Children of the Wolf (2 page)

Mr. Welles stroked his beard again. He was silent for a long time, the same silence that made all the younger children nervous. Abruptly he broke the silence. “Near the village?” he asked.

Chunarem was startled and jumped. Then he said, “About three miles away, sir. Through the forest. I saw it with the others when we went to gather firewood. Ordinarily the women and children would do such a thing, but there have been many wolves….” His voice trailed off, indicating what the many wolves would do with village women and their infants. Then, almost apologetically, he added, “It was my wife,
sahib
, who begged me to come to you, and the others agreed.”

I had been sitting quietly in the corner through all this, taking notes in my book. I tried to be as quiet as possible, but at that very moment my pen slipped, squealing across the page and reminding Mr. Welles of my presence.

“Mohandas!” he barked. I stood up, and he sent me from the room. My wooden slippers made a great deal of noise on the den floor, but I was too proud and too afraid to slip them off. I was also too proud and too afraid to listen at the door, and so heard no more, but I could guess the rest.

The ghost worshipers were a silly people. They believed that a
manush-bagha
can go through the forest on trackless feet and come near a village at dusk to scream horribly. Since I now believed in the Christian god, as did we all at The Home, I was not afraid of such a ghost. And even if I was, of what consequence was it? The
manush-bagha
was in Godamuri, and I was in the outskirts of Midnapore, in a Christian orphanage where crosses guarded the doorposts of the brushwood fence so such a being could not enter.

An hour later, when the villager Chunarem had gone back to Godamuri, Mr. Welles called Rama and me into his study. His lady wife was there as well.

Usually I loved that study. It smelled of pipe smoke and leather. It had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined with volumes whose bindings were well-worn. As a reward, when one of us did especially well at lessons, Mr. Welles would let us borrow a book. The lowest three shelves held the ones we were allowed to read. So far I had read my way through
Pilgrim’s Progress
,
The Water Babies
, and
A Christmas Carol
. I was just beginning
The Boy’s King Arthur
, and I much admired the pictures, especially the one of Sir Launcelot as the wild man in the woods.

This time, however, I was not to be so happy, as Mr. Welles came right to the point without silences or prayers or a waterfall of words.

“I must go in the morning to Godamuri and see for myself what frightens the villagers so. They say it is a ghost, but we good Christians do not believe in them, do we?” He shook his head to offer us the answer.

Dutifully, first Rama and then I answered him back, head shake for head shake, though surely he knew that we Indians took that motion to mean either yes or no. And suddenly I was remembering the ghosts of Christmas past and present in the book I had just read. Was Mr. Dickens, I wondered, not a Christian man? Or perhaps those were particularly Christian ghosts and the ones we at The Home did not believe in were Hindu. Often I had such confusing thoughts, though Rama never did. He shook his head, but it meant that, ghosts or not, he was not afraid. To be afraid ahead of time one needs imagination.

“I want you two boys, who are the oldest in The Home and therefore almost of an age to leave us, to accompany me. The trip will take two nights and three days, although we will be gone from The Home much longer than that. I want the natives to see that two of their own kind—boys—are not afraid of so-called ghosts.” He stroked his beard yet another time. “Be ready in the morning. Early.”

We were dismissed, and Rama whispered to me, “But we are not of
their
kind,” meaning the Santals. It was a distinction that meant a lot to him.

As we left, Mr. Welles was turning excitedly to his wife. “This, my dear,” he said, “may at last be the miracle I have waited for so long. The reason that God has sent me to this place.”

And she, in her ever-soft voice, replied, “Are not the children miracle enough, David?” adding as an afterthought, “Those poor boys. You have thoroughly frightened them, you know.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

In the hall I said to Rama, “Are we thoroughly frightened?”

“Of course not,” he said. He squared his shoulders and smiled. “
Santals
are frightened, but we are not Santals.” His smile grew broader under the beginnings of a mustache. He touched the mustache, preening the way he did each morning when he looked into the bit of mirror he had taken from Cook. “
I
am not frightened.”

Not to be outdone or put in the same category as the wretched Santal villagers, I answered, “I am the same.” It was a no-answer reply, but sufficient for Rama.

And that was how we were committed to courage on the road to Godamuri.

W
E LEFT THE NEAT
rice swamps near our orphanage early the next morning and traveled quickly into the barren countryside that was crisscrossed with fast-flowing rivers. Herons stalked the shorelines, searching for frogs, and I longed to watch them. All too soon we came into the sal jungle, where I had never been before, the deep jungle that is spread with a dense canopy of leaves and vines.

Since Mr. Welles had traveled before to Godamuri, there was a path of sorts already cut through this part of the jungle. But the jungle is a living, breathing entity; it is never still. Already creepers had rewoven most of the barriers from tree to tree.

I walked at the head of the bullock and tickled him under the chin to encourage him to pull the cart that was heavy with our supplies. He was lazy and loved the luxury of standing still, but he loved a chin tickle even more. Rama and the two carters swung axes against the new-grown foliage in our way. Mr. Welles would occasionally call out instructions from the cart, where he rode.

So thick with sal trees was this particular part of the jungle that it was shady even during the day. The sun might be overhead, but we were rarely able to see it through the green filtered light, until a single ray of sunshine would suddenly come through a rip in the fabric of leaves, reminding us that there was another world beyond and above the jungle. Dark as it was, it was not altogether gloomy, for the air was filled with the cries of rhesus monkeys and the steady
racheta-racheta
of the empty kerosene can fixed under the cart, with a protruding stick hitting against the wheels. The jungle was not even particularly frightening, for the noise of the stick did its job and scared away most of the wild beasts. And when one time we heard the cough of a big cat nearby and then, suddenly ahead of us, saw a tiger with her cubs, I reached into the cart behind Mr. Welles for the two tabor drums. Rama and I pounded on them, and the other men shouted, sending wave upon wave of noise into the air. The tiger vanished back into the black door of her cave, a bright red flash of meat in her mouth, and the cubs followed.

Often we saw peacocks perched on viny swings. And once, when we had stopped for lunch in one of the infrequent open places in the sal, Mr. Welles said to me, “Look carefully. Over there, Mohandas.”

I looked and saw a herd of reddish-brown deer.

“They are Axis deer.
Axis axis
,” Mr. Welles said. “Or as you natives call them, chital.”

No sooner had he named them than they sprang up and ran off, leaving dust as thick as smoke behind.

“Chital,” I repeated to myself as the cart started up once again and the sound of the stick against the wheels hid the sound of my mouthings. “Axis deer.
Axis axis
.” For I was determined not to lose this gift of names. Later I would write it down in my book and so make it mine forever.

At night we slept under the cart, the four of us, and Mr. Welles slept in the cart. We kept a fire going at all times, encircling us, not for warmth but for protection against the night creatures of the jungle. One of the carters played a
narh
, and each evening before we settled down he would pull haunting music from the flute, a sound that seemed as much a part of the forest as the animal calls.

We all took turns with the fire, even Mr. Welles. He would dismount from the cart, where he slept guarding the medicine chest and the Bibles and the pamphlets about cleanliness and Christ.

And right after the playing of the
narh
, before we slept for the first round of the night, Mr. Welles would fire a shot from his big gun out past the fire. I wondered briefly out loud if he were aiming at ghosts, such things being ever present in my thoughts. But Rama, who had been on one or two trips before, said no.

“It is part of his religion, I think,” said Rama, “for he calls on his god right before he pulls the trigger.”

“
Our
god,” I reminded him.

He gave that shake of the head somewhere between yes and no, and smiled, then moved away from me to the company of the two men.

I wrote all these things down in my book, which I kept under the drum in the cart. Once I caught Mr. Welles looking in my book. My scribblings must have puzzled him. It seemed for a moment as if he were going to ask me about them. After all, he had given me the book to improve my English writing, and my ciphers were not exactly what he had in mind. But then he did not ask, after all; he just stroked his beard and looked off into the distance at a ray of sunlight that had pierced the tight green lacings of sal.

It took two nights and three days to get to Godamuri, and all the time Mr. Welles pointed out the jungle to me. Some things he had learned from the Santal villagers in exchange for teaching them about the god he knew: how to clap hands in such a way as to call up the red jungle fowl, or how to tell time by watching the sal leaf wither. Other things he knew from books, such as the Latin names of the forest animals. He named in three different tongues each bird and creature we saw, and once he said to me, “A man has power over his world if he can name all the things in it, Mohandas. Just that way God has control over the world He made.”

Mr. Welles never spoke in this way to Rama. But I do not think that Rama minded. He was always in front of the cart with the men, laughing and singing as they forced their sharp blades up and through the tangles of vines.

Two nights and three days—and not once did we talk about the reason for this particular trip, about the
manush-bagha
that screamed outside of Godamuri. But the nearer we got to its dwelling place, the more I could see it in the eye of my mind. By the time we had reached the outskirts of Godamuri, the
manush-bagha
I feared was as tall as Mr. Welles and laughed as it gnawed on Christian bones. I dreamed of it by day and night. And though I was too afraid of it to say its name aloud and so call it to me, anagrams of its name decorated the pages of my book.
Sham-bangs
, I called it. Or
bagman-hush
. A poor kind of magic.

The men of Godamuri rushed out to greet us through the green clumps of bamboo that hid the village. They had been warned of our arrival first by Chunarem the day before, and then by a charcoal burner, an old Santal man who lived a little way into the jungle. He had seen smoke from our second night’s fire and had hurried to the village, shouting his discovery. Visitors were a rarity in Godamuri. The people of the village often went out to the regional
hâts
, the fairs, to sell things, but foreigners rarely came in.

The men washed our feet, which embarrassed me, but Rama whispered that the Santals do it to all strangers. And Mr. Welles reminded us that Christ himself washed the feet of his apostles. So I submitted to the custom but, I am afraid, with rather bad grace. Besides, I am extremely ticklish on the bottoms of my feet.

It was quite a processional back to the village itself, along the one main street of packed dirt that threaded between the adobe-and-thatch huts. Rama and the two carters, plus Chunarem and the twenty or so who had come to greet us, went along in front. I hung back near the cart. Then the bullock, suspecting the end of his journey, hurried forward for the first time, and I had to trot to keep up.

The village women, in white saris, with brass pitchers on their hips, came out to greet us. Mr. Welles blessed them all and dismounted from the cart. He lit his pipe. The smoke encircled his head like a halo.

At that, I fell behind the cart and entered the village last of all, following the trail of smoke from Mr. Welles’ pipe, thinking about the
manush-bagha
, and being very afraid.

T
HE OTHERS STAYED UP LATE THAT NIGHT, DRINKING RICE
beer, reciting love poems, and boasting of what they would do to the ghost. Only Mr. Welles and I retired early, he to his prayers and I to a rice straw pallet on the cold floor of Chunarem’s house.

I did everything not to think about the coming morning: sums in my head, the words of hymns, a litany of my chores at The Home, starting with emptying the kitchen garbage and ending with cleaning the compound. I even spoke the names of all the children, their family names and their pet names and the cruel nicknames they each hated as well. But it was no use. All I could think of was the ghost, and, thinking of this, I fell into a troubled sleep.

Rama shook me awake.

“Come,” he said. “It is time.”

We helped with the breakfast—woman’s work at The Home—and then, packing another meal on our backs, we met Mr. Welles at the door of the cowshed. He was rubbing his hands together and looking pleased.

“They have built us a
machan
as I requested,” he said. “We will watch this so-called ghost from there.”

Though I had never been up on a
machan
, still I knew all about them. What boy of my age did not? The
machan
would be high above the place that the
manush-bagha
inhabited. And unlike tigers, ghosts do not climb trees. Yet I did not think it would be high enough, even then, for me to feel safe.

We went out boldly, Mr. Welles, Rama, and I, for it was our duty to show a good face to the Santals, who are but silly, frightened villagers. Chunarem was most reluctant to come, but Mr. Welles insisted that he had to show us the way. The rest of the Santals, even the ones who had boasted so loudly the night before, stayed behind. It was enough, they said, that they had built the
machan
. That had exhausted their courage. They did not want to return and further anger the ghost. This time we did not take the bullock and the cart, but our own carters came; they believed themselves well under the protection of Mr. Welles and his god.