Tikkipala (8 page)

Then Sangita, half blinded with tears and shaking with despair, went into the palace. Throwing herself before her statue of Ganesh, she lit five whole packets of agarbathi, all at once. Placing them in their golden holder she threw herself onto the ground at the deity's feet and began to pray. Outside, she could still hear the shouts and calls of the searching people and see the bobbing of their lamps flickering through the trees.

‘I beg you, Lord Ganesh, to send Anwar back and cancel out my early prayer because I did not mean it when I asked for him to be lost so that his father would suffer.' The statue was almost invisible behind its veil of perfumed smoke. ‘Can you hear me? Are you going to give me my child back?' After all it was this statue that had caused the child to be taken from her, so it must be able to give Anwar back again. But though she sat there for hours, nothing happened.

When dawn came and the agarbathis were reduced to little piles of silver ash, Sangita was still begging the statue, ‘Say something. Do something. Give me a sign. Tell me you are going to give me my baby back.'

Then very slowly the elephant mouth, that made of ivory and gold, opened slightly then closed again as though making a silent request.

Sangita let out a little scream that was half shock and half hope. ‘Is that a sign?' she cried. ‘Have you undone my prayer? Is that what it means?'

The statue became quite still.

‘You are going to send Anwar back, is that what you meant?' Nothing more happened.

Sangita had an idea. Calling a servant, she ordered a cup of milk.

When the man was gone, she held the cup up to the statue's mouth saying, ‘If you drink it I will know for sure that you are going to give me back my son.'

Her hands were shaking so much that the milk went slopping all down the gods fat stomach. For a long time she stood, holding the cup against the place where she thought an elephant's mouth must be, while her heart leapt and hammered in her breast and outside people kept calling, ‘Baby sahib Anwar, baby sahib Anwar.' She kept on waiting, her eyes on the god's face, but there came no expression or movement on it. Nothing happened. She began to weep aloud, letting out noisy howls, tears pouring down her face, her nose running as though she was a child. Her arm started to ache from holding the cup for so long at such an awkward angle. Misery and longing had driven her stupid. The ivory face remained perfectly still. The image was, after all, only a carved ivory statue. Then, just as Sangita was about to toss away the milk and run out to join the people looking for her son, gently the golden mouth pursed and the trunk curled as though hard material had taken on the softness of elephant flesh. Sangita, suppressing a cry of shock, held the cup as steadily as she could against the statue's mouth. With a tiny sipping sound like a kitten lapping, Ganesh started drinking. Sangita laughed aloud as the milk began to vanish into the solid image because now she knew her boy was coming back.

‘Darling god,' she said, when the final drop was gone, ‘Thank you. Oh, thank you.' And she thought that Ganesh bent his head the smallest bit, as though saying ‘Thank you,' too.

She rose at last, her fear gone because she knew that Ganesh was bringing Anwar back to her.

Even when an hour turned into two, then into three, and there was no sign of her child, Sangita did not feel afraid like everybody else, because Ganesh had taken her milk and made her a promise.

All that evening and late into the night, the palace servants, people from the village and the Raja himself searched the woods and jungles, spreading out through the trees, scrambling over rocks and crawling among bushes, hunting for the smallest sign of the missing child while Sangita knelt before Ganesh, burning ever more agarbati sticks and imploring him to hurry and fulfil his promise.

Throughout the next day and night, the people searched, but Anwar was not found. Sangita waited, increasingly worried because her child had had no food, and not eating anything herself because how can a mother eat when her child goes hungry?

By next evening, too, he had not returned.

‘Hurry, hurry,' Sangita shouted to Ganesh. ‘He must be ravenous by now. Don't wait like this.'

It was a week later that the woman who had been sent to find an offering for the Tikki returned to the tribe. She was scratched, bleeding and gasping because she had spent many hours creeping and clinging in the dark, and she was nauseated because of the vile thing she had clutched to her breast. There had been a dozen times when she had nearly dropped it and a dozen other times when she had nearly lost her footing and plunged a thousand feet through the dark.

At first the people were hopeful, seeing that she had brought something that she thought would be suitable for the Tikki, but when the people saw the gift, they began to moan with horror and shrink away.

‘This is a Coarseones' child,' they cried and put their hands across their eyes because they could not bear to look at it. They held their hands across their nose because of the loathsome smell of it.

Now the people understood why the Coarseones had been making such a commotion. This must be the child they had lost, though it surprised the people that the Coarseone showed so much grief. ‘For these Coarseones are not like us,' they said to each other. ‘They do not love their children like we do.' People who allowed children to shout and run and twist their bodies, as the Coarseones' sons had done, could not possible be caring parents,' reasoned the people of the tribe. Even the adult Coarseones behaved like babies, running and screaming and wounding the darkness of the night with swinging lamps. Their own children had died, but the tribe's mothers kept their weeping silent and their bodies still.

‘I thought it might be possible to purify it,' said the woman who had brought the child.

‘But it has had no naming ceremony,' said an elder. ‘We cannot give a nameless sacrifice to the Tikki.'

Another suggested, ‘Let us do this ceremony now.' But as soon as he said it, he knew it was not possible for this child was already too old.

‘Perhaps the Tikki will not object to the child being unnamed,' the elders said. ‘For, without this creature, what else have we got to offer her?'

But the elders continued to be troubled. ‘How can a Coarseone ever be purified?' they cried. ‘Look at the way it twists its body and creases up its face. Look at how its
body is quivering and shaking like a tree rattled by the wind. Look at how it is allowing the water of tears to run down its face although it is no longer a suckling baby but a large and walking child.'

But then the subtle ones came forward saying, ‘Our need is very desperate and great. Perhaps, given time, even though it is unnamed, we will be able to train this child into our still and silent ways, until at last it becomes a suitable gift for the Tikki, for never before has she been given a human child and although a Coarseone, I think it is also human.'

‘The subtle ones are saying something good,' agreed the elders. ‘We will do as they suggest. Have this Coarse child cleansed and prepared. The first thing that is needed is to remove its foul coverings and, after that, the creature must be washed in the juices of our jungle plants.'

The Coarse child screamed, writhed and clung as the people of the tribe ripped its clothes away. It shrieked sounds like, ‘Mama, Mama' and ‘Papa, Papa,' and struck out with its fists when they started scrubbing it. It tried to escape them, ducking and dodging from their grasp. After they had shaved away its hair and eyebrows and smeared its naked body with purifying juices, and bound up its mouth with a weaving of bark and hair so that it could not shout aloud, they tied the creature with a ligament to stop it from running away.

At first the people thought that the Coarseones would go away quickly, realising that their child was lost forever, but even many days later when the Coarse child was starting to be subdued and the people felt that their taming methods might have some chance of success, still the clamour rose from the Coarseones palace and still they heard the cries of ‘Anwar, Anwar, where are you?'

When that day and next brought no child, Sangita could not understand it. How could the Lord Ganesh fail to keep his promise? It was as though he was no better than her husband the Raja, and the Lord Rama.

Day after day Sangita waited, first filled with hope and then, as time passed, worry gradually grew into despair until her prayers to Ganesh went from pleading to anger. ‘I gave you milk and you drank it. You accepted my gift, now fulfil your promise.' But still no Anwar.

In the third week, Sangita was suddenly seized with a new and terrible fear. This loss of Anwar was nothing to do with her regretted prayer but she was being punished for the lie she had told.

She had expected the iron to burn her. It should have done so and, sometimes since, she had feared being punished in some other way. For she had sworn she was innocent, though when Paul had kissed her, a fainting bliss that was as strong as the terror she now felt, but that did not hurt at all, had taken hold of her. All this time later she could still summon up the sensation of his mouth against hers and the way her lips had tingled as though they had just encountered hot chillies and lime juice. And later, when she had been returned to the palace and, in the night, lay under the striving body of her husband, she would purposely summon up the feeling of Paul's hands against her skin and his mouth on hers. Otherwise she could not have endured the Raja's physical intrusions. Staring up, past her husband's body, at the ghekko studded ceiling and the slowly turning fan, her mind transformed the Raja's body into Paul's, and his struggling grunts into Paul's imagined utterances of love. Sangita had even pretended she could feel, against her skin, Paul stroking her with palms hardened by his tennis racquet. Those sharp small calluses that had pressed her shoulders when he kissed her were in the very places where she had expected to be burnt from the red hot iron.

Being burnt with a hot iron was not painful enough to punish her for the joy she had experienced with a man who was not her husband, and the way in which later she had protested her innocence, Ganesh had decided. Taking her child away was the only thing severe enough for what she had done.

She had been dreadfully afraid before she gripped the red hot iron, because she had not expected Ganesh to protect her even though she had begged him passionately inside her heart. Now she opened her hands and gazed at her palms, longing to see long delayed blisters, because that would show she had been punished already and therefore there was no need to punish her further. But her skin remained unblemished.

In the days, then weeks that followed, the Raja no longer searched the hillsides for minerals and crystals, but for his lost child. He spent all day organising gangs of searchers, chivvying the policemen and the soldiers he had employed. He hired forest rangers and sent them to check every inch of jungle. Sometimes he would go with them and suddenly stop dead. Raising his forefinger to silence those accompanying him, he would stand listening, thinking for a moment that he heard his lost son's voice.

‘There is only one answer,' he said at last. ‘These people of the village are all thags as we know and they have kidnapped my child and are holding him for ransom.' He went down into the village himself and, throwing himself on the ground before his embarrassed tenants, implored them to return Anwar.

He waited for two days, at first sure that his child would soon be back now that they knew he was aware of their crime, but eventually, when he got no response, he instructed the police, ‘Go into the homes of the thags and beat up the people there. Torture them till they give me back my child.'

The police toiled for a fortnight and the thagee village was filled, day and night, with shrieks and weeping, but they found no sign of Anwar, nor got from any information as to where he might be.

‘We have had no success, Lord,' the policemen said, coming back to the palace. ‘We have beaten the hell out of the fellows and have learnt nothing. We have even delivered whackings to the children and the women, but now we think this is the wrong track and that your child is somewhere else.'

‘Rubbish, beat harder,' cried the Raja at first. ‘Perhaps they have inadvertently killed Prince Anwar in their kidnap attempt and this is why they refuse to speak.'

At last, when all the efforts of the police were still met with hopeless silence, or desperate lies, even the Raja had to admit that they were wasting time with the thags. ‘We must think of something else'. The high jungle was the only place left that had not been searched because no one could get there.

In spite of the protests of geologists to whom he had gone for advice, that there was no way a four year old child could have got up to the high jungle, when even experts like themselves were unable to climb the impossible rocks, he sent word to Britain and imported mountaineers but even the most expert of them could find no way to get up to the high jungle. ‘And even suppose we manage it, Raja sir, how can a couple of mountaineers search hundreds of miles of primeval forest for a small child?' asked the men.

An English explorer was employed for a while and tried to reach the high jungle in his flying machine but he crashed before he was half way up. All these experiments failed utterly, until the hillside became scattered with the wrecks of broken machines, fallen ropes, ladders and the corpses of men.

The Raja began spending hours at the stable after his efforts to find a mechanical way to the high jungle failed. He went at first to find comfort, because the pony was the only thing now linking him to his beloved son. But after a while, the idea came to him that this was the only creature who knew what had happened to Anwar. He started staring into the eyes of the pony pleading, ‘Tell me, tell me. What did you do with him?' and when the pony struggled to avoid his grip, grabbed its ears and shouted, ‘Speak to me, horse. Speak to me.' Eventually the silent and exasperated animal bit him on the nose and the Raja was forced to abandon this way of getting information.