Scenes From Early Life (5 page)

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.

‘Do you want to see him now?’ I said. Naughtiness came over me. But I felt it was in an admirable cause. I was following a higher duty than family commandments. I went behind my aunts’ backs and offered friendship to Assad because he was separated from his family, and still nobody would greet him. In that moment, I assigned fine feelings to him, and a future in which we sloped off school and went fishing together.

‘You’re not allowed to invite me,’ he said, his face falling.

‘There’s no one about,’ I said. ‘I don’t care whether you come into the garden or not.’

‘My father says I’m not supposed to play with you,’ he said.

‘Where’s your father now?’ I said, shocked; I had not thought that the prohibition went in both directions.

‘I don’t want to see your chicken, anyway,’ Assad said.

‘Yes, you do,’ I said. ‘I know you do.’ I turned back to my grandfather’s house, and Assad trotted beside me. ‘He knows who I am,’ I said. ‘He comes to me whenever I go into the garden and I call his name. He’ll take food from my palm. He’s getting big now – he’s almost a full-grown chicken.’

‘Does he think you’re his mother?’ Assad said.

‘No, he knows who I am,’ I said.

‘How big is he?’ Assad said, as we went through the front gate of the house. ‘Is he big enough to cook and eat yet?’

‘No one’s going to cook and eat him,’ I said. ‘He’s not that sort of chicken. He’s my chicken, my special chicken.’

‘Just because he’s got a name doesn’t mean they won’t come and get him for the pot,’ Assad said. ‘If they know his name and they recognize him, they might come and get him first.’

We came round the house into the garden. There was nobody there, not even Atish the gardener.

‘No one would do that,’ I said. Assad had let me down with his scepticism, and I was full of scorn for him now. He understood nothing; he did not understand Piklu’s place in our household. He did not deserve to be introduced to Piklu. The chickens were scattered about, feeding from the ground, like walking clouds against a dark sky. They raised their heads and, just as I had promised, Piklu with the two scribbled brown lines down his back came straight to me with joy in his strut.

I had nothing to give Piklu. I felt in my pockets, but there was nothing there. He pecked enquiringly around me, walking backwards and forwards like a sentry before me. ‘This is Piklu,’ I said. ‘Did you see how he came straight to me? That’s because he recognizes me. He knows he’s my chicken.’

‘How do I know that’s the chicken you said is yours?’ Assad said. ‘All I saw is a chicken that came over looking for food. It could be any chicken.’

Assad was horrible, I saw that now. But I knew that we were not horrible to horrible people. That was not the way we were. We understood that it was our responsibility to behave in civilized ways, even when we were confronted with uncivilized people. So I said, quite mildly, ‘You can tell it’s Piklu because he has those two lines down his back. He had those when he was a chick, straight from the egg.’

‘You could just have said that,’ Assad said. ‘What else does your chicken do? It doesn’t do anything interesting.’

‘He doesn’t have to do interesting things,’ I said. ‘He’s not in a circus. He’s my chicken. Anyway, you don’t do interesting things. I’ve never seen you do anything interesting. Piklu’s much nicer and more interesting than you are.’

‘I can do lots of interesting things. I know how to do all sorts of things you don’t,’ Assad said. His voice had coarsened and deepened. ‘I know how . . .’ He lowered himself by stages, gently, gently, towards the ground, and then, quite suddenly, his hand shot out and caught Piklu round the neck. ‘I know how to kill a chicken.’

Piklu was trapped by the neck under Assad’s hand; his feet were running frantically in the dust.

‘The principle is the same,’ Assad said. ‘It’s the same for anything that you want to kill. You slice through the neck –’ for one moment I thought he had a knife in his pocket, that he was going to kill Piklu in front of me, but he was just slicing against Piklu’s white throat with the edge of his hand ‘– and then it bleeds to death, quite quickly. It makes a terrible mess, my father said. Not with a small animal like a chicken. But with bigger animals, it makes a big mess.’

I knew this was true. I had seen the slaughter of a cow in the street at the festival of Eid, and walked afterwards through the slip of blood on stone, the gallons of blood churning the streets into mud, the stench filling the street, like the crowd, pressing up against you. And afterwards, the stink that came from the tanneries, down by the river. It was unavoidable if you had to take a boat from Sadarghat, and the smell of the black water was the smell of large animals being slaughtered. If you lived in Dacca, you knew the big mess that a bigger animal made when it was killed.

All at once I could move. I rushed at Assad, screaming, my fists held high, and he let Piklu go. My chicken jumped to its feet, shuffling its feathers, and ran away to the far corner of the garden. I hit Assad with both my fists in the certainty that Piklu would now never again come to me of his free will: he would remember the day that I had asked him to come to me and I had delivered him to Assad. He would remember being held down by his throat against the dirt, and the thought that he was about to die, and he would run from me. I pummelled Assad, and he hit me back, his tupi flying from his head.

Then Nani, my grandmother, was in the garden. ‘Stop that at once,’ she said. ‘Brawling like street-urchins. Stop it. I’m ashamed of you, Saadi. What would Nana have to say? Do you think he would call you Churchill now?’

We stopped, our faces lowered towards the mud our fight had made. Grown-ups, when they interrupted our fights, had a way of insisting that we shook hands, apologized and made up with each other. It was their way. But Nani inspected Assad, his dirty shirt, his muddy hair, and the tupi lying on the leaves of a shrub, like washing laid out to dry, and made no such demand. ‘I know who you are,’ she said to Assad, taking his dirty head in her hands, turning it this way and that, like a shopkeeper with a fine vase. ‘I want you to leave my garden now, and never come back. You should never have come into my garden. Go away.’

Assad went. Nani watched him go every step of the way; she followed him to the gate, and shut it behind him with her own hands. ‘I don’t know how that was left open,’ she said. ‘Saadi, go and have a bath. I’m ashamed of you.’

7.

It was our ayah’s job to go and hail a cycle-rickshaw to take us, each Friday morning, from my parents’ house to my grand-parents’. When she opened the gates, you could see the woman who always squatted there, under the tree, breaking bricks and stones into rubble all day long; her skin was dry and white with the dust, and we were forbidden to speak to her. While our ayah was finding the cycle-rickshaw, my mother lined us up and inspected us. My sisters were wearing their best frocks; I was in my newest and whitest shirt. My brother was coming with us, unusually. He was wearing his best shirt. We knew what this meant, and before we set off, my mother asked us to behave especially well. There were people coming to Nana’s from the village. They were especially looking forward to seeing us, 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.