Once Boy learns words and numbers and time, his mind becomes as quick as his feet. When he’d fled from his mother’s body, he’d run without stopping. Now he can think without stopping. He can read the signs that say, jalalabad this way, pakistan that way. He pores through magazines that talk about Fever Valley, where he used to cut poppy bulbs with Nazook, and where there’s still land for the taking, if a man has courage and imagination. The magazines don’t put it that way, but Boy understands.
Soon, Taj feels he has earned his name. He walks into the field, enchanted by the rustling of the stalks, the warmth of the life-giving sun, and the vastness of the sky. These are the finest poppies in the valley. More important, they are his. The Kochis roam with their knives and containers, working, scarcely looking up, doing what he says.
It took eight years. For so long, he did what he was told, still thinking of himself as Boy. With a small blade that fit in his palm, he scored poppy pods, kept his head down, followed orders. In each field, he wrapped a brightly colored scarf around the best poppies, like the farmers told him to do. After every harvest, Boy helped round up the good poppies, the ones with brightly colored scarves, because the farmers saved their seeds for next year so they could plant only the best—the ones whose sap flowed like a river, hardening into copper-colored resin.
In a field of a thousand flowers, maybe one hundred were good, and half of those were extraordinary. He wandered from field to field like this, working harder than the others. He became known for his skills. A poppy pod would continue to give resin for a few days, and could be tapped four or five times. Taj was the best at getting every drop, tapping a pod six or even seven times.
For every hundred exceptional poppies Boy bundled for the farmer, he set aside ten or twelve for himself. The farmers never saw, because Boy had always been the best thief. He cut the poppy at the stalk, keeping only the pod where the seeds were.
He hid the pods in his turban. Nobody would dare ask him to take it off. At home, he meticulously extracted the seeds and dried them over a flame, adding them to his collection. At first, he kept them in a jeweled box he’d stolen from a shop, but soon he had far too many seeds. When he still lived with Nazook, he sometimes hid the seeds in plastic bags for oranges or pomegranates, shoving the bags under his mattress. But now Nazook is dead because he tried to hold Taj back, telling him he should know his place, and that he wouldn’t be anything without his mentor. Taj knew by then that his place was to be king, and kings got rid of people who stood in their way. No one will ever find Nazook’s body because only Taj knows the Valley so well, and there is no better burial ground than an endless garden.
He stored more and more seeds, and one day he piled the boxes and bags into crates he found in an alley. Temperature mattered, so in the summer Boy buried the containers in the earth, just behind the kitchen, and in the winter he stacked them in a hole behind the fireplace. After eight years, he had thousands of seeds. The older ones wouldn’t yield much, but they would help fill the fields he dreamed of, and one day he would have the grandest flowers and the finest resin.
Today, he is more than a king. He is a Manticore. The flowers whisper hello when Taj comes around, and sometimes he drives to the field late at night and sleeps between the stalks. There is an American agency that has been very helpful. A few years ago, it came to Fever Valley and gave land to farmers to grow corn and whatever else Americans liked to eat. First, they nourished and tilled land that belonged to nobody. Then they struck at a field full of poppies, but the poppies came back, laughing at them along with the Manticores. The Americans were very angry, not because the poppies were still growing, but because people were laughing at them.
Sometimes Taj still had dinner with Nazook’s parents, who thought him a nice boy like their late son. It was there that he heard the American agency was struggling with money. A few years ago, he wouldn’t have believed it. He’d heard about Americans and their money since before he could read. Surely money in America was as plentiful as sand in the desert. But now that he can read the newspaper, Taj thinks that in America, some people have too much money, but the government doesn’t have enough. There is a new group from Washington coming to the agency this year to convert everybody’s poppy fields to wheat and corn. Nazook’s father says, “They think they’re magicians, these Americans, that they can just instantly turn one thing into another.”