His shoulders were taut with tension, but his eyes were alert and bright. His pronged staff probed the ground in front of him, whispering through the shrubs. Once or twice he pointed to a slithering body or a disappearing tail in the undergrowth. Dear God, the place was crawling with serpents. Near a very large tree he stopped suddenly.
“There he is,” he whispered.
Fearfully I swung my eyes in the direction of his gaze. On the ground a monster of a cobra was curled around the exposed roots of a big tree. Its thick body glistened in the silver night like a polished, extremely expensive belt. The wide belt hissed and uncoiled slowly.
“I can catch it now, but I want to show you something first.” Slowly Raja lowered himself to his knees. Behind him I swallowed and took a cowardly step back, ready to flee.
The snake began to move its lustrous body away from us slowly, scales brushing scales, soundless in its precision, the muscles under its skin strong and sure. Suddenly, among the moving black scales I saw its cold eyes watching us. The urge to run was so strong, I had to clench my teeth and bunch my fist to stop me disgracing myself.
From his trouser pocket Raja brought out a tiny vial. Very slowly he rubbed the contents onto his hands. The smell was sweetly aromatic. Then he began to chant slowly. The cobra reared suddenly as if it had only now sensed mortal danger.
I froze.
In front of me, Raja’s fine full limbs gleamed. Every atom that lived inside his body had become still. He was listening. And all of him, even his skin, became an extension of his ear. A deadly silence seemed to descend on the cemetery. After a while there was just Raja, the snake, and me, and the only thing that moved was Raja’s mouth. The cobra fanned its hood open, raised its head high into the air, and stood so stock-still that it could have been a freakishly good wooden carving. Out of the shadows of the tree its eyes were very, very shiny. Ominous and watchful, it pinned its unblinking gaze on Raja. Raja ceased chanting and stood up very, very slowly. He walked toward the cobra and held out his hand.
I stood transfixed, holding my breath. The snake stood up. Its shiny black hood was inches from Raja’s bare outstretched hand. He has gone completely mad, I thought, but to my astonishment the cobra flicked out its forked tongue, then rubbed its head like a sleepy kitten might and slowly curled its thick body up Raja’s hand. The hypnotized snake moved up his outstretched arm in a sensuous dance until it was at eye level with him. They stared at each other. Raja had become a wooden carving himself. Seconds, perhaps minutes, passed. Not a muscle moved. Time ground to a halt. The world stopped spinning so Raja could have his prize snake. I have lived many years since that night, but it remains the most amazing thing I have ever seen. He was truly the master that night.
Like a dark flash Raja made a lightning-fast movement. The stunned cobra swayed back and opened a purple mouth, but Raja was already gripping the sides of its head immovably in his hand. I could see its glossy fangs and the colorless liquid that dripped from them. All at once the tricked creature was writhing furiously. Raja held the head high above his head like a trophy as he surveyed his long catch. Its thick body curled and slapped uselessly against his lean tall frame. The struggling snake went into the sack, whereupon it calmed down instantly.
“I shall keep this cobra for my own. He is too long to fit into a basket and too heavy to carry to the marketplace,” Raja said with great satisfaction in his voice. His voice was full of justified bravery. How I envied him that night.
“Come, we must get you back in bed.”
We walked quickly through the jungle. With the woods behind us, he turned to face me. “Will you tell her? Will you tell her that I tamed the king of all serpents?” he asked, a quiet pride quivering in his voice.
“Yes,” I lied, worrying anew about the pungent smell rising in clouds from my skin and Mother’s sharp nose, knowing I would never ever tell anyone in my family about my adventure. I would be imprisoned at home forever. I’d be made to peel potatoes or chop onions in the kitchen all day.
Now I was hooked. I was past afternoons under the neem tree listening to stories; that was for babies. The adrenaline rush that had flooded into my body watching Raja and the monster snake staring at each other in the moonlight was addictive. I wanted more. Surely Mohini’s brother deserved more. I begged, I cajoled, I bribed.
“Show me something more,” I implored. I was relentless in my efforts. “Soon the Japanese will be gone, and Mohini will walk to the temple. I can arrange an accidental meeting,” I promised untruthfully, watching the black in his eyes turn to burning embers. “My father listens to the BBC, and he says that the Germans have already lost the war. The Japanese will be gone soon. They have almost lost the war.”
He looked at me carefully, and something flickered across his closed face. For a moment it seemed as if he knew my promises were false and my friendship hollow, but then his eyes became blank. “Yes,” he conceded. “I will show you more.”
He took me to the dilapidated, deserted house at the other edge of the jungle. The rotting door opened wide at his touch. Inside it was dark and cool but quiet, very quiet. There was the impression that the jungle was taking over, slowly creeping in. Sand-colored roots had broken through the cement floor, and wild plants were growing in the cracks in the walls. There were gaping holes in the roof, and in the broken corners of the ceiling pale pink roots spiraled downward, but in the middle of the room a single lightbulb hung from the wooden rafters. I shivered inside my shirt. I was glad Raja was with me.
We sat cross-legged on the cracked floor among the large roots. Out of a cloth pouch tied around his waist, he produced a little bottle and pulled out the stopper. Immediately a strong smell wafted out. I crinkled my nose with disgust, but he assured me it was only the juice of roots and tree barks and that a sip would show me another world. He began to build an uneven pyramid of wood and grass on the cement floor of the deserted house. When he had coaxed a small yellow fire into the dry branches, he turned to me and offered me the bottle. There was no expression on his face. I was sure it was a test of some kind and to hesitate would have revealed my doubt and fear. I took the bottle from his hand and took a good gulp. The brown mixture was thick and bitter in my mouth. The hair on my arms stood on end.
“Look into the fire,” he ordered. “Look into the fire until it looks back, until it talks to you.”
“Okay.” I stared at the flames until my eyes burned, but the fire steadfastly remained mute. “How much longer?” I asked, tears starting to cloud my vision.
“Don’t look away—look into the fire,” he said, very close to my ears. I could smell him, that peculiar animal smell, the scent of something that lives in the wild by its wits.
I was starting to feel giddy with staring at the dancing tongues of yellow and orange, but every time I wanted to look away, a firm voice instructed, “Watch it burn.”
Just when my eyes began to hurt, the fire turned blue. The edges burned green, and the middle burned turquoise like the uniform secondary-school girls wear. “The fire is blue and green,” I said. My voice sounded far away and quite unlike my own, and my tongue felt thick and heavy inside my mouth. I blinked rapidly a few times. The fire burned a bright blue.
“Look at me now,” Raja instructed. His voice sounded like a whisper or a hiss. My head lolled around on my neck, and my heavy eyes fell on my hands. With something approaching detached wonder, I noticed that the skin on my hands had turned transparent. I could see my blood pounding and rushing through my veins. I stared at my hands in shock, and then I noticed the floor. It was moving. “Hey,” I said thickly, turning to look at Raja.
“Great, isn’t it?” he grinned.
I nodded, grinning back. I was eleven years old and as high as a kite on secret roots and tree bark. It was then that I noticed Raja was changing. I peered into his face.
“What? What do I look like?” Raja asked eagerly. His eyes were feverish in the flames of the small fire. He was a wild animal.
; I blinked and shook my head, unsure of what my eyes were seeing. I looked at the fire. It was burning yellow again, but I had an impression it was urging me to reach out and touch it, hold it and enter it. If only it was bigger, I thought, I could stand in it. The thought frightened me, and in frustratingly slow motion I focused on Raja once more. It took some time to get the smudges out of the edges of my vision. Thoughts formed in my brain, and words appeared out of nowhere. They were mine, and yet how could I have spoken them? “Can I touch the fire?” I astonished myself by asking.
“Don’t look at the fire anymore. Tell me what I look like,” Raja persisted. “Do I look like a snake?” he asked. Had he sounded hopeful? I felt confused. Were there points for agreeing? I shook my head weakly, and my head swung on my neck like a balloon filled with water. My whole body was alive with strange sensations. Inside my skin my blood pounded in a not-unpleasant way. When I shut my eyes, a burst of color appeared across my closed eyelids. Beautiful rainbow hues appeared and merged again in countless patterns.
Smiling, I opened my eyes, and Raja stood before me. His eyes glittered fiercely, and his teeth seemed long and ferocious. There was something wild and unfamiliar in his face. For a while I could do nothing more than stare in shock at the transformation, then I quickly shut my eyes. I was no longer excited but full of deep foreboding. Water lapped against the walls of the balloon. I needed to think, but my head was heavy with the water that swished around inside. Raja was turning into a frightening creature. Inside him was not Chibindi the dancing lion tamer but something evil and ugly that I didn’t recognize. Something I had never suspected. Poor sweet Mohini.
“What do I look like?” he asked again. His voice had changed too. I had heard it before in the cemetery. I had heard it among the gnarled feet of a large tree in the silence of white stone tablets. It was a very low hiss.
“No, you do not look like a snake,” I slurred with a tongue gone fat and lazy. I was too frightened to look at him directly. “I want to go home.” My heart was pounding in my chest.
“No, not yet. The effect will wear off soon and then you can go home.”
I began to shiver with fear. Raja and I did not speak. I dared not. I could feel him breathing beside me, but I kept my eyes downcast on the moving floor. It was as if the cement was a thin cotton cloth, and underneath it a million ants moved, milled, and teemed. Beside me I felt the heat that came from Raja, but I refused to turn my head and see what beast sat beside me. Whatever drug gripped me it was all-powerful. What a trip! No other reality existed but what I could feel and see at that moment. Too young to recognize that I was hallucinating, I stared at the floor, terrified. A lifetime passed, sitting there not moving, my heart pounding wildly like an African drum just waiting for the dangerous creature to pounce on me at any moment.
Finally Raja said, “Let’s go.” His voice was flat. He sounded disappointed. “Come on.”
I looked into his face, into the flat, dead eyes in his slightly triangular face, and shot back in alarm. Yes, he did look like a snake. He had turned into a snake. The potion we had consumed had turned him into a snake. I felt my face to see if I too had turned into one. My face under my hands moved, and I cried out in horror. Inside my numb mouth my teeth began to chatter. I was turning into a snake too. Crazy thoughts jumped into my head. He had brought me here to turn me into a snake so he could keep me in a basket and make me dance to his stupid little flute. I sobbed helplessly in slow motion. The sound long and drawn out.
When his face came very close, I shut my eyes and began to pray to Ganesha. Then Raja’s voice was in my ear. “The magic is too strong for you. Don’t worry, in a few more minutes everything will return to normal. Come, we will walk together. It is getting dark outside.”
I opened my eyes, surprised. He had not hurt me. I watched him in a daze as he put out the fire and came to help me up. We walked together, with me leaning heavily on his arm. I refused to look at him. “The fresh air will do you good.” His voice still sounded like the rasp of sandpaper, but now that we were outside, I felt better. Safer. It was evening, and there were people taking slow strolls, laughing and talking in low voices. Their voices seemed very far away.
“Don’t worry, all will be normal in a little while. Stand straight and walk like a man. Keep your head up.”
Finally we turned into our little neighborhood. The thought of Mother waiting at home was frightening. Right away she would see the change in me. She would see the moving skin and be livid.
Inside the walled garden of Old Soong, Mui Tsai was building a fire. She was burning all the dead leaves and grasses, and Old Soong was standing by with his heavy hands on his hips, watching her like a grinning crocodile, his large mouth open and full of teeth. I looked at the fire that was as large as a funeral pyre, and suddenly without conscious thought I began to run toward it. I ran like the wind. I was an iron filing rushing toward a giant magnet. Mui Tsai stared, openmouthed and confounded. I thought she looked like a frightened rabbit. Laughing, I ran toward the beautiful fire, my hands outstretched, and the fire reached out and called me to it. Within the orange tongues eating dead leaves was an attraction greater than I.
The first blast of purifying heat hit my body as I leaped into the fire, but instead of being in the middle of my master, I was lying on the ground with Raja on top of me, his heart knocking on my breastbone. I looked into the glittering eyes, into the unfamiliar mutant triangular face, and knew that I had really scared him.
“Stop it,” he hissed. “Try to behave like a normal person.”
There was nothing to say. I had not reached my master’s feet.
Raja led me to the steps of my home and strode away. Mother came out, and I stared astonished at her. She was beautiful. A most dangerous female tiger, her eyes polished yellow amber and indescribable. And she was furious. Not with me. Just generally furious. I saw it in her burning eyes.
“What happened?” she growled, coming down the steps as fast as a springing cat. When she touched me, I wanted to flinch, so strong was the energy that emanated from her body. I could hear Mui Tsai’s nearly hysterical voice in the background, telling her about my leap into the flames. I felt Mother’s eyes looking at me, at my moving skin. Inside the house, Mohini was hiding behind the curtains. Like a cat. Beautiful, soft, and perfectly white with large green eyes. There was something so benign and so beguiling about her that I wanted to reach out and stroke her. It was clear now why Raja loved her so deeply. I frowned as I realized the implication of Raja’s transformation. A snake and a cat in the same room. I should never have encouraged him. I opened my mouth to warn Mother, but Lalita’s distressed face pushed itself close to mine. In her hand, held very close to her head, was the doll I had saved from the monsoon drain. I stared at the doll curiously. It appeared strangely lifelike. Suddenly it winked slyly at me, opened its mouth, and bleated like a goat. A horrified scream gathered in my windpipe, but a great gush of air rushed into my throat instead, and black spots appeared in my view, like the kind of ink spots you see in old photographs or the way an old mirror goes cloudy and gets badly speckled. Slowly the spots grew bigger and bigger. More spots appeared like spreading ink until my world became black.
After that I don’t remember anything else, but Mother tells me that I screamed like one possessed for a mirror. Thrashed wildly with the strength of a full-grown man to get into the house so I could look at a mirror.
I was ill for two days. Mother was told to rub a paste of spices and chilies on my head to clear my thoughts. When I was better, I couldn’t bear to see Lalita’s staring doll anymore. I felt that its eyes, far from being sightless, hid old evil. Every time I looked at it, I saw it alive and staring at me, its mouth curving to bleat like a goat. I reached out my hand to touch it so I would be reassured that it was only a doll, only to recoil in disgust. Its skin had the texture of the dead people the Japanese had stuck on poles or left hanging upside down at the roundabouts. I know because once, goaded beyond endurance,
I accepted a dare to touch one of them. The dead man’s skin was cold and slightly pliant. It made me sick to think of my innocent sister sleeping next to the monstrous thing. When I was better, I threw the doll into a monsoon drain on the other side of town and watched the fast-flowing water carry it away until it was a pink-and-yellow speck in the distance. I returned home to a distraught Lalita and pretended to help her to search for the doll for hours. Then I blamed Blackie, the dog next door.
After that incident I was very careful. I had seen Raja once in such a way that there was no going back and no forgetting. There could be no more pretending that the people who came to see his father, their mouths twisted with thwarted intentions, and who left clutching cloth packages and hopeful expressions didn’t exist. No more pretending that the lumpy red-and-black cloth packages they carried away were filled with the essence of apple or pink pomegranates instead of the horrible bits from all those midnight trips to the unmarked graves so a lover might be punished or an enemy destroyed. I began to avoid Raja.
Then came the day Raja approached me and asked for a lock of her hair. For precious seconds I could only stare blankly at his closed face, then I shook my head dumbly and ran away. I already knew what charms these people could do with a lock of hair. I began to fear Raja. I couldn’t forget the glittering eyes in the triangular face watching me, watching me, and watching me.
So I began to watch Mohini. Every day I rushed home from school and examined her carefully. Her smile, her words, her limbs, everything had to be minutely observed to be certain that no subtle changes had occurred in my absence. I was going crazy with guilt and worry. In the mirror a stranger with haunted, feverish eyes stared back. At school I had even stopped noticing the foul taste of the castor oil they poured down my throat. I had no wish to go crawling back to my old gang, so I sat on my hard wooden chair in school and stared blankly as one teacher after another finished his class and walked out. When the last bell for the day rang, I charged out of the classroom. Once I had finished examining Mohini for signs of I don’t know what, I sat down and waited for the evening to arrive.