Tooth and Nail, Fur and Scale Page 4

  And Sri went after it.

  The path widened out and then emerged from the trees at another wall—this one taller, and made of wood instead of brick or stone. Sri sighed with relief—he was glad to be out of the darkness of the forest. He spotted the swollen sack disappearing through a small iron gate set in the wall, and followed, panting heavily. There was a guard-post on the other side of the gate, filled with the sounds of snoring men.

  The buildings here were much closer together than in Sri’s neighbourhood, stacked on top of each other without regard for beauty or safety. In places, they were reinforced with bamboo scaffolding and exposed wooden beams. Electrical wires hung between them in knots and tangles, like unruly hair, some of them overgrown with creepers. The walls were dense with graffiti that was so stylized that he couldn’t make out a single word. Desert coolers and fans hummed above him, and a lone bulb flickered from what looked like a shuttered shopfront. A TV or radio muttered indistinctly from a window, and drainage gurgled along either side of the street.

  When Sri stopped to catch his breath, he looked up and saw that the buildings were getting even stranger. A lot of the roofs were thatched with something like straw. Some of the lower walls seemed to be bowing under the weight of the buildings stacked carelessly above them. He remembered the jack-o’-lanterns that his school had put up near the reception desk last Diwali. A week later, he had seen them in the dumpster outside school, piled one on top of the other, their skin splotchy and wet. That’s how these houses looked. There was a sickly sweet smell in the air, and he thought it was maybe the walls rotting. He moved on.

  The monster waddled through the narrow streets, making no sound, and turned into an even narrower alleyway. When Sri entered the alley, he couldn’t see it any more. For a minute, panic seized him—what if after coming all this way, he had lost the poochandi? No one would ever believe him if he went back with no evidence. Worse, he would never get back before his mother woke up, and his parents would ground him for weeks if they found out he had slipped out at night for no good reason.

  He breathed heavily, trying not to lean against the peeling, soggy wall, and happened to glance up. Under the light of a dim red bulb on the first floor balcony, he noticed movement.

  There it was! He watched the creature’s head bobbing above the parapet. It stopped in front of a door, and, after a moment, the door swung open and it ducked inside.

  It’s not satisfied with its haul for tonight, Sri thought. It’s going to kidnap more children!

  Sri hunted about in the darkness, and finally found a narrow staircase that seemed to lead to the first floor. He staggered up, huffing and puffing, and found himself on the balcony, which went all around the building. He saw the dim red light bulb and tried the door that he had seen the monster go through. It was locked. Sri wondered if he should bang on it—cause a ruckus to warn the people in the house—but he had no idea how the monster would react if it found itself cornered.

  To one side of the door was a shuttered window, but some of the slats in the shutter were broken, and Sri peered through the gaps.

  The lighting inside the house was dim, and it took him a while to understand what he was looking at.

  The first thing he realized was that the space inside the house was limited. The ceiling was low, and the furniture seemed . . . shorter than usual. The seats and tabletops were long and broad, the legs and the backrests looking like they’d been cut halfway up. Everything was made of either wood or cloth or stone, and there was very little plastic or metal.

  And in the centre of the room, there was the cauldron, there was the fire, and there were the knife, the grater and the mallet.

  The creature was sitting on one of the strangely squat sofas, and had set its sack on the floor in front of it. Its staff leaned against a nearby chair, and its knobbly fingers were wrapped around a sharp flake of stone. As Sri watched, it sliced the cord around the mouth of the sack with the stone blade, and even before it could draw the blade away, the children burst out of the burlap, startling it.

  ‘Arre!’ said the creature, jerking his hand away. ‘Hold on, you little rascals!’ But the children were on top of him. One of them flung his arms around the creature’s neck and the other two grabbed his arms, and the sharp stone tool clattered on to the floor. Their squeals made Sri’s blood run cold. He shuddered as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

  The children had the same vertically challenged look, with willowy arms, swollen joints and uniformly hairy heads, complete with beards. Their coal-black skin was smeared with ash, and their eyes gleamed yellow in the barely lit room.

  ‘Easy, there!’ said the adult, booming with laughter.

  ‘We want to play now, Appa!’ the children chorused, refusing to let up, clutching at his beard and pulling at the threads around his arms.

  ‘It’s too late for fun and games,’ their father said. ‘It’s time for the three of you to have dinner and then go to bed!’

  ‘But we’ve been behaving ourselves, Appa! We didn’t squirm at all when you were carrying us here.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ said the poochandi, ladling out a thick broth from the cauldron on to three small plates and putting them in front of the children. ‘You squirmed and screamed same as ever!’

  ‘Oh, Appa, but can’t we play for just a bit? Just a bit, and then we can go to sleep!’

  Sri watched, horrified, as the children gobbled up their dinner, while their father told them that they couldn’t stay up because it was a school night, and that he couldn’t either because he had to go to work early next morning. Sri noticed that he was hugging himself tight, his skin covered in goosebumps.

  I’m not scared of them, he thought, forcing himself to put his arms by his side, his hands balled up into fists. In fact, I couldn’t have been luckier! This means I can take back the perfect evidence to show the world that these monsters do exist!

  It wouldn’t do for him to return with just the staff or the sack—humans used staffs and sacks too! He could take a picture with his mother’s phone, of course, but no one believed pictures any more—they could easily be Photoshopped or Prisma-ed or whatever. But a live specimen? Surely no one could deny his claims then? Oh, yes, he would be famous! The boy genius who captured a live poochandi—the prodigy explorer who went forth in the night! The boy who was not scared!

  The adult would be too hard to subdue—he looked strong, and he had that evil-looking staff and that sharp piece of stone. But the children . . . if I could only get at one of them, Sri thought, I bet I could bundle him up and take him right back!

  He turned around, and tried to imagine his way back home. The strange neighbourhood of the poochandis seemed like a maze, piles of houses walling every path. I’ll find a way, he told himself. I’m not that far, am I?

  But when he looked up at the crescent moon—which shone with an odd purple light—even though he had never paid attention to the stargazing lessons at summer camp, he knew that the sky was all wrong. The stars looked bigger, and seemed to be twinkling rather slowly. Pulsating like Christmas lights.

  And he heard the creature inside the house say, ‘Go to bed, little ones, or you know who will come for you!’

  And the kids squealed with fear and ran into their room, where their sheets would protect them. And if they slept, Sri knew, they would be safe out of his reach.

  POOCHANDI

  The poochandi is the Tamil bogeyman—the legend that parents have used to scare the wits out of kids since time immemorial.

  If you don’t behave yourself, the poochandi will come at night and nab you. If you don’t eat your dinner or go to bed on time, the poochandi will snatch you away. You get the drift.

  No one really knows what the poochandi looks like or what it might do to you after taking you away, but that’s exactly why it’s the scariest monster. A faceless horror—like a big label in your mind.

  I myself have lain awake through several terri
fying nights, covering my face for fear of the big P. So when I realized that I had to physically describe the poochandi in this story, I decided to depict it the way I imagined it as a child—an unwashed, bearded man who scares kids and keeps odd hours.

  I’m happy to report that over the years I’ve not only got over this fear of mine—I’ve gone on to become it.

  THE GUARDIAN OF THE FOUNT

  Hiren collapsed on to the chair with a loud sigh. The woman in the next seat grimaced and pulled her handbag away from his sweaty arm, but he was feeling too relieved to care.

  The guards at the security check had asked him a thousand questions about the molaga podi1 in his hand baggage, and he’d had to do a little begging for them to let it through. Other than that, the whole process had been fairly simple, but his anxiety was only just leaving him.

  His first time flying alone. He’d put up a brave front against his mother’s silent disquiet and his father’s vocal nervousness, but once he was through the gates, his smug smile had faded and his jaunty walk had turned into a frightened scuttle. Now, the worst of it was over.

  ‘How stupid,’ he muttered to himself. ‘What could they have done? Put me in jail?’

  He brought his phone out. It had been buzzing constantly, adding to his tension, and he’d had to turn it off at the check-in counter. He saw now that there were four ‘Where are you’s from each of his parents, a message from the airline saying the boarding gates would close in another hour and a half and a couple of Google alerts telling him it was time to leave for the airport.

  Good old Google, he thought, and called his mother. They had dropped him off two hours before time, and were circling around the airport in their car, waiting for him to call in case of any trouble.

  ‘I’m through security,’ he told them, and heard his father giving God a long vote of thanks in the background. ‘I’ve got some time to kill.’

  They filled his ears with advice and instructions—about keeping his belongings safe, surviving a plane crash and a hundred other eventualities. By the time they were done, he didn’t have much time left to kill after all.

  ‘Okay, Ma,’ he said. ‘I—I think they’ve started boarding, okay? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’m just gonna get a drink of water before—no! I won’t, don’t worryyy! Come on, Ma, I’m thirsty! Okay. Okayyy, I won’t. I won’t. Yeah, promise.’

  He hung up in the middle of their goodbyes and wishes of luck, and got to his feet, looking around for a water fountain. The woman next to him had joined the long line at the terminal gate, and he figured he had about twenty minutes before they shut the counter. Surely that was enough time to run to a water fountain?

  The closest two had big yellow ‘Out of Order’ signs leaning against them, and he panicked a little when he saw that the one he had to get to was all the way near Gate 19, which was three gates over and totally deserted—and dark, because they hadn’t switched on all the lights near it.

  It won’t even take a minute, he thought, and jogged up to it.

  The fountain was a swanky new model—they’d left part of the plastic wrapping around the basin. It took Hiren almost ten seconds to figure out that it was operated by a pedal near the base, and he was about to step on it when he heard a low masculine voice.

  ‘Beware.’

  Hiren whirled around, but there was no one behind him. Maybe it was the public address system, he thought, cut off in the middle of one of those ‘Beware of bombs under your seat!’ announcements that they kept playing on loop. He put his foot on the pedal and bent over the spout.

  ‘Beware!’

  He jumped. This time it had sounded closer, and there was none of the distortion of a PA system.

  ‘Of what?’ he said under his breath to no one he could see.

  ‘Beware, for the water you are attempting to drink belongs to me!’

  Hiren raised an eyebrow. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Drinking it without my permission will lead to disaster! Beware!’

  ‘Um . . . where’s this voice coming from?’

  ‘From my mouth, of course.’

  Hiren ducked to check for a speaker of some sort under the basin. ‘Yeeeahhh, but where are you?’ he asked. ‘Is this a prank? Some kind of Candid Camera, Impractical Jokers thing?’

  ‘You think this is a joke? This is the most serious transaction you’ve ever made, fool—for the payment could well be your life!’

  Hiren backed away from the fountain, looking all around for the hidden camera. Of course, there were surveillance cameras everywhere, and they could just be using one of those . . .

  ‘Oookay . . . this is a bit freaky,’ he said. ‘Listen, I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t want to play.’ He waited, but the voice didn’t say anything in response, and he really was starting to feel creeped out. ‘Okay then . . .’ he said, turning around. ‘I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get on the plane to get a drink . . .’

  ‘Stop!’

  He looked over his shoulder and, at first, saw nothing. But then a glimmer above the edge of the basin caught his eye, and he went in for a closer look.

  The man was about eight inches tall and purple-skinned. He was clothed in leaf and bark and vine, but it was all shaped and woven elaborately to form an angavastra, a dhoti and various pieces of jewellery. And the clothes didn’t look like they were dead plant matter—they looked fresh, almost alive. On his head was a circlet of wood, with a drop of what looked like clear water glistening at its centre, like a gem.

  ‘Whoa,’ breathed Hiren.

  The little man crossed his arms over a puffed-up chest. ‘Do you not wish to quench your thirst, child?’

  ‘This is some sort of augmented reality stuff, isn’t it?’

  ‘I am the yaksha of this fount, and none may drink of it without my permission.’

  Hiren blinked. ‘A what?’

  ‘A yaksha, insolent child! A being of great power! A force of nature! A spirit of the wild world! A demigod, some would—what! What are you doing? I warn you! Don’t make any sudden—’

  ‘This is just epic!’ said Hiren. He was careful to turn the flash off before taking the picture. This yaksha guy looked kind of jumpy, and he didn’t want to scare him off.

  He tried several times, tapping the little man’s face on the screen to make the camera focus on him, but for some reason it didn’t work. The photos were all blurry and unimpressive. They could maybe prove that he had seen something weird, but they were too bad for him to post anywhere!

  ‘Lower your weapon, or else I will be forced to—’

  ‘Relax! Relax! I was just taking a photo,’ he said. ‘And it didn’t really come out well anyway. I’m sorry, I still don’t understand what you’re supposed to be . . . You look like someone out of the Mahabharata or something, but you’re . . . kind of tiny.’

  ‘I can change my size and shape at will, you fool!’ the yaksha said, then raised his chin and looked down his nose at the boy. ‘And it is likely that I was mentioned in the Mahabharata, or in the Ramayana, or one of the other epics of great importance.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? What did you do in them?’

  ‘What do you mean, what did I do?’

  ‘Did you fight in the war? Did you meet Arjuna? Or Luv and Kush?’

  ‘Hah! You think I would remember meeting mortal men? I am a consort of gods, child! Even devas sought audience with me, once.’

  Hiren raised an eyebrow. ‘So . . . what are you doing here?’

  The yaksha furrowed his brow. ‘I told you. I have dominion over this fount, and none may drink of it without—’

  ‘You mean you rule over this water fountain?’

  The yaksha narrowed his eyes. ‘Is there any other kind?’

  Hiren smiled. ‘Sure. You used to have chocolate fountains in all the malls some years ago. And I hear there are gravy fountains too. I guess you could put anything in a fountain as long as it’s liquid.’

  ‘Well, I am lord of this fount of water.’

&nbs
p; ‘Okay . . . so do I have it?’

  ‘Do you have what?’

  ‘Your permission!’

  ‘Of course you don’t! You think it’s that easy to get a yaksha’s approval? To get my permission, you must answer my riddles! And let me warn you—these are puzzles that even heroes of great wisdom have failed to solve!’

  ‘Puzzles? You mean this is some sort of a game?’

  The little man looked like he had finally lost it. ‘This is no GAME, you imbecile! This is a profound challenge! A matter of life and death! Because if you fail to answer my riddles, you will immediately be struck dead!’

  Hiren stroked his chin. ‘So . . . if I answer your questions correctly, I get a drink of water. And if I answer them wrong, you’ll KILL me?’

  ‘Comprehension finally dawns on you!’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t think those are very good stakes for the amount of risk involved.’

  ‘Hah! If you do not take your chance, the life-giving water of this fount will forever be denied to you!’

  ‘Mmhmm,’ said Hiren, turning halfway around. ‘And a poor air hostess will have to get me a glass of water on the plane. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Stop!’

  Hiren met the yaksha’s fiery gaze. ‘What happens if I drink the water without your permission, then?’ he asked.

  ‘You will drink it with your last breath,’ said the yaksha.

  ‘Interesting. Can I touch you?’

  ‘How dare you—’

  ‘I just need to know that you’re real and not some kind of holographic projection, man. It’s all the rage right now. Even our prime minister is holographic sometimes.’ He walked up to the little man and extended his index finger, fully expecting it to come in contact with a glass pane set at an angle. ‘I’m going to touch your arm right here—nice and easy now . . . whoa!’

  It was real! This little man was real! The arm was supple enough to be flesh and firm enough to have a frame of bone and muscle under it. If someone’s going to these lengths to prank me, thought Hiren, I don’t really mind getting got.