Scenes from Early Life

It was quite late in the morning when they found Mr Khandekar’s house. The gate was ajar, and they pushed it open nervously. From the white-painted square house, the noise of a discussion was going on and, somewhere deeper in the house, the clamour and clang of cooking pots. They stood under the dense shade of the large mango tree at the entrance. ‘We should go in,’ Amit said. ‘Or knock on the door.’

‘I can’t remember,’ Altaf said. ‘There might be an entrance at the back. For clients.’

But Amit walked forward, quite boldly, and pushed a button to the side of the door. Inside the house, a bell rang – an electric two-note song. The door was opened almost immediately, and behind was Mr Khandekar – Altaf recognized him. He was obviously going out: he was wearing a black suit and a white shirt, and was struggling with a white cambric stock at his throat. His collar was detached, and flying away like the wing of a bird: it was clear that Mr Khandekar was trying to do everything in the wrong order. ‘Salaam,’ he said, fumbling with the stock. ‘Good morning to you.’

‘Sir,’ Altaf said, ‘if this is an inconvenient time—’

‘Please, introduce yourselves,’ Mr Khandekar said. Altaf did so, reminding Mr Khandekar of his family, and of his knowledge of his father’s family, his respect for Mr Khandekar’s father. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘I don’t have the time to see you now. Come in, walk with me.’

They went into the dark wooden hallway of Mr Khandekar’s house and followed him through the salon into a room lined with books. ‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said, as he walked. He had given them each one assessing look, from top to bottom, at the front door. But then he had averted his eyes and talked to them without looking, rummaging about in the drawers of his desk, pulling out a paper from a pile, picking up a clever neat little stud to hold his white collar down and pushing it into a hole, somewhere at the back of his neck. ‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said, picking up a second collar stud and getting to work with it.

Altaf stood in front of this furious activity, and started to explain about his friend, his friend’s aunt, the nephew in Cox’s Bazar, the will and the legacy, the spare room, the terms of the lease—

‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘I can’t find the last collar stud. It must be here. Explain, explain.’

Altaf explained about Amit, how his aunt’s landlord had known perfectly well that he was living there but now chose to say that he was flabbergasted to discover it, and that Amit wanted to stay on there, but the landlord’s view was that—

‘There it is,’ Mr Khandekar said, with relief, pouncing on a small silver stud, like a chicken on a seed. ‘Now I can go. Come with me.’

Altaf had feared they were about to be ejected – Mr Khandekar seemed so busy and unconcerned. But he knew that great men were not as you expected. He had expected that they would be asked to wait in an antechamber, rather than following Mr Khandekar about his house as he dressed. Mr Khandekar had his own ways, and he had been listening to them in his own fashion. He had been friendly, manly, and would now be helpful. Altaf had stumbled over the story, but Mr Khandekar had followed its disorganized path and had made sense of it, and now he would present them with a solution. Mr Khandekar led them out of his study. He paused at a looking glass in the salon, and with one hand smoothed down his greying hair; he licked the tips of the forefinger and thumb on his left hand and, in a gesture Altaf half knew, half remembered as being characteristic, wiped them across his eyebrows in a single opening gesture. ‘Come with me,’ he said again. They followed him across the crowded salon, stepping cautiously between little tables and low stools, and through the hallway. Mr Khandekar stopped at a closed door, knocked briefly and pushed it open.

‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said. ‘Two fellows from the village.’ He turned to Altaf. ‘What did you say your name was? A problem with accommodation. Talk to them. See if you can do anything. I have to be off. I’m fearfully late. How are you, Nadira? Always a pleasure.’

He turned swiftly, in his immaculate black-and-white dress, the white stock now quickly tied and beautifully neat at his throat. There was genuine warmth in the greeting or, Altaf supposed, the farewell to the girl. ‘I always like to see old friends from the village,’ he said. ‘Always, always. Explain everything to my wife – she is the true power in this house. She can do so much more for you than I can, believe me.’ The front door opened anonymously, smoothly, and in front of the house, under the mango tree, a car stood idling. A driver was waiting for Mr Khandekar.

‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘Always a pleasure.’

6.

Mrs Khandekar was a tiny woman, dressed enchantingly in a pink sari and a single simple necklace. The room she came to the door of was also pink, and lit by the light of the morning sun, coming through the leaves of the tree outside. It was a graceful, charming room, with two Chinese vases on either end of a teak sideboard, the sofa and armchairs upholstered in pale green silk. On the low teak and glass table was a tray with tea things on it, a blue-and-white Chinese set, and a plate of sweet biscuits arranged in a little fan. In the small brown vase on the table, a branch of fruit blossom.

Mrs Khandekar had a guest. She was a girl of perhaps fifteen, who craned her head at the visitors as Mrs Khandekar rose and went to speak to Amit and Altaf at the door. The girl sat very upright, and her hair was arranged in an upwards style. She sat as if aware of the way she would be looked at. Mr Khandekar had called her Nadira.

‘I am so sorry about my husband,’ Mrs Khandekar said, smiling. ‘He is always in such a rush. But perhaps I can help you? You are an old friend of Mr Khandekar’s father, I think?’

Altaf explained. Standing at the door to Mrs Khandekar’s sitting room, he found it came out in a much more orderly way. Amit’s problem seemed to unfold to an easy, elegant, listening audience. Amit stood, listening to Altaf’s explanation with a furrowed brow.

When Altaf had finished, Mrs Khandekar said, ‘I see. It happens to many people, that sort of thing. But do you think your friend’s landlord is at all likely to change his mind? He sounds quite set in his decision.’

‘He doesn’t want me to stay in the flat,’ Amit said, speaking for the first time. ‘I’m sure he has his own good reasons.’

‘I don’t think anyone can force him to rent his flat to someone, once he has made his mind up,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘It is unfortunate, but there it is.’

She looked at them, levelly and not without kindness.

‘I’m sorry to have troubled you in your home,’ Altaf said after a moment, lowering his head.

‘But what would you hope for, at the end of all this?’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘Don’t think about how you would achieve it but what you actually want.’

‘Somewhere to live,’ Altaf said. ‘Merely somewhere to live.’

‘Mrs Khandekar,’ the girl in the pink sitting room said – her voice was low and melodious, and she had an air of adult confidence about her. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Khandekar. What about—’

‘This is Nadira,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘The daughter of a very old friend of my husband’s, come to visit and take a cup of tea in the morning. It is so kind of her to drop in like this.’

Altaf and Amit bowed in her direction. ‘And now,’ Mrs Khandekar said, ‘I wonder if the best thing for me to do is not to start telling you about lawyers and law courts and the laws relating to landlords and their tenants, but just to try to help you to find somewhere to live. After all, that is all you want, I believe?’

‘That was just what I was going to say,’ the girl said.

Mrs Khandekar, she said, owned a block of flats in Old Dacca. They had belonged to her father before her, and he had left them to her. They were nice flats – a little old-fashioned, perhaps, but in good order, well looked after and in a very respectable, quiet neighbourhood.

‘What are your professions, gentlemen?’ Mrs Khandekar said.

Altaf let Amit say, ‘Schoolmaster,’ which at least sounded regular and respectable.

Somehow, it seemed to be established in Mrs Khandekar’s mind that the two of them were looking for a flat together, and he found himself saying, ‘I am a musician,’ adding for good measure, ‘I play on the radio,’ and going on to explain the Saturday-evening programme on which he was a regular.

‘How delightful!’ Mrs Khandekar said, with real warmth, clapping her hands together in pleasure. ‘My husband and I never miss it. We must listen out for you.’ She used an English expression.

There were some landlords who would be put off by the idea of musicians, but Mrs Khandekar was not one of them. In fact, once she had discovered that Amit was not just a schoolmaster but also a musician – ‘A famous musician,’ she flatteringly said – it appeared to act as a recommendation and a passport. She asked them into her sitting room, and offered them a seat and a cup of tea. Before long, it had emerged that Nadira, the assured and dignified girl on the sofa, liked to sing and, after a little more conversation, they had agreed to come to her house to teach her, the next free afternoon. In half an hour, everything seemed to have been arranged, and Mrs Khandekar had told them where to meet her the next morning to look at a flat in the block that had become vacant in recent weeks. ‘It is rather small, I am afraid,’ she said apologetically. ‘You must say at once if it does not suit you.’

But of course it would suit them. Altaf thought of his bedroom at home, with the rosewood harmonium placed beyond his brothers’ reach, the noise and the stolen half-hours between hours of chaos. He thought of a door that he could close and a life of his own. Amit’s face showed that, from the beginning, he had considered Altaf a part of his plans for living. Altaf’s heart swelled at the kindness of his friend, and at the degree of understanding between them that went without words.

7.

‘I’ve been to see the hall at the university,’ Altaf said.

It was a year later, and they had been very happily ensconced in Mrs Khandekar’s apartment, just the two of them. It suited them perfectly. It was on the third floor of an old building, and the streets that ran in front of and to the side of it were quiet ones. This was in the furniture-makers’ quarter, and all day long the streets were crowded with bed frames, like brown grazing cows. The smell of wood-shavings perfumed the air; the day was filled with the sounds of honest labour. In the corner of the sitting room, Amit’s mattress was rolled up and tied: he unrolled it every night when Altaf went to the bedroom. The flat was quite dark, with its small windows, but it suited them both and they were happy there. The musical instruments and the copies of music, including ‘Githo Bitan’ by Tagore, were on a shelf in the bedroom. In the sitting room there was a radio they had bought together, which they referred to as ‘our radio’. They had always battened on to the radios of others – an aunt’s, a mother’s – and it was a pleasure to share one instead. There was a portrait of Tagore tacked to the wall of the sitting room, and in each room, a kerosene lamp for when, as now, the electricity failed. Altaf and Amit were sitting by the light of the kerosene lamp on the floor of their small apartment. Mrs Khandekar’s apartment had a table, but they often preferred to sit on the floor to eat. Before them, lay plates of rice, fish and dal, cooked by Amit on the kerosene stove. Altaf and Amit were steadily rolling up the food into balls with the fingers of one hand, and eating them in one gulp. Their dark fingers glistened in the warm light with grains of rice.

‘What hall?’ Amit said, after a pause.

‘It will be for singers, for writers, for scholars like the professor, and for musicians. It can be a place for everyone to meet, and for people to share their knowledge of the Bengali traditions. It will be wonderful, Amit. There are so many people who are interested.’

Amit stopped. ‘They won’t permit it,’ he said. ‘The government.’

‘They won’t have any choice,’ Altaf said.

‘They tried to make everyone write in their script,’ Amit said. ‘They’ll try again. They don’t like us singing our own songs. They’ll respond if Bengalis start gathering to sing their songs and read their poetry and show their paintings.’

‘They needn’t know anything about it,’ Altaf said, with bravado.

‘Oh, yes?’ Amit said, quite mildly. ‘Do you think there’s nobody at the university in the pay of the police? They probably already know about the whole plan.’

‘Well,’ Altaf said, ‘if they already know, we might as well continue with it.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Amit said. ‘We might as well continue.’

This conversation took place just when memories of previous suppressions were fading, and people like Altaf and Amit were making their plans.

Nadira, who was my Nadira-aunty, had been taking music lessons from them for a year, ever since they had met her at Mrs Khandekar’s house. There was even talk of Nadira going on the radio and singing with them, on a Saturday afternoon. They sang classic songs, and read Bengali poetry together, and loaned each other novels in Bengali. There were classics, and new novels: everyone adored Sangshaptak when it came out, and soon Shahidullah Kaiser was a regular presence at the little group. After a few weeks, Nadira had introduced the two musicians to her sisters and even to her smallest brother, the eight-year-old Pultoo; after a few weeks more, her father – my nana – came in and greeted them. There was always a great respect for culture in my family, and from the beginning, Nana and Nani treated Nadira’s music teachers not as servants and lowly tutors, although of course they were paid to come, but as honoured guests.

In time, friends of Nadira asked if Altaf and Amit could come to teach them music, too. There was soon almost more teaching than they could cope with, and they grew to know the numbered streets of Dhanmondi very well, and wondered how they could ever have got so lost that first morning, when they had tried to find their way to Mr Khandekar’s house. There was even talk, at one point, of them being introduced to the household of Sheikh Mujib himself: Sheikh Hasina, his daughter, was said to have enquired about them of a friend. Nothing came of that, though they did see Sheikh Mujib and his daughter occasionally at the sort of gatherings in Dhanmondi where they sometimes played to an audience. They did have half a dozen regular visits to pay, and that was more or less the limit of what they could achieve.

The respectable and quiet streets of Dhanmondi had become fervently enthusiastic about the culture of the Bengalis. Behind the walls of many houses, conversations continued late into the night. Conversations about writers, artists, musicians, poets. Once the gates were shut against the outside world, against neighbours who could not be trusted, against the policemen in the streets and the laws of an alien people, households in Dhanmondi relaxed, and started to talk, and to listen to girls like Nadira-aunty singing a song as Altaf played the harmonium and sang too, and Amit’s palms and fingers pattered like rain on the tabla next to them.

The flower says,

‘Blessed am I,

Blessed am I

On the earth . . .’

Institutions started to open up. A school might decide to hold an exhibition of paintings on Bengali themes by its pupils – Pultoo was, at ten, the star of one of these exhibitions. At parties, the girls of the family might dance to the sitar and the harmonium; in other households, a member of the family might recite their own poetry. In Dhanmondi, on summer afternoons, families went from household to household, taking their music with them. Fifteen years before, the occupying Pakistani forces had tried to suppress the language of Bengal, and to force all in the province to write in an unfamiliar and alien script. (My own parents had demonstrated against this, in 1952, and had been thrown together into police cells; it was a happy and a romantic memory for them.) Now, in the last years of the 1960s, the Pakistani policemen stood around menacingly, and everyone knew who, in the neighbourhood, had been an informer, and probably still was one. Nothing seemed to matter. The Bengalis went from house to house with joyous abandon.

Among them were Altaf and Amit, who were universally welcome, and Nadira and her sisters; there were Nana and Nani and Mr and Mrs Khandekar; there was, too, Sheikh Mujib, whom you could see everywhere, on his way to forging a new country in the fires of his soul. He was the leader of a political party; his daughter was the one who had fretted and raged to my mother about the two missing bags of chilli. He lived under the constant threat of imprisonment, and sometimes he was trailed for days by the police, who sat endlessly in a car outside his house, a hundred yards away from Mr Khandekar. Sheikh Mujib came to these parties when he could; he said it made him glad to hear the songs of the Bengali. He made no particular fuss when he entered a room as a guest; still, he was who he was, and the room was drawn towards his big glossy hair, his plump, humorous look. The room stood up at his entrance: he would force a friend, perhaps a distinguished poet, to sit down again, before him. A special place was made for him, and perhaps for his daughter, Hasina, too. He would accept the special place while, all the time, protesting mildly with his hands. You never knew who you would meet at one of these parties. The gates stood open, and almost everyone was welcome.

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