Read Online The Village by the Sea by Anita Desai - Free Book Online Page B

me,’ he ordered, and they obeyed. He pulled some leaves out of his bag and made them put the ash on the leaves, then rolled them up and tied them into neat packets with bits of thread that he pulled out of his turban. ‘Here,’ he said, handing them to the girls. ‘Go and put one packet under her pillow. It will drive away the fever-demon. Go and put
the others under your own pillows. It will keep you safe from the demons. I have blessed it. Hari Om, Hari Om, Hari Om,’ he bellowed suddenly and, lifting his trumpet, blew a long blast on it that made Pinto, tied to a post, howl furiously.
    Lowering the trumpet, he stared down into their faces and looked very fierce. They noticed that his moustache bristled like a brush and that it was stained with tobacco. ‘So?’ he shouted at them. ‘What do you do now? Stare at my face? Got nothing to give me but your stares? Think I can fill my stomach with that? Think I do it all for free?’
    Lila shook herself guiltily and ran into the hut, Bela and Kamal staring after her in agony, knowing there was no money. But she came out with something in her hand and when she handed it over the girls saw what it was – the ring their mother used to wear when she was well and that she had taken off and kept behind the mirror on the shelf now that she was ill. It was of silver – rather blackened and twisted now, but still silver. The girls gave a little gasp of astonishment but the man merely snatched it out of Lila’s hand, stared at it, then at them, tucked it away into one of his pouches and marched off towards his cow without a word of thanks.
    He set off with her, alternately stroking the hide-drum to draw long, strange sounds out of it, blowing on his trumpet and calling, ‘Hari Om, Hari Om,’ into the sky. Birds flew up in fright, screaming and wheeling till he was out of sight and hearing.
    The girls were left staring at the leaf-packets in their hands.
    ‘What shall we do with them?’ Bela and Kamal asked.
    Lila clutched the one in her hand as if she wanted to tear it apart or throw it away. ‘What shall we do?’ she cried. ‘We can’t do anything – we have to listen to him. There’s no hospital in the village we could take her to, and no doctor who would come. We have no one but the magic man to help us. Magic!’ she said fiercely and turned and marched into the hut to do what the man had told her to.

    The girls were frightened enough by these events but the day seemed to be a cursed one and had still more shocks and alarms in store for them.
    As they lay stretched on mats on the cool clay floor of the hut in the afternoon, dozing, they
were woken first by Pinto’s sudden bark and then the barks of a great many other dogs near by. Kamal got up at once, trying to hush Pinto but the noise the dogs made outside grew louder and louder. Pinto was so frantic that she could not hold him back, he pulled away from her and darted out. She followed and stood under the tattered palm thatch of the veranda, staring into the white-hot glare of the afternoon.
    A band of men, boys and mongrels had invaded the dense shrubbery that surrounded the creek. All the quiet birds that haunted it – the moorhen, the heron, the kingfishers and egrets – had flown. The men were trampling down the pandanus, breaking the slim stems of the casuarinas and beating the rushes and grasses with the long sticks they carried, howling and yelling as if they were cavemen hunting in ancient times. The mongrels that usually lay about on the beach, half asleep, now yapped and yowled with excitement. For once they were not beaten with sticks or driven away – they were being used in the hunt.
    ‘What are they doing?’ whispered Bela who had crept out to stand beside her sister and watch, frightenedly.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Kamal whispered back. ‘The way they are screaming, it seems there is an elephant there, or a man-eater. Perhaps it is a cobra.’
    Bela gave a shudder, feeling an icy finger run