CHAPTER 9
How I Was Allowed to Eat As Much As I Liked
1.
‘What is all of this?’ Nana was saying. He was upstairs in his house. He had come home a half-hour before; had greeted Nani, his daughters, his two mothers, his younger son, the elder son and his wife and children, another husband or two and a few more children of his daughters, such as Zahid, my brother, and my sisters Sushmita and Sunchita and his grandson, or adopted child Shibli, who appeared to be wailing for some reason. He had given a more distant greeting to the cousins from the village who had arrived the week before, asking for accommodation. All this greeting and enquiries after people’s health had taken some time. When it was done, and Nana saw that the boy was preparing his tray of tea, he went upstairs. The cook, Ahmed, came to the kitchen door, and a veiled, warning expression passed between him and Nani, sitting on the couch reading the newspaper to my mother. Dahlia and Nadira exchanged a questioning glance; Nadira tightly shook her head to discourage comment. The cook went back into the kitchen. A question came from upstairs. My grandfather never needed to raise his voice. In that house, he was listened to.
‘What is all this?’ Nana said, coming downstairs with his barrister’s stock in his hand.
‘What is all what?’ Nani said. ‘You know quite well what everything is. Your question makes no sense to me whatsoever. You must speak more clearly.’
‘On my balcony,’ Nana said. ‘My balcony is full of rubbish and detritus. What is all of that?’
‘That is not rubbish and detritus,’ Nani said, quite calmly. ‘The chillis and tomatoes and mangoes and all of that are being dried, and will be preserved and pickled. It will be out of your way in a day or two.’ Nana made a gesture of impatience, and retreated back up to his bedroom. ‘Your father is quite right,’ Nani said to her daughters. ‘We should not simply have occupied his balcony without asking for permission first. But where else are Ahmed and I supposed to lay fruit out for pickling where no one will walk over it and the animals won’t steal it? I don’t think he has considered that. And if there is no pickling and preserving, what does he think we are all going to eat the next time we can’t leave the house? We have no idea how long it will go on for, next time.’
When Nana moved from the house in Rankin Street to the larger house in Dhanmondi, the courtyard house that I remembered from my own childhood, he must have anticipated having more space at his disposal. Most of all, he wanted to have a balcony on which to rest at the end of his day’s labours, where the servants would bring him tea and biscuits, and he could call, perhaps, for one clean and well-behaved grandchild to pay their dutiful respects. He had envied his friend Khandekar, who had exactly this arrangement, and a civilized habit of receiving guests in his private space. Within months of the move, however, the balcony in Dhanmondi was claimed by the alliance of Nani and Ahmed, the cook. They had discovered that it was the perfect space for drying chillis and tamarind and other things, for pickles. It faced the right way; it was secluded from the raids of children and animals; it had just the right extent for the load of pickles that could be dealt with in an afternoon, which is about as much time as anyone wants to devote to pickling.
In the same way, Nana had believed that his larger, more orderly house would only gain in gracious space in time. Boro-mama had left home, and had set up his own household with his wife and, now, three children. My mother and father had insisted on doing the same, and had been living in Elephant Road. Era-aunty had followed suit, and though Mary-aunty had so far not married, most of the younger aunts and, in time, Pultoo-mama as well would make homes of their own.
The normal process began to be reversed with Boro-mama’s fourth child. Sharmin had been determined that she would have only two children, one to replace her in the world, the other to replace her husband. She firmly believed that it was wrong to go on populating the world in this way. But her husband, Laddu, held no such conviction. He hardly thought about his relations with his wife in terms even of whether they could afford to raise another child, let alone in terms of their responsibility to mankind. Sharmin believed that he had taken personal responsibility for not giving her a third child, who came as a surprise. When she found that she was pregnant with a fourth, she blamed Laddu entirely.
‘Well,’ Mira said at the time, ‘I don’t think it could have been completely big-brother’s doing.’
‘Sharmin must have played a necessary role,’ Nadira said. ‘Big-brother didn’t bring it about all on his own.’
But that seemed to be Sharmin’s belief, and she went about saying quite openly to Laddu’s sisters that the only possible action for her to take was to abort the baby. Soft-hearted Dahlia overheard this – at thirteen, she would weep over the death of a baby bird or the fate of an old beggar, bent double over a stick in the street. She reported it, in tears, to Nani, who talked it over with Nana. So Shibli was born, and not aborted for the sake of his mother’s principles. But almost as soon as he was born, he came to live in my grandfather’s house, and was brought up by them as their own youngest son. At first a wet-nurse came in, and then Shibli provided employment for the same ayah who had brought up most of his aunts and his uncle. After all, my grandmother used to say, Shibli was only eight years younger than her own youngest child, Bubbly. It was a pleasure to have a baby in the house again after a short break. ‘Come and see what little Shibli is doing!’ Nani would call from her room, hanging entranced over his cradle. It was as if she had never had children of her own; or as if Shibli and the condition of grandmotherhood had returned her to her first moment of motherhood, looking after that son whom only she really remembered, killed in Calcutta during the war by Japanese bombs. There was something new and girlish about this stately, sharp woman in the company of Sharmin’s baby.
(When we were children, this history of Shibli’s was well known to us and, in particular, how Shibli should have been aborted. I do not know who told us the story in the first place, and it seems a harsh, ruthless fact to share with children. But for the most part it only confirmed my opinion that Shibli had been horribly spoilt and indulged by everyone, not just since the moment of his birth but well before that. His characteristic simper was that of someone who knew he had survived against terrible odds.)
Shibli, however, was just one small child. Shortly afterwards, Nana’s two mothers arrived for a stay of three weeks. They were the two wives of Nana’s father, the last man in my family to marry polygamously, and though only one of them was his real mother, he treated them both in exactly the same way, with an ostentatious courtesy of the door-opening, standing-up, rice-serving, deferential kind. He would perform these conspicuous gestures individually, and not to them as a pair; when he did so, the mother who had his attention would beam, her old face screwing up into a smiling pucker, as if she had never been so well treated.
The stay of three weeks was supposed to be a short visit, but they arrived with a substantial volume of luggage following behind in a cart. It was clear that they were unhappy about living in the country apart from the rest of the family. Things, they said, were not as easy as they had once been. So Nana invited them to stay as long as they liked. Perhaps that was what they had been hoping for. They made themselves useful about the house, minding Bubbly, mending socks, fetching clean jars of water for Pultoo when he was at the easel painting, or even cleaning his brushes for him – they were great admirers of Pultoo’s early work. Their limit came only with baby Shibli, whom they were prepared to coo over but not to bear responsibility for. Most of all, they made themselves useful by being pleasant and humble about the house, never intruding or making noise. The room they shared made no extra work for the servants. Nani might have disliked their constant grinding of paan with a pestle, the two of them sitting quietly in a corner muttering trivialities. They were keen observers, from their window, of the comings and goings of the neighbourhood, and always wanted to know when they glimpsed a child who he or she could possibly be. But, on the whole, nobody minded them being there, and it was with some surprise that Pultoo remarked one day that it must be a year since his two grandmothers had come to stay in Dhanmondi.
2.
The house of Khandekar, Nana’s great friend, was quite different. When the roadblocks allowed, and there were fewer soldiers on the streets making a nuisance of themselves, Nana often went round there for some civilized company. There were only two sons, both students at the university, both clever, respectful, well-read boys, who would be a credit to their parents and to the legal profession. Khandekar and his wife had their home to themselves. There were never great crowds of daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren demanding attention; never a party of cousins from the village muttering among themselves and asking to help with the preparation of food. Nobody threatened to dry mangoes on Khandekar’s balcony. It was pleasant to visit for an hour or two, take a cup of tea; to continue the argument about a law suit, to chat quietly about the state of affairs, to drift back under the portico, with the rich, jam-like scent of mimosa and jasmine, to the pleasant subject of their student days in Calcutta. It was good to laugh and banter and forget the world altogether, as much as they could.
Nana would have gone to Khandekar’s house every day if he could. But all too often, however, it proved impossible to get from one house to another, even though they were separated by only a ten-minute journey. Roadblocks sprang up overnight; bands of soldiers loitered at corners; men who in other times would have been the refuse of the street appeared out of nowhere, demanding papers with threats and refusing to state the source of their authority. There were many such people, these days, and they were especially evident about Khandekar’s house. Many of them were Bihari, who had never felt at home, had always been dissatisfied among the Bengalis. It was impossible to know in advance whether one would get to the end of one’s journey unmolested. My grandfather was not accustomed to put up with the impudence of soldiers and badmashes demanding papers. But he saw that there was no point in fighting it. He gloomily observed over the dinner table that, like an old-fashioned Munshi, he would soon have to forbid the women of his family to leave the house. The women of his family objected. But he laid down the law, and none of them, not even Nani, was ever allowed to go on a visit, or to the market, without taking Rustum to sit by them and stare down the soldiery. To Khandekar’s house, they could not go at all, not unless they went with him. Just by there the roadblocks shifted, repositioned, multiplied. Across the road, from side to side, mysterious and unproductive workmen spread, making the way impassable. Once, a huge demonstration appeared from nowhere, blocking the roads in that quarter for hours. It turned out to be a demonstration of loyalty to the government in West Pakistan, and therefore hired for this specific occasion. Sometimes it was possible to reach Khandekar’s house, so very few streets away, by ingenious means. But often those ingenious means failed; no resourceful improvisation on Rustum’s part could circumvent protesters, roadblocks, security checks, puffed-up and paid-for Biharis, or ersatz roadworks. The authorities were bending all their ingenuity on blocking these streets, because a few houses away from Khandekar lived Sheikh Mujib.
These days, Sheikh Mujib’s face was everywhere in Dacca. His candidacy to become prime minister had spread and spread, and his face was on every wall. His thick glasses, his open, trustworthy, intelligent face promised that things would change. He was no longer seen at Sufiya’s, and his usual enjoyment of walking in the street had come to an end. Occasionally there was a genuine demonstration outside Sheikh Mujib’s house in support of him. Several times, Sheikh Mujib had made an appearance before bigger crowds, calling for some measure of independence. It was two years since the government had clamped down on statements of Bengal nationhood – meaning poetry, music, images. What would happen, people started to ask, if a Bengali were elected president of the whole country – if the capital of Pakistan were moved to Dacca, the first language of the nation became Bengali, and the national anthem became a song of Tagore’s? It was unthinkable. But there was no obvious reason why it should not happen – Nana and Khandekar agreed on this. There were more voters in East Pakistan than in West Pakistan, and they were less divided. There might be no democratic reason why Sheikh Mujib should not be elected president of the divided country, and make his first presidential speech in the language of Dacca, to an immense crowd of Bengalis, on the banks of the Padma. Was there any reason why not? What would happen if it came to pass? The authorities did not propose to find out. Hence the fake roadworks and the hired demonstrators and the security checks, blocking in Sheikh Mujib’s house. They often prevented visitors to his near neighbours, too, such as Khandekar, to my grandfather’s immense irritation, as I said.
‘I am astonished you reached us,’ Khandekar said, coming to the door himself as my grandfather came in. ‘Astonished. We were waiting yesterday all day for my wife’s brother to visit, and the day before that, and the day before that, but nothing. He was turned back three, four times. What is your secret, my dear fellow?’
‘I have no idea,’ Nana said. ‘I have not the foggiest idea. This is a very strange situation. Some days you cannot leave your house before being harassed; others you sail through without the smallest disturbance. I did see that the goons were drawn up the road somewhat, besieging your distinguished neighbour. Rustum said, “If I drive this way and that way, and double back, and then through and across and in between – then we shall reach our destination without the smallest trouble.” And so it proved.’
‘Ah, Rustum, resourceful fellow,’ Khandekar said. ‘Ask him to take his tea in the kitchen – we are lucky to have such people by us. My wife is joining us.’
My grandfather greeted Mrs Khandekar, neat and shining, something like excitement in her face.
‘I was just saying,’ Khandekar said to her, in a loud voice, ‘how lucky it is to have a driver like Rustum, a clever, resourceful fellow like that. We will have tea in the study today. There. The truth is –’ Mr Khandekar said, in a lower voice, having shut the door to his study and invited my grandfather to sit on the beige sofa underneath the bookcase ‘– the truth is that last week, my wife and I were talking on the upper veranda, quite innocuously, when I observed, over the wall, a pair of official goons standing in the street. They were evidently listening to what we were saying. Here, we will not be listened to.’
‘If it were just the goons in the street!’ Mrs Khandekar burst out. ‘But when the listeners are within one’s own house . . .’
‘Surely—’
‘I am afraid so,’ Khandekar said. ‘We strongly suspect that one or more of the servants are listening to our conversations. We could hardly believe it at first.’
‘They have been with us for decades,’ Mrs Khandekar said, ‘every one of them. But I see that money and threats are greater things than loyalty in this world.’
‘We cannot trust anyone,’ Khandekar said. ‘Do not trust anyone, my dear friend – not Rustum, not the gardener. Perhaps especially not Laddu’s wife.’
‘Oh, surely not Sharmin,’ my grandfather said. ‘She is quite one of the family now. I cannot believe—’
‘Perhaps she is to be trusted,’ Khandekar said. ‘But what about her family? Are you sure that no cousin of hers, no uncle in Lahore ever asks her friendly questions about her husband’s family? How could she not answer such questions, and how could she know what use the answers would be put to?’
‘My dear Khandekar,’ my grandfather said, ‘if there were anything whatsoever that would interest the authorities in my family’s—’ He stopped. Evidently he thought at this moment about his beautiful library, concealed behind a plaster wall in the cellar. He had heard his daughters speak about it as a great joke among themselves. It had never occurred to him that Sharmin should be excluded from such conversations, and it would never have occurred to his daughters. But how simple for a cousin or uncle of Sharmin to ask a question or two, to discover so interesting and comment-worthy a fact! ‘My dear Khandekar,’ he began again, in a lower voice, ‘surely you don’t have anything to conceal. You lead so blameless a life. No authority could concoct a case against you on any grounds. It would be making bricks without straw.’
Khandekar and his wife exchanged looks. They were unreadable looks. My grandfather, horrified, came to an easy conclusion. His oldest friend was consulting his wife to discover whether he could be trusted. For a moment, he thought of getting up and leaving. But then he observed to himself that the situation would pass. The suspicion shadowing Khandekar’s mind was unworthy, but perhaps nothing could be ruled out, with the soldiery rampaging through the street, unchecked. What pressures had been brought to bear, and what obligations called in – one never knew that about the oldest of old friends. So my grandfather forgave Khandekar, and Khandekar never knew that he had been forgiven for anything in particular.
And then the look between Khandekar and his wife proved a responsible one, because Khandekar’s wife gave a small, tight, satisfied smile. ‘The boys,’ Khandekar said in a low voice. ‘They have gone. No one knows. The servants all believe that they have gone to stay with their uncle, my wife’s brother the civil engineer, in Chittagong.’
‘But they have not,’ my grandfather said.
‘No,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘No, they have not.’
The tea was brought, and for some moments they talked of trivialities. There were few trivialities to be had in those days. Future plans, current activities, social life, mutual friends – all seemed to be tinged with disaster. We Bengalis, we love to talk, on any subject and on none, but the men in the street, the stench of their breath had entered Khandekar’s study, and silence fell, unaccountably, between the three of them. The boy who brought the tea was familiar to my grandfather, his face politely lowered behind the tea tray. He had been with Khandekar’s family for ten years, at the very least. How could such a man be suspected of anything, of deserving silence?
At length, the boy withdrew, leaving the tea things. Mrs Khandekar poured it out herself, as she liked to. After a decent pause, listening to the boy’s noisy retreat in the hallway, she said, ‘The boys have gone, you see.’
‘Next week,’ Khandekar said, ‘Mujib will win this election. No one can doubt it. He will win it fair and square.’
‘There is no doubt about that,’ my grandfather said.
‘And then what happens?’ Khandekar said, his voice lowered. ‘Of course, it is clear what will not happen. Mujib will not become Prime Minister of this country. He will not be invited to take up his position. How could that happen? Those people over there, they have gone to the effort of suppressing songs – songs, my dear old friend. What efforts do you suppose they will go to to suppress the result of something important, like an election, to make sure that the result is to their taste?’
‘I have seen the soldiers outside,’ my grandfather said. ‘I know what you say is right.’
‘The boys have gone,’ Mrs Khandekar said again. ‘It is best if they leave now, not after the election. We do not know what will happen once the election takes place. They have gone somewhere in readiness for any eventuality. I do not know where. It was best not to know.’
My grandfather nodded. He understood. They were good, brave boys, the Khandekar sons. One of them would be killed in due course, fighting against the Pakistanis for the independence of Bangla Desh. Vulgar people afterwards tried to describe that son as a martyr, but in later years, Khandekar and Mrs Khandekar would have no truck with such comments. They kept his photograph on the sideboard in their house, the one that I came to be familiar with when I made a visit with my grandfather in later years. The other, the younger of the two, returned after the war and continued with his studies, becoming, in the end, a very senior public administrator whom I always found cold and frightening to deal with. But all that lay far in the future. For the moment, the two boys had gone, and were preparing to fight for the freedom of their country in the struggle to come, though the expression ‘freedom-fighter’ was not yet coined. Where they were, the Khandekars did not know, or were not saying.
‘If I may give my old friend some firm advice,’ Khandekar said.
My grandfather nodded.
‘Have your family around you. Ask them to come and stay in your house. Nobody knows how bad things may get. You will want to have them around you, to know that they are safe.’
At that moment, outside, as if to confirm Khandekar’s advice, there was a shriek of brakes and a short burst of gunfire. There had been gunfire in the streets before, but remote, and possible to mistake for fireworks. This was close. There was no possibility of thinking that it was anything else. ‘Rustum!’ my grandfather called. ‘Rustum!’
It was difficult to express what my grandfather might have been fearing, but he got up and opened the door into the hallway, and Rustum was emerging from the kitchen, wiping his mouth, with a puzzled expression. Behind him was a tall, thin man with neatly combed hair and a very clean white shirt.
‘We are nearly finished in here,’ said Mrs Khandekar, to this second man. ‘Thank you for your patience.’
My grandfather did not know it – he did not recognize this man, though he had been in the same room as him a dozen times and he must have been faintly familiar. He did not recognize him, even though he was carrying his well-polished harmonium. It was Altaf, visiting at the suggestion of Mrs Khandekar, who had a particular task she wanted him to carry out.
3.
Nana wasted no time. As soon as he got home, again succeeding in avoiding the roadblocks, he went upstairs to his office and wrote three well-argued letters. He sealed them, addressed them, and sent Rustum out to deliver them to Laddu; to Mahmood and Shiri; and to Era, newly married and living twenty minutes’ drive away. Rustum told them that Advocate-sahib had told him to wait for a response, so he sat in the kitchen of each house, and waited for the discussion to finish, and a reply to be written. Finally, he returned home. It was very late at night by the time his task was done. And it was a good day that my grandfather chose to send these messages round by hand. It would not be long before a curfew was imposed by the military authorities, and Rustum, driving about Dacca after dark, would have been shot on sight.
In my grandfather’s house, there were already living Nana and Nani, of course. The unmarried daughters were there, Mary, Mira, Nadira, Dahlia, and ten-year-old Bubbly, in that house without books, without the harmonium, where the possessions were spaced out in ways that had grown familiar in the last year or so. Pultoo was also still there, a thoughtful, quiet boy, good at occupying himself, and Boro-mama’s son Shibli, who was a sturdy child, walking and talking now. There were also the two great-grandmothers, Nana’s two mothers, and some cousins who had come in the last month from the village, and were remaining there. Now the other children, the ones married and away from home, read Nana’s letters. They all decided that they must follow his instructions, and come back home for the sake of safety.
Era and her new husband were the first to arrive, the very next morning; they came with suitcases, as if for a very few days. And then Boro-mama and Sharmin came the next day with their other three children, wan and puzzled. Their possessions were innumerable and small, and several journeys back and forth were needed before all of them were piled up in the hallway of Grandfather’s house. ‘Look, it’s daddy,’ Dahlia said to Shibli, but he clung to her legs. For him, his mother and father were glamorous visitors, seen at weekends, and though he would play with his brothers and sister when asked to, he always gave the impression of playing alongside them, rather than with, always happier to retreat into his world of wooden blocks, singing a small song to himself. His father came to him and lifted him up into the air, making a puffing noise. Boro-mama’s sisters could have told him that, of all things, Shibli hated being lifted from the ground. His cries filled the house, and eventually, when his father set him back down again and let him run back to his aunt Dahlia, they coagulated into words. ‘Do not do that!’ he cried. ‘Do not do that! I am absolutely frightened when you do that to me!’
‘Oh dear,’ Nani said.
But in an hour Shibli, comforted with a sweet, was sitting quite contentedly by the side of his sister – his brothers, five and seven years older than him, considered themselves men like their father, and Shibli was unmistakably a child happiest when surrounded and pampered by ladies. His sister, resigned to her task, was nearer his age, and imbued with the duty of being a good little girl – her aunts privately thought her dull. She had recently learnt to read, and was turning the pages of her picture book for Shibli’s benefit. His eyes, however, went round the crowded room.
‘I don’t see how we are to manage,’ Boro-mama said.
‘It is better that you are here,’ Nani said briskly. These arrangements would not be for so very long, she assured him, wondering whether this was, in fact, the case. She looked about the room. Not everyone staying, or living in the house was there. Some of the girls were in their rooms, occupying themselves in privacy. But even so, it seemed very crowded already. Outside, in the street, there was a shout, followed by another shout, further away. Men’s voices in this quiet street were not that common. It could not be understood what the voices had called. But the tone of command and acknowledgement was unmistakable; the tone of military command. Nana, retreating from the sitting room to go and sit in quiet upstairs, paused and gave a questioning look to Nani.
‘Are the gates shut and bolted?’ she said, to nobody in particular.
‘Bolted?’ said one of the great-grandmothers – they were both sitting on the two-seater sofa, upright and occupied with darning. ‘Bolted?’
‘What did she say?’ the other great-grandmother said, the bigger, more assertive one. ‘Bolted? What for? It’s the middle of the afternoon.’
‘Rustum shut the gates,’ Boro-mama said. ‘I don’t know if he bolted them.’
‘He bolted them,’ Era said. ‘Did he bolt them?’
‘And Shiri has not yet come,’ Nana said. ‘She must not arrive to find herself bolted out.’
‘Those were soldiers,’ Mary said, in a low voice to Era. ‘Those were soldiers, in the street. They were right outside the gate, just in the street, just there.’
‘I wish Shiri would come,’ Era said. ‘And then we could bolt the gates and feel safe.’
4.
Sheikh Mujib won the election. For the first time since the founding of the two-part country, the leader of the country would represent the eastern half. But nothing happened; he was arrested; he was released; and then he made a speech announcing the independence of the Bengalis, and was arrested again. For many days, the sounds from the streets were of student protests, of shouting and chanting and the noise of official warnings, made over the loudspeakers. Finally, the Pakistanis came over, and began to have discussions with Mujib about his demands. But nobody believed in any of these discussions, and the protests continued and grew. People said – Khandekar, for instance, told my grandfather – that the commercial flights from West Pakistan to Dacca were full these days. Full of young, fit men with short hair, moving with purpose. Many people believed that these men were Pakistani soldiers in mufti, coming in large numbers to prepare for a crackdown.
My father, in the sitting room in Elephant Road, read his father-in-law’s letter, requesting that they up sticks and go to stay with him for the time being, and his brow furrowed.
‘How many are they, living there?’ he asked my mother. She did not know.
‘A lot,’ he said. ‘We are better off here.’ It was true that the six of us had our own space, there in Elephant Road. The house was as secure as my grandfather’s, which was only a short distance away, and even if the storm broke, they could stay where they were, communicating with my mother’s family by telephone. So, for the moment, my mother and father decided that we would not move, and my mother tried to calm Nana down in a telephone call. My brother had his own room; my sisters shared a room; and the baby slept at the foot of my parents’ bed. That baby was me: I had been born only a very few months before, and everybody called me Saadi. In any case, my father went on to say, there was the family downstairs, who were well connected and would see to our safety, whatever happened.
The next morning they awoke to the sound of an air-raid siren. In front of the house, there were two tanks of the Pakistani Army, pointing the barrels of their guns over the wall and directly at the front bedrooms of the house.
My mother hurried downstairs to try to understand what had happened. There, she learnt that the brother of their landlord, who had been serving in the Pakistani Air Force in a very senior capacity, had deserted on hearing that Sheikh Mujib had been arrested and the results of the election declared null and void. Where he was, nobody knew. He was what my father referred to when he said that the family downstairs had very good connections. It had turned out that they had very bad connections, or so it seemed, in those days. The military authorities had decided that the house in Elephant Road bore some sort of responsibility for the desertion, and the guns were pointed directly at them and, of course, at us.
My mother screamed and fainted and revived herself. She accused my father of leaving them in terrible danger, when they could have left the day before, or the day before that; they could have been secure in her father’s house, where nobody could seriously discover a danger or a threat. Nobody would point a tank at her father’s house; nobody in their family was in a position to desert. In a spirit of pure terror, she picked up the telephone and tried to dial. But that was too late, also. There was no dialling tone. Looking out of the window, she saw that the telephone wires to the house had been cut. They hung like a mop from the telegraph pole.
There was no means of getting out of the house, and soon a van with a loudspeaker went by, announcing a general curfew with immediate effect. That had been what the air-raid siren had warned of. When my parents listened to the radio, they discovered the detail of the general curfew called by the Pakistani Army. Not everyone was prevented from leaving their houses by the presence of a tank against the front wall. But everyone in Dacca was barred inside, on pain of death. It was 25 March. As that long day went on, the children bored and fractious and not understanding, the vengeance of the army on the rest of Dacca intruded on the street. Somewhere in the middle distance, a great plume of smoke was rising. Something was burning, or being burnt: something substantial, and rather nearer, from time to time, screams and shouts and the rattle of gunfire; very near, the metallic, clipped announcements through loud-hailers, announcing the penalty of death.
The radio had nothing to say about any of that. It was only much later that people learnt the army had gone into the poor parts of Dacca and burnt them to the ground; that the university had been entered and set to the torch. Afterwards, the dead came to be reckoned, but at the time, there was only black smoke and, too near, fire and shots. My mother and father, my brothers and sisters and I went to the back room of the house and passed the time as best we could. From time to time the neighbours downstairs came up to see how we were. But they knew no more than anyone else, and they could not comfort or explain the situation.
‘They are going to blow up the house,’ my mother said, and, without meaning to, she started screaming. ‘If only we had gone to Papa’s – they are going to break in and kill us, they will, they will kill us all.’
‘We have done nothing wrong,’ my father said.
‘They are going to kill us,’ my mother said. ‘They will.’ My brother, eleven years old, understood, and looked at her with solemn, frightened eyes. He was not familiar with the display of fear by the adults of his family. Quietly, I slept on.
The next day, the cook came into the salon early. ‘There are people on the streets,’ he said. It was around eight thirty. ‘On bicycles and in cars, moving around normally.’ The radio, when switched on, announced that the curfew would be lifted for a short time that day to allow people to fetch supplies and food. It would be reimposed, however, at one, and anyone found wandering the streets would be shot on sight. My father went into the front room of the house. Even after a day, it had the musty, miserable air of an uncared-for house returned to after a long holiday. Cautiously, he went to the windows. The street was empty; there was no one moving. More remarkably, the two tanks were gone. He tried not to look at what he saw at the end of the road, lying in the dirt.
‘Where are you going?’ my mother said, coming out of the back room with the baby in her arms. My father was going downstairs. ‘We have to get to Father’s house. We cannot stay here. They are going to kill us.’
‘No, you and the children mustn’t stay,’ my father said, carrying on his way downstairs, quite calmly. ‘You must go while you can.’
‘But how?’ my mother said. ‘How are we to get a message to them? There is no telephone.’
From downstairs, my father’s voice drifted up. ‘You must pack a bag for you and the children,’ he called. ‘Do it quickly. Only what you need.’
Nothing seemed clear to my mother, but she did what she was told. She quietened the children, pretending as best she could that this was all some great adventure, and told Zahid that he must make sure the others made no noise, and stayed exactly where they were, in the back rooms of the house. Her main terror was that a child of hers, standing at the front window of the upper storey, would be seen by a passing soldier and shot for no reason. And then a miracle happened: a familiar engine noise in the street outside. She hesitatingly went herself to the front window. There, below, in the street, was the red Vauxhall car. Rustum, my grandfather’s driver, got out hurriedly, looking quickly to left and right. He left the car’s engine running, and the driver’s door open. He banged on the gate of the house, but my mother was already taking her half-packed bags, one in each hand, and calling for the children. Behind her, Zahid and the girls were following, their faces pale. ‘Where is Saadi?’ my mother said. I had been left sleeping peacefully in the back bedroom. ‘Go, go, go,’ she said to Sushmita. ‘Go and pick up your little brother. Do you think you can carry him?’ Sushmita thought she could, and the five of us went swiftly downstairs. From the other flat, my father emerged and, sweeping us along, brought up the rear. My mother dropped the suitcase on the ground, and fumblingly opened the bolt of the front gate. ‘I never said goodbye,’ she said to my father, meaning to the neighbours downstairs.
‘Go on, go on,’ my father said impatiently, and between them, he and Rustum bundled my mother and the four children into the back of the red Vauxhall. Quite suddenly, the back door of the car was shut; Rustum got into the driver’s seat. ‘You go on,’ my father said. ‘I shall come along later today.’ From the outside, he banged on the roof to tell Rustum to go.
‘What is it? What are you doing?’ my mother mouthed from the back of the car, but it was too late. My father had turned and gone back inside the house in Elephant Road, shutting and bolting the gate behind him, and again my mother, secure in the back of the red Vauxhall, began to scream. This time I awoke and, responding to my mother’s screams, began to wail myself. She had had no idea my father would not come with us until he had shut the door of the car and banged a practical, necessary farewell on the roof.
It had been only fifteen minutes since the lifting of the curfew for five hours was announced on the radio. At one o’clock it would fall again. Nana must have ordered Rustum to go straight out and fetch us.
5.
Elephant Road was only a ten-minute drive from my grandfather’s house. It was quite a different sort of place. There were small shops, selling groceries and household necessities; it was, in normal times, a pleasant, busy thoroughfare. There was a large Bata store, which acted as a landmark in Dacca, and other shoe shops, carpet sellers, hardware emporia, with rows of plastic bowls and aluminium pans hanging outside, tea stalls, confectioners, copper show-pieces, barbers, chemists and sherwani-merchants.
I slept peacefully through the short journey from Elephant Road to Nana’s house in Dhanmondi. My mother, brother and sisters would never forget what they saw. The windows of Sushmita’s favourite confectioner, the one with the best jelapi, the one where she loved to hang around and watch the expert confectioner piping a map of the world, a round Arabic signature, a piece of magical writing in the seething oil and let it rise; the windows of that shop were smashed. Inside, there was broken glass and spattered confectionery, milk and flour and sugar thrown like abstract fantasies across the oil-soaked floor. A house was on fire, its gates hanging from their hinges. The hardware shops had given up their contents, like great vomiting beasts. Across the street, pans and tools and plastic goods were strewn and crushed. And there was a rickshaw, turned over, lying in the street abandoned. ‘There’s blood on it – there’s blood on it!’ Sushmita screamed. There was; and underneath it was lying some kind of large packet, slumped and crushed.
‘Don’t look,’ Rustum said. ‘We’ll soon be nice and safe.’ But they had to look. Down a side-street, there was a platoon of the military, lounging against the cab of a lorry and paying no attention to the shop further down that was on fire, the gusts of flame and black smoke pouring into the street like great foul-fragrant blooms. It must have been one of the shops that made a good living renting out splendid garments in silver and thread-of-gold to guests at weddings; all that glitter and light, consumed in a moment. And one of the shop’s mannequins – no, more than one had been dragged out of the shop and thrown into the road, lying there in an awkward position. Perhaps the person who had done it had wanted to steal the outfits from the mannequins, because they were quite bare, the arms raised, waxlike in the mud of the street, and more blood covering one mannequin’s chest and running into a black stain on the road. But it was no mannequin. ‘Don’t look,’ Rustum said again. Sushmita would never forget that sight: a man lying in the road, his throat cut, his fat little legs raised as if in an attempt to run. And then she was sick.
‘Please, Rustum,’ my mother said, when they were drawing up outside Nana’s house. ‘Please, just leave us here and go back for my husband.’
‘It is too dangerous,’ Rustum said. ‘He would not come. He will come later. I can’t go and make him get in the car. If he didn’t come, it’s because he has important things that he has to do.’
‘He has to come,’ my mother said, but now Rustum was out of the car and opening the gate. There were no soldiers to be seen. ‘If you won’t go, I shall go myself.’
Rustum ignored this, and between him, Nana, Nani and Boro-mama, who had all come out of the house, my mother and all of us were bundled together into safety. The children, Shiri and the baby came through the glass-framed porch at the side of the house, and were propelled by the servants and others along the passageway and into the large salon at the back of the house. My mother was screaming in terror, screaming for her husband, and Rustum explained how it was that my father had been left behind. Nana’s face seemed to age in a moment. ‘Have mercy,’ my grandmother said, and led my mother away.
My sisters were handed over to Shibli’s ayah who took them upstairs to clean them up and make them respectable again. My brother Zahid, who had observed everything in silence, went over to his aunts, who greeted him politely, as if he were a grown-up and paying a visit. In twenty minutes, the noises of grief from Nani’s room had subsided a little; and Zahid had found an interesting book to occupy himself with in a corner. For the moment, I was sleeping peacefully, swaddled in my blanket, guarded by Dahlia-aunty. The gates were shut and bolted. Outside, in the Dhanmondi street, the noises of battle, the crackle that a house on fire makes began to return.
6.
Many people had taken the same decision that my family had, and gone to wherever they could be together. They felt that they could best sit out the curfew if they knew where everyone was, and could feel reassured. One of these families was in a house only two streets away from my grandfather’s. It was also a white courtyard house, very much in the same Bauhaus style, and there was, too, a large coconut palm at the front and a pair of green-painted gates against the street. In this house, which belonged to an important businessman, were living their children, two sons and two daughters, the eldest thirty-three, the youngest only nineteen. The two eldest were sons, and married, and their young wives were with them. There were also two grandchildren: a boy of four and a baby, which had been born only weeks before, to the younger son’s wife. All these people had moved to the same house by the first day of the curfew, the day that we had been in Elephant Road with the guns of the tanks pointing directly at us.
All that day, the soldiery had roamed the street. They had not hesitated to shoot at anyone, even rickshaw drivers, who had been seen out, breaking the law. When they saw a shop with a Hindu proprietor, or one where they knew a grudge could be borne, they broke in. They threw the stock, whether sweets, or meat, or cloth, or paper, or books, or shirts, into the road. They poured petrol on to whatever they could find and set a match to it. Then they sat back and watched it burn. They drove to the university, and set fire to one of the main buildings. ‘Intellectuals,’ the soldiers said to each other. Another troop drove into the shanty town, where the buildings were made of wood and hardboard. There was no curfew observance here: the inhabitants lived half outside, and had no gates to close. The settlement burnt at the touch of a match.
The soldiery had been given orders, but there were just too many of them. They kept meeting up with the same patrols, bellowing curfew orders into loudspeakers. And at some point, one tank patrol found its way into Dhanmondi, and outside the house with the green gates.
Afterwards, my family always believed that these soldiers had not found their way by chance to this house. We believed that there were families living in Dhanmondi who believed in the unity of the state; who did not speak Bengali much, and thought of those who did as traitors. Some of those families were happy to tell the roaming soldiery the houses from which rebel songs could be heard; where the flag of an independent Bangla Home had been raised from the roof. Perhaps, too, houses where they might find traitors who could easily be punished in an immediate way; even young women.
Some of these families who gave out such information, who directed the forces to particular houses during the war, went on living where they did after the war. Everyone knew who they were. They kept to themselves, and in after years, we children were not permitted to play with the children of such families.
In any case, perhaps the soldiers found their way to this house by chance. Perhaps they just heard something within, without paying for advice. A sound was coming from the house, a thin, high crying. It was a hungry baby. The soldiers knew that where there was a baby crying, there were young women. This was a rich area, but that meant nothing any more. The patrol hammered on the green gates of the house, and, when no response came, they got in their tank and drove directly at it. The white walls of the house fell inwards, into the garden.
‘What is it?’ the businessman was shouting, as he came out of his house – even then, he continued believing that he was living in the world he knew from a week ago. He did not see how things had changed, or he would not have come out shouting in outrage. The commander pushed him aside and went into the house. Five women – four young, one middle-aged, one nursing the baby that had been making the noise – were in what seemed to be the salon. They stood up as eight of the soldiers stamped into the house; the mother made a gesture as if to draw her daughters to her. But one daughter – a plump-faced, pretty girl in a silver-edged sari – broke away and ran out of the french windows into the garden. Where was she thinking of going? There was no escape there. And if there had been an escape, that would have been breaking the curfew, and they could have shot her. Three soldiers followed her out, easily overtaking her and throwing her down on the ground. There was no difficulty in holding her shoulders to the earth while another soldier forced her legs apart, raising her sari. A fist went over her mouth, and a terrible stifled yell was all the protest she could make.
In the house, there was a single shot. The women screamed, and went on screaming. In a few moments, the soldiers killed the other brother, too, with two shots, then a third, and then the father, in the same way. But they did not kill the women until they had raped all of them. One of them, as she was borne down by the terrible weight of the men, tried to grasp and steal the pistol in the captain’s holster. But her arms were held down, and she could not reach. The captain took out the pistol and waved it in her face, before hitting her hard on one side, then on the other, then again; there was the sound and the strange sensation, like wooden bricks moving about in a soft bag, of her jaw breaking under the blow. Then they raped her again.
They did not waste a bullet on the baby, but killed it with a knife they took from the kitchen. The howling child went the same way. Under the table, two manservants cowered, their hands over their heads, shaking, backwards and forwards, clutching at each other. What were the soldiery going to do with them? Nothing. They could spread the word. That was what would happen.
For ever afterwards, my family wondered how it was that Nana knew what the soldiers had done, and what they were capable of. From the start of the curfew, he was determined that not only should nobody step outside the house but that the house should seem to be empty. Nadira-aunty believed and said that there was no need for such precautions. She did not believe that the Pakistani Army would enter any house if there was no threat and the inhabitants were obeying the curfew faithfully.
‘That is how it is to be,’ Nana said quietly. ‘Nobody is to make any noise, or light a lamp. This house is to seem empty, without interest, vacated. You are not to draw attention to this house. When night falls, we sit in the dark or we go to bed.’
My grandfather would not share what he knew about what had happened in the businessman’s house, two streets away. There were many such stories in Dacca that day, and for weeks into the future. The rapes and murders of the businessman’s family was the one my grandfather knew about. The two manservants whom the soldiery had left cowering under the kitchen table had waited there, expecting their deaths, until the point where the platoon had driven away. They had emerged from their inadequate hiding place, slowly taking their hands off their heads. The curfew was still in force, and if they left the house and walked on the street, they would be shot. There was, however, a back way through the gardens of the houses that could take them to somewhere safe. They were, as it happens, friends or perhaps even relations of Rustum, my grandfather’s chauffeur, and they thought of going to him. They knew my grandfather was a powerful man; they might have known that he had had some dealings with the authorities, and they might have believed that he and his household were in some way protected from the worst of the events. They decided to make their way to my grandfather’s house. It would mean crossing two streets, out in the open. But only two. They could risk that. And there was no question of remaining in this house. The worst of the events lay, defiled, in the sitting room and the garden. There was only one way they could take, and they were obliged to start by going into the garden next door. For the two manservants, passing through those scenes was the worst thing either of them ever had to do.
7.
When my father had waved goodbye to his wife and children, he went back inside the house. The neighbours downstairs were waiting for him. He had discussed the situation with them, and had agreed that he could help them to leave the city as quickly as possible. So when he went inside their house, he found them sitting in their chairs with fraught expressions, three suitcases in front of them. They had not managed to pack very much.
The wife was crying, quite helplessly, and the children – two young men, thirteen and sixteen years old – were trying to comfort her. My father had already established, in conversations with their father, that nobody knew what had happened to their uncle, the distinguished air-force officer who had abruptly deserted three days before. It was clear that they would have to leave the house as quickly as possible. The house was being watched, and there was no possibility of them leaving on foot with suitcases without being arrested immediately. My father had agreed to help them to safety, before going to his father-in-law’s house in Dhanmondi.
My father left the house, walking two hundred yards to the busy intersection where the cycle-rickshaws normally sat. He tried not to see what was to the left and to the right of him. Despite everything, there were two cycle-rickshaws sitting at their normal place, and he summoned both of them. Ignoring the four men on the opposite side of the road, hunched up and observant, he went back into the house. The younger child and the mother, veiling her face, came out and got into one rickshaw, which drove off northwards, towards Gulistan. Twenty minutes later, the father, alone, came out and took the second rickshaw in the opposite direction. Neither party had any luggage, and they were informally dressed. It was important to give the impression that they had gone out only for half an hour or an hour, perhaps to buy food, perhaps to ensure the safety of others. The second boy and my father stayed behind; the watchers would know something was happening if all the family left the house at the same time.
In an hour, an unfamiliar car drew up outside, and my father, in the most casual way imaginable, came out to hail the driver. With the telephone wires cut, how had my father got a message to his old college friend, living half a mile away? Nobody knew – it must have been a note, delivered by a servant of ours or of the family downstairs. The watchers opposite did not move, even when my father came out with three suitcases, one, two, three, helped by the gardener’s boy in a grubby shirt and gloves, and loaded them into the boot of the car. My father was not their concern. They did not register when the gardener’s boy, having loaded the three suitcases into the boot and shut the door on my father’s side, went back to the gate of the house and shut it from the street side. The boy stepped into the car in the most natural way possible, and it drove off. It was only much later in the day, when the army officers came to discover what had been happening to the house of the traitor’s brother, that they reflected that the gardener in the house was, after all, a much older man who had not been seen for some time, and he had never had a boy to help him out at all. But by that time the family who lived downstairs had disappeared, and could not be traced.
Their destination was a house in the quieter north of Dacca, away from the fighting and protests and the bodies in the streets, in Mohakhali. The three parties – the mother and younger son, the father, both in rickshaws, and my father and the elder son, looking like the gardener’s boy, in a car with the family’s luggage – reached the house in Mohakhali by different routes, some quite complicated. Everywhere, the streets were filled with rickshaws heavily laden with luggage; at the sides of the road, families were trying to hail private cars, begging to be taken away. In the course of their journey, my father heard about what had been done in the previous twenty-four hours – the monuments desecrated, the university buildings destroyed, the people shot. Anyone who had raised a flag of the Bengali Home above their house had been targeted. About him, sitting incongruously in the back of the car with a dirty and shivering teenage boy, my father could see the abandoned and charred results of a day of violence.
My father’s first idea had been to go, in pretence, to my grandfather’s house in Dhanmondi, as if the suitcases really were his. But he saw how impossible that would be. He could trick my mother once, but not twice, and she would not let him go. So the car drove in a large circuit through Dacca, stopping once or twice as if on urgent errands. My father’s resourcefulness ran out: he found himself going into paper-merchants and butchers and a hardware store when he saw a rare one that was not looted or destroyed, and had opened today. The mother’s journey was similar: she left the cycle-rickshaw where it was, and went into shops and immediately out again; once she made a pretence of paying off the cycle-rickshaw and went into a large shoe emporium; the rickshaw cycled off, but in reality made a large circle through the streets and picked her and her son up at the shop’s other entrance, seven minutes later. From there, she made her way to the safe-house in Mohakhali. There were other tricks and dodges, though none of them knew if they were really being followed, many entrances into houses and shops and swift exits at other points, much bold innocent play-acting among the wreckage and bodies of Dacca on the morning of 26 March 1971.
By twelve o’clock, the family from downstairs in Elephant Road were safe for the moment in their friend’s house in Mohakhali. My father had an hour to reach Dhanmondi, in a city where everyone was trying to flee in different directions for safety. After that, the curfew would begin and, promptly, the shooting.
8.
In my grandfather’s house, there had been some trouble in finding space for everyone. Most of the household had gathered and discussed, and proposed different arrangements. The servants had almost all been sent out to buy as much food as they possibly could. The curfew had been lifted for a few hours today, but might be reimposed for the whole day tomorrow; and shortly there might be no food left in the shops. The servants were despatched to different markets and shopping streets in different parts of Dacca to buy food to see the large household through a week or two.
In making practical arrangements such as these, my mother, Shiri, generally took the lead. She was a well-organized and sensible person, who could be relied upon to give her sisters and the servants a task each that would contribute to a smooth-running machine. Her sisters were accustomed to ask her what they should do next and, despite his bluster and complaint, so was her elder brother Laddu. But today they were obliged to make the arrangements themselves, under the impatient direction of my grandmother. My mother had come into the house and collapsed on a sofa in the corner of the room, drawing her shawl about her head. There was nothing else she could do.
In her lap was a baby wrapped in blankets. For the moment I was sleeping. There were plenty of children in the house now – Boro-mama’s children, my brother and sisters, and at least one aunt’s children, too. I was the youngest, and the only one who had no understanding at all of what was happening. The other children, even the quite young ones, were old enough to understand that they must be quiet, and stay in their room without making any disturbance. Mary-aunty was supervising them, from the eleven-year-olds, like my brother Zahid, down to the little but sensible ones, like my sister Sunchita. They were playing some very quiet game, like Dead Crocodiles, in which the player who can stay absolutely still for the longest time wins the game; or perhaps Mary-aunty was reading all the children a long, quiet fairy story. Downstairs, my mother sobbed into her shawl as quietly as she knew how.
There was no word from my father. He had disappeared back inside the house in Elephant Road without any explanation, without even waving goodbye. Nobody could understand it. He had to be following shortly – there was nothing to keep him in the house, and he must understand how dangerous it would be to remain in the same place as the family of a deserting senior officer. His cousins, however, knew that Mahmood was stubborn, and that he would not be ordered around or threatened. ‘He must be helping them to safety,’ Nadira said to Dahlia, when she was sure my mother could not hear. ‘How like Mahmood.’ And it was like my father. But the morning turned into afternoon, and there was still no word. My mother continued to weep. She could not know that her husband had, three times, passed within two hundred yards of Nana’s house in his doubling-back attempts to confuse any informers and stool-pigeons who might be trailing him. If she had, she would have run out on to the streets, hurling herself on the bonnet of the car.
Towards the middle of the afternoon, just as the family from downstairs was finally assembling at the safe-house in Mohakhali, the silent baby in its swaddling began to stir and warble, and to screw its ugly face up into a ball. My mother made no response, and soon I began to cry properly. It had been some hours since I was fed, and I probably needed to be changed as well. My mother, so sunk in herself, still made no response.
‘Shiri!’ my grandmother called. ‘Shiri, wake up and pay attention. Your baby is crying.’
‘Shall I take him?’ Mira said. ‘Shall I take dear little Saadi? He is only a little bit cross, and perhaps he could be hungry, too. He has been so good.’
‘No,’ my grandmother said. ‘Shiri, you must take care of him. Get up and make an effort, now – this is not like you at all.’
‘She thinks Mahmood will be caught out in the streets when the curfew falls,’ Era said, in a low voice.
‘How could he?’ Sharmin said. ‘Causing everyone such worry like this.’
‘Causing everyone such worry – oh, that is so much like Mahmood,’ Era said. ‘He would never consider what other people are thinking about, or worrying over. He just does what he thinks is the right thing to do.’
‘A very annoying trait in a person,’ Sharmin said, keeping her voice down.
‘What is that noise?’ said one of the great-grandmothers, awakening like me from her sleep.
‘Poor little Saadi,’ my grandmother said. She got up from her chair, shuffled and cast her shawl over her shoulder, and went over to my basket. She picked me up; with a baby’s instinct for the unexpected, I began to cry with new force. Finally, my mother roused herself; she sat up, uncovered her face, and took me from her mother. Soon, as if through the repetition of routine alone, I had quietened down, and was feeding contentedly.
‘What was that noise?’ Nana said. He had come through from his study at the front of the house. Even in the current state of overcrowding, it was understood that he must have his own undisturbed space. His daughters and grandchildren and mothers and cousins might colonize the rest of the house, invading even the servants’ annexe, resting the whole day in the salon, finding corners in which to pass the time with small-scale near-silent activities like paan-grinding, embroidery, sock-darning, pickle-bottling and the like. But Nana must have his retreat in his depleted library, and when he came out, the daughters and the little awestruck cousins busied themselves, knowing that something must have disturbed him.
‘It is dear little Saadi,’ Nani said. ‘He was just hungry and woke up. Poor little thing, he can’t tell us that he wants something other than by crying. But he’s quite all right now.’
‘Can’t he be kept quiet with the other children?’ Nana said.
‘Mary can’t keep him quiet with The Snow Queen,’ Shiri said. Her face was red with weeping; she did not turn to her father when she spoke, but kept herself hunched over the baby. ‘The other children will listen to stories or play games, but he’s too little to understand any of that. Poor little mite.’
‘Poor little mite,’ said Era.
‘He must keep quiet,’ Nana said. ‘We mustn’t be heard from the street by anyone who passes.’ His eyes went round the room, to his seven daughters, one upstairs, to his daughter-in-law and three female cousins; perhaps he thought, too, a dreadful thought, of a tableau; his wife and mothers and perhaps even the grand-daughters, too. The mind shrank from it. I was the youngest child in the house, and the only child of an age to cry incontinently, who could not understand what the situation was. My wails could be heard in the street, when I cried, and to the passing soldiery, it would be like the display of a rebel flag, a reason for forcing an entry.
‘Poor little Saadi,’ Mira said. ‘He can’t be expected to understand what’s happening. We can’t tell him not to cry, he wouldn’t listen.’
‘That’s so,’ my grandfather said, considering. His lawyer’s logical brain went through various considerations. ‘He must never be left alone, that’s all. Carry him about with you – not just his mother, but the rest of you girls, too, take turns. If he wants to sleep, put him down but don’t leave him. And have cake to hand at all times. If it begins to look as if he might be thinking of crying – beginning to look like that, no more – then distract him, feed him, interest him, jiggle him. He mustn’t cry. Give him cake and mishti doi. Babies like that. He must be allowed to eat whatever he likes.’
And that is how I was allowed to eat whatever I liked, without any restraint at all. There was no shortage of mishti doi, it being made in the kitchen rather than bought in from confectioners. From that moment onwards, my aunts took turns looking after me. I grew popular with them because a baby cared for at every minute, whose every need is anticipated and fulfilled before he has even begun to express it, is a placid and cheerful baby, as well as a very fat one. My aunts said they loved my chubby face; they loved my cheerful demeanour. They passed me from one to another with some regret, looking forward to their next turn looking after Saadi. Anyone who came into the house would have seen me being cradled in an aunt’s elbow as she crooned to me – Era, Sharmin, Mary, Nadira, Mira, Dahlia, even Bubbly, though she was no more than thirteen and, I was told in later years, not very good at it.
On the table or the armrest of a chair by them was a terracotta pot of mishti doi, a teaspoon stuck in it, and from time to time, not interrupting her burble of conversation or under-the-breath song, the aunt of the moment would lean forward, dig into the pot and bring another half-teaspoon to my little wrinkled mouth. In the whole of that time, I hardly had the opportunity to cry. No sooner, day or night, had my face begun to move inwards and my brow to furrow than an aunt moved in and embarked on a well-established routine of Saadi-distracting, involving the pulling of funny faces, jogging up and down, a favourite knitted rabbit, tickling on the tummy (mine) and the regular administration of half-teaspoons of mishti doi.
It is a sign of how desperate and serious those months of 1971 were that the other children in the house had no resentment or complaint against this exceptional treatment of a baby. They never produced, as far as I can discover, that universal childhood complaint, ‘It isn’t fair,’ when they saw the constant watching and concern that I was attracting. They knew that it wasn’t fair, none of it, even the very smallest of them. I slept contentedly, in an atmosphere of love, from the March curfew until the day in December that Bangla Desh was liberated, and I did not cry. The house in Dhanmondi was as quiet as a tomb, and no soldier was drawn by his curiosity in a baby crying to force the gates and enter.
But this is to move ahead in the story.
9.
‘What is that?’ my mother said.
‘What is what?’ Nadira said.
‘That sound,’ my mother said. They all listened. In the city, far away, a noise like a howl was rising. It was what they had all been dreading. Two days before, nobody had known what the sound had meant. It was a siren, driven about the streets of the old city, of Sadarghat, Gulistan, Dhanmondi, Mohakhali and the other parts of the city, in warning; it signified, a radio announcement had made clear, the beginning of a curfew. Now it was one o’clock, and the sirens were sounding. There had still been no word from my father. He was out there in the city somewhere. Nobody had the heart to tell my mother that he must have returned, in safety, to the house in Elephant Road – that her husband was a sensible man who would not risk his life in this way.
‘Put the radio on,’ Era said, and Nadira hastened to do so. The new audio cabinet, a stylish model in teak, included a radio. These days, it was kept permanently tuned to Radio Calcutta, which could be trusted.
The news ran through the events in Dacca and in the rest of the country. Universities had been burnt; intellectuals rounded up. There was no news of Sheikh Mujib. There were international condemnations. The curfew had been imposed and had been lifted for five hours during the day before being put in place again. Finally, the radio news regretted to announce the death of Begum Sufiya Kemal, in unknown circumstances—
‘Oh,’ Nani said.
‘How could they?’ Nadira said; her eyes began to fill with tears. Sufiya lived so close; the whole family knew her; they had been to her house many times. How could they?
‘But all she did was to write some poems,’ Mira said. ‘How can they shoot women for writing poems?’
And Begum Sufiya would be remembered, above all, the radio continued, for poems that encouraged her countrymen and -women in the struggle for freedom. There was a brief pause, and another voice began to read a poem. It was Sufiya’s voice; the poem must have been recorded at some time, and the recording obtained somehow by Radio Calcutta. ‘“This is no time to be braiding your hair,”’ the poem began.
‘My friend’s poem,’ Nana said. ‘I am glad they are letting her read this.’ He had been called through from his study by the sound of poetry, or by the sound of his friend’s voice on the radio. But he had not heard the news.
‘She has been killed, Papa,’ Nadira said.
‘How has she been killed?’ Nana said.
‘They didn’t say,’ Nani said. ‘Only that she has died. How could they?’
‘They wouldn’t,’ Nana said. ‘They wouldn’t dare. We would have heard if she had been killed. This is a mistake, I know. She could not be dead.’
‘The radio said that she is dead,’ Nani said, with surprise.
‘The radio is mistaken,’ Nana said. ‘Where is Mahmood? The curfew has begun now.’
And the strange thing was that Nana was right. Sufiya was not dead at all. The announcement on Radio Calcutta of her passing was mistaken, and taken from unreliable information. A street or two away, Sufiya and her daughters were sitting, just as my family was, inside, waiting for news, and she had the shock of hearing her own death announced, and then of listening to her own voice reading her famous poem. Three days later, my grandfather had the pleasure of reading an advertisement in the newspaper, placed there by Sufiya herself, in which she announced to all her friends that, contrary to reports, she was alive and well, and hoping to be listened to for many years to come. There was something steely and full of reprimand about the tone of the advert. Nobody could doubt that it was Sufiya herself who had written it, and there were no rumours about her having met her death from that point onwards.
In the street, the sirens howled like cats. Beyond that, there was no sound. ‘Mahmood must be safely inside,’ Era said. ‘He has taken shelter. He will come tomorrow. Shiri, he is sensible, your husband.’
‘I know he is dead,’ my mother said. She gulped and clutched the gold hem of her sari. ‘How could he – how could he go to the help of those people downstairs? We hardly know them.’
‘He did what he had to do,’ my grandfather said. It was so conclusive, the tone in which he said it, that the music of its serious finality drew the children from upstairs; they stood, lined up along the banisters, and gazed, shocked, at the adults giving way.
My sisters were the last to take their positions: they had been concealing themselves on the front balcony of the house, watching from behind a chair the distant fires of the city and the silent, empty street. They wondered, as they stood, why the aunts and cousins and the rest of the grown-ups were crying and silent. Surely their father would put things to rights when he came, as he would come. As he was coming, in fact. They had seen him hurrying along from a hundred yards away, hunched under the trees, swift and surreptitious, but, to his children, an unmistakable walk and silhouette. It was strange that he had not made an effort to arrive before the sirens started sounding but, after all, he was not so very late. In the past, he had often arrived twenty or thirty minutes late for dinner at Nana’s house, kept behind at the office. It was ridiculous to make such a fuss when he was only five or ten minutes late for lunch. And before Sushmita, in her practical way, could say something to point this out, the gates at the front of the house were clanging open and shut; the grown-ups were rising to their feet; the light footfalls of Pa were heard in the glass-fronted side porch of the house, and there he was.
He looked tired and untidy; his jacket was over the crook of his arm. He was a little late, but he had had things to do all day, and sometimes things take longer to achieve than people anticipate and, after all, he was only six or seven minutes late. Sushmita and Sunchita were glad to see their father, but not excessively so. After all, everyone had been expecting his arrival, all morning, and here he was.
It was a surprise to them when Nana strode forward out of his chair, took their father by his thin shoulders and shook him hard. There were not many occasions on which Grandfather raised his voice; perhaps this one was the first one they would remember. He shouted into my father’s face: ‘Do not do that! Never again do that to my daughter! Never, ever, do that to my wife, or to me, or to my daughters! Never, ever, do that to my grandchildren!’ My grandfather went on through the table of affinities. It was as if he were attempting to run through all the possibilities of insult and offence and the vulnerable. His rage took three or four sentences to lower from its highest pitch, as he remembered the need to remain quiet; after twenty seconds, the rage continued at a lower volume. Into my father’s face my grandfather shouted, a mute in his throat but no restraint on his rage.
Sunchita and Sushmita watched, horrified and appalled, at the unknown sight of their grandfather shouting; the still less imaginable sight of their father taking the abuse. From any unjustified display of power their father, they knew, would walk away. Now he had arrived ten minutes later than he should have, and not only was Grandfather shouting at him, but Father was standing there accepting the abuse, as long as it seemed to go on.
My aunts and my mother, drying her tears and coming to her husband, found this a less unfamiliar sight than the children. They remembered the last time Nana had burst out shouting. It had been thirteen years before. It had been the day that Boro-mama had run away, leaving the garden path unswept; the day he had run away to marry Sharmin, who was now sitting in a placid way in a corner of the salon, keeping an eye on their four children. (She was glad to see her brother-in-law Mahmood: she had never really doubted that he would get here safely, and she went on knitting.) That was the last time Nana had shouted, when he had raised his voice and demanded the immediate attendance of Era, who had known all about it. My grandfather never lost his temper, and never raised his voice. He must have shouted as a boy, though it was hard to imagine. But in family stories, these were the two occasions when he raised his voice: to Era, when she knew all about Laddu’s elopement; and to Mahmood, the day he came in after the curfew had been declared, making his wife cry. For the rest of his life, my grandfather never saw anything to make him shout. But that day, he did shout, and my father knew he was right to.