Ch. 2: A Bad Season for Serpents

The house of Godly the Brahmin was not large. It had one room for sleeping and one for cooking, both opening onto a courtyard with a tulsi plant growing in a whitewashed stand at its centre. Beyond the courtyard was the garden, which was mostly the old tamarind tree, a patch of gourds that climbed over a bamboo frame, and a low mud wall with a gap in it where the goats from next door sometimes wandered in. Beyond the wall the ground fell away into scrub and stones, and then to the path that led down to the well.

The day in that house had a shape, and the shape did not change much from one season to the next. Before light, the Brahmin's wife rose and lit the fire. While the smoke climbed through the thatch, Godly went to the river to bathe and say his prayers, and came back with his hair dripping and his sacred thread dark with water. Then he took up his bowl and went out on his rounds, and his wife set about the hundred tasks that waited for her: the sweeping, the grinding, the washing of pots with ash and sand, the mending, the drawing of water.

And through all of it, the boy and the mongoose played.

They played on the courtyard floor in the cool of the morning, the boy pushing a little clay bullock on wooden wheels that his father had bought from the potter, and Nunu pouncing on it every time it stopped, as though it might escape. They played in the dust beneath the tamarind tree, where the boy dug holes with a stick and Nunu dug them deeper with his claws, throwing up a fine spray of earth behind him until the boy shrieked with laughter and his mother came running to see what was wrong. They played at hiding, which was a game only Nunu really understood, since the boy's way of hiding was to put his hands over his own eyes. Nunu would vanish behind a water jar or into the folds of a rolled-up mat, and the boy would toddle around calling “Nu! Nu!” until a grey nose appeared from somewhere unexpected, and then the chase would begin again.

When the heat of noon pressed down on the town and everyone lay still, the boy slept in his cradle, a shallow wooden trough hung by ropes from a beam in the sleeping room, and Nunu slept beneath it. The Brahmin‘s wife, sitting in the doorway with her mending, could see them both: the small hand hanging over the side of the cradle, the grey ring of fur on the floor below, rising and falling. Sometimes, in his sleep, the boy’s fingers twitched, and Nunu's ear twitched in answer, as though even dreaming they were talking to each other.

There was an evening in the hot season when the household learned something about Nunu.

The boy had been playing near the woodpile at the edge of the courtyard. His mother was at the fire, her back half turned. She heard a sharp hiss, a scuffle, and a cry from the boy that was more surprise than pain, and she spun round with the ladle still in her hand.

Nunu was standing in front of the boy with every hair on his body raised, so that he looked twice his size. Something black and jointed was twitching on the ground before him. It was a scorpion, as long as her finger, and it had come out from under the logs. As she watched, Nunu darted in, quick as a thrown stone, and bit, and shook his head, and darted back. The scorpion curled and was still.

She snatched up the boy and turned him over in her hands, looking for a sting. There was none. He had not been touched. He was only cross at being lifted away from the interesting thing on the ground, and he wriggled and pointed and said “Nu!” in a tone of complaint.

That night she told Godly, and he was delighted. “You see?” he said. “I told you. He is the guardian of the house. We should feed him on sweets.”

“We should feed him on what we have,” she said, “which is not sweets.” But she gave Nunu a little of the curd that night, in a clay dish of his own, and stood watching him lick it clean. And for a while afterward she found it harder to hear the cold voice in her mind that said a mongoose was a nasty kind of creature.

Only for a while, though. Old fears do not leave a heart in a single evening. A few days later she saw Nunu with his mouth red from some lizard he had caught in the garden, and she felt the old stone settle back in its place. He is a wild thing, she thought. He kills easily. He kills without thinking. What if one day he does not know the difference?

Godly, for his part, had troubles of his own, and they mostly concerned his stomach.

It was not that he was a glutton, exactly. But he had been poor all his life, and poverty had taught him to fear an empty bowl more than almost anything. When a householder was generous, he lingered. When there was a feast for a naming or a wedding or the anniversary of some rich man‘s father’s death, he knew of it days in advance and made sure to be at the door. His wife knew this about him, and teased him for it, and sometimes, when he came home late with his belly full and the bowl half empty, she did more than tease.

“You think of nothing but rice,” she told him once.

“Rice is a great deal to think of,” he said, with dignity. “The old books say that food is the life of all creatures.”

“The old books also say,” she answered, “that a man should mind his own house before he minds his neighbour's kitchen.”

He could not remember the old books saying anything of the kind, but he thought it wiser not to argue.

The rains were late that year. The ground baked and cracked. The river shrank back from its banks, leaving wide stretches of grey mud, and the creatures that lived in the earth began to move about, searching for water and shade. The potter's wife across the lane found a snake skin in her storeroom. A child two houses down was bitten by something in the night, though she recovered. Old men sitting under the banyan tree in the square said it was a bad season for serpents, and told stories of the great black cobra that had lived in the temple wall when they were boys.

The Brahmin‘s wife heard these stories and did not like them. She took to looking carefully into dark corners before she reached into them, and to banging the pots before she lifted them. Behind the gourd frame, near the gap in the garden wall, there was a hole in the earth among the roots, wider than a man’s wrist, which she was almost sure had not been there in the spring. She looked at it for a long time. Then she put a flat stone over it and told herself it was a rat hole.

Nunu found the stone the next morning, and spent half an hour scratching at its edges, his fur standing up along his spine. She called him away, and he came, but slowly, looking back over his shoulder.

That night, as she lay on her mat with one arm curled around her sleeping son, she listened to the dry wind rattling the tamarind pods, and she could not have said which she feared more: the hole in the garden, or the small grey animal breathing softly at the foot of her bed.