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Award-winning journalist and author Pallavi Aiyar spent six years living in a hutong and reported from across China for the Hindu and Indian Express. Her debut book Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China won the Vodafone-Crossword Reader’s Choice Award for 2008.

Her first novel, Chinese Whiskers, a modern fable set in contemporary Beijing, will be published in January 2011. Aiyar currently lives in Brussels where she writes about Europe for the Business Standard. Below she gives permissions for an excerpt.

Previously on Danwei: An excerpt from Smoke and Mirrors.

Chasing Dragonflies

A beam of hot sun leaked through the leaves of the tree I was crouching under. My nose twitched. I badly needed to sneeze. But I forced myself to ignore the itch and focus on the prey in sight. Stalking was serious business after all. I held my crouch, frozen like a stone.

The buzzing of the dragonfly was deliciously exciting. I moved an inch closer and then another inch, until it was hovering directly above me, darting in and out of a bamboo thicket, totally unaware that I was so close. It was a perfect setup. I wanted to leap high, higher than I ever had before, up into the white sky and pluck it out of the air.

But just at the moment I was readying to launch Ma’s penetrating meow calling me back for a lunchtime feed sent the dragonfly gliding away from my outstretched claws and in a flash it had disappeared over the grey brick walls of the courtyard.

I had been trying to catch a dragonfly from the time my eyes had opened. It was much harder than it sounded and no matter how silently I stalked or how quickly I jumped, I had always failed.

Ma told me to be patient. I was still too young she said.

But I felt that even though I was small, I was quick and talented and fierce and dragonflies should beware of me. My belly rumbled. In the heat of the dragonfly chase I’d forgotten how late it was; definitely time for lunch. I began to trot back towards the corner of the covered corridor where Nai Nai had made a home of old cloth and cardboard for Ma and me. The more I thought of the creamy milk I would soon be slurping down, the faster I ran until I was bounding at full speed, the warm spring wind rushing past.

I was golden, like a tiger and full of energy and strength. I never felt tired and Ma had given up trying to get me to take an afternoon nap. There was so much to do and see and explore. I simply couldn’t understand why anyone would waste their time sleeping.

I was the lone kitten in Ma’s litter. I knew this was very unusual for us cats because we tended to have large families.

‘Maomi! Little kitten!’ Nai Nai would croon as she tickled me into wiggly delight. ‘You are a model cat for the new China and your Ma a model citizen. Look at how she has obeyed the one child policy and produced you; you Little Emperor cat; you very pretty maomi.’

Nai Nai was the oldest Ren, in the Xu household, the human family who owned the siheyuan we lived in. I worshipped her as did all the cats. In the evening when the rest of the family was busy gulping beer, cracking sunflower seeds and playing long, loud games of cards, Nai Nai would sneak away to be with us.

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