I first encountered bullies at the age of four.
After telling me to go back to my own country, my classmates gave me a nickname. Poo-skin. A juvenile enough insult to adult ears, but to be labelled in such a way as a young child, by your peers no less, was incredibly demoralising. They would often chant it in the mornings, or simply use it in lieu of my name.
As a child, you trust that teachers will intervene, but this rarely happened. If they did react, it was treated no worse than as if I had been called four eyes. Their ambivalence made me feel like they agreed with my tormentors. After all, I was different. I was the only minority in my class and one of a handful in the entire school.
In my last week at the school the ringleader chased me into a bathroom stall and when I tried to hold the door closed, my finger became trapped in the doorjamb. Despite my screams of pain, he leaned on the door with all his weight, resulting in serious damage that left a permanent scar. The school, knowing an expulsion would affect his record, “asked him to leave”. Since it was the last week of school and we were in the final year group, he never missed a day.
At my next school, I was again in the minority, as well as being incredibly shy. A few weeks in, a group of boys approached me, claimed their Pokémon cards had been stolen and asked if they could search my bag in the cloakroom. I agreed, since I had nothing to hide. Lo and behold, I was sent to the headmaster and my parents were called. The boys had planted them there and called a teacher. For the rest of my time there, the boys would hide things in my bag or desk to frame me. If someone lost something, the teachers would immediately search my things, assuming I had stolen it.
This culminated in my second year there, when an anonymous, hate-filled letter was hidden in my desk. Instead of a punishment, the boy who admitted to it was told to say, “I’m sorry” and shake hands with me.
Throughout my younger years, I felt immense loneliness, which I think is something that many people experience when they are singled out for being different, whatever the reason. Other times, I simply felt extremely angry, exacerbated by the lack of consequences for the bullies’ actions. Ultimately, three things got me through it.
The first was simply making other friends. In the end, you’ll never win over the people who dislike you for what you are, but there are plenty of people who won’t care at all and will welcome you with open arms. The insults mattered a lot less when I knew that I had friends who liked me for who I was, and when they came to my defence I knew I did not have to face it alone.
The second was reading, especially in the early days – you are never alone with a good book, and the fantastical worlds I read gave me a great buffer from the anger I felt. The way the book’s protagonists overcame their problems taught me to not feel so sorry for myself and face things head on.
I became especially attached to young male characters that I could empathise with, especially those who overcame things on their own. One was the protagonist from the Saga of Darren Shan, who was the only young boy in a world full of older vampires. Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet was another favourite, where a boy crash-lands in the wilderness and learns to survive on his own.
Even with these brilliant, self-sufficient characters to read about, it was not enough – I wanted to create my own, even be the hero myself. So, writing became the third thing that got me through my childhood.
I dreamed of becoming an author myself, starting my first book at nine years old. It featured a young, olive-skinned boy named Narat, who, together with his wizard uncle Nilrem, fought against an evil witch. As I became older and my writing evolved, I became particularly interested in fantasy races.
I found them in books, from Tolkein’s elves, dwarves and orcs to Brian Jacques’s anthropomorphic animals. I even saw them in tabletop games such as Warhammer as well as videogames like Skyrim and Starcraft. Through these races, I found it easier to both understand and explore the racial tensions that exist in my own world, for their differences, both physical and cultural, were more pronounced.
This story does have a happy ending!
I loved my third school. The boys there were from all walks of life. On my first day I sat between an oligarch’s son and a boy who lived in a south London council estate. The cultural diversity there was amazing, with foreign exchange students and a broad mix of backgrounds. I made lifelong friends and had a very happy end to my childhood.
As an adult, I followed my love of books into publishing, interning at Penguin Random House for two months. There, I realised that authors were real people, just like you and me, not the fabled literary geniuses I had imagined. This inspired me to write my own book soon after my internship ended.
I took part in NaNoWriMo, a competition where writers attempt to write 50,000 words in one month. As I wrote my new book, The Novice, I simultaneously uploaded it to a social reading website and app called Wattpad, hoping to get some feedback and meet other, likeminded writers. By the end of the month, I had one hundred thousand reads. Two and a half months after that, I hit one million. My book had gone viral.
That was when I started getting calls from journalists and publishers. After choosing one of the six literary agents who offered to represent me, my trilogy was snapped up by publishers all over the world, some even bidding against each other for the right to publish it. The book now has over six million reads on Wattpad.
The first book in the Summoner Trilogy, The Novice, will be translated into 12 languages and will be published all over the world. My childhood dream of becoming a published author has come true.
Taran Matharu has a Brazilian mother and Indian father. His debut fantasy novel, Summoner: The Novice, is available at the Guardian bookshop. One of the novel’s themes, through the metaphor of fantasy races, is the reality of racial division and its consequences.
