Asymptote

I have always paid too much attention to things that do not require it.

Let me tell you about the pig.

I was maybe eight years old. Our neighbour in Komakya kept three of them; huge, white, indifferent creatures in a pen near the edge of the compound. I was a curious child, which is a polite way of saying I had no instinct for minding my own business. One afternoon, I crouched by the fence and watched them.

For ten minutes, nothing happened. The pigs moved slowly. They ate. They ignored me.

And then one of them walked toward the fence and looked directly at me.

Not at the general direction of me. At me. Into me.

I looked back.

This is where I should tell you I blinked and moved on. That is not what happened.

What happened is that we held eye contact for nearly a full minute, the pig and I, and somewhere in the thirty-second mark, something shifted. Its eyes began to look different. Adjusting. Alive in a way I had not expected from an animal. They were round and dark and wet and they looked, I swear to you, like the eyes of a person.

Not a smart person, maybe. But a person.

My heart started beating very fast. I had recently watched Dragon Ball Z, and specifically the episode where Captain Ginyu switches bodies with Goku and ends up trapped in a frog. This memory arrived in my brain at the worst possible moment.

I did not sleep that night.

I told my friend Abby about it the next day. He listened for four seconds, said 'mmh,' and changed the subject. That was Abby. His attention span was like a candle in wind; brief, flickering, gone.

But I could not forget it. What if there was something inside? A consciousness looking out through the wrong face? What if, every time we look at an animal and see nothing, we are simply not paying close enough attention?

I was eight. I did not have the words for what I was feeling. But that was my first real philosophical experience; crouching in the mud, staring into a pig's eyes, wondering what it meant to be trapped in a body that was not your own.

Years later, I would learn there is an entire field of thought built around these questions. But I did not need a textbook. I had a pig. And I had the particular, restless kind of mind that cannot look at anything without asking: but what is it really?

That is the kind of boy this story is about.

* * *

My name is *******. Everyone calls me Babu. I was born into a family of teachers in the foothills of Kilimanjaro, in northern Tanzania, where the air is cool and clear and the mountain appears in the distance on days when the clouds agree to move aside.

Both my parents were teachers. This meant that our house was my first classroom; a place where numbers were explained at the dinner table and books were not decoration but furniture. It also meant I arrived at school slightly ahead, which is both an advantage and a kind of loneliness, because you spend your early years waiting for everyone else to catch up.

My father was steady. That is the word that comes to me first. Steady like the mountain. His hand in mine on the walk to school was a whole sentence; one that said: the ground may be wet, your feet may slip, but you will not fall.

My mother was different. Sharper. Quicker to pinch. A woman of high standards and low tolerance for nonsense, which was unfortunate for me because nonsense was essentially my first language.

Together, they made me. Or they started making me. The rest; the schools, the friends, the embarrassments, the small victories, the distances traveled; that is what this book is about.