Children of the Wolf (6 page)

They walked on hands and feet, not like a human at all. Forced upright, they teetered painfully, dropping back to all fours as soon as possible. I wrote a sketch of them in my book and tried to walk that way myself. After a minute it hurt my back and strained my thighs, yet Amala and Kamala ran quickly in this manner, scuttling across the courtyard when they played with the dogs.

It was their faces that were the strangest of all, and the most frightening, for it was there that they seemed the most removed from humanity: eyes set in two hollows, thin, long noses ending in two wide nostrils, and the nostrils themselves able to widen and flare as easily as a dog’s. Their eyeteeth were longer and more pointed than normal.

Rama called them ugly. “Pig ugly,” he said.

Yet I saw a strange, perverse beauty in their faces, a look that hovered somewhere between the human and the beast.

After the first week they ate from a plate, more in imitation of the puppies than the people. They lowered their mouths to lap at bowls placed on the ground. It appalled Cook, but they still preferred their meat raw or at least undercooked. If given a bowl of rice and vegetables and meat, they would nose out the meat and leave the rest. So Mrs. Welles insisted that, for a while at least, they be catered to, although Mr. Welles worried that a diet of near-raw meat would keep their tempers inflamed.

“They will be dead in a week if they do not eat,” said Mrs. Welles sensibly, and so it was settled.

Since Cook threatened, halfheartedly, to leave rather than serve meat raw (she preferred burning the food, said Indira), Mrs. Welles sighed and took on the job herself.

“We must slowly accustom them to being human,” she explained to us all. That was at dinner, right after Krithi had found them eating and rolling in the half-picked carcass of a wood pigeon that had flown over the compound wall in the night.

Mr. Welles saw his duty differently. He would first teach them to speak and then to be Christians. He enlisted me as his chief helper.

“Mohandas,” he said as I stood uneasily waiting to be informed of my new duties. “Without the Word, they will remain beasts. And though the Lord loves the beasts of the fields and forests, He prefers human beings, for He made us—and not them—in His image.”

Still I waited.

“You will be let off all other chores and tend only to the wolf-children. Tame them. Accustom them to your sight and smell. Then begin to teach them words. Simple words at first. Me. You. Your name. Words for food, water, hunger. Words for—um”—he hesitated—“calls of nature.”

I nodded. He had not asked me to make friends with them, only to treat them as animals. To make them biddable.

“You will be my gillie—do you know what that means?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“In the highlands of Scotland, not far from where I myself was born, a gillie is a manservant who helps his laird—his master—with the wild game. You shall be my gillie—and the Lord’s. And you shall help with these very particular wild creatures.”

“Gillie,” I said, reminding myself to write it down.

“First, though, we should decide on names for them. I thought Mary and Ann would do.”

Marveling at my courage, I answered, “Sir, they already have names.”

“What!” He took his glasses off at once and began rubbing them vigorously with his handkerchief.

I persisted in my not-quite lie. “Yes, sir. Their names are Amala and Kamala. The little one is Amala, the bigger one Kamala.”

“Mohandas, Mohandas, what an incredible boy you are! Kamala, lotus. Amala, yellow flower. Not exactly appropriate, but one never knows.” He smiled at me, a crooked little smile that touched his mouth briefly. “And so the miracle grows. They have told you their names. God’s wonders never cease in this strange barbaric land. A lotus and a yellow flower. Have they spoken anything else?”

I shook my head and looked to the ground. Suddenly my lie loomed large before me. Should I confess it? I wondered. Would he guess?

“Do not worry, Mohandas,” he said, taking my chin in his hand and slowly forcing my face up toward his. I stared into his bright blue eyes. “Do not worry. They will say more. One’s name, it is thought, is the first thing learned and the last forgot. Names are powerful, my boy. That is why in the Bible God hides from Moses His own ineffable name.”

The blue eyes were as wide as pools. I felt myself drowning in them. I blinked several times.

Mr. Welles patted my head. “My boy, my boy, these two babes of the wood shall be your special charge now. Since they have spoken only to you, they have—for whatever reason—singled you out. You must write in your English journal about them so that when they begin to tell their great and wonderful story, we shall have it all set down.”

“I have already begun writing of them,” I said, the words, as usual, difficult to say.

“Good boy,” Mr. Welles answered. He turned from me and sat down behind his desk, took out his pipe and began the long ritual of lighting it. “Will you let me see what you have written?”

“It is…it is in cipher,” I said, all my shame welling up. I was certain he could see the lies.

“If I give you another book, will you translate it for me—the part about the wolf-girls only?” His brief smile stumbled across his mouth again.

I nodded, Indian style, somewhere between yes and no, and did not even attempt to smile back.

A
MALA AND KAMALA. IT
is strange how those two took up my days. I was rarely with Rama and the other children except at meals, and I did not miss them, although until the arrival of the wolf-girls they had been my only companions. Instead I followed the wolf-children around, followed as closely as I dared, watching as they crawled or scuttled around the compound, in the part of the courtyard shaded by the giant jackfruit tree.

Their loincloths were continually soiled with dirt and dog droppings and their own untended filth. As fast as Mrs. Welles changed them, she was never fast enough. and I was not allowed to do that office for them. Yet I found that their filth did not offend me. Amala and Kamala were like infants or baby animals, blissfully unaware that what they did might wrinkle the noses of fastidious human beings.

Indira openly mocked them. Rama made his abhorrence clear by the way he walked around them, never looking directly at them, not even letting his eyes slide toward the corner they had made their own. But the open hatred of Indira and Rama and the others did not trouble me. I simply did not care what they thought. Amala and Kamala had been put in
my
charge. I was Mr. Welles’ gillie, eager for my duties.

After a while the wolf-girls became used to me. I was a part of their surroundings, and they accepted me as they accepted their dish of food or the lantana bushes or the gate that shut them away from the gardens.

By the second week of my gilliehood, the little one, Amala, came onto my lap. I was sitting quietly near them, and suddenly, without warning, she bounded playfully up to me and settled herself on my outstretched legs. She was very light. Carefully I patted her head, then her bare shoulder. Neither girl would yet accept the cotton shift without ripping it off, though they tolerated the loincloths, which were firmly sewed, rather than pinned or tied, into place.

Amala began to hum under her breath, a sound that was part purr and part tune. She shoved her face under my arm, sniffing and snuggling—the kind of thing I had seen her do with her sister, the most basic animal communication.

I ran my hand along her backbone. It was knobby and bumpy, full of ridges. There were scars, too, all along her back.

Suddenly she became wet and, without thinking, I shoved her off my lap. She lifted her face to mine, and though there was little expression there, she managed to look hurt and scurried back to the wall. But she was to come up to me and snuggle frequently after that. Wet or dry, she made no distinction, though I tried to teach her the difference.

Kamala, though, retained a certain aloofness, a kind of quiet dignity. She felt—I am sure of it—that she resided in that gulf between animal and human. She seemed puzzled by it, moving her head from side to side, considering. Often I would look at her as she rested, head on arm. Unlike Amala, who had moments of great playfulness mixed with long hours of sleep, Kamala was almost always alert, her eyes open and interested in everything. There were wrinkle lines on her forehead, as though she were thinking about how she was different from the dogs and different, as well, from me.

I helped her the only way I could. I would creep on hands and knees to within a foot of her and sit silently for a long, still moment until she was no longer restive. I would say my name, say hers, in a clear but gentle voice, then pat the ground.

“Mohandas,” I said, pointing to my chest.

“Kamala,” I answered myself, pointing to her, adding in a fair imitation of Mr. Welles’ voice, “Everything has a name.” Then, patting the ground beside me, I would end, “Home. Home.”

Her forehead would wrinkle again, and she would blink, but she did not speak.

It was a strange time for me. The wolf-girls and I were left alone by the other children. Except for meals, which I still took with the others, and high tea under the
ansh
tree, and brief chats with Rama at bedtime about insignificant things, I led a separate life. I wrote down what I saw and read it out loud to Mr. Welles each evening. If he was distressed at the slow progress the wolf-children made, he did not say, and he did not ask again about their ability to speak. He listened with a quiet concentration, smoking his pipe, his forehead as wrinkled as Kamala’s, as I read, and only once or twice commented on my grammar or corrected my sentences in a perfunctory way.

The weeks of the dry season passed quickly, but the monsoon did not start until June fourth. Then we were all forced to stay indoors much of the time, listening to the battering rain shake the orphanage roof. Our gardens turned into jungles and every night it was hard to sleep because of the sweet, cloying scent of jasmine that covered us like an unwanted blanket. On the east side of the house the acres of mango and jackfruit and palm blossomed. The coleus and poinsettias overflowed their earthenware tubs. Only the section of English flowers, which Mr. Welles tended so carefully—violets and nasturtiums and phlox—suffered in the rain and heat, turning brown or growing in wild and irregular straggles of stem, leaf, and flower.

Amala and Kamala stayed out in the compound under a sheltering roof, but whenever the rains stopped, they would leave their little net-covered lean-to to lie outside, a rain cloud of mosquitoes buzzing over their heads.

Amala began to sleep more and more. She stopped eating, drank but little. After two days of it I spoke fearfully to Mrs. Welles.

“She does not wake up,” I said.

“It is this rain,” said Mrs. Welles, dabbing at her forehead with a handkerchief and sighing. Everything in the house seemed damp. “How the good Lord made a country with such weather is beyond me. I have always wondered that you Indians have prospered at all. Weeks of battering rains, months of stifling heat.”

“She has not awakened at all today,” I repeated.

Mrs. Welles looked down at me. “Not at all, Mohandas? Are you sure?”

“Not once,” I said, only slightly exaggerating. Amala had looked up—once. Her eyes had been glazed over. I did not think she had recognized me.

Mrs. Welles hesitated no longer, but gave a running commentary on her own faults as she saw them as we strode along the corridor. “I should not have left their care so much to you, Mohandas, but there were the accounts to do. And the quarter-year report to help Mr. Welles with. Oh, you have done well, and you have been infinitely patient with the wolf-children. I would not have thought it possible of an adolescent boy. But you
are
a boy. And a native at that, for all you are intelligent and a Christian now. But I should have set aside the reports. Oh, Mohandas, she has not waked once?”

Amala
was
awake when we got to the wall. She was moaning and thrashing convulsively. Mrs. Welles picked her up and carried her into the house. Amala was so weak she did not seem to notice.

Kamala followed us to the doorway. The sound of her howling protest followed us down the hall.

Mrs. Welles brought Amala into the sickroom and laid her down in one of the cribs.

“Quick, fetch Mr. Welles,” she said. Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “And some ice from Cook.” She looked down at Amala and shook her head.

Suddenly I was afraid. I ran swiftly to Mr. Welles’ study, practicing what I would say, and so great was my worry I entered without knocking. He looked up, surprised at my intrusion.

“Mohandas!”

“Your lady wife bids you come at once,” I said. “To the sickroom. It is Amala.”

“The younger one?” he asked, rising.

I nodded. “Ice,” I managed, my voice breaking on that single word. Then I turned and ran down the hallway, turned right and then right again into the kitchen. Behind me, I knew, the other children were gathering. I could hear their bare feet pattering along the floor.

Cook was sitting in the rocking chair Mrs. Welles had given her as a peace offering, a gift to make her stay despite the burden of the wolf-children. Cook took many rockings during her day now, and meals were even scantier and less appetizing than before. She looked up as I ran in, but only the widening of her eyes showed she was disturbed.

“Mrs. Welles needs ice,” I said.

She grunted and gestured with her hand toward the icehouse outside, signaling me to get it myself.

I went through the door. It was raining again, but I ran quickly to the little house that lay under the mounds of dirt insulation. Until I had come to The Home, I had never seen ice. Opening the door, I was engulfed in the cool air. I coughed, and my breath plumed out before me. I took the ice pick from its hook on the wall and managed to chip off several large pieces, which I wrapped with some linen cloth hanging by the door.

I raced back to the sickroom, trailed by most of the children.

Mr. Welles was there. And Rama. There was now a stick of incense burning in the holder by the door. From outside came the sound of Kamala’s ceaseless howls and the patter of rain.