Scenes From Early Life by Philip Hensher Page A

and we should not disappoint them by rolling in the mud, by saying that we were bored and could we watch the television, or by stuffing rice into our cheeks at the dinner table and pretending we were rats. That was always disgusting for other people, but it would be very disappointing for Nana’s visitors to see us behaving in such a way. ‘That was only Saadi,’ my sister Sushmita said.
    My sister Sunchita whispered into my ear, ‘It’s the witch who’s coming,’ when we were safely jammed into the cycle-rickshaw – our ayah had found a good one, polished silver with a big picture of a tiger on the back. ‘It’s her time of year to come.’ The rickshaw driver fastened his blue cotton lungi between his hairy, bony knees, above the cycle crossbar, spat into the dry earth of the street, and we set off.
    Our great-grandmother was called by Sunchita and me ‘the witch’ for no very good reason, except that she scared us. She was the last of the two widows of Nana’s father. I could just about remember the other one, and what they had been like. They had lived together where they had always lived, in Nana’s father’s house in the village. Nana’s father was the last person in the family who had married more than one woman; the question had never arisen afterwards, and now never would. The elder of the two had died when I was very small and, until then, they had come to see Nana once a year, around this time. The surviving one had carried on. Nana never travelled from Dacca to her village, although he sent small presents whenever any of his children went there in the summer. Nana always chose saris for her; he liked her to wear white saris with a thin band of colour, of blue or purple, at the edge, or sometimes a band of silver. (I could still remember her and the elderly senior wife, matching in their white and purple saris.) And the second one, the survivor, came to Dacca every year, in the summer, where she frightened, without knowing it, her great-grandchildren.
    At Nana’s house, everything was in a state of confusion. The gardener’s boy was cleaning the car with a bucket of water; Atish was weeding the flowerbed. In the upper windows, great white birds appeared to be plunging in the half-light; beds were being changed and aired. My great-grandmother had arrived, and had found fault. The servants, who were used to their own ways, did not look forward to her visits any more than I did. Attention fell on her in unwelcome ways; attention was simultaneously taken from me, and neither of us enjoyed it.
    We were led upstairs in our best clothes, and there in her room was my great-grandmother. The maid who always served her was already hard at work, brushing her hair; it was absolutely white – ‘As white as snow,’ I dreamily said to myself, a comparison from English books and not from experience. She could keep her maid hard at it all day long, going from one intimate task to another. While her hair was being brushed, she was at work preparing paan. She had her own pestle and mortar for this, and would prepare paan to chew; sometimes Nani took some, out of politeness, to give her mother-in-law some company. She pounded away at the tiny red rubble in her wooden bowl, the wooden pestle long since stained as if with blood. Her task was like that of the woman stone-breaker outside her house, but fragrant, elegant, clean and beautiful. She did not trust or like preparations of paan that had been made by anyone else. She carried the ingredients round in small pouches, making it out of dried leaves, pebble-like substances, samples of mysterious red matter, all just as she liked it. Her pestle and mortar, as well as the wooden clogs she always wore that gave you warning of her approach, were somehow carried over from the senior wife. She seemed to be carrying out a dead woman’s wishes, and she scared the life out of me.
    We submitted to being kissed by a paan-smelling old mouth, and my mother reminded her who we