Kunta wondered why the white people had done this to him. Born a free man, he was now in chains. Heavy iron chains around his feet and hands were fixed to a metal bar that ran round the hall about ten centimeters off the ground. He was just able to lie down on the ground, but could not stand up.

Kunta had been seized in the forest and then hit on the head with a hard object. When he woke up, his hands and feet had already been tied together. What shocked him most was that the men who carried him were black. He reasoned with them, and tried to persuade them to set him free. But they would not listen to him. When they came to the river, a white man was waiting in the boat for them. There was an argument about money, so it seemed, in a language that Kunta did not understand. Finally, Kunta was thrown into the bottom of the boat and covered with an old smelly cloth. The men took him in their boat to the castle on the coast where he was now held prisoner.

Another thing which shocked Kunta was that women were held in the castle too. He could hear their crying, also children’s voices. What was to become of them all, he wondered. For all his life, he had known that people suddenly disappeared from their villages. He had known that it was not safe to travel alone in the forest near the coast. But why did white people want to catch Africans and put them in chains? Would they be killed or even eaten? The situation seemed hopeless and he knew his life was in danger.

Worse was to come. A few days later about 140 black people were taken and put on a tall sailing ship waiting off the coast. Once on the boat, they were taken below and their chains were fixed to two bars that ran the length of the ship. Their feet were fixed to one bar and their hands to another bar. Thus they lay on hard wooden boards, unable to stand up or move around.

The sea journey lasted over sixty days and nights. They had rough weather and Kunta’s back bled from rolling over on the hard wooden boards. Many of the men fell sick with fever. They sighed and cried out for more water, but food and water were only given out once a day. Once in a while sailors came down, Kunta thought, to carry sick men upstairs for treatment. When the ship finally arrived in a port, the wooden cover was opened wide and Kunta could see in daylight for the first time across the part of the ship where he had been chained. About a third of the people who had been chained up below at the beginning of the journey were missing.

Pushpa hates tears but when she tells of incidents from her childhood, which she spent battling poverty, she can’t help feeling overwhelmed. “We used to be able to afford only one meal every day,” she says. But as challenging as those early years were, they would lead to her remarkable life as a scribe (抄写员) for people with special needs.

Pushpa remembers enjoying a blessedly normal childhood, peppered with “toys, dinners out and movies at the theatre”, until around grade 4. But life as she knew it disappeared when an accident left her father disabled.

“My mother, who wasn’t well-educated, had to work for ＄500 per month.” But what hit her hardest was her struggle to continue her education. The memory of her grade 7 teacher refusing to allow her to attend classes over unpaid school fees still hurts.

One day in 2007, while travelling with two visually impaired (有缺陷的) college students by bus, she heard them talk about how difficult it was for them to continue their education. “I remembered my own struggle to finish my studies so I seized the opportunity to help them.”

“I was a little nervous at first because I had passed my grade 10 examination only with a third class,” she smiles. “Since then, I’ve written exams for students who have low IQ, or are blind or visually impaired, or have met with an accident.”

It is, by no means, an easy task. “I read out the questions slowly and, sometimes, several times, and wait for the student to tell me the answer. I have seen scribes getting irritated (愤怒的) at students and that should not happen.” she explains.

Over the last 16 years, the young girl who once survived on handouts has come a long way. Connecting with examinees by word of mouth, till date, Pushpa has written 1,086 exams for special-needs test-takers and won the Nari Shakti Puraskar in 2018 for her efforts. “You should be prepared to help the student for those few hours, without expecting anything in return.” Pushpa adds.

A few years ago, I asked a neighborhood handyman to build a tree-house in my backyard. In part, this was to solve a problem: my children were good friends with the children who lived beside us and they liked to climb over the fence that separated the two yards. We could have just put a gate into the fence, but I decided that building some kind of climbable structure around the large fir tree in the yard, which also included a staircase into the neighbor’s yard, was a more creative solution to the problem, and I liked the idea that the tree-house would also serve to join the two play spaces together.

The handyman took the task much more seriously than I had expected. He made drawings, built small wooden models, and even held a kind of “visioning” exercise with the children and their parents to make sure that he hadn’t missed any important details. At the end of our lengthy discussions, he asked, “Where would you like me to put the beer rail?”

The question took me aback as I hadn’t really considered the possibility that a nice play structure in my yard might also facilitate beer consumption among the neighborhood children, but I quickly tuned in to the fact that our designer had intuited what should have been obvious to me—the children wouldn’t be the only ones to take advantage of this platform up among the branches of the beautiful old tree. And, indeed, over the years that I lived in that house I discovered that the platform made a pretty good perch (栖息处), not only for the occasional cold beer, but also for sitting and dreaming, reading a book, enjoying a picnic or even getting some writing done. My children enjoyed climbing around in the tree-house, playing tag, setting up imaginary pirate ships and fortresses (城堡), and they also used it for some quiet thinking and even the occasional math homework. The tree seemed to be a particularly good algebra tutor.