A lost 'boy' learns life from the start

By CATHERINE MASTERS

The people who look after Sujit Kumar in Fiji call him a boy, even though he is 32 years old.

He cannot speak and is only just learning to communicate with humans.

The reason, they say, is that he was brought up among chickens.

One of those helping to look after him is Elizabeth Clayton, president of the Suva Rotary Club.

Ms Clayton - widow of New Zealand mountain climber Roger Buick, who died on Mt Everest in 1998 - admits it is an astonishing claim, but says it is true.

She says that when she first met Sujit he pecked at his food and would crouch down as if roosting.

His fingers still turn inward from scratching around in the dirt. Although he has progressed to eating from a plate, he seems detached from much that goes on around him.

Ms Clayton discovered him in an old people's home in Suva. He had been tied to his bed for 20 years after being found in the middle of the road one night and taken to the home by welfare officers.

She has been piecing together his past and says when his mother committed suicide and his father was murdered, Sujit fell into the care of his elderly grandfather.

But his grandfather had no idea what to do with him and locked him in the chicken coop.

It is thought he lived there for years with nothing to model himself on but the chickens around him.

A sister in the Samabula Old People's Home, where Sujit lives in Suva, told Ms Clayton that when he first arrived it was obvious he had been badly mistreated, traumatised and environmentally deprived.

"Sujit would mostly hop around like a chicken, peck at his food, perch like a chicken and make noises like a chicken," she said.

"He would prefer to roost on the floor to go to sleep rather than sleep in a bed."

According to a report in a Suva newspaper which quoted American behavioural scientists, he displays no signs of mental illness or conditions such as autism.

The Rotary Club in Suva has taken responsibility for his education and Ms Clayton is calling on any members of his family to come forward and share his babyhood experiences so he might be helped to learn to speak.

Ms Clayton provides the school room for Sujit in an old factory.

It is next door to another old factory on the outskirts of Suva which achieved notoriety last month as the scene of a $1 billion methamphetamine bust.