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Literary Review
The tiger by the river
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Exclusive extracts from Ravi Shankar Etteth's first work of fiction, published recently.
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THE day before Kombiyachan enquired of Charteris, "What is the Portuguese word for decapitate?" the king of Chittoor had woken from a dream in which his dead wife appeared and urged him to flee to the mountains with Ponni. His daughter's belly was swollen in her eighth month of pregnancy, and she had withdrawn into herself. She refused to speak or smile, and had fashioned a rough shroud with which she covered her face. The maids who were attending the king told him that the princess was perhaps going mad, that her mind had travelled inwards and that she made noises that echoed the gurgling in her womb.
The king took Gomez into her room, hoping he would be able to rouse Ponni from her stupor. Gomez took her face in his hands, looked into her eyes and recoiled at the blackness he saw in them. The princess was absent from her own face. He knelt by her bed and placed his ear to her swollen belly. He felt his son inside but Ponni did not respond to his touch. He spoke to her in urgent whispers about their love, about his loneliness in the dungeon and his love for their unborn child. But Ponni did not move, and, as the guards dragged her lover from her, screaming and crying out her name, she lay still, lost inside the world of her womb.
The next morning Kombiyachan's navy docked at the riverbank. When he and his panther, guided by Omar, entered Chittoor palace all they found was Gomez in the dungeon, chained to the wall. The king of Chittoor had put his pregnant daughter on his horse and was already halfway into the forest of Panayur when Omar walked down the steps to the near-deserted dungeons and heard Gomez crying.
"So here you are, Kapitan," Omar the Moor said softly, and began to chuckle. The sight of his old captain in rags, his eyes sunken, face unshaven and dirty and hair infested with lice, amused him.
A flight of hope crossed the Portuguese's eyes as he saw his old comrade. "Help me escape, Omar," he pleaded.
Omar picked a louse from Gomez's beard and cracked it between his thumbnails.
"Kill me, then, please. I don't want to be taken alive by that monster."
"That would be helping you", Omar said, "and that I cannot do."
When he discovered that Ponni had fled, Kombiyachan's rage was terrible. He ran through the rooms of the palace searching for his fugitive wife and her father, his sword drawn and the panther trotting beside him. The rooms were deserted; he slashed at the copper lampstands and velvet canopies, plunging his sword into beds and cushions while screaming for his unfaithful queen to be brought before him. He had brought the bullock cart of royal punishment with him on the ship, drawn by twin oxen whose sides shone fat and white in the sun. They had tassels of gold strung on their painted horns. A plough of teak was attached to their necks with banded red rope, the end sharpened to a keen point. It was meant to go between Ponni's legs, entering her vagina and severing the joints of her thighs as the oxen backed into her, slowly pushing into her womb and her stomach, collapsing her lungs and spearing her heart to emerge, glutinous with blood, bile and phlegm, through her broken throat. The disappointment drove Kombiyachan insane with rage and he ordered the soldiers to ransack the palace and burn it down.
When he saw Omar dragging a chained Gomez towards him, he almost swung his sword at the Portuguese's neck. "No, white dog." The king checked himself. "You will die too quickly. I will find my queen and you will die together, slowly and painfully. I will prepare a festival for it."
Gomez looked at Kombiyachan sitting on the throne of Chittoor, which had been dragged into the front courtyard of the palace. By now the building had been torched and the flames now framed Kombiyachan. Gomez spat at him and screamed, "Now there are three of us. Try killing us all."
Kombiyachan's forehead grew black with fury. "I will find her and your bastard!" he shouted. "And I will scoop the rat out of her belly with my sword!"
Gomez grinned at him, through his filthy lice-infested hair and the caked blood at his mouth. He knew he had won.
The Tiger by the River, Ravi Shankar Etteth, Viking Penguin India, Rs. 395.
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