Tikkipala (10 page)

The servants looked away and felt hot with embarrassment because the Ranee's clothes had revealed parts of her body that were immodest. ‘Please come with us,' they called, with their gaze fixed in the opposite direction. ‘Because the Raja has ordered us to return you to the palace.'

She did not reply.

The servants stood around for some time, wondering what to do. But at last, unable to bring themselves to climb the rock and lay hands upon their mistress, they returned to the palace and told the Raja, ‘We could not reach her, Lord.' Then they flinched backwards to avoid the full blast of his fury.

‘I will bring her back myself,' the Raja decided. As he scrambled upwards to where he had last seen her, the realisation of what she was looking for dawned on him and for some reason made him angrier than ever. When, gasping and sweating, he got within earshot of Sangita, he yelled, ‘Now I can see you are a superstitious fool as well as sinful.'

She glanced at him casually, then went on probing into the rocky crevices. The silk of her clothes was torn, her hair was loose and twigs and leaves had caught in it. Her
garment had ridden so high that her thigh was exposed but she did not seem to care or even notice. She said, as though addressing a stranger, ‘Did you want something?'

His fury reached an impossible level because of the scorn in her tone. His face dark with rage, he roared, ‘Why are you still here, you churail? I have forbidden you to live in my palace.'

She flung aside the handful of pebbles she had just found and said casually, ‘I will not leave here without my son.'

‘He is gone. Even a fool like you must see that by now. What four year old could still be alive after all these months?'

Sangita shrugged and threw more stones away. One struck the Raja on the cheek. He wondered if she had done it on purpose.

‘You will have to kill me first if you want me to go from here,' she said. His anger did not seem to be bothering her at all although in the old days she would have cringed from him. ‘Also it is your fault that our child is missing, because you broke your promise to the gods when you did not take me back even though I was not burnt. Now the gods are punishing you,' she added.

And perhaps because he had not slept for so long and because his brain was not working properly, he only stared at her and was unable to think of what to say. He gazed up at her, fingering the fine tips of his lacquered moustache and could not remember if Lord Rama, who had also broken his promise, had been punished for it. His wife, he thought, had changed and not in a nice way. He felt as though he was looking at a new person. Was she always as small as that, and as thin? Were her eyes always ringed with dark as though she had not slept for weeks? Had that fierce look of fury always been in her eyes and he had never noticed it? Had her lips always been
curled in that expression of bitterness? In the end he only said, his tone coming out a little lamer and a little weaker than his intention, ‘I cannot bear to look at you.'

But all the same he could not stop looking at her after he got back to the palace. Hour after hour he would watch through his binoculars, knowing what she was looking for, hoping she would find it though, of course, since he was not a simple peasant, he did not believe the silly superstitions of the village people. He knew as much about geology, and mineral stones, as anyone in India, and there was certainly no stone that lets you find or create children. But all the same, because there was nothing else to give him hope, he peered and peered at his hunting wife till his eyes stung. He despised himself for hoping and for looking, but could not stop. He despised his wife for searching. But he still went on hoping.

It was a week later. Because Sangita had found that crumb of bright blue mineral, she now spent all her time searching under the rock bulge at the foot of the high jungle. But although she spent hour upon hour creeping through the harsh grass, grating her knees on the roughness of rock, and although again and again she came upon some sparkling, brightly coloured piece of mineral, she found nothing at all that could be the Ama stone.

But then, just as she had miserably decided that her husband was right and that there was no such stone, something higher up caught her eye. Not a stone, but some tiny flickering among the rocks above her. It was nothing, she knew. The sun glinting on a leaf or beetle's back. But all the same, because there was nothing else to do, she started to claw her way up to the boulder. At last she got on top of the stone and could see the thing that glittered more clearly, though it was still out of reach. Something like a tiny hammock, about the shape and size of a grape, seemed to be swinging in
the breeze. A little woven thing decorated with sparkling stones. Something that people must have made. This was no random piece of nature. Perhaps, she thought, some clever child from the village had come playing up here and made itself a dolly cradle. Standing on tiptoe on top of the boulder, she began to try to get a foothold in the first part of the smooth rock. She jumped and leapt, trying to snatch the hammock down, grabbing at it as if it was a piece of ripe fruit she was trying to pick. After ten jumps, suddenly it came away with a snap, as though it had been attached quite tightly to the rock, and she had the thing in her hand. She sat down to examine it and felt amazed. The tiny thing, which seemed to have been woven from long human hairs, was decorated with the most minute and finely worked semi precious jewels, a thousand of them strung along the hairs. As she started to open the bag, there came a humming sound as though a beetle or a wild bee was inside. Quickly she put the thing down but as though her touch had woken something inside, the bag began to quiver. Perhaps, thought Sangita, there is a mouse in here. Cautiously she enlarged the opening with her finger and peeped in, then reeled back dazzled. Inside the bag lay a dark blue stone, and at its heart, a red glowing centre. She pulled the stone out, dazed with hope and joy. She knew what it was. She had found the Ama.

The Raja, watching with his binoculars, saw his wife suddenly stop, reach up, seize something from the ground, and then still clutching it, sit down. ‘She is crazy,' he told himself. ‘She probably knows I am looking and that is why she is carrying on like that,' but all the same he felt a surge of hopefulness. But then, even from this great distance, though he could not even see Sangita's expression or hear her voice, there came flashing from her hands a sharp red light.

He rose, entirely suffused with hope.

Sangita held the stone on her open palm and stared at it while the red heart flickered on her face, dazzled her eyes and buzzed against her palm.

‘Where is my child?' she whispered. ‘Where is the life I made?'

Nothing happened. It was like the time she had given milk to Ganesh. Ganesh had drunk in the end, so the stone might become active, too, if she was patient. But after a while, just as she had begun to fear that the servants and her husband were right and the whole thing was a silly superstition, the stone began to shudder.

She let out a small shriek, and clutched the stone before it fell. She closed her fingers over it and held it tight and inside her fist she felt the stone grow hotter. After a while, unable to bear the pain, she opened her palm. At once the stone began to swing round like the needle of a compass until it was whirling and the light radiating from it was so bright that she had to shut her eyes.

Then the stone shot off Sangita's hand and struck her painfully in the stomach. Before she could snatch it, it fell to the ground and the dazzle diminished.

‘Oh, stupid,' said Sangita aloud and bent to retrieve it, where it lay flickering in the dust. She began all over again and the same thing happened a second time and this time inside her body she felt something shiver, as though a life was settling there, and she understood.

Then, as she stood there, smiling, the stone began to get hot and in a moment Sangita could not longer hold it. With a shriek of pain, she hurled it away. For a while she watched as it went spiralling and flashing down the mountainside. Once it struck a rock so hard that a little chip flew off. She heard it tinkling on, as it fell for quite a long time, then it was gone and even the flashing light was hidden somewhere down
among the trees. But Sangita did not mind because the stone had already told her what she wanted to know and she did not need it any more.

She sighed, smiled, and started back. She came down the mountainside carefully, like a pitcher that had been filled to the brim with something very precious and that must not be spilled or broken. She would never need to come up here again, she knew. She would not have to search for the Ama. It did not matter that Ganesh was broken because she did not need him now.

The Raja put down his binoculars and let out a sorrowful groan. For a very short moment he had felt that his child might be found. Of course he had not believed, for a single moment, the silly superstitious stories that the local people told of a magic stone called ‘Ama' but all the same… all the same.

It took Sangita more than an hour to reach the place where her husband sat, sorrowful and once again despairing. She was smiling still. Her slippers smacked loudly on the marble floor. He looked up, scowling, annoyed at having his grief disturbed by the infantile entrance.

‘Husband,' she said. ‘You need not look for Anwar anymore because he is back. He has returned to my womb.'

The Raja sank lower into his chair and let out a sob.

Several weeks after the woman brought the Coarsechild to the tribe, the people, who were always watching out for their Ama and guarding it with their minds and eyes, looked down, and saw a female Coarseone near the sacred shrine.

At first they could not believe that the Coarseone had really found their sacred stone. For a long time they gazed down at her, their breaths held, their hearts pounding. Then, with a great despair they saw the Ama light burn on her face.

‘Perhaps she will put it back,' cried the people of the tribe. ‘She will see, from the swinging bag, that it belongs to someone else.'

But the female did not return the Ama to its swinging bag. After a long period of scrutiny they saw her leap to her feet and, with a scream, hurl the Ama down the rock side. With horror in their hearts, they saw their most precious thing fall flashing through the air then disappear from sight.

‘People must go down at once and look for it,' ordered the elders.

That night the four of the greatest of the subtle ones went down the tunnel, taking with them the sling of diamonds that had been made a thousand years before, for the carrying of the sacred Ama, for it was a sacrilege to touch the stone with naked fingers.

The people were afraid but also hopeful as they waited. After two weeks the subtle ones returned. They looked as though they had been walking in the pits of death. As though they had fallen through the mouth of the volcano. ‘We have looked in every place we could,' they said. ‘We laid our ears to the ground to listen for its singing. But
the Ama is very small and the area is large. Also there are Coarseones roaming there, so we had to search secretly. But we could not find it. Our Ama has gone.'

After that, for a long time, a great despair came upon the people of the tribe. They were even becoming less hopeful about the sacrifice, for the taming and purification of the Coarseones' child was proving to be more difficult that they expected.

By now their hunter was enough recovered from his illness to go and bring meat for them again, but his strength was small and although the Animals managed to surround buck and sambhar several times, he had neither to strength to kill them nor to carry them back to the tribe. He could only bring them small meat, lizards, frogs, beetles, nothing that could possibly please the Tikki. For that they would have to wait till the Coarseones' child had become pure enough. It was the only thing they had to offer now. But perhaps that would never happen, they sometimes feared, for when they gave the child live lizards for its meal, it would not eat them but vomited the struggling reptiles from its mouth. It screamed when the people tried to spit chewed black berries into its eyes to brighten them. It writhed and bellowed when they tried to clean its skin with the stinging leaves of the Puah tree. In the end two women had to hold it down, even when they wanted to spit the pulp of puah fruit into its mouth. ‘This Coarsechild is giving a bad example to our own children,' said the mothers. ‘How can we teach them to behave when they see such violence from another child? All the people of our tribe and our very culture are being polluted by the foul behaviour of this Coarseones' child.'

Several times over the following weeks, then months, the elders decided that there was no point in continuing with the creature, that it would never be still and pure and quiet enough to be offered to the Tikki and that the best thing would be to do away
with it at once. But because the hunter was still unwell, and because they had nothing else, they kept on trying.

‘The time has come to bring Vikram to his prepared nursery,' said the Raja, nine months later.

Sangita was looking joyfully into the face of the new born son but swiftly tucked him against her breast when her husband spoke. She did not answer the Raja and he had to give the order a second time. Talking had been difficult for him ever since his stroke and it made him feel angry and ashamed to have to repeat his question. He tried to subdue his feelings as he asked the question a second time.

She looked up, blinking, as though she had forgotten he was there, or perhaps even forgotten that he existed. He pressed his handkerchief to the paralysed side of his mouth and dabbed the dribble away. Even standing here was hard for him. Ever since he had slipped and fallen, as he searched for his lost Anwar, his right leg had not functioned properly. It was the fall that had brought on the stroke as well. The doctor had told him, ‘Any functions not restored to you after six weeks will be lost permanently.' That had been three months ago. He would never be able to smile or use his right arm again.