Chasing Rudyard Kipling,

By Kyle Hemmings

Winner BTC Flash Fiction Contest: Eavesdropping

Chasing Rudyard Kipling

A dying sun emits orange-red rays. Our scrawny arms burn bronze and our bellies cry out for more bajra and jowar. We carry the white man’s casket past bamboo thickets and fields of jute. Mowgli glances at me and asks did you hear that rattle?

 

“ A snake?” I say.

 

“No. From the casket.”

 

"Yes. I hear something."

 

We stop. A slight creaking, then, nothing. We trudge on past the Vindhya hills, past stands of sal, teak, and ebony, towards the Narmada River, where we will deliver the white man’s body. He will sink to the bottom and his skin will turn to the color of silt.

Then, we will say a prayer, wishing for him to return, perhaps as a wise old grasshopper, or a beautiful Grey Hypocolius and not an Old World Warbler. People will worship this grey bird and it will never be caged.

 

 And Mowgli agrees with me without saying a word. Since we are twins, we can often eavesdrop on each other thoughts. He sometimes can repeat what I think. Mowgli and I work as birdkeepers for my father.

 

I know what Mowgli is now thinking: there’s another noise coming from the casket. I strain my neck and look up. The casket lid is opening.

 

“Mowgli!” I say “He’s trying to escape.”

 

With mouths agape, we watch Shrimaan Kipling jump over our heads, run past a clouded tiger prowling near shoots and tall grasses, past the water buffalo in the fields. What dharma can explain this? asks Mowgli. You know it is the third time he’s done it, I say.

 

Soaked with sweat, our legs bare and barely able to carry us, Mowgli and I chase him. “Shrimaan Kipling,” we cry out, “Please, get back in the casket!” We keep shouting this until our words splinter into the air and our breaths turn into elusive spirits. We watch Shrimaan Kipling dive into the Narmada, singing “Go to your own gawd . . . For sunshine and a mind at ease.”

 

We dive into the water, chasing after him. And because we are so tired and air hungry, we sometimes swallow generous gulps of water that taste like mud and copper, or what Mowgli imagines mud and copper to taste like.

 

We continue to swim, arms and legs splashing, until they become heavy like sacks of millet, sacks of gun powder. With whatever strength we have left, we tread towards shore, a tiny inlet of oak and fir trees, and beyond that the sun is beginning to sink. It is not the Englishman’s sun but a sun that rose over Kashmir today and gleamed over the yellow hands of the tea traders, the tobacco merchants.

 

I fear soon it will be too dark to search for the white man. My father will whip us with a stick used by camel drivers, spice traders, and I will feel Mowgli’s pain, and he, mine.

 

Perhaps beyond the far trees, Master Kipling is watching us, laughing to himself: they will never catch me. I know his game. He keeps denying his own death; he keeps jumping out of the casket, trying to prolong his life. But his legs are too wobbly and his eyes are too weak. He will attain a new life but in a different form.

 

But first, he needs a proper burial in my family's tradition. Then, he will arise from the river like some exotic frigatebird, black as an echo, able to fly for days and days. A frigatebird cannot walk or swim or take off from flat ground. A frigatebird is married to the sky.

 

Mowgli says he’s hungry and it's my thought too. We explore a tiny path leading into a dense forest. We can detect a noise from afar, behind the trees, perhaps an animal we have no name for, perhaps a reflection of our own fears.

 

Suddenly, we hear the trumpet of this animal charging us from behind a thicket. It is a white elephant, thumping the ground, causing it to shake with its massive pillar-like legs. The animal is raging dangerously towards us, as if it knows our names, as if we harbor lecherous thoughts. I can see the oily sliver draining between the eye and ear-musth-meaning madness. That is what Master Kipling once taught us, or told my father, after the white man had returned from a sojourn to the Punjab.

 

The elephant pursues us, chases us back into the water, and there, I watch Mowgli, read his thoughts--the elephant is scared of crossing the water. But one thing I do know: that white elephant must be Kipling, now an animal too sacred to touch, and too large to ever fit back in our casket.

 

We reach the other side of the shore; the sun has set, the sky is an old man’s body of red and orange scars. Mowgli and I stand up, look to the other side. We watch the elephant in the distance, now a slight mist hovering over the shore. The animal flaps its tusk, roars, and with that, it turns and disappears into the green-black darkness of foliage. The air all around us is now filled with the echo of Kipling’s laughter, as if a thought freed from the brain. It is no longer the sound of the elephant.

 

I throw one arm over Mowgli’s shoulders and we both sing a song the British infantrymen once sang, about missing home, missing loved ones. We don’t know all the words, but we fill in the gaps with our own. I know when we reach home, my father will interrogate us, ask us what took so long.

 

We will tell him, Master Kipling’s body was very heavy, especially after that long trek, to pick him up, throw him across the water in the proper manner. This, I think, he would believe, and Mowgli thinks so too.

Kyle Hemmings recently finished his MFA from National University, CA. He loves to cook, bake, and usually winds up burning whatever he cooks or bakes. His other aspiration is to someday draw comics like R. Crumb. He lives and works in New Jersey.