Ch. 3: The Empty House

The morning it happened began like any other.

The Brahmin‘s wife woke before the birds. She lit the fire, swept the courtyard, and made the dough for the day’s flatbread. Godly went down to the river and came back wet and murmuring. The boy woke, and was fed, and was carried around the courtyard on his mother's hip while she worked, and then set down on the floor to play with his clay bullock while Nunu circled him in the warm dust.

But there was no water in the house. The big jar by the door was dry to its last inch. The well nearest them had sunk so low in the long drought that the women of the lane had given up on it, and now they walked to the old well beyond the scrub, past the shrine of the snake goddess and down the stony path. It was a long walk there and a longer one back, with a full jar on the head.

By the time the sun had cleared the mango trees, the boy was drooping. He had been up early, and the heat was already thick in the air. His mother washed his face and hands, rocked him a little, and laid him in his cradle in the sleeping room, where the walls kept the worst of the sun away. She tucked the thin cotton cloth around him and stood watching while his eyes grew heavy and his fists uncurled. Under the cradle, Nunu turned round twice and lay down.

She looked at the mongoose. Then she looked at her husband, who was sitting in the courtyard with his palm-leaf book open on his knees, not reading it.

She took up the water-jar, a round, heavy pot of fired clay with a lip worn smooth by years of her hands, and settled the coiled cloth on her head to carry it.

“Now, Professor,” she said. “I am going for water. It will take me some time. The boy is asleep. You must protect him from the mongoose.”

Godly blinked at her. “From Nunu?”

“From the mongoose,” she said again. “Stay with the child. Do not leave the house. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” said Godly. “Go, go. I will sit right here.”

She gave him one more look, the look of a woman who has been married to a man for many years and knows exactly how much his promises weigh, and then she went out through the gap in the wall and down the path toward the well.

Godly did sit right there, for a while.

He sat and turned the leaves of his book and listened to the town. He heard the potter's wheel across the lane, and the cries of a man selling oil, and a flock of parrots quarrelling in the tamarind tree. And then, from somewhere beyond the square, he heard the sound of a conch shell and a drum, and he lifted his head like a dog that has heard its name.

It was the house of the grain merchant. He remembered now. The merchant's eldest son was to be married within the month, and today there was to be a feeding of Brahmins, for the blessing of the match. Every Brahmin in the town who could walk would be at that door before noon, and the merchant was known to be generous, and there would be rice, and perhaps sweet rice with cardamom, and perhaps even ghee.

Godly looked toward the sleeping room. The house was quiet. The boy was asleep. His wife would be gone a long time, for the well was far. He would be back long before she was. He would only go to the door, receive what was given, say the blessing, and come straight home. It would take no time at all. And besides, what was there to protect the boy from? The mongoose? Nunu, who killed scorpions for him? It was absurd. She worried too much. She always had.

He took his bowl from its peg. He paused at the door of the sleeping room and looked in. The cradle hung still. Under it, Nunu lifted his head and looked back at him with his round dark eyes.

“Mind your brother,” said Godly, and went out.

The house was empty then, except for a sleeping child and a small grey animal lying in the shadow beneath him.

For a long time nothing moved in the sleeping room but the light, inching across the floor from the high window as the sun climbed.

Then Nunu raised his head.

He did not know what had woken him. A sound perhaps, too faint for any human ear, or a smell carried on the hot air from the garden, sour and cold and very old. He stood up. The fur along his back began to rise. He went to the doorway and stood there with one forepaw lifted, looking out across the courtyard toward the tamarind tree and the gourd frame and the flat stone by the garden wall.

The flat stone had been pushed aside.

Something was coming across the courtyard. It came without hurry, pouring itself over the beaten earth the way dark water pours, its body thick as a man's forearm and black as a cooking pot, with a faint sheen along its scales where the sun touched it. It paused by the tulsi stand and lifted its head and tasted the air with a flickering tongue. Then, as fate would have it, it turned toward the open door of the sleeping room, where the shade was, and where the cradle hung from its beam, and where the child slept.

Nunu did not think. A mongoose does not think as people think. He knew only two things, and he knew them in his blood and bones: that this was his enemy, as it had been the enemy of all his kind since the beginning of the world, and that behind him in the cradle was his brother.

He went out to meet it.

They met halfway across the courtyard, in the open, under the white sky. The snake reared up and spread itself and struck, and Nunu was not there. He had sprung aside, light as a seed on the wind, and he was circling, his fur standing out so that he looked twice his size. The snake struck again. Again he was not there. He danced around the great dark body, darting in and out, never still, never where the head came down, until the snake began to tire. Then Nunu struck, once, behind the head, with all the quickness that the gods give his kind.

It was a long fight, and a hard one, and the dust rose around them. But in the end the snake lay still on the courtyard floor, and it would not move again, and Nunu stood over it with his sides heaving. He was not content with that. In the fury of his victory, he tore the creature apart and flung the pieces away from him, as far as he could, as if to be sure that nothing of it would ever crawl toward that cradle again.

Then he went back to the doorway of the sleeping room and looked in.

The boy was still asleep. He had not stirred. One small hand hung over the side of the cradle, the fingers loosely curled.

Nunu stood there a while, trembling. Then a strange, bright excitement came over him, the kind that comes to any creature after a great danger has passed. He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to be seen. He ran out through the gap in the garden wall and down the stony path toward the well, to find the woman who had fed him from her own breast, so that he could show her what he had done.