Fantasy: Ru, a boy from nowhere, dreams of dragons. What is his connection to these divine beasts?

When I was in school, I was called the snake from nowhere.

What my classmates at St Lorenzo School for Boys meant was that I didn’t know where I was from. I was Indian, of course-brown and black-haired like them, that went without saying, but it didn’t count. When asked what my family was, I shrugged and said I didn’t know. This was the truth. I didn’t know whether we were Hindu or Muslim or Christian or God Only Knows. I didn’t know whether we were Bengali or Anglo-Indian or Marwari (I know Bangla, English and a little bit of Hindi, but so do a lot of people in West Bengal). I “looked”, according to my classmates, Chinese or Northeastern, like a Naga, a word for a people and also for “snake”. I had a Christian surname (George) and an odd first name (Reuel), but didn’t seem to know much about Christianity. So they called me the snake from nowhere. I told them that snakes don’t have narrow eyes, which they gave me as the reason I looked Northeastern. They ignored this logic, because logic is no friend of cruelty or racism.

The snake from nowhere.

Realising that we don’t live in a country (or world)...

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