Tikkipala (7 page)

‘Mama, Mama' whispered Anwar. ‘Let me go for one little ride on my own. I know I can catch that wild pig now I have learnt tent pegging.'

‘You father said ‘no' darling. Why don't you just enjoy riding round the palace?'

His face went grim and he began to slither from her knee.

‘Anwar, come back. Don't get cross.' She reached out and tried to pull him back. He turned his face away from her and writhed his hand out of her grip.

‘How can I let you go when your father says you mustn't?' she pleaded.

‘I hate you,' he yelled. ‘I thought you loved me and now I know that only Papa loves me.'

‘I love you, Anwar, I love you!' She began to feel like crying.

‘Then why don't you let me go for a little ride on my own? You can see that I can ride properly and that Whitey is a good pony.'

‘No.'

‘Please,' he came sneaking back and started getting back onto her knee. ‘Please darling Mama. I will love you so much if you let me. Nothing can happen, I promise. Papa is being silly. Everybody says that. Even Hari says that.' He could see her resolution weakening. ‘Mama, darling, please.' He snuggled into her lap, clasped her face in his hands and looked with love and pleading into her eyes. ‘Only half an hour. I'll come back after half an hour.'

‘You mustn't tell your father, then. Never tell your father.' She felt something like a sob come rising in her throat. She wished she was not doing this, but could not help herself. And he was sure to be alright. She would never have allowed it if she thought differently. The Raja was obsessed with this child and that was his only reason for forbidding the boy to ride alone. He did not want the boy to be independent and could not bear the thought that Anwar was growing up and one day would not need him.

Anwar flung himself at his mother and began hugging, kissing and laughing. ‘I love you so much, Mama. I love you best in the world. I love you more that Papa, much much more.'

As she held him in her arms, she told herself, the whole damage of the two lost years has been wiped away and this boy is my child now and mine alone.

‘Only half an hour, then. Promise. I will lend you my watch,' she said.

The elders of the tribe had a meeting. A disaster had overtaken their people. All their young males were dying and though their hunter had scoured the upper jungle, hoping to capture young males from another tribe, it was found that they too had succumbed to the disease.

‘We must give an offering to the Tikki,' decided the elders. ‘And in exchange she will put a stop to this sickness.'

So the hunter was sent, with the pack of Animals to catch a sacrifice.

‘Bring back the whitest and most beautiful young buck you can find,' the elders told him. ‘Or even better, the cub of a tiger. For our need is very great and therefore the gift to the Tikki must be magnificent.'

After the hunter was gone, the people of the tribe waited with joy and hope, thinking that soon their troubles would be ended. But four days later the man returned, creeping on his knees and with no gift for the Tikki. He had succumbed to the sickness. Then the people felt despair and did not know what to do.

‘Perhaps we should bring up the Ama,' suggested one elder. ‘With it we may be able to create a new male child for the purpose.'

There came a gasp of horror at this. The Ama, which was also called ‘the stone of life' was kept at the foot of the mountain in a special hammock shrine to protect it from the Tikki. Down there she could not feel it buzzing.

In the days when she was quite small and still sweet, they had kept the stone in the tribal trees, but one day she had grabbed it from where it hung and tried to devour it. The elders and the subtle ones had held her down and got the stone back from behind her teeth, but all the same she had become so ill and weak that they had feared that she would die and by the time they got the stone out, it had started dissolving with the powerful Tikki juices. It was now one third smaller than it had been before the Tikki sucked it.

That had been three hundred years ago and now the Tikki was three hundred times larger. If she bit the stone now, they would never be able to get it away from her, even supposing that there was anyone brave or strong enough to do it. If Tikki found the stone, no one in the tribe could prevent her from devouring it and then they would lose not only their Tikki, but all their chances of creating another one. The Ama was the only thing in the world, said the people of the tribe, that could destroy the Tikki and if she found it, she would use it, for, just as human people desired life and happiness, the Tikki desired death.

‘And also,' protested one of the elders, ‘although we have created Animals and the Tikki herself by using the Ama, we have not yet tried to create a human child and do not even know if it can be done.'

‘We must find another way,' the elders decided. ‘We dare not bring the Ama here.'

Then one of the elders said, ‘This seems to be a sickness of the males so a woman should go and procure a sacrifice for us.'

The tribe was shocked for they had never heard of such a thing, but there seemed no other way, even though the elders objected, ‘Women do not know how to hunt, and they have no weapons.'

But the subtle ones felt less doubtful. ‘Because the Tikki is a female, perhaps a woman will be better able to provide her with what she wants.'

The woman wept silently as the tribe drove her down from the trees, and onto the jungle floor.

‘The Tikki may be lost, or dead, or gone altogether,' she sobbed to herself as she pushed her body through the denseness of the ferns, creepers and thorny vines.

It was possible. Throughout the history of the tribe the Tikki had got lost and the tribe had not known where to look for her. Without her, the tribe suffered sickness and disaster until they managed to recreate her by using subtle tools, resins of enlargement, and the essence part of many plants and creatures. They put into her the crawling of the snake and the scuttling of the beetle. They gave her the appetite of the elephant and the grace of the panther. They planted weather into her so that she could instruct the rain and cause the sun to shine again. They trimmed her with sickness so that she could seal disease from them. They empowered her with the running of water and the growing of plants. She was possessed of the essence of all the things the tribe required for life. And when all the ingredients were put together, the Ama stone was struck and set life to her. Sometimes, if the sacrifice was good enough she would ward death away though the people of the tribe knew that this was a terrible thing for her, and they did not ask it often.

But to create a Tikki was a difficult and unpredictable thing. Sometimes the subtle ones would have to create a thousand failures first and some of these most dangerous, before having the vital single success.

The Tikki was only considered ready when she had been endowed with ferocity and courage, with speed and cunning, with weight and the ability to become lighter than air. At first she had fit into the palm of a man's hand and sometimes, because it made her laugh, they would let her loose like a floating moon. Crickets and frogs would nourish her and then, later, birds and hares. Sometimes a generation of suffering would go by while the tribe listened hopefully, trying to hear among the sounds of the jungle that one which told them that their Tikki now walked upon the ground.

Animals were the result of one failed goddess and when the tribe understood the value of the strange hybrid they had inadvertently created, they made a pack of them. At first the behaviour of Animals was dull and unpredictable, they sometimes even turned on the people of the tribe and attacked them without provocation. But then the subtle ones entered the brains of the Animals with transparent mineral tools and doctored them, giving each a single characteristic; courage, cunning, affection, brilliance, caution. The only shared quality among them was ferocity. A pack like this could achieve almost anything.

As the people of the tribe waited, filled with anxiety, their sufferings were increased by a new clamour from the Coarseones that lived below. These Coarseones had always been a source of misery for the tribe, with their terrible noises and blaring lights, but a few days after the woman went in search of a gift for the Tikki, the noise from below became gigantic. There came ceaseless cries of, ‘Anwar, Anwar, where are you?' and the lights went bobbing about through the lower jungles throughout the whole of the night so that the people of the tribe got no dark at all.

Because Sangita had lent her watch to Anwar, it was only when the syce began to shout and run that real fear, instead of anxiety, took hold. Fear comes rushing like a hurricane going through a jungle. The heart leaps and the throat hurts. Strange tingling things happen to the finger ends. The lungs feel tight and only little breaths are able to emerge. For, with a shock of horror, she had remembered a dreadful prayer she had once made to the elephant-headed god. Perhaps, thought Sangita, Ganesh was now answering Sangita's instantly regretted prayer.

As the voice of the syce was heard, receding and echoing into the distance, calling out, ‘Baba sahib, Baba sahib, come back, come back. Thirty minutes is over,' Sangita ran into the palace and, prostrating herself before her statue, said, ‘I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it. I pray you now to bring Anwar back.'

The syce scrambled up, over the rocks, till he reached the lower jungle. He was full of panic because he had disobeyed the Raja's orders and allowed little prince Anwar to ride on his own and was desperate to find the boy before the Raja came home and discovered what he had done. Sometimes he shouted out and sometimes stopped to listen, but the only returning sounds were echoes of his own voice, the scuttle of wild animals and the rattle of startled birds. As he climbed and the trees became denser and higher, his fear increased. He had heard the local people say, ‘The evil is higher,' and though no one seemed to know exactly what it meant, the village people always refused to go up here, as though the place was haunted with evil spirits or occupied by a dangerous deity. And also there were fierce wild animals here. Only a year before, the Raja had shot a tiger in this very place.

At first, when Hari heard the creaking munching sounds, he hardly dared to go on, feeling sure that he was just about to encounter a wild tiger that was in the process of
devouring the little boy and his pony. But when Hari at last got up the courage to peep through the bushes, he saw Whitey grazing peacefully. The sounds Hari had heard were the pony's teeth ripping grass, the clang of bit and stirrup and the stirring of leather, for the pony still wore its saddle and bridle. The syce was filled with instant relief. The little prince must have dismounted, was lying asleep beside his pony, and that was why he had not responded to the syce's cries. He even might have fallen and was lying injured, in which case the syce would get him back down the mountain, and to the palace as quickly as he could.

The pony looked up and neighed a welcome as Hari approached, but though Hari looked all around, there was no sign at all of Anwar. Maybe the little prince had got off and was wandering nearby, thought Hari. He felt sure that the child had not been snatched off the pony's back by a wild animal, for there were no signs of a struggle and the saddlery was unbroken. Also the pony would not be so calm if it had recently encountered a tiger or a panther. At any rate, thought Hari with relief, the pony was found and the little boy would be found too, at any moment.

He began to search, his heart leaping with fright every time he heard a sudden sound that might be some ferocious jungle animal, and expecting at any moment to come upon the prince. But after a long time, there was still no sign of the little lord.

‘Baby Sahib Anwar, Baby Sahib Anwar,' cried the syce over and over, shouting loudly because it is well known that wild animals run away from the sound of the human voice. As the syce began to dash from this side to that, his heart was not only beating fast from fear of tigers, but because much time had now passed and he could not see little lord Anwar anywhere. After a while, trembling and panting, he had to stop running because he did not know where, in this vast jungle, to go looking next.

At last he came back to where the pony was still quietly cropping. The sun would soon set, he needed help. He mounted the little pony and, with his feet trailing the ground, forced it to gallop back down to the palace, calling for Anwar all the time. At each turn he hoped that the little prince would come leaping out, crying, ‘I was hiding from you, Hari.' Every few minutes he would think he heard the sound of Anwar's voice, but each time it turned out only to be the scream of a peacock, or the crowing of a jungle fowl. The child seemed to have vanished utterly, as though by magic. Perhaps, thought Hari, that is what had happened. Anwar had been taken by magic, for there seemed no other way he could have disappeared so utterly. The local people were forever talking of the evil magic that lurked in these jungles. ‘And high up is the place where the great white Tikki, stealer and eater of children, lives,' the old woman who came up with the milk, had said. The memory of her croaking words made the hairs on the back of Hari's neck tingle and after that, instead of tiger noises, he thought he heard the Tikki. Pressing his heels into the pony's side, he urged it on, trying to make it go even faster.

Everyone was gathered, waiting expectant and hopeful, as Hari arrived at the palace gates on his lathered panting pony, but they let out cries and groans of horror when they saw he was alone. Although the sun was about to set, the Raja ordered everyone to go out and start looking for Anwar at once.

Sangita started crying when she saw the syce. She had felt so sure, when she heard the sounds of Whitey's cantering hooves on the road, that this was Anwar returning.

All that evening and late into the night the people searched and kept on calling. The lower jungle bobbed and sparkled with the light from hurricane lamps. People ran and
called and shouted and implored, but even by midnight there was no sign of the little prince.