I told her my new name, ‘Son of Gulliver’ – and how the children liked to call me Owzat – but that I would never forget my old name, nor Father, nor Hanan, nor her. I would always be Omar. And I would not forget my old home, nor our language – I spoke to her in Pashto of course. I told her how I hoped she would soon be safe and well with Uncle Said in Fore Street, Mevagissey, in England.
‘Are you there already?’ I asked her. ‘You must talk to me, Mother, tell me. Then I’ll know you are alive. Please talk to me.’ But she did not.
So that was the end of my first day on Lilliput. It had been a long day, but one I shall never forget.
‘You still have not told J.J. about me,’ whispered the small voice in my left ear, Zaya’s voice.
‘Nor me,’ said the other voice in my right ear, Natoban’s voice, louder – he always spoke louder.
‘I will, I will,’ I said. ‘You’re going to be in the story any moment now, you’ll see. Now, can I go on?’
I went on before they could stop me.
Without these two friends of mine, Zaya and Natoban, who you see now sitting on my shoulders, I said to J.J., I’m not sure I would ever have learnt to speak English properly. These two, along with Gran Baruta and Tapit, taught me well. I had no choice. I had to learn it. No one in Lilliput spoke a word of Pashto, of my own language.
In the days and weeks that followed I learnt fast. Children make the best teachers. For a start they don’t mind if you make mistakes. They are used to it. They don’t think there is anything wrong with it. They know that making mistakes is how you learn. And Lilliputian children, like most children, are playful, and quick, so they make teaching and learning fun. They want it to be fun. And these two were eager that I should learn. They wanted me to understand them, and I wanted them to understand me. So with this kind of encouragement I learnt quite quickly and easily.
There was so much I still wanted to know, but could not ask, so much I wanted to tell them, and could not. I had no idea, for instance, in my early days on Lilliput, how old most of these Lilliputians – apart from Gran Baruta – might be. In time I learnt from the children how old each of them was. Counting on fingers helped with this. I knew four and six already of course, from cricket. So that was a start. I learnt my numbers in English before almost any other words.
They explained to me that, in Lilliput, children were children until they were thirty. They all found it very hard to believe when I told them that a giant like me was only twelve – which was my age, by the way, when I first arrived on Lilliput.
But now, J.J., the time has come for me to tell you about Zaya and Natoban, who, after four years of living on Lilliput, became my best friends in all the world. Zaya is sitting on my left shoulder, Natoban on my right. Zaya is thirty-three, Natoban thirty-three. So not children any more, but children when I first knew them. They are brother and sister, twins. Soon after I arrived on the island, Gran Baruta made them my guardians. It is something that was very common there. Everyone who was old or alone in this world had a young guardian or two to look after them. I wasn’t old, but I was alone.
So I became their adopted brother, and they became my adopted sister and brother. We adopted one another. Brothers and sisters for life, as you will see.
Now that they were in the story the two of them were much happier, punching the air in delight at every mention of their names.
‘Brothers and sisters for life,’ they echoed in my ears. ‘Go on, Owzat, go on!’
So I did.
Zaya and Natoban came every day to my house with a dozen or so children helping them. They brought me all the food and drink I needed, and wood for the fire too. I soon realised that, with me being so huge, it took many hands and a lot of work to look after me. I loved having them with me. They would often sit on the window ledge beside my table and watch me eat. They always seemed amazed at all I did, at how much I was eating and drinking, what huge strides I took when I walked across the room, how loud it was when I talked. If I ever tried to talk in a whisper, that just made them laugh. Lilliputian children, like all children, love life, and love to laugh. They can be cautious, but never fearful. They feel deeply and think deeply, which is why they speak their minds – and often interrupt – and why they ask so many questions. They always have a lot to say, and that’s because they care so much about everything and everyone. They say what they think, what they believe. They speak truth. Children do that.
And they are endlessly inquisitive too. These two loved to explore, and to explore me – especially in those early days, before I became familiar to them. If ever I sat down, they would climb up on to me. They were the ones who came to call me ‘Mountain Man’. Soon I was Mountain Man or Owzat or Son of Gulliver to everyone on the island.
Lilliputians are wonderful climbers. Zaya and Natoban could always find a way up my coat and on to my shoulders. Out walking with them around the island, they always wanted a ride, didn’t you? Other children would often join us and clamber all over me. Whenever there wasn’t room for them on my shoulders because there were too many up there already, Zaya and Natoban would find their way down into my coat pockets, peer out from there, talk to me from there and be quite happy. In the end they travelled mostly in my pockets.
I must have become a strange sight in those early days, wandering the island with my two constant companions – and that’s what they were to me. These two were always my guides on my travels around the island.
Natoban liked to sit as he is now, beside my right earlobe, tweaking it one way or the other to show me which way I should go, and pulling down on my lobe once whenever he wanted me to stop, and twice if he wanted me to sit down.
As we walked, Zaya would point out to me this and that and tell me what everything was called in English, and have me repeat it. And sometimes when she asked, I would tell her Pashto words – she can speak Pashto now just as well as I can speak English.
Soon, I came to think of them not just as friends, but as much more than that.
I had a new sister, and a brother too.
‘And by the way, I can speak some Pashto words too,’ Natoban insisted.
‘I can speak more,’ Zaya said.
‘That’s only because you talk more anyway,’ Natoban told her.
‘I don’t.’
‘You do.’
‘Can I please go on?’ I said.
‘You go on, Omar,’ J.J. said, impatient but laughing. ‘I’m listening. I want to hear. I want to hear.’
Her boat lay still on the silent sea, almost as if she too was waiting for me to go on.
All the time, I was discovering more and more of the life of the people on the island. Standing high on the mountain above my home I could see the whole of Lilliput spread out below me, the tracks spreading like a great web all over the island through the forests and fields, from house to farm.
The soaring eagles were no bigger than flies to me, the blowing whales at sea no larger than sardines, the sheep and cows and pigs were hardly the size of mice. Everywhere I looked the little people were out at work in the fields with their horses, and the fishing boats were ploughing through the waves on the open sea. There were always children out playing, or climbing the trees – and few of these trees were any taller than my hand. The children would be swimming in the sea or splashing in the streams. And they would often be singing as they played their games. They loved to sing, and I loved to hear them.
As I think I have told you, J.J., the island was very small. From my mountain top, I could see just about everything and everyone. I very soon got to know every farmhouse, every street in the village by the sea, every boat sailing in or out of the harbour. I could soon recognise all the people too, knew where they lived, what work they did. Zaya and Natoban took me everywhere, showed me everything, told me all about the island, made me feel at home.
In the village there was no school, as there had been in my town, or none that I could see. I learnt from Zaya and Natoban that on Lilliput
everyone taught everyone, so there was no need for a school. They didn’t even seem to know what a school was.
And they answered all my questions too – except one.
I wanted still to know about the island I could see across the channel from Lilliput, the one I knew was called Blufescu, the one no one seemed to want to talk about. More than once I tried asking these two. But they always looked the other way and would not say a word. Zaya shivered sometimes even at the mention of the name, and I noticed that when she did, Natoban would often take her hand in his to comfort her.
On clear days when there was no sea mist over the channel – as there often was between the two islands – I could see to the mountain on Blufescu, a high mountain with a jagged, pointed peak. It seemed to be a bigger and longer island than Lilliput, crescent-like in shape, the horns of the crescent pointing towards Lilliput, like the claws of an angry crab. Often I would see dark, threatening clouds hanging over Blufescu.
I wondered who lived there and why it was that the little people of Lilliput could scarcely bring themselves to look at the place, let alone talk about it.
It was true, it did not look a welcoming place to me at all. Every time I looked across the sea at the clouded island of Blufescu, I felt I had been very lucky to wash up on Lilliput.
And, as I would come to learn soon enough, I was right about that.
There seemed no end to the kindness and hospitality of these good people. I could not go into their tiny houses of course, but I was often invited to bend down and peer in through their windows, to see a newly born, or to wave at an old person sitting by a stove. I could scarcely pass by a house without being offered a loaf of freshly baked bread, which of course was hardly a mouthful to me.
Wherever I went, farming families were always proud to show me their animals; to them any animal – farm animal or wild animal – was treated like another member of the family. But the horses I met never liked me that much. They would toss their heads at me and show me the whites of their eyes. I was just too big for them. I would try lying down in a field to make myself as small as I could, and then I would reach out to them very slowly. But they were not stupid. They knew I was the same towering giant they had seen before. Many a time I tried to make friends with them, and many a time they would turn their backs on me and kick out. They had sharp little hooves, so a kick on my knuckles or ankles could really hurt.
The children, who seemed to follow me in droves wherever I went, always loved it when a horse kicked out at me. They loved it when they heard me crying out, or saw me shaking the pain off my knuckles, or hopping about. They would play with my words as if they were toys, and ‘owzat’ had become their favourite toy. In fact, that word was how most children always greeted me now on the island.
‘Hello, Owzat! Good morning, Owzat.’
With everyone talking English to me, I learnt quickly enough how to understand it. Speaking it wasn’t so easy. I had these two, usually sitting on my shoulders, just as they are now. Zaya and Natoban were always with me, always teaching me words, reminding me, correcting me, especially my accent.
‘You speak it quite well now,’ Zaya whispered in my left ear.
‘Only quite well,’ said Natoban. ‘We speak it better. And by the way, I think you’ve gone on long enough with the story. Zaya and me, we do know it, you know.’
‘J.J. wasn’t there. She doesn’t know it, does she?’ I told him.
‘I wish I had been,’ J.J. said. ‘I want to know everything, all of it.’
Natoban squeezed my earlobe – this was often how he showed his irritation or impatience. I ignored it, shook my head to stop him, and went on anyway.
The children on Lilliput especially liked it when I tried to speak. They would giggle and laugh at me, and tease me, but never cruelly. The people of Lilliput were never cruel, not to me, not to one another, not to the animals. It is not in their nature.
I often tried to imagine how I must have been to them, this strange visitor who towered above them, this giant they had taken in and looked after, with his big hands, big feet, big nose and big ears. I was a tree to climb on – the grown-ups were soon using me like this too. I once counted seventy Lilliputians climbing all over me at the same time. They would swing on me, walk along my outstretched arm, even balance on my head sometimes. If I lay down, they would dance on me, bounce up and down on me. They loved to mimic me, my accent, my loud voice, my huge steps. They walked like me, talked like me. And they soon discovered I was ticklish, that it didn’t take much to make me break into giggles. They liked to hear me laugh, and I loved laughing too. I had not laughed like this, played like this, loved life like this since before the war came to my town and my world of home, and happiness had come to an end. When I laughed and played with my new friends in Lilliput, I could forget all that. Laughing helps you to forget. Friends help you to forget.
Whatever I did, wherever I went, it was always with Zaya and Natoban. They were and they are my guardians and my guides – even if they do interrupt me sometimes, and pinch my earlobes. We roamed the island together, climbed the mountain together – easy for me, not so easy for them. They tried to teach me to swim – everyone on Lilliput seemed as happy and natural in the water as out of it, but I could never do it. I never trusted the water to hold me up.
I had never lived by the sea, and I think I had seen too many people drowning in it. Thanks to these two, it wasn’t long before I knew the island from end to end, before it became like a home to me. And every evening when they took me back to my house, there was food and drink waiting for me on my table, and a fire burning to warm the house.
Sometimes Gran Baruta and Tapit would be waiting there by the fire. I never ate alone, never felt alone – they made sure of that. I would show off to them words I had learnt that day, and this, I could see, pleased them both. During these evenings and over the many months and years I lived on Lilliput, she and Tapit were my most frequent visitors, and I came to know them well and trust them. They were my new family now, Tapit my uncle, Gran Baruta my grandmother, and these two, like brother and sister to me.
I felt I could tell them everything – who I was, where I had come from, about the war in my country, and how it had destroyed our lives, and driven Mother and me and millions like us from our homes, and forced us to find safety in other countries.
The more English I learnt to speak, the more I could tell them, and the better I could understand what they told me. I remember how, as I was describing the bombing of my town, telling them how Father had been killed, how Hanan had disappeared, Gran Baruta reached out and held my little finger tight.
‘Gulliver always said,’ she told me, ‘that this was why we all had to learn to be kind to one another in this life, that fear and suspicion and anger and greed and hate always lead to war, and that one war always leads to another, sooner or later, that in his world – and his world was the same world you come from, Son of Gulliver – there was always war, that it is a disease that would destroy everyone. The only cure for it, he told us, is goodwill, and kindness and understanding. That’s why we have become as we are, here on Lilliput. It is because of Gulliver, because of what he told us of your world. He was warning us.’
Between Gran Baruta and Tapit – and my friends sitting here on my shoulders – I was discovering so much about Gulliver: for instance, how he had brought the English language to Lilliput three hundred or more years before, which was why everyone on the island now spoke two languages, Lilliputian and English. I discovered, in time, that the suit of clothes I was wearing had not been newly made for me, as I had always supposed, but was altered from some of Gulliver’s clothes that they had kept and looked after when he left. As for my house, it had been Gulliver’s house when he was on Lilliput. Like my clothes, it had been cared for all these years, and looked after, so that everything would be ready for him if he ever came back.
‘He never did come back,’ Gran Baruta told me sadly one evening. ‘But we never forgot him,
never forgot what he did for us, how his wise words changed our life here forever, helped us become who we are. The spirit of Gulliver lives on. He may not have come back as we had hoped, but you did, Son of Gulliver, you did.’
So I was learning more and more about this Gulliver who had been there before me. But about Blufescu, they would tell me nothing. Just a mention of it and everyone fell silent. Blufescu was a closed book.
At night-times especially, my head was full of all that was happening to me, all I was discovering every day, all Baruta was telling me. I was never sure I had understood everything properly, but I did realise soon enough that my arrival on Lilliput was the most important and most welcome event ever since the coming of Gulliver, my father, my predecessor. I would tell Mother more about it every night, and it was not easy to explain. But I loved talking to her, and it was a relief to speak Pashto, speak my own language again. In Pashto I could say exactly what I meant.
I was sure Mother must have arrived safely in England by now. I would often ask her about how it was in Fore Street, Mevagissey, and in Uncle Said’s café. I longed for her to answer, but she never did of course. I tried to reassure her that I was well looked after and safe and happy. I told her more every evening about Lilliput – and about this Gulliver man who had come here a long time ago from England. I told her that I was speaking English really well now, much better than I ever had in the refugee camp with Jimbo and the other aid workers. I told her how good I thought this was, because when I came to England I would be able to speak in English as well as English people do. I told her how strange it was not to be called Tiny any more, that in Lilliput I was a giant, and how I loved being a giant, and how much I missed her, and all my friends at home, and how I longed to play cricket with them, but that I knew I never would, that those days were over, and how that made me very sad. I poured all my thoughts out to her, all my hopes.
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