The Hundred Names of Darkness

by Nilanjana Roy

  “But it wasn’t the fear of the outside that kept me trapped at home, alone except for my Bigfeet and the few cats who visited me,” said Mara.

  Hatch leaned forward, rocking on his talons. His black and gold eyes were puzzled.

  “You’re looking at it the wrong way,” she said. “You don’t have a flying problem, and you’re not really afraid of the sky, Hatch. You might think you are. I thought I was afraid of the outside, but that wasn’t what was wrong. You and I, Hatch, we didn’t have a problem with fear, or being outside, or being in the sky.”

  “We…didn’t? Uh. You said ‘we,’ like, us two,” said Hatch, bobbing up and down.

  The Sender stood up and stretched to her fullest extent, letting her own powerful forelimb muscles show.

  “We have a memory problem,” she said. “Until someone reminded me, I’d forgotten what I was. And you’ve forgotten what you are. You’re not a sparrow, cleaning its feathers in the dust. And you’re not a mynah meant to spend your life marching up and down on the ground, yammering at the other birds. You’re a cheel. You belong in the sky. And most of all, you’re a predator, Hatch. Remember that.”

  As Beraal and she left, they heard Hatch, talking to himself.

  “Predator,” said Hatch thoughtfully, testing his wings and flexing his talons, though he stayed on the ground. “Predator, huh?”

  He sounded happy.

  The course sprawled across more open land than Southpaw had ever seen, and he understood that it might take him many moons to discover the secrets of all its acres. In the daytime, he gave the Bigfeet a wide berth. He watched their antics, fascinated by the peculiar calls and the thwack of the club upon the ball; but he kept to the safety of the rough, and did not attempt to go too close to them. Early on, he had tried to make friends with one of them, retrieving a ball that the Bigfoot had smacked into the rough scrub; but the Bigfoot began yelling and thumping, and didn’t seem pleased at all. Since then, Southpaw had left them alone. He slept in the old monuments that dotted the greens, ignoring the susurration of the wings of the bats, who stirred in their sleep when he came by for his afternoon naps. Hunting was rich and easy, and though Southpaw kept a wary eye out for the large rat snakes and cheels, he found few predators. His whiskers sang to him every morning of the hidden delights of the day ahead, and he often woke up at night with the fur on his paws prickling in anticipation of whatever he might find, meet or hunt under the benign gaze of the moon.

  Far away from the place where he had met the bandicoots, a grove of fig trees overlooking the fifth hole became his base. The branches of the intertwined ficus trees offered shelter to owls, squirrels, bee-eaters, parrots, coucals, treepies and dozens of different insects. He often slept in its shade, and at night, when he was tired of roaming the course, he explored the tree itself. He was soon on good terms with a family of scops owls who uttered soft, pleased whuks when they saw him.

  The Horned owls, Hobson and Jobson, were less friendly, but they did not attack the tom. He felt their yellow eyes on him sometimes at night, and he often watched them, too, learning from the swift, deadly skill with which they hunted rats, moles and shrews. It was a good life, a comfortable life, but often, he raised his nose and sniffed at the air, as though the scent trails of the clan and the warm smell of Mara’s fur would be conjured up by the intensity of his longing.

  —

  “HOW LONG WILL IT take me to get home?” he asked Thomas Mor when he met him next, pointing with his whiskers in the direction that whispered to him most of Nizamuddin.

  “Where’s the rush, young whippersnapper?” said Thomas, striding ahead, his plumes bobbing behind him. “If it’s the wall you mean, it’s no more than a few days’ journey—half a moon, I’d say, because you’ll have to stop and rest that paw of yours, young fellow. Yes, yes, you never complain, that would be bad form, but it slows you down, doesn’t it? Fine over short distances, but you couldn’t cross more than one hole a day on the course without needing to rest. I twisted a claw once, when I was a young nitwit of a bird—tried to steal a golf ball off the greens, it was so white and so tempting, what—and it was dashed agony, having to hop around like a hoopoe.”

  Southpaw stopped when the peacock stopped, both of them watching the Bigfeet practise their shots. The safest place, he’d begun to realize, was behind the Bigfeet—except for the novices, who were easy to spot because they smelled nervous and made the most racket of them all. There was no safe zone around the beginners, who were capable of landing golf balls anywhere at all. One stepped up to the tee, and flailing his hands in a way that reminded Southpaw of a beetle knocked over on his shell, struggling to get back up, hit the ball with immense force and no judgement at all.

  Southpaw and Thomas, settled comfortably in the shade of a ruined tomb that stood near the tee, watched the ball rise almost vertically into the air.

  “What goes up must come—oh well, apparently not,” said Thomas philosophically, as the white golf ball disappeared into a koel’s nest.

  There was a mellifluous cry of surprise from the nest, and a brown-and-white dappled head rose, daintily. “Which admirer has left such rare gifts for me?” said the koel, trilling.

  Thomas hunched slightly, trying to avoid being seen by the koel. “Kooky’s very sweet,” he muttered to Southpaw, “but she’s not quite—you’ll see what I mean. She’s a sub-tenant of the bulbuls, in a sense—steals their nest whenever they’re away.”

  “Was it you, darling Thomas? My absurd little bird, too shy to speak your heart!” the koel trilled.

  “Worms and grubs and centipedes!” Thomas said under his breath, but he raised his superb head, bowing so that his emerald crest bobbed in Kooky’s direction.

  “I cannot claim credit,” he said. “It was the Bigfoot over there. He’s having trouble with his tee shots.”

  “Of course he is!” said the koel, her sweet voice trilling gladly. “Of coooourrrse he is! Love will do that to a bird, or a Bigfoot, and it is the season of sighs and songs. O Bigfoot! Thank you for your fine gift—see how love overtakes him? See him run, for fear that he will look up and swoon at the very sight of his beloved? Such a dear little Bigfoot! Such a shy little Bigfoot! Had a bird ever had such a lover?”

  Thomas let out a stifled cry of annoyance. “He’s off to the second hole, Kooky, he’s taken a mulligan because he can’t find his ball. Er. He can’t find his ball because you’re sitting on it.”

  “The lover leaves for fear that he will betray himself,” said Kooky simply. “As for the gift—I would be a cruel harpy indeed if I spurned the gift of an egg! Shall Kooky break her lover’s heart, even if he be Bigfoot and perhaps too large to share her love nest with any degree of ease? No! I shall love the egg he has left behind; if I cannot have him, no matter. I shall have his fledgling when it hatches.”

  Thomas raised his tail, and the dazzling colours flashed out for a moment. The peacock almost danced in exasperation.

  “Kooky!” he said. “We’ve been through this last year, haven’t we? That’s not an egg, it’s a golf ball! It isn’t going to hatch!”

  The koel uttered a reproach, her song liquid, beautiful and running to several verses.

  “It did not hatch last year because he was not the right one!” she said, her feathers smoothing protectively over the golf ball. “He was not worthy to give me an egg. But this Bigfoot—how long has he come to this very hole, day after day, hoping for no more than the right to hear a few nazms, a few couplets, from my beak? I will sing to his egg. I will sing to the egg that he has left me, as a token of his undying love, and you’ll feel so silly, won’t you, when it hatches.”

  “I’ll feel extremely surprised if it hatches, Kooky my sweet,” said Thomas drily. “But I wish you joy of your nesting. We’ll be off, then.”

  “It must be so,” said Kooky, a trifle dramatically, flinging her tail feathers up and spreading her wings over the nest. “My lovers all leave me, because they cannot bear to see me return the fav
ours of another. Go, Thomas, we shall meet again, you know you always come back, like a moth to a flame.”

  “I always come back, Kooky,” said Thomas, his voice rising to a screech, “because this is the first hole! All of us who patrol the course start from here!”

  Kooky laughed, a tinkling, musical sound, her beak clacking in perfect rhythm.

  “They all say that,” she said fondly to the golf ball, tucking it in under her feathery backside, in between the bulbul’s eggs.

  Thomas said nothing until they were safely out of earshot, and then the peacock stopped in the green hedges between the third and the fourth hole, letting out an anguished shriek.

  “That’s better!” he said. “The peahens refuse to come to the first hole any more because she drives them bonkers. But there’s no harm in our Kooky, it’s only that she flutters so. We’re right at the edge of Mashie’s territory—you’ve met him, of course?”

  “Not often,” said Southpaw, his whiskers dropping, his mew tinged ever so slightly with regret.

  Southpaw had met Mashie and Niblick. Like Mulligan, they were friendly enough, bright-eyed, purposeful cats who patrolled their territories with much care, and extended their hospitality freely to strangers. But the Golf Course cats lived an entirely different life from the Nizamuddin clan. The land teemed with everything a cat might need—prey, shelter and water, and there were few natural predators, barring the Bigfeet. There were few cats, too, and each kept to his or her own territory, meeting infrequently if at all. They rarely linked, using their whiskers only in times of emergency. The clubhouse cats, led by Colonel Bogey, were kind enough, but their lives revolved around the Bigfeet who worked in the kitchens, and Southpaw shuddered as he saw how easily they let themselves be petted. They were sleek, feeding on the rich scraps from the Bigfeet’s plates, but the brown tom could not understand why they would choose to sequester themselves in the confines of the clubhouse when there was so much else to explore.

  “What was your life in Nizamuddin like, young chap? Living among all those Bigfeet, no greens, no open spaces—can’t have been easy, what?” Thomas had trouble trying to imagine a life away from the calm spaciousness of the Golf Course.

  Southpaw sat down, and washed his fur as he tried to help Thomas understand, the bird grubbing up worms from the ground for a light snack as he listened.

  “The Bigfeet aren’t easy to live with, true,” he said, his whiskers waving outwards as he remembered. “We often hid from them on the rooftops, and we feared their loud voices, the harm they could do with their feet, their blows. None of you know what it is like to go hungry here, or to search for clean water.”

  As he talked in low, soft, reflective mews that were almost chirrups, the sounds and smells of home, the constant thud and grumble of traffic, the Bigfeet’s unpredictable ways, the difficulty of hunting for prey when the prey itself was starving or too thin to be worth the trouble—all this and more came back to him. And in a great rush of longing, everything he missed came back to him, too: the skein of caring that connected the cats, an invisible but unbreakable thread. He could almost feel the shadows cooling his fur as the cheels of Nizamuddin sailed overhead, hear the slow sensual melodies and the quicktempo, warbled ragas of Qawwali and Dastan clearing their throats as they taunted the dogs in the dargah. And he could feel Mara’s whiskers brushing his own; he remembered how good it had felt to be able to come to the Sender after a long night’s hunting or patrolling, to nestle into her soft orange fur and be washed until he fell asleep.

  “We were all so close,” he said, and absently, his paws kneaded the ground as he shared his memories. “I miss them so very much, especially Mara. I wish I could tell them where I am.”

  Thomas spread his tail out, the high plumes allowing him to hear everything Southpaw said, and much that the tom hadn’t put into mews, but that drifted out into the summer air on the tops of his whiskers all the same.

  “If you never went back to your clan, could you be happy here, Southpaw?” he asked.

  The brown tom felt the cool grass under his paws; even in the worst of the summer, the Golf Course held secret patches of coolness and comfort, and he knew without having to ask that there would be ample shelter for all who lived here through the monsoons, ample protection from the biting cold of winter.

  “What creature could not be happy here?” he said, but the scent of sadness rose briefly from his fur. “There is good hunting, and peace; the Bigfeet do not crowd us or bother us. The trees and the shrubs would make a thousand cats happy; the air is filled with calm, and birdsong, and at night, the bats tell tales that make my whiskers rise in laughter. At home, we had to fight for every scrap that we could call our own, and often the moon would sink in the morning, and the sun would come up, and my belly would hang to the earth, still empty for all the night’s hunting. I have had a full belly since I came here, but…”

  He stopped, and washed his tail furiously.

  “A full belly, but an aching heart,” Thomas finished for him. The peacock shuffled his claws uneasily, raising and lowering his magnificent plumes. He turned his sinuous head and answered the distant call of one of the Mors, asking them to wait for a few moments.

  “Your whiskers do you proud, my striped friend,” said the peacock. “They hold the scent of the clan, despite the comforts of the course. Oh well, I had hoped you’d be our guest at least till the monsoons—what beauty, Southpaw, as the rains roll across the courses, and we have most of the greenery to ourselves, since the Bigfeet stay away in the heavy downpours. But if your heart draws you home, I have nothing but respect for that, old son. I’ll get the Mors to show you the softest path to the wall, and from there you’ll have to make the crossing back home yourself. Whiskers up, we’ll soon have you home, though why you would prefer the Bigfeet with their giant termite heaps when you could have this, I don’t know. Don’t suppose we can persuade you to stay—no? Very well, then.”

  They were approaching the sixth hole, taking a thickly overgrown path that wound past one of the abandoned pepperpot tombs. It was late afternoon, and the worst of the heat had left them. Here in the shade, the grasses whispered to Southpaw to stay; he saw a rat snake wriggle off in the distance, startled by their march through the long shrubbery, and knew he would miss this earth, the many riches of the course, the abundance it so freely offered the creatures who lived here in the wild places strewn among the Bigfeet’s manicured greens.

  Thomas’s plumes started to rise off the ground at the exact moment that Southpaw felt his whiskers stand up in warning, and his fur trembled all the way down to the skin. The yowl that rent the air was long, anguished and familiar.

  Thomas wasted no time with screeches; he skittered along the ground, his plumes streaming in the evening breeze, and Southpaw followed him, careful not to press down too much on his injured paw.

  The ixora bushes shook, their dark, silky green leaves parting sharply. Mulligan shot out from between the branches, snarling, his eyes wide as he howled. Shock radiated from his whiskers, so strong that Southpaw flinched, as though his own head had been soundly smacked.

  “My home!” the Bengal cat howled, spitting and spinning through the grasses. “They have my home!” His rosettes rippled as the evening sun fell on the three, illuminating all of them, setting Thomas’s plumes on fire until the grasses seemed to flash blue and green.

  Southpaw’s fur shivered, and then he smelled it—some distance away, towards the water hazards where he and Mulligan had first met. Rising up like a black, oily fog, overpowering the light lure of the golden magnolia flowers and the sweet smell of the grasses, stronger than the markings of the bats who had made the pepperpot ruin their summer home, there was the unmistakeable stench of bandicoots.

  “A Mor! A Mor!” cried Thomas, beginning to dance. His high shrieks silenced Mulligan, the Bengal cat trembling as the peacocks picked up the call along the length and breadth of the course.

  “They will not challenge you,” said Mulli
gan, coming back to himself now that he was in safer territory. “They won’t come into your territory, or stray across Henry’s boundaries. I should have trusted my nose, I should have listened to my whiskers. They told me that there were too many of them; the stink from the burrows, when I finally got there! But this place is so large, I’ve been over in the south corner all spring. So many of them, so many new families added over the winter, over the spring, so many runs and burrows across the place that you can’t make a dash for it without twisting your paws! And the pythons have gone! Gone, killed, I don’t know which; there were only the broken shells of their eggs, and a few scraps of snake-skin, as dried up as the eggshells were old and covered with dust. They won’t risk a war with your kind, Thomas, they’re cowards, after all. But they have my home; they’ve moved in, lock, stock and snout. It belongs to them, my part of the course, and given the numbers of them coming in every day—the tunnels, the new roads they’ve built—they might threaten Mashie or Niblick. Curses on them all!”

  His fur was trembling, but the Bengal cat had recovered some of his poise. When he washed his paws, he took care to go over the claws, and to make sure that every knot of fur on his rosettes was licked back into place.

  Thomas stopped dancing, but he kept up the warning shrieks for a while, and by the sound and the distance of the responses, Southpaw understood that the peacocks were drawing a boundary, re-establishing the lines of their terrain for the benefit of the intruders.

  The evening breeze changed direction, and the filthy, oily stink came back so swiftly that it almost gagged Southpaw. His tail swished back and forth, and then he met Mulligan’s gaze, and the brown tom understood.

  “It’s the bandicoots,” he said. “The bandicoots have attacked.”

  Mulligan turned, his proud form silhouetted in the evening light, his long tail swinging from side to side.

  “They won’t stop there,” he said. “Moonch and Poonch want all of the course—every bit that doesn’t belong to the Bigfeet—and there aren’t enough of us cats to drive him and his kind out. Soon, this will belong to the bandicoots, too. They’ve been coming in for many moons, from all over the city.”