‘This is Piklu,’ I said. ‘He’s my chicken.’
And Bubbly-aunty was so impressed, she went to fetch Dahlia out of her music lesson to show her.
3.
Every aunt had her occupation – to paint, to cook, to help Nana with legal research, to attend to the chickens. Bubbly, who loved food, was forever in the kitchen, though her particular task was to supervise the making of the pickles. Mary’s was to keep the children in order; Nadira’s was to sing. Though she was in Sheffield now, the other aunts talked about her ceaselessly. I could remember her wedding, how beautiful it had been, how beautiful she had been. Her singing had been good enough for her to appear on Bangladeshi television, performing Tagore songs. ‘Do you think she has her own programme, by now, on British television?’ Mary asked guilelessly.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ Nani said.
At the time when Tagore was banned by the Pakistanis, before independence, Nadira had hidden her music with all the other Bengali music, poetry and books in the secret cellar at my grandfather’s house. When it was safe to bring it out again, it was clear that she had not forgotten any of it. That was her occupation.
Dahlia was my favourite aunt. Nadira had been fascinating and dramatic, always ready to shout and stamp or even to cry for effect in public. But she could also say, ‘Be off with you, wretched child.’ Dahlia was as fragrant as Nadira had been, and as pretty as her name. She, too, had her music. It was understood that Nadira was a better singer, but Dahlia took lessons from the two musicians who came to the house. Her occupation, however, since Nadira had taken music as her first choice, was to sew: she embroidered very deft, very intricate scenes of country life, not using patterns, but quite out of her head. If you asked her, she would explain that this figure was a man she had seen working in the fields near my grandfather’s village last summer, that this was his wife, waiting for him at home and cooking a delicious supper, that these were what she imagined his children looked like, and these were the mountains in the distance, with cows and goats on them. Pultoo was very scathing about Dahlia’s sewing and her designs, but many people loved them, and she was always being asked for her next one by friends of the family. It often took her a year or more to finish one, however, and they tended to stay in the family, in the rooms of the children of this aunt or that. Sometimes Dahlia just placed them in a large biscuit box she had at home, and only took them out if you asked her.
Sunchita had once asked her if she could make a picture of something in particular, a picture of children she knew, queuing up and travelling on an aeroplane. Sunchita had asked for this very fervently, but Dahlia-aunty had laughed and said she would make that for her, one of these days. That day had not yet come. I had one of Dahlia’s tapestries on my wall at home, and I had named every single figure in the image, and had a good idea of their relation to each other, the stories they were embarked upon.
Dahlia was busy in a corner of the salon, her head bent over her half-finished work. She heard me coming in, and called to me. There was no one else in the room, and I went to sit by her. She tutted, and smoothed my hair; she took a sweet-smelling folded handkerchief from the short sleeve of the dark blue blouse under her sari. She spat a little into it, and wiped my cheeks, one after the other. I must have been smudged from the street. ‘Little urchin,’ she said.
‘Dahlia-aunty,’ I said, and told her all about the Roots game we had been playing. I went into details. She listened patiently, laughing sometimes.
‘I wondered what you were all doing,’ she said. ‘Nani came down from upstairs where she had been dressing the mango to dry, and said that she had never been so shocked. She saw a group of street-urchins tearing up and down the street, making a terrible din, and she thought that never had such a thing been heard of in Dhanmondi.’
‘And it was us, wasn’t it, Dahlia-aunty?’ I said happily. I took her hand, and pulled the thimble off her forefinger; that silver top joint of the finger was fascinating to me, and I could only think of it as a sort of toy. I loved to put my finger into it, and twirl it about.
‘She called down to me, and I went up, and then the whole gang of you rushed past, and I said to Nani, “I think I know one or two of those street-urchins.”’
‘Are we in trouble?’ I asked.
Dahlia held up her needle to the light, licked the end of the blue thread, rethreaded the needle. She unsmilingly held out her hand, and I, smilingly, took the thimble off my too-thin finger. Instead of putting it on the palm of the hand she held out, I reached around and put it on the finger of her left hand; an intimate, professional thing to do, like a servant’s task. She gave way: she smiled, and gave me a kiss.
‘Who are those boys that you play with?’ she said.
‘I told you once,’ I said, exasperated. I ran through the names, but she stopped me.
‘Assad,’ she said. ‘Is that the little boy who lives three houses away?’
‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘I don’t like him at all. He wanted to be the slave-owner, but everyone said I should do it, and he cried at first, but now he just wants to be another slave-owner. He doesn’t play the game properly.’
‘But he lives, doesn’t he, three houses away? I mean, to the left, up the road, towards the main road?’
I thought, and then agreed.
‘Saadi,’ she said, ‘I want you to promise me that you won’t go to that boy’s house, and you won’t ask him here. You can play with him in the street, if there are lots of other children, like today, but don’t go to his house, and don’t have anything to do with his big brothers, or his father, or any of his family. Can you promise me that?’
I promised. ‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go to his old house, anyway.’
‘Has he asked you?’
‘No,’ I had to admit.
‘If he asks you, don’t go,’ Dahlia-aunty said. ‘Your grandfather wouldn’t like it. You know why. Now. I’ve been hard at work all afternoon – my fingers are red raw, look. Shall we have our tea, just you and I?’
I felt I had made a solemn and binding contract with my aunt, something which was beyond my sisters’ capacity, and it was with an adult’s serious walk that I went to the kitchen to call for tea and biscuits. If a guest had brought some or the kitchen had made some, there might be semai, chumchum, or rosogallai. These were the sweets that my aunt and I liked to eat together.
When my aunt said to me that I was not to play with Assad, and that I knew the reason why, she spoke the truth. At that time, there was only one reason why we did not associate with people of the neighbourhood, and that reason was known to everyone in the house, from the oldest visitors from the village down to the smallest child. It came to us as we woke, and was with us when we went to bed. We understood very well the reason why a child was forbidden our company. When Dahlia gave me this instruction I understood very well that it must have been his father who had sided with the Pakistanis.
4.
In Dhanmondi, where my grandfather lived, associations between neighbours were generally relaxed and easy. A gardener or a chauffeur would be lent without a thought; the women went between houses all day long. This was even true of the president of the country, Sheikh Mujib, whose house was four away from Khandekar-nana’s house. My mother used to tell the story of going to visit Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, at her father’s house, to find her in a terrible rage. She had been expecting a certain number of bags of chilli to be sent up from their estate in the country; the bags had arrived, but there were two short. ‘There should be two more! Two more!’ Sheikh Hasina had shouted, over and over. She barely paused in her rage to greet my mother.
‘Imagine that,’ my mother said. ‘Her father is the president of the country, and she was angry for the lack of two bags of chilli, which she could well afford to buy from the market.’
But