Scenes from Early Life. Philip Hensher

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ