Scenes From Early Life (4 page)

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.