Tikkipala (23 page)

At midnight, when Khan returned, he was depressed to see that they were all still there and merrier than ever, now sitting in the middle of the lawn, eating mutton biryani. They welcomed the arrival of more brandy with enthusiasm.

The thags all agreed as they trundled back down the mountain in their wagons, that the Ranee had provided them with the best party they had ever been to and decided that after all it had been worthwhile holding back from plundering her, for who knows what profits and pleasures might come from her in the future.

In the days that followed, Devi tried not to think about the desecration of the jungle above and to take her mind off by sorting through her week's discoveries. Blue striped Chalcadony, Bixbyite, Magnetite.Ilmenite. Each one as carefully labelled as her grandfather's. Already she had found some new ones though no sign of the fabulous Ama.

She heard the sound of some heavy vehicle approaching. She was expecting granite slabs to repair the kitchen.

Her father had sent a message recently, ringing the telephone exchange in the village and having someone sent up to tell Devi verbally, ‘The Raja says this is coming too expensive and you must stop the spending now, please Madam.'

But this clamour was a timber lorry.

‘These fellows from the wood cutting have brought down some injured fellow on the helicopter and require that you have him transported to the village for treatment because they have no vehicle, Madam,' Khan said. Since Devi had settled in, his services as a driver had not been needed, so he had, as best he could, transformed himself into a bearer, putting on a smart black atchkhan and binding his head with a starched turban.

‘I have no intention of taking responsibility for an injured lumberjack.' said Devi crossly. ‘I hate them all and would not mind if the whole lot of the heartless vandals became injured. That would put a stop to their evil destruction.' She looked up from her labelling and added, ‘You look very smart, Khan. How is your wife?'

‘Very not happy, Madam,' said Khan gravely. ‘But, Madam, the wounded fellow is not one of the tree cutters, but a madman who had been living in the tree top and fell out as they brought it down.'

‘What rubbish,' cried Devi. ‘Everyone knows that no one is living up there in that jungle.'

‘The two tree cutting persons who brought down the wounded madman say that there were many others of these tree people, but all the rest ran away and only this injured one remains.'

‘They must have been monkeys,' said Devi. ‘I bet those wretched lumberjacks can't tell the difference between a monkey and a porcupine.'

‘The tree cutting persons are still waiting there,' Khan persevered. ‘They are saying that they are hopeful that you will give them some recompense, because they have taken time off working to bring the fellow down.'

‘They are still waiting there are they?' said Devi fiercely, leaping up. ‘O.K. I will talk to them. Yes I will.'

Khan followed her to the back of the palace where a pair of men wearing helmets and overalls stood waiting. They flinched simultaneously as Devi began to shout, ‘You are ruining our land. Don't you worry about what will happen to India if you break up her beautiful jungles? Don't you care that the land will start to fall if you cut down the trees?'

The men, who had been proud of their action in bringing the crazy youth to the Memsahib and had been told she would be grateful, now began to think they had made a mistake. They started shuffling their boots from which fell fermented saw dust. They mumbled, ‘We are poor men, Madam and only doing our job and also, Madam, we are swiftly required back on the mountain side.'

‘You should not go back. You should give up this job which is a very wicked one,' stormed Devi.

‘How will we feed our children then?' said the men. ‘When Mr Dar tells us to cut, then that is what we must do, even if some bits of forest get broken and some trees come down.'

Devi let out some furious growling sounds.

‘He is wearing colour stones,' one of the men suggested hopefully. ‘And the people of the village told us that you are liking these things.' Perhaps there was still hope of a little recompense.

Devi, telling herself, don't get too excited, this is probably going to be some monkey who has got entangled in a string of plastic beads, perhaps, or some poor peasant wearing a glass necklace who has got in the way of the felling, all the same followed the men to where a child lay. At first Devi thought it was a girl. Although the lad was tall, his long hair nearly reached to his ankles. He lay very still and the wound on his head was deep. His leg looked badly hurt and she thought it must be broken. Around his waist and penis he wore a weaving of the finest and most beautiful little mineral stones that she had ever seen. Devi gazed at them in awe. The workmanship on every bead was minute and perfect. The tiny fragments had been worked with such utter precision that they sparkled like many sided diamonds as though they had been carved with a laser beam. ‘Where ever could he have got them?' she wondered. For surely no tree living tribal could have created such a thing. She managed with difficulty to get her attention away from them.

‘He needs urgent medical attention,' she said as she grudgingly shoved some money into the hands of the two timber men, then, telling Khan to be careful in case the boy had internal injuries, she took Maw's head and Khan his feet, and they carried the king into the palace.

‘Make up a bed for him in one of the side rooms,' she called, as they went through the corridors. And when Maw had been laid on a bed, Devi told Khan to drive down to the village and bring the doctor. ‘The child is too ill to make that journey in the car. And quickly send some of those people who are working in the kitchen to bring water and bandages.'

As Khan, grumbling at yet another example of Madam's foolishness, set off, Devi sat down by the bedside of the boy and began to wipe the dirt and blood that smeared his stomach. She could not wait to examine the stones. They were even more wonderful than she had at first thought and had been strung on string so fine that Devi thought it could only be human hair. The stones themselves were of blazing colour and glory and there was hardly a stone among them that she recognised. Apart from them he was entirely naked.

The boy suddenly opened his eyes. He stared at Devi for a long numb moment, then something leapt into his expression that she felt, with shock, was revulsion.

Pala had hunted well and was coming home with the meat. He was half way down the mountain side when he heard the sound of machines roaring and saw that the tribal trees had fallen. That everyone was down. Premonition that something was happening to Maw made him start running. He ran till his chest ached, his legs shuddered and the necklace of juicy game banged against his shoulders till he came in sight of the home place. At first he thought something had happened to his sight because so many trees were gone. Leaping the stumps and logs, he rushed to the place where Maw's tree should be. It was down, and now lay, prostrate. Beyond it he could hear the sound of the Coarseones' hideous laughing voices and the chopping sound of their metal axes. Fear filled his heart. He began to call among the trees, ‘Maw, Maw, where are you?' Flinging the meat from his body he began to run wildly through the jungle, shouting, ‘Maw, my Maw, my king.' He found two elders hiding. ‘He is dead,' they whispered. ‘The Coarseones chopped him with their axes and then some of them took his body away in their machine.'

Pala gave a gigantic roar when he heard this and went rushing to the place where he had heard the Coarseones. Raising his spear Pala went at them.

The lumber men heard a roar and, looking up, saw a great, naked, crystal sparkling man. They had thought they had already dealt with all the danger so had left their guns inside the lorry. Gripping their axes, they braced themselves as the murderous savage rushed towards them.

Pala reached the men and, whirling the spear, thrust at the neck of the nearest man. The timber man fell, blood bursting and spilling into the ground. ‘Grab him,' shouted the others. Before Pala could strike again, he was grabbed from behind and pulled to the ground.

In the days that followed Devi began to agree with the timber men. The tree top boy was mad. Sadly there seemed no doubt. She tried to talk to him but as though the sound of her voice hurt his ears, he shrank away. Keeping her voice as soft and low as possible, she tried every language that she knew but the boy did not respond at all and she could see from the expression in his eyes that he was hardly aware that she was trying to communicate with him.

‘In my opinion this boy has been abandoned since birth and brought up by animals. His brain therefore had missed out making the connections required for learning speech. And because of his age, which is thirteen or fourteen years, it is too late for him to learn now. The vocal cords of this child have not developed, and he will remain mute for life,' the doctor told Devi.

‘What about these beads put round his waist? How would they have got there, then, do you think? They seem to have been made very skilfully.'

The doctor shrugged. ‘Possibly they were placed on his person at the time of abandonment.'

‘Surely they would be too tight by now,' objected Devi.

‘Another possibility is that the parents, having tried in vain to rear a mentally deficient boy, have only recently turned him out, for some reason furnishing him with this little waistband and that other lot.'

Khan said, ‘These fellows working on the ceilings are saying that this fellow might have been put out for sacrifice to the goddess Kali and that the stones have been put round his body to make him more acceptable.'

‘This is also possible,' said the doctor. ‘You never can tell what depravity these primitive people can sink to.'

As the days past, the cuts and bruises on the youth's face started healing. In spite of puffiness round his eyes and swelling on his cheek he was quite nice looking in a very dark skinned way, Devi decided. One of the kitchen people had washed the boy's thick hair and now that the red earth and tree debris had been rinsed away, the boy's hair shone with an almost blue blackness.

On the third day Maw made his first sound, a strange wild scream of, ‘Maw, Maw, Maw.' Devi, who had been sitting by his bed, her book of minerals in her hand, trying to identify the stones he wore, leapt back in alarm.

‘This proves my point perfectly,' said the doctor later.

‘But you said he would be mute,' protested Devi.

‘Sometimes these abandoned children copy jungle sounds, but his brain has stultified. His sounds have no meaning. Even if he had his wits at first, they have clearly been lost during his jungle sojourn.'

‘The timber men said they encountered other jungle people when they cut the trees. Isn't it possible that there is a whole tribe up there and this boy is one of them?'

The doctor firmly shook his head. ‘In my opinion there are clearly no such people. These are figments of the imagination, caused by anxiety and isolation and also heavy alcohol consumption, which I hear is a bad weakness of these timber people. If I was you, madam, I would send this fellow away, for he will never be any use to anyone.'

‘Where do you suggest I send him?' The doctor's words made her cross.

‘There are asylums around the country for such persons, or you could also let him loose to beg his living as many others of his type are doing already.'

Maw was able to sit up by now, though because his leg was broken he was still unable to walk.

At first, when he had been very ill and hardly conscious, Devi had spooned small amounts of warmed milk into his mouth and he had swallowed without seemingly knowing what he took. But as his health returned, he began to refuse everything she offered him. In the end, when he had eaten nothing at all for two days, she held him under his jaw and forced pureed rice into his mouth as though he was a dog being treated for worms. But as she stood back, smiling, satisfied that at last she had got some nourishment into him, he spat the mixture out. She caught the full mouthful in her face. Maw's own face was creased in angry revulsion.

Through all this, Animal was still locked away in the small store room. Devi could not bring herself to have him put down and dared not let him out. But he had become increasingly violent after the arrival of Maw, hurling his body at the door and window of his cell with such force that the noise could be heard from one end of the palace to the other. The door would shudder and creak with the tremendous battering and the window glass was already shattered. Only the iron bars held the creature in.

Sometimes, when Devi went to visit the sick boy, she would find him looking towards the direction of the sound, his expression tense. There would be something so urgent in his gaze that Devi would feel almost desperate in her need to communicate with him. She would like to reassure him but did not know how. She would like to question him, because there was something more than just interest in the boy's avid attention on the bumps and growls coming from the room where the animal was.

Maw would dream of Pala coming here and saving him and when he woke and found himself trapped in a Coarseones' living place and not knowing where Pala was at all, he would have to bite back hot tears and a scalding feeling would start to burn the bottom of his stomach. At first, each day, he waited, feeling certain that Pala would come. There had never been a time in all his life when Pala had not saved him. Sometimes he would hear the soft footstep outside, on the garden grass and his heart would soar with hope because he felt so sure that Pala was there. But as time went on fear began to grow inside the heart of Maw.

The Coarseones had placed a bowl beside his lying place to put his urine. This was a terrible thing for him because, since he was the Maw, his body fluids were sacred. It was a sacrilege for them fall upon an object that belonged to the Coarseones. At first he tried to hold back urine altogether, but when he no longer could, he tried, with his broken leg, to stagger to the window and pee onto the clean earth outside. He managed to get as far as the floor and fell.