Tikkipala (19 page)

‘There is the palace,' said the bullock cart driver, shaking his stick in the direction of a crumbling dark building silhouetted against an impossible high mountain.

The place still stood, though her father had been right and it looked very different from the marble home of his childhood description. It was slimed with green mould and pillars had collapsed completely. Those that still stood were so muffled and
wound in jungle creepers that they were invisible. There was a hole in the roof and in and out of it wild birds were flying. The once lovely gardens now consisted of ugly weeds, toppled fountains and vanished walkways.

Devi scrambled off her perch on a forty gallon drum and went up the steps. She entered cautiously in case things collapsed on her, while Khan stood by the cart shouting warnings. There came a scuttling and a whirring of wings as sparrows and pigeons flapped up to the ceilings in alarm. The marble floor slabs of green, black and red were cocked and tilted with tree roots. Spindly shrubs sprouted from the cracks.

Devi stared at the desolation and felt a little dismayed while outside Khan kept up a keening moan that is usually only heard at the most tragic of occasions.

They had brought camping things to start with and that night Devi laid down her sleeping bag on the veranda.

Khan said that though he would lie down he would not sleep for a moment, he would be so terrified.

It was a pitch black night, no moon, so that the mountains and the sky seemed one great dark infinity, stung only with the wink of fire flies and the glow of stars. Far, far below, if she turned her head, she could see the faint glow of light coming from the thag village. She put her hands under her head, looked up into the forever sky until mosquitoes began to fly with a tiny screaming and she was forced to pull her sheet over her face. Through the cloth she could still smell the ancient house and beyond it the jungle waft of rich earth, animal, jungle flower and the deep moist smell of things growing and rotting. There came unfamiliar noises, a crackling crunch as though some animal moved around stealthily. Probably a dog though it could be a panther. Cicadas. A little wind clattering the hard large leaves of the tree in the yard. A creaking of a charpoy that must be Khan, sleepless with fear and discomfort. And
beyond, the sounds of the jungle above that she thought of as the Doorway to Heaven because her father had told her that most of the trees were Deodhar. Half asleep Devi lay listening to the trilling, whooping, booming, trickling, roaring. There was a throbbing like the warm beating of a hugged heart and the soft whoosh of water like someone breathing. Then another sound in which, although it was so far away, seemed like fear. Some sad and frantic young creature, a calf or deer calling out for its mother, and from another place the desperate sound of mother responding. For half an hour Devi lay listening, all her attention on this sound, wondering what could be causing a mother animal and her young one to be separated for so long, wishing that the two would be reunited. Perhaps the baby had fallen into a swamp, she thought, and was slowly sinking. Or had got caught in a trap. But why was the mother not near it? Could a tiger or a panther have made off with the young one? Surely it would be dead by now if that was the case. The most likely thing, she thought, was that people had captured the baby and its mother and were keeping them apart, but she had been told that no one lived in the high up jungles. You could not even get there, she had been told. There was a barren bulge of rock, like a gigantic forehead, that made it impassable for any but the most skilful mountaineer. But all the same she remembered the stories her ayah had told her when she was little.

Up there in the jungle, the ayah said, there was a Shaktee and there were people living there who worshipped her and fed her sacrifices. Perhaps that, said the ayah, is where your great uncle Anwar went on his little white pony. If he was not eaten by the tigers then he was captured by the tribals and given to the Shakti.

‘Don't fill the child's head with these stories, Ayah,' the Raja had reprimanded. ‘You know nothing about…'

‘I know everything about it, Lord,' said Ayah firmly. ‘To this day the people talk about how little Anwar Prince was lost. Many people said that the Shakti ate all the meat off Anwar then sucked his bones clean and made them into music instruments.'

‘Stop that at once,' said the Raja with a shudder.

‘What is a Shakti?' asked Devi.

‘An aspect of the goddess Kali. The female principle. Energy,' said the Raja.

Now Devi lay staring into the enigmatic tingling hills, her happiness ebbing because the cry she had heard sounded so sad. Of course it could not have been her captured great uncle. He would not still be crying after all these years. Or could he? In the middle of the dark and jungle night anything seemed possible.

She was considering getting up and going to the edge of the estate to hear better when there came a short shriek and the young creature's crying stopped abruptly. The mother calls went on for a while longer then they fell silent too.

Devi fell asleep at last and dreamt of a great goddess, snatching up a little prince from the back of his pony and biting off his head as an owl bites off the head of a grasshopper.

In the days that followed, Devi climbed the nearby hill flanks for most of the day, returning sweating and dusty, bringing back boxes and sack loads of minerals and stones. Squatting in the wrecked dining hall, she would unearth them carefully, calling to Khan to come and see, holding out with a hand that often trembled with joy, some little chipped bit of stone or pebble. ‘Just wait till I get back and write it up.'

The people of the village were thags, followers of the goddess Kali, and from time immemorial they had derived their living from waylaying travellers, luring them to
lift their throats in song, then strangling them and stealing all their property. In the old days it had been easy to capture the rich who passed by on horseback, on foot or in wagons. But a few years earlier a new road had been built and these days, not only did very few people use the old road and even fewer walk or ride, but the new road was so thronged with traffic, including lorries driven by armed and stalwart drivers, that lately the thags had made hardly any living at all. For a time they had tried blocking the old road with felled trees, forcing the very occasional cars to stop and then getting the occupiers' valuables. But it was not the same. For one thing there was no point in killing and burying the occupants of the car and thus hiding the evidence if there was no way of getting rid of the car itself. In the pre-car days, although travellers would fail to arrive at their destination, no one ever found out what had happened to them and the existence of the thags had not even been suspected. But once the roads began to be littered with empty cars, the police would very likely be able to put two and two together and find them. Also timber companies had started felling the roadside trees and carting the wood away. ‘How shall we survive if you take away our livings?' the thags had complained to the tree fellers. ‘Now the nearest trees are half a mile away and how are we to cart these to the road?'

But the timber men were unsympathetic. ‘You are just a lot of thieves and don't deserve consideration. Look at us, how we toil all day even in the blazing heat. You should try for proper work and not live from stealing.'

Even when the thags cried, ‘But sirs, this is our god given dharma. How are we to change our dharma when it is against the wish of the goddess Kali?' But the timber men only laughed.

The thags had been hopeful at first when they had heard that the Raja's daughter was coming to live in the palace. ‘She will undoubtedly arrive dressed in jewels and this will keep us going for some time.'

But the bullock cart driver, who had been employed by the Raja, warned them, ‘Her father says he will bring on an army of soldiers to beat us with lathis and to burn our homes if we touch hand on her and also he is saying that she is a person who goes wearing only khadi and no jewels at all, even though she is daughter of the Raja.'

Disappointed, the thags had turned back to their dusty and humiliating fields, continued the struggle of trying to get enough growing to feed themselves and their children, and stopping the occasional motor car, though often these yielded little more than a few rupees.

So when Rani Devi's car came free-wheeling into the village, a man in uniform in the driving seat, and came to a halt in the centre, the villagers ran to gather round it filled with hope because perhaps the goddess Kali might be smiling on them once again.

Khan had been filled with apprehension at the idea of going to the thag village but Devi had insisted. ‘For otherwise we are stuck here forever, and you wouldn't like that would you?'

No, Khan would not. After the car came to a halt in the village centre he sat on for some time, trying to pluck up the courage to open the door while an ever increasing crowd of people gathered round. The statue of a pitch black goddess, her hanging tongue glistening with blood and with a necklace of skulls round her neck, loomed over the car and blocked the horizon. Kali shuddered.

The car began to rock as the crowd pressed tightly round it. Kali thought that the children now fiddling at the headlights looked like miniature bandits. The adults that
were clawing at the bonnet were definitely fully fledged villains but the car could go no further. He was trapped here.

People pressed round tightly, scarred faces grinning evilly at him through the window. Their teeth, where they had them, were scarlet with paan. And round their waists hung belts slung with guns, knives and pistols. Even the women were draped with rusted armoury. Some of the little children were holding guns too. Khan felt they were sure to be loaded.

Even when villagers began asking, ‘What is your problem, sir? Can we assist you?' the words sounded sinister and as though they meant something else. He wound the window down two inches and in a choking voice, muttered, ‘Is there an engineer here who knows how to repair this car?'

‘Oh, yes, sir,' cried the most wicked looking of them all, pushing his way through the mob. His eyes were wild and squinting, his hair was a thick and tangled mass, his face was pockmarked and the collection of rusty pistols slung from his waist clattered menacingly. ‘I am an expert in these matters,' he said.

Khan did not feel comforted in the least. The village, which, apart from the statue of the goddess Kali, consisted of nothing but a group of dreary dusty huts, could not possibly contain the necessary machinery required to repair a luxury car, let alone provide the spare parts.

‘Fear not, dear sir,' cried the bandit, seeing Khan's frown of doubt. ‘You please wait here and while women serve you tea and nourishment, I will go to fetch these things you need.' He spoke as though there was a large car repair shop just round the corner, whereas Khan knew that there was not a village, let alone a town for at least fifty miles.

‘It will take some time, sir,' said the engineer with smiling nods. ‘Perhaps even one whole day.'

Khan hung about the tea shop all day long, feeling increasingly despairing.

The mechanic and his brother had to wait at the road side for five hours till the correct car came along. They stopped the car by stretching their steel cable, filched from the electricity system, across the road. The driver, a fat business man, shouted with fury at first, then turned to pleading and the crowd of women and children crushed in front and back, wept and implored as the mechanic, brandishing his rifle, removed their jewels, watches and cash. He even found a wrist watch stowed away in the knickers of the year old female child. And all the while he was doing his pilfering of valuables, his brother was niftily and secretly managing to remove the necessary parts from the engine.

They then went behind some rocks and changed their clothes while from the car came the hopeless sounds of attempted starts, accompanied by the howls of children and the raging cries of women. To the rich, all poor people look alike, and, confident they would not be recognised, the thags returned to the car that had been deprived of vital parts. The faces of the stranded family crumpled with hope at the sight of the arriving and altered bandits who asked, ‘Sahibs and memsahibs, you are looking as though you are having some kind of trouble. May we be of help to you?'

The thag help was eagerly accepted. ‘We were stopped by bandits and now our car will not start again,' mourned the man.

The two thags, murmuring things like, ‘This is disgraceful. What a terrible world we are living in these days, when such evil people are roaming around,' and ‘Fancy doing such things to respectable people like your good selves and with women and children
suffering also,' and ‘These bandit persons should have their heads cut off as punishment for their wicked deeds,' opened up the engine and pretended to peer inside. After a while they told the family, with false amazement, ‘But you have no carburettor and it is a great surprise that you have managed to get so far.'

‘Can you do something?' begged the family.

‘We will go and find the necessary part for you,' said the thags. ‘But this will take some time. Perhaps all night.' Luck seemed to be back with them again. Perhaps the goddess Kali was once more smiling on them. After they had fitted up Khan's car, perhaps they would be able to capture another car to replace the stolen carburettor and then another to serve that one, and so on. The people of the village had had a hard time for many years, but perhaps something good was going to happen to them now.

With the cries of gratitude from the stranded man and his family ringing in their ears, the thag mechanics returned to where Khan waited.

Khan could hardly believe it when the thag mechanics arrived at last with the oily carburettor.

‘We may be a small place and also poor people,' the thag mechanic told Khan smugly as he wiped his oily hands on a rag, having successfully installed the part. ‘But we have good stocks of all merchandise here. Anything you or the lady Raja are requiring, please let us know and we will acquire it for you.'