CHAPTER 3
Altaf and Amit
1.
The best place to watch what was happening in the street was from my grandfather’s first-floor balcony. The houses in the street were fronted by high walls, dusted with green lichen, for security. But the balcony on the first floor was high enough to see over. From there, you could see visitors approaching. It might be a family member returning: Nana in his red Vauxhall, driven by Rustum, or my father in a cycle-rickshaw, laden with papers, or some aunts returning from a visit in the neighbourhood. As you negotiated your way between heavy jars of pickles, or slices of mango laid out on kula to dry, you could see if there was a war going on in the street between children of the neighbourhood. Sometimes, when I was very young I would see Sheikh Mujib sweep by in his big official car, with a policeman on a motorbike driving just before. And you knew that he was the prime minister of the country. I never forgot that sight.
Or there might be visitors. Mr Khandekar-nana came sometimes, simply, on foot, with his wife and a son or two. Pultoo-uncle’s friends Kajol and Kanaq would arrive with their folders of art under their arms, sticking out from either side of a cycle-rickshaw. You could hear them arguing from a hundred yards away: they always turned up in a towering passion, appealing to anyone in the house to settle the dispute by taking one side or the other. From Nana’s balcony, through the branches of the tamarind tree, you could see all the way down the street to the left, and all the way down the street to the right. I spent hours up there, in the odour of spice and fruit drying in the open air, in the shade of the tamarind tree.
Some days, a sweet-seller would set up shop opposite Nana’s house. He would make those yellow calligraphic sweets that look like a circular signature in Arabic; I loved to watch. First, he would take a bag of wet dough, then write quickly, a round and a squiggle and a zigzag, directly in the boiling yellow oil, then another one, then another. The sweets would coagulate, then bob to the surface. He would know exactly when to fish them out to drain on newspaper. And then he would start again. It was a little marvel of the street, across the wall at the front of Nana’s house. I could have watched him all day.
I craned out, observing neighbours and guests and street-wallahs and unfamiliar figures; I got to know them from the way they walked, their usual belongings, the way they arrived in a rickshaw or a car or on foot. The most familiar of relatives looked unsure of themselves when surprised from up here, making their way down the public highway in Dhanmondi. Dahlia-aunty, for instance, so confident and cosy when going between Nana’s salon and the kitchen, looked fretful, nervous, and unsure of herself when making her way out of the gate to walk a hundred yards to visit a neighbour. She revealed a different side of herself. Or perhaps that was just the way she looked from Nana’s balcony.
On Saturday morning the cleaner came. You watched him approach from the far end of the street. He did not look at ease, or in the right street; he cringed as he walked even in the empty street, the walk of a man who had been hit too often. He came to do the heavy work that no one in the house would do, to clean the drains and the toilets. He was not Bengali, but Bihari; many of his type had left for Pakistan after 1971, but he was a poor Bihari, and had stayed to clean our drains. If you spoke to him, he answered in Urdu, the Pakistani language, cringing. ‘Chota-sahib’, he called me: little sir. It did not make me like him, though I understood that he wanted to make me his friend by abasing himself in that way. Years later I understood that I actually despised him. It was not a feeling I had had before, and I did not understand it when I was tiny. If you did not speak to him, he sang continuously: he always knew the latest Urdu pop song. As I say, I did not like him. On Saturdays, we got up early, before eight o’clock, because he was coming, and then there was nothing to do but go on to Nana’s balcony and wait for his obsequious walk – he swayed from side to side, ready to bow to anyone.
But there were more welcome visitors, and ones I looked forward to. It was not always obvious why we would impatiently await their turn into the corner of road six, or what they had done to deserve our excitement. When we saw Nadira, after lunch, going to her room to fetch the harmonium, the tabla, and sometimes the sitar, we knew who was coming, and I went up to Nana’s balcony to sit and stare at the corner of the road. Two figures turned the corner. One was very tall and thin, his head bald on top. Under his arm he carried two notebooks, and in the other hand, a black umbrella for when the sun grew too strong in the summer or against the rain in the wet season. The other was very short; he wore plenty of oil on his hair, and it would glint in the light. It was brushed close, immaculately.
These were Nadira’s music teachers. They were not very well paid, and the trousers, long shirt and sandals that the shorter of the two wore were the only clothes I ever saw him in. They were soft and worn, and, if you looked closely, frayed at cuff and hem. All the same, they were both very clean – the short one very strikingly so, his white shirt brilliant in the sunlight from as far away as the corner of the street. I think he washed his shirt every night, pummelling away with soap and water and a stone, hanging it up to dry until the morning. He was the player of tabla. His colleague played the harmonium while Nadira sang. You could not help but think, as they hurried towards Nana’s house, talking quietly and with a professorial air of respect to each other, that they were glad to be coming to teach her. And this was true. They were glad.
I was permitted to sit in on Nadira’s lessons. She was a beautiful singer, and the two instrumentalists took more instruction from her than the other way round. She sang songs by Tagore, and more recent songs about the countryside in Bangladesh, too; they accompanied her on the fluting harmonium, the pattering little song of the tabla and if you looked out of the window, you could see that even the gardener was slowing his work and listening. The tabla player would often ask me to fetch him a glass of water before he began, and as a reward would let me try to play on his small tuned drums, to fetch a melody from them. But I never could, and quickly started to bang on them with my fists. Nadira would never put up with that. ‘You’re making a horrible noise. You can leave, or you can sit on the sofa and listen.’ The harmonium player would never invite me to play on his instrument, with its odd flapping front; balding, tall and serious, he made no effort to befriend small boys. He would never say ‘Chota-sahib’ to a child, and I utterly respected him for it.
They would stay for two hours, accompanying Nadira. They would perform five or six songs. First they would play one through, then return and repeat a section. This was very dull. I would have preferred it if they had just performed their six songs, and then gone away, like a concert. But I understood that they had to practise. My aunt had the loveliest voice I ever heard, and she sang Bengali songs, by Nazrul as well as Tagore. She was quite a different person in these lessons, humble, respectful; she took comments and advice from the two musicians very easily. They seemed more like honoured guests in our house than people who were paid to teach my aunt. I always hoped that they would sing the song about the flower. It was my favourite.
The flower says,
‘Blessed am I,
Blessed am I
On the earth . . .’
The flower says,
‘I was born from the dust,
Kindly, kindly,
Let me forget it,
Let me forget it,
Let me forget.
There is nothing of dust inside me,
There is no dust inside me,’
So says the flower.
They would come to the end of their two hours. Once I had settled, I could listen very happily for all that time, so long as there was more playing than rehearsing, as I thought of it. Nadira would offer them a cup of tea, or a glass of water, and they would accept. If there were other people in the house, at this point they came to greet them. My family knew and respected both of the musicians, from many years back, and so did Khandekar-nana’s family. The tall musician would give an imperceptible sign to the short tabla player. They would get up and go. That was the end of their lesson. The whole family came to the door to say goodbye to them.
2.
In 1965 Altaf Ali was twenty-nine years old, and Amit Mukhopadhyay was twenty-eight. They shared a flat in a block owned by Mrs Khandekar, the wife of my grandfather’s best friend.
They had met in the following way. The radio station in Dacca held concerts of Bengali music every Saturday night. The programme was very popular, and had resisted all attempts so far to remove it from the air. A large roster of Dacca musicians supplied the regular basis of the listeners’ pleasure. It was not always possible for musicians to play, however, in established pairings and groupings. Listeners would find their admired musicians combining in unfamiliar and unprecedented ways. This was one of the appealing things of the programme: the sense, like Bengali street life, that you never knew who you might hear talking together.
Sometimes a sitar player would arrive without his regular partner on tabla. Sometimes a tabla player would say he had no idea what had happened to a harmonium player. Musicians are not the most reliable class of people, and if at worst they could be drunkards and gamblers by inclination, at best they were always open to a better offer from others. When a musician failed to turn up at the recording studio, he had often been offered a well-paid job at the wedding of a rich man’s daughter. The radio programme commanded a large audience. But it could not compete with the fees possible when accompanying a famous singer at a lavish Dacca wedding. The producers understood this. They were always ready to match up instrumentalists and singers who had only a small acquaintance. The musicians were ready, in their turn, not to make difficulties about this, although in practice the performances that were broadcast sometimes came close to catastrophe.
Altaf and Amit met each other in just such a way. Altaf was expecting to see the same tabla player he had been playing with for the previous three years. But the producer came into the musicians’ room – a crowded, cramped room in the old British barracks that the radio station used. (The recording studio next door had its windows muffled with blankets and the door reinforced; still, some noises and voices of the city tended to seep into the programmes that were broadcast.) He hailed Altaf, and looked about the room. ‘This is Amit Mukhopadhyay,’ he said wildly. He was always in a hurry, referring frequently to the big black-bound book in which the logistical details of bookings and commitments were entered. ‘He’ll be playing with you today.’ Then the producer disappeared, without once looking up from the bound volume, or even over the top of his half-moon glasses.
Altaf had not noticed the man. Now he looked at him: he was short but well turned out. His shirt and trousers were very clean, and his hair was neatly brushed, with a tidy parting that drew a white line on his scalp. His face gave the impression of liveliness, without actually engaging to the point of saying anything. Altaf greeted him; the short man greeted him back. They quickly discussed the music. Altaf explained the mode he would be using, and two or three other details about how he liked things to begin, and how to conclude. If the tabla player was good, that would be enough for him. It was all a matter of quick-wittedness, improvisation and response. A bad musician simply played. A good one listened as he played. A very good one would anticipate.
Sometimes a new friend slips into your life unobtrusively, as if you have been walking quietly along when out from a doorway steps a familiar easy presence. He makes a brief remark in greeting, and falls companionably into the rhythm of your stride, so that you hardly remember what it was like to walk alone. So it was with Altaf and Amit. Once they were in the studio, and they started to play the evening song, with Altaf leading, they were attuned to and easy in each other’s musical company. There were none of those false starts and assertive blunders that unfamiliar pairings often made, and practised musicians knew how to conceal. Instead, there was a considerate listening presence. Amit’s playing was, as it were, full of himself: not in a bumptious or assertive way, just as an egg holds meat. It was simply full of a strong flavour, which was Amit’s personality. His playing was free and lucid, complicated, but easy and interesting to follow. There was now a little hesitation, like the lyric breath at the brink of a sneeze, as Amit hung fire before plunging into a decisive monsoon-patter; then there was a rapturous run between tones, without hesitation. All the time Amit’s playing was full of pensive thought and possibility. Altaf felt that those pauses and falterings, like a bird cocking its head and waiting between flourishes of flight, came from Amit’s listening to Altaf’s harmonium. A musician as good as Amit would have been as good with most competent partners. But Altaf could not help taking their broadcast that afternoon as a compliment. And performing to the ear of so good and attentive a partner, Altaf could hear his own musical lines grow more flexible, inward and fantastic. He could not imagine, after ten minutes, how he had ever endured such a thudding banger as Mohammed, his usual partner, which, apparently, he had done week after week until now. After the recording, Amit was flushed and cheerful, although not much more talkative. They found themselves walking in the same direction.
3.
Altaf had five younger brothers still living at home. He had to share a bedroom with the thirteen-year-old and the seven-year-old. He could not remember ever having had a room of his own, although when he was born, for the three years when he was not just the eldest but the only one, he must have lived in such a way. Now, the bedroom had to serve for everything – not just for his brothers’ homework, which they did kneeling on the floor before an old gateleg table intended to support a teacup or two, but his harmonium practice, too. He kept his instrument on a high shelf where his brothers could not get at it. His brothers regarded his harmonium as a toy, and not as the tool of his trade. He practised when they were at school, and put it away out of reach before their return. Every Saturday, he polished the rosewood case with beeswax. He believed it improved the tone.
There was no point in remonstrances with his mother and father. There was no more space in the house to be had. He supposed that he would find a place of his own when he married. But he was poor and did not have the means to marry, and wives expected children, so there would not be any time in which he could live and play in peace. Altaf accepted all of this.
Amit had come to Dacca from Chittagong to play the tabla. He had no other skills. He did not want to do anything else. He did not come from a rich family. (That was how he put it, walking along with Altaf, another recording session over.) But he was making some headway for himself and would progress in life, he believed. He taught, during the week, in a boys’ school, an hour’s bus ride away from where he lived in a quiet way with an old Dacca aunt of his father’s, a widow. There was not enough work to allow him to teach the boys music only; he had to teach them the rudiments of Bengali poetry, too. That was no hardship. The boys were good, intelligent and lively. He sometimes found it hard to keep discipline. Once, an older master who was conducting a class next door had stepped in to ask what the meaning of the unholy bedlam could possibly be.
(Amit, without making any obvious effort, was a good mimic. Altaf laughed at the vividness of the impression, though he did not know the man.)
That had not been pleasant, Amit went on. And naturally, afterwards, the boys had been still harder to keep under control. But it was a good school, and Amit had been lucky to be taken on as a junior master, teaching the boys music and poetry. He taught them to sing Bengali songs, often famous songs by Atulprasad, Tagore and Nazrul, and talked to them about other poets and writers of Bengal. They read the work of these writers together. When the boys were interested and quietened down to listen, they were good students. Amit considered himself very lucky to be able to teach in such a good school, yes he did, and he did not think the daily journey too much. There were neighbours of his aunt who travelled two or three hours every day to go to their place of work. And the other masters were reasonable people.
They stopped at a pavement sandesh-seller; the sweets were all of the same stuff, but shaped in different ways. Some people had their favourite shapes. Altaf did not, but now, talking to Amit, he found himself hovering, unable to decide which shape of sandesh they would settle on and share.
Amit reached the end of his account of his circumstances, and ate a sweet. He had one of those faces which, in movement or in conversation – even when he was working up to saying something – looked open, innocent and trusting. When he sank deep into thought, it looked quite different; it could take on a furrowed, even rather angry appearance. Altaf had known him for almost a year before he realized that the positive way in which he spoke about his circumstances did not reflect an optimistic personality. Instead, Amit spoke well of his bestial pupils and insulting colleagues because he did not trust anyone. He believed that a bad word might get back, and he spoke guardedly, even to Altaf. When he stopped speaking, his face grew dark; he looked on the verge of shouting in rage. And then he ate his sweet with open, boyish enjoyment, and looked quite trusting again.
Altaf was from a Muslim family; Amit was a Hindu. His aunt had a small corner in her flat devoted to some of her gods. Altaf believed that this trait of Amit’s – his inability to trust people, or think that anything was for the best in the end – came ultimately from his family’s religion. He did not say so.
It was hard for Amit to be honest when things had gone wrong in his life. His problems with his flat had been going on for weeks, for instance, before he mentioned them to Altaf. He mentioned them in such a closed and quiet way that Altaf would hardly have realized at first that they were problems at all, if he had not known Amit quite well by then. They were walking along in Old Dacca on their way to meet a possible new singer.
‘I may be moving into a new place,’ Amit remarked out of the blue.
‘Why? I thought you and your aunt were quite settled together.’
‘I thought so too,’ Amit said. ‘But it appears I have been living in a fool’s paradise, all things considered.’
‘In what way?’
‘My aunt has told me that she has had enough of living in Dacca,’ Amit said. ‘I can’t blame her. It is no place for a widow to grow old. Only last month, a rude child called something out to her in the street. It upset her for days. And then there are the Pakistani soldiers. They searched her shopping sack once.’
Altaf believed that sort of thing happened to nearly everyone, and had heard, before, of these two incidents. Amit had mentioned them twice: his aunt, Altaf believed, talked of very little else. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘she has you to look out for her, doesn’t she? You wouldn’t move out unless you had to.’
‘She talks about when I get married, when I leave her alone – then how will she cope?’ Amit said. ‘I have told her many times that I am not in a position to get married, and if I ever do, I will make sure that a younger brother of mine would come from Chittagong to take my place. She is a wonderful woman. I wish you could meet her.’
Altaf had his own views on this matter. ‘But what has changed?’
‘Her son wrote to her from Cox’s Bazar, and suggested that she come and live with him in her declining years,’ Amit said. ‘He has told her about the healthful sea air and his beautiful house, and the peace and quiet. He is a very generous man, I know.’
‘He is worried that she is going to die and leave her money to you,’ Altaf said. ‘That is why he is making this invitation. I have heard about this man before.’
‘Well, she ought to bequeath him her widow’s mite,’ Amit said. ‘That would be the right thing to do. I really don’t blame him, and I can see why she wants to go and live with him. But that is not the problem.’
‘What is the problem?’ Altaf said. ‘Something is worrying you.’
‘It seems very silly,’ Amit said apologetically. ‘But I don’t know where I am going to live.’
‘Why can’t you take over the lease of the flat where you are living? Is it too expensive?’
‘No, not at all,’ Amit said. ‘The landlord is really very reasonable. The rent is a good one, all things considered, and I think I could pay it. Unfortunately, my aunt never really got round to telling him that I was living there and paying rent for the spare room. So he never knew that anyone else was in the flat. How could he, if you think about it? I went to him, and explained the situation to him, and asked if he could consider me as the tenant after my aunt gave notice. I set out how very reasonable it would be for him – he would not have to struggle to find a new tenant, he would not have to ask people, or take anyone on trust. He would have the same tenant he had had for the last three years. I put it to him like that.’
‘And what did he say?’
Amit looked up at the sky; he looked down at the road. A cart loaded with old books, pulled by a bent man crying out, ‘Mind, mind,’ separated the pair of them for a moment. When they came together again, Amit had failed to produce any kind of positive interpretation to put on his landlord’s reply.
‘I am sorry to say he told me to be out of the flat with the rest of my aunt’s rubbish,’ Amit said. ‘Those were his words.’
‘He can’t do that,’ Altaf said.
‘He can do what he likes with his flat,’ Amit said. ‘I don’t know where I am to live. I think I will have to go back to Chittagong.’
‘No, no,’ Altaf said. He looked at Amit. To his surprise, there were tears in his friend’s eyes. No one, after all, likes to be removed from their house at a time not of their choosing. ‘I know exactly who to speak to.’
4.
For eighteen years, Altaf and his family had lived in Dacca, and all his brothers, except two, had been born there. But his family had not always lived in Dacca. His mother and father had married in another part of Bengal, but one which was now part of India. They had made the decision, in 1947, to leave the settlement fifty miles outside Calcutta and go to the new country of Pakistan. They went to the eastern division, where the largest city in the region was Dacca. Not all of their relations had done the same thing. Altaf still had cousins who lived in Calcutta, who had not been killed in the mob violence and rioting. They owned a tailor’s shop around the corner from the American consulate, in a very respectable part of the city, or so Altaf believed.
Altaf had been ten. He remembered bundling under the seat in the train, that one time, clutching his six-year-old brother and holding his mouth shut. His mother and father remained in their seats, holding the baby his mother had not known how to surrender; she made little gulps and gasps as the train juddered to a halt. Who had stopped the train? Everyone knew what happened to the passengers in trains bound for Pakistan, in 1947: the trains were stopped by murderous gangs, and the gangs killed all those inside. That was why his mother had pushed him and his brother underneath the seats. The gang that had stopped this train might murder his mother and father, but they would not think to look under the seats, and Altaf and his brother, alone, could make a new life in Pakistan. She had not known how to surrender the baby she held. Altaf’s blood ran cold to think of the sacrifice she would have made, and at the thought that it would not have worked. The Hindu gangs knew how to look under a train seat.
It had not been a Hindu gang of murderers, but a party of soldiers. They had actually stopped and boarded the train to protect the passengers from gangs further up the line. That terrible journey had finally come to an end, the five of them in a strange city with no possessions but alive. Much later, Altaf had realized that many people had not made the journey in the same way they had. He wondered what had happened to most of the boys he had known at the madrasa and the mosque in the small town outside Calcutta. They had been planning to leave with their families as well, and to make the journey to the new country. Some had arrived; some had stayed. But there were also some who had been killed, as everyone knew, and others whose end had not been discovered.
Altaf’s father had made his way in Dacca: he was a small bookseller for college students. He spoke of himself as a Paragraph-wallah; most of his business was selling volumes of Paragraphs, small essays in the English language that every schoolchild had to write sooner or later. It was a good, steady business, down in Old Dacca, not far from the ferry terminal, a back-street business where no schoolmaster would find his way. When the wind blew in the wrong direction, the stink from the nearby tanneries made the atmosphere for learning in the back-street unendurable. Generations of schoolboys went there, and turned in the same Paragraphs, year after year, with the same mistakes. The family business gave Altaf a respect for Amit’s profession; it also gave him some sense of connection with the sort of people who read and thought.
Among those who had, like Altaf and his family, reached Dacca alive was the son of the most important landowner in the village. He had sacrificed a great deal. He had been a lawyer in Calcutta, whose name was Mr Khandekar. Because of the position his father held in Murshidabad, Altaf’s family were accustomed to approach Mr Khandekar on any question of law or of business. He had always helped them, and always would.
It was interesting and strange to Altaf that Amit did not have such a person in his life. He seemed entirely vulnerable and friendless. The only lawyers he seemed to know, or know of, were the broken-down ones who sat by the courthouse with ancient typewriters balanced on planks on their knees, saying, ‘Affidavit, sir?’ to anyone who passed by. Altaf’s heart went out to him: he decided that he would take charge of Amit’s problem. He was sure that the landlord could not, in fact, evict Amit from the flat he had lived in for three years without any problem, and that Mr Khandekar would bring about a happy conclusion. His only concern was whether Amit, as he said, could really afford the rent of the whole flat. It was possible that Amit would make this claim to Altaf, without it being true, to save face. If the flat were awarded to him, Amit might himself need to take in a lodger.
5.
Mr Khandekar lived in a wealthy part of Dacca, where Amit and Altaf had rarely, if ever, been. They had planned to get there early in the morning, so as not to intrude on Mr Khandekar’s day, and so that it would be more likely that he would be at home. Altaf, in explaining about Mr Khandekar to Amit, had stressed how important and busy he was in his law practice. Perhaps he had overdone it. The night before, Amit had interrupted Altaf’s explanation: ‘Let’s not bother him. I’m sure I will be perfectly all right. There are plenty of places to live. I don’t think I have a leg to stand on.’ But Altaf explained that Mr Khandekar would be very helpful, so long as they arrived at his house early enough and did not interrupt his working day. He was the most important person Altaf knew.
But they were not very familiar with Dhanmondi, where Mr Khandekar lived. They got off the bus on Mirpur Road, which circled the district, and it pulled away. The servants, drivers and other unimportant people who had got off the bus at the same time scattered swiftly in every direction. Altaf had been to Mr Khandekar’s house before, and had thought he would be able to find it easily. But in fact they had got off the bus half a mile too soon, in their nervousness. It took half an hour of doubling backwards and forwards to discover the direction in which the wide, leafy avenues were numbered, and an hour beyond that to find road number twenty. That was the road in which Mr Khandekar’s house lay. In this district, there were few people about, and none to ask for directions. In Altaf’s part of Dacca, a request for help would pull a small crowd, eager to explain that the goal of the journey was beyond the mosque, down the small road behind Suleiman’s hardware store and so on. Here, the only people to ask were scurrying ayahs or servants, late for their tasks, slipping behind high white walls. From time to time a large car murmured down the centre of the road, and behind a shining window, a small face inspected Altaf and Amit, unfamiliar figures in this rich and green-shaded neighbourhood.
It was quite late in the morning when they found Mr Khandekar’s house. The gate was ajar, and they pushed it open nervously. From the white-painted square house, the noise of a discussion was going on and, somewhere deeper in the house, the clamour and clang of cooking pots. They stood under the dense shade of the large mango tree at the entrance. ‘We should go in,’ Amit said. ‘Or knock on the door.’
‘I can’t remember,’ Altaf said. ‘There might be an entrance at the back. For clients.’
But Amit walked forward, quite boldly, and pushed a button to the side of the door. Inside the house, a bell rang – an electric two-note song. The door was opened almost immediately, and behind was Mr Khandekar – Altaf recognized him. He was obviously going out: he was wearing a black suit and a white shirt, and was struggling with a white cambric stock at his throat. His collar was detached, and flying away like the wing of a bird: it was clear that Mr Khandekar was trying to do everything in the wrong order. ‘Salaam,’ he said, fumbling with the stock. ‘Good morning to you.’
‘Sir,’ Altaf said, ‘if this is an inconvenient time—’
‘Please, introduce yourselves,’ Mr Khandekar said. Altaf did so, reminding Mr Khandekar of his family, and of his knowledge of his father’s family, his respect for Mr Khandekar’s father. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘I don’t have the time to see you now. Come in, walk with me.’
They went into the dark wooden hallway of Mr Khandekar’s house and followed him through the salon into a room lined with books. ‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said, as he walked. He had given them each one assessing look, from top to bottom, at the front door. But then he had averted his eyes and talked to them without looking, rummaging about in the drawers of his desk, pulling out a paper from a pile, picking up a clever neat little stud to hold his white collar down and pushing it into a hole, somewhere at the back of his neck. ‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said, picking up a second collar stud and getting to work with it.
Altaf stood in front of this furious activity, and started to explain about his friend, his friend’s aunt, the nephew in Cox’s Bazar, the will and the legacy, the spare room, the terms of the lease—
‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘I can’t find the last collar stud. It must be here. Explain, explain.’
Altaf explained about Amit, how his aunt’s landlord had known perfectly well that he was living there but now chose to say that he was flabbergasted to discover it, and that Amit wanted to stay on there, but the landlord’s view was that—
‘There it is,’ Mr Khandekar said, with relief, pouncing on a small silver stud, like a chicken on a seed. ‘Now I can go. Come with me.’
Altaf had feared they were about to be ejected – Mr Khandekar seemed so busy and unconcerned. But he knew that great men were not as you expected. He had expected that they would be asked to wait in an antechamber, rather than following Mr Khandekar about his house as he dressed. Mr Khandekar had his own ways, and he had been listening to them in his own fashion. He had been friendly, manly, and would now be helpful. Altaf had stumbled over the story, but Mr Khandekar had followed its disorganized path and had made sense of it, and now he would present them with a solution. Mr Khandekar led them out of his study. He paused at a looking glass in the salon, and with one hand smoothed down his greying hair; he licked the tips of the forefinger and thumb on his left hand and, in a gesture Altaf half knew, half remembered as being characteristic, wiped them across his eyebrows in a single opening gesture. ‘Come with me,’ he said again. They followed him across the crowded salon, stepping cautiously between little tables and low stools, and through the hallway. Mr Khandekar stopped at a closed door, knocked briefly and pushed it open.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said. ‘Two fellows from the village.’ He turned to Altaf. ‘What did you say your name was? A problem with accommodation. Talk to them. See if you can do anything. I have to be off. I’m fearfully late. How are you, Nadira? Always a pleasure.’
He turned swiftly, in his immaculate black-and-white dress, the white stock now quickly tied and beautifully neat at his throat. There was genuine warmth in the greeting or, Altaf supposed, the farewell to the girl. ‘I always like to see old friends from the village,’ he said. ‘Always, always. Explain everything to my wife – she is the true power in this house. She can do so much more for you than I can, believe me.’ The front door opened anonymously, smoothly, and in front of the house, under the mango tree, a car stood idling. A driver was waiting for Mr Khandekar.
‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘Always a pleasure.’
6.
Mrs Khandekar was a tiny woman, dressed enchantingly in a pink sari and a single simple necklace. The room she came to the door of was also pink, and lit by the light of the morning sun, coming through the leaves of the tree outside. It was a graceful, charming room, with two Chinese vases on either end of a teak sideboard, the sofa and armchairs upholstered in pale green silk. On the low teak and glass table was a tray with tea things on it, a blue-and-white Chinese set, and a plate of sweet biscuits arranged in a little fan. In the small brown vase on the table, a branch of fruit blossom.
Mrs Khandekar had a guest. She was a girl of perhaps fifteen, who craned her head at the visitors as Mrs Khandekar rose and went to speak to Amit and Altaf at the door. The girl sat very upright, and her hair was arranged in an upwards style. She sat as if aware of the way she would be looked at. Mr Khandekar had called her Nadira.
‘I am so sorry about my husband,’ Mrs Khandekar said, smiling. ‘He is always in such a rush. But perhaps I can help you? You are an old friend of Mr Khandekar’s father, I think?’
Altaf explained. Standing at the door to Mrs Khandekar’s sitting room, he found it came out in a much more orderly way. Amit’s problem seemed to unfold to an easy, elegant, listening audience. Amit stood, listening to Altaf’s explanation with a furrowed brow.
When Altaf had finished, Mrs Khandekar said, ‘I see. It happens to many people, that sort of thing. But do you think your friend’s landlord is at all likely to change his mind? He sounds quite set in his decision.’
‘He doesn’t want me to stay in the flat,’ Amit said, speaking for the first time. ‘I’m sure he has his own good reasons.’
‘I don’t think anyone can force him to rent his flat to someone, once he has made his mind up,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘It is unfortunate, but there it is.’
She looked at them, levelly and not without kindness.
‘I’m sorry to have troubled you in your home,’ Altaf said after a moment, lowering his head.
‘But what would you hope for, at the end of all this?’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘Don’t think about how you would achieve it but what you actually want.’
‘Somewhere to live,’ Altaf said. ‘Merely somewhere to live.’
‘Mrs Khandekar,’ the girl in the pink sitting room said – her voice was low and melodious, and she had an air of adult confidence about her. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Khandekar. What about—’
‘This is Nadira,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘The daughter of a very old friend of my husband’s, come to visit and take a cup of tea in the morning. It is so kind of her to drop in like this.’
Altaf and Amit bowed in her direction. ‘And now,’ Mrs Khandekar said, ‘I wonder if the best thing for me to do is not to start telling you about lawyers and law courts and the laws relating to landlords and their tenants, but just to try to help you to find somewhere to live. After all, that is all you want, I believe?’
‘That was just what I was going to say,’ the girl said.
Mrs Khandekar, she said, owned a block of flats in Old Dacca. They had belonged to her father before her, and he had left them to her. They were nice flats – a little old-fashioned, perhaps, but in good order, well looked after and in a very respectable, quiet neighbourhood.
‘What are your professions, gentlemen?’ Mrs Khandekar said.
Altaf let Amit say, ‘Schoolmaster,’ which at least sounded regular and respectable.
Somehow, it seemed to be established in Mrs Khandekar’s mind that the two of them were looking for a flat together, and he found himself saying, ‘I am a musician,’ adding for good measure, ‘I play on the radio,’ and going on to explain the Saturday-evening programme on which he was a regular.
‘How delightful!’ Mrs Khandekar said, with real warmth, clapping her hands together in pleasure. ‘My husband and I never miss it. We must listen out for you.’ She used an English expression.
There were some landlords who would be put off by the idea of musicians, but Mrs Khandekar was not one of them. In fact, once she had discovered that Amit was not just a schoolmaster but also a musician – ‘A famous musician,’ she flatteringly said – it appeared to act as a recommendation and a passport. She asked them into her sitting room, and offered them a seat and a cup of tea. Before long, it had emerged that Nadira, the assured and dignified girl on the sofa, liked to sing and, after a little more conversation, they had agreed to come to her house to teach her, the next free afternoon. In half an hour, everything seemed to have been arranged, and Mrs Khandekar had told them where to meet her the next morning to look at a flat in the block that had become vacant in recent weeks. ‘It is rather small, I am afraid,’ she said apologetically. ‘You must say at once if it does not suit you.’
But of course it would suit them. Altaf thought of his bedroom at home, with the rosewood harmonium placed beyond his brothers’ reach, the noise and the stolen half-hours between hours of chaos. He thought of a door that he could close and a life of his own. Amit’s face showed that, from the beginning, he had considered Altaf a part of his plans for living. Altaf’s heart swelled at the kindness of his friend, and at the degree of understanding between them that went without words.
7.
‘I’ve been to see the hall at the university,’ Altaf said.
It was a year later, and they had been very happily ensconced in Mrs Khandekar’s apartment, just the two of them. It suited them perfectly. It was on the third floor of an old building, and the streets that ran in front of and to the side of it were quiet ones. This was in the furniture-makers’ quarter, and all day long the streets were crowded with bed frames, like brown grazing cows. The smell of wood-shavings perfumed the air; the day was filled with the sounds of honest labour. In the corner of the sitting room, Amit’s mattress was rolled up and tied: he unrolled it every night when Altaf went to the bedroom. The flat was quite dark, with its small windows, but it suited them both and they were happy there. The musical instruments and the copies of music, including ‘Githo Bitan’ by Tagore, were on a shelf in the bedroom. In the sitting room there was a radio they had bought together, which they referred to as ‘our radio’. They had always battened on to the radios of others – an aunt’s, a mother’s – and it was a pleasure to share one instead. There was a portrait of Tagore tacked to the wall of the sitting room, and in each room, a kerosene lamp for when, as now, the electricity failed. Altaf and Amit were sitting by the light of the kerosene lamp on the floor of their small apartment. Mrs Khandekar’s apartment had a table, but they often preferred to sit on the floor to eat. Before them, lay plates of rice, fish and dal, cooked by Amit on the kerosene stove. Altaf and Amit were steadily rolling up the food into balls with the fingers of one hand, and eating them in one gulp. Their dark fingers glistened in the warm light with grains of rice.
‘What hall?’ Amit said, after a pause.
‘It will be for singers, for writers, for scholars like the professor, and for musicians. It can be a place for everyone to meet, and for people to share their knowledge of the Bengali traditions. It will be wonderful, Amit. There are so many people who are interested.’
Amit stopped. ‘They won’t permit it,’ he said. ‘The government.’
‘They won’t have any choice,’ Altaf said.
‘They tried to make everyone write in their script,’ Amit said. ‘They’ll try again. They don’t like us singing our own songs. They’ll respond if Bengalis start gathering to sing their songs and read their poetry and show their paintings.’
‘They needn’t know anything about it,’ Altaf said, with bravado.
‘Oh, yes?’ Amit said, quite mildly. ‘Do you think there’s nobody at the university in the pay of the police? They probably already know about the whole plan.’
‘Well,’ Altaf said, ‘if they already know, we might as well continue with it.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Amit said. ‘We might as well continue.’
This conversation took place just when memories of previous suppressions were fading, and people like Altaf and Amit were making their plans.
Nadira, who was my Nadira-aunty, had been taking music lessons from them for a year, ever since they had met her at Mrs Khandekar’s house. There was even talk of Nadira going on the radio and singing with them, on a Saturday afternoon. They sang classic songs, and read Bengali poetry together, and loaned each other novels in Bengali. There were classics, and new novels: everyone adored Sangshaptak when it came out, and soon Shahidullah Kaiser was a regular presence at the little group. After a few weeks, Nadira had introduced the two musicians to her sisters and even to her smallest brother, the eight-year-old Pultoo; after a few weeks more, her father – my nana – came in and greeted them. There was always a great respect for culture in my family, and from the beginning, Nana and Nani treated Nadira’s music teachers not as servants and lowly tutors, although of course they were paid to come, but as honoured guests.
In time, friends of Nadira asked if Altaf and Amit could come to teach them music, too. There was soon almost more teaching than they could cope with, and they grew to know the numbered streets of Dhanmondi very well, and wondered how they could ever have got so lost that first morning, when they had tried to find their way to Mr Khandekar’s house. There was even talk, at one point, of them being introduced to the household of Sheikh Mujib himself: Sheikh Hasina, his daughter, was said to have enquired about them of a friend. Nothing came of that, though they did see Sheikh Mujib and his daughter occasionally at the sort of gatherings in Dhanmondi where they sometimes played to an audience. They did have half a dozen regular visits to pay, and that was more or less the limit of what they could achieve.
The respectable and quiet streets of Dhanmondi had become fervently enthusiastic about the culture of the Bengalis. Behind the walls of many houses, conversations continued late into the night. Conversations about writers, artists, musicians, poets. Once the gates were shut against the outside world, against neighbours who could not be trusted, against the policemen in the streets and the laws of an alien people, households in Dhanmondi relaxed, and started to talk, and to listen to girls like Nadira-aunty singing a song as Altaf played the harmonium and sang too, and Amit’s palms and fingers pattered like rain on the tabla next to them.
The flower says,
‘Blessed am I,
Blessed am I
On the earth . . .’
Institutions started to open up. A school might decide to hold an exhibition of paintings on Bengali themes by its pupils – Pultoo was, at ten, the star of one of these exhibitions. At parties, the girls of the family might dance to the sitar and the harmonium; in other households, a member of the family might recite their own poetry. In Dhanmondi, on summer afternoons, families went from household to household, taking their music with them. Fifteen years before, the occupying Pakistani forces had tried to suppress the language of Bengal, and to force all in the province to write in an unfamiliar and alien script. (My own parents had demonstrated against this, in 1952, and had been thrown together into police cells; it was a happy and a romantic memory for them.) Now, in the last years of the 1960s, the Pakistani policemen stood around menacingly, and everyone knew who, in the neighbourhood, had been an informer, and probably still was one. Nothing seemed to matter. The Bengalis went from house to house with joyous abandon.
Among them were Altaf and Amit, who were universally welcome, and Nadira and her sisters; there were Nana and Nani and Mr and Mrs Khandekar; there was, too, Sheikh Mujib, whom you could see everywhere, on his way to forging a new country in the fires of his soul. He was the leader of a political party; his daughter was the one who had fretted and raged to my mother about the two missing bags of chilli. He lived under the constant threat of imprisonment, and sometimes he was trailed for days by the police, who sat endlessly in a car outside his house, a hundred yards away from Mr Khandekar. Sheikh Mujib came to these parties when he could; he said it made him glad to hear the songs of the Bengali. He made no particular fuss when he entered a room as a guest; still, he was who he was, and the room was drawn towards his big glossy hair, his plump, humorous look. The room stood up at his entrance: he would force a friend, perhaps a distinguished poet, to sit down again, before him. A special place was made for him, and perhaps for his daughter, Hasina, too. He would accept the special place while, all the time, protesting mildly with his hands. You never knew who you would meet at one of these parties. The gates stood open, and almost everyone was welcome.
It was after one of these parties that the idea had been raised for a school that would teach the Bengali arts; not just gatherings, but an institution. Sheikh Mujib had heard, and said it was a wonderful idea, and so it had to be done. Khandekar, who could speak to Sheikh Mujib quite naturally, as an equal, volunteered to discover whether the university could find some place or other for it. Speaking, again quite naturally, as an equal, to Altaf, he asked him quietly if he could talk to a professor of Bengali he named to discuss the matter. ‘Quite hush-hush for the moment,’ he said. ‘I know I can trust you, Altaf.’
Altaf did not feel he was in a position to refuse Khandekar anything. The parties they played at were so nice. You had a feeling of something quite new starting up in everyone’s lives, as afternoon faded into evening and the tea-lights in the garden were lit, the manservants going silently with their tapers from lantern to lantern. Altaf made a small gesture with his head. He would go and ask the professor for the loan, once a week, of some rooms in the Curzon Hall at the university, and make himself useful to Khandekar.
In the early evening, in a crowded room, the song began. The room fell silent.