Scenes From Early Life

by Philip Hensher

  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.

  At Nana’s house, everything was in a state of confusion. The gardener’s boy was cleaning the car with a bucket of water; Atish was weeding the flowerbed. In the upper windows, great white birds appeared to be plunging in the half-light; beds were being changed and aired. My great-grandmother had arrived, and had found fault. The servants, who were used to their own ways, did not look forward to her visits any more than I did. Attention fell on her in unwelcome ways; attention was simultaneously taken from me, and neither of us enjoyed it.

  We were led upstairs in our best clothes, and there in her room was my great-grandmother. The maid who always served her was already hard at work, brushing her hair; it was absolutely white – ‘As white as snow,’ I dreamily said to myself, a comparison from English books and not from experience. She could keep her maid hard at it all day long, going from one intimate task to another. While her hair was being brushed, she was at work preparing paan. She had her own pestle and mortar for this, and would prepare paan to chew; sometimes Nani took some, out of politeness, to give her mother-in-law some company. She pounded away at the tiny red rubble in her wooden bowl, the wooden pestle long since stained as if with blood. Her task was like that of the woman stone
-breaker outside her house, but fragrant, elegant, clean and beautiful. She did not trust or like preparations of paan that had been made by anyone else. She carried the ingredients round in small pouches, making it out of dried leaves, pebble-like substances, samples of mysterious red matter, all just as she liked it. Her pestle and mortar, as well as the wooden clogs she always wore that gave you warning of her approach, were somehow carried over from the senior wife. She seemed to be carrying out a dead woman’s wishes, and she scared the life out of me.

  We submitted to being kissed by a paan-smelling old mouth, and my mother reminded her who we were, and how old we were now. She seemed to take it all in, nodding over her stained moustaches. But then she immediately started explaining who had done what to whom in the village. She lived in a large property, given to both women by my grandfather, and she was the centre of village complaint and litigation. Everyone had always come to the pair of them with disputes, and nowadays she passed down the law without hesitation.

  (Nana had a story about his mothers’ intrusions. He told it endlessly. It seemed that a village couple had decided to give their new baby daughter a Western name, and had somehow heard of ‘Irene’. Unexpectedly, the mother gave birth not to one daughter, but to a pair of twins, and the couple could not think of a suitable second name for some time. Then they were struck by inspiration, and decided to call the second daughter ‘Urine’. This was one of the many occasions on which my great-grandmothers descended into the private lives of the villagers, and told them what they could not do, brooking no contradiction. Nana could never remember what the daughters were called in the end, with the agreement of his father’s two wives.)

  The stories of litigation and irritation reached their first pause, and the enquiries had run their course into how Zahid was growing up into a fine young man, and I would be a lawyer like my father and grandfather. My mother had gently reminded her that Sushmita and Sunchita would have their own professions, too. We were permitted to go downstairs, but only to sit quietly and to read a book, not to turn on the television, not to trouble the servants, and certainly not to go out and run in the garden, just underneath the window of Great-grandmother’s room.

  I wanted to see Piklu, my chicken, but I knew better than to disobey my mother when the witch was there. We filed downstairs and took up our books in the salon, sitting on two cream-and-brown sofas at right angles to each other, Sunchita reading a long sentimental novel, Sushmita a Feluda detective story, and my brother Zahid a physics textbook, which seemed to give him as much pleasure as anything. From time to time, Sunchita would sigh affectedly at some occurrence in her book, and even remark on an event that had moved her. I had my book, too, but I could not stay still. I thought of Piklu, out there; I did not know if he would come to greet me, or whether I would remain unforgiven for what Assad had done to him the previous weekend. Piklu changed from week to week, although now he was a proper, grown-up chicken, as big as his mother, and I did not want to be separated from him. From time to time I leapt up from the scratchy wool sofa, going to the window to see if I could see Piklu. But I could not. The other chickens were pottering about, pecking at the dirt as usual, but Piklu must have been inside the chicken coop, waiting for me to come.

  8.

  ‘Ah, children,’ Mary-aunty said, coming into the salon. She, too, was wearing her best clothes, with a gold band down the edge of her sari. ‘I hope you’re all being good. Oh dear.’ She fluttered, and left. In a moment Dahlia came in. She came straight to me, picked up the book I was reading from my lap and looked at the title. Ignoring the others, she gave me a kiss on my nose; she shook her head, and hurried out again.

  The aunts came in, singly and in pairs, and found some reason to address me before leaving in an absent way. I could not account for it. My aunts had different favourites, and sometimes our own gestures of fondness were not returned; Sushmita had thought Nadira, with her dramatic entrances and her immaculate appearance, was marvellous, but Nadira, before she got married and went to Sheffield, was at best indifferent to the small, impressed offerings of gaze and giggle that Sushmita laid at her feet. Today every aunt came in and, one after another, stroked my head or called me a little sweetie. It was as if they wanted something from me. It was unusual in any circumstance: when Great-grandmother was there, making demands and criticizing the household, calling for people to brush her hair and listen to her stories, we children were used to being ushered into a quiet corner and expected to remain silent. The attention I was getting was pleasing, but unnerving. I wondered whether I was about to get a present.

  ‘And he is studying at college now,’ Great-grandmother said at table. She was talking about the son of a neighbour of theirs, a neighbour in the country. ‘Studying to be an engineer. He has made a good success of his life. When you consider who his father is. There was constant trouble with his father. Running wild. And now he is going to Libya,’ she finished, hunching over her plate.

  ‘Fateh is going to Libya?’ Nana said, puzzled. He remembered the farmer, his youth, running wild.

  ‘Libya?’ Era said.

  ‘Not Fateh,’ Great-grandmother said, her brilliant white hair combed back now. ‘Fateh could never go to Libya. Fateh stays where he was born. His son, he is going to Libya. He is studying at college. Studying to be an engineer. And afterwards, he is going to Libya.’

  There was a satisfied pause. The dining-room door swung open, and in came a succession of dishes, steaming hot. All at once, the table broke into conversation.

  ‘Were you at your college today?’ Dahlia called across to Pultoo-uncle.

  ‘No, because—’

  ‘And Mahmood had a great success today,’ my mother called across to Nani, gesturing at my father who, in honour of a great-grandparent, had come, for once, to dinner on Friday.

  ‘I’m so pleased for him,’ Nani said. ‘Era, did you hear what your sister was saying?’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ Era said. ‘A success, today . . . I was just about to say . . .’

  It was mystifying. The lids of the dishes were taken off, in a shining line down the long table; the richest of the dishes before Nana. ‘Good, good,’ he said, poking in it with the serving spoon in his usual way; it was as if he suspected the most delicious parts to be always hidden deep in the dish. ‘Good. Chicken.’

  Around the table, there was a nervous little spasm of conversation, and I had the sense of aunt turning to aunt, and smiling shamefully at me. ‘Do have some, Saadi,’ Mary-aunty said. ‘It’s especially for your great-grandmother, since she has come all this way to see us.’

  A horrible thought came to me. ‘Where did the chicken come from?’ I said to Nana. ‘Nana, what is this chicken?’

  But I had been shunted down a place by the arrival of my Great-grandmother, and he affected not to hear my shrill demand. ‘Nana,’ I said. ‘Nana.’

  ‘Quiet, Saadi,’ Bubbly-aunty said, next to me. ‘Don’t scream in people’s ears. It’s a chicken from the garden, as usual.’

  ‘Which one?’ I said. ‘Which chicken are we eating?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Bubbly said. ‘I really don’t know the difference between one chicken and another. They’d be very happy, I’m sure, if they knew they were going to make such a lovely dinner for all of us. Now, I’m sure you’re not going to be a bad little boy. I’m sure you’re going to be a good little boy, and eat your dinner, aren’t you?’

  In my family, we did not leap up and push our chairs over; we did not scream and denounce our relations; we did not punch and pummel the servants, even the ones who had seized our pet chickens and put them in the pot without a second thought. We did not run howling out into the garden in search of our lost chickens. What we did was push the dish away when it came to us, and say, with murder in our voices, ‘No, thank you. I don’t care to eat a friend of mine.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Great-grandmother said.

  ‘I didn’t hear,’ Nana said. ‘Pay no attention, and everything will be qu
ite all right.’

  9.

  I sat in mutinous silence all through dinner. I would not look at or answer my great-grandmother, for whose sake Piklu had been killed and eaten. I promised myself I would never speak to her again, not until she died like the other one, which would be soon. And when dinner was over, I gabbled out the formula asking for permission to get down from the table, and went swiftly out of the front door into the street. It was still light, and my shadow went before me as I walked, shivering and dancing like a puppet, making its own dance, as I tried to walk like a big man down the Dhanmondi street, trying my best to walk like a slave-owner, to walk as a talking car would walk, to walk down my grandfather’s street like Hungry Bear.

  Chapter 3

  Altaf and Amit

  1.

  The best place to watch what was happening in the street was from my grandfather’s first-floor balcony. The houses in the street were fronted by high walls, dusted with green lichen, for security. But the balcony on the first floor was high enough to see over. From there, you could see visitors approaching. It might be a family member returning: Nana in his red Vauxhall, driven by Rustum, or my father in a cycle-rickshaw, laden with papers, or some aunts returning from a visit in the neighbourhood. As you negotiated your way between heavy jars of pickles, or slices of mango laid out on kula to dry, you could see if there was a war going on in the street between children of the neighbourhood. Sometimes, when I was very young I would see Sheikh Mujib sweep by in his big official car, with a policeman on a motorbike driving just before. And you knew that he was the prime minister of the country. I never forgot that sight.