Scenes From Early Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 troubling to close the gates behind us. For once, we did not mooch or loiter until we came across some children we knew. We banged on doors like drunkards, demanding that our playfellows came 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