CHAPTER 4
A Journey in the Dry Season
1.
My father lived where he worked. His chambers were attached to the flat where we – my parents, my sisters, my brother and I – lived. The flat was even more crowded than my grandfather’s house. In both of them, transitory residents gave them the air of slight chaos, but at Nana’s house, at least Nana always knew who they all were – cousins from the village, brothers of his driver or gardener, dependants of his two mothers – and could explain who any stranger was. My father had strangers of this sort and, like Nana, employed vulnerable people – my ayah and the boy who served his chambers. He put up with their dependants in turn. But most of the crowds in our flat were clients: belligerent, impatient, wronged and sometimes rather smelly.
The antechamber to my father’s chambers was quite full. It was a dark room, with only one window looking out on to a blank wall where a building had been put up a year ago; it had been painted a light yellow colour in a not very successful attempt to lighten the mood. Outside office hours, it was not a place to linger: there were twenty mismatched chairs about a central table, a desk and a seat for the clerk, and nothing much else, except some files and a short bookcase, a black cashbox on the top shelf behind the clerk underneath the Supreme Court Calendar. In office hours, there was nothing to do but linger, and most of the time it was full. The first noise of the morning was the ring on the doorbell by the first client: it almost always woke us. Soon after that, the sick chatter of the clerk’s typewriter would begin, and continue all day. My father worked hard, at any aspect of law he could think of – criminal law, property law, tax law, family law – and his clients kept him busy.
It was not always as full as it was that afternoon. The clients, as usual, would have been what I thought of as ‘poor people’ – people who came to a lawyer’s office in long shirts and loose pyjama trousers, or with lungis wrapped about their middle and their legs. They were people who did not even think of putting on shoes other than sandals or chappals. Their disputes and feuds were endless, and a steady source of income for my father. They were not, in fact, as I thought of them, poor. When the time came to pay, they would delve meditatively into the depths of their lungis, brightly eyeing the clerk as he turned, with his invoice before him, for the cashbox; what they produced was a fist solid with banknotes, held by a rubber band or a bulldog clip, as thick as a cream roll. Somehow all this money had been concealed in their lungis’ waistband, in some miracle of knotting known only to country landlords. They knew what they were about, those landlords and rentiers and farmers from the country, wearing their dusty sandals to their lawyer’s chambers. They respected my father, who had no snobbery about the clients he would take. He respected them too, treating them with an honour that might have been due to zamindars, and not just for the thick roll of banknotes they brought out to pay his fees.
The waiting room was quite full, and three clients were standing in the doorway of the chambers. The boy had brought round cups of tea on a tray, several times. ‘How long now?’ one man with a huge dyed-red beard called out to the clerk, sitting behind his desk, cowering a little at his typewriter. By this time of the day, the room was dense with smoke – the waiting clients and, between invoices and briefs, the clerk smoked steadily through the day their strong-smelling K2 and Captain’s cigarettes.
‘Advocate-sahib is busy,’ the clerk said. ‘But he will see everybody today. It may take a little longer than usual, gentlemen. But a little patience, a little patience.’
Somewhere outside the room, in the domestic parts of the flat, a noise: a door slamming, a child shouting, another child calling for its mother, quickly silenced.
‘We have been waiting for over two hours,’ a client said.
‘Three hours, three and a half,’ another put in.
‘I would prefer to return tomorrow rather than wait a further two hours,’ the first said. ‘I could return tomorrow at first light.’
‘I am sorry,’ the clerk said. He was a small, slight man with uneven dark patches on his cheeks and neck, and broken stained teeth from his habit of smoking and of chewing paan. ‘I am truly sorry. But Advocate-sahib leaves town very early tomorrow for a family holiday, for some weeks. He leaves Dacca for the country, and will not return soon. He undertakes to see every one of you today, however long it takes. You will not be turned away dissatisfied. All I ask in return is a little patience from you, gentlemen.’
In the corridor, somewhat closer, the same child’s voice was raised in complaint. ‘But he always—’ the always in Bengali a sibilant, carrying objection. A low woman’s voice, urgent and silencing; again the girl, louder now, saying, ‘Always—’ and then the noise of tears, a foot stamping, the girl’s voice almost screaming with rage. The Advocate-sahib’s door opened, and my father came out. With his glasses in hand, he walked straight through the waiting room and past the clients at the door; they shrank back respectfully.
‘That’s quite enough,’ he could be heard saying. ‘Go back to your room immediately, Sunchita. I don’t expect to hear these noises during office hours. Go back straight away.’
‘But, Daddy, he always—’
‘That’s quite enough,’ my father said. ‘I have very many important clients to see this afternoon. Tomorrow we go to the village, and everything can be play and noise in the fields, if you choose. Today has to be business, and I expect you to be quiet in the flat. Is that clear?’
My sister agreed. My father returned to his office; Sunchita, her eyes red with frustrated tears, came back to her room, where I was sitting on her bed, her possessions cast on to the floor. In the suitcase on the bed, there was one wooden pistol.
2.
It was always the same, the afternoon before we set off on our long journey to the village. My father had a lot of work, a lot of disgruntled clients to get through – his appointments system extended to asking people to come on a particular day, and if they asked to come on a day when we would be on holiday, he could not resist asking them to come on the last day before we left, rather than putting them off until we returned. The last day was always as overcrowded as this, and sometimes he did not finish with his clients until one in the morning.
My mother and the ayah, Majeda, would go to the kitchen and prepare the food we would be taking with us on the journey the next day – parathas, dry masala chicken, vegetable bhaji, aloo, papaya, potol, the Bengali pod-like vegetable that looks, when raw and piled, like a heap of big green eyes. My mother and father liked their own food, and took it with them when they travelled. While my mother and Majeda were preparing the food, my sisters and I were set a simple, useful task: packing our own suitcases.
Sunchita and I shared a large suitcase. We had already successfully laid out all the clothes we were to be taking – or, rather, Majeda had helped us to choose them, earlier, and we placed them in the suitcase, like a good little boy and girl, taking half the suitcase each. Sunchita’s idea of a holiday in the country was to take as many books as she possibly could; she put in a thick, almost geological, layer of books she was now reading and others she hoped to get round to reading, as well as two or three favourites, which she thought she could do with in the country. This was a good number of books: Sunchita always had three or four on the go simultaneously. I insisted on having my own book, as well, pushing aside one of Sunchita’s favourites.
‘That’s babyish,’ she said. ‘I finished reading Shukumur Roy years ago. That’s a book for babies.’
‘Look at what you are reading,’ I said, picking up her book. It was an adult novel by Shahidullah Kaiser. I remembered the immensely cutting remark my grandfather had made about my sister’s reading. It seemed the cruellest and most witty thing I could say. ‘This book is not for you,’ I said, with an echo of Nana’s grand sweeping gesture. ‘What are you doing, reading such a book?’
Sunchita grabbed it from me, and walked out of the room. I knew she was going to the kitchen to complain about the way I was treating her. I saw my chance. Not everything I had demanded be put in had been agreed to. One of these was my wooden pistol. It was a key part of the Roots game – I loved to stand, my legs apart, before the cowering slaves and wave my pistol menacingly about my head. I felt sure that I would find a use for it in the village, among the farmers’ children. It would add greatly to my own prestige. Quickly, I removed the layer of books, throwing them on the floor, then pulled out my shirts, trousers, Sunchita’s clothes. I got to the very bottom of the suitcase, and put the wooden pistol there, exactly where it would never be discovered.
‘Saadi,’ my ayah said. She was standing in the doorway. ‘Saadi! What have you done? You have destroyed the packing. I’m very cross with you.’
My sister pushed past her; she had left her books and clothes neatly packed in her half of the suitcase, and now they were lying anyhow on the floor. She broke the rule about keeping her voice down during office hours. She ran at me, cuffing me about the head. ‘But he always—’ she shouted, then turned about, pushed past Majeda, and into the corridor. ‘He always—’ she went on.
We heard the professional click of Father’s office door opening.
3.
A word about Majeda. She came to us in the following way.
She was from a family of six daughters and one son, in a village near Faridpur. She was the eldest, and beautiful from quite a young age. Her father was a farmer on a small scale. In the way of things, she attracted the attention of the son of the shopkeeper in the village. The shopkeepers made a good living. They could charge what they liked, and if a villager fell out with them for whatever reason, they could refuse to give him any service. Sometimes they would wilfully charge someone they disliked twice as much; if they thought they could get away with it, they would double the price of a bag of rice. In popular films of the time, the shopkeeper of the town is almost always villainous, and there was a good reason for that.
The shopkeeper’s family was well off, by village standards. The eldest son would not normally have been allowed to marry the daughter of a small village farmer. But the son saw Majeda, scattering rice seed to the chickens, and fell in love with her. He insisted that he only wanted to marry Majeda, and finally his family agreed to it. They insisted that her family put up a substantial dowry, however. That was the way they could save face in the village, by demonstrating that the new bride’s family had more substance than people knew. Or perhaps they were just keen on money, and believed in squeezing new wives. Majeda’s father lost his head, and promised a much larger dowry than he could really afford. With six daughters to marry, he could spare only a small amount.
After the marriage, Majeda’s father could not pay the dowry he had promised. Majeda’s husband, who was a decent man, was prepared to forget all about it. Perhaps he looked at the situation and thought that his family had enough to support Majeda, whom he genuinely loved. But his parents did not see it in that light. They thought that Majeda and her father had defrauded them by pretending to be much richer than they were. They were furious, and after a time, they turned Majeda out of the house.
In later years, the demanding of a dowry became illegal because of cases like Majeda’s. In some extreme cases, brides whose families defaulted on their dowries were actually murdered. But Majeda was merely forced to leave her husband. Instead of returning to her family, in the village where she would have had to face her in-laws every day, she came to Dacca. She had a connection of some sort who was a near neighbour of ours, and my mother came to hear about her situation. Zahid, my brother, was a toddler at the time, and my mother needed a nurse. She met Majeda, who was a nice, modest girl with a pleasant manner, and decided to employ her.
She was still there fifteen years later, and was still quite beautiful. My parents did not pay her well, I believe: she got fifty taka a month. But she had her room and board, and my parents paid for her to return home to see her family at least once a year. They also bought her good-quality and even elegant clothes to wear. I am sure they would have done just the same if Majeda had not been beautiful at all, but as it was, when she came to meet me from school, I always thought that my ayah was much more beautiful and well-dressed than anyone else’s. It may have been, too, that my mother, with six sisters herself, felt the uncomfortable situation Majeda’s father had been placed in with some sympathy. Of course, Nana would not have found himself obliged to provide large dowries, so the situation was not really very similar.
Majeda had an air of romantic sadness in her eyes – they were so black that there was no distinction between iris and pupil, just a deep circle of black. She had a quiet, musical voice. I never heard her regret her life, though my mother often told me that she greatly missed her husband. She believed that he had always loved her and never remarried, even though he had had some good opportunities. I do not know how my mother knew this. But that is the story of how Majeda, my ayah, came to live with our family.
4.
Our suitcase had been repacked, and we had been put to bed. At the far end of the flat, there was still the grumble of the waiting clients, and the smell of their cigarette smoke. Father would continue to see them until he was done. We were in our beds, side by side, and Sunchita and I were talking about all the things we were going to do when we got to the village.
‘I want to go to the sugar-cane field,’ I said.
‘And cut down sugar cane, and eat it,’ Sunchita said.
‘I want to find that tree, the one with the seeds,’ I said. ‘The big red seeds, the hard ones.’
‘I’m going to collect the seeds and make a necklace out of them, like I did last year,’ Sunchita said.
‘I’m going to bring back a big bag of seeds,’ I said.
‘I’ll make two, three necklaces,’ she said. ‘So they’ll last all the time until we get to go again.’
‘I’m going to teach the cousins about Roots,’ I said. ‘They don’t know about Roots. They haven’t got a television. And I’m going to make a fishing rod, and go down to the river to climb into the tree, and sit, and wait until I catch a great big fish.’
‘I’m going to go into the mango orchard,’ Sunchita said, her voice growing heavy and slow, pausing between one word and the next, ‘and I’m going to climb up into a mango tree, and I’m going to take a book, and I’ll sit there, and I’ll pick a mango, and I’ll suck at a mango, and I’ll read my book, and no one will find me . . .’
My sister was in my mind, in the low branches of a mango tree in the mango orchard, hidden behind leaves, her book resting on her knees. She turned a page, and her face was down and she was absorbed in her book. And I was lying underneath the tree, looking up into its dark and light, and losing my dappled sister the more I tried to find her.
5.
My father had a terrible fear of being late for the bus to the village. Even if he had not finished with his last client until after one in the morning, he would insist on everybody being woken at half past four for a bus that did not leave until after seven. My mother complained, every year, at this imposition. Father said that it was important to get there early, to get the best seats; my mother would point out that the seats had been reserved, weeks before. My father would then say that it was not a question of the seats on the bus, but of the best place to put our luggage, in the cage on the roof, so that it should not fall off and be lost. The conversation ran the same course every year, and my father always had his way.
The suitcases and the food for the journey were in a neat pile in the hallway. The boy who worked in the chambers was woken and sent out to the nearby main road to wake three cycle-rickshaw drivers in their turn, sleeping in their cabs. The rickshaws would be loaded up with our luggage, and Mother would inspect us all: father, Majeda, my brother Zahid, my sisters Sunchita and Sushmita, and me. We were in our best travelling clothes; I wore a short-sleeved shirt and short trousers. The rickshaws took us in twos and threes through the streets of Dacca, rattling past whole families under temporary roadside shelter, and only the very occasional figure standing on an unknown, solitary task at a junction. We travelled to the village at the same time each year, the mango season. It was quite dark when we got up; by the time we were in the rickshaws and on the way to the bus station, light was painting the sky in pale streaks.
Later, the bus station would be crowded and noisy, with passengers pushing and shoving, hawkers selling toys, labour-saving devices for the home as well as snacks and whole meals. Later still, the noise would be overwhelming, and the mass of humanity holding up the corner of a sari or a handkerchief to get through the black, belching smoke from the back of the hundreds of buses. But if you arrived, like us, before six, the crowds were on a smaller scale. There were still boys going from bus to bus, calling out, ‘Chai, chai,’ with their trays of glasses of milky tea; I admired their skill in balancing a tray on one hand and with the other scratching themselves under their lungi or under their grubby white singlets. I never knew anyone who bought a cup of tea from the bus-station boys. There were families like ours, sitting on piles of luggage, and there were buses being loaded up.
My father had no difficulty in identifying the bus that would take us across seven rivers to Jhenaidah sub-district, then to Shailkupa-thana, and to Mirzapur village. I could recite it. My father’s skill in tracking down the bus in Komlapur bus station in Dacca, among the dozens of identical idling buses, all brick-red BRTC buses with the same open caged windows, was prodigious to me. It seemed on the same level of skill as the bus drivers’ in tracing the route away from the knot of roads that wound up into Dacca. Anyone could find their way to Dacca, it seemed to me, but only a BRTC driver with his cigarette and his jaunty manner and, in later years, his cassette player firmly wedged under his seat, could find his way to a given place, starting from the capital.
Quickly and inexplicably, my father found our bus; the suitcases were loaded on to the roof, in a spot where they could not fall off, and we took our reserved seats. ‘You can’t sit there,’ my father said to me. ‘It isn’t safe for little boys.’ I was moved from the place next to the window, and we sat and waited for the station to wake up, for the bus to fill over the next hour, for it to depart.
We set off, and the streets of Dacca had come to life. Those sleeping families were awake, and washing underneath the street-corner taps; men rubbing their faces and glistening torsos, snorting in and spurting out water from their nostrils, women trudging along with their baskets, and people hurrying to their daily tasks. The sun was up, and the first wave of traffic in the city was immense. It took hours before we reached the first river to cross, and most of those hours were spent, it always seemed, getting through Dacca. The road was humped and rough; the bus banged and hurtled through the air as it hit each bump. ‘Ai – ai – ai,’ my sister Sushmita cried, on the other side of the aisle. She hated to travel; she grew pale, sweaty and sick in the heat and petrol-smell, and the hammering leaps of the bus over the humps in the road were painful to her.
‘Slow down, slow down,’ the passengers yodelled to the driver.
The conductor, an efficient man whose job was never clear to me, came to tell us that if the driver slowed down, he would never reach his destination in time. The families of doctors, lawyers, university professors about us remonstrated, and the conductor repeated what he had said.
I greatly enjoyed the cross exchanges between the passengers and the conductor. They got worse as the journey progressed. ‘Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai,’ a passenger shouted. ‘Stop, stop, stop – my fruit, my fruit.’ We had seen the whole drama. He must have arrived at the bus station long after us and placed a basket of oranges, packed in hay, on the very top, where the loading was unstable. With some pleasure and excitement, an hour on the road out of Dacca, we had seen the basket fall heavily behind the bus with a crash. Before anyone could do anything, the bus behind had driven right over it; behind us, the squashed oranges were a catastrophe of mud, juice and hay, and the passenger wailing his bad fortune and the carelessness of the BRTC. Once, the bus had a puncture six hours into the journey. ‘Why didn’t you check the tyres on the ferry?’ my father shouted at the conductor. ‘That’s your job, to check that the tyres are in perfect condition before you set off, and again on the ferry.’
‘There’s nothing you can do against a nail on the road,’ the conductor retorted, and my father made his own objection to this. The bus had juddered to a halt between paddy-fields, and in the midday heat, we all got off. ‘Don’t wander too far off, Saadi,’ my mother said. She had a great fear of kidnappers, and felt that at any moment I might be grabbed by criminals, disguised perhaps as rice-farmers. So I had to stay close to Majeda.
We got off, and with great fascination watched the conductor and the driver prise the burst tyre off its axle, jacking the bus up off the ground. The conductor went to the back and fetched the spare tyre. ‘What happens if there is another nail on the ground?’ I said, but Majeda didn’t know. She was the only woman in the small crowd of men and boys, standing about watching the interesting act of a wheel being changed. All about us, other men from the bus were taking an opportunity, and peeing in a ragged line into the ditch at the side of the road; the mothers and sisters were fanning themselves in the shade cast by the bus, taking no interest in the mechanical doings.
6.
The first river was crossed by means of a bridge, but the second was the Padma river. That was what we in Bangladesh called the Ganges as it came towards the Bay of Bengal, the open sea. My father, who admired the British almost as much as Nana did, always said, as we approached the Padma on our summer journey, ‘I will never understand why the British did not build a bridge over the Padma, and save us from all this kerfuffle.’
My brother, who was literal-minded and interested in engineering, explained at this point that it was not possible to build a bridge over the Padma, because the river constantly washed away the mud of the bank. The ground was too soft and sifting to support the huge piles that a bridge over the Padma would require.
The Padma was an enormous river, and coming to it impressed us with the scale and drama of our nation. From one bank, it was impossible to see the far bank; it was like a great sea. The banks were uneven cliffs of clay and, as Zahid said, the river constantly tore away at it. You could see great bites of clay and grass collapsing into the flood.
There was no bridge: you crossed on a ferry. However big the ferries were, they could not meet demand. There were always at least two hundred buses waiting at the ferry ghat to embark, and it could be a long wait. It was my favourite part of the whole journey. I got off the bus with my sisters, Zahid and Majeda, and Majeda took me to a place where I could pee into the river. She turned her head decorously, as I could not go while anyone was watching me, but she stood not far off. A temporary encampment, a middle-sized town, had sprung up. Like the mud banks, it slid from time to time into the river and was carried off; constantly, from the back, it was renewed with more buses, more people, more hawkers, more of everything.
The food my mother and my ayah had prepared was brought out. They had made all sorts of dry cooked food, nothing that would add to the pungent smell of the hot bus, and nothing that could not be eaten with a napkin and fingers. We knew a place nearby, in the shade, away from the worst of the noise and the confusion. We referred to it as ‘our place’, a little hollow underneath a tree, and resented it if, when we got there, another family had set up their picnic. We never considered that they, too, might think of it as ‘their place’. I grew tense as the time of the picnic approached. The riverbank was lined with men selling freshly cooked hilsha fish; the smell was almost unendurably delicious. More than anything, I longed for my mother to augment her already lavish picnic with a pair of hot bought hilsha fish. My mother and father did not like to buy and eat other people’s cooked food. They hardly ever went to a restaurant if they could help it, and certainly never bought food from a stall in the street. For my father, to do such things was the habit of a poor law student without his own cooking facilities, wife, servants or children. He thought it a waste of money, and he did not believe it was safe to eat from the stove of a stranger. Certainly, we children were expressly forbidden ever to buy anything from the street, except an unpeeled banana or the water of a green coconut, freshly opened. The sweet stalls that had sprung up on the bank of the Padma were not, we understood, for us, and the children who were permitted to buy a bag of lozenges from them would, we knew priggishly, be in agonizing pain and perhaps even dead before the end of their journey today.
The sweet stalls were one matter, and we filed past them with our eyes decorously low. But the piles of hilsha fish smelt so good that we could not help looking longingly at them, and then at Mother. In the past, she had spontaneously pulled at Father’s shirt-sleeves, and once or twice before on this journey, we had found that she, too, could not resist the sweet nutty smell of freshly fried hilsha fish. It would do no good to beg; my sisters and I simply tried to catch my mother’s eye. But this year, it did not work. She continued on past the fish stalls, carrying, with Majeda, the cold picnic. She was following my father and my serious, ungreedy brother, as the two of them went on discussing the many difficulties that would have to be resolved, if Bangladesh were ever to construct a bridge across the great span of the Padma river. Into the huge flood of the river, the ferry boats continued to launch themselves, like floating seed-pods, heavy with their burdens.
7.
It took two or three hours to cross the Padma on the ferry. The river was thick with mud at its edges, and as the ferry slipped its bonds and set off into the flood, it churned behind grey and brown. We were on the deck of the boat. Behind us, the land sank back, with its load of trucks and coaches, and the stevedores preparing for the next ferry.
There was so much to watch out for in the river: the storks picking elegantly, like rich ladies in white draped saris, through the mud, and the river dolphins. Long-nosed, they threw themselves out of the flood in gangs, their wet flanks flashing in the sun. They seemed to have no reason to do it but their own pleasure. We lost count of the river dolphins, there were so many. River birds followed, shrieking, in the wake of the boat, hoping for waste food to be tossed overboard. Life on the river had its own rhythm, and the men who crewed the ferry from one bank of the Padma to the other, four times a day, were practical, hard-faced, but somehow light in spirit. They did not give the impression of being proper sailors, but to have settled for this particular rank in life as they strolled the decks and talked out of the corners of their mouths. They had their own ways of speaking. And by the time we reached the middle of the Padma, busy and torn by dolphins, the muddy water of the banks had clarified. The river, just there in the middle of the stream before it started to thicken and obscure again, was a translucent, veiled blue, like the sky.
8.
There were seven rivers to cross. The Padma was the biggest. It was only the second we came to. After that, there were rivers with bridges, and then ones with ferries. After the Padma, the buses went off in different directions, like rolling coconuts. When our bus reached the next ferry-crossing, there were many fewer buses waiting. The ferries were much smaller, however, and could only take four or five buses at a time. These smaller ferry ghats still had life, and boys went between the waiting buses with fruit and sweets and tea.
After the Padma, it was easy to fall asleep. I would wake up and ask how many rivers we had now crossed. It would outrage me that nobody woke me up at each river bridge; I liked to count the rivers out. My sister Sushmita never slept: she could not. During the long journey, as she followed us on or off of the bus, she complained ceaselessly about the discomfort and the unpleasantness. My mother said, quite mildly, that she was not very good to complain so much about a journey. She should remember the journey that Nana and Nani took, when they were thrown out of Calcutta in 1947 and had to go to Dacca without any idea of what they would find there. There were no bandits on the road today, waiting to kill Sushmita and the rest of us. There was only a lovely journey, with some exciting rides on ferries, and at the end of it, everyone in the village would be excited to see Sushmita, and disappointed to see such a grumpy face.
My sister Sushmita’s stomach felt as if it was going to explode when it travelled over bumps in the road. She hated the strong smell of the river. She longed for her own chair, her own bed, her own things. It was no consolation to her to remember that the older members of her family had undergone a much worse journey thirty years before. When she reached the village – she could be heard to mumble under the noise of the bus’s engine – she would go straight to bed and stay there all night and all day the next day. That was what she was looking forward to doing.
After seven rivers, three ferries and four bridges, the bus pulled into the station at the main town of Jhenaidah. Here we got off. The station was the centre of the town. Baggage bobbed about on the heads of porters above the crowd, like flotsam after a shipwreck, and all the time the hawkers were crying out their offers of tea, hot food and sweets. A chain of porters swiftly assembled to take the luggage down from the roof. I held tight to my mother’s hand, and she pulled me after her down the bus’s rotting tin steps; Sushmita and Sunchita were trusted to stay and look after each other, hand in hand. Behind all of us, Majeda hovered, making vague shepherding gestures with both hands. ‘That’s ours – that’s ours – that’s ours – four – five,’ my mother called, as the porters handed down our suitcases. The country porters were in awe of women like my mother, capable city women used to organizing others and raising their voices when it was absolutely required. She got her way.
My father was already elsewhere. He relished the moment of arrival in the main town of Jhenaidah. It was here that he would start to be recognized. In the mass of Dacca, he was not known by more than one person in a thousand, and he passed through the crowded streets with his head borne down by anonymity. As soon as he returned to the district where he had grown up, he knew he became an object of pride. He was a popular man in his profession and society; it was only the numbers of Dacca that concealed this from him. Here, his popularity was made apparent to everyone by the way he could simply stand there and wait for people in the main square of the town to greet him. This they did by hailing his name in a familiar way, by saying, ‘Advocate-sahib,’ or by abasing themselves. My father’s head was high in the crowd; he was talking with confidence and fluency to a small circle, already in place. He was making an effort not to look too overcome with joy; his expression was even a little irritable. But he loved being greeted and surrounded. For once, it corresponded with the valuation he held of himself in the world.
‘There is the bus,’ my mother said, referring to the bus that we were to transfer everything on to, the small country bus that would take us all the way to the village. ‘It is waiting. We should get on to it.’
‘There is no hurry,’ my father said, from the middle of his crowd of acquaintances, friends, acolytes and cronies. ‘There will be another bus along in fifteen minutes. They go constantly.’
After some time, Zahid and I would be called over and exhibited to the friends of his youth. After hours of travelling, we did not look as fine and elegant as we had at the beginning of the journey. But we were conscious that we still looked like the children of a Dacca advocate. The children of the small town gazed at us from behind a thicket of adult legs, clutching to what they knew. We talked to each other loudly, making sure our voices could be heard. All about, the tones and music of the town’s speech were strange and even comical to us; the country accent was not the same as ours. My father’s courtroom voice, his lecturing voice, carried on, explaining that Zahid was to become an engineer, and had done very well in all his exams this year, and was top of his class, and that I was to become a lawyer, ‘like his father and like his grandfather’; explaining all of this to people he was friends with, people whom he just about knew, people whom he did not know at all.
It could take an hour before we finally detached ourselves from the group, assembled our luggage again and got on to the small, local bus that would take us the remaining part of the journey. It was much less comfortable than the big bus: its seats were wooden slats, and the people on it were local people, going back to their small villages from the large market town. They held wicker baskets of mangoes and oranges in hay, chickens, eggs in straw, sleeping or crying babies; they looked at us with curiosity, and sometimes with recognition. To either side of the narrow road, the fields were green with growing rice, with sugar cane, wet fields of grass, with jute, or with the brilliant yellow of the mustard plant. Orchards of mango trees, of jackfruit, tamarind, palms bearing bananas and dates rippled off into the middle distance. Every five minutes the bus stopped, and a passenger or two got off, heaving their burden from underneath the seat, walking off across the field towards a cracked mud house.
9.
My father had grown up in these fields, in this village. His father was a teacher at the village mosque, and many of his brothers and sisters were much more religious than my Dacca relations. Some of my father’s sisters wore the veil, and his brothers went to the mosque at least once a day. My father had escaped from all that. He had come to Dacca to study law, and had stayed with my mother’s father, Nana, who had married an aunt of my father’s. So my mother and father were first cousins. When he was a child, he had run in these fields with his brothers and sisters and the boys from the village. He had studied hard, and was the pride of the place. Even some of our relations called him ‘Advocate-sahib’ now, though not the close ones. Some of them remembered the boy who, as I did now on our visits, took a long twig, a piece of string, a hook and a worm from the earth, and then sat over the river, waiting for the fish to bite. But they did not mention it until my father did – he liked to share these memories with me, and a trip to the village meant a relaxation of his stern ways.
When the bus stopped for us, there were three relations waiting; a brother of Father’s, and two of his sons, between Zahid’s age and mine. Behind them was a cart, pulled by a waiting cow. The heat of the late afternoon was still high, making the surface of the farm’s ponds a beaten bronze. We dismounted, the driver helping us to unload our suitcases and parcels from the roof of the bus. We stood, and the uncle and his two sons respectfully went down, and touched my father’s feet, my mother’s, my brother’s, my two sisters’, and even mine, in greeting. The bus pulled away, leaving us with a pile of luggage in the dusty road. Behind the roadside ditch, a wall of jute, twice a man’s height, fine and green. There was a path cut in the jute, and from this, a small man emerged in a lungi, carrying an immense machete. ‘Who is this? Who’s arrived?’ he called, in his yawning, singing country accent.
‘It’s Mahmood and his family, come from Dacca,’ my father’s brother called back, and the farmer made a great certain wave in the air, a greeting with his machete, before going back into the dark sylvan depths of the crop, its top stretching wildly above the farmer’s head. My father had remembered him.
From the back of the cart, behind the cow’s backside lumbering to left and right, like a piece of furniture being laboriously moved, we saw farmers raising themselves from their crop, ambling along the road, smallholders and rice-growers. They saw the familiar cow, lumbering from side to side, pulling a cart with unfamiliar children, and they called out exactly the same thing: ‘Who is that? Who is arriving?’ We felt like royalty. We imitated our father and waved back, and then he would tell us who they were, and my father’s brother would explain what had happened to them in the last year; who had married, who had died, who had had children, whose crops and chickens had done well and whose had failed, leading them into debt. And then there was the family house, and Grandfather in his beard coming out to meet us. Now the day was beginning to fade; soon it would be night; soon we would be fed, and put to bed.
But tomorrow I would run out into the fields, to the brook, with a rod I had made myself from a thin branch, a string, a hook and with a worm I had found myself. There would be the friends from last summer, the boys from the village and the cousins in the country. We would fish, and get into the sugar-cane field and eat as much as we could. My sister Sushmita would stay inside, not getting up the whole day, complaining about her headache and her exhaustion, lying in the dark as awed country aunts brought her tea and soft, white, affectionate things on small plates to tempt her appetite.
And Sunchita would pick her moment. She would run out into the mango orchard, a book and a stolen red silk pillow from the dusty salon under her arm. She would find a tree with low-lying branches, and jump on to the lowest, gripping the trunk of the tree. She would climb up into the dark foliage where the red mangoes hung like Chinese lanterns. She would find a place to rest her back, and then reach forward from time to time in the dappled interior light, plucking a ripe mango from its long stalk. She would pummel the fruit, and pinch a hole at the bottom, and suck the flesh out whole. All the time, in this light-and-dark-strewn hiding place, her concentration would be on the book she held. Wedged into a tree in a mango orchard, the red silk cushion behind her back, she could read for hours, the distant shouts of farmers and cousins not disturbing her, hardly noticing the song of the birds sitting at rest, like her, in the trees.