite possible that my father once acted for him in a long-running court case, or something of that nature.)
‘He was sorry not to see you,’ Mother said.
‘What was he doing in Dacca? Is he visiting?’
‘Yes, he has been here for a month. Unfortunately, he goes back to the country tomorrow, or he would have liked to see you. Apparently,’ my mother pressed on dauntlessly, ‘Nadira is marrying soon.’
‘Nadira-sister?’ my father said. ‘Every month, another of your sisters marries. How did Lutfur-uncle hear about that?’
‘In fact,’ my mother said, ‘Papa particularly asked if he would come to see us to let us know. Papa, and Nadira, they both particularly asked if we could come to the wedding.’
‘No,’ my father said. ‘Under no circumstances.’ His face darkened; he got up to leave. My mother would have done better to leave the discussion until after my father had eaten his dinner. He would still have said no; he would still have left the room to immure himself in his study; but he would have done so with better grace.
‘For Nadira, though . . .’ my mother said.
‘It doesn’t matter who is marrying,’ my father said. ‘There must be an apology before anything can change. I said that before, and nothing has changed.’
‘You haven’t even asked who Nadira is marrying,’ my mother said, her voice slightly rising. But my father left the room, and went to sit in his chambers, to go on working.
Great-uncle Lutfur was the first visitor. Afterwards, my mother wondered whether he was chosen by Grandfather as being the most insignificant member of the family to begin the campaign. Nana was cunning, and my father had the sort of rudimentary, lawyerly cunning that never imagines anyone else could operate on the same level of tactical planning. He saw himself as a fox in a coop of hens, never imagining that behind the blithe open gaze of those hens there might be teeth, and a thorough knowledge of vulpine habits. Nana knew where Father was vulnerable, and he proceeded to run rings round him.
Two days later Mary and Era came, to offer the same invitation. The doors to the salon were closed again, but this time there was nothing but huge laughter from behind them. Mother had not seen any of her sisters for two years, and there was plenty to talk over. Mary and Era, too, must have been delighted to be liberated from Nana’s edict forbidding anyone to say anything rude about Bubbly’s new husband Alam. That must have been the main topic of conversation, too, when Pultoo visited, also offering an invitation to Nadira’s wedding. Pultoo had actually been to Srimongol to stay with Bubbly and Alam at their new house amid the tea-gardens – I had seen photographs, and they were very like the pictures of English houses among hedges I so enjoyed in my sisters’ book The Radiant Way, the English textbook. Pultoo was able to be very amusing on the subject of Bubbly’s new family. Alam had been Pultoo’s friend in the first place, but he knew exactly what the family were like. The grandmother’s lamentable attempts to explain not just how the family had come to Bangladesh but the history of events that had led up to their removal was brought out to delight his eldest sister. ‘No – wait – it was Gandhi-ji who was killed, and the English princess, she stayed, and she married a maharajah, and they say, in the end, the Englishman, he renounced the world. Oh dear, am I confusing matters? Alam, tell me, have I remembered things correctly?’ My mother laughed and laughed; it seemed she had almost forgotten how to.
For some reason, both of these visits took place on days when my father was in court, and he came home to find my mother glowing, and happy, and free of any sense of resentment, her sisters or brother having just left. Still Father said no to the invitation. After all, it was only his wife’s younger sibling. Perhaps the campaign – the diplomatic démarche – planned by Nana moved into a graver stage in the next days, when a motor-rickshaw pulled up outside, and out stepped Nani herself, and Nadira in a beautiful silver-edged periwinkle sari. ‘You’ve made your new home lovely,’ Nani said. I remember that, because my mother, resigned to a sequence of visits with the same purpose, had made more elaborate preparations for the reception of guests in the afternoon. Those elaborate preparations for the reception of guests included putting me in my best clean shirt and red shorts, and my sister Sunchita in a pretty pink dress and ankle socks, and telling us that we were to sit up nicely, and not under any circumstances take more than one slice of cake. How children dressed in the 1970s on best occasions! I mostly remember how lovely Nadira looked; I was still quite small, though, I hope, well behaved. But afterwards, my father still said no.
And that seemed to be that. Boro-mama would not be despatched. If my father said no when the bride and her mother came, what more could be done? My sisters and I were terribly upset. We had never been to a wedding. Sunchita longed to be a bridesmaid, about which she had read in novels. I had just heard about the food to be had. We begged and pulled and whined at my mother. But she said, ‘Your father says that we may not go. So that is the end of it.’ She walked away. I knew there was more she wanted to say.
Of course there was something else Nana could do in his campaign. But nobody even imagined that he would do it. It was on a Saturday afternoon, some time after three, when the red Vauxhall pulled up outside the house. ‘It’s Nana,’ Sushmita called out – she was at the front of the house. And there he was: Rustum opened the door for him, and he got out of the car, dressed at his most irresistibly natty, his black shoes shining, a white handkerchief pressed and folded into a square in the top pocket of his jacket. Nana was barely known to pay calls on anyone, least of all his own family. They came to him, even after they were married and had families of their own. It was a standing joke to his children that, after a brief initial tour of inspection, he hardly knew where they lived. It was simply extraordinary that he should pay a visit, on his own, to our house. He had chosen a time when my father was at home – Nana knew, of course, the opening hours of the Bar library. And my father came to the gate, opening it himself, and welcomed Nana into the house.
He stayed for half an hour, and afterwards, both my mother and father saw him out, walking him to the car and waving him off. It had been the friendliest visit imaginable. Just as he was about to get into the car, my mother said, ‘And Nadira, where is she going to live, after the marriage?’
Nana looked surprised. ‘In Sheffield,’ he said, and seeing that the name meant little to my mother and father, he clarified. ‘In England. Her husband has a job, teaching in England. They are going to leave immediately after the wedding.’
He got into the car, and Rustum drove him away. We all waved until they had gone quite out of sight. My mother turned to my father and said, ‘I’ve made my mind up. You don’t have to go. But I am going to Nadira’s wedding with the children. Enough,’ she said, ‘is enough.’
My father’s eyes filled with admiration. He knew my mother had her limits, and he knew her strengths. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you’re right.’
‘It doesn’t matter if you go or not,’ she said. ‘But it’s my duty to go, and to take the children.’
My father leant on the heavy iron gate; he pushed it shut. He wiped his hands on the sides of his cavalry twill trousers, and pushed the bolt to. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’