Chase away a little bird, putha, only a little bird. It looked more like a winged dog, waiting for him at the far side of the great green clearing. His father was standing beside the man who’d come to the hut and eaten all their lunch the day before. His mother and brothers and sisters and the new baby were also there, and one of his grandmothers, who was given a stool. She carried a little rag and always wiped her mouth before and after she spoke. The baby was crying. His father motioned him over and opened and closed his palm long enough to show him a piece of jaggery. Then he pointed at the bird and the boy ran right at it. On his eighth birthday, the crow was waiting at the same place behind the village. His father showed him two pieces and the boy ran again. As he neared, the bird lifted and jumped forward, directly at him, once more sending him glancing to the side. But this time, when he turned to face his father, he had to watch him feed his promised sweets to two of his brothers, who were jumping up and down at their sudden good fortune. He decided that would not happen again. At nine, they went to the field with a bowl of curd and treacle, and a newer baby crying, and no grandmother, and with everyone cheering he sprinted at the crow through a stretch of limp yellow grass no longer knee high. His heart lifted as the bird went off at his approach but it resettled not ten steps away. He looked to his father, who was looking to the keeper for a ruling. The boy would not wait. He ran at the bird again, who lifted over another few feet, then again, and again, and soon he was running useless figure eights across the great green clearing, his eyes burning with sweat and tears and dirt, and they were all laughing and eventually he fell and the bird, the bird actually hopped closer to him. It seemed to be considering him with its bead-black eyes, as if to say Hard luck. See you next year, but it was only watching his father, who knelt beside the boy, lifted his chin, and pointed at the crow. He wanted to say to him Sorry Appachchi but instead watched his father dump the bowl of white curd onto the dry brown ground. The bird’s beak gleamed.

He’d been six-plus when the dry time had first descended on the village. Every family needed someone to blame. They took him to the astrologer’s hut, which always occupied the most auspicious of the four corners of the dry dirt square where the village’s two lanes met. Villagers had lately been queuing in greater numbers to see her. She asked less than the nearby temple monks and their bottomless stomachs, and besides horoscopes, she could also read palms. After first uncoiling his birth-hour scroll and showing his parents a future tattooed with empty houses and empty marriages, she took the boy by the wrist and traced the lines already creasing his small hands—hunger, poverty, rage. The boy was then sent from the hut, where he met other families’ blights: a granny who peed herself while he waited, and a girl with milk-white eyes, another with a creviced lip, and also an uncle who giggled while smelling his wrists. But he had ten fingers and ten toes. He hunted snakes and could climb almost any tree his brothers could. Why was he here? Meanwhile, the astrologer told his parents that this was a son never meant to be born in the middle of a family. She said he would never give when he could take, never serve when he could be served. He should have been born first or last.

“What will he do to us?” his mother asked.

“Ruin you,” she answered.

“What can be done?” his father asked.

“I’ll send my husband to see you.”

As was his known habit in the village, the astrologer’s husband came calling just as his mother was getting the lunch—rice, a thumbprint of dried fish for his father’s plate, dhal, and limp long slices of salt-and-peppered papaya and combs of finger-long plantains. Plantains were the only food the children were allowed to eat as they pleased. His father gave his plate to the visitor.

“He looks too young, I am telling you. I can’t take a man’s money when he has so many to care for, and at such a terrible time for everyone, no?” The crow-keeper swept his dhal-dripping hand across the reedy children, all of them watching him with mud-brown eyes.

“Doesn’t matter,” his father answered. “Tomorrow he is seven. We have heard of others who have chased the crow at this age. Who’s to say, maybe he will too, no? At least to try, what harm?”

“Only harm is the cost.”

“Which is?”

“Not payable with a plate of rice and curry.”

“No, it’s an honour to have you share our table. About paying, it’s like this.” His father bagged up his sarong between his legs. “I’d like to pay you, of course. But also, if you’re interested—”

“I’m not.”

“Right.”

His father took him walking that evening. He couldn’t think of what for, this private time together. As they passed through the village, dusk and a long day’s work draining it of all colour, his father ruffled his hair, then found a piece of sweet jaggery in one of his ears and popped it into the boy’s mouth. Joyfully sucking on this hard miracle, he didn’t think they were eating such delights even in the great walauwa itself.

“Tomorrow, putha, do you know what day that is?”

“Appachchi,” he slobbered, before shifting the sugar rock to the other side of his mouth, “another piece?”

“Soon, baba, soon. Tell me, putha, what day is tomorrow?”

“Birth day.”

“And how old are you turning?”

“Se-ven.” A gob of sweet spit dripped from his mouth.

“And do you know what that means? It means you must show all of us what a big boy you’ve become! Tomorrow in the clearing you will see a little bird, putha, only a little bird, and you must run at it like the big boy you are and chase it off. We will all be watching and cheering you. Will you do this for your Appachchi?”

“What will you give me if I chase the bird, Appachchi?”

His father nodded. A son who would never give when he could take.

When he was ten, the village was still in a very bad way. A fourth year of poor paddy: cracked mud lands, the village water tank a puddle of itself, the men broadcasting useless seed, the silo empty of all rice and grain and echoing like bellies. People were accusing each other of evil eyes and bad mouths. Jungle papers covered the tree trunks, so many that when the anonymous accusations were read, the sound was like an army walking through leaves. The astrologer was chased off and brought back, chased off and brought back. Pirith ceremonies became so commonplace that monks were yawning in the middle of their chanting against these dark days. The walauwa people, who had misfortune enough in their own history, as the old ones in the village sometimes lamented, sometimes cackled about, were made to suffer again. A rich fisherman from down south came to buy the family lands, and the servants said the Ralahami had him chased off only because the figure was too low. Then, a few months later, his wife, the pretty Hamine, died in her first childbirth: twins, a boy and girl, Arthur and Alice. The Ralahami cursed both babies.

On his tenth birthday, his father walked him over to the great green clearing wordless and empty handed. Twenty words hadn’t passed between them that year. The crow-keeper approached like an old friendly devil. He took the boy close and tried to give him an avocado nut to throw at it. The keeper had grown a grand belly in recent times, which inclined him to be merciful to those he’d seen more than twice. But the boy walked straight past him. This old ugly bird, also slick and fat from years of good work, didn’t even watch him coming. Only the boy didn’t run this time. After hundreds of nights of plotting under the broadcast stars, the jurying heavens, he had decided that he wouldn’t chase this bird into the air. He would stomp it into the ground. He would do it slowly and absolutely. The crow cleared the treetops before cawing its offence. Turning back triumphant, the boy passed the keeper calling after the bird in vain. That night the keeper left the village and was never called back. Alone, the astrologer held out for another week.

His father met him and cupped his chin. He told him that he was such a good boy. His ears burned. His father said more. He said the boy had done an auspicious thing for his family name and that it would be remembered. As they returned to tell his mother, his father said that the next morning he would get his reward. He promised that it wouldn’t be more jaggery and curd, and at this they laughed together like men, and the boy almost forgot how he had wanted to grind his heel into that bird until its blue-black wings snapped. The next day, at dawn, in fresh rods of joyful rain, the half-sleeping child was bundled into a bullock cart, his head pressed against his proud father, who murmured of prizes as they went forth. Who broke no branch when they passed from the village into the world. Who, at the gates to the great temple at Kandy town, pressed down on his shoulders until he knelt and then pointed at the dry red ground in front of a smiling saffron man. And when the boy stood and looked back and called for him, it was raining and his father was gone. And so he was taken to robes and shaved to skin to begin a new life of desire and suffering, defeat and triumph, from which would come another, and another, and another, and then, at last, after one hundred years of steel and pride, fever and speed, another.