I said.
Assad brightened. ‘No,’ he said. I knew he had not.
‘Do you want to see him now?’ I said. Naughtiness came over me. But I felt it was in an admirable cause. I was following a higher duty than family commandments. I went behind my aunts’ backs and offered friendship to Assad because he was separated from his family, and still nobody would greet him. In that moment, I assigned fine feelings to him, and a future in which we sloped off school and went fishing together.
‘You’re not allowed to invite me,’ he said, his face falling.
‘There’s no one about,’ I said. ‘I don’t care whether you come into the garden or not.’
‘My father says I’m not supposed to play with you,’ he said.
‘Where’s your father now?’ I said, shocked; I had not thought that the prohibition went in both directions.
‘I don’t want to see your chicken, anyway,’ Assad said.
‘Yes, you do,’ I said. ‘I know you do.’ I turned back to my grandfather’s house, and Assad trotted beside me. ‘He knows who I am,’ I said. ‘He comes to me whenever I go into the garden and I call his name. He’ll take food from my palm. He’s getting big now – he’s almost a full-grown chicken.’
‘Does he think you’re his mother?’ Assad said.
‘No, he knows who I am,’ I said.
‘How big is he?’ Assad said, as we went through the front gate of the house. ‘Is he big enough to cook and eat yet?’
‘No one’s going to cook and eat him,’ I said. ‘He’s not that sort of chicken. He’s my chicken, my special chicken.’
‘Just because he’s got a name doesn’t mean they won’t come and get him for the pot,’ Assad said. ‘If they know his name and they recognize him, they might come and get him first.’
We came round the house into the garden. There was nobody there, not even Atish the gardener.
‘No one would do that,’ I said. Assad had let me down with his scepticism, and I was full of scorn for him now. He understood nothing; he did not understand Piklu’s place in our household. He did not deserve to be introduced to Piklu. The chickens were scattered about, feeding from the ground, like walking clouds against a dark sky. They raised their heads and, just as I had promised, Piklu with the two scribbled brown lines down his back came straight to me with joy in his strut.
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
