The Faith of Ashish (14 page)

Latha found Sethu coming up the path behind the huts and rushed over to report Ashish's words. "It's a blessing that my Ashish came by when he did," Latha said. "Imagine what that horrible boy might have done to your Devi!"

Sethu's face grew hard. "It is no concern of yours. And tell your nosy son to stay out of our hut."

Latha stared at her friend. "You mean you
knew?"

"It is not your concern." Sethu tried to push her way past, but Latha refused to let her go.

"Devi is hardly more than a child! How could you give that sweet girl over to so arrogant a fool who would hit her and kick her and . . . and . . . and use her?"

"It is easy for you to talk," Sethu said, her face hard and angry. "You have one son. But I have four girls. Why do you think Devi has so good a job in Master Landlord's garden? Why do you think we have papayas and plantains and spinach for our curries, while you scrape and beg for a handful of rice? Why do you think we have cauliflowers and cabbages, peas and radishes—enough to share with you, by the way? Why do you think we have an earthenware pot filled with lentils?"

"But . . . your own child!"

"She is just a girl," Sethu said flatly. "At least this way she is of some good to us."

In the deep of the night, a terrifying shriek shook the settlement awake.

"What is it?" Ashish cried.

"Hush!" Virat said. He sat up on his sleeping mat and listened.

A low growl, then another shriek, this time long and horrible.

And then quiet.

A
ll night, the settlement waited in uneasy stillness for dawn to break. Latha lay on her sleeping mat, her good eye wide open. Ashish nestled beside her, breathing long, deep sleeping breaths. But not Virat. He, like Latha, lay wide awake.

"We must get away from here," Latha whispered.

"You know we cannot," Virat answered. "Not yet, anyway. Until our debt is paid, the landlord owns all of us."

"Then we must work harder so we can give the landlord's money back to him. I can do extra jobs. Perhaps I could gather fodder for the cattle after I finish my work in the fields. And you could ask Anup for more jobs too. Watchman perhaps. And Ashish—even he can work more, sweeping or cleaning or doing other small jobs."

Virat said nothing.

Slowly the settlement came alive, though everyone felt far too edgy and nervous to move about freely outside. The night's long, horrible shriek still echoed in everyone's ears and chilled their blood. Even so, Jeeja and her daughters stepped out from their palm frond hut and lit their morning cooking fire as though it were any other morning. Latha watched them from her doorway—as did every other person whose doorway looked out at the palm leaf hut. Jeeja went for water and never looked behind her. One daughter baked chilies while another pounded grain and cooked it into mush over the fire.

And then the woven door opened again and Hilmi stepped out, alive and well. Not one bite had been taken out of him. The settlement of laborers caught its collective breath and let out a gasp of awed disbelief.

"Hilmi!" Anup exclaimed. "We heard the tiger roar! We thought it got you."

"No," Hilmi said. "I that got the tiger."

"What happened?"

All the men pressed around, eager to hear Hilmi's story. He had been sleeping in the far field, he said, when he heard a disturbance among some of the cattle in a field closer to the settlement.

"Those fields have already been harvested," Anup said. "So you knew it wasn't the thief."

"I knew it was the tiger," said Hilmi. "I could smell it. A most foul scent, it was. The smell of an injured animal, frightened and hungry."

"But what happened?" Anup demanded.

"I crept toward the poor beast." Hilmi crouched down to demonstrate the stealthy way he had sneaked forward. "I knew it would attack. What else could it do?" With movements fluid and agile, he showed how he had prepared himself for the inevitable. "I had to be ready." With a rapid pounce, then a twist and a scramble, he replayed his reactions to the tiger's attack. "My knife went right to the tiger's throat," Hilmi said. "The great beast did not suffer."

"You killed the tiger all by yourself?" Anup shook his head in disbelief. "Only with your hands and your knife?"

"I killed him the same way he would have killed me. My sharp knife was like a tiger's sharp teeth."

As Hilmi told the story, acting out each part, the women pushed in close behind the transfixed men. Children shoved their way near enough to see the tiger-killer's every move with their own eyes and hear his tale with their own ears.

No sooner had Hilmi finished the story than someone called out, "Tell it again!" So he did. But when that telling was done, another person immediately insisted, "Again! Tell it another time!" So Hilmi told the story yet again. And though, when he finished that telling, the people begged, "Again! Again!" he decided three times were enough. So Hilmi sat down and ate the mush and chilies his daughters had cooked for him.

Young Devi, humiliated and disgraced by the endless gossip that buzzed through the settlement, begged to stay away from the landlord's garden. "Can't Lidya go this one day? I would stay here and sweep the floor and prepare the meal," the girl pleaded. But Sethu said absolutely not, she must tend to her job. If she were wise, she would hold her head up high and look her accusers straight in the eye.

Devi pulled up the edge of her
sari
from off her shoulder and threw it over her head, low enough in front to shade her face. It couldn't hide the huge purple bruise on her cheek, though, nor her eyes, red and swollen from a night of weeping.

As Hilmi told his story for the third time, Devi hurried behind the push of workers and moved on toward the path that led to the landlord's garden. Unfortunately for her, a wizened old woman at the back of the crowd spotted her and called out through her few remaining teeth, "There she goes, that foolish girl, on her way to see the landowner's son again."

"Thinking herself good enough for the son of the master!" said another, clicking a scolding tongue.

"Her next life will most definitely be as a rat," said a third. "A female rat and nothing more."

Others turned to stare. And to whisper insults. And to cast sneers her way. Devi did the only thing she could do—she hung her head low and hurried past them all. She headed for the path that led back to the garden, and, inevitably, to Boban Joseph.

Hilmi was no different than he had been before. Still small and wiry, still dark and leathery, the exact same tribal man everyone had looked upon with such disdain. Still an outcaste of the outcastes. His wife Jeeja remained every bit as quiet and suspicious as before, and their children as silent and strange to the eye. The difference was that the workers no longer moved away when Hilmi passed by. And they no longer murmured insults about wild savages and where they did and did not belong.

Hilmi had killed the tiger.

At first, a few doubters among them whispered, "Why should we trust the word of a savage?" and "This could be but a ruse to keep from having to stand watch at night." But no more. That very morning Anup had taken four men out to dig a pit and bury the beast, and the men came back with amazing tales of their own.

Hilmi had indeed killed the tiger.

That evening, as the women started their cooking fires, Hilmi and his sons dug in the dirt until they had fashioned a long pit. This they lined with rocks and heaped with leaves and branches they brought back from deep in the woods. When nothing more could fit into the pit, Hilmi lit it on fire. Leaving his boys to tend the blaze, Hilmi sat down with his legs crossed and assumed a position of meditation.

As the men of the settlement ate their rice and vegetables, Hilmi's boys tended the fire while their father meditated. When the settlement's men finished and their sons ate, Hilmi's boys stirred the dying fire with sticks and Hilmi chanted
mantras.
When the sons finished eating and the women dipped their hands into the food pot, Hilmi's boys hunkered down and kept watch over the fiery cinders while their father meditated some more.

When the settlement's girls—the last ones to eat—scraped together the leftover grains of rice and morsels of food from their family's pots, Hilmi's sons stirred the ashes in the fire pit into a bed of glowing embers, and Hilmi at last ended his mediation. Curious men and women gathered around to watch. The tribal fisherman paid them no mind. He stood up, looked to heaven, and stepped with his bare feet into the pit of red-hot embers. With unhurried steps, he walked across the glowing bed of charcoal.

"Why do you do it?" an old man asked after Hilmi reached the other side.

"It's my sacrifice of obedience," Hilmi answered. "Because the tiger lies dead and I do not."

"Is it not the master landlord's order that you post a watchman in the field without fail?" Virat insisted to Anup. "I could sleep on the platform every night. Or I could sleep on the ground, if I must."

"Why do you want to do that?"

"So I can pay back our debt more quickly," Virat said. "So I can take my family away from here."

"You think too much about the future, Virat," Anup said with a sigh. "You should be more like me. I do not think about the future at all. I want to keep my mind happy."

"Please, I beg you. I do not sit in judgment on your family, and I ask you not to sit in judgment on mine. My wife and I want to work hard and pay off our debt. But we need you to help us."

"Keep your mind happy," Anup pleaded. "Please, do not insist on thinking about the future."

"Don't take our sleeping mats outside tonight, Husband," Latha said as Virat pulled the mats from the corner. "Please, this night let us sleep inside the hut."

So Virat spread the mats out on the dirt floor next to Ashish, who already slept soundly, curled up in a corner. Latha lay down and Virat stretched out his weary body beside her.

"I talked to Anup," he said, because he knew the question Latha wanted to ask of him. "Maybe he will let me work as watchman in the fields or maybe he will not. But even if he does, I do not think we can pay our debt back quickly."

"Let's simply leave," Latha said. "Let's go back to our mud hut on the other side of the river. Pooni has kept it ready for us, I'm sure of it."

Virat reached over and ran his calloused fingers down Latha's arm. It shocked him to feel the scratched-up roughness of her skin. How the sun had baked it. No longer was it smooth as butter.

"You know we cannot," Virat said. "The landlord's servants would find us and drag us back. They would flog us bitterly—even little Ashish, who could not bear it. The landlord would increase our debt so much that we could not hope to pay it off before the end of our days."

"We could go to the English clinic, then," Latha said. "The English lady loved Ashish. I could scrub their floors and cook their rice, and you could pick up the dead animals from their streets. The English healer wouldn't let the landowner take us back. He would protect us for Ashish's sake."

"No, no!" said Virat. "The English loved Ashish too much. They would take our son away from us and make him be English too. Already the pale woman said she wanted to keep him for her own. No, not the English!"

"What of Hilmi, then? When the rains come and he goes back to the coast, maybe we could go with him."

"I am not a fisherman. We don't know the tribal ways or customs. If we move to their village, they will look at us with the same suspicion and distrust that we look at Hilmi and Jeeja."

Latha said nothing. She longed to argue, but she knew that her husband only told the truth.