The Game - Laurie R. King [63]
“Oah yes. I write my name,” he asserted, but he began to concentrate closely on the trio of coloured balls he was tossing and catching with smooth competence.
“Why are you not in school?”
“I told you, I learn things from you.”
“You should be in school.”
He did not bother to answer. I tried another tack. “How old are you, Bindra?”
“Maybe twenty?” But before I could react, he changed it to “Or eleven? I think more than eight, I can remember eight.”
“Where are you from? Where is your family?”
“I have no family.”
“You’re an orphan?”
“I have an auntie in Calcutta. I was with her, oh, two or three years I think, before she sold me to the horse-dealer.”
“Sold you?”
“Oah yes,” he said nonchalantly. “I was happy to go. His hand was lighter than hers.”
“There’s no slavery in India.”
The brief look he shot me was eloquent. It occurred to me that I’d just given myself away definitively: He’d long overlooked my chronic oddities of speech and habit, but only a foreigner could assert that slavery did not exist in a place where clearly it did. I tried to regain my standing.
“Truly, Bindra, under the white man’s law, slavery is not allowed. Your aunt could not sell you, although she told you she could.”
“Oah, I know that. But I am a child. If I stand up and say, ‘I am not to be sold,’ what then? I am turned out to live on the street and go hungry. I did not mind. And ho! It has meant that I found you and the magician. I eat good food and breathe clean air. And now I am going to ride a train.”
Every boy’s dream, in this country as in others: to run away and join the circus. “Yes, well. We must talk more about a school for you. Because one day you will be a man, and need the skills you can only learn in school. Unless you wish to be a farmer in a village,” I added, knowing his disdain for the man with the hoe.
“I shall be a magician,” he said, adding slyly, “when you have taught me to pick the coin out of the air.”
I laughed and reached out to clap him on the back, and stopped with my hand an inch from his shoulder. To most Hindus, I as a Moslem was horribly unclean, and making contact with them would be deeply offensive, requiring lengthy purification. “What is your caste, Bindra?”
“Oah, I have no caste.”
“No caste? What do you mean, all India has some kind of caste.”
“No. I am a Kee-ristian.” It took a moment for my ears to translate the word from Hindi. The boy was a Christian? Good Lord, I thought; were we dealing with another Kim here, an abandoned European? The boy went on, oblivious. “Some Kee-ristians came into our village when I was quite small—this was before I went to Calcutta to live with my auntie. They wore long dresses, the women always, the men on some days, and one such day they made a great ceremony under the trees and dipped water on our heads and told us that in Jesu there was neither Brahmin nor Kshatriya, no Sudra or foreigner. Some of the village were angry, and in the end they drove those Kee-ristian men away with sticks and paid the priests great sums to return them to their proper place. I had no money to pay the priests, but although I did not ask to have my caste taken from me, truly, I have found that to have no caste is altogether a good thing, for now I can eat what I like, sleep where I please. I will have to pay a priest to restore me when I wish to marry, of course—who but the lowest Sudra would take a casteless man into his house? But that is a long time away.”
I could only gaze at him, open-mouthed, and follow him into the little carriage when the train pulled in a few minutes later.
Holmes had told me that the narrow-gauge train would climb six thousand feet, in sixty miles, taking six hours or more to do so. We should need our heavy coats at the end of it. The sites of my chilblains tingled in anticipation, as I found