Children of the Wolf

  Children of the Wolf

  Jane Yolen

  For my son Jason Stemple, who loves

  all of nature

  And for Linda Zuckerman

  and Deborah Brodie,

  who ask the right questions

  Contents

  RAMA AND ME

  GHOSTS

  THE ROAD TO GODAMURI

  VIEW FROM A MACHAN

  CATCHING A GHOST

  TWO CAGES

  FIRST DAY

  TROUBLES

  AMALA AND KAMALA

  THE GILLIE

  KAMALA ALONE

  WALKING OUT

  WORDS

  INDIRA’S WAR

  THE SEARCH

  IN THE WHITE ANT MOUND

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  A Note from the Author

  A Biography of Jane Yolen

  RAMA AND ME

  A WOLF BARKED OUTSIDE UNDER THE WINDOW OF THE bedroom that Rama and I shared. It woke me out of an uneasy sleep. I had been dozing when what I really wanted to do was wait up for Rama’s return.

  I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was the moon shining in the window, making a mark on Rama’s empty bed. It was a stark, accusing finger, that white light, but if Rama had been there at that moment to see it, he would have shrugged it away. He did not care if anyone knew he sneaked out of The Home at night to go out dancing and drinking in the village. He wore his new manhood easily, as proud of it as a soldier of his colored riband medals.

  The wolf barked again, and I sat up. I shivered, though it was hot, the beginning of the rainless season. Rather than stare at the window where the wolf waited, I stared at Rama’s bed. If only I dared to go out with him, to sing and dance to the music of the wailing narh and the pounding beat of the tabor drum; to parade with him on the back streets of Tantigoria and sit in the little bazaar drinking green coconut water or homemade wine.

  I shivered once more, not knowing if I was more afraid of the wolf outside or of the village men, wondering if they were all made more dreadful because of imagination. Even at fourteen I was more boy than man, more dreamer than doer, making monsters where there were none.

  The wolf barked a third time, and then the bark turned into a giggle.

  “Rama!” I whispered fiercely.

  “Mo-han-das,” came a ghostly voice from the compound.

  Of course, no wolf could have gotten in, past the great wooden gates and fence, past the dogs which roamed loose at night inside the compound. Even though we lived close by the great sal jungle, we had no fear of wild animals. Between us and the sal lay first the maidan, the parade grounds, and then the rice fields. They served as further defenses. Civilization, we Indians knew, was an effective barrier to beasts.

  All the fears I had conjured up disappeared. I would have laughed at myself if Rama had not already laughed at me. Wolf, indeed!

  Rama climbed in the window and sat on the sill, his long, strong legs dangling down almost to the floor.

  “You were not afraid of a wolf, Mohandas?” he teased.

  “They steal children,” I said. “I am not a child.”

  He nodded. We knew all about wolves. There was not a village in the sal jungle that did not have a story about a child taken from its mother’s side as she gathered firewood or picked herbs. But I had no mother to be stolen from. And I was not a child.

  “And you are no wolf,” I added aloud.

  “I am the wolf of Tantigoria,” he said in English, smiling that sweet, wide smile that had all of us at The Home ready to do his bidding. Then he switched to Bengali, the tongue of his own people, and described what had happened that night.

  I lay back and listened, closing my eyes so that he might think I had fallen asleep, but I heard it all. In Bengali, which he spoke with grace and ease, the tale was full of village rhythms. He even sang a song about the end of the rains.

  I knew I would write it down in my notebook in the cipher hand I had devised, come morning.

  Once Rama had read out to the others what I had written in my book. The Reverend Mr. Welles had given each of us a book in which to practice our English writing. I made up stories and bits and pieces of poems, and sometimes I wrote down things about the other children. About Rama, who had been nearly eight when his dying grandmother had brought him to The Home, who spoke Bengali like a singer and English like a fool. About Krithi, who had a shriveled leg and so had been left in the forest by his parents when he was an infant and found by an Englishman on shikar. About Veda, who had been picked up unclaimed from the streets of Santalia and who braided the pipal flowers in her hair but did not speak above a whisper. About Preeti, whose seeing was shadowed and who had to look from the corners of her eyes. About the dark anger of Indira, no orphan at all, whose parents had sent her to The Home to be schooled and who loved to pinch the younger girls until they cried out loud.

  Rama had performed nearly half a page of my poetry in his halting English in front of the others, his voice still cracking from his manhood change, before I had had the courage to leap on him, hitting and kicking, screaming curses in Bengali, though the language is forbidden in The Home. Rama laughed and apologized and returned the book to me. Not because I had hurt him. None of the rest of us was strong enough for that. But because he was not mean by nature. He returned the book, I think, because he had judged how much anger there was in me. He did not know that it was not anger but fear, fear that he would read out what I had written about him—about his beauty and his power over all of us children—and that armed with that knowledge he would somehow be changed.

  That was when I invented my cipher hand, a code part English, part Bengali, and part made-up words with which to hide my innermost thoughts. But it did not matter that I wrote it in cipher. Rama never again tried to look at my book, nor would he let any of the others. The one time Indira tried, he shook her like a puppy until she dropped it. The other girls cheered—even Vedar—and Indira’s face turned nearly black with loathing. But her anger was toward me, not Rama. None of us could be angry with him.

  The mornings after one of Rama’s night wanderings always came too early. We were expected to perform many chores at The Home: weeding the kitchen garden, emptying the trash, cleaning up after the dogs. Rama and I, being the oldest boys, had the most arduous tasks, but even the little ones had their duties.

  Rama got up easily, as supple as a jungle cat, stretching and moving comfortably. I always had to be shaken awake.

  “Come, Mohandas, quickly, or there will be another speech.” Rama hated the English words that poured so easily from Mr. Welles’ mouth. “A waterfall of words,” Rama often said with disgust. “Someday we will all drown in them.” It was unusual for Rama to display such imagination. He mistrusted words, especially the English ones. His was a language of touch and laughter. Was it any wonder that the one person not under Rama’s spell was Mr. Welles?

  I nodded reluctantly. To me the words that flowed so easily out of Mr. Welles were a miracle. They matched the words I could read in books. I only hoped that someday there would be some way to unlock the flood of words that was stopped up inside of me. I wanted to pour those words out. But I did not let Rama—or anyone else—know of this.

  I got up and dressed quickly, and with the kharom on our feet clickety-clacking on the floor as we walked, we went out of our room.

  As always, I was aware of what a strange pair we made—brothers and not brothers. By chance kin and friends. By chance only, the dark and unhappy forces that had brought us to this place had bound us to each other for seven years, like someone in the Bible. He was so tall and smiling, his handsome face mobile and open. And I was his small, brown, smileless shadow, always a step
behind.

  We reported, as usual, with all the other children to the hall near the kitchen, where Mr. Welles waited. Showered and brushed and polished, even in a jungle setting, the Reverend Mr. Welles gleamed.

  “We are here, sir,” I said, speaking in English for Rama as well as myself.

  Rama smiled.

  The other children bowed.

  And so, as always, began our day.

  Mr. Welles put out his white hands, too white, for the sun never seemed to change them, the palms turned up as if receiving a gift from the skies. We did the same. In a great circle before him, we children stood for five long, silent minutes and prayed. For me the silence was no chore, though for some of the younger ones it was an agony. Often I watched them under lowered lids as they tried not to shift from one foot to another. Krithi, with one leg noticeably shorter than the other, always had the worst time. But Mr. Welles was strict on that account, even with Krithi.

  After the silence Mr. Welles preached at us for another five minutes, most of the time about duty, though occasionally about other things. And then at last we were set free to attend to our chores. That was how it was every day.

  But the day I remember best was the one that began with the barking man-wolf and the moon’s outstretched finger. I remember it because it was different from the rest, the day that began the strange events that unraveled all our lives, for it was the day that the man from Godamuri appeared.

  GHOSTS

  THE VILLAGE OF GODAMURI lies uncomfortably between the city of Midnapore and the Morbhanj border on the edge of the great sal jungle. It is a small, insignificant place of very primitive people, or so Mr. Welles said. He had visited it many times on his missionary tours. But insignificant or not, Godamuri was a thorn in his side, for he had not been able to convert a single villager to the god Christ. They were Hindus there, and ghost worshipers.

  The village was so poor that, even though each house had a courtyard and a cowshed, Mr. Welles preferred to stay overnight in the sheds rather than in the houses.

  “It is infinitely more comfortable,” he said, adding as a quiet afterthought, “and cleaner, too. And better company.” The last was said only to his lady wife. I overheard it, although I think I was not supposed to. Better company the cows probably were. They, at least, did not believe in ghosts.

  It was because of a particular ghost, a manush-bagha, a man-ghost, that we made the trip that fall day in 1920 to Godamuri—Mr. Welles, Rama, several carters, and I. The villagers had become so frightened of this manush-bagha that they sent one of their number to The Home. They hoped that Mr. Welles, being a Christian and a good hunter, might come and frighten the manush-bagha away.

  The man who came from Godamuri was named Chunarem. He was a small and wiry dark man, with a face marked clearly by a succession of diseases. (“A veritable map of smallpox,” Mrs. Welles later said. I wrote that down in my book.) He made a steeple of his fingers, lowered his head to greet Mr. Welles, and spoke like this:

  “It is hideous, sahib, and only partly human. Its body and hands and feet are like a little man’s. Its head is enormous.” He rubbed his own head vigorously as he spoke.

  Mr. Welles stroked his beard, which is something he does when he is thinking. “Did you see it yourself?”

  “Oh, yes, sahib. It has hair that grows all the way down its back. Perhaps it changes into a wolf when the moon is at its fullest. This last, though, I have not yet seen, though my wife assures me it is so.”

  “Tell me, Chunarem, at what time does this man-ghost appear?” asked Mr. Welles. He took off his eyeglasses and cleaned them on his white linen handkerchief. He always carries one. Then he put the glasses on again, tucked the handkerchief securely into his jacket pocket, and stared at the villager quite intently with his piercing blue eyes. “Christ eyes,” the villagers call them, being all dark-eyed themselves.

  For a moment Chunarem looked as if he did not know whom to be more frightened of—the manush-bagha or the missionary. Then, summoning the last of his fading courage, he said, “It comes at dusk. Reverend Sahib. When the sun has gone out of the sky but still the soft light lingers.”

  Mr. Welles stroked his beard again. He was silent for a long time, the same silence that made all the younger children nervous. Abruptly he broke the silence. “Near the village?” he asked.

  Chunarem was startled and jumped. Then he said, “About three miles away, sir. Through the forest. I saw it with the others when we went to gather firewood. Ordinarily the women and children would do such a thing, but there have been many wolves….” His voice trailed off, indicating what the many wolves would do with village women and their infants. Then, almost apologetically, he added, “It was my wife, sahib, who begged me to come to you, and the others agreed.”

  I had been sitting quietly in the corner through all this, taking notes in my book. I tried to be as quiet as possible, but at that very moment my pen slipped, squealing across the page and reminding Mr. Welles of my presence.

  “Mohandas!” he barked. I stood up, and he sent me from the room. My wooden slippers made a great deal of noise on the den floor, but I was too proud and too afraid to slip them off. I was also too proud and too afraid to listen at the door, and so heard no more, but I could guess the rest.

  The ghost worshipers were a silly people. They believed that a manush-bagha can go through the forest on trackless feet and come near a village at dusk to scream horribly. Since I now believed in the Christian god, as did we all at The Home, I was not afraid of such a ghost. And even if I was, of what consequence was it? The manush-bagha was in Godamuri, and I was in the outskirts of Midnapore, in a Christian orphanage where crosses guarded the doorposts of the brushwood fence so such a being could not enter.

  An hour later, when the villager Chunarem had gone back to Godamuri, Mr. Welles called Rama and me into his study. His lady wife was there as well.

  Usually I loved that study. It smelled of pipe smoke and leather. It had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined with volumes whose bindings were well-worn. As a reward, when one of us did especially well at lessons, Mr. Welles would let us borrow a book. The lowest three shelves held the ones we were allowed to read. So far I had read my way through Pilgrim’s Progress, The Water Babies, and A Christmas Carol. I was just beginning The Boy’s King Arthur, and I much admired the pictures, especially the one of Sir Launcelot as the wild man in the woods.

  This time, however, I was not to be so happy, as Mr. Welles came right to the point without silences or prayers or a waterfall of words.

  “I must go in the morning to Godamuri and see for myself what frightens the villagers so. They say it is a ghost, but we good Christians do not believe in them, do we?” He shook his head to offer us the answer.

  Dutifully, first Rama and then I answered him back, head shake for head shake, though surely he knew that we Indians took that motion to mean either yes or no. And suddenly I was remembering the ghosts of Christmas past and present in the book I had just read. Was Mr. Dickens, I wondered, not a Christian man? Or perhaps those were particularly Christian ghosts and the ones we at The Home did not believe in were Hindu. Often I had such confusing thoughts, though Rama never did. He shook his head, but it meant that, ghosts or not, he was not afraid. To be afraid ahead of time one needs imagination.

  “I want you two boys, who are the oldest in The Home and therefore almost of an age to leave us, to accompany me. The trip will take two nights and three days, although we will be gone from The Home much longer than that. I want the natives to see that two of their own kind—boys—are not afraid of so-called ghosts.” He stroked his beard yet another time. “Be ready in the morning. Early.”

  We were dismissed, and Rama whispered to me, “But we are not of their kind,” meaning the Santals. It was a distinction that meant a lot to him.

  As we left, Mr. Welles was turning excitedly to his wife. “This, my dear,” he said, “may at last be the miracle I have waited for so long. The reason that God has sen
t me to this place.”

  And she, in her ever-soft voice, replied, “Are not the children miracle enough, David?” adding as an afterthought, “Those poor boys. You have thoroughly frightened them, you know.”

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  In the hall I said to Rama, “Are we thoroughly frightened?”

  “Of course not,” he said. He squared his shoulders and smiled. “Santals are frightened, but we are not Santals.” His smile grew broader under the beginnings of a mustache. He touched the mustache, preening the way he did each morning when he looked into the bit of mirror he had taken from Cook. “I am not frightened.”

  Not to be outdone or put in the same category as the wretched Santal villagers, I answered, “I am the same.” It was a no-answer reply, but sufficient for Rama.

  And that was how we were committed to courage on the road to Godamuri.

  THE ROAD TO GODAMURI

  WE LEFT THE NEAT rice swamps near our orphanage early the next morning and traveled quickly into the barren countryside that was crisscrossed with fast-flowing rivers. Herons stalked the shorelines, searching for frogs, and I longed to watch them. All too soon we came into the sal jungle, where I had never been before, the deep jungle that is spread with a dense canopy of leaves and vines.

  Since Mr. Welles had traveled before to Godamuri, there was a path of sorts already cut through this part of the jungle. But the jungle is a living, breathing entity; it is never still. Already creepers had rewoven most of the barriers from tree to tree.

  I walked at the head of the bullock and tickled him under the chin to encourage him to pull the cart that was heavy with our supplies. He was lazy and loved the luxury of standing still, but he loved a chin tickle even more. Rama and the two carters swung axes against the new-grown foliage in our way. Mr. Welles would occasionally call out instructions from the cart, where he rode.

  So thick with sal trees was this particular part of the jungle that it was shady even during the day. The sun might be overhead, but we were rarely able to see it through the green filtered light, until a single ray of sunshine would suddenly come through a rip in the fabric of leaves, reminding us that there was another world beyond and above the jungle. Dark as it was, it was not altogether gloomy, for the air was filled with the cries of rhesus monkeys and the steady racheta-racheta of the empty kerosene can fixed under the cart, with a protruding stick hitting against the wheels. The jungle was not even particularly frightening, for the noise of the stick did its job and scared away most of the wild beasts. And when one time we heard the cough of a big cat nearby and then, suddenly ahead of us, saw a tiger with her cubs, I reached into the cart behind Mr. Welles for the two tabor drums. Rama and I pounded on them, and the other men shouted, sending wave upon wave of noise into the air. The tiger vanished back into the black door of her cave, a bright red flash of meat in her mouth, and the cubs followed.