![]() Rikki thinks he is the cobra and cowers as Teddy pets her. Then Teddy, the child of the human family who owns the garden, comes in whistling. But Rikki has never seen a live cobra and she is terrified by Darzee’s description. Rikki says she loves cobra-in her mother’s dinner casseroles. Darzee warns her of Nag the cobra who sometimes comes to the garden. She has found hers!ĭarzee tries to make the garden seem unappealing, but Rikki loves it. But Rikki has learned from her mother that every mongoose needs a garden to make perfect. ![]() Darzee does not want to be friends with Rikki and tries to convince Rikki to leave. ![]() She remembers, “Dark, wet, whoosh, can’t see, floating and floating, land here, sleep, wake up.” She knows she is lost and misses her cozy burrow, but she is delighted to find a “best friend” in Darzee. Alarmed by snoring, she awakens a young mongoose who, startled, cries out “rikki tikki, rikki tikki.” After Darzee calms her down, the mongoose introduces herself as Rikki Tikki Tavi. But Rudyard Kipling, I do believe, would have eaten us alive.On a bright sunny day in India, Darzee the tailorbird enjoys the garden home she is proud to call all her own. Dubus, whose grave is in Haverhill, entertained us in a serious way and perhaps enlarged us. We listened some of us dozed, shallowly, like Rikki-tikki on Teddy’s pillow. In the event, at that church in Haverhill, our reader went with “A Father’s Story,” by Andre Dubus, which has a certain amount of God in it and no coyotes. Nagaina was coiled up on the matting by Teddy’s chair, within easy striking distance of Teddy’s bare leg, and she was swaying to and fro …” The paleness and immobility of the humans, the fatal grace of the she-cobra, the suspended threat: It all seems to rise up, like a bad dream, from some prehistoric reservoir of fear. They sat stone-still, and their faces were white. “Teddy and his mother and father were there at early breakfast, but Rikki-tikki saw that they were not eating anything. Near the end of the story, having feasted murderously on 24 of Nagaina’s eggs (“He bit off the tops of the eggs as fast as he could, taking care to crush the young cobras …”), Rikki-tikki returns to the veranda with the last egg intact in his mouth-a hostage. Get enough of that in there, by a paradox, and you will achieve true symbolism. ![]() But to read it as an authoritarian fable is to miss the real action of the story, which is down in the unconscious, down with the prima materia, down by the bathroom sluice, where the creepy-crawlies hiss and fiddle and not even Father, the big man, can keep you safe.Īll of which brings us back to Kipling’s taste for immediate reality, for the ravening second and the undoctored instant. The slithering menace to the family the white, scared faces of the parents the atavistic intercessor/guardian … Of course “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is also saturated with imperialist ideology, subduing the alien, etc., Rikki-tikki himself being the emblem of a kind of perfected native servant, house-trained but homicidally loyal. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” succeeds so spectacularly because it is, in a sense, written by that 10-year-old boy-by little Teddy, the quietest character in the story but the one with whose special boyish loves and terrors the narrative is saturated. “Kipling,” says a psychiatrist friend of mine, “was always pretending to be something other than he actually was-which was a 10-year-old boy.” His work, the best of it, has a boy’s barbarism and a boy’s conservatism. (“Go in quietly,” Nagaina instructs her husband, by the sluice that leads into the bungalow’s bathroom, “and remember that the big man … is the first one to bite.”) So now it’s on: a fight to the death. ![]() After scuffling with this assassin-couple and doing a bit of trash-talking, Rikki-tikki learns of their terrible snakey designs upon his beloved English people. In the bungalow’s explosively fertile garden-“bushes, as big as summer houses, of Marshall Neil roses, lime- and orange-trees, clumps of bamboos and thickets of high grass”-Rikki-tikki encounters the local fauna, including a pair of nasty cobras, Nag and his wife, the lethal Nagaina. ‘This is a splendid hunting-ground,’ he said, and his tail grew bottle-brushy at the thought of it.’ ” Saved from drowning by a family who have just moved into a bungalow in the “Segowlie cantonment”-a fictional garrison for soldiers of the British Raj-Rikki-tikki becomes sworn protector of the household, and in particular of young Teddy, upon whose pillow he dozes at night, lightly and happily, springing to combat-readiness at the slightest sound. Rikki-tikki-tavi, eponymous hero of the first Jungle Book’s best story, knows who he is (a house mongoose in India), knows what he’s for (killing snakes), knows his place, damn it, and a bristling unbroken current of mongoose-osity runs right down his ultra-flexible spine. ![]()
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