Animal's People Read Online Free Page A

Animal.
    Another time, I’d have been about eight or nine, we’d gone to swim. Just now I mentioned lakes, really they’re clay pits behind the Kampani’s factory where bulldozers would dump all different coloured sludges. These pits are massive, the water in them stinks, but when the rains come they fill up and become proper lakes with reeds etc. Since rain water is clean people would wash their cows and buffalos, we kids would jump in, splash around in the water. I could no longer dive or swim, I’d wade up to my neck, but my arse stuck out of the water.
    One day we were lying on the grass in hot sun, drying off. A girl about my own age, she pushed me and left the prints of her muddy fingertips on my body. The mud dried pale on my skin. She said, “Like a leopard!” So then they all dipped their fingers in the clay and covered me with leopardy marks. “Animal, jungli Animal!” The name, like the mud, stuck. The nuns tried to stop it but some things have a logic that can’t be denied. How do you shit, when your arse is up in the air and legs too weak to squat? Not easy. What do you look like as the turds tumble from your hindquarters? Like a donkey dropping dung, when I walk, it’s
    feet on tiptoe
    head down below
    arse en haut
    thus do I go
    In my street years I hated to see dogs fucking, my mates would shout, “Hey Animal, is this how you do it?”
    They’d make a fist, ram two fingers in and out with loud sucking noises, then let on the fingers were trapped, they’d yell, “Hey Fourlegs, you get glued up like this, you and your girlfriend? You and Jara?” Never have I been able to cope with teasing. I’d lose my temper, fataak! I know how to fight. Early in life I learned to look out for myself, to put myself first, before all others and every other thing. Who else was going to stick up for me? It’s a bad idea to attack an opponent who can kick shit out of you, I got a few beatings, but if they know you’ll fight back, people mostly leave you alone. Plus I used to bite. Maybe they were afraid of getting rabies.

    Jara’s my friend. She wasn’t always. We used to be enemies. In the days of living on the street we were rivals for food. We used to work the same territory, the alleys behind the eating houses in the old city. We’d get there late evening when the waiters were tired and would sling the day’s scraps at, rather than in, the bins. Such delicacies we fought over, bit of naan, thrown-down banana skin, with nub of meat going gooey brown where someone had not fancied it. I might arrive to find Jara crouching over some prize, a bone to which clung a few shreds of mutton, a splash of daal. Or I’d be there first, slobbering over a choice morsel, and look up to see her eyes fastened on mine, drooling from the back corners of her mouth. I was scared of her. Of her sharp teeth, her orangey-brown eyes in which there was no friendliness. She’d lie and watch me until hunger drove her forward, crouching on her haunches, a low growl, rrrrr, starting in her throat. I came to know that snarling mouth quite well. A long curved tooth in her lower jaw had lost its tip. When she got close enough for me to see that tooth, I’d back away.
    One day, I found a thing with flies sticking to it like peppercorns, fish-snout with backbone protruding behind, a fair slab of flesh, brown with masalas, lying on a bed of rice, remains of someone’s dinner. I’d begun making a feast of it when I heard her growl. The fish was too good to give up. I stuck firm as she made her approach, the lips lifted over those evil yellow teeth. She started all that rrrrr business. I don’t know how, but some rebellion ignited inside me. On all fours I rushed at her snapping my jaws, growling louder than she, the warning of a desperate animal that will stick at nothing. She turned and slunk back a few paces, then lay down again, giving me a