Scenes from Early Life. Philip Hensher

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 had laid down his tools and was now standing behind me. I think he liked watching the newly hatched chicks as much as I did. ‘Not like human beings. Human beings can’t feed themselves, they can’t walk, not for years. A chicken makes his own way out of the shell, punches his way out, and then he cleans himself off, and he stands on his two feet and off he goes like you or me. First thing he does is to find something to eat, and it’s the same food he’ll eat all his life.’

      This was true. I watched the chicks pecking at the seeds on the ground. It was exactly what the fully grown chickens ate. From the house came the sound of music: Dahlia-aunty was having a music lesson, with tabla and harmonium, and her lovely singing voice filled the garden.

      ‘Can I have a chick of my own?’ I asked Atish.

      ‘It’s not for me to say,’ Atish said.

      But he reached into the pocket of his grimy shirt and took out a chapatti. It might have been there for him to eat later, or it might have been in his shirt for some time. He tore off a corner and gave it to me. ‘If you get a chick to come to you,’ he said, ‘it will be your friend.’

      I took it, and held it out on the palm of my hand. I had the attention of the chicks. I lowered my hand almost to the ground. After a moment, a chick detached itself from the others, and came up, quite boldly, investigating. He pecked swiftly at the corner of the chapatti in the palm of my hand. He was not committing himself, staying in a place he could run from if I turned out to be an enemy, tempting him into a trap. I wondered at the cunning of a creature so small and so young in days. But then, as I did not move, but just let him go on pecking at the corner of Atish’s chapatti, he made some kind of decision, and hopped up on to the palm of my hand, where he could get at the bread more comfortably. He was darker than the other chicks, almost brown in hue, with two parallel black squiggles along his back, running along where his wings were.

      ‘You see?’ Atish said. ‘That one likes you. He’ll always remember you, now.’

      ‘How can he remember?’ I said.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Atish said. He threw his shawl over his shoulder, picked up his fork again. ‘But he always will. Sometimes when they come up to you, they think that you’re their mother, and then they never change their mind.’

      The idea that my chick thought I was his mother was so funny that I trembled with laughter. The chick jumped off my hand, but did not run away; he went on pecking nonchalantly around my hand as if the movement of my laughter had been an inexplicable quake. And in a moment he returned to me, and hopped back on my palm.

      When I went back into the house, I told everyone that I had a chicken all of my own and had decided to call him Piklu. My sisters, Mary-aunty and Bubbly-aunty, who had come from Srimongol to visit, all came out to see my chicken. ‘Don’t go too close,’ Mary-aunty warned. ‘You’ll upset the mother and she might even eat her own chicks.’ But I knew that would not happen, unless my sisters and aunts came running across and crowded them. I approached the mass of new chicks pecking at the ground before the chicken house, walking softly, and what happened did not surprise me at all. The chick with the