Scenes from Early Life

The cards would be for the new year. In Bangladesh, Choto-mama said, people were always sending cards for any reason; but they were mass-produced, the same cards that were sold anywhere, and did not speak to the sender or to the recipient. ‘I saw a birthday card,’ my uncle’s friend Kajol said. ‘It was a photograph of a mountainside in the Himalaya, I expect, and the message inside was “This is what I dream of . . .” It means nothing, that kind of thing. Produced in factories, designed by slaves.’

‘Yes,’ Pultoo said, in his excitable way. ‘People would not buy that if they could buy the sort of thing we are going to make for them.’

‘What sort of thing?’ my grandmother said.

I wondered whether their idea was to make cards with pictures of naked people on them. I did not think people would want to buy those. But Pultoo-uncle explained that they would be drawing and painting famous views in Bangladesh, typical scenes of Bangladesh, such as a village house or a tea plantation, perhaps even well-known corners of Dacca. ‘I would much prefer to see a hand-drawn picture like that,’ Pultoo said.

‘When are your teachers coming?’ Shibli called to Dahlia-aunty. ‘The musicians.’

‘Quiet, Shibli,’ Nani said, in her stagy way. ‘Don’t you have any respect? Your uncle is talking about your country.’

‘Your country, yes,’ Era said.

8.

The servants in my grandfather’s house held a fascination for me. I never knew how many there were. After Mary-aunty had put my sister and me to bed in the afternoons, we would often start up a row, a pillow fight, a shouting match, and soon she would come to see what the noise was. But she was somebody who could not pass another human being known to her in any degree without greeting them. So we could hear the passage of Mary-aunty through the house from her slapping chappals, and from a constant stream of greetings, and expressions of concern and interest: ‘Good afternoon, Rustum’; ‘how are your children, Timur; is your daughter happy with Mr Khandekar . . .’ That sort of thing. There were enough servants to slow her progress, to warn us and allow us to calm down and pretend to be asleep by the time she opened the door to shout at us.

My grandfather had a gardener called Atish. Over the years, he had become both an inside servant and an outside servant, according to need. I was not allowed to follow Atish about when he was inside, cleaning and polishing. When he was gardening, there were no objections to my walking about with him and asking him any number of questions. There was plenty to occupy him: the huge bougainvillaeas that poured out of pots and formed a blazing arch, the way that the terrace and entrance needed to be swept of dead leaves and flowers. He trimmed back the flowers in the flowerbeds; he carried out mysterious surgical operations with saw and secateurs on the fruit trees – the guava tree, the mango tree, the jackfruit tree, the banana tree, the tamarind tree, with its neatly diagrammatic leaves and its extravagant flower. There was plenty of digging and pruning and planting to do, with a small boy gazing and a chicken or two following round in the hope of an upturned worm.

Atish was a poor Hindu who was left behind in 1947. Grandfather and Grandmother had had to leave Calcutta in a great hurry and come to Dacca. Nana had bought a house in Rankin Street from a rich Hindu, who had had to leave Dacca in a great hurry and go to Calcutta. I wondered why they had not simply swapped their houses, but they had not. Atish had not gone like the rich Hindus to Calcutta: he had stayed where he was, and Grandfather had taken pity on him and employed him in the garden. It suited him.

Nana liked to employ poor and vulnerable people. All of them stayed for ever. And Nana’s relations with them sometimes surprised his friends, since he encouraged the people he employed to speak their minds to him. Sometimes they developed independent habits, which could prove inconvenient to the rest of the household. Rustum, Nana’s driver, was another of these vulnerable people, but after a while, he developed the habit of taking the car out on his own, or of ignoring instructions. Sometimes my grandmother would come out after lunch, expecting Rustum to be there to drive her to a friend’s house, and would find that he had gone out with the car, and no one knew where he had gone. When he came back, I had heard him blame Dahlia-aunty, saying that she had told him to go and fetch something from a shop on the other side of Dacca. She had demanded, he would say, a particular sort of sandesh, one that could only be got in a confectioner’s shop on Sadarghat. He knew the sort of blame that could be convincingly put on Dahlia. But if this got back to Dahlia-aunty, she would fly into a furious passion. It was the first thing that came into Rustum’s mind, it seemed, and it did not occur to him that anyone might ask Dahlia whether there was any truth in his story.

‘How could he? How could he? How could he?’ Dahlia would shout, sometimes audibly from outside the gates of the house. To passers-by and neighbours, it did not seem obvious that these screams were caused only by a servant’s unreliable events; surely, they must have thought, a husband or father must have threatened a beating to the victim, at the very least. But nobody beat anyone in Nana’s house, and Dahlia screamed because Rustum had pretended she had ordered him about.

Finally there came the terrible day when Rustum had a fight with Nana himself. It occurred in the week. When we arrived that Friday, Rustum was not there. This was not unusual, but it was strange that the red Vauxhall was in the garage when both Nana and Rustum were out of the house. When Nana came home, he came home in a cycle-rickshaw, and I understood that something atrocious had happened. Rustum had been asked to leave. ‘I could forgive him for taking the car without permission,’ my grandfather said, a week or two later when he could bring himself to talk about it. ‘But it was the lying afterwards I could not put up with.’ My grandfather, however, immediately felt guilty about evicting Rustum and his family from the flat in the servants’ block, and made it his business to find Rustum another place to live and even another job. When, five years later, Rustum was diagnosed with tuberculosis, my grandfather paid for his treatment.

Atish the gardener was not as popular with the children as Rustum. He did not have the glamour of a red Vauxhall car to carry out his trade, but only a spade, a hoe, a trowel and a fork; among his tools, only the secateurs, with their terrible grip and savage slice, had the power to fascinate. But I liked to follow him around the garden, and watch him at his tasks, and he did not object. Sometimes he let me undertake a small task to help him, such as filling his two watering-cans. If it was cold, Atish used to wear a shawl about his shoulders, a scarf wound right around his head, like a sufferer from the toothache; his set face emerged from a kind of red cotton nest on the coldest days of the year.

Atish would start work at the front of the house, where the tamarind tree shaded the entrance. There were always things to sweep up here. Then he would move on to the flowerbeds at the side of the house in the full sun, and then to the back of the house, with the other fruit trees, the lawn and, underneath the jackfruit tree, the chicken house. The chickens were allowed to wander the garden, eating whatever they could find. One of the days that Atish devoted to digging and turning over the earth in the flowerbeds was a festival day for the chickens, as they could eye and pounce on a worm or a beetle that Atish’s spade had uncovered. They stood, beadily eyeing his work, like supervisors in a factory.

The chicken house had been made and painted, decorated, by Choto-mama Pultoo. He had started it when he was still at school and showing signs of artistic and practical talent. He had painted a frame, put a tidy little net in its front, and then, he said, he had wondered what he would like in his house, if he were a chicken. So the chicken house contained the dead branches of trees for the chickens to perch on, and the back wall had a landscape painted by Pultoo. ‘So that they can think of the wide open spaces of the countryside, even when they are confined in a small garden in Dacca,’ Pultoo poetically observed. The chickens seemed to take more pleasure in the dead tree, on which they happily roosted and slept, than in the landscape, which they ignored. Within a few months, the mountain view was dimmed and smeared by chicken feathers and chicken shit. Pultoo was not put off, and carried on adding ornament and furniture to the chicken house in the hope of broadening their mental horizons. The latest was a series of terracotta yogurt pots, which he had decorated with some folk-like paintings of milkmaids.

‘Come on,’ Dahlia-aunty, who was a good sort, would sometimes say to me when we arrived at my grandfather’s house for the weekend. ‘Let’s go and see what Choto-mama has done to the chicken run this week.’

Atish never made any comment on Pultoo’s chicken run, or on the chickens themselves for that matter. He stayed silent on the subject, even when the cat next door got into the garden and killed three chicks. He ignored the chickens standing by his side, watching him hoe and dig, though he would pause in his regular rhythm if they darted forward to grab a worm.

I could stand there all morning, watching Atish work and the chickens eat the grubs he found for them. The only things he said to me were odd horticultural pieces of advice: it was necessary to prune a mango tree in March; the first sprouts from seeds that would turn into sunflowers must be thinned out when they had reached an inch tall; you could not water a bougainvillaea enough. It was as if he thought I was going to become a gardener like him when I grew up. The way he gave horticultural maxims is clear in my head, but not what he said exactly. I may have got them quite wrong. But I stood or squatted there all morning, watching Atish at work, watching the white chickens dart to and fro.

9.

My father came before lunch on Saturday. He did not come with a dramatic flourish, like my grandfather; he did not come with excitement, like my mother and my sisters. He came under a pile of papers, tied up with red ribbon, and in a pernickety, unenthusiastic way. Sometimes he was carrying so much that it threatened to overbalance him. It is not easy to travel with a large bundle of papers in the back of a cycle-rickshaw, and he often turned up with his arms in a desperate position, clutching them like a large escaping fish. I liked to watch him arrive. The cycle-rickshaw he always used was glittering silver, polished, with the faces of film stars under a setting sun painted on the back of its canopy; like many of the other rickshaws of Dacca, its canopy was lined with tinsel, like a fur-lined hood. The rickshaw driver, however, was a taciturn, serious man, whom you could not imagine decorating his vehicle in this way, and so was my father, sitting in the square middle of the rickshaw with his papers on his lap, his lawyer’s white bands around his throat.

Both I and my father were hypocrites – he, because he did not really want to come to my grandfather’s house: he was a government lawyer, my grandfather was a lawyer for the people, so they were always on opposite sides, and my grandfather could never resist needling him about this argument or other that he had undertaken with less success than he had hoped for. He came because he felt he ought to, and because the Bar library in which he did so much of his work closed at weekends.

I was a hypocrite because, towards the end of Saturday morning, I made a habit of going up to Nana’s balcony to watch out for Father’s arrival. The balcony had by far the best view down the street, and it was where anyone sat to keep an eye out for an eagerly awaited visitor. From there, you could see the curious events of the street: a handcart laden with megaphones, like silver tropical flowers, heading to a rally, or a pitiful hawker, selling a single useless part of a household object, such as the handles of a pressure cooker, laid out on a cloth in the forlorn hope of a purchaser. I went up there, making sure that everyone knew I was going up there, to watch out for Father’s arrival in a cycle-rickshaw. In fact, my father’s arrival was nothing to look forward to. I disliked the way my mother and aunts had less time for me, busy with meeting his needs. He was much more remote than my aunts and my mother, and the idea of creating fun for his children would not have occurred to him. I made a great performance out of my anticipation because I thought that was the right, or the dramatic, thing to do. But in fact I did not much care that I had not seen him since early breakfast on Friday, and would not have minded if I had not seen him until Monday morning. Like many little boys, I wanted to have my mother to myself, with her warm iron-scented flesh, her ripple of silk against my face when she embraced me.

The one thing that made the weekend visits to Nana endurable for my father was that Nana had an excellent law library of his own. Although the public law library was closed at weekends, my father could, once he had eaten lunch with the aunts, his parents-in-law and the children, retreat to Nana’s library and carry on working in its rusty warm light. Sometimes he would call Sunchita and me in, and set us the task to find a particular book in Nana’s library, or a particular case within a book. I believe he thought he was providing us with some fun, as well as with a little education.

The library had a double aspect: one barred window looked out to the tamarind tree at the front, the other at the flowerbed to the side. Out of the front window, I could see the watchman leaning on the bonnet of the red Vauxhall. The big front gate of the house was open, and he was talking to someone I could not see. From the side window, there was Atish, attending to the flowerbeds. There was no one to fill his watering-cans for him, and he was trudging backwards and forwards with an uncomplaining uneven gait, like a badly oiled clockwork toy that threatened to start walking in circles. ‘Liberty Cinema versus CIT,’ my father said, in his light-toned voice. ‘Have you found that one for me?’

Elsewhere in the house the television was on, and Shibli was watching; Mary-aunty’s slapping chappals were coming down the stairs, and she was greeting the cook by asking about her daughter. My grandfather was laughing somewhere. Behind everything, the quiet of the Dhanmondi street, and the peaceful burble of the chickens in the garden.

Chapter 2

The Game of Roots

1.

The children all around watched American television shows with absorption, and would not be distracted. They watched Knight Rider and Kojak, Dallas and Starsky and Hutch, and other things still less suitable for small children. Afterwards, they rushed out into the street, into each other’s gardens and homes, dizzy and full of games of re-enactment. For weeks after Starsky and Hutch had rescued a girl bound and imprisoned in a church crypt, nurses, ayahs, mothers and aunts kept discovering small girls in their charge tied up with washing line to jackfruit trees. They had been abandoned in the joy of the game and, unable to untie themselves, wailed until someone rescued them.

‘Little brutes,’ Dahlia-aunty would say, when Sunchita, Shibli and I roared in after a morning playing some delirious game, wild-haired and dirty. ‘Go and wash yourselves immediately.’

‘Immediately,’ Era would add.

The games were played in the street, in gardens, on any spare plot of ground, with fervour and without planning. When we came across a neighbour’s children or grandchildren, we would start a game of Starsky and Hutch without any discussion. We knew all the children for many houses around, all the short-cuts between gardens, and the houses we would be chased away from.

In the streets, we lost all our respectability, and became, as our aunts told us, little ragamuffins. Sometimes, in our racing about, we got as far as Mirpur Road, where we were forbidden to go on our own. It was exciting there: the streets were suddenly full of trades. You could see the aubergine-seller, frying white discs in his yellow oil, the black iron cauldron precariously balanced on the gas stove; the cracker of nuts; a pavement cobbler; the barber with his cut-throat razor attending to a man leaning back in a chair under a tree, a broken scrap of mirror all he had to work with to perfect the moustache. There was the chai-wallah with his little terracotta cups, waiting to be filled with tea, and a hundred potsherds lying around him from the morning’s custom. We raced around all of them, playing our TV games, further than we ever meant to go, ignoring their curses and delirious in our rule-breaking. We all knew that Mirpur Road was where a little boy had been kidnapped and eaten by starving people, and we ran through its chaos and indifference, yelling like urchins.

We played Kojak and Knight Rider and Double Deckers constantly, without much preference for one game over another. Perhaps there was not much difference between the games. Dallas was more of a girl’s game. My sisters never got tired of parading up and down the garden and pointing a vengeful finger at the small girl from Mrs Rahman’s house. ‘Ten million dollars!’ they would cry. The rest of us were happy pretending to be talking cars, being kidnappers, or trying to walk like Hungry Bear.

The hold these television programmes had over our imaginations was swept away in one moment by a new series. My aunts talked about it seriously some time before it even started. The whole world, they said, had watched this series, and now it was coming to us, to be shown on Bangladesh television. It was the first time I realized that the programmes we watched were not made especially for us, although most of the television we watched was about people who did not look at all like us.

The programme was called Roots, and was about a family of black people. They started by living in Africa, then were kidnapped and taken to America, where they were slaves. We were entranced. It did not seem to agree with our idea of America at all. The next day we lifted the bolt, pushed the iron gates open and ran out across the street, not troubling to close the gates behind us. For once, we did not mooch or loiter until we came across some children we knew. We banged on doors like drunkards, demanding that our playfellows came out. ‘Did you see Roots?’ we shouted, and everyone had. Finally, there were twenty children, all nearly overcome with excitement, spilling across the quiet street under the trees and shouting their heads off.

‘I want to be Kunta Kinte,’ one said.

‘No, I want to be,’ another said. And my sister said she would be Kunta Kinte’s wife. Shibli was a brother who was to be killed. He liked to be killed in games, so long as he could stand up straight away and go to be killed all over again.

‘So I’m walking down the riverbank with my wife,’ Kunta Kinte said, balancing along the gutter. ‘Oh, wife, wife, I love you so much.’

‘Oh, husband,’ Sunchita said. A fight was breaking out between the slave-traders and the Africans. ‘Stop it, stop it, you’ve got to watch me. Look, watch me, I’m walking with my husband Kunta Kinte.’

Shibli got up from being killed. ‘Who’s the chief slave-owner? I want to be the chief slave-owner.’

‘You can’t be,’ a boy called Assad shouted. ‘You don’t know how to kill anyone. I want to be the chief slave-owner. I want to come and put Kunta Kinte in chains and steal him to America.’

‘You don’t know how to kill anyone either,’ Sunchita said to Assad. He was a boy we only sometimes saw. We had not called at his house, three houses away; he had heard the noise and the shouts of ‘Roots’ and had come out of his own accord. ‘You can’t be the chief slave-owner.’

‘I know how people are killed,’ Assad said. ‘It’s not fair.’

I was clamouring like all the others to be allowed to be the chief slave-owner, the Englishman. That was the thing I wanted to be. And then a miracle happened. Kunta Kinte intervened and said, with calm authority, ‘Saadi should be the slave-owner. After all, he’s the palest among us. He can be the white man.’ And that was that, and I was the slave-owner, because, after all, Kunta Kinte was the hero of the game and what he said went.

Assad rushed at me with both fists flying. I hated to fight – when I fought with my sisters, it was always in play. I had never done anything worse to anyone than throw an orange directly at Sunchita’s head. I dodged behind my big sister Sushmita, who had no such reluctance. She pushed him, hard, and he fell over in the dust, wailing.

‘I don’t want to play this game,’ Assad howled. But he did not run away. The game was too good for that. In ten minutes’ time, he was lining up gleefully with all the other slaves behind Kunta Kinte and his wife, while I growled, ‘This is my slave ship, and you are all under my power for ever and ever.’ One of my two assistant slave-keeping Englishmen had got the plum role of the man with the whip – a torn-off vine – and he now dramatically brought it down on the backs of the ten slaves, hunched and moaning. Two small girls of the neighbourhood, the daughters of Mr Khandekar-nana’s niece, were happily screaming for help. They were tied with washing line to the roadside trees. Over the road, a houseboy was watching with fascination, perhaps wanting to abandon his duties and come over to join in. It was the best game we ever played, and we played it every Sunday afternoon for many weeks.

2.

Whenever a chick emerged from Pultoo-uncle’s chicken house, my sisters, Shibli and I would rush to see it. We would have warning. A mother hen would sit on her eggs inside the chicken house, blowing her feathers out into a big angry ball and clucking. And then one morning there would be some small puffs of yellowish feathers with the big feet of a toy, and eyes with a strange, tired, aged look. My sisters made small girlish piping noises to echo the little squeaks; Shibli would always pick one up, sometimes making the mother hen rush at him with her neck outstretched. The hens were so sharp and businesslike, getting on with their occupations, but their chicks were fluffy and yellow and not like animals at all, but like things run by inner machinery. I did not torment them, but liked to watch them, dipping their heads into the waterbowl left for them by Atish the gardener, running back to their mothers, making their small cries for attention. I could sit on my haunches, watching them, for hours.

Once, I was alone in the garden watching some day-old chicks in this way, quite silently. The others were inside – Sushmita was reading, Shibli was making a nuisance of himself in the kitchen, and Sunchita had been sent to bed in disgrace. I had seen chicks hatch from their eggs; the struggle inside the shell was hateful to me – I always feared that the effort would be too much for them. And when they emerged, they were so wet and slimy, so ugly, I could not help imagining how frightening they would be, with their sudden sharp gestures, if they were the same size as me.

But within hours they were small and round and fluffed quite yellow, and seemed nearly at home in the world. They stretched their plump little wings, like stubby fingers, and, not able to fly, fell from the chicken house on to the lawn under the jackfruit tree. Their movements were undecided and sudden, and you could not know what would cause them to take fright, or when they would move confidently.

‘They’re born standing,’ Atish the gardener said. He had laid down his tools and was now standing behind me. I think he liked watching the newly hatched chicks as much as I did. ‘Not like human beings. Human beings can’t feed themselves, they can’t walk, not for years. A chicken makes his own way out of the shell, punches his way out, and then he cleans himself off, and he stands on his two feet and off he goes like you or me. First thing he does is to find something to eat, and it’s the same food he’ll eat all his life.’

This was true. I watched the chicks pecking at the seeds on the ground. It was exactly what the fully grown chickens ate. From the house came the sound of music: Dahlia-aunty was having a music lesson, with tabla and harmonium, and her lovely singing voice filled the garden.