Ch. 4: The Water-Jar

The well beyond the scrub was crowded that morning, for every woman in that end of town had come to it. The Brahmin‘s wife waited her turn in the thin shade of a neem tree, listening to the talk. It was all of the drought, and the price of grain, and the snakes. One woman said that the snake goddess was angry because her shrine had not been properly kept. Another said that her husband had killed a krait in the cowshed with a hoe. The Brahmin’s wife said nothing. She was thinking of the cradle, and of Godly sitting in the courtyard with his book, and of the small grey animal sleeping beneath her son.

When her turn came at last, she let the rope down hand over hand into the dark, a long way down, and heard the bucket strike the water far below, and drew it up, and filled her jar. It took three buckets. She settled the coil of cloth on her head and lifted the jar onto it, and felt its weight press down through her neck and shoulders into her spine. Then she started home.

The path was steep and stony, and she walked it slowly, one hand steadying the jar. The sun was high now. The scrub on either side ticked and rustled in the heat. She passed the shrine of the snake goddess, a rough stone daubed with red, and bowed her head to it without stopping. She was halfway up the slope, with the roofs of the town in sight above her, when something came running down the path toward her.

It was Nunu.

He came fast, faster than she had ever seen him move, his body low and his tail streaming out behind him. He was chattering as he ran, a high, eager, broken sound. His fur was wild and stiff with dust. And his mouth, and his chin, and the fur of his chest were dark and wet with blood.

She stopped where she stood.

In that moment the whole world drew itself down to a single point. She did not see the path or the sky or the scrub. She saw only the blood, and the excitement in him, and the place he had come from, which was her house, where her son lay sleeping, alone, with this wild thing beside him. And the cold voice that had lived in her heart for a year and more, the voice she had never quite silenced, spoke now with a terrible certainty. It has happened, the voice said. You always knew it would. He is a mongoose, and a mongoose is a nasty kind of creature, and he has killed your child.

She did not stop to ask how. She did not stop to think at all. Nunu reached her feet and rose up on his hind legs, the way he had risen up a hundred times at the edge of the cradle, and lifted his bright face toward her, as if to say: look, look what I have done.

She lifted the heavy jar from her head with both hands and let it fall.

It struck him where he stood. The clay cracked across, and the water she had drawn so far and carried so carefully ran out over the stones and into the dust. And Nunu lay still beside it. It was over at once. He did not cry out.

She did not look at him. She did not stop. She left him there on the path with the broken jar and the spilled water, and she ran.

She ran up the slope and through the gap in the wall, her sari catching on the thorns, her breath tearing in her throat. She ran across the courtyard and did not see what lay there. She ran to the door of the sleeping room and caught hold of the frame to stop herself.

The cradle hung from its beam, quite still. Inside it, her son was asleep. His cheeks were flushed with the heat, and his lips were parted, and one small hand hung over the side, the fingers loosely curled. As she stood there, gasping, he sighed in his sleep and turned his head.

He was safe. He was whole. Nothing had touched him.

She stood looking at him for a long moment, not understanding. Then, slowly, she turned around and looked at the courtyard, and this time she saw it.

Across the courtyard floor, not far from the room where the cradle hung, lay the pieces of a great black snake, torn apart and flung far and wide. The dust was scuffed into strange patterns all around, where something small and quick had danced and turned and danced again. She saw it all, and in one cold and dreadful instant she understood everything: the danger that had come out of the hole beneath the flat stone, and the one who had stood between it and her son, and why he had come running down the path to find her, and what she had done.

The Brahmin's wife sank down on the threshold of her house. She beat her head and her breast with her hands, and she wept as she had not wept since she was a child. She wept for the little shivering thing she had found among the tamarind roots, and fed from her own body, and bathed in the brass dish. She wept for the grey ring of fur beneath the cradle, and the clay dish of curd, and the game of hiding that only one of them had understood. She wept because he had been her son, too, and she had known it, and she had not trusted it, and now there was nothing in the world she could do to make it right.

The boy woke at the noise, and sat up in his cradle, and looked about the room. “Nu?” he said. “Nu?”

No grey nose answered him.

It was then that Godly came home.

He came in through the gate with a dish of rice gruel held carefully in both hands, for the merchant's household had been generous, and he was pleased with himself, and he had been thinking all the way home of how he would make his wife laugh by describing the other Brahmins jostling at the door. He stopped short when he saw her on the threshold. He saw the torn snake on the courtyard floor. He saw her face.

“What has happened?” he said. “Where is the boy?”

“The boy is alive,” she said. Her voice was low and terrible. “It is the other one who is dead. Our son. The mongoose. I killed him with my own hands, on the path, because I saw blood on his mouth and thought he had harmed the child. And all the while it was the snake's blood. He saved the boy, Professor. He saved him, and he ran to tell me, and I killed him for it.”

Godly stood holding the dish of gruel. He opened his mouth and found he had nothing to say.

“And where were you?” she said. “I told you to stay. I told you not to leave the house. Because you could not keep from a rich man‘s door for a single morning, you must now taste the bitterness of a son’s death. This is the fruit of your own greed. And of my haste. Both of them. Both.”

Then she put her face in her hands, and Godly set the dish of gruel down on the ground, very carefully, as though it were made of something that might break, and went and sat beside her on the threshold, and for a long time neither of them spoke.

That evening they went down the path together, the Brahmin and his wife, carrying the boy between them. They found Nunu where she had left him, beside the broken jar, in the dust where the water had long since dried. She wrapped him in the end of her sari, as she had done on the first evening, and carried him home. They buried him under the tamarind tree, among the roots where she had found him, and the boy, who did not understand, put a clay bullock on the little mound of earth so that his friend would have something to play with.

The Brahmin's wife lived a long life after that, and raised her son, and saw him grow into a man. It is said that she never again struck a blow in anger, nor judged a creature by what she feared it to be rather than by what it was. And when, in later years, she heard of someone acting in haste, she would tell them the story of the mongoose who guarded her child. She would end it always with the same words, which the old tellers of this tale have handed down:

Let the well-advised be done; Ill-advised leave unbegun.

Then she would fall silent, and look out toward the tamarind tree, and say no more.