"Oh come here you lovely, cute thing."

"You like that huh? Yes you do! Who's a good girl? Yeah, you're a good girl."

I was currently scratching a mangy brown dog under her chin and she was absolutely loving it. Her eyes had closed shut, her tail was wagging like it was attached to a machine and her long tongue was drooping outside her muzzle. I had named her 'Lolo' after' her habit of lolling around in contentment. she was content quite a lot.

Lolo was my saving grace. My constant companion. I had hoped to become accepted as part of the village over time but that had simply not happened. The village society was rigidly hierarchical. It had become clear to me that physical labour of any kind was frowned upon and considered a 'lower' form of work. On the other hand, wealth was given a lot of respect as was age. The elders of the village were its highest decision- makers and they gathered regularly at a giant hardwood tree near the central pond to hear villagers' issues, to discuss village matters and more often than not just to chit-chat amongst themselves.

Dhanjay was an odd soul in the village as was I. Dhanjay was middle-aged so technically he had yet to earn the respect due to an elder, yet because of his wealth he was arguably the most important man in the village. He would sit with the elders on important matters and they would yield to him quite often.

It wasn't often, or ever, that I was invited to these gatherings of the elders. But there was nothing in the village or beyond its walls that was hidden to me. I would go up the boundary of the inner-most huts surrounding the pond and peer over the roofs to observe the proceedings.

I occupied at a different special space in the village structure. I was at once an outsider and yet also a key worker for the most important man in the village. I did unskilled physical labour, which would have pegged me in the lowest strata of the hierarchy, yet I was also more than double the size of any villager and was able to upr­oot trees with my bare hands. I was an anomaly and treated as such.

I learned an important lesson at that village which I carried with me forever after. I learned that there are two kinds of power - one is fundam­ental, primal power, such as a storm or a landslide or a massive beast. The other kind of power only exists within the framework of rules that all participants agree to. This secondary power only exists as long as all participants accept its existence. Breaking the illusion of that power leaves its participants dimin­ished greatly. At the time, however, I didn't know how to exploit this truism.

My special place in the village was an incredibly lonely one. My interaction with the adults never increased des­pite my expectations. Worse, the ador­able children stopped playing their little games with me as well. I supposed that their parents had warne­d them away from me. My only cont­act was with Dhanjay and his labo­urers. The former had become clipped and professional in his conversations with me. I yearned for the company of the latter as they were by-and-large soft-spoken and devoted to their work. They also didn't seem to mind my appearance as much as the other villagers. did. But they were never inclined to a conversation and I never pushed them. I suspected that their own precarious social st­anding in the village would be further eroded by being seen to be friendly with me.

I suffered a lot in that time. From time to time I would be laid low with bouts of severe anxiety and panic as I realised how untethered I was in this unfamiliar world. I also suffered from loneliness. I wished for someone to explain even the simplest things about this world to me. I also wished to know that there was someone in this world who cared that I lived and needed me. In those darkest times, it was the sight of Lolo's ridiculous-looking face and her furiously wagging tail that dissipated those thoughts.

As small mercies go, it was lucky that I didn't have many opportunities to see my own face. I rarely ventured to the village pond and instead performed my ablutions in the river a few miles away from the village. I was proud of how clean I was but I studio­usly avoided looking at my face in the water lest I sink into melancholy. The sense of dissociation I felt was at its worst around some of the women in the village. I would catch a glimpse of a sashaying hip and it would stir my loins. This was immediately follo­wed by erection-dampening self-disgust. Not only would that sort of thing just not have been physically impossible, but more than that none of the women looked at me with any sort of non-platonic interest. It's a strange thing to not recognize your own face and body and to find someone who looks drastically different from you, and could be an entirely different species, normal.

It was at this point that I first entertained thoughts of finding others similar to me who could possibly answer my questions about how I came to find myself in this situation. But I never seriously considered leaving the village in those days. I was just too scared. It might seem perplexing that a literal giant would be scared of anyth­ing but I had woken up in the unknow­n and had found refuge from it in that village. More­over I was still not able to reconcile my own strength and size. The village to me was the mast of a partially sunken ship and I was determined to cling on.