Now it so happened that the moment when Luka shouted out in anger was one of those rare instants when by some inexplicable accident all the noises of the universe fall silent at the same time, the cars stop honking, the scooters stop phut-phuttering, the birds stop squawking in the trees, and everyone stops talking at once, and in that magical hush Luka’s voice rang out as clearly as a gunshot, and his words expanded until they filled the sky, and perhaps even found their way to the invisible home of the Fates who, according to some people, rule the world. Captain Aag winced as if somebody had slapped him on the face and then he stared straight into Luka’s eyes, giving him a look of such blazing hatred that the young boy was almost knocked off his feet. Then the world started making its usual racket again, and the circus parade moved on, and Luka and Rashid went home for dinner. But Luka’s words were still out there in the air, doing their secret business.
That night it was reported on the TV news that, in an astonishing development, the animals of the GROF circus had unanimously refused to perform. In a crowded tent, and to the amazement of costumed clowns and plain-clothes customers alike, they rebelled against their master in an unprecedented act of defiance. Grandmaster Flame stood in the centre ring of the three Great Rings of Fire bellowing orders and cracking his whip, but when he saw all the animals beginning to walk calmly and slowly towards him, in step, as if they were an army, closing in on him from all directions until they formed an animal circle of rage, his nerve cracked and he fell to his knees, weeping and whimpering and begging for his life. The audience began to boo and throw fruit and cushions, and then harder objects, stones, for example, and walnuts and telephone directories. Aag turned and fled. The animals parted ranks and let him through, and he ran away crying like a baby.
That was the first amazing thing. The second took place later that night. A noise started up around midnight, a noise like the rustling and crackling of a billion autumn leaves, or maybe even a billion billion, a noise that spread all the way from the Big Top by the banks of the Silsila to Luka’s bedroom, and woke him up. When he looked out of his bedroom window he saw that the Great Tent was on fire, burning brightly in the field by the river’s edge. The Great Rings of Fire were ablaze; and it was not an illusion.
Luka’s curse had worked.
The third amazing thing happened the next morning. A dog with a tag on its collar reading ‘Bear’ and a bear with a tag on its collar reading ‘Dog’ showed up at Luka’s door – afterwards Luka would wonder exactly how they had found their way there – and Dog the bear began to twirl and jig enthusiastically while Bear the dog yowled out a foot-tapping melody. Luka and his father Rashid Khalifa and his mother Soraya and his older brother Haroun gathered at the door of their house to watch, while from her veranda their neighbour, Miss Oneeta, shouted, ‘Have a care! When animals begin to sing and dance, then plainly some witchy business is afoot!’ But Soraya Khalifa laughed. ‘The animals are celebrating their freedom,’ she said. Then Rashid adopted a grave expression, and told his wife about Luka’s curse. ‘It seems to me,’ he opined, ‘that if any witchy business has been done it is our young Luka who has done it, and these good creatures have come to thank him.’
The other circus animals had escaped into the Wild and were never seen again, but the dog and the bear had plainly come to stay. They had even brought their own snacks. The bear was carrying a bucket of fish and the dog wore a little coat with a pocket full of bones. ‘Why not, after all?’ cried Rashid Khalifa gaily. ‘My storytelling performances could do with a little help. Nothing like a dog-and-bear song-and-dance act to get an audience’s attention.’ So it was settled, and later that day it was Luka’s brother Haroun who had the last word. ‘I knew it would happen soon,’ he said. ‘You’ve reached the age at which people in this family cross the border into the magical world. It’s your turn for an adventure – yes, it’s finally here! – and it certainly looks like you’ve started something now. But be careful. Cursing is a dangerous power. I was never able to do anything so – well – dark.’
‘An adventure of my very own,’ Luka thought in wonderment, and his big brother smiled, because he knew perfectly well about Luka’s Secret Jealousy, which was actually Not So Secret At All. When Haroun had been Luka’s age he had travelled to the Earth’s second moon, befriended fishes who spoke in rhyme and a gardener made of lotus roots, and helped to overthrow the evil Cultmaster Khattam-Shud who was trying to destroy the Sea of Stories itself. By contrast, Luka’s biggest adventures to date had taken place during the Great Playground Wars at school, in which he had led his gang, the Intergalactic Penguins Team, to a famous victory over the Imperial Highness Army led by his hated rival, Adi Ratshit, aka Red Bottom, winning the day with a daring aerial attack involving paper planes loaded with itching powder. It had been extremely satisfying to watch Ratshit jump into the playground pond to calm down the itch that had spread all over his body; but Luka knew that, compared to Haroun’s achievements, his really didn’t amount to very much at all. Haroun, for his part, knew about Luka’s desire for a real adventure, preferably one involving improbable creatures, travel to other planets (or at least satellites) and P2C2Es, or Processes Too Complicated To Explain. But until now he had always tried to damp down Luka’s lusts. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he told Luka, who replied, ‘To be honest with you, that is easily the most annoying thing you have ever said.’
In general, however, the two brothers, Haroun and Luka, rarely quarrelled and, in fact, got on unusually well. An eighteen-year age gap had turned out to be a good place to dump most of the problems that can sometimes crop up between brothers, all those little irritations that make the older brother accidentally knock the kid’s head against a stone wall or put a pillow over his sleeping face by mistake, or persuade the younger brother that it’s a good idea to fill the big fellow’s shoes with sweet, sticky mango pickle, or to call the big guy’s new girlfriend by a different girlfriend’s name and then pretend it was just a really unfortunate slip of the tongue. So none of that happened. Instead, Haroun taught his younger brother many useful things, kick-boxing, for example, and the rules of cricket, and what music was cool and what was not; and Luka uncomplicatedly adored his older brother, and thought he looked like a big bear – a bit like Dog the bear, in fact – or, perhaps, like a comfortable stubbly mountain with a wide grin near the top.
Luka had first amazed people just by getting born, because his brother Haroun was already eighteen years old when his mother Soraya at the age of forty-one gave birth to a second fine young boy. Her husband Rashid was lost for words, and so, as usual, found far too many of them. In Soraya’s hospital ward, he picked up his newborn son, cradled him gently in his arms and peppered him with unreasonable questions. ‘Who’d have thought it? Where did you come from, buster? How did you get here? What do you have to say for yourself? What’s your name? What will you grow up to be? What is it you want?’ He had a question for Soraya, too. ‘At our age,’ he marvelled, shaking his balding head, ‘what’s the meaning of a wonder like this?’ Rashid was fifty years old when Luka arrived, but at that moment he sounded like any young, greenhorn father flummoxed by the arrival of responsibility, and even a little scared.