少年派的奇幻漂流 Chapter 5

Chapter 5,My name isn't the end of the story about my name. When your name is Bob no one asks you, "How do you spell that?" Not so with Piscine Molitor Patel.,Some thought it was P. Singh and that I was a Sikh, and they wondered why I wasn't wearing a turban.,In my university days I visited Montreal once with some friends. It fell to me to order pizzas one night. I couldn't bear to have yet another French speaker guffawing ¹ at my name, so when the man on the phone asked, "Can I 'ave your name?" I said, "I am who I am." Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for "Ian Hoolihan.",It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names. Witness Simon who is called Peter, Matthew also known as Levi, Nathaniel who is also Bartholomew, Judas, not Iscariot, who took the name Thaddeus, Simeon who went by Niger, Saul who became Paul.,My Roman soldier stood in the schoolyard one morning when I was twelve. I had just arrived. He saw me and a flash of evil genius lit up his dull mind. He raised his arm, pointed ² at me and shouted, "It's Pissing Patel!",The cruelty of children comes as news to no one. The words would waft ³ across the yard to my ears, unprovoked, uncalled for: "Where's Pissing? I've got to go." Or: "You're facing the wall. Are you Pissing?" Or something of the sort. I would freeze or, the contrary, pursue my activity, pretending not to have heard. The sound would disappear, but the hurt would linger, like the smell of piss long after it has evaporated.,Teachers started doing it too. It was the heat. As the day wore on, the geography lesson, which in the morning had been as compact as an oasis ⁴, started to stretch out like the Thar Desert; the history lesson, so alive when the day was young, became parched ⁵ and dusty; the mathematics lesson, so precise at first, became muddled ⁶. In their afternoon fatigue ⁷, as they wiped their foreheads and the backs of their necks with their handkerchiefs, without meaning to offend or get a laugh, even teachers forgot the fresh aquatic ⁸ promise of my name and distorted it in a shameful ⁹ way. By nearly imperceptible modulations I could hear the change. It was as if their tongues were charioteers driving wild horses. They could manage well enough the first syllable ¹⁰, the Pea, but eventually the heat was too much and they lost control of their frothy-mouthed steeds and could no longer rein ¹¹ them in for the climb to the second syllable, the seen. Instead they plunged ¹² hell-bent into sing, and next time round, all was lost. My hand would be up to give an answer and it would be acknowledged with a "Yes, Pissing." Often the teacher wouldn't realize what he had just called me. He would look at me wearily after a moment, wondering why I wasn't coming out with the answer. And sometimes the class, as beaten down by the heat as he was, wouldn't react either. Not a snicker or a smile. But I always heard the slur ¹³.,I spent my last year at St. Joseph's School feeling like the persecuted ¹⁴ prophet Muhammad in Mecca, peace be upon him. But just as he planned his flight to Medina, the Hejira that would mark the beginning of Muslim time, I planned my escape and the beginning of a new time for me.,After St. Joseph's, I went to Petit Seminaire, the best private English-medium secondary school in Pondicherry. Ravi was already there, and like all younger brothers, I would suffer from following in the footsteps of a popular older sibling ¹⁵.,He was the athlete of his generation at Petit Seminaire, a fearsome bowler ¹⁶ and a Powerful batter ¹⁷, the captain of the town's best cricket team, our very own Kapil Dev. That I was a swimmer made no waves; it seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspicious of swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountain climbers. But following in someone's shadow wasn't my escape, though I would have taken any name over "Pissing," even "Ravi's brother." I had a better plan than that.,He gave me a very sharp pointed pencil.他给我一支削得非常尖的铅笔 。