Scenes from Early Life. Philip Hensher

could stand there all morning, watching Atish work and the chickens eat the grubs he found for them. The only things he said to me were odd horticultural pieces of advice: it was necessary to prune a mango tree in March; the first sprouts from seeds that would turn into sunflowers must be thinned out when they had reached an inch tall; you could not water a bougainvillaea enough. It was as if he thought I was going to become a gardener like him when I grew up. The way he gave horticultural maxims is clear in my head, but not what he said exactly. I may have got them quite wrong. But I stood or squatted there all morning, watching Atish at work, watching the white chickens dart to and fro.

      9.

      My father came before lunch on Saturday. He did not come with a dramatic flourish, like my grandfather; he did not come with excitement, like my mother and my sisters. He came under a pile of papers, tied up with red ribbon, and in a pernickety, unenthusiastic way. Sometimes he was carrying so much that it threatened to overbalance him. It is not easy to travel with a large bundle of papers in the back of a cycle-rickshaw, and he often turned up with his arms in a desperate position, clutching them like a large escaping fish. I liked to watch him arrive. The cycle-rickshaw he always used was glittering silver, polished, with the faces of film stars under a setting sun painted on the back of its canopy; like many of the other rickshaws of Dacca, its canopy was lined with tinsel, like a fur-lined hood. The rickshaw driver, however, was a taciturn, serious man, whom you could not imagine decorating his vehicle in this way, and so was my father, sitting in the square middle of the rickshaw with his papers on his lap, his lawyer’s white bands around his throat.

      Both I and my father were hypocrites – he, because he did not really want to come to my grandfather’s house: he was a government lawyer, my grandfather was a lawyer for the people, so they were always on opposite sides, and my grandfather could never resist needling him about this argument or other that he had undertaken with less success than he had hoped for. He came because he felt he ought to, and because the Bar library in which he did so much of his work closed at weekends.

      I was a hypocrite because, towards the end of Saturday morning, I made a habit of going up to Nana’s balcony to watch out for Father’s arrival. The balcony had by far the best view down the street, and it was where anyone sat to keep an eye out for an eagerly awaited visitor. From there, you could see the curious events of the street: a handcart laden with megaphones, like silver tropical flowers, heading to a rally, or a pitiful hawker, selling a single useless part of a household object, such as the handles of a pressure cooker, laid out on a cloth in the forlorn hope of a purchaser. I went up there, making sure that everyone knew I was going up there, to watch out for Father’s arrival in a cycle-rickshaw. In fact, my father’s arrival was nothing to look forward to. I disliked the way my mother and aunts had less time for me, busy with meeting his needs. He was much more remote than my aunts and my mother, and the idea of creating fun for his children would not have occurred to him. I made a great performance out of my anticipation because I thought that was the right, or the dramatic, thing to do. But in fact I did not much care that I had not seen him since early breakfast on Friday, and would not have minded if I had not seen him until Monday morning. Like many little boys, I wanted to have my mother to myself, with her warm iron-scented flesh, her ripple of silk against my face when she embraced me.

      The one thing that made the weekend visits to Nana endurable for my father was that Nana had an excellent law library of his own. Although the public law library was closed at weekends, my father could, once he had eaten lunch with the aunts, his parents-in-law and the children, retreat to Nana’s library and carry on working in its rusty warm light. Sometimes he would call Sunchita and me in, and set us the task to find a particular book in Nana’s library, or a particular case within a book. I believe he thought he was providing us with some fun, as well as with a little education.

      The library had a double aspect: one barred window looked out to the tamarind tree at the front, the other at the flowerbed to the side. Out of the front window, I could see the watchman leaning on the bonnet of the red Vauxhall. The big front gate of the house was open, and he was talking to someone I could not see. From the side window, there was Atish, attending to the flowerbeds. There was no one to fill his watering-cans for him, and he was trudging backwards and forwards with an uncomplaining uneven gait, like a badly oiled clockwork toy that threatened to start walking in circles. ‘Liberty Cinema versus CIT,’ my father said, in his light-toned voice. ‘Have you found that one for me?’

      Elsewhere in the house the television was on, and Shibli was watching; Mary-aunty’s slapping chappals were coming down the stairs, and she was greeting the cook by asking about her daughter. My grandfather was laughing somewhere. Behind everything, the quiet of the Dhanmondi street, and the peaceful burble of the chickens in the garden.

      Chapter 2

       The Game of Roots

      1.

      The children all around watched American television shows with absorption, and would not be distracted. They watched Knight Rider and Kojak, Dallas and Starsky and Hutch, and other things still less suitable for small children. Afterwards, they rushed out into the street, into each other’s gardens and homes, dizzy and full of games of re-enactment. For weeks after Starsky and Hutch had rescued a girl bound and imprisoned in a church crypt, nurses, ayahs, mothers and aunts kept discovering small girls in their charge tied up with washing line to jackfruit trees. They had been abandoned in the joy of the game and, unable to untie themselves, wailed until someone rescued them.

      ‘Little brutes,’ Dahlia-aunty would say, when Sunchita, Shibli and I roared in after a morning playing some delirious game, wild-haired and dirty. ‘Go and wash yourselves immediately.’

      ‘Immediately,’ Era would add.

      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