Cry freedom

Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that readers may question that definition. Set in Dacca (now Dhaka), it is about the emergence of Bangladesh as a state independent of Pakistan after the savage civil war of 1971. Philip Hensher has drawn on memory and history — family history and ‘real’ history. Historical characters, notably Sheik Mujib, the courageous and civilised Bangladeshi leader, mingle with semi- and wholly fictional ones. The joins are seamless. Finishing the book, I was startled to realise that Hensher, an Englishman, had written a novel without a single English character in it, and that I, at least, had been wholly convinced.

The narrator is Hensher’s husband, Zaved Mahmood, now a human rights lawyer for the UN, once a chubby, charming Bengali child, the youngest in the family and the object of adoration for his multitudinous aunts. His Anglophile grandfather calls him ‘Churchill’ because he cries a lot — apparently a characteristic of the infant Winston. This little Churchill, more generally known as Saadi, is making up for lost crying time, because during his babyhood he, with the entire extended family, hid in the grandfather’s house, sheltering from the Pakistani soldiers who had permission to loot, rape and kill on the slightest pretext in the interests of Urdu supremacy.

During this time, baby Saadi could not be allowed to cry; the barred and bolted house had to appear uninhabited. So he was passed from aunt to aunt, cosseted, played with and above all constantly fed. A neighbour’s baby was killed with a kitchen knife — the soldiers, who had already murdered the rest of the family, didn’t want to waste a bullet.