Tikkipala (14 page)

‘He is a lovely child,' agreed the Collector, who in fact could hardly recall the child at all.

‘When he was a baby I used to kiss and kiss his darling lip that was stained with the family mark. Unlike his father, I was not filled with joy when he grew a moustache so that the mark was hidden. I was sad when he grew his moustache, in fact.'

The Collector shifted his position awkwardly. If it had not been for the circumstances, he would have left by now, but he could not see a way to do it.

‘It is so odd,' said Sangita dreamily. ‘But the very thing about Anoo that made him his father's child was the same thing that caused the father to reject him so that he became mine alone.'

The room was very hot. The Collector felt sweat gathering on his face. The punka wallah seemed to have gone to sleep. He wished he could find a way of leaving without seeming rude or unsympathetic. ‘I am sorry,' he said in the end.

‘Oh, don't be sorry,' said Sangita. ‘You needn't be.' She twisted round and looked at the Collector for the first time since he had given her the news of her husband's death. ‘By the way, did you know Paul? His father was the Collector here about fifty years ago.'

The young Collector felt his face go red. He had heard of the scandal. ‘It was before my time,' he said.

She nodded. ‘Oh yes. It would have been. You can go now.' She turned her face back to the flask of sparkling liquid with the last abrupt sentence as though, now that she had dismissed him, he was gone already.

Over the years that followed, the men coming and claiming to be the lost prince of Bidwar became fewer and fewer. Just when Sangita thought it had stopped altogether the servants came, once again to tell her that someone claiming to be her lost son was waiting outside.

‘Send him away!' ordered Sangita.

‘He is a respectable educated person,' said the servants timorously. ‘At least will you not talk to him, Memsahib?'

Because, until now, the pretenders had all been disreputable people, Sangita reluctantly agreed.

A plump man with a moustache came in. He seemed to give a jump of shock at the sight of Sangita. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘Perhaps I have made a mistake.'

‘Yes, you certainly have,' said Sangita. ‘I suppose you were going to tell me you are my son. Well, young man, may I inform you that my son, Anwar, is alive and well, and living with me at this very moment.'

The man nodded, and seemed about to leave. Then he turned back and said, ‘Will you at least listen to my story?'

‘Be quick then,' said Sangita.

‘I was captured by the tribal people in the high jungle.'

‘All of you were. Tell me something new,' said Sangita.

‘After some years of suffering terribly at their hands - even after I fathered one of their children, I was treated like an animal - I managed, at last, to get away.'

‘Something new, I said!' Sangita snapped.

‘After wandering through the jungles for a while, and nearly dying many times, I was found by some timber people who took care of me. My benefactor owns a timber company called Sita Timbers. I work as a manager for them.'

‘Excellent. Then what do you want from me?' asked Sangita.

‘But for all these years I have remembered things. And now I look round this palace and again the memories are stirring in me.' He looked around the room. ‘I can remember some of the things here.'

‘I suppose you look at me and remember that I was once your mother?' Sangita let out a humourless laugh.

‘No,' the man said. ‘I think now it must have been somebody else.' He paused, then said, ‘I did not come here because I wanted money from you. I do not want to be the Raja of Bidwar. I…'

Sangita waited a bit, and then when he did not say anything more, asked, ‘So what do you want?'

‘Revenge,' he said.

The new young Mawa in due course gave birth to a son but died during the labour.

Then the tribe became filled with fear again and in the first hours after her death, the elders tiptoed over the hair walkways, their faces bent with anxiousness. They whispered to each other, wondering what they should do while the orphaned new born child lay alone in the dead mother's place, letting out wails like those of a wild kitten. The tree tops stung with the sound of the new born child's miserable wailing.

The mothers, peeping through the weavings of their swinging homes, listened to the elders and their nipples tightened and spilled with the milk that had been stimulated by the hungry baby's crying.

‘We must obey our law,' said an elder. ‘Now that this child is motherless, we must kill him and breed another who will be raised in the proper manner.'

There rose a murmur of dismay. ‘Is this really the law?'

‘In all the history of our tribe,' maintained the elders, ‘No such child had been allowed to live.'

‘They are going to kill it,' whispered the mothers.

‘But it is different for this child,' argued one of the subtle ones. ‘For he is our only Maw now. Without him we have no other. Surely we do not have to kill him.'

‘They are going to let it live,' the mothers whispered.

‘Also,' said another. ‘How shall we breed again, now that the mother is dead and there is now no queenly womb?'

‘And also no virgin male from whom to take seed with which to make another king,' said a third.

‘We must kill it,' cried another. ‘In my youth I attended a meeting of our elders and one of them said that a motherless Maw will one day destroy us.'

‘When?' cried one. ‘I do not remember it.'

‘I was seven at the time, and remember it clearly,' said another.

‘If you were seven, you may not have understood,' argued a third.

‘We will be better without this child,' pursued the elder. ‘Perhaps we will be better with no Maw at all than this one, for remember the seed that created him.'

‘When I played music through his vertebrae today, the sound came out pure,' said an elder.

‘But is it not possible that Coarseness comes out later, for in the screeching of this new born child I hear a sound I do not like?'

‘It is possible,' said the elders, and hung their heads in thoughtful doubt.

By now the wailing of the baby had become very loud. The elders and the subtle ones were finding it hard to concentrate because of it.

‘Even if we keep this child, how shall it live? How shall we feed it?' said one of the subtle ones.

‘Who will teach it the things our children need to know, since it has no parents?'

‘How will it learn to communicate with Animals?'

‘Perhaps we can hand it to the mothers,' suggested another.

‘But there is no mother who is without a child,' the first one, an old woman, said.

‘Let a woman who already has a child care for this one too,' suggested one of the elders.

A gasp of horror went up at this suggestion. The people of the tribe lived in the tops of trees and could only carry a single nursing child. When twins were born one was always killed. A mother with two babies could not survive here.

‘We will have to get rid of the mother's own child, then' said an elder, ‘And replace it with this baby Maw.'

The listening mothers pressed their children to their hearts and felt terror filling them.

But there came a strong murmur of disagreement with this. ‘She may hate the child who has been the cause of death of her own and a Maw brought up by a mother who hates him will certainly destroy us.'

The hunter, Pala, stepped forward. ‘Subtle ones and elders,' he said, ‘Hand this child to me and I will raise him for you with love.'

‘But you are a man,' cried the elders and the subtle ones. ‘You have no milk. What can a man do for a baby? How can a man hunt when he carries a child?'

‘I can do it,' said the beautiful Pala. ‘I will feed this child on the milk of our jungle creatures. Tiger milk and monkey milk, sambhar milk and wild cat milk will be food for him and when he grows older, he will eat the honey of our fierce wild bees and the bitter juices of our trees. He will be the strongest Maw our people have ever had. This little Maw will grow to save our tribe and return it to its former glory.'

‘But how will you hunt, great Pala?' asked the elders. ‘For we need your skills to feed our people.'

‘I will carry him on my back when I hunt, till he learns to walk. Give me this child and I will create a Maw for you.'

The mothers listened, tense with hope while the elders and the subtle ones became silent with thought.

Then, at last, one said, ‘It is good. Our new Maw will be nourished with the milk of panthers.' No one listened any more to the man who, when he was seven, had heard it said that a motherless Maw would one day destroy the tribe.

‘He will learn the ways of the jungle from our great hero, Pala.' ‘He will become courageous like Pala.' ‘He will become the greatest hunter our tribe has ever had, because our glorious Pala is his tutor.' ‘He will be able to read the minds of Animals, and know how to instruct them before any other of our children, because Pala will be teaching him.' The subtle ones, the elders, the people and the mothers all began to laugh and feel happy because even though their queen was dead, they were going to have a Maw.

The day came when the last of the meat was eaten and it was time for Pala and the Animals to return to the hunt.

‘He will not be able to take the child,' the elders and the subtle ones whispered one to another.

‘He will soon see that a man cannot hunt with a baby tied to his back,' murmured the mothers.

Pala heard them, but did not care. He felt confident as he tied the baby to his back and set off with the pack of Animals.

After that, the tribe waited every day for the return of the great hunter, and sometimes they became afraid, feeling sure that, hampered with the child, the hunter had been killed by some wild creature, or, his attention diverted, had fallen from a high tree and died. ‘And we shall have lost our only Maw as well,' they told each other, sadly. ‘And without a hunter or a Maw we cannot survive.'

So when, two weeks later, Pala returned not only with meat, but also with the child still safely strapped against his back, there was great celebration, and the people took out their most sacred instruments to play a music that celebrated the return of heroes. Pala played the vertebrae of the baby Maw's father, and the sound came out pure and
clean and strong as though he had not, after all, been corrupted by the seed of the Coarseones.

‘One day, little Maw, you will learn to play your father's bone,' Pala whispered, as he laid down the honed and polished backbone. ‘Though your ancestor's bones will never go inside your throat, for you are the Maw and must remain unblemished, you will be able to take this fine ancestral instrument to your lips and play on it.' The baby stirred and let out a murmuring sound as though it understood the words.

In the months that followed, Animals tracked down lactating jungle creatures, and Pala then meshed, tied and slung them. Lying his body on top of theirs, he held them down while the baby suckled. Usually it was buck, sambhar, jackal, wild dog and forest pigs, but he kept his promise to the tribe and four times the child sucked from a panther and once, though the moment was brief, from a female tiger. The baby would take on the smell of the creature that fed him for hours after. Tiger lingered in the baby's hair from where the child had snuggled among the cubs so that all night long Pala kept sniffing the little head and remembering that wild moment when he had got the tigress tied and seen his baby grasp the tigress nipple with its lips. This is a great moment in our history, he thought, for there can be no other child who has drunk tiger milk like our little Maw.

All the same it was a relief to Pala when the child became old enough to be weaned. The capturing and the keeping down of all the furious female creatures was taking too much of his time and energy. He was hardly able to free himself from feeding little Maw to hunt for meat for the rest of the tribe.

Each time Pala returned to the tribe, the people would enthusiastically snatch Maw from him and pass him, hand to hand, cuddling and kissing him, squashing insects
sweetened with wild honey into his greedy mouth and saying, ‘How big our little king has grown and how much he looks like his pure and suitable mother.'

When Maw was two years old, he started to kick and wriggle in the basket on Pala's back. ‘I want out, Pala. I want to walk,' he would demand and even when Pala told him, ‘Hush my darling or the piglet will hear us and we'll have no supper' the rowdy child would not keep quiet. ‘I want to hunt it too, Pala. Let me out.'

‘Stay still, you little maggot,' Pala warned him. ‘Stay still or Pala will smack you hard.' Maw only laughed. Pala had never hurt him. He could not imagine such a thing happening.

Pala not only cared for Maw and fed and carried him, but he also taught him all the things a man of the tribe needed to know as well as all its wisdom.

‘Listen while I tell you the story of the Tikki,' he said, and took the child onto his lap. ‘After the people of the tribe had shot a spark from the Ama and set her alive they put the tiny Tikki into the penis cover of the most venerable of the elders.'

‘How could she fit?' asked Maw.

‘They made the cover a little larger for her. She grew in there for the first ten months.'

‘I want a penis cover,' said Maw.

‘You are not old enough yet. Now do you want me to go on?'

‘Yes,' said Maw.

‘You will be safe now,' the people told the little Tikki. ‘Because the penis cover is so precious that nothing wicked can fit inside as well.'

‘What is wicked?' asked Maw.

‘Hush. You said you would not shout.'

‘I forgot. What is it, though?'