Stick Out Your Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the tent slowly seeped into his body. He took a few sips of butter tea and checked the taste. The butter was fresh but the tea hadn’t brewed long enough and tasted a little of mould.
    He wanted to speak. ‘Ask me whatever you like,’ he said. ‘Have you seen the big building I live in? It’s very tall. There are rooms on each floor.’ He thought about the cinema near his school and said, ‘One day we could all be in a film.’ He looked at their blank faces and explained, ‘There are many kinds of films: dramas, documentaries, foreign films.’ Seeing that they were still confused, he added: ‘It’s a bigger world outside. But of course, there aren’t so many mountains as there are here.’
    As he continued talking, he thought about his school, and about what an oddity he was in the eyes of his classmates: a boy who came from the wild grasslands, five thousand metres above sea level. When
he first arrived in Saga, he felt homesick, and often dreamed about the tent that smelt of dung smoke and warm milk, and about the endless, empty plains. In the grasslands, if you have a rifle, some gunpowder, a horse and a dog, you can feed on gazelles and wild deer, and sleep for free under the stars. But after a while, he settled in and began to enjoy the comforts and excitement of modern life. When he left Saga last month and boarded the bus to Mayoumu, he was so torn between the town and the grasslands that he felt as though his body were being ripped in two.
    Now, half of his body had returned home. He was sitting in his family’s tent on the high plateau near the shores of Lake Drolmula, listening to the wind rustling outside and his family discussing the breeding of yaks and sheep. He knew that the smell of cake in the air was the smell of Dawa’s skin.
    He stood up, and with his head bowed low circled the tent. He stroked the rough surface of the central pole. As a child, he used to test the knives he made by running the blades through the wood. He stroked the mirror on the door of the wooden wardrobe. Dawa walked over to him and, just as she used to, pushed her head against his. She gazed at her reflection, and he gazed at it too as her hair brushed against his neck. Nothing had changed.

    Didn’t you want to come home to Mayoumu? he asked himself. Haven’t you come home now? Haven’t you found your family’s tent? Haven’t you given Dawa a gold chiffon scarf and a pair of nylon socks, your mother a shirt, a box of powdered orange juice, a scroll painting of a Chinese landscape? But didn’t the black horse run away with those presents? You told them that the girls in Saga wear leather shoes and you showed them how they walked. You said: ‘I’ll take you to Saga. You could find work there. There are books on everything, the roads are as hard as rock, there are a hundred times more shops than there are in Mayoumu. If you go to Saga, you’ll never want to come back here again.’
    Dawa walked over and poured him some fresh tea. ‘Undo your top buttons,’ she said. ‘You’re sweating. Did you meet many girls in the town?’
    He stared at Dawa’s eyes, then at her mouth, and said, ‘The girls in Saga wear jeans, not robes. Their legs are as shiny as yak legs. They take off their jeans before they go to bed. They don’t sleep in their robes like us.’ After he said this, Dawa looked away, and he too dropped his gaze.
    In Saga, whenever he saw a girl walk down the street, his thoughts always returned to the high plateau, and the dank, heavy air that pressed down on it.
    Another gust of wind blew on Sonam’s face. His
heart sank as he watched the slowly wakening marshes of Lake Drolmula. The ribbons of salt crystals along the shore were soaking up the first rays of the morning sun. The black horse must have delivered my sack to the tent by now, he thought to himself. In a daze, he found himself