Scenes from Early Life

‘Can I have a chick of my own?’ I asked Atish.

‘It’s not for me to say,’ Atish said.

But he reached into the pocket of his grimy shirt and took out a chapatti. It might have been there for him to eat later, or it might have been in his shirt for some time. He tore off a corner and gave it to me. ‘If you get a chick to come to you,’ he said, ‘it will be your friend.’

I took it, and held it out on the palm of my hand. I had the attention of the chicks. I lowered my hand almost to the ground. After a moment, a chick detached itself from the others, and came up, quite boldly, investigating. He pecked swiftly at the corner of the chapatti in the palm of my hand. He was not committing himself, staying in a place he could run from if I turned out to be an enemy, tempting him into a trap. I wondered at the cunning of a creature so small and so young in days. But then, as I did not move, but just let him go on pecking at the corner of Atish’s chapatti, he made some kind of decision, and hopped up on to the palm of my hand, where he could get at the bread more comfortably. He was darker than the other chicks, almost brown in hue, with two parallel black squiggles along his back, running along where his wings were.

‘You see?’ Atish said. ‘That one likes you. He’ll always remember you, now.’

‘How can he remember?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ Atish said. He threw his shawl over his shoulder, picked up his fork again. ‘But he always will. Sometimes when they come up to you, they think that you’re their mother, and then they never change their mind.’

The idea that my chick thought I was his mother was so funny that I trembled with laughter. The chick jumped off my hand, but did not run away; he went on pecking nonchalantly around my hand as if the movement of my laughter had been an inexplicable quake. And in a moment he returned to me, and hopped back on my palm.

When I went back into the house, I told everyone that I had a chicken all of my own and had decided to call him Piklu. My sisters, Mary-aunty and Bubbly-aunty, who had come from Srimongol to visit, all came out to see my chicken. ‘Don’t go too close,’ Mary-aunty warned. ‘You’ll upset the mother and she might even eat her own chicks.’ But I knew that would not happen, unless my sisters and aunts came running across and crowded them. I approached the mass of new chicks pecking at the ground before the chicken house, walking softly, and what happened did not surprise me at all. The chick with the two black squiggles down its back, the one a little darker than the others, detached itself quite easily from its brothers and sisters and came to say hello to me. I squatted down, and held out my hand, and the chick hopped happily on to my palm.

‘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 there were some families in the neighbourhood who walked out alone, with their heads held high; we did not know them, and we did not lend our servants to them; we did not greet them, and my grandfather said their names were unfamiliar to him. There were a number of families like this. If the children of such a family walked out with their ayah, they would walk in a regimented way, in their best clothes, looking neither to left nor to right. That expression, with a head held high, not scanning the horizon but directed forward, like a horse with blinkers, was characteristic of all of them. When the gate of their house was opened, and a car drove out, with some older members of the family in it, you saw it then, that upright, distant, ignoring expression. They would not catch the eyes of anyone in the street. You could recognize these families. They dressed beautifully, dustlessly, in conventional and traditional ways. My aunts mostly put their clothes together from this and that; Mary-aunty thought nothing of borrowing her brother Pultoo-uncle’s stained painting jacket to wear on top, if she was cold.

‘Why can’t you dress like Nadira?’ Nani would say to her daughters, if they seemed to be going too far – if, say, she recognized an old pinstriped jacket of Nana’s on Era’s back on a cold January morning.

‘Like Nadira?’ Era would say, astonished.

Unlike Nadira, whose passion for clothes and makeup was legendary, they all shuffled about in old pairs of chappals, or slippers trodden down at the heel. It was accepted that they did. But Nani would not ask why her daughters could not dress like those neighbours of theirs. Those other families were immaculate in appearance, and they dressed as if they were living in the year 1850. They were the only ones in the neighbourhood where the women wore veils before their faces, where the men wore a covering on their heads. That was why I had not recognized the boy Assad for the type that he was.

These families mixed with each other, but not with us. To see the men with their friends was always unexpected; then they were at ease, greeting, laughing, chatting quite easily, their wives and sisters to one side. For those moments, despite their immaculate clothes, they resembled our own families, but of course they were not like them at all. And then they would say goodbye, and without warning, the men would resume that remote gaze of theirs. They would not acknowledge their nearest neighbours, and their nearest neighbours would ignore them, too. It was as if there were two cities laid on top of one another, each quite invisible to the other, each engaging only with its own sort.

A child knew what these people had done. They had taken money from the Pakistanis; they had betrayed their own kind; they had worked on behalf of the foreigners. They had taken the wrong side in the war, and that would never be forgotten. They had fled, often, to Pakistan, and had returned with the amnesty, buying a big house in Dhanmondi with the money they had made out of threatening Hindus and denouncing intellectuals. That was what we all believed of them. ‘If everyone had their just deserts,’ my aunts would say, ‘such a person would not be living opposite your grandfather. They would be in jail.’ And yet explaining to Assad that he must leave us and must play with his own kind was beyond me. He came from a family we could not mix with, and I did not like him. But I could not banish him on my own.

5.

During the week we lived at home and I went to school. We had no car and no television, and there were only the six of us: my mother, my father, my two sisters, my brother and myself. It was quiet in our house, and my mother’s attention was all on my father’s needs. My brother Zahid was to become an engineer, and his serious spirit filled the house in the evenings. I was to become a lawyer, like my father and grandfather, but although my head was bent over my books, I was only pretending to get on with my work. At school, my teachers were always shouting at me and throwing pieces of chalk at my head when they saw that I was daydreaming. My sister Sunchita was eleven months older than I, and was in the same class. She was always being held up as an example to me, with her eagerness to read, her love of studying; in the bosoms of my teachers, the memory of my serious, intelligent, practical brother Zahid was just as warm, although he was ten years older than I was. My teachers could show me that I was not as good a student as Sunchita, who basked in the praise, and they were certain that I would not grow up to match Zahid. I knuckled down – and pretended to concentrate on the picture book of geography. The boy I sat at a desk with tugged our shared copy back into his half, and I kicked him.

At school and at home, pretending to work, I was thinking only of one thing. I was thinking of my chicken, Piklu. Piklu had a carefree life compared to mine. He woke up and made a brave little leap from the brink of Choto-mama’s chicken coop into the garden. There would be fresh seeds to peck at, fresh worms to eat. He would puff out his little feathers, and go to explore the new morning. And that was all he had to do all day long. I worried that he would miss me. He would look about to see if I was there, but there would be only Atish, to whom one chicken was much the same as another.

My weeks were filled with worry on Piklu’s behalf. While I was not there, he might eat a poisonous berry by mistake, not knowing the difference. Or a cat might get into the garden and kill him. This had happened once before, and the neighbour whose cat it was had merely apologized and told my grandfather that these things would happen. The cat must have returned to its owner with a prowling, sated gait, blood around its mouth and its whiskers adorned with fluffy yellow feathers. They must have known what it had done, but they had not cared. I could not endure that such a thing might happen to Piklu.

There were other dangers that might fall on him while I was not there. But the first among these was that Piklu might forget me between Sunday night, when we left, and Friday, when we returned to my grandfather’s house.

It is astonishing how fast a chicken grows. From one week to another, an almost globular chick turns into a grey bony thing, with a great beak and awkward corners, and then, no more than a week or two later, into something that resembles a chicken, its feathers puffing out. Piklu had changed every time we arrived at my grandfather’s house, and I hardly recognized him. But he recognized me. When I came towards the chicken coop, Piklu separated himself from the rest of the flock and came to greet me. I recognized him from the two irregular lines down his back, and I bent down to give him some crumbs I had kept for him. He was my chicken and I was his boy. The bond between us made Shibli jealous, but it amused almost everyone else: I had said I wanted a chicken of my own, and I had bound a chicken to me by willpower.

The best Roots game remained the one of capture and imprisonment. That was because of what came at the end of it: the game of auctioning off the captured slaves. There was a dramatic poignancy to that, which Shibli, who played the auctioneer, never failed to exploit. First the Africans played house, quietly at home in Africa before the slave-drivers came. Then I arrived with my henchmen, cracking whips and making the Africans scream and run. Once you had touched an African on both shoulders simultaneously, they came on to your side and chased the remaining Africans until they were all transformed. Then Shibli played the auctioneer, and sold the slaves.

‘What am I bid for this fine slave?’ he called, as I growled and pranced. Half of the Africans had to take the role of the bidders at the auction, or it would not have worked out. ‘Am I bid one thousand dollars? Two thousand? Three?’ Or sometimes he would vary it by suggesting that nobody would bid more than one cent for this miserable slave, and give them away for nothing. Nobody knew what Shibli would do; the auction part of the game filled us with a terrible, inexpressible excitement. It was what we looked forward to most.

The game started almost immediately after lunch for most of us, and continued all afternoon. It began as soon as enough people were there to join in. Assad came later. His family were religious – his mother, big sisters and aunts covered their faces with a veil, and his father, uncles and brothers, like Assad, wore a cap, a tupi, on their heads. When the call to prayer was heard, five times a day, none of my family took the slightest notice, and most of my grandfather’s neighbours were the same. But you could see the family of Assad hurrying home, and we knew that they all prayed constantly. For this reason Assad was never there at the start of the game. He appeared at five o’clock, between prayers; sometimes he would say that he had given his father the slip, that he had gone to the mosque but had left him behind. He seemed to have no sense of decorum; he did not know that it should have been embarrassing and shameful to him to admit to having parents at all.

Everyone in the game had seen my chicken Piklu. He was famous in the neighbourhood. Everyone – friends of my aunts, visiting cousins from the village, the children of the Roots game and their families – had come to see Piklu. The way he separated himself from the flock and came to greet me, but only me, was celebrated in Dhanmondi. ‘Have you seen Saadi’s chicken?’ people would be saying, or so I imagined, all over Dhanmondi. ‘You should visit. It is worth the visit.’

If the subject came up while Assad was there, he would squat on his haunches against a wall and say nothing; he would smile in a secretive, silly way, and wait for the conversation to turn to something else. He had nothing to say about my chicken. Because, of course, he could not come to see it; I was forbidden to ask him to my grandfather’s garden, and I was not sure I was really allowed to include him in the game. His uncle and father had taken money from the Pakistanis, and had told them where they could find intellectuals – musicians, poets, scholars, professors, schoolteachers – to kill. Everyone knew that, and knew that they would never be prosecuted for it. So Assad, in his tupi, with his fact-hiding, knowing smile, would never be allowed to come into my grandfather’s garden to see Piklu.

6.

It was easy to escape from my grandfather’s house, and when Mary-aunty had put us to bed in the afternoon, I let her walk away, then started to plot my manoeuvres. The most exciting was to get out of the bedroom, cross the landing into my grandfather’s room and go out on to his balcony. There might be drying pickles out there, or just my grandfather’s chair. He did not rest in his room in the afternoon, but said he would work in his library, often going to sleep there in his armchair. Only once did I come into his room to find him, his legs stretched out, on the balcony. ‘Churchill!’ he said. But normally it was possible to leave the aunt’s room, go into my grandfather’s room and through on to his balcony without discovery.

I noticed, from the balcony, that the front gate had been left open when the car had been brought in. A thought came to me. In a moment I had gripped the branch of the tamarind tree, and in another I had shinned down it. The house and the garden were absolutely quiet. I sauntered out of the front gate gleefully.

A small figure in the street, a hundred or two hundred yards away, was disturbing the peace of the afternoon. A ball of red dust with arms and legs emerging, like a fight in a comic, stopped under a tree. The dust subsided, and it turned out to be Assad in white shirt and tupi, kicking up the dirt, his arms windmilling with aimless fury. I went towards him.

‘I was supposed to go to the mosque,’ he said. ‘But I ran away and hid, and they went without me.’

‘I was put to bed,’ I explained. ‘But I got out.’

‘Where’s everybody?’ he said, sinking down and jogging up and down on his haunches. ‘I thought everybody would be here.’

I shrugged. I thought it was possible that the others had seen Assad on his own, and decided not to come out. You could not play the Roots game of slave and slave-owner with only two: what role would I play, and what role would be Assad’s? Other people in the game might have thought this, and remained inside their houses. My aunt had told me I was allowed to see Assad if there were plenty of other people around, but I knew she would not like it if he became a friend of mine.

Other families must have said the same thing. I was always susceptible to pathos when I was a child. When Mary-aunty’s cat gave birth to kittens, one of the kittens fell from the balcony in the night and was found dead in the morning. My sisters and I were inconsolable; we gave it a funeral and a little gravestone, and decorated the mound of the grave with flower petals. There was something noble to me about the state of being moved, and we tried to encourage Mary-aunty’s cat to stand with us as we wept over the unnamed kitten; she would not, however. So, when I saw Assad in the street, kicking at the dust and trying to see if he could rotate his arms in opposite directions, I thought of everyone who had seen him alone and decided not to come out. It was a terrible but a sad business, being the son of an informer.

‘Have you seen my chicken Piklu?’ I said.

Assad brightened. ‘No,’ he said. I knew he had not.