Scenes from Early Life. Philip Hensher

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ