| caption: |
Chapter eleven. The Affair of Degalang |
| text: |
(87) At half-past ten on a bright October morning Degalang the dog-boy eloped with Dinekamba's sister. Namkia and I were in the family's rice-field at the time, making a colour-film of Dinekamba and his uncle threshing. |
| text: |
Here in the field the cut rice was piled in a red-gold ring. The aunt, a drab figure in mud-coloured clothes, exactly like all the other wives of Laisong, gleaned and gathered the sheaves. Rangalang, his curly, rusty hair full of dust, swept the small sheaves into big armfuls and threw them out to Dinekamba. He, his long ear-tassels bobbing, drew them against his feet on the mat and beat them with a ribbed wooden fan - beat them and shook them up, beat them and shook them up; and the grain fell showering out on the smoky cane matting, a golden rain before the colour-camera. We came back home in the twilight to find no dog-boy. He had strolled off in the morning, the cook said, and had not come back. The cook himself always tender towards animals, had fed the vocal and hungry Khamba. We debated the matter in the front room, the lamp lit, the door still open on the veranda and the warm night. I was indignant; Namkia, I remember, non-committal. At that moment, in the doorway, in the spread of light from the hurricane lamp, appeared a breathless, angry, sweating Rangalang. He was (88) panting, having run full tilt from the village. He was still stripped to his kilt and covered in dust and husks, just as he had come up with us from the fields. |
| text: |
" Where's Degalang ? " he said. " Where's Degalang ? My girl's missing." |
| text: |
Namkia turned to him with, I thought, a trace of triumph. |
| text: |
" 'Ga-le,"' he said. " Not here." |
| text: |
There is, in that simple Zemi negative, a finality and an expression of utter absence irreproducible in English. It was not merely that Degalang was not there; he could not possibly have been less present. And in the same word, by some subtle inflection, Namkia conveyed that he knew exactly what had happened and that it was Rangalang's own fault. Rangalang made a noise like a cat spitting; and disappeared, running again, into the dark. Namkia, when he turned round again, was smiling a feline smile. |
