Dhaka In 1947

Dhaka In 1947

---Editor, Literature Page

IT was at night, with the house to myself, that the strangeness of the country made itself felt in sound. I had come at the season most unlike anything in Northern Europe, when the monsoon was at full strength. Veiled lightning flickered from cloud to cloud and thunder grumbled in a continuous undertone. Then perhaps a wind would rise, at first in a sighing of far-off trees, but it gathered strength, advancing like an army on the march till it overwhelmed the bungalow and passed on to its unknown destination. Frogs, close under the window as it seemed, burst into a deafening chorus of earthy contentment with the weather, stopped abruptly and began again with the unanimity of a well-conducted orchestra; the noise was punctuated now and then by a scuffle and a scream from some treetop murder, or the squelching tread of a cow swishing through the bushes; or sometimes the howl of hunting jackals rose up and up and quavered into shrill, fragmented yappings--the most godforsaken cry in all the world. And now and then a humanly intelligible sound would drift through this elemental music, the notes of a flute or a snatch of religious song from some belated traveller keeping up his spirits.

I would lie under the mosquito net picking out one note or another from the medley of sound till it faded away, and I woke to a world taken over by other gods. The early morning is the best of the day in India, and if it was not pouring with rain I was usually out, exploring narrow roads banked high over fields where the paddy grew from standing water. The paddy was a luminous green ocean stretching to the horizon, its flatness broken by darker capes and ridges, which were groves of mango and palm. Here and there a crane stared into a pool, or a troop of small parrots as green as the paddy dipped and skimmed over it, wings flickering in and out of sunlight. Everything sparkled with light and wetness and the air was like velvet. I came home to find Abdul (her cook-bearer) cooking eggs and by the time I reached the office the day was too steamily hot for walking to be any pleasure till the sun was low again; one sat under an electric fan trying to keep books and papers out of the range of the dripping sweat.