Ch. 1: Two Sons, One with a Tail

In a certain town, where the river bent slowly around a hill of mango trees and the temple bell could be heard from every lane, there lived a Brahmin named Godly. He was a learned man, as learning was counted in that place. He could recite the long hymns without stumbling, he knew which days were lucky for a wedding and which were not, and when the merchants quarrelled over a boundary stone they sometimes came to him to hear what the old books said. But learning, in that town, filled a man's head more readily than his rice pot, and Godly lived by begging, as many Brahmins did. Each morning he took his brass bowl and walked the lanes, and each noon he came home with whatever the householders had chosen to give him.

His wife was a different sort of person. She was small and quick, with a voice that could carry across the courtyard and hands that were never still. It was she who swept the floor of beaten earth each dawn and smeared it fresh with cow dung, she who ground the grain on the flat stone, she who knew to the last handful how much lentil was left in the clay jar by the door. Godly called her his treasury, half in jest. She called him Professor, wholly in jest, and only when she was cross with him.

For many years they had no child, and the house was quiet. Then, in the season after the rains, a son was born to them. He was a round, solemn baby with a fuzz of black hair and a habit of frowning at the ceiling as though he were working out a difficult sum. Godly, holding him for the first time, declared that the boy would grow up to be a great scholar. His wife said that she would be content if he grew up at all, and took him back.

That same week, something else came into the house.

It was evening, and she had gone to the edge of the garden to throw out the water from the cooking pots. Among the roots of the old tamarind tree she heard a thin, scraping cry, like a hinge that wants oil. She bent down and parted the grass, and there she found a young mongoose, no longer than her hand, its eyes barely open. Of its mother there was no sign. Perhaps a hawk had taken her, or a dog from the next lane. The little thing lay shivering on the bare earth and opened its pink mouth at her and cried again.

She stood looking at it for a long moment. She had a baby of her own at home, and a baby was work enough. A mongoose, besides, was a wild creature, and she had been taught from childhood that wild creatures belonged in the wild. But she had been without children for so long that perhaps her heart had grown large with waiting, and now it could not shut itself against anything small and helpless. She picked the mongoose up in the end of her sari and carried it inside.

“What is that?” said Godly, looking up from his palm-leaf book.

“Another mouth,” she said. “Do not trouble yourself. I will feed it.”

And she did. She fed the mongoose as she fed her son, with milk from her own breast, for there was nothing else in the house soft enough for it. She rubbed it with turmeric paste when its skin was dry, the same paste she used for the baby. She bathed it in a little brass dish in warm water, and it complained bitterly and then fell asleep in the folds of the cloth while it dried. Within a month it had doubled in size. Within two it had learned the whole house, every corner and crack, every place where a lizard might hide and every jar that might be knocked over.

The neighbours laughed at her. “Two sons now,” said the potter‘s wife across the lane, “and one of them has a tail.” The Brahmin’s wife only shrugged. “A child is a child,” she said. “One cries in the night and one chases beetles. I do not see that it makes much difference.”

Yet for all her tenderness, there was a seed of doubt in her that she never quite dug out. She had grown up hearing that a mongoose was a sly and savage animal. She had seen, once, as a girl, a mongoose come into her father's henhouse at night and leave nothing behind but feathers. So even as she fed this one and bathed it and let it sleep at the foot of her mat, a quiet voice in her mind kept its own counsel. A mongoose is a nasty kind of creature, the voice said. Who knows what it will do one day? It might hurt the boy.

She did not say this aloud, not even to Godly. But when the baby lay on his quilt in the sun, she always placed herself between him and the mongoose. When she rocked the cradle, she watched where the small grey shape was. And when she lay down at night, she kept one arm curved around her son.

The mongoose did not seem to notice. Or if it noticed, it did not mind. It had decided, in whatever way such creatures decide, that the baby belonged to it. When the baby cried, it was the mongoose who reached the cradle first, and stood up on its hind legs with its forepaws on the wooden rail, looking in with its bright, round eyes and making a low chittering sound that was something between a question and a song. When the baby slept, the mongoose slept too, curled in a tight grey ring just under the cradle where it could hear him breathe.

Godly found this very amusing. “He is guarding his little brother,” he would say. “See, he takes his duties seriously. He will make a better Brahmin than I do.”

“He will make a mess of my lentils,” said his wife, but she smiled when she said it.

They never quite settled on a name for him. Godly wished to call him something grand out of the old stories, and tried several in turn, but none of them stuck. The baby, when he was old enough to make sounds that were nearly words, called him something like “Nunu,” and after that the whole household called him Nunu, and so did half the lane.

That was how the first year passed. The rains came and went again. The mango trees on the hill flowered, set their fruit, and dropped it, and the boys of the town fought over the windfalls. The baby learned to sit, and then to crawl, and then to pull himself up by the edge of the grinding stone and stand there wobbling, very proud of himself, until he sat down hard. Each time he fell, Nunu was beside him, sniffing at his face anxiously, until the boy laughed and grabbed for his tail.

And the Brahmin's wife watched them both, with love in one half of her heart and a small cold stone in the other, and she did not know which half was the wiser.