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I WAS INITIATED into contemplating the many aspects and meanings of failure at an early age. The agent provocateur of this high-minded enterprise was none other than the grandest failure of them all—G. Isaac. Rhodes scholar turned pickle baron. It would have been my sixth or seventh birthday. We were still living in Ayemenem. There may or may not have been a cake, I don’t remember. I do remember that everybody gave me lots of the usual advice about studying hard and doing well in life. Not G. Isaac. Instead, he took me to his room, his annexe which had a separate entrance of its own. As children we were rarely admitted into that hallowed space. Being taken there was a gift in itself. It looked like a bombed-out airbase for broken airplanes. He was obsessed with aero-modelling. Almost every week a new kit would arrive in the post. Balsa-wood airplanes that had crash- landed when he tried to fly them littered the floor. (Clearly, he was frittering away the profits from the pickle factory.) He dangled a cheap bauble in front of me, a chain with a sparkly locket.
“Do you want this?”
“Yes!” My greedy, acquisitive little heart soared.
“I’ll give it to you if you fail.”
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